Bill Blum has died....

[Peter Lemkin]

See post #9 about Bill dying today.....

Bill is a good and old friend of mine. If you have not read his books, what the fuck are you waiting for?!?! They have no equals. In his illness for quite some time he has not been posting his blog of many years. Here is the latest. I know some of the other advanced Deep Political thinkers will see that Bill doesn't quite see the possibilities of false-flag or terrorists-R-paid-by-US, but nevertheless his ramblings have value, IMO. Read his books!!!!!


The Anti-Empire Report #150

By William Blum Published August 25th, 2017


Share10

I'm back

It has recently been reported that Senator John McCain has an aggressive brain tumor. Not long ago I would have thought: "Good. It'll be great to be rid of that neanderthal reactionary bastard!"
Not now. My kidneys are gone and I'm on (rather unpleasant) dialysis for the rest of my life. My separated-from German wife is in Germany and can't fly because of the danger of blood clots forming and lodging in her lungs or heart. I'm an avid reader of medical news and almost every day I get choked-up and depressed by the never-ending heart-breaking stories of incurable pain and suffering of the old and the young.
So I wish the senator a good recovery, if that's possible. Probably no more possible than his politics recovering. He just condemned all the neo-Nazi actions in Charlottesville, this man who went out of his way to pose for friendly photos with neo-Nazis in Ukraine and jihadists in Syria.
So far the dialysis does not seem to have helped, at least not with my two main symptoms: deep-seated sleepiness at home, resulting in repeated naps, making my writing difficult; and getting out-of-breath and having to stop and rest after a very short and slow walk outdoors. I'm curious about whether any of my readers knows of anyone with a medical problem that was clearly relieved by dialysis. It may be my advanced age of 84 that blocks any improvement. But, supposedly, the dialysis keeps me alive in the absence of functioning kidneys. Incidentally, nine of my readers and friends have offered me a kidney for transplant, but I can't find a hospital willing to perform it; again it's my age, though I'm very willing.
At least I still have my eyesight and my hearing. My mind is okay. I have all my limbs and am not paralyzed. And I'm not in pain. Much to be thankful for.
It's also very nice to have gone past the hangups my condition thrust upon me and to be back writing my report for the first time in five months. During the recent American presidential campaign I wrote that if I were forced to vote and also forced to choose between Clinton and Trump I'd vote for the Donald. (As it turned out I voted for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.) I stated two reasons why I'd choose Trump over Clinton: presumably, a lesser chance of nuclear war with Russia and a lesser chance of the American government closing down the Russian TV station, Russia Today (RT), broadcasting in the US. There was at the time, and now again, growing Congressional pressure to do just that and I'm very reliant on the station. Because of such matters I was willing to overlook Trump's many and obvious character defects, which I summed up with the endearing word of my people back in Brooklyn - "shmuck". But by now the man's shmuckiness has been writ so large that little hope for him can be maintained.
What is keeping Donald Trump from drowning in the very cesspool of his own shmuckiness is a gentleman named Kim Jong-un. Who would have believed that a single historical period could produce two such giant shmucks, men who tower over their pathetic contemporaries? There's only one explanation for this remarkable phenomenon. Of course. It's Russia. Moscow is using the two men to make America look foolish. And Russia, it may soon be revealed, gave North Korea its nuclear weapons. Did you think that such an impoverished, downtrodden society could produce such scientific marvels on its own?
Is there any act too dastardly for Vladimir Putin?
We don't know yet whether Trump's son, daughter or son-in-law made any deals with Kim Jong-un. Stay tuned to Fox News and CNN.
Those stations, amongst others, put out a lot of fake news, but when it comes to news of North Korea nothing compares to the fake news of 1950. Did you know there's no convincing evidence that North Korea did what they're most famous for - the June 25, 1950 invasion of South Korea, which led to the everlasting division of the Korean peninsula into two countries? And there were no United Nations forces that observed this invasion, as we've been taught. In any event, the two sides had been clashing across the dividing line for several years. What happened on that fateful day in June could thus be regarded as no more than the escalation of an ongoing civil war. Read my chapter on Korea in Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II for the full details of these and other myths.
The response to terrorism

I still get emails criticizing me for the stand I took against Islamic terrorists earlier this year. Almost every one feels obliged to remind me that the terrorists are acting in revenge for decades of US/Western bombing of Muslim populations and assorted other atrocities. And I then have to inform each one of them that they've chosen the wrong person for such a lecture. I, it happens, wrote the fucking book on the subject!
In the first edition of my book Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, published in 2001, before September 11, the first chapter was "Why do terrorists keep picking on The United States?" It includes a long list of hostile US military and political actions against the Islamic world during the previous 20 years.
So I can well see why radical Muslims would harbor a deep-seated desire for revenge against The United States and its allies who often contributed to the hostile actions. My problem is that the Islamic terrorist actions are seldom aimed at those responsible for this awful history - the executive and military branches of the Western nations, but are more and more targeted against innocent civilians, which at times includes other Muslims, probably even, on occasion, some who sympathize with the radical Islamic cause. These random terrorist acts are thus not defendable or understandable from any revenge point of view. What did the poor people of Barcelona have to do with Western imperialism?
Civilians are of course much easier to target, but that's clearly no excuse. As I've pointed out in the past, we should consider this: From the 1950s to the 1980s the United States carried out all kinds of very harmful policies against Latin America, including numerous bombings, without the natives ever resorting to the uncivilized, barbaric kind of retaliation as employed by ISIS. Latin American leftists generally took their revenge out upon concrete representatives of the American empire: diplomatic, military and corporate targets not markets, theatres, nightclubs, hospitals, schools, restaurants or churches.
The terrorists' choice of targets is bad enough, but their methods are even worse. Who could have imagined 20 years ago that an organization would exist in this world that would widely publicize detailed instructions on how to choose a truck to drive down a busy thoroughfare and directly into crowds of people? What species of human being is this?
What is needed is a worldwide media campaign to make fun of the very idea that such men, along with suicide bombers, will be rewarded by Allah in an afterlife; even the idea of an afterlife can of course be derided; yes, even the idea of Allah, by that or any other name, can be derided; at least the idea of such a cruel God. Appealing to jihadists on simply moral grounds would be even more useless than appealing to Pentagon officials or Donald Trump on moral grounds. The jihadists have to be deeply ridiculed; the small amount of human empathy and decency still remaining in their heart of hearts has to be reached through embarrassing them before their friends and family. Femmes fatalescan be used against young Islamic men, most of whom, I'd venture to say, have sizable sexual hangups. Bombing them only increases their numbers.
Some thoughts on the question that will not go away: Capitalism vs. socialism

"The whole art of Conservative politics in the 20th century is being deployed to enable wealth to persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power." Aneurin Bevan (1897-1960), Labour Party (UK) minister
The fact that Donald J. Trump is a champion - indeed, a model, or as he might say, a huge model - of capitalism should be enough to make people turn away from the system, but the debate between capitalism and socialism continues without pause in the Trump era as it has since the 19th century. The wealth gap, affordable housing, free education, public transportation, a sustainable environment, and health care are some of the perennial points of argument we're all familiar with.
So many empty houses … so many homeless people - Is this the way a market economy is supposed to work?
Twice in recent times the federal government in Washington has undertaken major studies of many thousands of federal jobs to determine whether they could be done more efficiently by private contractors. On one occasion the federal employees won more than 80% of the time; on the other occasion 91%. Both studies took place under the George W. Bush administration, which was hoping for different results. The American people have to be reminded of what they once knew but seem to have forgotten: that they don't want BIG government, or SMALL government; they don't want MORE government, or LESS government; they want government ON THEIR SIDE.
As to corporations, we have to ask: Do the members of a family relate to each other on the basis of self-interest and greed?
Speaking in very broad terms … slavery gave way to feudalism … feudalism gave way to capitalism … capitalism is not a timelessly valid institution but was created to satisfy certain needs of the time … capitalism has outlived its usefulness and must now give way to socialism … the ultimate incompatibility between capitalist profit motive and human environmental survival demands nothing less.
The system corrupts every important aspect of our lives, including the one which takes up the most of our time - our work, even for corporation executives, who demand huge salaries and benefits to justify their working at jobs that otherwise are not particularly satisfying. Several years ago, the Financial Times of London reported on Wall Street's opposition to salary limits:

Senior bankers were quick to warn the plans would cause a brain drain from the profession as top executives seek more rewarding jobs out of the public eye. Unlike other careers where job satisfaction and other considerations play a part, finance tends to attract people whose main motivation is money. … The cap is a lousy idea,' complained one top Wall Street executive. If there is no monetary upside, who would want to do these jobs?'

