Bulletin N° 793
Subject
: FALSE FLAGS AND CARNIVORES: BEYOND
‘THE POLITICAL THEATER’.
11 April 2018
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
We must assume that capitalists are not suicidal,
or, indeed, there remains no hope!
They don’t mind, of course, getting large numbers of
us killed; they have demonstrated this throughout their history, but
self-sacrifice is not a prominent trait among the owners of capital. We can
count on this, for what it’s worth . . . .
World War III would not be a good investment for this
class of owners! The accumulation of private profits for only a few nanoseconds is not attractive, not even to the
“masters of the universe”. If they could somehow trigger a thermonuclear war
that did not touch them directly and brought them high private profits; then, of
course, they would see no problem in letting it happen. But this seems unlikely
today.
Having said this, however, we must acknowledge that the
military brinksmanship now underway, which is itself
highly profitable to some capitalist speculators and a small class of well-paid professional
collaborators, could possibly get out of control. This is not to say that the wars of the
past century - WW I and WW II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, etc. . . . - were
episodes of capitalist expansion gone “out of control”. No, the capitalist class remained on top of these events, but the political economy of 21st
century technology seems to indicate that low-level technocrats have the
capability to disappoint the owners of capital today and to threaten complete
destruction of everything, including capitalism.
And for those who think that capitalists do not wish to own society, just pay attention to how the corporate media manages public opinion, which is easy to criticize, more difficult to analyze, and virtually impossible to completely understand -raising uncertainties which can be delt with only by using calculations of 'probability', rather than those of precise 'cause and effect'.
Meanwhile, the killers of innocent men, women and
children should be arrested by responsible law enforcement officers and following their public trial should be required, for the rest of their natural lives,
to care for their victims’ survivors. Incarcerating such criminals or executing them would accomplish nothing; and a pubic trial, everything !
And organized mainstream religions – Catholics in
Latin America, Protestants and Jews in the United States, Muslims in middle
eastern kingdoms and elsewhere, the followers of Confucius, Buddha, and the
Hindus in eastern Asia – all incorporate so-called ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’
factions, to be sure; but, nevertheless, as a body they exist as organized mental constructs to assure the cultural
hegemony of their ideals in the geographical regions they control. The
so-called ‘progressives’ in these associations, though completely marginalized,
serve unwittingly to legitimize their institution as a whole, contributing to
an ideological monopoly which is most often dominated by a bigoted
view of "The Other". The institutional
objective is always secular power - to influence economic and political
policies - not to eliminate the left from within their ranks - a voice which is easily
silenced anyhow - and whose complete removal would diminish the political power of the disciplined organization.
Listen
to “Black Agenda Radio” @
https://soundcloud.com/user-208734627
The 17 items below offer CEIMSA readers a
chilling reflection on "WW I redux", a replay of 1914,
only with bigger toys and further reach.
Sincerely,
Francis Feeley
Professor emeritus of American Studies
University Grenoble-Alpes
Director of Research
University of Paris-Nanterre
Center for the Advanced Study of
American Institutions and Social Movements
The University of California-San Diego
a.
War Is On The Horizon
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49009.htm
by Paul Craig
Roberts
Have Washington and its British vassal set a stage for
testing whether Russia has the stomach for war?
How else do we
interpret the announcement by General Sergey Rudskoy,
chief of the Operational Directorate of the Russian General Staff, that “we
have reliable information at our disposal that US instructors have trained a number of militant groups in the vicinity of the
town of At-Tanf, to stage provocations involving
chemical warfare agents in southern Syria. They are preparing a series of
chemical munitions explosions. This fact will be used to blame the government
forces. The components to produce chemical munitions have been already
delivered to the southern de-escalation zone under the guise of humanitarian
convoys of a number of NGOs. The provocations will be used as a pretext by the
United States and its allies to launch strikes on military and government
infrastructure in Syria.”
+
https://thesaker.is/on-the-threshold-of-war-paul-craig-roberts/
==========
b.
