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Quando l'ideologia diventa patologica

Freedonia - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 11:09

 

 

di Phil Duffy

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn avrà anche ricevuto il Premio Nobel per la letteratura nel 1970, ma ciò non rende la sua opera, Gulag Archipelago, una lettura piacevole. La sola descrizione dettagliata dei metodi di tortura impiegati dal sistema sovietico allontanerà molti lettori. Al di là degli interrogatori ci sono i processi basati su un sistema giuridico finto, descritto dalla teoria del giurista sovietico Andrei Vyshinsky secondo cui la verità è relativa e che le prove possono essere ignorate per poi essere sostituite da confessioni forzate ottenute sotto tortura.

Al di là dell’incubo del sistema giudiziario sovietico, Solzhenitsyn descrisse quelle che chiamò “le navi dell’arcipelago”, i mezzi per trasportare i condannati al luogo finale d'incarcerazione e lavoro forzato. I mezzi di trasporto erano chiamati vagoni passeggeri “Stolypin”, progettati in epoca zarista per ospitare, al massimo, undici prigionieri per scompartimento. Nei momenti peggiori, secondo Solzhenitsyn, uno Stolypin poteva impiegare sette giorni per raggiungere la sua destinazione, carico di venticinque prigionieri.

Nella migliore delle circostanze gli scompartimenti erano pieni di prigionieri politici. Tuttavia i ladri – o blatnye, come venivano chiamati – venivano trasportati con i prigionieri politici e godevano di una posizione più alta nella gerarchia distopica sovietica. Occupavano i posti migliori nello scompartimento di uno Stolypin, continuando a esercitare il loro mestiere vittimizzando i prigionieri politici. I blatnye non venivano puniti per il possesso di un'arma: “La loro legge sui ladri veniva rispettata (“Non possono essere altro che quello che sono”). E un nuovo omicidio in cella non avrebbe aumentato la pena dell'assassino, ma gli avrebbe portato invece nuovi allori [...]. Stalin ha sempre avuto un debole per i ladri: dopo tutto, chi ha rapinato le banche per lui?”.

Solzhenitsyn, senza dubbio, si riferiva al ruolo di Joseph Stalin nella pianificazione della grande rapina alla Banca di Stato di Tiflis nella Georgia. Lo scopo della rapina era finanziare gli sforzi rivoluzionari dei bolscevichi, un piano presumibilmente approvato da Vladimir Lenin.

Com'è possibile che una nazione affidò il proprio sistema di giustizia alla sua classe criminale? Nel caso della Russia, le ragioni sono molteplici e complesse. Parte di questo fenomeno era legato alla sua storia e alle divisioni di classe che ne derivarono. Tuttavia c’era un altro fattore che ebbe un ruolo in particolare nei secoli XIX e XX: l’ideologia. Solzhenitsyn condivise una  prospettiva interessante al riguardo:

Le autogiustificazioni di Macbeth erano deboli e la sua coscienza lo divorava. Sì, anche Iago era un agnellino. L'immaginazione e la forza spirituale dei malfattori di Shakespeare si fermarono davanti a una dozzina di cadaveri. Perché non avevano ideologia.

L'ideologia: questo è ciò che dà al male la giustificazione a lungo cercata e dà al malfattore la necessaria fermezza e determinazione. Questa è la teoria sociale che lo aiuta a far sì che le sue azioni sembrino buone invece che cattive, ai suoi occhi e a quelli degli altri, cosicché non sentirà rimproveri e maledizioni ma riceverà lodi e onori.

Secondo George F. Kennan, che fece parte del gruppo di ambasciatori degli Stati Uniti a Mosca tra il 1933 e il 1953, l’Occidente – dall’inizio della rivoluzione russa nel 1917 – aveva difficoltà a comprendere le motivazioni del regime rivoluzionario:

C'era [...] un'importante differenza tra la questione che interessava i primi bolscevichi e quella che interessava le parti in guerra in Occidente. La prima era ideologica, con implicazioni sociali e politiche universali. I bolscevichi credevano che le questioni di organizzazione sociale – in particolare la questione della proprietà dei mezzi di produzione – avessero un’importanza che trascendeva tutte le rivalità internazionali. Tali rivalità erano, ai loro occhi, il prodotto delle relazioni sociali. Ecco perché attribuivano così poca importanza all’esito militare della lotta in Occidente.

I politici occidentali, al contrario, si concentravano sugli interessi nazionali e sul mantenimento di un equilibrio di potere tra quelle nazioni.

In quanto marxisti, i bolscevichi erano convinti che i successi ottenuti dalla Russia arretrata costituissero un'eccezione alla regola di Karl Marx secondo cui una rivoluzione socialista sarebbe avvenuta prima nelle società industriali più avanzate, in particolare nella patria di Marx, la Germania. Mentre erano ansiosi per i capitali occidentali che avrebbero permesso loro di acquisire attrezzature dall’Occidente per la crescita industriale, i bolscevichi condussero contemporaneamente campagne di propaganda in Occidente progettate per abbattere le sue economie e strutture politiche.

L'ideologia costituì quindi la giustificazione sociale non solo per il violento rovesciamento del regime zarista, ma anche per una continua “purificazione” del socialismo sovietico che portò alle famigerate  purghe di Stalin, le quali mandarono a morte milioni di cittadini sovietici. Sebbene non ci siano dubbi sul fatto che le purghe fossero progettate per eliminare i rivali politici di Stalin, furono vendute al popolo sovietico come parte di una spirale di purezza, in cui gli ideali della rivoluzione russa – e il marxismo classico – venivano in tal modo preservati.

L'ideologia ebbe una presa particolare sul popolo russo all'inizio delle rivoluzioni di febbraio e ottobre del 1917. La vita sotto gli zar aveva creato una rigida società feudale che sopravvisse anche dopo la  liberazione di venti milioni di servi da parte dello zar Alessandro II nel 1861. Non ci fu alcun movimento significativo verso il liberalismo in quel periodo come c’era stato in Gran Bretagna e in altre nazioni dell’Europa occidentale.

Alcune di queste differenze erano basate sulla natura fisica del territorio sovietico e sul suo clima freddo, il quale produceva stagioni di crescita brevi. Il suo sistema ferroviario era molto indietro rispetto a quello occidentale, ostacolando la circolazione di beni e servizi verso i mercati. Jerome Blum, in Russian Agriculture in the Last 150 Years of Serfdom, scrive: “Durante i 150 anni da Pietro ad Alessandro II, quando tante innovazioni furono introdotte in altri settori della vita nazionale, l’agricoltura rimase pressoché immutata rispetto a quello che era stata per secoli”.

Daniel Field ha osservato in A Companion to Russian History che: “La rivoluzione agricola, iniziata in Gran Bretagna a metà del XVIII secolo, aveva alcuni ammiratori nella Russia rurale, ma nessun praticante”.

La Russia era lontana dagli effetti dell’Era delle Scoperte, della rivoluzione agricola britannica e della Rivoluzione industriale.

Anche la distribuzione delle terre ai contadini, conseguente alla loro emancipazione, aveva i suoi lati oscuri:

Per quanto sembrassero impressionanti a prima vista queste libertà, presto divenne evidente che avevano avuto un costo pesante per i contadini. I beneficiari non erano loro, ma i proprietari terrieri. La cosa non deve sorprenderci: erano stati i dvoriane [cortigiani] ad elaborare le proposte di emancipazione. Il risarcimento ricevuto dai proprietari terrieri era molto superiore al valore di mercato delle loro proprietà; avevano anche il diritto di decidere a quale parte delle loro partecipazioni rinunciare. Non sorprende che abbiano tenuto per sé la terra migliore; i servi si prendevano gli avanzi. I dati mostrano che i proprietari terrieri conservarono i due terzi della terra, mentre i contadini ne ricevettero solo un terzo. La terra di qualità a prezzi accessibili ai contadini era così limitata che essi furono ridotti ad acquistare strisce strette che si rivelarono difficili da mantenere e che fruttavano poco cibo o profitto.

Inoltre, mentre ai proprietari terrieri veniva concessa una compensazione finanziaria per ciò a cui avevano rinunciato, i contadini dovevano pagare per la loro nuova proprietà. Non avendo risparmi, dovettero accendere dei mutui, l'80% erogato dalla banca statale e il restante 20% dai proprietari. Sembrava un'offerta generosa, ma come in ogni operazione di prestito il problema stava nei rimborsi. I contadini si ritrovarono gravati da pagamenti che diventarono un peso per tutta la vita e che poi doveva essere trasferito ai loro figli.

Nel 1917, gravata dalla sua partecipazione alla prima guerra mondiale, la Russia era matura per una rivoluzione basata sull’ideologia marxista. Tuttavia il termine ideologia richiede un chiarimento per comprenderne l’impatto in Russia. Britannica descrive l'evoluzione del termine:

La parola fece la sua prima apparizione in francese come idéologie ai tempi della Rivoluzione francese, quando fu introdotta dal filosofo A.-L.-C. Destutt de Tracy, come sostantivo abbreviato per quella che chiamava la sua “scienza delle idee” [...]. Destutt de Tracy e i suoi compagni ideologi idearono un sistema d'istruzione nazionale che credevano avrebbe trasformato la Francia in una società razionale e scientifica.

Britannica aggiunge poi che:

L'ideologia in senso stretto rimane abbastanza vicina alla concezione originale di Destutt de Tracy e può essere identificata da cinque caratteristiche: (1) contiene una teoria esplicativa di tipo più o meno completo sull'esperienza umana e sul mondo esterno; (2) stabilisce un programma, in termini generalizzati e astratti, di organizzazione sociale e politica; (3) concepisce la realizzazione di questo programma come una lotta; (4) non cerca semplicemente di persuadere ma di reclutare seguaci leali, esigendo quello che a volte viene chiamato impegno; (5) si rivolge a un vasto pubblico ma può tendere a conferire un ruolo speciale di leadership agli intellettuali.

La definizione più ampia di ideologia, descritta dal primo criterio di cui sopra, è troppo generale per essere utile a comprendere il conflitto che diede origine alla Rivoluzione Russa e alle sue conseguenze. I restanti quattro criteri, tuttavia, spiegano il divario che esiste tra la definizione più ampia di ideologia, che può comprendere il liberalismo classico, e la definizione più rigorosa che è l’essenza del marxismo violento. È quest’ultima definizione che richiede la nostra attenzione, perché rappresenta un rifiuto totale della moralità e del pensiero che è stato il motore del progresso nel mondo occidentale.

Si può speculare sulla carriera di Stalin in assenza della sua adozione del marxismo, ma è chiaro che nel 1907, quando organizzò la rapina alla banca di Tiflis, era già impegnato in una vita criminale che comprendeva rapine, omicidi, rapimenti ed estorsioni. Ciò solleva una domanda sul ruolo dell’ideologia in tutti i collettivismi: in che misura i dittatori collettivisti sono dogmaticamente legati all’ideologia originale dopo che questa ha favorito la loro ascesa al potere? Stalin usò l’ideologia marxista come copertura per rimuovere qualsiasi opposizione al suo regime e impiegò i suoi militari per costringere altre nazioni a diventare parte del suo impero sovietico. Altri dittatori hanno adottato la stessa strategia, da Mao Zedong in Cina a Fidel Castro a Cuba e Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Tutti hanno utilizzato il manuale marxista mentre serviva ai loro scopi, ma lo hanno ignorato per eliminare brutalmente l’opposizione. Le persone in quei Paesi, che avrebbero dovuto beneficiare del socialismo marxista, hanno sofferto invece di privazione economica e perdita di libertà.

E ciò ci porta alla domanda definitiva: fino a che punto l’ideologia, rigorosamente definita, si traduce in una perdita di libertà e opportunità economiche all’interno di tutti i collettivismi, incluso il socialismo non marxista, il fascismo, il progressismo e persino la socialdemocrazia? I collettivisti abbandonano il principio di non aggressione mentre giustificano la violenza statale sulla base della falsa idea che il fine giustifica i mezzi. Poiché sempre più potere si concentra nel governo federale degli Stati Uniti, la natura coercitiva dello stato viene sempre più utilizzata per far rispettare obiettivi definiti politicamente come, ad esempio, diversità, equità e inclusione, “diritti” di identificazione del genere e discutibili strategie di controllo del clima. Le università, un tempo bastioni della libertà di parola, ora tollerano la violenza contro coloro che si oppongono ai programmi promossi dai collettivisti. La differenza fondamentale tra la definizione rigorosa di ideologia, che descrive le convinzioni dei collettivisti, e la definizione più ampia, che descrive le convinzioni del liberale classico, è l’ingegneria sociale condotta attraverso lo stato.

Nel regno della ragione il collettivismo non potrà mai vincere sul liberalismo classico e sull’economia del libero mercato. Tuttavia, come osservò Solzhenitsyn, l’ideologia prevalse sulla ragione negli anni successivi alla Rivoluzione russa. La politica di contenimento di George Kennan ebbe un discreto successo nel mettere in quarantena il marxismo virulento/violento dietro la cortina di ferro e il sistema sovietico alla fine fallì a causa delle sue stesse contraddizioni.

Tuttavia ciò è accaduto trentatré anni fa e da allora le lezioni della storia sono andate perdute in Occidente. Il liberalismo classico e il sistema di libero mercato non possono mai essere racchiusi in un’ideologia per contrastare il collettivismo. La ragione deve prevalere, ma dobbiamo evitare il tipo di pensiero superficiale che prevalse tra gli Alleati nella Prima Guerra Mondiale. La sopravvivenza della moralità occidentale è a rischio. Mentre tutte le generazioni perderanno, le generazioni più giovani hanno più da perdere sotto il collettivismo perché dovranno soffrirne più a lungo.


[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/


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From Tupac to Trump – Everything Is Scripted

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

The other night, I was watching Jason Whitlock’s excellent “Fearless” podcast, as I regularly do. He was covering the history of rap, or hip-hop (as a mere White male, I cannot determined the difference between them), with a focus on the most popular players in the industry, people like P-Diddy (formerly Puff Daddy) and Tupac Shakur.

I knew about Diddy’s dubious background. His father was a street criminal who was murdered when Puffy/Diddy was little. Little Diddy, like a song. At any rate, from these unfortunate set of circumstances, Puffy/Diddy somehow was handed Bad Boy Records, a division of corporate giant Arista, despite having no background in business. He was now no longer Sean Combs, his birth name, and initially was known as Puff Daddy. To be honest, that’s kind of a weak sounding name for someone in charge of a gangster rap label. Not that P Diddy strikes fear in the hearts of anyone, either. Snoop Dog? Lil’ Romeo? What’s with all these lame nicknames for supposed tough guys? And to think Johnny Cash was embarrassed about being named Sue.

But what really struck me is the research Whitlock did on Tupac Shakur. The guy with the “Thug Life” tattoo. The “baddest” man in a “bad” industry. Whitlock, who is an actual investigative journalist, unearthed a remarkable video interview with a teenage Shakur, who was then known as “Zesty.” Well, to be fair, it’s no less imposing of a nickname than Snoop Doggy Dog or Lil’ Romeo. At any rate, the interview reveals a very dainty, feminine Shakur, who seems much more like the theater major he was planning to be than any future gangster. Whitlock talked about how, in 1994, Shakur was supposedly shot five times, including twice in the head. Remarkably, he was released from the hospital the next day, complete with a Hollywoodish bandage wrapped around his head. He was now the face of gangster rap. Central casting 101.