As for those below the executive class … When they work, it's too often just any job they can find, rather than one designed to realize innermost spiritual or artistic needs. Their innermost needs are rent, food, clothes, and electricity.
For those concerned about the extent of freedom under socialism the jury is still out because the United States and other capitalist powers have subverted, destabilized, invaded, and/or overthrown every halfway serious attempt at socialism in the world. Not one socialist-oriented government, from Cuba and Vietnam in the 1960s, to Nicaragua and Chile in the 1970s, to Bulgaria and Yugoslavia in the 1990s, to Haiti and Venezuela in the 2000s has been allowed to rise or fall based on its own merits or lack of same, or allowed to relax its guard against the ever-threatening imperialists.
The demise of the Soviet Union (even with all its shortcomings) has turned out to be the greatest setback to the fight against the capitalist behemoth, and we have not yet recovered.
How could the current distribution of property and wealth reasonably be expected to emerge from any sort of truly democratic process? And if this is the way regulated capitalism works, what would life under unregulated capitalism be like? We've long known the answer to that question. Theodore Roosevelt (president of the United States 1901-09) said in a speech in 1912: "The limitation of governmental powers, of governmental action, means the enslavement of the people by the great corporations who can only be held in check through the extension of governmental power."
And what do the corporate elite want? In a word: "everything" … from our schools to our social security, from our health care to outer space, from our media to our sports.
"We are all ready to be savage in some cause. The difference between a good man and a bad one is the choice of the cause." William James (1842-1910)

A few years ago, when George W. Bush came out as a painter, he said that he had told his art teacher that "there's a Rembrandt trapped inside this body". Ah, so Georgie is more than just a painter. He's an artiste.
And we all know that artistes are very special people.
They're never to be confused with mass murderers, war criminals, merciless torturers or inveterate liars.
Neither are they ever to be accused of dullness of wit or incoherence of thought or speech.
Artistes are not the only special people.
Devout people are also special: Josef Stalin studied for the priesthood.
Osama bin Laden prayed five times a day.
And animal lovers: Herman Goering, while his Luftwaffe rained death upon Europe, kept a sign in his office that read: "He who tortures animals wounds the feelings of the German people."
Adolf Hitler was also an animal lover and had long periods of being a vegetarian and anti-smoking.
Charles Manson was a staunch anti-vivisectionist.
And cultured people: This fact Elie Wiesel called the greatest discovery of the war: that Adolf Eichmann was cultured, read deeply, played the violin.
Mussolini also played the violin.
Some Nazi concentration camp commanders listened to Mozart to drown out the cries of the inmates.
Former Bosnian Serb politician Radovan Karadzic, convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia for war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity, was a psychiatrist, specializing in depression; a practitioner of alternative medicine; published a book of poetry and books for children.
Members of ISIS and Al Qaeda and other suicide bombers are genuinely and sincerely convinced that they are doing the right thing, for which they will be honored and rewarded in an afterlife. That doesn't make them less evil; in fact it makes them more terrifying, since they force us to face the scary reality of a world in which sincerity and morality do not necessarily have anything to do with each other.
Dick Gregory, 1932-2017

"Mayor Daley and other government officials during the riots of the '60s showed their preference for property over humanity by ordering the police to shoot all looters to kill. They never said shoot murderers to kill or shoot dope pushers to kill."
"When the white Christian missionaries went to Africa, the white folks had the bibles and the natives had the land. When the missionaries pulled out, they had the land and the natives had the bibles."
"The way Americans seem to think today, about the only way to end hunger in America would be for Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to go on national TV and say we are falling behind the Russians in feeding folks."
"What we're doing in Vietnam is using the black man to kill the yellow man so the white man can keep the land he took from the red man."

Notes

• Washington Post, June 8, 2005 and March 23, 2006
  
• Financial Times (London) February 5, 2009
  
• Washington Post, November 21, 2013
  

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

The Anti-Empire Report #153

By William Blum Published December 5th, 2017

Cold War Number One: 70 years of daily national stupidity

Cold War Number Two: Still in its youth, but just as stupid

"He said he absolutely did not meddle in our election. He did not do what they are saying he did." President Trump re Vladimir Putin after their meeting in Vietnam.
Putin later added that he knew "absolutely nothing" about Russian contacts with Trump campaign officials. "They can do what they want, looking for some sensation. But there are no sensations."
Numerous US intelligence agencies have said otherwise. Former Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, responded to Trump's remarks by declaring: "The president was given clear and indisputable evidence that Russia interfered in the election."
As we'll see below, there isn't too much of the "clear and indisputable" stuff. And this of course is the same James Clapper who made an admittedly false statement to Congress in March 2013, when he responded, "No, sir" and "not wittingly" to a question about whether the National Security Agency was collecting "any type of data at all" on millions of Americans. Lies don't usually come in any size larger than that.
Virtually every member of Congress who has publicly stated a position on the issue has criticized Russia for interfering in the 2016 American presidential election. And it would be very difficult to find a member of the mainstream media which has questioned this thesis.
What is the poor consumer of news to make of these gross contradictions? Here are some things to keep in mind:
How do we know that the tweets and advertisements "sent by Russians" - those presented as attempts to sway the vote - were actually sent by Russians? The Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), composed of National Security Agency and CIA veterans, recently declared that the CIA knows how to disguise the origin of emails and tweets. The Washington Post has as well reported that Twitter "makes it easy for users to hide their true identities." Even if these communications were actually sent from Russia, how do we know that they came from the Russian government, and not from any of the other 144.3 million residents of Russia?
Even if they were sent by the Russian government, we have to ask: Why would they do that? Do the Russians think the United States is a Third World, under-developed, backward Banana Republic easily influenced and moved by a bunch of simple condemnations of the plight of blacks in America and the Clinton "dynasty"? Or clichéd statements about other controversial issues, such as gun rights and immigration? If so, many Democratic and Republican officials would love to know the secret of the Russians' method. Consider also that Facebook has stated that 90 percent of the alleged-Russian-bought content that ran on its network did not even mention Trump or Clinton.
On top of all this is the complete absence of even the charge, much less with any supporting evidence, of Russian interference in the actual voting or counting of votes.
After his remark suggesting he believed Putin's assertion that there had been no Russian meddling in the election, Trump of course, as usual attempted to backtrack and distant himself from his words after drawing criticism at home; while James Clapper declared: "The fact the president of the United States would take Putin at his word over that of the intelligence community is quite simply unconscionable."
Given Clapper's large-size lie referred to above, can Trump be faulted for being skeptical of the intelligence community's Holy Writ? Purposeful lies of the intelligence community during the first Cold War were legendary, many hailed as brilliant tactics when later revealed. The CIA, for example, had phoney articles and editorials planted in foreign newspapers (real Fake News), made sex films of target subjects caught in flagrante delicto who had been lured to Agency safe houses by female agents, had Communist embassy personnel expelled because of phoney CIA documents, and much more.
The Post recently published an article entitled "How did Russian trolls get into your Facebook feed? Silicon Valley made it easy." In the midst of this "exposé," The Post stated: "There's no way to tell if you personally saw a Russian post or tweet." So … Do the Cold Warriors have a case to make or do they not? Or do they just want us to remember that the Russkis are bad? So it goes.
An organization in the Czech Republic with the self-appointed name of European Values has produced a lengthy report entitled "The Kremlin's Platform for Useful Idiots' in the West: An Overview of RT's Editorial Strategy and Evidence of Impact". It includes a long list of people who have appeared on the Russian-owned TV station RT (formerly Russia Today), which can be seen in the US, the UK and other countries. Those who've been guests on RT are the "idiots" useful to Moscow. (The list is not complete. I've been on RT about five times, but I'm not listed. Where is my Idiot Badge?)
RT's YouTube channel has more than two million followers and claims to be the "most-watched news network" on the video site. Its Facebook page has more than 4 million likes and followers. Can this explain why the powers-that-be forget about a thing called freedom-of-speech and treat the station like an enemy? The US government recently forced RT America to register as a foreign agent and has cut off the station's Congressional press credentials.
The Cold War strategist, George Kennan, wrote prophetically: "Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military-industrial establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy."
Writer John Wight has described the new Cold War as being "in response to Russia's recovery from the demise of the Soviet Union and the failed attempt to turn the country into a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington via the imposition of free market economic shock treatment thereafter."
So let's see what other brilliance the New Cold War brings us. … Ah yes, another headline in the Post(November 18, 2017): "British alarm rising over possible Russian meddling in Brexit". Of course, why else would the British people have voted to leave the European Union? But wait a moment, again, one of the British researchers behind the report "said that the accounts they analyzed which claimed Russian as their language when they were set up but tweeted in English posted a mixture of pro-leave' and pro-remain' messages regarding Brexit. Commentators have said that the goal may simply have been to sow discord and division in society."
Was there ever a time when the Post would have been embarrassed to be so openly, amateurishly biased about Russia? Perhaps during the few years between the two Cold Wars.
In case you don't remember how stupid Cold War Number One was …

• 1948: The Pittsburgh Press published the names, addresses, and places of employment of about 1,000 citizens who had signed presidential-nominating petitions for former Vice President Henry Wallace, running under the Progressive Party. This, and a number of other lists of "communists", published in the mainstream media, resulted in people losing their jobs, being expelled from unions, having their children abused, being denied state welfare benefits, and suffering various other punishments.
  