Red Crescent says it found no trace of ‘Ghouta chem attack’
used by US to blame
Damascus & Moscow
https://www.rt.com/news/423539-red-crescent-ghouta-no-chemical/
==========
c.
State Dept Accuses Russia And Syria
Of Gassing Civilians Before Any Investigation
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49172.htm
by Caitlin Johnstone
Just weeks ago, two firebreathing neoconservative war whores
were promoted to the highest echelons of influence within the Trump
administration. The new National Security Advisor John Bolton only has one key on his piano, and that key is
war. Neoconservative hawk Mike Pompeo
was promoted from the head of the notoriously vicious Central Intelligence
Agency to Hillary Clinton's old job as Secretary of State after famously announcing that he was trying to make the CIA
"a much more vicious agency."
+
https://southfront.org/u-k-prepares-to-join-trumps-strikes-on-syria/
==========
d.
Glenn Greenwald on Syria: U.S. & Israel Revving Up
War Machine Won’t Help Suffering Syrian Civilians
https://www.democracynow.org/2018/4/9/glenn_greenwald_on_syria_us_israel
Outing
Amy Goodman & Glenn Greenwald :
Are ‘Democracy Now!’ & ‘The Intercept’ in bed with the ‘White Helmets’?
See
also: https://www.corbettreport.com/whitehelmets/
GLENN GREENWALD: So, obviously, the use of chemical
weapons in any instance is horrific. It’s a war crime. It’s heinous. And it
ought to be strongly condemned by everybody. I think that it’s—the evidence is
quite overwhelming that the perpetrators of this chemical weapons attack, as
well as previous ones, is the Assad government, although, in war, there are
always lots of reasons to doubt, and we certainly shouldn’t run off and make
hasty decisions, until there’s a real investigation, to make the evidence
available.
==========
e.
Syria: Another Fake Gas Attack?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49173.htm
by Moon
Of Alabama
Syria - Timelines Of 'Gas Attacks'
Follow A Similar Scheme
An alleged new 'chemical incident' in Syria
reminds of a similar series of events we saw last year. We are told to believe
that each time the U.S. pulls back from the war on Syria the Syrian government
is responding with a 'chemical attack' that pulls the U.S. back in.
==========
f.
Insouciant
Russians?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49158.htm
by Paul Craig Roberts
I
have often wondered if the Russian media shields Russians from the insulting
and derogatory things that American elites say about Russia and President
Putin.
For
example, here is Harvard University Professor Graham Allison:
“However demonic, however destructive, however devious, however deserving of
being strangled Russia is, the brute fact is that we cannot kill this bastard
without committing suicide.” http://nationalinterest.org/feature/america-russia-back-basics-21901
Here
is Bloomberg News:
Interpol “should be issuing more international arrest warrants for Russian
officials implicated in assassinations abroad. Ideally, Russia would find
itself in the same position as outlaw states like Iran. . . . This should
include designating Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism.” https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-03-09/u-k-spy-poisoning-treat-russia-like-the-terrorist-it-is
Here
is a collection of insulting and demonizing statements about Russia assembled
by Professor Stephen Cohen:
https://www.thenation.com/article/russophobia-in-the-new-cold-war/
Hillary
Clinton called President Putin “the new Hitler.”
+
==========
g.
Chris Hedges: "U.S. Citizens Are Living In
An Inverted Totalitarian Country"
7/7
The
mainstream media deflects attention from where power resides: corporations, not
with the leaders of the free world. The arguments posed by Chris Hedges, that
the U.S. is neither a democracy nor a republic but a totalitarian state that
can now assassinate its citizens at will, are pertinent ones. Scary ones. Especially as consecutive governments seem
equally as impotent to invoke any real change for the States. If the media
won’t stand up to the marionettes who pull the strings
of the conglomerates causing deep, indelible polarisation
in the world abound; then so we must act. Together.
+
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/sheldon-wolin-and-inverted-totalitarianism/
==========
h.
2 Israeli warplanes carried out strikes on Syrian
airbase – Russian MoD
https://www.rt.com/news/423545-israel-planes-syria-strike/
+
==========
i.