This was a few years before Tupac was actually shot and killed, seemingly at the behest of his rival, Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G. There was a whole east coast-west coast rivalry going on. It’s a hip hop thing, you wouldn’t understand. On the old Bozo cartoons, his chief antagonists were a criminal duo known as Short Biggie and Big Shorty. Maybe the Notorious B.I.G. was a Bozo fan. At any rate, some fans refused to believe Zesty/Tupac was really gone. Did he fake his death, like Elvis? Or JFK, Jr.? Biggie Smalls went on to be murdered himself shortly thereafter. That’s organized crime for you. And those concocting this stupid and dangerous rap music industry wanted nothing more than for young people to make that comparison. They glamorized rappers the way Warner Brothers glamorized 1930s gangsters in films.

“Beto” O’Rourke, the Irish guy born Robert Francis O’Rourke, was a drunk driver, played in a punk band, a member of the self-proclaimed world’s oldest computer hacking group, the Cult of the Dead Cow, and most notably admitted to having fantasized about killing young kids. Then he was recruited- “installed” as comedian Katt Williams calls it- as an exciting young Democratic Party politician. Just like Sandy Cortez, as she was known as a popular teenager in an upper-middle class area. She was transformed into “AOC,” after she was hired to play the role of congressional representative, according to her brother. Or, you may prefer to believe our state controlled media, who tell us that in America, any obscure waitress can grow up to be a politician. That can happen if you’re really good at mixing drinks.

Have you watched “comedian” Lily Singh? She makes Margaret Cho look like Rodney Dangerfield. And her ego puts Trumpenstein to shame. There are lots of videos devoted to critiquing her ridiculous pomposity on YouTube. But someone “discovered” her. And gave her a late night talk show. She was “installed.” They needed a bisexual woman of color, as she refers to herself in every other sentence. Going back a bit, how did Don King go from two time murderer to the world’s premiere boxing promoter? Everything about King- his finger in a light socket hairdo, his wrapping himself in the American flag, his fracturing of big words, screams actor. Someone “discovered” him in his prison cell. He was definitely “installed.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene is the Republican alternative to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the former perky high schooler known as Sandy. MTG to AOC. A female Trump. Greene’s background is pretty undistinguished. She seems to have worked as a cross fit trainer, and also written for some conspiracy periodical. Hey, I still do kick boxing workouts at sixty seven, and I’ve written for conspiracy periodicals. Can someone “discover” me? MTG’s antics are very similar to AOC’s. You have a clear choice. Can anyone listen to Kamala Harris for five minutes, and not believe she was “installed?” There are lots of more attractive women, who can cackle as well as her. And millions of White women more qualified to be the nation’s first female vice president.

Who “installed” Lori Lightfoot? Gretchen Whitmer? Online rumors claim that Whitmer was known as “Stretchin’ Gretchen” in high school. I think you can probably figure out what the nickname suggests. How did Mike Lindell go from crackhead to the CEO of the world’s biggest pillow company? Did someone really think Lindsey Graham had the charisma and charm of a successful politician? Adam Schiff? Chucky Schumer? Did Nancy Pelosi really turn Miss Lube Job of 1959 into Speaker of the House? None of these leading political figures are personable in the manner of a Bill Clinton or a Ronald Reagan, let alone Franklin Roosevelt or John F. Kennedy. Yet someone backed them with big money, and if we are to believe the voting results, someone keeps returning them to office. Every one of them are “installed.”

In our world of alternative media, I am suspicious about lots of the most popular figures. I know how hard it is to get the kind of following I have built. I don’t know what you have to do, or what you can do, to get hundreds of thousands, or even millions of followers. Some of these people have become One Percenters while saying and writing many of the same things I have, without becoming a One Percenter. As I’ve said, I treat everyone as legitimate until proven otherwise. But it is impossible to escape the notion that there is an unseen source of power behind some of them. We may not know which ones, but some of them were undoubtedly “installed.”

I read a story recently about a couple that lost their little girl on the beach. Apparently, the sand where she was playing just collapsed, and pulled her under. The interview I saw with the parents raised the kinds of questions such interviews usually do. I don’t know, maybe it’s not as traumatic as I would think it would be to lose a small child like that. And it wasn’t explained just how she was sucked under, to such an extent that volunteers worked for twenty minutes or something before reaching her dead body. I can’t imagine a more horrible way to die. My apologies to the parents, and to the parents enduring tragedies like this, for noticing their demeanor. But we see it regularly in all the mass casualty events. It just sets off my Spidey Sense. But who knows, maybe Zesty Shakur was shot twice in the head. He was a gangster.

It’s hard to disagree with Shakespeare’s proclamation that “all the world’s a stage.” But who was Shakespeare? There has long been a scholarly debate about the real identity of perhaps the world’s greatest author. The historical William Shakespeare had little education, and had never traveled to any of the countries he described so colorfully. When James Wilmot set out to write the first biography of Shakespeare in 1781, and visited his home town, he was shocked by what he discovered. There was no evidence that Shakespeare had ever owned, let alone read, any books. He left behind no letters. The real author of the work credited to Shakespeare must have been an aristocrat like Francis Bacon. Maybe I’m just being an elitist snob. A community college dropout and self-proclaimed populist shouldn’t be a snob.

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The Heinous Constitution: An Abominable Curse on the Liberty of All

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

“Still another of the frauds of these men is, that they are now establishing, and that the war was designed to establish, “a government of consent.” The only idea they have ever manifested as to what is a government of consent, is this—that it is one to which everybody must consent, or be shot. This idea was the dominant one on which the war was carried on; and it is the dominant one, now that we have got what is called “peace.”

Lysander Spooner, No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority

To believe or support any document that is claimed to be a contract agreed upon by all, and in perpetuity, without a single signature by any held to its decrees, represented by only a few criminal rulers, ‘interpreted’ by only nine appointed criminal ‘supreme’ court judges, and enforced at the point of a gun, is not only ignorant, arrogant, and asinine, it is completely insane. But in this nation-state 235 years ago, a few rich mercantilists and corrupt politicians falsely referred to as the ‘founders,’ in the dark of night, behind locked and closed doors, in total secrecy, drafted what is referred to as ‘The Constitution,’ and claimed it bound every single individual in the country, and would be binding on every single individual born thereafter. What nonsense is this?

No man, and no group of men called government, have any right whatsoever to rule over any other man on earth. To assume such a position, whether this rule be consented to by any minority or majority, or unlawfully ‘designated’ to any so-called ‘representative, is illegitimate and immoral, and is the epitome of evil. This is without question, and those who would attempt to refute this truth, are not to be trusted. All power of one over another is criminal, therefore the delegation of such power is also criminal. This should bring forth the assumption that all those who participate in this unauthorized government, all those who support this system, and all those who vote to sustain this system, are behaving in a criminal manner. As should be obvious at this juncture, we live in a criminal country.

Unfortunately, every country on earth has some form of government, or governing structure, and all are illegitimate. Although some places are better than others, none are truly free, so this makes it virtually impossible to use your feet to seek real freedom, as none exists in its natural form in this world. How did man get to this place? How did man not see the error in rule, and squash it at the beginning? How did man over thousands of years of rule not understand that rule is the essence of slavery?

Could any government be legitimate? I would say no, but optimistically speaking, there is always the possibility. A legitimate government could theoretically (never in reality) exist, but with a very strict set of parameters. It would have to be completely voluntary by all participants, it could have no power whatsoever to make ‘laws’ or mandates or delegate any power,  it could only protect the natural rights of man without any manner of aggression, it could have no power to tax (steal), it could not regulate or restrict anyone from any activity that did not harm the natural rights of others, and none could be bound by it should they decide to leave the system. This seems simple enough to me, but it has never once been tried; this likely due to the fact that no criminal politician would have any interest whatsoever in not having power over others. This is a realization that should be embraced by all.

Due to extreme propaganda, outright lies, lifetime indoctrination, and brainwashing, most in this country cling to the State’s false narrative that they are free, but there has never been total freedom, even when times were much better than today. Every day since the so-called birth of the U.S., freedom has been compromised, and the population has experienced less and less liberty. This was not an accident, as all government is criminal, and seeks only to gain more power over others. Government is fraudulent, and its constitutions therefore, are fraudulent as well. This should be easily understood, but it is not except by the very few.

Governments have no legitimate right to rule, and cannot therefore, define, grant, restrict, or take away natural rights, or alter natural law, without destroying the concept of freedom in the process. Any government constitution is in direct contradiction of this truth, as constitutions are meant to first define the powers assumed by government, when government has no justifiable authority to claim power over any man, his property, or his beliefs. Considering the U.S. Constitution, especially Article 1, Section 8, it grants unlimited powers to government, including the power to tax, to control all money, to control all commerce, to provide for the general welfare, to provide (control) for all common defense, to borrow money creating common debt, to declare war, to raise armies and militaries, to assume control of all by complete power over the militia, and grants itself ‘authority’ to purchase (steal) any property it deems necessary for these purposes, among other powers. If this is not enough, government gives itself the power to make all laws necessary for executing any and all powers as ‘vested’ by the Constitution. As you can see in this statement alone, this constitution was meant to ‘vest’ massive powers to government. Nothing could be more harmful to freedom, nor could it be more blatantly immoral and absurd.

The government drafted and implemented this document to greatly expand centralized power, and gave itself unlimited powers to do so. This was not done by the people, or with the consent of the people, certainly not even one single individual, and this heinous document was never created out of whole cloth in order to limit itself, or empower the people in any way. Should that have been the mission, it was an abject failure from minute one, but in reality, it was no failure for the rulers, it was a magnificent success, as can be evidenced over our history of tyranny and totalitarian rule.

The U.S. Constitution is not only illegitimate, it is a complete fraud. It has no authority over any individual, it cannot define or grant rights, as all rights are natural, and it was never drafted for that purpose. To accept anything other than this truth, one would have to concede that any government, and at any time in history, or any so-called criminal representatives of government, could bind you by an unsigned contract without your implicit agreement, to be a slave to the State. Not only that, but also, that all your children, and your children’s children, and every generation in the future would also be bound by the dead politicians who forced this on the people in the first place. The idiocy of this kind of thinking is not only bewildering, but is also idiotic.

Everything I have said here applies to every constitution, every government decree, every restrictive law, whether State or Federal. Constitutions have no legitimate authority, regardless of venue. There is no such thing as limited government because government only seeks more power. There is no such thing as a benevolent government for these same reasons, and that all government is evil. No one has any right whatsoever to delegate power to anyone or any government to bind another; one can only bind himself, so this fact alone negates all government and its heinous constitutions.

Of course the questions I will be asked, are: “What is your solution?” “What system do you recommend?” How do we ‘reform’ government to make it better?” “Who will protect me, and keep me safe?” “Who will build roads?” “Who should I vote for as my master to fix government?” And many will think if not ask: “Who will steal from my neighbors to give to me, so I can have ‘free’ healthcare, welfare, ‘covid’ checks, tax credits, government schooling, food stamps, retirement pay, etc.?” Stupid questions all, and an obvious sign that irresponsibility and voluntary enslavement to the State, is more important to most than their own freedom. This is pathetic beyond words, and the chatter of dependent fools.

“To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.”

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century

The post The Heinous Constitution: An Abominable Curse on the Liberty of All appeared first on LewRockwell.

The CIA Does ‘Soulful Work’

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of books and articles extolling the word “soul” became the rage in the United States.  Soul became the chic word.  It popped up everywhere.  Everything seemed to acquire soul – cars, toasters, underwear, cats’ pajamas, assorted crap, kitsch, etc.  Soul sold styles from boots to bras to bibelots from The New York Times to O Magazine.

The vogue in soul talk spread to every domain as everyone was commodified and capital was financialized.  While political, economic, and ecological reality spun out of regular people’s control and they felt unable to feel connected to a religious tradition that cut through the materialistic and war miasma, they were ravaged with a hunger to devour, to consume.  It was soul propaganda, highbrow New Ageism at its finest, the religious equivalent of an old-fashioned Ralph Lauren interior.  It was the era of consuming souls in a society that had become a spiritual void.  At least for those who had become divorced from their bodies and tradition at its best.  Fantasy started to rapidly replace reality.

The great popularizer of this new sense of soul and self (though no-self would be more accurate) was Thomas Moore, the author of the best-selling book – Care of the Soul, “a pathbreaking lifestyle handbook” and soon to be soul franchise (The Soul of Sex, Soul Therapy, The Soul of Christmas, etc.)  His works replaced the idea of an existential self with a precious, epicurean conception.  “You have a soul, the tree in front of your house has a soul, but so too does the car parked under the tree,” he said, adding that things “have as much personality and independence as I do.”  Ah, soul!

Not soul as I once learned in Catholic school: the essence of human freedom and consciousness in God united with the body.

Definitely not soul as the essence of a person bound by conscience to God and other human beings.

Not soul as in “For what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul.”

Not even soul as the dictionary defines it” “the immortal essence of an individual life.”

Although I have seen this soul-talk used for decades now to sell all sorts of bullshit and thought I couldn’t be surprised by any more usage, I just stumbled on one that took my breath away.  I read in Life Undercover, a memoir by RFK, Jr.’s presidential campaign manager, daughter-in-law, and former CIA spy under nonofficial cover in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa, Amaryllis Fox (Kennedy), that CIA work is “soulful work.”  I didn’t know this.  I thought its job was to spy, kill, and foment chaos for its Wall St handlers (with certain exceptions being some analysts who gather information).  I recall former CIA Director Mike Pompeo saying, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”  Or as my friend Doug Valentine, an expert on the CIA, puts it, the CIA is “Organized Crime,” not a bunch of soul-force workers out to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.  He writes:

CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret police interrogators. Their strategic intelligence networks in any nation are protected by corrupt warlords and politicians, the ‘friendly civilians’ who supply the death squads that in fact are their private militias, funded largely by drug smuggling and other criminal activities.

Yet Fox effusively thanks her CIA colleagues for their great work and for making her the woman she has become.  “Your allegiance is to the flag, to the Constitution, to some higher power, be that God or Love,” she writes in gratitude.

For some reason, I don’t think the assassinated JFK or RFK would buy her love talk; rather, they may quote another eloquent Irish-American, the playwright Eugene O’Neill: “God damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap.”

The man Fox is trying to elect president of the U.S., Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., also wrote a memoir – American Values – that revolves around an indictment of the CIA for an endless series of crimes:  “What are we going to do about the CIA?” he quotes his father saying to his aide Fred Dutton at the beginning of JFK’s presidency, before both Kennedys had yet to be killed by the soulful CIA.  Kennedy, Jr. writes:

Critics warned that the ‘tail’ of the covert operations branch would inevitably wag the dog of intelligence gathering (espionage). And indeed , the clandestine services quickly subsumed the CIA’s espionage function as the Agency’s intelligence analysts increasingly provided justification for the CIA’s endless interventions.

Fifty-six years later his campaign manager Fox Kennedy – you can’t make this weirdness up – married to RFK, III, is touting the soulful work of the Agency.  She replaced Dennis Kucinich, who was a strong a supporter of the Palestinians.  Is Fox and RFK, Jr.’s relationship a matter of what the Boss says to Luke in the iconic movie Cool Hand Luke – “What we got here is failure to communicate” – or the kind of communication that takes place in elite circles behind closed doors?

Sometimes sick people utter truths that lead to sardonic assent.  They remind you of history that is so shameful you cringe.  Fox and Pompeo also seem to live in separate realities, their psyches twisted by some deep evil force for which they both worked.

And here we are in another presidential election year.  When you think about presidential politics, you have to laugh.  I like to laugh, so I think about them from time to time.  It’s always a bad joke, but that’s why they are funny.  It makes no difference whether the president is Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden, or anyone who tries to square the oval office for their special sort of big change that never comes.  Those who tell you with a straight face that the lesser of two (or more) evils is better than nothing have not studied history.  They choose the evil of two lessers and wash their hands.  They live on pipe dreams, as Eugene O’Neill put it in his play The Iceman Cometh:

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk or sober.