  
• Around 1950: The House Committee on Un-American Activities published a pamphlet, "100 Things You Should Know About Communism in the U.S.A." This included information about what a communist takeover of the United States would mean:
  Q: What would happen to my insurance?
  A: It would go to the Communists.
  Q: Would communism give me something better than I have now?
  A: Not unless you are in a penitentiary serving a life sentence at hard labor.
  
  
• 1950s: Mrs. Ada White, member of the Indiana State Textbook Commission, believed that Robin Hood was a Communist and urged that books that told the Robin Hood story be banned from Indiana schools.
  
  
• As evidence that anti-communist mania was not limited to the lunatic fringe or conservative newspaper publishers, here is Clark Kerr, president of the University of California at Berkeley in a 1959 speech: "Perhaps 2 or even 20 million people have been killed in China by the new [communist] regime." One person wrote to Kerr: "I am wondering how you would judge a person who estimates the age of a passerby on the street as being perhaps 2 or even 20 years old.' Or what would you think of a physician who tells you to take perhaps 2 or even twenty teaspoonsful of a remedy'?"
  
  
• Throughout the cold war, traffic in phoney Lenin quotes was brisk, each one passed around from one publication or speaker to another for years. Here's U.S. News and World Report in 1958 demonstrating communist duplicity by quoting Lenin: "Promises are like pie crusts, made to be broken." Secretary of State John Foster Dulles used it in a speech shortly afterward, one of many to do so during the cold war. Lenin actually did use a very similar line, but he explicitly stated that he was quoting an English proverb (it comes from Jonathan Swift) and his purpose was to show the unreliability of the bourgeoisie, not of communists.
  "First we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States, which will be the last bastion of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands." This Lenin "quotation" had the usual wide circulation, even winding up in the Congressional Record in 1962. This was not simply a careless attribution; this was an out-and-out fabrication; an extensive search, including by the Library of Congress and the United States Information Agency failed to find its origin.
  
  
• A favorite theme of the anti-communists was that a principal force behind drug trafficking was a communist plot to demoralize the United States. Here's a small sample:
  Don Keller, District Attorney for San Diego County, California in 1953: "We know that more heroin is being produced south of the border than ever before and we are beginning to hear stories of financial backing by big shot Communists operating out of Mexico City."
  Henry Giordano, Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1964, interviewed in the American Legion Magazine: Interviewer: "I've been told that the communists are trying to flood our country with narcotics to weaken our moral and physical stamina. Is that true?"
  Giordano: "As far as the drugs are concerned, it's true. There's a terrific flow of drugs coming out of Yunnan Province of China. … There's no question that in that particular area this is the aim of the Red Chinese. It should be apparent that if you could addict a population you would degrade a nation's moral fiber."
  Fulton Lewis, Jr., prominent conservative radio broadcaster and newspaper columnist, 1965: "Narcotics of Cuban origin marijuana, cocaine, opium, and heroin are now peddled in big cities and tiny hamlets throughout this country. Several Cubans arrested by the Los Angeles police have boasted they are communists."
  We were also told that along with drugs another tool of the commies to undermine America's spirit was fluoridation of the water.
  
  
• Mickey Spillane was one of the most successful writers of the 1950s, selling millions of his anti-communist thriller mysteries. Here is his hero, Mike Hammer, in "One Lonely Night", boasting of his delight in the grisly murders he commits, all in the name of destroying a communist plot to steal atomic secrets. After a night of carnage, the triumphant Hammer gloats, "I shot them in cold blood and enjoyed every minute of it. I pumped slugs into the nastiest bunch of bastards you ever saw. … They were Commies. … Pretty soon what's left of Russia and the slime that breeds there won't be worth mentioning and I'm glad because I had a part in the killing. God, but it was fun!"
  
  
• 1952: A campaign against the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) because it was tainted with "atheism and communism", and was "subversive" because it preached internationalism. Any attempt to introduce an international point of view in the schools was seen as undermining patriotism and loyalty to the United States. A bill in the US Senate, clearly aimed at UNESCO, called for a ban on the funding of "any international agency that directly or indirectly promoted one-world government or world citizenship." There was also opposition to UNESCO's association with the UN Declaration of Human Rights on the grounds that it was trying to replace the American Bill of Rights with a less liberty-giving covenant of human rights.
  
  
• 1955: A US Army 6-page pamphlet, "How to Spot a Communist", informed us that a communist could be spotted by his predisposition to discuss civil rights, racial and religious discrimination, the immigration laws, anti-subversive legislation, curbs on unions, and peace. Good Americans were advised to keep their ears stretched for such give-away terms as "chauvinism", "book-burning", "colonialism", "demagogy", "witch hunt", "reactionary", "progressive", and "exploitation". Another "distinguishing mark" of "Communist language" was a "preference for long sentences." After some ridicule, the Army rescinded the pamphlet.
  
  
• 1958: The noted sportscaster Bill Stern (one of the heroes of my innocent youth) observed on the radio that the lack of interest in "big time" football at New York University, City College of New York, Chicago, and Harvard "is due to the widespread acceptance of Communism at the universities."
  
  
• 1960: US General Thomas Power speaking about nuclear war or a first strike by the US: "The whole idea is to kill the bastards! At the end of the war, if there are two Americans and one Russian, we win!" The response from one of those present was: "Well, you'd better make sure that they're a man and a woman."
  
  
• 1966: The Boys Club of America is of course wholesome and patriotic. Imagine their horror when they were confused with the Dubois Clubs. (W.E.B. Du Bois had been a very prominent civil rights activist.) When the Justice Department required the DuBois Clubs to register as a Communist front group, good loyal Americans knew what to do. They called up the Boys Club to announce that they would no longer contribute any money, or to threaten violence against them; and sure enough an explosion damaged the national headquarters of the youth group in San Francisco. Then former Vice President Richard Nixon, who was national board chairman of the Boys Club, declared: "This is an almost classic example of Communist deception and duplicity. The DuBois Clubs' are not unaware of the confusion they are causing among our supporters and among many other good citizens."
  
  
• 1966: "Rhythm, Riots and Revolution: An Analysis of the Communist Use of Music, The Communist Master Music Plan", by David A. Noebel, published by Christian Crusade Publications, (expanded version of 1965 pamphlet: "Communism, Hypnotism and the Beatles"). Some chapters: Communist Use of Mind Warfare … Nature of Red Record Companies … Destructive Nature of Beatle Music … Communist Subversion of Folk Music … Folk Music and the Negro Revolution … Folk Music and the College Revolution
  
  
• 1968: William Calley, US Army Lieutenant, charged with overseeing the massacre of more than 100 Vietnamese civilians in My Lai in 1968, said some years later: "In all my years in the Army I was never taught that communists were human beings. We were there to kill ideology carried by I don't know pawns, blobs, pieces of flesh. I was there to destroy communism. We never conceived of old people, men, women, children, babies."
  
  
• 1977: Scientists theorized that the earth's protective ozone layer was being damaged by synthetic chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons. The manufacturers and users of CFCs were not happy. They made life difficult for the lead scientist. The president of one aerosol manufacturing firm suggested that criticism of CFCs was "orchestrated by the Ministry of Disinformation of the KGB."
  
  
• 1978: Life inside a California youth camp of the ultra anti-communist John Birch Society: Five hours each day of lectures on communism, Americanism and "The Conspiracy"; campers learned that the Soviet government had created a famine and spread a virus to kill a large number of citizens and make the rest of them more manageable; the famine led starving adults to eat their children; communist guerrillas in Southeast Asia jammed chopsticks into children's ears, piercing their eardrums; American movies are all under the control of the Communists; the theme is always that capitalism is no better than communism; you can't find a dictionary now that isn't under communist influence; the communists are also taking over the Bibles.
  
  
• The Reagan administration declared that the Russians were spraying toxic chemicals over Laos, Cambodia and Afghanistan the so-called "yellow rain" and had caused more than ten thousand deaths by 1982 alone, (including, in Afghanistan, 3,042 deaths attributed to 47 separate incidents between the summer of 1979 and the summer of 1981, so precise was the information). Secretary of State Alexander Haig was a prime dispenser of such stories, and President Reagan himself denounced the Soviet Union thusly more than 15 times in documents and speeches. The "yellow rain", it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of honeybees flying far overhead.
  
  
• 1982: In commenting about sexual harassment in the Army, General John Crosby stated that the Army doesn't care about soldiers' social lives "The basic purpose of the United States Army is to kill Russians," he said.
  
  
• 1983: The US invasion of Grenada, the home of the Cuban ambassador is damaged and looted by American soldiers; on one wall is written "AA", symbol of the 82nd Airborne Division; beside it the message: "Eat shit, commie faggot." … "I want to fuck communism out of this little island," says a marine, "and fuck it right back to Moscow."
  