From: Alison Weir, “If Americans Knew”
<contact@ifamericansknew.org>
Sent: Saturday, 7 April, 2018
Subject: Our video exposé about
Israeli efforts to censor the Internet
Our
video exposé about Israeli efforts to censor the Internet
We've
just created a revealing 5-minute video about
how Israel and its partisans work to control and censor what people see on
the Internet. This contains detailed information about Israeli projects to
infiltrate wikipedia; utilize Israeli
soldiers, students, American teens and others to carry out social media
missions assigned from Israel; and more...
+
https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/tamara-nassar/video-israeli-interrogators-threaten-ahed-tamimi
==========
j.
Israel Kills Palestinians and Western Liberals Shrug.
Their Humanitarianism Is a Sham
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49128.htm
by Mehdi Hasan
“If the concept of intervention is driven
by universal human rights, why is it — from the people who identify themselves
as liberal interventionists — why do we never hear a peep, a word, about
intervening to protect the Palestinians?”
That was the question I put to the
French philosopher, author, and champion of liberal (or
humanitarian) interventionism, Bernard-Henri Lévy,
on my Al Jazeera English interview show “Head to Head” in 2013.
The usually silver-tongued Levy struggled to answer the question. The situation
in Palestine is “not the same” as in Syria and “you have not all the good on
one side and all the bad on the other side,” said Levy, who once remarked in reference to the
Israeli Defense Forces, or IDF, that he had “never seen such a democratic army,
which asks itself so many moral questions.” I couldn’t
help but be reminded of my exchange with the man known as “BHL” this past weekend, as I
watched horrific
images of unarmed
Palestinian protesters at the Gaza border being shot in the back by the “democratic
army” of Israel. How many “moral questions” did those Israeli snipers ask
themselves, I wondered, before they gunned
down Gazan refugees for daring to demand
a return to their homes inside the Green Line?
==========
k.
Palestinian journalist dies after being shot by Israeli
forces
![Yaser Murtaja, 30, was shot in the stomach in Khuza'a in the southern Gaza Strip on April 6 [Ibraheem Abu Mustafa/Reuters]](images/793_007.jpg)
Yaser Murtaja
was shot in the stomach during Friday's mass protests, bringing death toll to
31 since March 30.
+
==========
l.
“No
Hope for Change from Within.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MlNn1v4_Uf0
Blumenthal said that
his comments were “motivated by a strong opposition to Israel's systemic
discrimination against Palestinians,” and his “dedication to equal rights for
all.” He called the YouTube's decision “a political one and likely made under
pressure from powerful pro-Israel interests.”
==========
m.
UK
Foreign Office Denies Claiming Nerve Agent From Russia
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49134.htm
by RT
|
The UK Foreign
Office denies claiming the nerve agent used in the Salisbury poisoning of the
Skripals came directly from Russia. Despite
admitting it sent a tweet saying exactly that, and Boris Johnson making the
same claim.The UK Foreign Office has admitted it
deleted the tweet which directly stated that the nerve agent, identified by
the UK as A-234 – also known as Novichok- used in
the Salisbury poisoning of the Skripals, came
direct from Russia. This week British government scientists admitted they
couldn’t tell where the poison came from, undermining a number of claims to
come out of the Foreign Office. |
London
has directly accused the Kremlin on at least three occasions of being
behind the chemical attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
==========
n.
Operation Hades - A Model For The 'Novichok' Case?
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49126.htm
by Moon Of Aalabama
The
Russian government sent fourteen specific questions to the British
government and thirteen questions to the OPCW. There seems
to be some French involvement in the investigation of the alleged nerve agent
and Russia ask why that is the case.