I am reminded of advice I was given during the immoral and illegal Vietnam War when I had decided to apply for a discharge from the Marines as a conscientious objector.  But if you don’t go to the war, people said to me with straight faces, some poor draftee will.  The military needs good people.  To which I would often respond: Like the country needs good commanders-in-chief such as Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.  It’s like what people say about buying a lottery ticket when your odds are 1 in 500,000,000 – someone has to win.  Ha!  Ha!  Never reject the system is always the message.

Contemplating U.S. history for the past fifty-five plus years confirms the continuity of government policy for war and economic policies that enrich the wealthy at the expense of the working class and massacre the innocent around the world.  But we can pretend otherwise.  For an egregious recent example, the three leading candidates in this year’s election – Biden, Trump, and RFK, Jr. – all stand firmly behind the Israeli genocide in Gaza that any human being with a soul would condemn.

That these men are controlled by the Israel Lobby is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.

That this is corruption is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.

We can pretend and pretend and pretend all we want because we are living in a pretend society.

What’s that old Rodney Dangerfield joke: the problem with happiness is that it can’t buy you money?  Well, the problem with presidential politics is it can’t buy you the truth, but if you do it right it can fetch you money, a lot of corrupt money to help you rise to the pinnacle of a corrupt government.  For the truth is that the CIA/NSA run U.S. foreign war policy and the presidents are figureheads, actors in a society that lost all connection to reality on November 22, 1963.

Scotte Ritter has recently written the following about the CIA and its spearheading of the U.S. war against Russia through Ukraine:

Now, amid such a tense environment, it appears the C.I.A. has not only green-lighted an actual invasion of the Russian Federation, but more than likely was involved in its planning, preparation and execution.

Never in the history of the nuclear era has such danger of nuclear war been so manifest.

That the American people have allowed their government to create the conditions where foreign governments can determine their fate and the C.I.A. can carry out a secret war which could trigger a nuclear conflict, eviscerates the notion of democracy.

If this is soulful work, God help us.

Ask the 32,000 + dead Palestinians in Gaza whose voices cry out for justice while the top presidential contenders cheer on the Israeli/U.S. slaughter.

“The terrible truth is,” writes Douglass Valentine, “that a Cult of Death rules America and is hell-bent on world domination.”

And yes, presidential politics is a funny diversion from that reality.  Eugene O’Neill could be humorous also.  He played the Iceman theme to perfection, the Grim Reaper of two faces.

There was a tale circulating in the 1930s that a man came home and called upstairs to his wife, “Has the iceman come yet?”  “No,” she replied, “but he’s breathing hard.”

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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Rule by Criminals: When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth.”— Martin Luther King Jr.

When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals.

In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”

The government’s list of so-called “enemies of the state” is growing by the day.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is merely one of the most visible victims of the police state’s war on dissidents and whistleblowers.

Five years ago, on April 11, 2019, police arrested Assange for daring to access and disclose military documents that portray the U.S. government and its endless wars abroad as reckless, irresponsible, immoral and responsible for thousands of civilian deaths.

Included among the leaked materials was gunsight video footage from two U.S. AH-64 Apache helicopters engaged in a series of air-to-ground attacks while American air crew laughed at some of the casualties. Among the casualties were two Reuters correspondents who were gunned down after their cameras were mistaken for weapons and a driver who stopped to help one of the journalists. The driver’s two children, who happened to be in the van at the time it was fired upon by U.S. forces, suffered serious injuries.

There is nothing defensible about crimes such as these perpetrated by the government.

When any government becomes almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting—whether that evil takes the form of war, terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity—that government has lost its claim to legitimacy.

These are hard words, but hard times require straight-talking.

It is easy to remain silent in the face of evil.

What is harder—what we lack today and so desperately need—are those with moral courage who will risk their freedoms and lives in order to speak out against evil in its many forms.

Throughout history, individuals or groups of individuals have risen up to challenge the injustices of their age. Nazi Germany had its Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The gulags of the Soviet Union were challenged by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. America had its color-coded system of racial segregation and warmongering called out for what it was, blatant discrimination and profiteering, by Martin Luther King Jr.

And then there was Jesus Christ, an itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist, who not only died challenging the police state of his day—namely, the Roman Empire—but provided a blueprint for civil disobedience that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Indeed, it is fitting that we remember that Jesus Christ—the religious figure worshipped by Christians for his death on the cross and subsequent resurrection—paid the ultimate price for speaking out against the police state of his day.

A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus was a far cry from the watered-down, corporatized, simplified, gentrified, sissified vision of a meek creature holding a lamb that most modern churches peddle. In fact, he spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, and pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire.

Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day had all of the characteristics of a police state: secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state.

For all the accolades poured out upon Jesus, little is said about the harsh realities of the police state in which he lived and its similarities to modern-day America, and yet they are striking.

Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the increasingly militarized police forces across the country.

Widespread police presence. The Roman Empire used its military forces to maintain the “peace,” thereby establishing a police state that reached into all aspects of a citizen’s life. In this way, these military officers, used to address a broad range of routine problems and conflicts, enforced the will of the state. Today SWAT teams, comprised of local police and federal agents, are employed to carry out routine search warrants for minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud.

Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.

Perpetual wars and a military empire. Much like America today with its practice of policing the world, war and an over-arching militarist ethos provided the framework for the Roman Empire, which extended from the Italian peninsula to all over Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, extending into North Africa and Western Asia as well. In addition to significant foreign threats, wars were waged against inchoate, unstructured and socially inferior foes.

Martial law. Eventually, Rome established a permanent military dictatorship that left the citizens at the mercy of an unreachable and oppressive totalitarian regime. In the absence of resources to establish civic police forces, the Romans relied increasingly on the military to intervene in all matters of conflict or upheaval in provinces, from small-scale scuffles to large-scale revolts. Not unlike police forces today, with their martial law training drills on American soil, militarized weapons and “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset, the Roman soldier had “the exercise of lethal force at his fingertips” with the potential of wreaking havoc on normal citizens’ lives.

A nation of suspects. Just as the American Empire looks upon its citizens as suspects to be tracked, surveilled and controlled, the Roman Empire looked upon all potential insubordinates, from the common thief to a full-fledged insurrectionist, as threats to its power. The insurrectionist was seen as directly challenging the Emperor.  A “bandit,” or revolutionist, was seen as capable of overturning the empire, was always considered guilty and deserving of the most savage penalties, including capital punishment. Bandits were usually punished publicly and cruelly as a means of deterring others from challenging the power of the state.  Jesus’ execution was one such public punishment.

Acts of civil disobedience by insurrectionists. Much like the Roman Empire, the American Empire has exhibited zero tolerance for dissidents such as Julian Assange, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning who exposed the police state’s seedy underbelly. Jesus was also branded a political revolutionary starting with his attack on the money chargers and traders at the Jewish temple, an act of civil disobedience at the site of the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council.

Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers.  Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas. Acting as a government informant, Judas concocted a kiss as a secret identification marker, hinting that a level of deception and trickery must be used to obtain this seemingly “dangerous revolutionist’s” cooperation.

Torture and capital punishment. In Jesus’ day, religious preachers, self-proclaimed prophets and nonviolent protesters were not summarily arrested and executed. Indeed, the high priests and Roman governors normally allowed a protest, particularly a small-scale one, to run its course. However, government authorities were quick to dispose of leaders and movements that appeared to threaten the Roman Empire. The charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious. To the Romans, any one of these charges was enough to merit death by crucifixion, which was usually reserved for slaves, non-Romans, radicals, revolutionaries and the worst criminals.

Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.” After Jesus is formally condemned by Pilate, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.”  The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry. After being ruthlessly whipped and mocked, Jesus was nailed to a cross.

Jesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state. Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.

Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics.

Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.

What a marked contrast to the advice being given to Americans by church leaders to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do.

Telling Americans to blindly obey the government or put their faith in politics and vote for a political savior flies in the face of everything for which Jesus lived and died.

Will we follow the path of least resistance—turning a blind eye to the evils of our age and marching in lockstep with the police state—or will we be transformed nonconformists “dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood”?

As Martin Luther King Jr. reminds us in a powerful sermon delivered 70 years ago, “This command not to conform comes … [from] Jesus Christ, the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of mankind.”

Ultimately, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.

Reprinted with permission from The Rutherford Institute.

The post Rule by Criminals: When Dissidents Become Enemies of the State appeared first on LewRockwell.

The Nuland – Budanov – Tajik – Crocus Connection

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources in Moscow discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of investigation.

December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley, only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post: “There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going to get their throat slit in the middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there and create a campaign behind the lines.”

January 4, 2024: In an interview with ABC News, “spy chief” Kyrylo Budanov lays down the road map: strikes “deeper and deeper” into Russia.

January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets Budanov. Then, in a dodgy press conference at night in the middle of an empty street, she promises “nasty surprises” to Putin: code for asymmetric war.

February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty surprises” and asymmetric war. That may be interpreted as the definitive signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty ops.

February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine: nothing that Russian intel does not already know.

Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been in effect. Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter alongside the CIA and the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State factions got hold of it and maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or another – because Russian intel would have inevitably connected the dots.

Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in Rome for a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to be at Columbia University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).

Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in place, in the dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.

March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.

March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the Crocus venue and has his photo taken.

March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies simultaneously announce a possible terror attack on Moscow, telling their nationals to avoid “concerts” and gatherings within the next two days.

March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman performs at Crocus. That may have been the carefully chosen occasion targeted for the “nasty surprise” – as it falls only a few days before the presidential elections, from March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus was massive, so the op is postponed.

March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.

ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms

The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to previous Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir Tatarsky: close reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a dash for the border.

And that brings us to the Tajik connection.

There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the ragged bunch turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on Telegram; offered what was later established as a puny 500 thousand rubles (roughly $4,500) for the four of them to shoot random people in a concert hall; sent half of the funds via Telegram; directed to a weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand grenades.

The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were accurate, short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective use of hand grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away, almost in time to catch the “window” that would take them across the border to Ukraine.

All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all – quite literally.

A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish intel had earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat Khorasan in Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told the FSB their “acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the op.

And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.

The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari. He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the Americans were spinning: he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in Pakistan.

Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen Abdul Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad al-Kavkaz (“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the government in Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a crackdown by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those classic inter-jihadi squabbles.

Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent attack concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another vector of the “nasty surprises”.

Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired citizenship. He is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty motley crue Idlib gangs in Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra, which was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS.

Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the classic “moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by the CIA and the Pentagon.

Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed ideological/religious indoctrination on the internet dispensed by Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.

The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon Khurosoni. He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando. Khurosoni is arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.

The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never features a fistful of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom. Yet in this case it seems it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the 500 thousand ruble reward.

After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat – the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have been their final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not identified by FSB sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then Afghanistan.

That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have been the ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the client.

The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs

Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between GUR and the CIA.

Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led to Crocus.

One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea included – from lodging to juridical assistance.

The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were working for ISIS-K.

The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable.

Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge, the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying,

As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021, after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the relentless progress of the Taliban.

Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).

The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be hell to pay.

But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.

The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks.

But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems to be leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial middleman. And everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.

Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators” chose on purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority – Tajiks – who barely speak Russian to open up new wounds in a multinational nation where dozens of ethnicities live side by side for centuries.

In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes.

The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation.

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The Russian Elections: Were They Actually Rigged?

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

It is fascinating and instructive to read and digest the various critiques of the recent Russian presidential elections, March 16-18, 2024. Western journalists both on the political Left and the supposed political Right have uniformly attacked the vote as “rigged” and the election as stolen. That is, the election apparatus of “dictator” Vladimir Putin—who, along with Donald Trump and Viktor Orban, is the leader most loathed globally by both the political Left and the Establishment Right—manipulated and massaged the results to the effect that the Russian president received 87% of the votes cast (the turnout was around 74%).

Here is how the English Leftist paper of record, The Guardian, leads off its reporting of March 18 on the Russian vote:

Although Vladimir Putin’s landslide victory with 87% of the vote in the Russian election was no surprise, these elections were important both for the Kremlin and for those in opposition to Putin.

With voter turnout at 74% – the highest in history – anything less than a landslide victory would have suggested that those who did not vote for Putin represented a significant force in Russian politics. This would have been particularly awkward in the case of young upstart Vladislav Davankov, who, with 3.79% of the vote, came a close third place. Davankov has been mistakenly described as an anti-war candidate – he supports peace and negotiations, ‘but on Russia’s conditions and without one step backwards’ – but his platform also called for ‘freedom of speech and opinion, instead of intolerance and denunciations’, and ‘openness and pragmatism instead of searching for new enemies’. [Claims by NPR that all oppositions candidates were in jail are patently false].

Several opposition figures, including the well-known blogger Maxim Katz, and barred candidate Boris Nadezhdin, publicly stated they would vote for him. According to Vote Abroad, Davankov gained the majority of votes at Russian polling stations in other countries. With such a ‘subversive’ candidate on the ballot sheet, nothing other than absolute victory would have allowed Putin to sleep at night.

It was clear for some time that the Kremlin saw this election as a test of the regime’s legitimacy. It was not enough for the Kremlin to win the election – it also had to demonstrate public engagement…. There was a push for early voting, especially in the occupied territories in Ukraine, where electoral officials accompanied by armed men in uniform knocked on people’s doors and politely asked them if they would like to vote early. Those who did not yet have Russian passports were allowed to use their Ukrainian IDs. In Russia there were the usual raffles, discos and canteens at polling stations to entice people out….”

In other words, Russian election officials did some of what American—Democrat—election officials and agents did for the 2020 election, most specifically in the six crucial battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada.

Never mind, say the critics. Russian elections and American ones are two separate species, not comparable. The Russian ones are not credible, they solemnly intone—Putin is a tyrant who was just consolidating his power, they add.

And suddenly up pops, conveniently, a virulent anti-Putin Russian analyst, Sergey Shpilkin, who employs a dubious methodology to estimate that perhaps as many as 31 million out Putin’s garnered total of 76 million (or about 41%) of the Russian president’s vote total is fake! His analysis “hinges on comparing the distribution of votes for different candidates with the turnout at each polling station. A fair election [sic!] would typically show identical distributions differing only in absolute values. However, discrepancies in this pattern suggest vote inflation through ballot stuffing or the rewriting of vote tallies, which appear to have significantly skewed the official results.”

His suggestion is sheer speculation based on what he conceives as a “fair election” and based on the presence or lack of identical vote total percentages for candidates across the board in all voting districts. In other words, he fails to take into account regional variations in voting and voting patterns, differences between urban and rural voting, and other significant factors which would account for vote totals. Indeed, is it not likely that regions of Russia nearest to and most affected by the war in Ukraine might vote differently than, say, regions in the Siberian Far East? Or that the city of Moscow, far more influenced by Western “culture,” might skew such guestimates?

Nevertheless, the results of Shpilkin’s miraculous deduction have been solemnly seized upon by the Establishment Media both in Western Europe and in the United States, as such a conclusion reinforces and confirms their view that “Putin is (another) new Hitler” who has destroyed “democracy” and “freedom” in Russia.