  
• 1984: During a sound check just before his weekly broadcast, President Reagan spoke these words into the microphone: "My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I have signed legislation to outlaw Russia, forever. We begin bombing in five minutes." His words were picked up by at least two radio networks.
  
  
• 1985: October 29 BBC interview with Ronald Reagan: asked about the differences he saw between the US and Russia, the president replied: "I'm no linguist, but I've been told that in the Russian language there isn't even a word for freedom." (The word is "svoboda".)
  
  
• 1986: Soviet artists and cultural officials criticized Rambo-like American films as an expression of "anti-Russian phobia even more pathological than in the days of McCarthyism". Russian film-maker Stanislav Rostofsky claimed that on one visit to an American school "a young girl trembled with fury when she heard I was from the Soviet Union, and said she hated Russians."
  
  
• 1986: Roy Cohn, who achieved considerable fame and notoriety in the 1950s as an assistant to the communist-witch-hunting Senator Joseph McCarthy, died, reportedly of AIDS. Cohn, though homosexual, had denied that he was and had denounced such rumors as communist smears.
  
  
• 1986: After American journalist Nicholas Daniloff was arrested in Moscow for "spying" and held in custody for two weeks, New York Mayor Edward Koch sent a group of 10 visiting Soviet students storming out of City Hall in fury. "The Soviet government is the pits," said Koch, visibly shocking the students, ranging in age from 10 to 18 years. One 14-year-old student was so outraged he declared: "I don't want to stay in this house. I want to go to the bus and go far away from this place. The mayor is very rude. We never had a worse welcome anywhere." As matters turned out, it appeared that Daniloff had not been completely pure when it came to his news gathering.
  
  
• 1989: After the infamous Chinese crackdown on dissenters in Tiananmen Square in June, the US news media was replete with reports that the governments of Nicaragua, Vietnam and Cuba had expressed their support of the Chinese leadership. Said the Wall Street Journal: "Nicaragua, with Cuba and Vietnam, constituted the only countries in the world to approve the Chinese Communists' slaughter of the students in Tiananmen Square." But it was all someone's fabrication; no such support had been expressed by any of the three governments. At that time, as now, there were few, if any, organizations other than the CIA which could manipulate major Western media in such a manner.
  

NOTE: It should be remembered that the worst consequences of anti-communism were not those discussed above. The worst consequences, the ultra-criminal consequences, were the abominable death, destruction, and violation of human rights that we know under various names: Vietnam, Chile, Korea, Guatemala, Cambodia, Indonesia, Brazil, Greece, Afghanistan, El Salvador, and many others.

[Peter Lemkin]

The Anti-Empire Report #155

By William Blum February 8th, 2018

"Fake news" is fake news.

The people who created Facebook and Google must be smart. They're billionaires, their companies are worth multi-multi billions, their programs are used by billions around the world.
But all these smart people, because of Congressional pressure, have swallowed the stories about "fake news". Facebook hired a very large staff of people to read everything posted by users to weed out the fake stuff. That didn't last too long at all before the company announced that it wasn't "comfortable" deciding which news sources are the most trustworthy in a "world with so much division". We all could have told them that, couldn't we?
Facebook's previous efforts to ask its users to determine the accuracy of news did not turn out any better. Last year, the company launched a feature that allowed users to flag news stories they felt were inaccurate. The experiment was shuttered after nine months.
"Fake news", however, is not the problem. News found in the mainstream media is rarely fake; i.e., actual lies made from whole cloth, totally manufactured. This was, however, a common practice of the CIA during the first Cold War. The Agency wrote editorials and phoney news stories to be knowingly published by Latin American media with no indication of CIA authorship or CIA payment to the particular media. The propaganda value of such a "news" item might be multiplied by being picked up by other CIA stations in Latin America who would disseminate it through a CIA-owned news agency or a CIA-owned radio station. Some of these stories made their way back to the United States to be read or heard by unknowing North Americans.
Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" in 2003 is another valid example of "fake news", but like the CIA material this was more a government invention than a media creation.
The main problem with the media today, as earlier, is what is left out of articles dealing with controversial issues. For example, the very common practice during the first Cold War of condemning the Soviet Union for taking over much of Eastern Europe after the Second World War. This takeover is certainly based on fact. But the condemnation is very much misapplied if no mention is made of the fact that Eastern Europe became communist because Hitler, with the approval of the West, used it as a highway to reach the Soviet Union to wipe out Bolshevism once and for all; the Russians in World Wars I and II lost about 40 million people because the West had twice used this highway to invade Russia. It should not be surprising that after World War II the Soviets were determined to close down the highway. It was not simply "communist expansion".
Or the case of Moammar Gaddafi. In the Western media he is invariably referred to as "the Libyan dictator". Period. And he certainly was a dictator. But he also did many marvelous things for the people of Libya (like the highest standard of living in Africa) and for the continent of Africa (like creating the African Union).
Or the case of Vladimir Putin. The Western media never tires of reminding its audience that Putin was once a KGB lieutenant colonel wink, wink, we all know what that means, chuckle, chuckle. But do they ever remind us with a wink or chuckle that US President George H.W. Bush was once not merely a CIA officer, but the fucking Director of the CIA!
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg now says: "We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective"; "broadly trusted" sources being those that are "affirmed by a significant cross-section of users".
Right, a significant cross-section of users Will that include me? Highly unlikely. Broadly trusted sources Will that include media like my Anti-Empire Report? Just as unlikely. Anything close? Maybe a single token leftist website amongst a large list, I'd guess. And a single token rightist website. Zuckerberg and his ilk probably think that the likes of NBC, NPR and CNN are very objective and are to be trusted when it comes to US foreign-policy issues or capitalism-vs-socialism issues.
On January 19 Google announced that it would cancel a two-month old experiment, called Knowledge Panel, that informed its users that a news article had been disputed by "independent fact-checking organizations". Conservatives had complained that the feature unfairly targeted a right-leaning outlet.
Imagine that. It's almost like people have political biases. Both Facebook and Google are still experimenting, trying to find a solution that I do not think exists. My solution is to leave it as it is. There's no automated way to remove bias or slant or judgment from writing or from those persons assigned to evaluate such.

Fake news by omission the Haiti example

"I'm happy to have a president that will bluntly speak the truth in negotiations," Eric Prince commented on Breitbart News. "If the president says some places are shitholes, he's accurate." Thus did Mr. Eric Prince pay homage to Mr. Donald Trump. Prince of course being the renowned founder of Blackwater, the private army which in September 2007 opened fire in a crowded square in Baghdad, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and seriously wounding 20 more.
Speaking of Haiti and other "shitholes", Prince declared: "It's a sad characterization of many of these places. It's not based on race. It has nothing to do with race. It has to do with corrupt incompetent governments that abuse their citizens, and that results in completely absent infrastructure to include open sewers, and unclean water, and crime. It's everything we don't want in America."
Like the US media, Prince failed to point out that on two occasions in the recent past when Haiti had a decent government, led by Jean-Bertrand Aristide, which was motivated to improve conditions, the United States was instrumental in nullifying its effect. This was in addition to fully supporting the Duvalier dictatorship for nearly 30 years prior to Aristide.
Aristide, a reformist priest, was elected to the presidency in 1991 but was ousted eight months later in a military coup. The 1993 Clinton White House thus found itself in the awkward position of having to pretend because of all their rhetoric about "democracy" that they supported the democratically-elected Aristide's return to power from his exile in he US. After delaying his return for more than two years, Washington finally had its military restore Aristide to office, but only after obliging the priest to guarantee that he would not help the poor at the expense of the rich literally! and that he would stick closely to free-market economics. This meant that Haiti would continue to be the assembly plant of the Western Hemisphere, with its workers receiving starvation wages, literally! If Aristide had thoughts about breaking the agreement forced upon him, he had only to look out his window US troops were stationed in Haiti for the remainder of his term.
In 2004, with Aristide once again the elected president, the United States staged one of its most blatant coups ever. On February 28, 2004, American military and diplomatic personnel arrived at Aristide's home to inform him that his private American security agents must either leave immediately to return to the US or fight and die; that the remaining 25 of the American security agents hired by the Haitian government, who were to arrive the next day, had been blocked by the United States from coming; that foreign and Haitian rebels were nearby, heavily armed, determined and ready to kill thousands of people in a bloodbath. Aristide was pressured to sign a "letter of resignation" before he was flown into exile by the United States.
And then US Secretary of State Colin Powell, in the sincerest voice he could muster, told the world that Aristide "was not kidnaped. We did not force him onto the airplane. He went onto the airplane willingly. And that's the truth." Powell sounded as sincere as he had sounded a year earlier when he gave the UN a detailed (albeit imaginary) inventory of the chemical, biological and nuclear weapons in Iraq, shortly before the US invasion.
Jean-Bertrand Aristide was on record, by word and deed, as not being a great lover of globalization or capitalism. This was not the kind of man the imperial mafia wanted in charge of the Western Hemisphere's assembly plant. It was only a matter of time before they took action.
It should be noted that the United States also kept progressives out of power in El Salvador, another of Trump's "shithole" countries.