Alexander
Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to Britain, further
increased the pressure on Theresa May by publicly asserting that the Skripal case was a 'provocation' carried out by British
intelligence. Telepolis points out (in German)
that this would not be the first time that a 'western' service would stage such
a 'provocation'.
|
The Skripal
case is indeed quite comparable to Operation
Hades. |
On
August 10 1994 German officials in Munich 'found' 363 grams of plutonium on a
plane coming from Moscow. They immediately asserted,
that the plutonium 'must' have come from a Russian reactor. There was a lot of
media panic, international political noise and condemnation of Russia. This put
pressure on the Russian government to increase its security at its nuclear
sites. The U.S. offered to 'help' with nuclear security and thus got easy
access to Russia's nuclear secrets. The case broke in the mid of the federal
election campaign in Germany and helped chancellor Kohl to get re-elected.
Months
later first leaks appeared, enterprising reporters dug deeper into the story
and it started to unravel.
Der
Spiegel filled ten pages (in German)
with the explosive story : "How German secret agents invented the
plutonium hazard".
It
turned out that the plutonium was
not from Russia but had been planted by the
German equivalent of the MI6, the Bundesnachrichtendienst
(BND). Leaks and counter-leaks created a convoluted story to hide the truth
behind it. A parliamentarian commission investigated the case but
the Kohl government eventually shut it down without any
political consequences. Shortly thereafter the deeply involved BND head, Bernd Schmidbauer, was sent into retirement.
The
Russian depicting of the 'Novichok' case as a staged
'provocation' has a historic antetype and, quite likely
in my view, significant merit.
It
took nine month for the 'Hades' story to fall apart. The 'Novichok'
fairy-tale may now see an earlier end.
==========
o.
Britain’s Not So Distant
History of State Sponsored Assassinations
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49127.htm
by Gavin O'Reilly
Britain’s
self-righteous tone when denouncing Russia for the alleged assassination of
Sergei Skripal ignores its own not so distant history
of engaging in state-sponsored assassinations.
With the eyes of the world focused on the alleged
nerve agent attack on
Sergei Skripal, the Russian who worked as a British
double-agent before being exiled to the UK in 2010, since he and his daughter
were found slumped on a Salisbury public bench last Sunday, one can’t help but
notice the hypocritical reaction of the British political establishment to the
attack. Addressing the House of Commons on Monday, Prime Minister Theresa May
alleged Kremlin involvement in the incident due to ‘Russia’s record of
conducting state-sponsored assassinations’. These words were spoken in a
self-righteous sense, one that suggested the UK held the moral ground over
Russia and would never go so far as to conduct assassinations of political
opponents on foreign soil.
==========
p.
Nonviolence or Nonexistence?
The Legacy of Martin Luther King Jr
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49129.htm
by Robert J. Burrowes
Fifty years
ago, on 4 April 1968, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
The
night before he died, King gave another of his many evocative speeches; this
one at the packed Mason Temple in Memphis. The speech included these words:
‘Men for
years now have been talking about war and peace. Now no longer can they just
talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and non-violence in
this world, it is non-violence or non-existence. That is where we are today.’
In
clearly identifying this stark choice and having been inspired by Mohandas K.
Gandhi’s wideranging social concerns, King’s concerns
were also broad:
‘The
Triple Evils of poverty, racism and militarism are forms of violence that exist
in a vicious cycle. They are interrelated, all-inclusive, and stand as barriers
to our living in the Beloved Community. When we work to remedy one evil, we
affect all evils.’See ‘The
King Philosophy’.
So what has
changed in the past 50 years? The world has traveled a great deal further down
the path of violence. So far, in fact, that nonexistence is now the most likely
outcome for humanity. See ‘On Track for
Extinction: Can Humanity Survive?’
==========
q.
Economic Update: Beyond the ‘Political Theater’
http://therealnews.com/t2/story:21497:Economic-Update%3A-Beyond-the-Political-Theater
Economist Richard Wolff says all the posturing and finger-pointing--from the
NRA's anti-government fear mongering to Trump's Chinese tariffs--are really
just an effort to distract from the real issue: 'It gets you focused on
something other than the economic system that is screwing you'
+
The coming collapse of the American economic system with Richard Wolff
https://www.rt.com/shows/on-contact/422893-richard-wolff-economic-collapse/