Report after report echoes the same refrain. Yet, despite that near uniformity in the media and among the US and EU political governing class that the Russian elections were rigged, and that if only a “fair” election would be held, Putin would be toast, the facts on the ground demonstrate the exact contrary. Vladimir Putin remains very popular in Russia. And occasionally a rare and realistic appraisal gets past the gatekeepers. Even the anti-Putin UK Telegraph (March 19) was forced to admit that the Russian president “enjoys a frightening level of support that Western media and politicians obscure….” And the Telegraph suggests that it understands why: “to preserve the illusion that there’s just one evil madman to blame for the war in Ukraine, rather than a nation with far too many brainwashed anti-Nato, anti-Western nationalists keen to endorse their leader’s aggression.”

Despite reports from the BBC and The Economist that only “some” Russians in fact support President Putin, even The New York Times was finally forced to admit that independent polling by the well-regarded Levada Center (that has been tracking Putin’s approval rating since 1999) revealed that his support nationally in Russia stood at 86%. “Perhaps even more surprising,” continued the Telegraph, “a ridiculous 75 per cent of Russians told the pollster that their country is heading in the right direction.”

And the writer adds: “In the same way that Daniel Jonah Goldhagen’s book, Hitler’s Willing Executioners challenged the notion that it was Hitler alone who was responsible for the horrors of WW2 and the Holocaust, we must be honest in assessing Russian aggression beyond Mr. Putin. The media hopefully pretends that Russian aggression is solely a Putin problem. In fact, polling from Levada and others indicates that there are a troubling number of Russians who endorse Putin’s warped view that Ukraine isn’t a legitimate nation [sic].”

Thus, the real enemy is not just Vladimir Putin, but the Russian people, the entire Russian nation. We can only imagine what alarms that sets off in the fetid minds of Western globalists. Will the unelected and fanatical Neoconservative/Leftist globalist foreign policy apparatchiks, hidden away in faceless edifices in Washington and Brussels, now declare that their “war” to rid the world of Putin, perhaps assassinate the Russian president because he won’t accept their tutelage, must be extended to the entirety of the Russian people? In other words, are we now watching the onset of an ethnic and religious war against an entire population? Is that what the US State Department and our foreign satraps in Bonn, London, and Paris now are envisaging in the name of “(y)our democracy”?

Consider: all independent polls prior to the Russian presidential election indicated that Vladimir Putin would win overwhelmingly by a huge margin of perhaps over 80%, which he did. Why, then, pray tell, given the global situation and how he is negatively viewed by American and EU leaders, would he confirm the views of Washington and Brussels that he was a “dictator,” a “new Hitler,” when assuredly he was destined to win by such a large margin?  It makes no sense, and, if anything, Putin is not dumb. Even if the tyrant as he is often portrayed, he did NOT have to rig anything.

Indeed, a strong case could be made that the recently completed Russian elections were actually fairer in some ways than their 2020 American counterparts. At the very least accusers in the US should examine their own disreputable history of voter fraud and manipulation before zealously attacking Moscow.

Are we not witnessing a form of gaslighting and projection by American and EU critics of events in Russia, especially as we consider the various efforts in the United States to rig elections nationally or simply prevent an opponent from being on the ballot (e.g., the actions of Colorado and a few other states to remove Donald Trump from the presidential ballot).

As Mollie Hemingway, Dr. Naomi Wolf, Tucker Carlson, and others have convincingly shown, our own 2020 American presidential election was fraught with very skillful rigging. The 2020 election was undoubtedly the most corrupt in American history. As Hemingway recounts, we witnessed a combination of greatly extended absentee voting and counting newly-discovered votes after the election was supposed to be over, the lack of proper voter identification, vote harvesting, and the intentional use of unverified drop boxes, all of which was backed up by millions of dollars and support from such luminaries as Mark Zuckerberg.  And we must add to this the direct and flagrant collusion of the news media which purposely hid the blockbuster story of Hunter Biden’s corruption and Joe Biden’s involvement in it.

Hemingway sums up what happened:

[T]o an alarming degree, Democrats achieved control over elections in 2020. What made 2020 different was that for the first time ever the groups that supported Democrats were allowed, on a widespread basis, to cross that bright red line that separates government officials who administer an election from political operatives. Unelected liberal activists were allowed to embed in government offices and actually take over election administration duties in crucial battleground states. They were given vast amounts of voter information and even put in charge of designing, distributing, and collecting ballots…. It was as if the Dallas Cowboys were allowed to hire and train their own family members to serve as referees and then got angry the opposing team didn’t publicly accept a narrow loss with several controversial calls.  [….]  (Hemingway, Rigged: How the Media, Bid Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections. Washington: Regnery, 2021, pp. 206-207)

Our national foreign policy elites stress that we favor implanting “democracy” all around the globe, and that we will do everything to see it flourish. Of course, Russia (and then China, Iran, Hungary, etc.) comes in for harsh criticism. Yet, some of our major allies—Saudi Arabia comes to mind—are most definitely not “democratic.” Our zeal for “(y)our democracy” has its velleities.

Or, consider our latest cause celebre, the defense of “(y)our democracy” in Ukraine. Our media and government praise its leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a “new George Washington.” Yet Zelensky’s government in Kiev has suppressed opposition parties and put his opponents in jail, while persecuting Ukraine’s large Russian Orthodox religious church. Even former president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has described our ally as “a country corrupt at all levels of society.”

The simple fact is that American criticism of the Russian elections, the constant accusations against its president, and the US commitment to defeat Russia in Ukraine, even if it costs the life of every Ukrainian, is essentially ideological and founded on the correct assumption that Russia refuses to return to the status which it had under Boris Yeltsin, who was, in  caricature called “America’s poodle” for his subservience to American globalist policy.

The developing globalist template can brook no opposition, whether domestically from a Donald Trump who fails to heed the commands of the Deep State, or from a Vladimir Putin who believes that the true interests of his country do not always coincide with Davos, Washington, or Brussels.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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Operation Cyclone: Creating the Islamic Mujahideen

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

According to our giggletoes Vice President, Kamala, ISIS-K is responsible for the attack on the Moscow concert and Putin was warned.  Ask ANY CIA media source and without a shred of evidence, the mantra gob speak is the same.   Therefore, it must be truth.  The fact that the US is so fearfully deflecting en masse with the ‘common enemy’ ISIS theme is classic “Call In The Cleaners” mafia mentality.

The ISIS-K group identified by giggles was formed in 2015 with declared opponents – Afghanistan and Pakistan – the same opponents of the US.   At their formation roughly 70 adherents joined.   While the Afghanistan Taliban is considered an opponent, they were also the source of alliance via defectors.  By 2017, they were still only 70-100 strong and had been ‘operational’ in Afghanistan and Pakistan only.  Their primary targets have been Shiites.   Oddly, in 2021, their opponents were expanded to include:  Iran, India, Russia and Tajikstan – Then suddenly, in March 2024, their history was altered, their size was expanded, their opponents became everyone, and the US claimed their funding came from Saudi Arabia and Qatar – both allies of the US. Yet their attacks never expanded outside of the original two opponents – Pakistan and Afghanistan.

That is – until the US became desperate to deflect blame on someone for the Moscow Theatre attack.   Moscow has revealed the attackers were from Tajikistan with a regroup after the attack in Ukraine.  Prior to this, the last attack by ISIS-K was purportedly in December 2020 wherein the US claimed “ISIS-K ambushed a bus of Syrian regime soldiers near the US occupied oil fields.”  Was it ISIS-K?   According to SANA, the Syrian News Agency, the bus was filled with civilians.   “It was the deadliest attack since the fall of ISIL last year” ~ The UK’s – Rami Abdel Rahman, a pawn of MI6.

The December 2020 attack occurred more than one year after the end of the Syrian War and the withdrawal of US forces.  Except US forces didn’t withdraw – a contingent moved northeast and took control of the oil wells belonging to Syria in al Shaddadi, al Hasakah, and Deir ez Zor.  To protect the oil from ISIS and Assad…  But ISIS was created by MI6/Mossad/US…  So ‘protecting’ was the preferred media hype for ‘confiscated illegally’.

After the Fall of ISIS in 2019, Trump declared he wanted ALL troops out of Syria – Mattis resigned in protest.  Netanyahu, Bolton, and Jordan’s King Abdullah, protested against Trump’s demand – and the oil was confiscated.   Oddly, these US troops who are stealing Syria’s oil are likely the same ones who opened fire on a bus of civilians …and the Mafia Cleanup Crew was immediately called.  And suddenly ISIS-K had been resurrected from the dead.  Then went underground and disappeared again – only to reappear 4 years later in Russia – arbitrarily.

That would be the US narrative.  And Putin’s point;  the men were ordered by various sources and those sources are what Russia will discover and take care of accordingly.

THE NEXT SPIN:   Syria’s hijacked oil is sold for pennies on the dollar to Iraq.   Iraq then exports the oil to India, China and the US – as of 2022.  Jordan imports its oil from Saudi Arabia and resells it to the US – for a profit.  Why don’t we import from Saudi Arabia?

The oil racket is NOT deaccelerating.   US production has hit 13 million barrels a day.  Of that, 9.5 barrels are exported, on consumption of 20 million barrels a day.   Giving us a shortage of 16.5 barrels a day – so the US imports 8.3 million barrels according to the EIA.   This Math debacle is indicative of government agencies not coordinating their propaganda lies.

These constant lies have become more pronounced as computers, social media, and researchers dig for information.  Unpacking one after another implies that our government is incapable of Truth.   A pathological disease that is – accelerating.   And the reason for the acceleration is to attempt to cover a previous lie with a new one.   Which has reached breaking point as sleuths dig out the truths.

When Musk gave the Twitter Files to Matt Taibbi, Lee Fang, Shellenberger, Alex Berrensen, David Zweig, and Bari Weiss, he handed them a Pulitzer.    But he also handed the Files to Progressive democrats – globalists – and libelous pundits.   Taibbi’s eulogy after the death of Andrew Breitbart was titled, “Death of a Douche”.   Why Musk chose these stalwarts of Liberalism was reflective of his own politics and Alwaleed bin Talal, the second largest shareholder.

Alwaleed was one of the primary benefactors of the Clinton Foundation and Hillary for years!   This alliance would signify that Musk was on par with the Clinton Family Dynasty of censorship.   Today, Musk announced that if we do not vote RED across the board – America is a dead sea scroll.   Did he really make an about-face in the span of 1 ½ years?   Or is Musk actually one of their greatest propaganda operation creations?

The Twitter Files did not result in any SEC or FBI wrist slaps and were not considered a ‘smoking gun’ by anyone – as reported.   A nothingism despite the revelations of election manipulation and interference … from within our own government.   It all went quietly away into the hallows of the Epstein Files.

The unraveling of ISIS is only one small pogrom in the schematic of America’s Fall from grace.   In 2015, Hillary went before Congress and explained how the CIA’s creation of al Qaeda was a necessary evil to fight ISIS.   Yes.   Hillary claimed that it was a necessary evil to purge Soviet influence.  So the purpose of Al Qaeda was to destroy the Soviet Union in preparation for Reagan’s Freedom For Soviet Union in 1991.

Between 1979 and 1992, the US, Mossad and MI6 collaborated in Operation Cyclone to arm and finance the Mujahideen in Afghanistan so as to eliminate Soviet influence.   Reagan accelerated the Operation despite the two major proponents being democrats Charlie Wilson and Michael Vickers.  Reagan authorized the funding of the mujahideen.

Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda was an offshoot of Operation Cyclone – as was the Taliban.  Various other offshoots include El Nusra, Boko Haram, ISIL, and others scattered across the globe – with the duel purpose of eradicating local populations while maintaining a climate of insecurity, and fear which allows US and western proxies to stage their own Savior psychosis.  In other words – the US/UK/Mossad creates the terrorists – gives the funding and orders – and then saves the defending country from the same terrorists – for a price…. RESOURCES.

Hillary considered this financial Ponzi scheme a winning strategy!  And Congress – AGREED.  This is how America created its excellence.   This is how America created its greatness.   This is what America is built on that everyone in government is desperate to maintain.  This is their secret from the American People and the World.   Approved by Carter & Reagan.

Does this mean that the Border Crisis is another 9-11?   A Talking Point to distract from the Psyops perpetrated by our military then – and Now?   IF one were to imagine the most horrific events happening today across the globe – we can functionally expect that these events are orchestrated by the US/UK/Mossad.   

Epstein.   Child Trafficking.

Reprinted with permission from Helena-The Nationalist Voice.

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Spending Unlimited

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

The White House released its budget proposal for Fiscal Year 2025 on March 11th, and the news was depressingly familiar: $895 billion for the Pentagon and work on nuclear weapons at the Department of Energy. After adjusting for inflation, that’s only slightly less than last year’s proposal, but far higher than the levels reached during either the Korean or Vietnam wars or at the height of the Cold War. And that figure doesn’t even include related spending on veterans, the Department of Homeland Security, or the additional tens of billions of dollars in “emergency” military spending likely to come later this year. One thing is all too obvious: a trillion-dollar budget for the Pentagon alone is right around the corner, at the expense of urgently needed action to address climate change, epidemics of disease, economic inequality, and other issues that threaten our lives and safety at least as much as, if not more than, traditional military challenges.

Americans would be hard-pressed to find members of Congress carefully scrutinizing such vast sums of national security spending, asking tough questions, or reining in Pentagon excess — despite the fact that this country is no longer fighting any major ground wars. Just a handful of senators and members of the House do that work while many more search for ways to increase the department’s already bloated budget and steer further contracts into their own states and districts.

Congress isn’t just shirking its oversight duties: these days, it can’t even seem to pass a budget on time. Our elected representatives settled on a final national budget just last week, leaving Pentagon spending at the already generous 2023 level for nearly half of the 2024 fiscal year. Now, the department will be inundated with a flood of new money that it has to spend in about six months instead of a year. More waste, fraud, and financial abuse are inevitable as the Pentagon prepares to shovel money out the door as quickly as possible. This is no way to craft a budget or defend a country.

And while congressional dysfunction is par for the course, in this instance it offers an opportunity to reevaluate what we’re spending all this money for. The biggest driver of overspending is an unrealistic, self-indulgent, and — yes — militaristic national defense strategy. It’s designed to maintain a capacity to go almost everywhere and do almost anything, from winning wars with rival superpowers to intervening in key regions across the planet to continuing the disastrous Global War on Terror, which was launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and never truly ended. As long as such a “cover the globe” strategy persists, the pressure to continue spending ever more on the Pentagon will prove irresistible, no matter how delusional the rationale for doing so may be.

Defending “the Free World”?

President Biden began his recent State of the Union address by comparing the present moment to the time when the United States was preparing to enter World War II. Like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941, Joe Biden told the American people that the country now faces an “unprecedented moment in the history of the Union,” one in which freedom and democracy are “under attack” both at home and abroad. He disparaged Congress’s failure to approve his emergency supplemental bill, claiming that, without additional aid for Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin will threaten not just that country but all of Europe and even the “free world.” Comparing (as he did) the challenge posed by Russia now to the threat that Hitler’s regime posed in World War II is a major exaggeration that’s of no value in developing an effective response to Moscow’s activities in Ukraine and beyond.

Engaging in such fearmongering to get the public on board with an increasingly militarized foreign policy ignores reality in service of the status quo. In truth, Russia poses no direct security threat to the United States. And while Putin may have ambitions beyond Ukraine, Russia simply doesn’t have the capability to threaten the “free world” with a military campaign. Neither does China, for that matter. But facing the facts about these powers would require a critical reassessment of the maximalist U.S. defense strategy that rules the roost. Currently, it reflects the profoundly misguided belief that, on matters of national security, U.S. military dominance takes precedence over the collective economic strength and prosperity of Americans.