Liberals today

On January 24 I went to the Washington, DC bookstore Politics & Prose to hear David Cay Johnston, author of "It's Even Worse Than You Think: What the Trump Administration Is Doing to America". To my surprise he repeatedly said negative things about Russia, and in the Q&A session I politely asked him about this. He did not take kindly to that and after a very brief exchange cut me off by asking for the next person in line to ask a question.
That was the end of our exchange. No one in the large audience came to my defense or followed up with a question in the same vein; i.e., the author as cold warrior. The only person who spoke to me afterwards had only this to say as he passed me by: "Putin kills people". Putin had not been mentioned. I should have asked him: "Which government never kills anyone?"
Politics & Prose is a very liberal bookstore. (Amongst many authors of the left, I've spoken there twice.) Its patrons are largely liberal. But liberals these days are largely cold warriors it appears. Even though the great majority of them can't stand Trump they have swallowed the anti-Russia line of his administration and the media, perhaps because of the belief that "Russian meddling" in the election led to dear Hillary's defeat, the proof of which seems more non-existent with each passing day.
Sam Smith (who puts out the Progressive Review in Maine) has written about Hillary's husband: "A major decline of progressive America occurred during the Clinton years as many liberals and their organizations accepted the presence of a Democratic president as an adequate substitute for the things liberals once believed in. Liberalism and a social democratic spirit painfully grown over the previous 60 years withered during the Clinton administration."
And shortly afterward came Barack Obama, not only a Democrat but an African-American, the perfect setup for a lot more withering, health care being a good example. The single-payer movement was regularly gaining momentum when Obama took office; it seemed like America was finally going to join the modern advanced world. But Mr. O put a definitive end to that. Profit even of the type Mr. Trump idealizes would still determine who is to live and who is to die, just like Jews intone during Rosh Hashanah.
Poor America. It can travel to other planets, create a military force powerful enough to conquer the world ten times over, invent the Internet and a thousand other things … but it can't provide medical care for all its people.
Now, three of the richest men in the world, the heads of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan Chase, which collectively employ more than a million people, have announced they are partnering to create an independent company aimed at reining in ever-increasing health-care costs for companies and employees alike. The three men will pursue this objective through a company whose initial focus will be on technology solutions that will provide US employees and their families with simplified, high-quality and transparent healthcare at a reasonable cost. Almost no details were made available on how they plan to do this, but I predict that whatever they do will fail. They have lots of models to emulate in Canada, Europe, Cuba and elsewhere but to an American nostril these examples all suffer from the same unpleasant odor, the smell of socialism.
I say this even though their announcement states that the new company will be "free from profit-making incentives and constraints". And Warren Buffet, head of Berkshire Hathaway, is cited on CNN as follows: "Warren Buffett says America is ready for single-payer health care. The billionaire investor tells PBS NewsHour that government-run health insurance probably is the best system' because it would control escalating costs. We are such a rich country. In a sense, we can afford to do it.'"
Of course the US could have afforded to do it 50 years ago. I really hope that my cynicism is misplaced.

The Trump Bubble. (Written before the market crashed)

Repeatedly, President Trump and his supporters have bragged about the "booming" stock market, attributing it to the administration's marvelous economic policies and the great public confidence in those policies. Like much of what comes out of the Donald's mouth … this is simply nonsense.
The stock market is, and always has been, just a gambling casino, a glorified Las Vegas. Every day a bunch of people, (gamblers) buy and/or sell one stock or another; sometimes they sell the same stock they bought the day before; or the hour before; or the minute before; the next day they may well do the exact reverse. All depending on the latest news headline, or what a corporation has done to elicit attention, or what a friend just told them, or a fortune teller, or that day's horoscope, or just a good ol' hunch. Or they make up a reason; anything to avoid thinking that they're just pulling the lever of a slot machine.
And many people buy certain stocks because other people are buying it. This is what stock market analysts call a speculative bubble. Prick the confidence and the bubble bursts. "The stock market," Naomi Klein has observed, "has the temperament of an overindulged 2-year-old, who can throw one of its world-shaking tantrums."
Walter Winchell, the 1960-70s powerful and widely-syndicated gossip columnist of the New York Daily News, famously wrote that he lost his faith in the stock market when he saw that a stock could jump sharply in price simply because he happened to mention something related to the company in his column.
And all this occurs even when the stock market is operating in the supposedly honest way it was designed to operate. What are we to make of it when sophisticated investors devise a computer scam for instantaneous buying and selling, as has happened several times in recent years?
Yet President Trump and his fans would have us believe that the big jump in stock prices of the past year is testimony to his sterling leadership and oh-so-wise policies. What will they say when the market crashes? As Trump himself will crash.

Driverless police cars

Yes, that's what they're thinking of next. Among other things these cars will be able to catch speeders and issue tickets. But here's the real test of the system's Artificial Intelligence Can the police car be taught how to recognize a young black man, drive to within a few feet of him, and fire a gun at his head?

[Peter Lemkin]

William Blum

The Anti-Empire Report #157

By William Blum Published April 18th, 2018


Share3

Unpersons

One reason it's so easy to get an American administration, the mainstream media, and the American people to jump on an anti-Russian bandwagon is of course the legacy of the Soviet Union. To all the real crimes and shortcomings of that period the US regularly added many fictitious claims to agitate the American public against Moscow. That has not come to a halt. During a debate in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, candidate Ben Carson (now the head of the US Housing and Urban Development agency) allowed the following to pass his lips: "Joseph Stalin said if you want to bring America down, you have to undermine three things: Our spiritual life, our patriotism, and our morality." This is a variation on many Stalinist "quotes" over the years designed to deprecate both the Soviet leader and any American who can be made to sound like him. The quote was quite false, but the debate moderators and the other candidates didn't raise any question about its accuracy. Of course not.
Another feature of Stalinism that was routinely hammered into our heads was that of the "non-person" or "unperson" the former well-known official or writer, for example, who fell out of favor with the Stalinist regime for something he said or did, and was thereafter doomed to a life of obscurity, if not worse. In his classic 1984 George Orwell speaks of a character who "was already an unperson. He did not exist: he had never existed." I was reminded of this by the recent sudden firing of Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. Matthew Lee, the courageous Associated Press reporter who has been challenging State Department propaganda for years, had this to say in an April 1 article:

Rex Tillerson has all but vanished from the State Department's website as his unceremonious firing by tweet took effect over the weekend.
The "Secretary of State Tillerson" link at the top of the department's homepage disappeared overnight Saturday and was replaced with a generic "Secretary of State" tab. When clicked, it leads to a page that informs visitors in a brief statement that Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan "became acting Secretary of State on April 1, 2018." It shows a photo of Sullivan signing his appointment papers as deputy in June 2017 but offers no explanation for the change in leadership.
In addition to that change, links that had connected to Tillerson's speeches, travels and other events now display those of Sullivan. The link to Tillerson's biography as the 69th secretary of state briefly returned a "We're sorry, that page can't be found" message. After being notified of the message, the State Department restored the link and an archive page for Tillerson's tenure was enabled.

The most repeated Cold War anti-Communist myth was of course Nikita Khrushchev's much quoted No, eternally quoted! line: "We will bury you." On November 20 1956 the New York Times had reported: "In commenting on coexistence last night Mr. Khrushchev said communism did not have to resort to war to defeat capitalism. "Whether you like it or not, history is on our side," he said. "We will bury you."
Obviously, it was not a military threat of any kind. But tell that to the countless individuals who have cited it as such forever. So, as matters turned out, did communism, or call it socialism, bury capitalism? No. But not for the reason the capitalists would like to think their superior socio-economic system. Capitalism remains the world's pre-eminent system primarily because of military power combined with CIA covert actions. It's that combination that irredeemably crippled socialist forces in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Philippines, Guatemala, Haiti, Ecuador, the Congo, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Chile, Angola, Grenada, Nicaragua, Bulgaria, Albania, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, El Salvador, etc., etc., etc.
We'll never know what kind of societies would have resulted if these movements had been allowed to develop without US interference; which of course was the idea behind the interference.

Political assassination. Political propaganda.