As a result, the administration places more emphasis on deterring potential (if unlikely) aggression from competitors than on improving relations with them. Of course, this approach depends almost entirely on increasing the production, distribution, and stockpiling of arms. The war in Ukraine and Israel’s continuing assault on Gaza have unfortunately only solidified the administration’s dedication to the concept of military-centric deterrence.

Contractor Dysfunction: Earning More, Doing Less

Ironically, such a defense strategy depends on an industry that continually exploits the government for its own benefit and wastes staggering amounts of taxpayer dollars. The major corporations that act as military contractors pocket about half of all Pentagon outlays while ripping off the government in a multitude of ways. But what’s even more striking is how little they accomplish with the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars they receive year in, year out. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), from 2020 to 2022, the total number of major defense acquisition programs actually declined even as total costs and average delivery time for new weapons systems increased.

Take the Navy’s top acquisition program, for example. Earlier this month, the news broke that the Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine is already at least a year behind schedule. That sub is the sea-based part of the next-generation nuclear (air-sea-and-land) triad that the administration considers the “ultimate backstop” for global deterrence. As a key part of this country’s never-ending arms buildup, the Columbia is supposedly the Navy’s most important program, so you might wonder why the Pentagon hasn’t implemented a single one of the GAO’s six recommendations to help keep it on track.

As the GAO report made clear, the Navy proposed delivering the first Columbia-class vessel in record time — a wildly unrealistic goal — despite it being the “largest and most complex submarine” in its history.

Yet the war economy persists, even as the giant weapons corporations deliver less weaponry for more money in an ever more predictable fashion (and often way behind schedule as well). This happens in part because the Pentagon regularly advances weapons programs before design and testing are even completed, a phenomenon known as “concurrent development.” Building systems before they’re fully tested means, of course, rushing them into production at the taxpayer’s expense before the bugs are out. Not surprisingly, operations and maintenance costs account for about 70% of the money spent on any U.S. weapons program.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 is the classic example of this enormously expensive tendency. The Pentagon just greenlit the fighter jet for full-scale production this month, 23 years (yes, that’s not a misprint!) after the program was launched. The fighter has suffered from persistent engine problems and deficient software. But the official go-ahead from the Pentagon means little, since Congress has long funded the F-35 as if it were already approved for full-scale production. At a projected cost of at least $1.7 trillion over its lifetime, America’s most expensive weapons program ever should offer a lesson in the necessity of trying before buying.

Unfortunately, this lesson is lost on those who need to learn it the most. Acquisition failures of the past never seem to financially impact the executives or shareholders of America’s biggest military contractors. On the contrary, those corporate leaders depend on Pentagon bloat and overpriced, often unnecessary weaponry. In 2023, America’s biggest military contractor, Lockheed Martin, paid its CEO John Taiclit $22.8 millionAnnual compensation for the CEOs of RTX, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, and Boeing ranged from $14.5 and $22.5 million in the past two years. And shareholders of those weapons makers are similarly cashing in. The arms industry increased cash paid to its shareholders by 73% in the 2010s compared to the prior decade. And they did so at the expense of investing in their own businesses. Now they expect taxpayers to bail them out to ramp up weapons production for Ukraine and Israel.

Reining in the Military-Industrial Complex

One way to begin reining in runaway Pentagon spending is to eliminate the ability of Congress and the president to arbitrarily increase that department’s budget. The best way to do so would be by doing away with the very concept of “emergency spending.” Otherwise, thanks to such spending, that $895 billion Pentagon budget will undoubtedly prove to be anything but a ceiling on military spending next year. As an example, the $95 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan that passed the Senate in February is still hung up in the House, but some portion of it will eventually get through and add substantially to the Pentagon’s already enormous budget.

Meanwhile, the Pentagon has fallen back on the same kind of budgetary maneuvers it perfected at the peak of its disastrous Afghan and Iraq wars earlier in this century, adding billions to the war budget to fund items on the department’s wish list that have little to do with “defense” in our present world. That includes emergency outlays destined to expand this country’s “defense industrial base” and further supersize the military-industrial complex — an expensive loophole that Congress should simply shut down. That, however, will undoubtedly prove a tough political fight, given how many stakeholders — from Pentagon officials to those corporate executives to compromised members of Congress — benefit from such spending sprees.

Ultimately, of course, the debate about Pentagon spending should be focused on far more than the staggering sums being spent. It should be about the impact of such spending on this planet. That includes the Biden administration’s stubborn continuation of support for Israel’s campaign of mass slaughter in Gaza, which has already killed more than 31,000 people while putting many more at risk of starvation. A recent Washington Post investigation found that the U.S. has made 100 arms sales to Israel since the start of the war last October, most of them set at value thresholds just low enough to bypass any requirement to report them to Congress.

The relentless supply of military equipment to a government that the International Court of Justice has said is plausibly engaged in a genocidal campaign is a deep moral stain on the foreign-policy record of the Biden administration, as well as a blow to American credibility and influence globally. No amount of airdrops or humanitarian supplies through a makeshift port can remotely make up for the damage still being done by U.S.-supplied weapons in Gaza.

The case of Gaza may be extreme in its brutality and the sheer speed of the slaughter, but it underscores the need to thoroughly rethink both the purpose of and funding for America’s foreign and military policies. It’s hard to imagine a more devastating example than Gaza of why the use of force so often makes matters far, far worse — particularly in conflicts rooted in longstanding political and social despair. A similar point could have been made with respect to the calamitous U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost untold numbers of lives, while pouring yet more money into the coffers of America’s major weapons makers. Both of those military campaigns, of course, failed disastrously in their stated objectives of promoting democracy, or at least stability, in troubled regions, even as they exacted huge costs in blood and treasure.

Before our government moves full speed ahead expanding the weapons industry and further militarizing geopolitical challenges posed by China and Russia, we should reflect on America’s disastrous performance in the costly, prolonged wars already waged in this century. After all, they did enormous damage, made the world a far more dangerous place, and only increased the significance of those weapons makers. Throwing another trillion dollars-plus at the Pentagon won’t change that.

Reprinted with permission from TomDispatch.com.

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Islamic State Terror Attack Against Moscow. Who Is Behind ISIL-ISIS-Daesh?

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

The Islamic State (IS) – a CIA creation – claimed credit for the attack.

However, the political end of this attack is more complex.

On March 7, 2024, the US Embassy in Russia warned Moscow that a terror attack may take place in Moscow within the next few weeks. No further details.

Is it one of the now fashionable “predictive planning” stunts?

On the same day, the same US Embassy in Moscow warned US citizens in Moscow not to visit shopping malls. How much did the US know?

Speculations abound. Was this an empty warning to destabilize Russia and Russian elections?

Or was it one more provocation to pull Russia into a larger conflict?

On the day of the attack, John Kirby, spokesman for National Security at the White House said in a Press Conference that there were no indications that Ukraine had anything to do with the attack. In early March Washington just had some indications that a terror assault may hit Moscow.

“Some indications”? Why then the warning on the same 7 March to US citizens in Moscow not to visit any shopping malls?

It could not be more obvious that a hidden agenda is being played by Washington – and, may be added, by NATO and Europe?

Whether the Islamic State (ISIL), Al Qaeda or another CIA / MI6 terror creation – or even Kiev directly — was involved in this mass-killing is irrelevant, because whoever acted, did so on behalf of US / NATO and the West’s “Classe politique”. 

It is no coincidence that French President Macron practically simultaneously sends officially 2,000 French NATO troops to Ukraine. “Officially”, because western / NATO military advisers, trainers and coaches for Kiev’s Nazi-military have been in Kiev for quite a while.

Polish Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, has called it an open secret that Western soldiers are in Ukraine. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, “there are already some troops from big countries in Ukraine.” See this.

Crossing Russia’s Redline

This is clearly the crossing of President Putin’s Red Line. Mr. Macron knows it, those who mandate the crossing of the Red Line, like the WEF and those dark Deep State Cult forces behind the WEF, know it – and Moscow knows that they know it.

Is it a provocation to pull Moscow into a hot war?

And the Moscow Concert Hall assault being a doubling-up of the Red-Line crossing?

This happening in the Ides of March, and just ten days after the confirmed landslide re-election of President Putin on 17 March 2024.

The Ides of March

Ides of March is the day in the ancient Roman calendar that falls approximately on Mid-March and is associated with misfortune and doom.

The date is also known as the date on which Julius Caesar was assassinated in 44 BC.

Most US wars were initiated in March. Has it become a symbolic cult ritual of the west?

“With the exception of the War on Afghanistan (October 2001) and the 1990-91 Gulf War, all major US-NATO and allied led military operations over a period of more than half a century –since the invasion of Vietnam by US ground forces on March 8, 1965– have been initiated in the month of March.”

(See: The Pentagon’s “Ides of March 2024”: Best Month to Go to War?, by Michel Chossudovsky, March 01, 2024

It would perfectly fit into the Death Cult of the Great Reset (WEF) and the UN Agenda 2030, which are currently plaguing humanity – worldwide.

There are other “non-coincidences”: Yugoslavia

The 24 March 2024 is the 25th anniversary of the 1999 US-NATO assault on Yugoslavia (Ides of March) – currently being commemorated by a two-day Conference 23-24 March 2024, in Belgrade.

The destruction and dismembering of Yugoslavia were also planned by a long hand.

After Josip Tito’s death in May 1980 (he served in several leadership positions of Yugoslavia from 1943-1980), there were some lesser communist successors, who were vulnerable to western / NATO “pressures”, and let what was a solid Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) deteriorate, western-style.

In 1990 Slobodan Milošević, President of Serbia became de facto President of the SFR Yugoslavia attempting to hold the federation together – which in the ten years after President Tito’s departure was financially destabilized by the west. In the 1990s the SFR Yugoslavia was one of the first “cases” where the World Bank, IMF Washington Consensus was applied full-scale – indebting to destabilize, create internal unrest – and divide.

Mr. Milošević was captured, detained at the International Criminal Court’s (ICC) prison in The Hague. He was poisoned on March 11, 2006 in his prison cell – shortly before his scheduled appearance at the International Criminal Tribunal on Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Once divided with constant civil unrest, there was “justification” for western rescue, i.e., bombing Yugoslavia literally into bits and pieces – leaving what we have today, numerous so-called independent former Yugoslavian Federal States – being economically and with “sanctions” controlled by the west.

Read the Whole Article

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Misunderstood Communism

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

Just humor yourself and do a search on the title of this post: Misunderstood communism. What you will find are mostly defenders of the ideal, trying to explain away its failures; trying to champion the cause.
You can find several communist Substacks with thousands of subscribers who have no idea what they are talking about.

Communism, some say, has never failed because it has never REALLY been tried. I am not going to talk about that as there is no point in arguing with religious fanatics. I am not going to address the “yes, but…” and the “what about the free stuff…” arguments either.

After I left communist Hungary, my greatest frustration was with those who sympathized. With the slightly condescending “you poor victim of totalitarianism….” attitude. The anti-communist West pictured communism in black and white, the Gulags and the propaganda, neither of which had much to do with real life.
In that real life, I had many friends, the summers were beautiful, the sexual revolution was raging just like in the West. We did not have access to all the goods the West produced, but what we were able to get, was appreciated far more than in the West.

The problem with the Western perception of communism is that both sides are using a fundamentally moralizing approach to very pragmatic problems.

  • The left sees its lofty goals and grandiose promises while the right looks at its most inhuman excesses.
  • The left is pointing to its supposed and nominal social rights while the right bemoans the loss and suppression of individual rights.
  • The left is smitten by its cheerful propaganda, the right is appalled by its blatant lies.

The real problems of communism were, of course, in the grey, depressing middle.
In the details that are hardly ever talked about.

The problems

  • In a system of strictly enforced centralized decision making, there can be no healthy economy.
  • In a system without a healthy civil society, there can be no morality.
  • In a system of compelled conformity, there can be no creativity.

It is important to understand, that these statements are not absolutes. In communist countries, there was (is) a more or less functioning economy, moral behaviour and creativity, but all of it existed DESPITE, not BECAUSE of the system that can only function on the remnants of attitudes, instincts and social conditioning that evolved over thousands of years of civilizational evolution. People living in communist countries are still humans.

Communism/socialism is a paradox that can only exist on the values it aims to replace.

There are two essential works to help you understand the economic aspects of the problem:

Mises explains how planning is impossible without market signals, while Hayek explores the pitfalls in the arrogance of the central planners.

In the first post of this series, I made the case for the value of distributed decision making.
The closer you are to the object of the decision, the more you can take into account the details that are needed to make the appropriate ones.
The further away you are from the details, the more of those details you will have to disregard in your decisions.
Communism is the ultimate example of centralized decision-making with a strictly enforced decision making hierarchy. Central planners are so far removed from the details, that it is not possible for them to even know what they are.
The pretense of knowledge is not driven by nefarious intent, but sheer necessity.
Marx called his economic delusions and political phantasies ‘science’.
The moment you buy into the ideology, you have to start treating Marx’s seriously confused ideas as gospel. Every communist had to treat them as such. Since the foundational questions – who will make decisions based on what information – could not be addressed, reality had to be shaped into matching the ideology-based projections. Of course it didn’t work. Ever.

In centrally planned economies there is constant waste on the one hand, shortages on the other;
black-markets and petty corruption, theft of public resources and bribes to get proper services or goods from the shadow economy.

Let me state it again, that all of this corruption was essential for some sort of economic functioning. The communist authorities were naturally blaming all problems on the people for not being in line with the ideology. If we were good communists, everything would be working fine – we were told.

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Brazil’s Sad Tale Sounds Familiar

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

Some things in life will never dwell together in unity. Examples from the physical world illustrate this easily—oil and water, equal magnetic poles, or cats and birds. The ideological world provides even more examples— prosperity and socialism, for example. As with other South American victims of the Left, this point is illustrated clearly in Brazil.

Younger Americans nonetheless love to agitate for socialism’s shiny promises—the “free” stuff like college educations and medical care, or the “cool” stuff, like high-speed rail or mass transit. Life under socialism appears to be one big, happy hostel, full of licentious delights, music festivals, and climate-friendly “solidarity”. What was “available for years in Europe” is now available here—if only people will, “like, save democracy” and vote!

Like European cars, real socialism would presumably bring stylish improvements to the clunkier traditions of American life. For the star-gazing Left and its young disciples, there is something pleasing and progressive about socialism’s brutalist, gender-fluid aesthetic. Regardless of the hipster window dressings applied to this dismal philosophy, though, one will only find the old deprivations and tyrannies within.

My regular Uber driver, a Brazilian guy named Alex, only shakes his head at his American peers’ mindless appetite for socialism. Like many in the ride share business, Alex is finding some success here. He’s happy to work long hours and build wealth along with his wife, who is also a citizen, now pregnant with their first child. Over the course of several airport drives, he described Brazilian socialism—the popularly touted “social democratic” variety that he escaped through a costly and legal immigration process.

As a newer American citizen with first-hand experience of socialist blight, Alex fears that socialism will bring another once-prosperous country to its knees. I was therefore intrigued by his take on young Americans’ economic make-believe; he described the hard facts that these hare-brained fantasies never include.

Surprisingly, his heavily-accented personal history don’t focus on stories of privations, shortages and censorship—although he observed those things, too. Instead, most of his Brazilian backstory was disturbingly relatable; it was as if he was describing my American life from a vista of the future, just a little further on down our current road.

When I asked about the “free” medical care enjoyed in Brazil—the left’s famously touted benefit of socialism—he shared his experience working for an oncology practice, where he scheduled patients for cancer surgeries. As is always true, “free” wasn’t worth much at the doctor’s office; most Brazilians still need private insurance because government medical care is poo— if you ever manage to get it. On many occasions, by the time he contacted cancer patients on the long waitlist, the patient had already died.

Government schools—both in Brazil and here— are the training and acclimation grounds for all such dismal results. Brazil teaches us where a socialist education model leads; public high schools and universities there are known to hang posters of Marx or Che Guevara. Public education is generally abysmal, so even struggling middle-class families will cobble funds to send their kids to private schools instead. Sexual performance “art” is increasingly common on college campuses. None of this is difficult for Americans to imagine anymore—to a large degree, it’s already happening here, too.

After hearing Alex mention the communist wall art, I remembered my own brushes with public education poster campaigns. In my middle school years, we saw “Reading is FUNdamental” and “Food Pyramid” posters in the library and lunchroom; they seemed like harmless, if unconvincing, ways to promote literacy and good health. Things have progressed on schedule, though; now schools have graduated to fist-up posters extolling power, pride, diversity, or banned books—the calls to action for today’s little K-12 revolutionaries. The Brazilian wall art probably isn’t that far away.

Before my talks with Alex, Brazil was Rio de Janeiro and exotic rain forests; but through my Uber seminars, it was revealed to be an eerily familiar prophecy of our own future, should our political left continue to run the show. Brazil’s powerful Supreme Court tramples legislative powers, and corruption is an entrenched feature of both sides of the political spectrum. Brazil’s Marxist leader, Lula, now aims his firepower at conservative ex-president Jair Bolsonaro and the Left’s favorite “threats to democracy,”—things like free speech and religion.

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Pawn Shop Inventories Are Exploding

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mer, 27/03/2024 - 05:01

How much longer will the Biden administration and the mainstream media continue to deny that we are in the midst of a very painful economic downturn?  Debt levels have never been higher, delinquency rates are spiking, the commercial real estate market is crashing, the banking industry is mired in turmoil and large companies are conducting mass layoffs all over the nation.  Anyone that attempts to claim that the U.S. economy is in good shape is just being delusional.  Unfortunately, it is those that are at the bottom of the economic food chain that are being hurt the most.

If you want to know what is really going on with the economy, pawn shops are a great place to look.

When the economy is doing well, pawn shop inventories tend to go down because people aren’t pawning much stuff and there is lots of buying going on.

But when the economy is not doing well, pawn shop inventories tend to go up because people are pawning lots of stuff for fast cash and there aren’t as many buyers as there were during the good times.

So what are we seeing during the early stages of 2024?

One pawn shop owner that was recently interviewed by USA Today admitted that he has “a glut of inventory” right now…

Clay Baron has everything in his pawn shop from gold rings and pearl necklaces to vintage cowboy boots, silver belt buckles, stereos and ticking clocks.

The only thing he’s short on is space. “Right now we have a glut of inventory,” Baron said, “which tells me that our clientele doesn’t necessarily have money.”

Accumulating pawn shop inventory means fewer buyers than sellers – a sign that for the lowest-income Americans, times remain tough.

That same article pointed out that inventory levels have also grown rapidly at some of the largest pawn shop chains in the entire nation…

Two of the largest, publicly traded pawnshop corporations in the U.S. – which between them own roughly 1,700 pawnshops nationwide – are also reporting growing inventory and increased demand for short-term loans.

FirstCash Holdings Inc. operates nearly 1,200 pawnshops under the FirstCash and Cash America brands in 29 states and the District of Columbia. The company reported “record pawn receivables” in its most recent year-end earnings report and a 10% increase in inventory at its U.S. stores.

EZCORP Inc. also owns 530 pawnshops in the U.S. and reported an 8% increase in inventory at U.S. stores in the company’s latest earnings report. The “challenging macro-economic backdrop” continued to fuel demand for short-term cash loans, the company said.

If anyone comes to you and tries to convince you that the economy is doing well, just show them these numbers.

That will be the end of any debate.

One of the reasons why so many Americans need fast cash is because debt loads have risen to unprecedented levels.  Here is just one example

For Denise and Paul Nierzwicki, credit cards are the only way to make ends meet. The couple, ages 69 and 72, respectively, have about $20,000 in debt spread across multiple cards, all with interest rates above 20%.

The trouble started during the pandemic, when Denise lost her job and a business deal for a bar that they owned in their hometown of Lexington, Kentucky, went bad.

They applied for Social Security, which helped, and Denise now works 50 hours a week at a restaurant. Still, they’re barely scraping together the minimum payments for their credit card debt.

Can you imagine how much stress they must be feeling on a daily basis?

Sadly, there are millions of others that are in similar positions.

The combination of high debt levels and high interest rates has created a “perfect storm” of suffering for U.S. consumers, and so it should be no surprise that delinquency rates have been surging

The signs are obvious. Last week we noted that banks’ charge-offs are accelerating, and are now above pre-pandemic levels.

…and leading this increase are credit card loans – with delinquencies that haven’t been this high since Q3 2011.

On top of that, while credit cards and nonfarm, nonresidential commercial real estate loans drove the quarterly increase in the noncurrent rate, residential mortgages drove the quarterly increase in the share of loans 30-89 days past due.

When large numbers of people start getting behind on their mortgages, it is only a matter of time before foreclosures start to spike.

And that is precisely what we are witnessing

Home foreclosures rose again in February as Americans continue to grapple with the ongoing cost-of-living crisis.

That is according to a new report published by real estate data provider ATTOM, which found that there were 32,938 properties in February with foreclosure filings, which includes default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions.

Sadly, things are only going to get worse during the months ahead, because the labor market is starting to get very tight.

One 26-year-old woman that has multiple degrees hasn’t been able to find a job even though she has already applied for approximately 1,000 different positions

Cheyenne Barton, 26, of Kissimmee, Florida, graduated in December with one degree in biomedical sciences and another in computing technology and software development – the kind of practical background employers have coveted.

She initially targeted software development jobs but is now looking for “really any job” where she can use her degrees.

Barton has applied for about 1,000 positions but hasn’t yet notched an interview.

Companies “say they want recent grads who are teachable and can learn quicker,” she says. “But then you apply for the job and it’s like, ‘Oh, we already have over 100 applications with people who are more qualified.’”

Wait a second.

Joe Biden told us that good jobs are easy to find these days.

So why can’t Cheyenne Barton even get an interview?

Something is not adding up.

Of course the truth is that we have seen a major shift in the labor market in recent months.  According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, the number of layoffs in February was the highest that they have ever recorded for that particular month

The pace of job cuts by U.S. employers accelerated in February, a sign the labor market is starting to deteriorate in the face of ongoing inflation and high interest rates.

That is according to a new report published Thursday by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which found that companies planned 84,638 job cuts in February, a 3% increase from the previous month and a 9% jump from the same time last year.

It marked the highest layoff total for the month of February in data going back to 2009.

The outlook for the rest of the year is absolutely dismal.

So even more Americans will fall into poverty.

And even more Americans will fall into hunger.

And even more Americans will end up homeless.

Over the weekend, a story about a homeless man in Wasco, California that was apparently eating “a severed human leg” has been going viral…

Video footage shot in Wasco, California appears to show a crazed maniac waving around a severed human leg and taking bites out of it before police apprehended him Friday.

Reports have suggested that the man ‘stole’ the leg from the scene of a train accident, where a person was earlier hit and killed.

The footage shows the man, identified as 27-year-old Resendo Tellez, holding and examining the limb, with witnesses saying he was eating parts of it, before attempting to walk away waving it around as multiple police cars close in on him.

That is pretty shocking.

But it is also a preview of where this country is heading.

The economic suffering of the past couple of years has been very painful, but the truth is that it isn’t even worth comparing to what is in front of us.

Reprinted with permission from The Economic Collapse.

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I commissari dei criteri D(iversità) E(quità) I(nclusione) sono una minaccia per la libertà

Freedonia - Mar, 26/03/2024 - 11:15

 

 

di Barry Brownstein

Nel suo libro The New Puritans Andrew Doyle scrive: “Abbiamo visto gli evangelisti della 'giustizia sociale' prendere il controllo delle nostre principali istituzioni culturali, politiche, educative e aziendali, assetati di opportunità per sconfiggere i diavoli, siano essi reali o meno. [...] Queste tendenze illiberali [...] minacciano di sabotare tutti quei progressi che abbiamo compiuto sin dai movimenti per i diritti civili degli anni ’60”.

Troppo pochi ascoltarono F. A. Hayek quando lanciò un messaggio simile quasi 50 anni fa. Nel suo libro Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 2: The Mirage of Social Justice Hayek scriveva, parlando di “giustizia sociale”, che “i vecchi diritti civili e i nuovi diritti sociali ed economici non possono essere raggiunti contemporaneamente ma sono di fatto incompatibili; i nuovi diritti non potrebbero essere imposti dalla legge senza distruggere allo stesso tempo quell’ordine liberale a cui mirano i vecchi diritti civili”.

Non penso che Hayek sarebbe scioccato dalle iniziative DEI (diversità, equità e inclusione) e dal loro uso del razzismo per “combattere” il razzismo. Di recente la Facoltà di Medicina della Johns Hopkins University, famosa in tutto il mondo, ha ripudiato il punto di vista del suo responsabile della diversità, la dottoressa Sherita Golden. Quest'ultima, nella sua newsletter mensile, aveva scritto che tutti “i bianchi, le persone normodotate, gli eterosessuali, le persone cisgender, i maschi, i cristiani, le persone della classe media o possidente, le persone di mezza età e le persone di lingua inglese” sono privilegiati .

Conosciamo tutti la retorica della Golden, l'unica sorpresa è stata che l'università abbia ripudiato la sua dichiarazione. Pensate ai commissari dei criteri DEI come a quelli sovietica memoria.

Nell’ex-Unione Sovietica un commissario era un burocrate inserito nell’esercito, o in altre organizzazioni governative, per garantire che le decisioni fossero fedeli allo spirito del partito comunista. Il loro compito era mantenere la purezza ideologica.

Le scene del romanzo di Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate, sono ambientate durante la battaglia per Stalingrado. Le vittime furono tante e una brigata aveva bisogno di un nuovo capo di stato maggiore. Il colonnello Novikov aveva bisogno dell'approvazione del commissario Getmanov per nominare il maggiore Basangov. Getmanov rispose: «Il secondo in comando della seconda brigata è un armeno; vuoi che il capo di stato maggiore sia un Kalmyk [mongolo]? E abbiamo già un Lifshits [un ebreo] come capo di stato maggiore della terza brigata. Non potremmo fare a meno dei Kalmyk?».

Il destino dell'Unione Sovietica era in bilico e il commissario badava alle identità etniche degli ufficiali. Novikov cedette al commissario e nominò un russo. Anche se Novikov “rideva dell'ignoranza militare di Getmanov [...] aveva paura di lui”.

Oggi in America molti potrebbero ridere dei commissari dei criteri DEI, ma come nel caso di Novikov, un’ombra di paura attraversa la loro mente.

Il vecchio movimento per i diritti civili a cui facevano riferimento Doyle e Hayek era vantaggioso per tutti: uguaglianza di fronte alla legge. Le iniziative DEI di oggi sono invece a somma zero: una persona meno qualificata riceve un lavoro in base alla razza, al sesso o ad altro status, mentre a qualcuno più qualificato gli viene negato.

Hayek spiegò che “la richiesta di 'giustizia sociale' diventa quindi una richiesta affinché i membri della società si organizzino in un modo che renda possibile assegnare porzioni particolari del prodotto della società ai diversi individui o gruppi”.

L’abuso della giustizia sociale, scrisse Hayek , “minaccia di distruggere la concezione del diritto che è a salvaguardia della libertà individuale”. Spiegò inoltre che quando questa “superstizione quasi religiosa” della giustizia sociale usa la coercizione, dev'essere combattuta perché è “la minaccia più grave alla maggior parte degli altri valori di una civiltà libera”.

Hayek poi aggiunse: “Quasi ogni richiesta di azione da parte dello stato a favore di particolari gruppi è avanzata in suo nome, e se si riesce a far sembrare che una certa misura sia richiesta dalla 'giustizia sociale', l’opposizione a essa s'indebolirà rapidamente”. Oggi i commissari dei criteri DEI avanzano le loro richieste contando su una debole opposizione.

L’American Library Association ha definito la giustizia sociale come “un mondo in cui la distribuzione delle risorse è equa e sostenibile e tutti i membri sono fisicamente e psicologicamente sicuri, protetti, riconosciuti e trattati con rispetto”. Hayek predisse che vaghe parole incomprensibili, come quelle dell'ALA, sarebbero diventate la norma.

Una volta che il termine giustizia sociale viene utilizzato come arma, scrisse Hayek, non può che espandersi: “È nella convinzione che qualcosa come una 'giustizia sociale' possa essere raggiunta che le persone hanno posto nelle mani dello stato poteri che ora non può rifiutare; da impiegare per soddisfare le pretese di un numero sempre crescente d'interessi particolari che hanno imparato a utilizzare il grimaldello della 'giustizia sociale'”.

Il pastore di Chicago, Corey Brooks, è in prima linea per alleviare le sofferenze della sua comunità. Ha esposto l’ideologia dei criteri DEI per quella che è:

L'ideologia dei criteri DEI [...] non ha alcuna capacità di aiutare [...]. Non offre fede e non offre alcun significato esistenziale [...]. È retorica manipolativa [...] ideologi di professione usano il nostro dolore per alimentare il loro tornaconto attraverso le istituzioni americane. La loro merce di scambio è un veleno che distrugge l’anima, i cui effetti morali e nel mondo reale sono altrettanto negativi per le nostre comunità quanto quelli di qualsiasi altro farmaco venduto nelle farmacie.

Brooks ci invita a considerare gli effetti distruttivi delle iniziative DEI. Hayek scrisse: “il liberalismo classico [...] era governato da principi di giusta condotta individuale mentre la nuova società deve soddisfare le richieste di 'giustizia sociale'”. Oggi alle persone viene detto che sono vittime o carnefici; le vittime si aspettano che lo stato risolva le loro lamentele.

Hayek predisse che una volta che la giustizia sociale fosse diventata un criterio accettato per allocare le risorse attraverso la coercizione, lo stato avrebbe dovuto trattare le persone “in modo diseguale”. Il fatto che ci siano troppe persone che si preparano per la carriera di commissari dei criteri DEI non avrebbe affatto sorpreso Hayek:

Una volta che le ricompense che l’individuo può aspettarsi non sono più un’indicazione adeguata di come dirigere i propri sforzi dove ce n’è più bisogno, perché queste ricompense non corrispondono più al valore che i suoi servizi hanno per i suoi simili, ma al merito morale o al disertare il valore che si ritiene le persone abbiano legittimamente guadagnato, perdono la funzione di guida che hanno nell'ordine del mercato e vengono sostituiti da autorità totalitarie.

Hayek sapeva che la giustizia sociale avrebbe indebolito la parità di trattamento ai sensi della legge. Oggi, secondo le parole di Doyle, la giustizia sociale pone “l’accento sull’identità di gruppo rispetto ai diritti dell’individuo, sul rifiuto del liberalismo sociale e sul presupposto che i risultati disuguali siano sempre la prova di disuguaglianze strutturali”. I commissari dei criteri DEI, come la Golden, diffondono la velenosa dottrina secondo cui la società si basa su alcuni gruppi che esercitano il loro “privilegio” a spese di altri.

Hayek disse che quanto più questo veleno si diffonde, tanto più la nostra civiltà è a rischio. Perché così tante persone hanno ignorato il suo monito? Conosciamo la risposta: per paura. E conosciamo anche l'antidoto: il coraggio.