In the Cold War struggles against the Soviets/Russians the United States has long had the upper hand when it comes to political propaganda. What do the Russkis know about sales campaigns, advertising, psychological manipulation of the public, bait-and-switch, and a host of other Madison Avenue innovations. Just look at what the American media and their Western partners have done with the poisoning of the two Russians, Sergei Skripal and his daughter, in the UK. How many in the West doubt Russia's guilt?
Then consider the case of Hugo Chávez. When he died in 2013 I wrote the following: "[W]hen someone like Chávez dies at the young age of 58 I have to wonder about the circumstances. Unremitting cancer, intractable respiratory infections, massive heart attack, one after the other … It is well known that during the Cold War, the CIA worked diligently to develop substances that could kill without leaving a trace. I would like to see the Venezuelan government pursue every avenue of investigation in having an autopsy performed." (None was performed apparently.)
Back in December 2011, Chávez, already under treatment for cancer, wondered out loud: "Would it be so strange that they've invented the technology to spread cancer and we won't know about it for 50 years?" The Venezuelan president was speaking a day after Argentina's leftist president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, announced she had been diagnosed with thyroid cancer. This was after three other prominent leftist Latin America leaders had been diagnosed with cancer: Brazil's president, Dilma Rousseff; Paraguay's Fernando Lugo; and the former Brazilian leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
"Evo take care of yourself. Correa, be careful. We just don't know," Chávez said, referring to Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, and Rafael Correa, the president of Ecuador, both leading leftists.
Chávez said he had received words of warning from Fidel Castro, himself the target of hundreds of failed and often bizarre CIA assassination plots. "Fidel always told me: Chávez take care. These people have developed technology. You are very careless. Take care what you eat, what they give you to eat … a little needle and they inject you with I don't know what."
When the new Venezuelan president, Nicolas Maduro, suggested possible American involvement in Chávez's death, the US State Department called the allegation "absurd" even though the United States had already played a key role in the short-lived overthrow of Chávez in 2002. I don't know of any American mainstream media that has raised the possibility that Chávez was murdered.
I personally believe, without any proof to offer, (although no less than is offered re Russia's guilt in the UK poisoning) that Hugo Chávez was indeed murdered by the United States. But unlike the UK case, I do have a motivation to offer: Given Chávez's unremitting hostility towards American imperialism and the CIA's record of more than 50 assassination attempts against such world political leaders, if his illness and death were NOT induced, the CIA was not doing its job. The world's media, however, did its job by overwhelmingly ignoring such "conspiracy" talk, saving it for a more "appropriate" occasion, one involving their favorite bad guy, Russia.
If I could speak to British prime-minister Theresa May and her boorish foreign minister Boris Johnson I'd like to ask them: "What are you going to say when it turns out that it wasn't Russia behind the Skripal poisonings?" Stay tuned.

Another of the many charming examples of Cold War anti-communism

Nostalgia is on the march in Brazil, a longing for a return to the military dictatorship of 1964-1985, during which nearly 500 people were killed by the authorities or simply disappeared. It was a time when the ruling generals used systemic brutality, including electric shocks, as well as psychological torture in their effort to cement power and ward off what they called "communism". They also stole many of the very young children of their victims and gave them to their followers, whom the children then believed to be their parents.
Crime is the main problem in Brazil today, the leading reason for the desire to return to the good old days of dictatorial rule. An estimated 43 percent of the Brazilian population supports at least a temporary revival of military control, according to a 2017 poll, up from 35 percent in 2016. Fear of violence, whether it be terrorism or street crime, has fueled support for authoritarian parties and bolstered populist leaders with tough-on-crime, anti-immigrant platforms around the world, from President Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines to Chancellor Sebastian Kurz in Austria to a fellow named Trump in the good ol' US of A.
"Thanks to you, Brazil did not become Cuba!" the crowd chanted at a recent demonstration in Brazil, some snapping salutes.
This is indeed the height of irony. In all likelihood many of those people were not strangers to hunger, struggling to pay their rent, could not afford needed medical care, or education; yet, they shouted against a country where such deprivations are virtually non-existent.
The United States of course played a significant role in the 1964 overthrow of the Brazilian democracy. How could it be otherwise in this world? Here is a phone conversation between US President Lyndon B. Johnson and Thomas Mann, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, April 3, 1964, two days after the coup:
MANN: I hope you're as happy about Brazil as I am.
LBJ: I am.
MANN: I think that's the most important thing that's happened in the hemisphere in three years.
LBJ: I hope they give us some credit instead of hell.

Does the man ever feel embarrassed?

In his desperation for approval, our dear president has jumped on the back of increased military spending. Speaking to the presidents of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania he said that he should be given "credit" for pressuring countries like theirs to give more money to NATO. None of presidents had the nerve to ask Mr. Trump why that is a good thing; perhaps pointing out that some of the millions of dollars could have been used to improve the quality of their people's lives.
A few days later, at the White House Easter Egg Roll the president "bragged to a crowd of children about increasing military spending to $700 billion." One can imagine what their young minds made of this. Will they one day realize that this man called "The President" was telling them that large amounts of money which could have been spent on their health and education, on their transportation and environment, was instead spent on various weapons used to kill people?
The size of the man's ego needs can not be exaggerated. The Washington Post observed that Trump instructed the Lithuanian president

to praise him on camera, just as he said she had done privately in the Oval Office. She obliged, saying changes to NATO would not be possible without the United States and that its vital voice and vital leadership' are important. Trump pressed her: And has Donald Trump made a difference on NATO?' Those in the room laughed, as she confirmed he has made a difference.

Thank God some of those in the room laughed. I was beginning to think that all hope was lost.

The stars we honor

Is it a sign of America's moral maturation that numerous celebrities have been forced to resign or retire because of being exposed as sexual predators?
Maybe. To some extent. I hope so.
But I'd be much more impressed if talk shows and other media stopped inviting and honoring much worse people as guests war criminals, torturers, serial liars, and mass murderers; people like George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, and many military officials.

[Peter Lemkin]

The Anti-Empire Report #159

By William Blum Published August 17th, 2018

The mind of the mass media: Email exchange between myself and a leading Washington Post foreign policy reporter:

July 18, 2018
Dear Mr. Birnbaum,
You write Trump "made no mention of Russia's adventures in Ukraine". Well, neither he nor Putin nor you made any mention of America's adventures in the Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of the Ukrainian government in 2014, which led to the justified Russian adventure. Therefore …?
If Russia overthrew the Mexican government would you blame the US for taking some action in Mexico?
William Blum

Dear Mr. Blum,
Thanks for your note. "America's adventures in the Ukraine": what are you talking about? Last time I checked, it was Ukrainians in the streets of Kiev who caused Yanukovych to turn tail and run. Whether or not that was a good thing, we can leave aside, but it wasn't the Americans who did it.
It is, however, Russian special forces who fanned out across Crimea in February and March 2014, according to Putin, and Russians who came down from Moscow who stoked conflict in eastern Ukraine in the months after, according to their own accounts.
Best, Michael Birnbaum

To MB,
I can scarcely believe your reply. Do you read nothing but the Post? Do you not know of high State Dept official Victoria Nuland and the US Ambassador in Ukraine in Maidan Square to encourage the protesters? She spoke of 5 billion (sic) dollars given to aid the protesters who were soon to overthrow the govt. She and the US Amb. spoke openly of who to choose as the next president. And he's the one who became president. This is all on tape. I guess you never watch Russia Today (RT). God forbid! I read the Post every day. You should watch RT once in a while.
William Blum

To WB,
I was the Moscow bureau chief of the newspaper; I reported extensively in Ukraine in the months and years following the protests. My observations are not based on reading. RT is not a credible news outlet, but I certainly do read far beyond our own pages, and of course I talk to the actual actors on the ground myself that's my job.
And: yes, of course Nuland was in the Maidan but encouraging the protests, as she clearly did, is not the same as sparking them or directing them, nor is playing favorites with potential successors, as she clearly did, the same as being directly responsible for overthrowing the government. I'm not saying the United States wasn't involved in trying to shape events. So were Russia and the European Union. But Ukrainians were in the driver's seat the whole way through. I know the guy who posted the first Facebook call to protest Yanukovych in November 2013; he's not an American agent. RT, meanwhile, reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time. By all means consume a healthy and varied media diet don't stop at the US mainstream media. But ask yourself how often RT reports critically on the Russian government, and consider how that lacuna shapes the rest of their reporting. You will find plenty of reporting in the Washington Post that is critical of the US government and US foreign policy in general, and decisions in Ukraine and the Ukrainian government in specific. Our aim is to be fair, without picking sides.
Best, Michael Birnbaum

======================= end of exchange =======================
Right, the United States doesn't play indispensable roles in changes of foreign governments; never has, never will; even when they offer billions of dollars; even when they pick the new president, which, apparently, is not the same as picking sides. It should be noticed that Mr Birnbaum offers not a single example to back up his extremist claim that RT "reports fabrications and terrible falsehoods all the time." "All the time", no less! That should make it easy to give some examples.
For the record, I think RT is much less biased than the Post on international affairs. And, yes, it's bias, not "fake news" that's the main problem Cold-War/anti-Communist/anti-Russian bias that Americans have been raised with for a full century. RT defends Russia against the countless mindless attacks from the West. Who else is there to do that? Should not the Western media be held accountable for what they broadcast? Americans are so unaccustomed to hearing the Russian side defended, or hearing it at all, that when they do it can seem rather weird.
To the casual observer, THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA indictments of July 14 of Russian intelligence agents (GRU) reinforced the argument that the Soviet government interfered in the US 2016 presidential election. Regard these indictments in proper perspective and we find that election interference is only listed as a supposed objective, with charges actually being for unlawful cyber operations, identity theft, and conspiracy to launder money by American individuals unconnected to the Russian government. So … we're still waiting for some evidence of actual Russian interference in the election aimed at determining the winner.