[*] traduzione di Francesco Simoncelli: https://www.francescosimoncelli.com/


Supporta Francesco Simoncelli's Freedonia lasciando una “mancia” in satoshi di bitcoin scannerizzando il QR seguente.

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Congressional Omnibus Is Like a Bad Hollywood Movie Sequel

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mar, 26/03/2024 - 05:01

This weekend’s late-night spending vote in Congress seems like another in an endless series of sequels to a bad suspense movie. Just at the brink of “disaster,” just before the stroke of midnight, Congress pulls off a miracle and passes an omnibus bill to save us from a “government shutdown!”

The heroes have saved the day!

Unfortunately, this latest sequel is as bad as the previous ones, as the American people are left with a massive $1.2 trillion dollar spending package to add to our already $34 trillion in debt. Military spending will, of course, be increased yet again, as the military-industrial complex demands more of our wealth to feed its ever-increasing appetite. And if this military spending increase is not enough, Congressional leadership is promising another huge supplemental bill to further fuel proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza – with some money to provoke China as well.

Republicans like to talk a good game about reining in spending – especially during election season – but as we learned with this “compromise” and all previous “compromises, it’s all talk. At the end of all the dramatic warnings about shutting the government down, we are left with a Washington-style compromise, meaning the leadership of both parties gets to throw anything and everything they want into the massive bill. Because it is only presented to the rank and file at the last moment before “disaster,” none of the Members get a chance to even read it, much less shape it through amendments and debate.

The Republican House leadership promised the Members 72 hours to read any new bill before a vote, but they broke their promise without hesitation. Members would not have the chance to read the more than 1,000 page bill, which was worked out in secret behind closed doors

There is likely a reason that Congressional leaders did not want Members to get the chance to read the bill. As Rep. Thomas Massie discovered, buried in the bill is funding for 13 year old children to get help with gender transitioning without consent from their parents. He also pointed out that although nowhere was it in the authorization bill, just hours after the omnibus passes the Department of Justice announces the creation of a Federal “Red Flag” center to attack our Second Amendment rights.

Who knows how many more items like these – and far worse – are deeply buried in the “must-pass” spending bill. Keeping these items from the American people by secretly embedding them in “must pass” legislation increasingly looks like a feature, not a bug. No wonder Congress enjoys such a low approval rate among the American people.

In the end, the bill only passed the Republican-controlled House with the support of Democrats, fueling a growing rebellion against Speaker Johnson among House conservatives.

The media-celebrated “bipartisanship” is not all it’s cracked up to be. It means that both parties embrace policies that are leading to our financial bankruptcy. This further threatens the dollar as the world’s reserve currency and will result in catastrophic changes worldwide that nearly no one in Congress seems capable of imagining. Republicans capitulating to Democrat demands to “save us” from a government shutdown may temporarily keep the appearance that “this is fine,” but in the end they are making the coming crash all the worse.

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The US and Europe Have Given Their Countries to Immigrant-Invaders

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mar, 26/03/2024 - 05:01

In America if you go on vacation for a week or two and leave your home unoccupied, or if you rent property and it is vacant between leases, immigrant-invaders can break into your property and occupy it as squatters. Home owners and rental property owners can get no help from police, prosecutors, or from “their” legislators.

This 20 minute video reports on the situation. It is not misinformation. It is not a conspiracy theory. It is our reality.

How did it come about that in the US where the Constitution protects property Americans are defenseless against immigrant-invaders stealing their property? American homeowners are being arrested for interfering with squattrers’ occupation of their homes. In America it is possible for immigrant-invaders to dispossess you.

As I have emphasized for years, the liberal/left have destroyed the American belief system and constitutional protections. The US cannot even protect its borders. Citizens cannot protect their property. The country is up for grabs, and it is being grabbed.

America has been intentionally destroyed. The Democrats are a principal enabler of this destruction, and Americans still vote for them.

And the dumbshits in Washington think the US, a country unable to protect its borders and the property of its citizens, is a superpower.

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RFK to Jay Powell on Day #1: You’re Fired!

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mar, 26/03/2024 - 05:01

RFK has pointedly announced that he will pardon Deep State prisoner Julian Assange on day #1. That sent a powerful message that the destructive rule of Washington’s bipartisan War Party will be brought to an abrupt end if he is elected President.

Likewise, RFK should announce an intent to stop dead in its tracks the Fed’s egregious servitude to Wall Street and the one percenters who luxuriate in the massive inflation of financial assets it enables. Pledging to hand ex-private equity impresario, Jay Powell, his walking papers on January 20, 2025, would give forceful expression to that intent.

At the substantive level, three policy markers could further convey that a sweeping regime change at the nation’s central bank is coming down the pike—changes that would liberate the Fed from the grip of Wall Street speculators and Washington spenders alike:

  • Enactment of an extended moratorium on any further Fed purchases of US Treasury or Federally guaranteed debt.
  • An end to Fed bailouts, interest rate subsidies, stock market puts and any other open market manipulations on Wall Street.
  • Return to a discount window-based modus operandi as provided by the Fed’s original authors, where member banks needing liquidity can get Fed advances against sound commercial collateral at market rates of interest plus a penalty spread for using the public credit.

These measures would kill two very bad birds with one stone. Without the prospect of the Fed’s false bid for government debt, bond yields would rise sharply and the warmongers and big spenders on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue would finally be faced with the true economic cost of their profligacy.

At the same time, a sharply higher bond yield would put the kibosh on the gigantic stock market bubble that has massively shifted wealth to the tippy-top of the economic ladder. Since 1989, for example, the net worth of the top 0.1% has soared from $1.8 trillion to just under $20 trillion. That’s a gain of $138 million per household.

By contrast, the aggregate net worth of the bottom 50% or 66 million households has risen from $0.7 trillion to $3.6 trillion. That’s a gain of just $44,000 per household.

Accordingly, the top 0.1% gained 3,100X more net worth each than the bottom half of America’s households. And that lopsided outcome was not due to the fact that the top 0.1% was much richer to begin with.

In fact, the aggregate net worth of the top 0.1% was 2.45X that of the bottom 50% in 1989, but by Q3 2023 it had grown to 5.45X. But that shift had nothing whatsoever to do with merit, investment prowess or contribution to American economic life. It was simply a product of financial asset inflation and the ready ability of the very wealthy to speculate with the cheap leverage supplied by the Fed.

In short, the drastic widening of the wealth gap depicted in the chart below was not the natural outcome of free market capitalism functioning on the basis of honest money. Instead, it was a product of the rampant money-printing by America’s rogue central bank—a state institution that has been taken over by Wall Street lock, stock and barrel.

Net Worth Of Top 0.1% Versus Bottom 50%, 1989 to 2023


The reason Powell needs to go, of course, is that he has now proven in spades he is clueless about the real impact of the Fed’s endless flood of cheap credit on Wall Street.

The latter, in turn, has been driven by the sheer insanity of its 2.00% inflation target, and the license it gives the Eccles Building to print money with reckless abandon.

Over the last several decades the Fed’s excuse has been either that inflation was missing its 2.00% target from below or that any temporary inflation flare-ups were transitory and would be soon getting back into the target range. Accordingly, the Fed never stopped printing fiat credit, raising its balance sheet from $200 billion in 1987 to $9 trillion at the peak in 2022. That 45X gain in central bank money massively exceeded the mere 5X rise in national income (GDP) during the same period.

That lopsided ratio alone says that the Fed’s printing presses need to be put on idle for a good while to come. Yet at Wednesday’s presser Powell implicitly affirmed that Wall Street will soon get a new flood of money, with at least three rate cuts (75 basis points) later this year. And that’s notwithstanding the fact that after family budgets have been clobbered by 20% higher prices since early 2021 the monthly inflation data in January and February was still coming in well above the Fed’s dubious 2.00% target:

The Fed won’t ignore bad news, but it also won’t overreact, he said. “They haven’t really changed the overall story, which is that of inflation moving down gradually on a sometimes-bumpy road toward 2 percent,” Powell said.

But here’s the thing. There is not a shred of evidence that 2.00% inflation does anything at all to benefit the main street economy or middle- and lower-income households. As we have demonstrated repeatedly, real economic growth rates, investment levels, productivity gains and middle-income living standards have all faltered badly relative to historical trends since the Fed went into heavy-duty money-printing during the Greenspan era.

But what 2.00% or higher inflation actually does is destroy the meager savings of main street households, which cannot afford to roll the dice on Wall Street or invest in risky junk bonds, securitized real estate or other higher yielding assets. Accordingly, even as the net worth of the top 0.1% rose by 1,000% between Q3 1989 and Q3 2023, the value of a dollar saved by an average consumer back in 1989 was worth only 41 cents at the end of this 34-year period.

Stated differently, the Fed’s pro -inflation policy savages the middle class and average wage-earners, even as it pumps massive amounts of cheap liquidity into the gambling dens of Wall Street.

So RFK simply needs to demand that the whole money-printing scam be brought to an abrupt halt. The rich don’t need any more cheap gambling chips and inflated financial assets and the middle class truly cannot stand any more “help” from Fed-fueled inflation.

Depreciation Of Consumer’s Dollar Since Q3 1989


What the PhD’s who peddle 2.00% inflation targeting always ignore is that inflation is cumulative, and there is no guarantee that any particular worker’s paycheck will keep up.

For instance, here is the average manufacturing wage (dashed red line) since Q3 1989 compared to food, energy and shelter costs.

We’d say that all this Fed-supplied inflation was not exactly a bargain for the average manufacturing worker—if he or she managed to actually keep their job. In point of fact, however, there are actually 5 million fewer such well-paying manufacturing jobs today than there were 34-years ago.

Nevertheless, the average hourly wage for manufacturing workers did not keep up with any of the principal living cost items during that period.

Cumulative % Change Between Q3 1989 and Q3 2023:

  • Hourly Wage of Mfg. workers: +156%.
  • CPI for Food: +157%.
  • CPI for Shelter: +188%.
  • CPI for Energy: +211%.

In a word, inflation ain’t no bargain for wage workers. The whole idea of targeting anything other than price stability amounts to thinly disguised academic gobbledygook designed to obfuscate the Fed’s true aim, which is to generate wealth on Wall Street out of the misbegotten Greenspanian notion that “wealth effects” and “trickle down” are a boon to main street America.

But when you compare the chart below with the net worth gains shown in the chart above the evidence screams out quite loudly: Inflation is a very bad deal for main street and a completely unwarranted and unfair windfall to Wall Street.

Change In Average Manufacturing Wage Versus CPI for Food, Shelter And Energy, Q3 1989 to Q3 2023

Needless to say, both ends of the Acela Corridor would scream bloody murder about firing Powell and shutting-down the cheap money spigot to the US Treasury. But there are simple and straight-forward answers to all of the red herrings that are likely to be offered by beneficiaries of the current rotten monetary policy regime at the Eccles Building.

Yes, a new President technically cannot fire the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, but Powell’s term as Chairman does end on May 15, 2026. So he can be called into the Oval Office on day #1 to receive word that he will not be reappointed under any circumstance and that should he choose to be a wounded lame duck during the following 16 months he will face an unrelenting assault from the Bully Pulpit.

Put that way, we are quite sure that Powell would choose to take the gold watch on January 20, 2025.

Secondly, it will be claimed that significantly higher bond yields will cause mortgage rates to rise proportionately, and to the detriment of middle class.

Well, yes to the first part and no to the second. According to the current government data, the average home mortgage in the US is $89,643, but in this case the average tells you almost nothing.

As shown below, the average mortgage held by the bottom 20% of households amounts to less than $15,000, while that for the 50th percentile is about $55,000 and the 99th percentile is $524,000. So the dollar benefits of artificially low mortgage rates overwhelmingly accrue to more affluent households.

Mortgage Debt Secured by a Primary Residence By Income Class


Moreover, if the government want to help middle- and lower-income families afford market rate mortgages, then the solution is not to subsidize the jumbo mortgages of the rich by suppressing interest rates, but to provide targeted, means-tested transfer payments to households on the lower end of the income scale. A buy-down of the mortgage interest rate for first-time homebuyers would be one mechanism to accomplish that.

Finally, it will be argued that an extended moratorium on Fed purchases of government or GSE debt will leave the financial system high and dry in the event of a liquidity crunch.

But that’s the worst red herring of all. If we want a radical break from the Fed’s abject servitude to Wall Street, the answer is to shutdown the FOMC (Federal Open Market Committee) and get the central bank’s operations out of the canyons of Wall Street entirely.

Indeed, the original designers of the Fed led by the great Carter Glass took great pains to keep the central bank as far away from Wall Street as possible. That’s why they provided for the Fed to operate through 12 regional discount windows, where member commercial banks in each region could obtain cash advances, but only on the basis of sound commercial collateral and at an interest rate based on the free market plus a penalty spread.

Today, the commercial banking system holds more than $12 trillion of loans and leases excluding Treasury debt and GSE securities. That’s more than enough collateral to meet any financial stringency; and, besides, what is wrong with requiring banks to pay market rates of interest plus, say a 200 basis point penalty, for using the credit of the central bank?

We’d say, there is nothing wrong with that at all, even as it would free the Federal Reserve from the baleful grip of its current Wall Street masters.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

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Korea: America’s Point of No Return

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mar, 26/03/2024 - 05:01

As Robert Higgs noted in his 1994 speech, “War and the Leviathan State,” World War II acted as one of the most pervasive changes to the psyche of the average American in regards to foreign policy. Not only this, but unlike previous wars, World War II did not see a return to a peacetime constitution like in previous conflicts. In many ways, it acted as the birth of the Military-Industrial Complex, leading our politicians into continuous, seemingly never-ending government involved in foreign conflicts. One such foreign conflict was Korea, the war that never was.

Often remembered as the Forgotten War, the American psyche around Korea is the polar opposite of that surrounding the Second World War. Despite this, Korea serves as one of the most important points in the birth of Post-War America. The mentality that came out of World War II, which viewed any sort of non-interventionism as the sort of “isolationism” that eventually led to U.S. involvement, would finally be tested. The MIC would truly become ingrained into American politics. Korea, as will be shown, was the final blow in returning to the foreign policy that made America great, instead turning it into a global occupier, eager to maintain an empire abroad.

Prior to the conflict, Korea was divided along the 38th Parallel by the Soviets and the United States. This was due to the previous Japanese occupation of the peninsula during the Second World War, when both sides had the understanding that at some point, the two Koreas would need to be united. However, as could’ve been predicted by any previous observer, this would be a disastrous idea. Each side had their own “democratic” government ruled by their influencer’s chosen strongman, Syngman Rhee and Kim Il-Sung, and both quickly became an area of focus for the two burgeoning superpowers. However, during this period, the relationship between the Soviets and the Americans was still up in the air, as highlighted by Paul Pierpaoli, Jr.,

Between 1945 and 1950, the United States oftentimes struggled to formulate a consistent, coherent foreign policy that would keep the Soviet threat at bay, protect vital national interests, and expand liberal, free-market capitalism. And although the Truman administration had decided to “contain” communism even before the concept was articulated and later expanded upon by George Kennan in 1946 and 1947, it is clear that the United States adhered to this containment mechanism – until war broke out in Korea in 1950. Prior to the Korean War, initiatives such as the IMF, the Marshall Plan, GATT, and even NATO would feature economic and political – rather than military – containment of the Soviet Union.

In essence, while an underlying idea existed that America needed to be the antisocialist bulwark, in practicality, the way that the United States was to bring this about was completely unknown.