The Russians did it (cont.)

Each day I spend about three hours reading the Washington Post. Amongst other things I'm looking for evidence real, legal, courtroom-quality evidence, or at least something logical and rational to pin down those awful Russkis for their many recent crimes, from influencing the outcome of the 2016 US presidential election to use of a nerve agent in the UK. But I do not find such evidence.
Each day brings headlines like these:
"U.S. to add economic sanctions on Russia: Attack with nerve agent on former spy in England forces White House to act"
"Is Russia exploiting new Facebook goal?"
"Experts: Trump team lacks urgency on Russian threat"
These are all from the same day, August 9, which led me to thinking of doing this article, but similar stories can be found any day in the Post and in major newspapers anywhere in America. None of the articles begins to explain how Russia did these things, or even WHY. Motivation appears to have become a lost pursuit in the American mass media. The one thing sometimes mentioned, which I think may have some credibility, is Russia's preference of Trump over Hillary Clinton in 2016. But this doesn't begin to explain how Russia could pull off any of the electoral magic it's accused of, which would be feasible only if the United States were a backward, Third World, Banana Republic.
There's the Facebook ads, as well as all the other ads … The people who are influenced by this story have they read many of the actual ads? Many are pro-Clinton or anti-Trump; many are both; many are neither. It's one big mess, the only rational explanation of this which I've read is that they come from money-making websites, "click-bait" sites as they're known, which earn money simply by attracting visitors.
As to the nerve agents, it makes more sense if the UK or the CIA did it to make the Russians look bad, because the anti-Russian scandal which followed was totally predictable. Why would Russia choose the time of the World Cup in Moscow of which all of Russia was immensely proud to bring such notoriety down upon their head? But that would have been an ideal time for their enemies to want to embarrass them.
However, I have no doubt that the great majority of Americans who follow the news each day believe the official stories about the Russians. They're particularly impressed with the fact that every US intelligence agency supports the official stories. They would not be impressed at all if told that a dozen Russian intelligence agencies all disputed the charges. Group-think is alive and well all over the world. As is Cold War II.

But we're the Good Guys, ain't we?

For a defender of US foreign policy there's very little that causes extreme heartburn more than someone implying a "moral equivalence" between American behavior and that of Russia. That was the case during Cold War I and it's the same now in Cold War II. It just drives them up the wall.
After the United States passed a law last year requiring TV station RT (Russia Today) to register as a "foreign agent", the Russians passed their own law allowing authorities to require foreign media to register as a "foreign agent". Senator John McCain denounced the new Russian law, saying there is "no equivalence" between RT and networks such as Voice of America, CNN and the BBC, whose journalists "seek the truth, debunk lies, and hold governments accountable." By contrast, he said, "RT's propagandists debunk the truth, spread lies, and seek to undermine democratic governments in order to further Vladimir Putin's agenda."
And here is Tom Malinowski, former Assistant Secretary of State for democracy, human rights and labor (2014-2017) last year he reported that Putin had "charged that the U.S. government had interfered aggressively' in Russia's 2012 presidential vote," claiming that Washington had "gathered opposition forces and financed them." Putin, wrote Malinowski, "apparently got President Trump to agree to a mutual commitment that neither country would interfere in the other's elections."
"Is this moral equivalence fair?" Malinowski asked and answered: "In short, no. Russia's interference in the United States' 2016 election could not have been more different from what the United States does to promote democracy in other countries."
How do you satirize such officials and such high-school beliefs?
We also have the case of the US government agency, National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which has interfered in more elections than the CIA or God. Indeed, the man who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, Allen Weinstein, declared in 1991: "A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA." On April 12, 2018 the presidents of two of NED's wings wrote: "A specious narrative has come back into circulation: that Moscow's campaign of political warfare is no different from U.S.-supported democracy assistance."
"Democracy assistance", you see, is what they call NED's election-interferences and government-overthrows. The authors continue: "This narrative is churned out by propaganda outlets such as RT and Sputnik [radio station]. … it is deployed by isolationists who propound a U.S. retreat from global leadership."
"Isolationists" is what conservatives call critics of US foreign policy whose arguments they can't easily dismiss, so they imply that such people just don't want the US to be involved in anything abroad.
And "global leadership" is what they call being first in election-interferences and government-overthrows.

What God giveth, Trump taketh away?

The White House sends out a newsletter, "1600 daily", each day to subscribers about what's new in the marvelous world inhabited by Donald J. Trump. On July 25 it reported about the president's talk before the Veterans of Foreign Wars national convention in Missouri: "We don't apologize for America anymore. We stand up for America. And we stand up for our National Anthem," the President said to "a thundering ovation".
At the same time, the newsletter informed us that the State Department is bringing together religious leaders and others for the first-ever Ministerial to Advance Religious Freedom. "The goal is simple," we are told, "to promote the God-given human right to believe what you choose."
Aha! I see. But what about those who believe that standing for the National Anthem implies support for America's racism or police brutality? Is it not a God-given human right to believe such a thing and "take a knee" in protest?
Or is it the devil that puts such evil ideas into our heads?

The weather all over is not just extreme … It's downright freakish.

The argument I like to use when speaking to those who don't accept the idea that extreme weather phenomena are largely man-made is this:
Well, we can proceed in one of two ways:

1. We can do our best to limit the greenhouse effect by curtailing greenhouse gas emissions (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) into the atmosphere, and if it turns out that these emissions were not in fact a significant cause of the widespread extreme weather phenomena, then we've wasted a lot of time, effort and money (although other benefits to the ecosystem would still accrue).
   
2. We can do nothing at all to curtail the emission of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and if it turns out that these emissions were in fact the leading cause of all the extreme weather phenomena, then we've lost the earth and life as we know it.
   

So, are you a gambler?
Irony of ironies … Misfortune of misfortunes … We have a leader who has zero interest in such things; indeed, the man is unequivocally contemptuous of the very idea of the need to modify individual or social behavior for the sake of the environment. And one after another he's appointed his soulmates to head government agencies concerned with the environment.
What is it that motivates such people? I think it's mainly that they realize that blame for much of environmental damage can be traced, directly or indirectly, to corporate profit-seeking behavior, an ideology to which they are firmly committed.

Notes

• Washington Post, November 16, 2017
  
• Ibid., July 23, 2017
  
• Ibid., September 22, 1991
  
• William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, chapter 19 on NED
  
• Washington Post, April 2, 2018
  

Any part of this report may be disseminated without permission, provided attribution to William Blum as author and a link to williamblum.org is provided.

[David Guyatt]

The number of times I have also come across this closed mind, group-think, that Bill Blum has just demonstrated with his exchange with Post reporter Birnbaum. These people are proud to be blind and argue for it. It makes me furious; specimens of humanity that actively avoid reality so they can perpetuate actual myths as truth.

George Friedman, the former CEO and founder of Stratfor, what has been called "the private CIA", stated openly that it really was the most blatant coup in history.

Head Of Stratfor, Private CIA', Says Overthrow Of Yanukovych Was The Most Blatant Coup In History'

By
Eric Zuesse -

Dec 22, 2014: 3:47 am
[/FONT]


Eric Zuesse
In a December 19th interview in the Russian magazine Kommersant, George Friedman, who is the Founder and CEO of Stratfor, the Shadow CIA' firm, says of the overthrow of Ukraine's President Viktor Yanukovych that occurred on February 22nd of 2014: "It really was the most blatant coup in history." Perhaps he is saying this because of the videos that were uploaded to the Web which showed it to be so, but this statement by him contradicts the description that is asserted by the U.S. White House and the European Union, and the Western press, which description is that Yanukovych's overthrow was instead just the result of the U.S. Government's $5+ billion expense since 1991 to establish democracy' in Ukraine.
Friedman further says that "The Russian authorities can not tolerate a situation in which western armed forces will be [in Ukraine] a hundred kilometers from Kursk or Voronezh [in Russia]", and that the goal of the U.S. is to "maintain the balance of power in Europe, helping the weaker party," which he says is Europe. He furthermore says, "The United States considers the most dangerous potential alliance to be between Russia and Germany. This would be an alliance of German technology and capital with Russian natural and human resources." So: the U.S. is trying to antagonize Germans against Russia. This will weaken both of them. However, that would be not a "balance of power" but an increasing imbalance of power in favor of the United States. The Russian interviewer failed to catch his inconsistency on that.
Friedman was consistent with the U.S. Government's line that Russia is a threat to the U.S.; he said: "No American president can afford to sit idly by if Russia becomes more and more influential." He said that this is especially the case in the Middle East, and regarding Syria. But he then clarified himself, "I'm not saying that Russia's intervention in the Syrian conflict was the cause of the Ukrainian crisis, it would be a stretch." Regarding Ukraine, he said: "The bottom line is that the strategic interests of the United States are to prevent Russia from becoming a hegemon. And the strategic interests of Russia are not to allow the US close to its borders." He avoided even to mention the United States as possibly being a "hegemon" itself, one which is trying, along with its NATO allies, to crush Russia for its resisting America's hegemony that is, global dominance by America's aristocracy.
President Obama had something to say about this very question when speaking at West Point on May 28th and asserting (with loaded anti-Russian assumptions and false outright allegations): "Russia's aggression toward former Soviet states unnerves capitals in Europe, while China's economic rise and military reach worries its neighbors. From Brazil to India, rising middle classes compete with us. … The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed [sp.: past [[somebody at the White House didn't even know the difference between past' and passed' and still don't, six months afterward]] and it will be true for the century to come." So: The U.S. President was telling West Point's graduating cadets that the U.S. is the only hegemon and will stay that way for at least a hundred years. This was their marching-order, from the U.S President himself, their own Commander-in-Chief, representing America's aristocracy (in this alleged democracy'), for whom they will fight and kill, and, some of them, perhaps even die, or else become crippled for life.
Friedman closed by saying, "Russia will not make concessions in the Crimea, this is obvious. But I believe that it could face serious problems with supplies to the peninsula. Yet Moscow cannot retreat from some of its requirements with regard to Ukraine. It cannot be allowed that Western military appear in Ukraine. This is a nightmare in Moscow. … This is already happening, slowly but occurs. And it will be something that Russia does not accept … The US is not aiming that you need to have control over Ukraine, but that it is important that it is not controlled by Russia." Here he was repeating his idea that America isn't seeking to achieve advantage over Russia that the U.S. has no hegemonic intentions, just "balance of power," notwithstanding the Commander-in-Chief's charge, months earlier, to his troops, for them to extend America's hegemony another century.
He said that this overthrow in Ukraine was a coup aimed against Russia, but then he closed with this statement that Russia is hegemonic but that the U.S. is not, which contradicts it.
Apparently, Mr. Friedman was nervous about losing U.S. Government business by being too honest, but he had already been too honest about the coup, and his self-contradictions didn't help him at all. Perhaps he believed that the vast majority of people can be fooled, as Americans were about "Saddam's WMD" and still are about "torture aimed at finding truth," none of which ever was true, but all of which the aristocracy wanted people to believe to be true. Their rule seems to be: Fools never learn, it's what they are and will continue to be, no matter how often they've been fooled in the past. Perhaps George Friedman was relying on this rule. But why then did he say things that are true but that his paymasters say are not? Might this intelligence expert' not be intelligent after all? If so, he has fooled the U.S. Government into thinking that he is: he's succeeded.
Here is an attempt to address the same issues that Friedman did, but without internal contradictions.
UPDATE: On 17 January 2015, the first English translation of this entire interview was posted to the Web, and it's here.

Friedman also outlines the battle for Eurasia between Russia, Europe and America. Of course, what is not mentioned is that America is a continent thousands of miles away but meddling in Europe, whereas Russia and Europe are de facto neighbours. In other words, a Frediman clearly confirms, the US is continuing the British great game by dividing in order to control and halt rapprochement between Moscow and Berlin, always the great fear to the survival of the Anglo-American hegemon. Friedman is always worth following because he tells his audience/readers what the big picture really is.

[Lauren Johnson]

And of course Friedman is a big fan of America the Not Hegemon. The word is unseemly -- implying that it is doing EXACTLY WHAT IT IS DOING.

[Peter Lemkin]

I'm greatly saddened to announce that just today Bill Blum, a longtime friend of mine died in a nursing home after a fall at home some weeks ago. I'll have more to say later. To any reading this who have not read all of his books - all I can say is what are you waiting for?! His books on the illegal, immoral, unjust, mostly hidden and under- or un-reported covert operations, government overthrows, assassinations, regime changes etc. the USA has done since WWII was his bailiwick and no one has done it better. A sad day in which another voice for the Truth has died and left us.....

William Blum is an author, historian, and U.S. foreign policy critic. He is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower, among others.

[Peter Lemkin]

William Blum, U.S. Policy Critic Cited by bin Laden, Dies at 85


William Blum, a longtime critic of United States foreign policy, with his book "Rogue State." Sales of the book surged in 2006 when a recording emerged on which Osama bin Laden said all Americans should read it.CreditJ. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press













Image
William Blum, a longtime critic of United States foreign policy, with his book "Rogue State." Sales of the book surged in 2006 when a recording emerged on which Osama bin Laden said all Americans should read it.CreditCreditJ. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

By Sam Roberts

• Dec. 11, 2018
  

William Blum, who raged against United States foreign policy in relative obscurity for decades until one of his published anti-imperialist broadsides received a surge in sales thanks to a surprise public tribute from Osama bin Laden, died on Sunday in Arlington, Va. He was 85.
His son, Alexander, said the cause was kidney failure. Mr. Blum had been hospitalized after being injured in a fall in his apartment in October.
Mr. Blum (pronounced "bloom") was a computer programmer for the State Department who aspired to become a career Foreign Service officer and "take part in the great anti-Communist crusade," he once recalled. But he became disillusioned over the Vietnam War.
After helping to inaugurate a short-lived biweekly underground newspaper, The Washington Free Press, and joining in antiwar protests, he said he was pressured in 1967 to quit his government job.



In the decades after that, he wrote largely polemical articles and columns, in print for publications like Foreign Policy Journal and Counterpunch and later online. He also produced, and contributed to, exposés in books and other media about what he called misdeeds by the United States at home and abroad that were carried out in the name of national security.
Faking a flat tire near the gate to Central Intelligence Agency headquarters in Virginia, he surreptitiously recorded the license plates of employees who were entering and leaving. He revealed the names and home addresses of more than 200 of them in his book "The CIA, a Forgotten History: U.S. Global Interventions Since World War 2" (1986).

"They could have been spies," said Louis Wolf, a founder with Mr. Blum in 1978 of what is now called CovertAction Magazine. "They could have been clerks."
In an interview with The Washington Post in 2006, Mr. Blum encapsulated his life's mission as "ending, at least slowing down, the American Empire," or "at least injuring the beast."
Still, no one was more surprised than he when a recording emerged in 2006 on which Osama bin Laden recommended that all Americans read Mr. Blum's book "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower," first published in 2000 and updated in 2005. It vaulted almost overnight from about 205,000 on Amazon's sales ranking to the top 50. (It stood at about 58,000 a few days after Mr. Blum's death.)

"This is almost as good as being an Oprah book," Mr. Blum said at the time.
While Mr. Blum denounced the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and said he would not want to live under an Islamic fundamentalist regime, he did not disavow the recommendation or express regret that bin Laden, the orchestrator of those attacks, shared his disdain for the policies carried out by the department where he had once worked.[URL="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/obituaries/notable-deaths-politics-public-affairs.html"]
[/URL]
He also reiterated his unpopular, but not unique, position that American intervention abroad had been breeding enemies and inviting terrorism. He blamed Washington for replacing secular governments in Afghanistan and other countries with Islamic fundamentalist regimes; reflexively favoring Israel over the Palestinians; and supporting Saudi Arabian dictators.
While bin Laden recommended that Americans read "Rogue State," he paraphrased a quotation that was actually from the back cover of another book by Mr. Blum, "Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire" (2004).
"If I were the president," that quotation reads, "I could stop terrorist attacks against the United States in a few days. Permanently. I would first apologize very publicly and very sincerely to all the widows and orphans, the impoverished and the tortured, and all the many millions of other victims of American imperialism."
William Henry Blum was born on March 6, 1933, in Brooklyn to Jewish immigrants from Poland, Isidore Blum, a machine operator, and Ruth (Katz) Blum.
After graduating from Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn, he earned a bachelor's degree in accounting from what is now Baruch College of the City University of New York.

Found unfit for military service because of the kidney ailment that ultimately proved fatal, his son said, Mr. Blum was hired as a programmer by I.B.M. and subsequently by the State Department.
He later collaborated in London with the former C.I.A. case officer Philip Agee, whose critical book "Inside the Company: CIA Diary" (1975), was followed by books and articles that made other disclosures about the agency's covert operations.
In 1979, Mr. Blum married Adelheid Zöfel. They later separated. She and their son survive him, along with two grandsons.
Mr. Blum repeatedly challenged the idealistic premise of American exceptionalism and argued instead that world hegemony was Washington's covert goal, for economic, nationalistic, ideological and religious reasons.
He continued to write his monthly online newspaper, The Anti-Empire Report, until September. His last public appearance was at a panel discussion over the summer sponsored by Left Forum and CovertAction, at which he repeated his premise that most Americans have "a deeply held conviction that no matter what the United States does abroad, no matter how bad it may look, no matter what harm results, the United States government means well."
In an interview in 2016 with Richard Grove of the website Tragedy and Hope, Mr. Blum was asked what he loved most about America. He replied, "Baseball, Jewish food, many films." Politically, he added, things could be worse:
"I have not been put in prison because of what I've written or spoken."