The Soviets, too, were in a similar situation. Prior to the conflict in 1950, Stalin had been providing weapons and ammunitions to communist groups in China. With the victory of the Chinese Communist Party, military intervention was not necessarily the top priority of the Soviet Union. Instead, it seems to be the case that the Soviet Union had little involvement in the start of the war. While the actual reasoning for the beginning of the conflict is shrouded in mystery, like most things involving North Korea, what is known is that many around Stalin and Kim seem to suggest that Stalin was unaware of the conflict before it occurred. In Khrushchev’s memoirs, he is even quoted as saying, “I must stress that the war wasn’t Stalin’s idea, but Kim I1-Sung’s. Kim was the initiator. Stalin, of course, didn’t try to dissuade him.” This is also the narrative held by a close advisor to Kim Il-Sung by the name of Lim Un who revealed that Stalin would not back fighting the United States even if they got directly involved in the war.

This continues to be a reappearing narrative. Prior to American involvement, Korea should have been thought of as more of a country on the verge of civil war. Robert Simmons concludes that the start of the war was most likely due to a nationalism which surrounded both sides and a political struggle between Kim Il-Sung and Pak Hon-yong, who was the head of the Communist Party of South Korea before it was banned by Syngman Rhee. Since both were in a rush to see who could unite the peninsula first, it seems that the power struggle led one of the two to eventually start the war.

Although, it should be noted that South Korea also bears responsibility, as pointed out by Karunakar Gupta, “While the United Nations Commission on Korea heard the North Korean broadcast on 25 June 1950 alleging the South Korean attack on Haeju, it simply brushed aside that complaint without any enquiry and accepted South Korea’s complaint of an unprovoked aggression to be true.” He suggest that the border skirmishes started by the Rhee administration also helped to provoke the invasion, which would seem to back up the view that the war in Korea was more akin to an inevitable civil war than any sort of Soviet invasion.
Soviet and Communist Chinese intervention seemed to be limited even after the start of the war and the Soviets seemed unprepared for the conflict. For instance, the Soviets weren’t present at the United Nations vote for intervention in the conflict. Chinese support for the war also was rather limited, with much of it being a response to the success of UN forces and fear of having an American puppet right on their border. The idea that the war was primarily fought by Chinese hordes was mostly a myth and the majority of Chinese forces were out of the peninsula before the end of the war. China was more focused on their interior than on the conflict abroad, which is one of the main reasons Kim received few Chinese armaments before the war started.

However, this was not the perspective of the United States. Once the war officially started, McCarthyism came into full swing, with Korea becoming the first domino in the Domino Theory. From here, there was no turning back. During the Korean Conflict, America permanently entered its modern state of affairs. The Truman administration controversially passed NSC-68, which saw military expenditure increase from $13 bil. in 1950 to $50 bil. by the end of 1951. Most importantly, much of this was marketed not for the Korean War, but instead acted as the nexus for the continuation of the military-industrial complex, along with the Marshall Plan being shifted to focus on rearmament during this period as opposed to economic growth. Pierpaoli notes “The decision to mobilize for the long haul of the Cold War meant that balanced federal budgets in America were no longer sacrosanct. The limited social Keynesianism that had guided American economic thinking since the late 1930s was to be wedded to the military Keynesianism of the World War II era.”

The effects of Truman’s policies were unpopular, acting as one of the greatest power grabs for the office of the president. Unlike previous administrations, no formal declaration of war was ever launched by the Truman administration and, despite saying the policy of the United States was that of containment, the US crossed north of the 38th parallel in order to unite the entire peninsula, which, as highlighted earlier, acted as the catalyst for Chinese involvement and directly increased the scale of the conflict.

This decision by Truman would lead to unprecedented human casualties. As Charles Armstrong notes,

The number of Korean dead, injured or missing by war’s end approached three million, ten percent of the overall population. The majority of those killed were in the North, which had half of the population of the South; although the DPRK does not have official figures, possibly twelve to fifteen percent of the population was killed in the war, a figure close to or surpassing the proportion of Soviet citizens killed in World War II.

Much of this was due in part to the indiscriminate bombing campaign of the United States, which dropped more bombs in the span of the Korean Conflict than the entire Pacific theater during World War II. In the end, this resulted in the death of over a million civilians in the North alone, leading to a psychological fear of the United States that persists to this very day.

It is believed that the Korean Conflict was one of the primary reasons for the Democratic defeat in 1952, however the Eisenhower administration failed to reduce the scope of the federal government in his presidency. Instead, Truman’s precedent would come to influence American foreign policy in Vietnam and his “limited aggression” would go on to be a major influence on the foreign policy of Henry Kissinger.

Of course, despite all this bad, I imagine there are those out there still thinking the conflict was worth it. I would instead suggest that this is not the case at all. America essentially traded away it’s freedom for a massive military base in Asia and used American and Korean lives to pay for it. However, that is not the complete scope of the tragedy. The consistent military training directly on the North Korean border can be attributed to much of the nation’s continuation of Stalinism and has led to repeated human travesties. It also cannot be said that America brought freedom to the nation. For decades, the American puppets, Syngman Rhee and Park Chung Hee, ruled the South with a brutality that caused the North to have a larger economy than the south until the mid-1980s. Only later, with the assassination of Park Chung Hee and the protest that followed was South Korea’s current, more pleasant government founded in 1987.

On the other hand, if America stayed out of the Korean affair, the end result cannot be determined. What is known, however, is that the DPRK could not rely on it’s unending nationalist cause of reunification to empower the regime, nor could it fall back on fear of foreign invasion to justify the Kim family’s rule. These reasons are primarily what caused North Korea to reject unification after the fall of the Soviet Union and remain in the situation it is now. However, by looking at other dictatorships like Ceausescu’s Romania or China after the death of Mao, it seems clear that without these causes, the eternal communism held today by the nation could not continue to exist without a true outside threat to “the people’s way of life”. At best, Korea could have ended up a united and prosperous post-soviet state like that of East Germany and at worst ended up in a similar situation to Vietnam or China, but it seems unlikely that the Juche regime could persist forever.

In conclusion, Korea should not be a forgotten war. Instead, it should be remembered as the war that the state used to greatly increase its power on false pretense. Korea permanently ingrained the Military-Industrial Complex into our society and began the policy of domino theory. It also saw the end of constitutional war, with the President being able to essentially deploy the US military wherever he wants globally. During the Great Depression and World War II, the federal government increased to an unprecedented size, as desired by the despotic nature of FDR. However it was his successor, Harry Truman, which ended any hope of returning to peace and it is Korea that acts as the point of no return.

Sources:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/493313

https://archive.org/details/strainedalliance0000simm/page/n7/mode/1up?view=theater

https://www.psupress.org/books/titles/978-0-271-02332-8.html

https://www-jstor-org.spot.lib.auburn.edu/stable/2756413?seq=7

https://www.jstor.org/stable/652290

https://www-jstor-org.spot.lib.auburn.edu/stable/41887070?seq=1

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CIA Secrecy on JFK Points to Criminal Culpability

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mar, 26/03/2024 - 05:01

More than 30 years ago, Congress enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992. Enacted in the wake of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, which posited that the Kennedy assassination was a regime-change operation on the part of the U.S. national-security establishment, the law mandated that all the assassination-related records of the Pentagon, the CIA, the Secret Service, the FBI, and other federal agencies be released to the public. Having succeeded in keeping their assassination-related records secret for almost 30 years, they didn’t like that at all.

Today — more than 60 years after the assassination — the CIA continues to keep thousands of its assassination-related records secret. Its justification? You guessed it: “national security,” the two most powerful and meaningless words in the American political lexicon. CIA officials maintain, with straight faces, that if those still-secret assassination-related records were released, the United States would fall into the ocean, be taken over by communists, or have its “national security” endangered in some other silly way.

How in the world can “national security” be threatened by the release of records that are more than 60 years old, regardless of what definition is placed on that nebulous term? Indeed, how can any American really believe this nonsense? They obviously take Americans for dupes.

It is a virtual certainty that those still-secret records contain circumstantial evidence that further confirms criminal culpability on the part of the CIA and the Pentagon in the assassination of President Kennedy. After all, the CIA knows that that is precisely what most everyone is thinking with respect to the continued secrecy of those records. Why would the CIA want to leave people thinking that? One reason: Because it’s better to have people thinking that those records contain incriminating evidence rather than knowing that they do.

What could the CIA be hiding with those still-secret records? The answer necessarily has to be speculative in nature, but my hunch is that some of the still-secret information deals with Mexico City, where the accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was supposed to have met with Cuban and Soviet officials.

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination, it is obvious that everything went wrong with the Mexico City part of the assassination plot. For example, there were audiotapes that supposedly contained Oswald’s voice and then suddenly there were no such audiotapes. There was a photograph of Oswald except that it was a photograph of someone else.

Why was Mexico City an important part of the assassination plot? As I detail in my newest book on the assassination, An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Storyan essential part of the assassination plot was to frame a communist. This was the height of the Cold War, when most everyone hated and feared the Reds. By framing a communist, the national-security establishment could rest assured that Americans would be reluctant to come to Oswald’s defense or believe anything he said.

Mexico City played an important role in this endeavor. Oswald was ordered to travel to Mexico City, where he was to meet with both Cuban and Soviet officials. In that way, the plotters could definitely tie the future assassin to the Soviet and Cuban communists.

Why would Oswald obey such orders? Because he was an operative for U.S. intelligence. Intelligence operatives follow orders, especially when they’re told that they are part of an intelligence operation.

In fact, in one of its first meetings, Earl Warren, the head of the Warren Commission, told the commission that there was highly discomforting evidence that Oswald was, in fact, an intelligence operative. Once the CIA and the FBI, which, of course, would never lie about such a thing, assured the commission that such wasn’t the case, Warren ordered that the meeting be kept top-secret and never revealed to the American people.

When he was serving in the military, Oswald became fluent in the Russian language. That is not an easy thing to do. It takes language experts, which the U.S. government has. That’s the only way Oswald could have learned to speak fluent Russian while he was in the military.

There is also New Orleans, where Oswald had moved from Dallas prior to his trip to Mexico City. In New Orleans, Oswald spent a lot of effort building up his “pro-communist” persona, especially with the help of an anti-Castro group called the DRE.

Immediately after the assassination, the DRE sent out a press release informing the nation that Oswald was a communist. There is one big important thing about the DRE that the nation did not know and would not know for several decades. It was a CIA-funded and CIA-supervised group. Thus, it was actually the CIA that wanted the nation to know that the president had been killed by a Red.

As JFK researcher Jefferson Morley, who first discovered the CIA’s connection to the DRE, has also discovered, the CIA was secretly monitoring Oswald in the months leading up to the assassination, including secretly reading his mail. Why would the CIA be doing that? Because if one is going to frame a person in a very complex murder plot, one has to be certain that the person being framed doesn’t figure out what is going on.

Will the CIA succeed in keeping its assassination-related records secret forever? Given the overwhelming power that the national-security branch has within the federal governmental structure, it’s a virtual certainty that it will succeed. But what difference does it make? The evidence that was released by the JFK Records Act already proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the Kennedy assassination was a national-security state regime-change operation, especially with respect to the fraudulent autopsy that the military conducted on JFK’s body and the fraudulent copy of the Zapruder film that the CIA produced. (See my books The Kennedy Autopsy and An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.) The CIA’s still-secret assassination-related records would only add more circumstantial evidence to what we already know.

Reprinted with permission from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

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The FDA Stops Its War on Ivermectin

Lew Rockwell Institute - Mar, 26/03/2024 - 05:01

Starting in 2021, the FDA mounted a misinformation campaign about ivermectin, an inexpensive, Nobel Prize-winning medication that showed promising signs in the early treatment of COVID-19. 

While the death toll from this campaign is difficult to calculate, the impact was far-reaching. The campaign was used as fuel to terminate the employment of doctors who understood the science behind ivermectin, as well as justification for pharmacies to cease filling ivermectin prescriptions when people needed the medication most. 

This war on Ivermectin touched us here at the OP as well. An article we published about a peer-reviewed report, Jagged Little Pill: How Many Lives Could Have Been Saved If We’d ACTUALLY “Followed the Science?” was targeted as ‘disinformation’ and used to downgrade our ranking with advertisers, costing us untold revenue.

It was used to discredit everyone who even dared to mention it. Users or those who wondered if it might be viable were treated with mockery and defamation.  Famously, Joe Rogan took it when he came down with Covid and recovered remarkably quickly, only to be scorned endlessly online for using “horse paste.


Courageous doctors fought back.  

In 2022, doctors filed a federal lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over the agencies’ unlawful attempts to block the use of ivermectin for treatment of COVID-19.

“We’re suing the FDA for lying to the public about ivermectin,” said Dr. Bowden, a plaintiff in the case. 

The complaint directly cites US laws, including the provision that the FDA “may not interfere with the authority of a health care provider to prescribe or administer any legally marked device to a patient for any condition or disease within a legitimate health care practitioner-patient relationship.” 

On Thursday, the court ruled against the FDA and mandated the removal of all previous social media posts that specifically addressed the use of ivermectin for the treatment or prevention of COVID-19. The posts have started to come down, including a popular one titled: “Should I take ivermectin to prevent or treat COVID-19? No.” 

Americans are waking up. 

Dr. Peter McCullough, America’s leading cardiologist and outspoken critic of the healthcare system’s response to COVID, said in a recent interview that in waging its revolting “horse de-wormer” propaganda campaign against ivermectin, the FDA systematically harmed the American people and should be held criminally and civilly liable for its malfeasance. 

Early treatment of respiratory illness like COVID with ivermectin is a critical tool in the medical arsenal. Dr. Peter McCullough explains: 

“Early intervention at the first sign of illness is critical to avoid a hospital visit. I have always wished patients could keep critical medications like antibiotics and Ivermectin on-hand so they can act fast; a recommendation whose importance was underscored by the drug restrictions during COVID.  This is now a dream come true from The Wellness Company.” 

How to get IVERMECTIN and the other effective drugs the FDA tried to ban. 

Escape the FDA propaganda and prepare ahead of time for illness with The Wellness Company’s Contagion Emergency Kits. Designed by elite doctors, including Dr. McCullough mentioned above, these prescription kits have emerged as a key piece of every household’s emergency preparedness plan, saving Americans thousands of dollars in unplanned hospital visits

After the last debacle, I’ll always keep critical life-saving medications like Ivermectin on hand. It’s all about the money and new drugs that make billions of dollars for pharmaceutical companies. If those drugs have negative side effects or don’t work? *shrug* They made their money.

Be ready for the next emergency and sleep with peace of mind. The Wellness Company’s Contagion Emergency Kit is the gold standard in preparation. It contains four life-saving medications: Ivermectin, Z-pack, Hydroxychloroquine, and Budesonide.   

  1. IVERMECTIN: The Nobel-prize-winning medicine demonized as “horse paste” by the FDA. 
  1. HYDROXYCHLOROQUINE: An antiviral that has been used for 50 years for the treatment of various diseases was suddenly banned when Trump endorsed it.  
  1. GENERIC Z-PAK: One of the most commonly prescribed antibiotics in history, it has promise in treating COVID-19.  
  1. BUDESONIDE: This became restricted due to supply chain shortages from Big Pharma’s outsourcing. 

The Contagion Emergency Kit also includes a nebulizer and guidebook to aid in the safe use of these life-saving medications.  

This kit is prescription-only – you can’t find it in any store or pharmacy. Simply fill out a short questionnaire after purchase and a trusted Wellness Company doctor will confirm your suitability and issue your prescription Contagion Emergency Kit

The Wellness Company and their doctors are medical professionals that you can trust. I’ve written about my experiences with them here.

SAVE 15% OFF A CONTAGION EMERGENCY KIT WITH CODE “FDA” AT CHECKOUT 

Reprinted with permission from The Organic Prepper.

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