Bulletin
N° 840
“Repentance”
(English subtitles)
(2h24min)
Subject :
Are We Trapped by a Ruling-Class
‘Death Wish’: Thanatos vs. Eros?
5 April 2019
Grenoble, France
Dear Colleagues and Friends of CEIMSA,
I was still a graduate student in history at Madison, Wisconsin when I saw the 1975 film, Hester Street. Madison was then known as “the WASP city with a Jewish soul.” I remember laughing with friends at the great line in this film which depicted Eastern European Jewish immigrants making a new life for themselves in New York City at the end of the 19th century and the conflicts that arose among them as they veered toward different cultural destinies: traditional religion, or secular liberalism. The young orthodox wife, Gitl, arrives from Russia in 1896, with her son,Yossele, to find her husband "Jake" completely acculturated into an American way of life. Furthermore, he is on the verge of getting married to a Polish immigrant, Mamie, who is equally acculturated. The young wife discovers the obstacle to her marriage and eventually decides to divorce her unfaithful husband, but not before acquiring $300, almost the entirel savings of the Polish fiancée. Before the divorce, the young wife’s friend and ally, Mrs. Kavarsky, turns on the husband who is proud of shedding his Jewish identity: “You can’t pee on my back and make me think it’s rain!” she told him. This was enough to synch the decision, and the husband left to join his americanized fiancée.
Unfortunately, the vibrant and massive 19th-century social movements are conspicuously absent in this film, and the existing option of socialist counter culture is entirely deleted. (See, for example, Emma Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life.) As for Zionism, this ideology had not invaded the minds and dominated the thinking of large numbers of Jews until the following century.
In the 1970s, the writings of Herbert Marcuse helped to fill a void in formal graduate student culture, and one of his early books, Eros and Civilization (1955), has a particularly poignant relevance today, at this historic conjuncture in Late Capitalist ideology. In this early writing, Marcuse took up the discussion of the much disputed Freudian concept of the universal “death wish” as an innate human instinct. (Wilhelm Reich was one student who later broke with Freud over “this invention,” dismissing it as a later perversion of his work that reflected Freud’s own repressions, after he failed to come to terms with the capitalist political economy of global imperialist wars and had contracted cancer. Freud had revised his thinking to explain the phylogenesis of mass annihilations as the consequence of a newly discovered "death instinct," which he labeled Thantos, instead of acknowledging that economic forces, and most recently the capitalist political economy, lay at the roots of this violence, and not "human instincts.")
Marcuse’s careful analysis of Freudian orthodoxy and of the ideological coherency of his overarching theory is an intellectual trip with many surprises.
In 1920, Freud began to consider Thanatos to be a "primary instinct," comparable to (albeit more fundamental than) Eros. With the publication of his book Beyond the Pleasure Principal (1920), Freud concluded that all instincts fall into one of two major classes: life instincts or death instincts, with the latter predominate in the sense that the former represents merely a "detour" before the inevitable rendez-vous with death. Nine years later, he elaborated on this discovery in his work, Civilization and its Discontents:
My next step was taken in Beyond the Pleasure Principle
. . , when the compulsion to repeat and the conservative character of
instinctual life first attracted my attention. Starting from
speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels, I drew the
conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substance and to join
it into ever larger units, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking
to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval,
inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death.
The phenomena of life could be explained from the concurrent or mutually
opposing actions of these two instincts. It was not easy, however, to
demonstrate the activities of this supposed death instinct. The manifestations
of Eros were conspicuous and noisy enough. It might be assumed that the death
instinct operated silently within the organism towards its dissolution,
but that, of course, was no proof. A more fruitful idea was that a portion of
the instinct is diverted towards the external world and comes to light as an
instinct of aggressiveness and destructiveness. In this way the instinct itself
could be pressed into the service of Eros, in that the organism was destroying
some other thing, whether animate or inanimate, instead of destroying its own
self. Conversely, any restriction of this aggressiveness directed outwards
would be bound to increase the self-destruction,
which is in any case proceeding. At the same time one can suspect from this
example that the two kinds of instinct seldom – perhaps never – appear in
isolation from each other, but are alloyed with each
other in varying and very different proportions and so become
unrecognizable to our judgment.
. . .
The assumption of the
existence of an instinct of death or destruction has met with resistance even
in analytic circles; I am aware that there is a frequent inclination rather to
ascribe whatever is dangerous and hostile in love to an original bi-polarity in
its own nature. To begin with it was only tentatively that I put forward the
views I have developed here, but in the course of time they have gained such a
hold upon me that I can no longer think in any other way. To my mind, they are
far more serviceable from a theoretical stand point than any other possible
ones; they provide that simplification, without either ignoring or doing
violence to the facts, for which we strive in scientific work.("Civilization
and its Discontents," 1930, pp.65-66)
According to Marcuse, Freud came to believe the death instinct represents a drive for the return to a totally inert condition of life, a regressive vortex moving toward the original monad, the celular stage of human development before the heartbeat and animal instincts develope. The death instinct is manifest in the religious urge to achieve NIRVANA, a totally detached state of body/mind, a vegetative condition of experiencing “cosmic unity.”
The animal human becomes a human being, writes Marcuse, when instincts give way to desires, the origins and aims of which are socially determined.
But the reality which shapes the instincts as well as their needs and
satisfaction is a social world. The animal man becomes a human being only
through fundamental transformation of his nature, affecting not only the
instinctual aims but also the institutional “values” – that is, the principles
that govern the attainment of the aims. The change in the governing value
system may be tentatively defined as follows:
from: to:
immediate satisfaction delayed satisfaction
pleasure restraint of pleasure
joy (play) toil
(work)
receptiveness productiveness
absence of repression security
Freud described this change
as the transformation of the pleasure principle into the reality
principle . . . . The reality principle supersedes the pleasure
principle: man learns to give up momentary, uncertain, and destructive pleasure
for delayed, restrained, but “assured” pleasure. Because of this lasting gain
through renunciation and restraint, according to Freud, the reality principle
“safeguards” rather than “dethrones,” “modifies” rather than denies, the
pleasure principle.
However, the psychoanalytic
interpretation reveals that the reality principle enforces change not only in
the form and timing of pleasure but in its very substance. The adjustment of
pleasure to the reality principle implies the subjugation and diversion of the
destructive force of instinctual gratification, of its incompatibly with the
established societal norms and relations, and, by that token, implies the
transubstantiation of pleasure itself.
With the establishment of the reality
principle, the human being which, under the pleasure principle, has been hardly
more than a bundle of animal drives, has become an organized ego. It strives
for “what is useful” and what can be obtained without damage to itself and to
its vital environment. Under the reality principle, the human being develops
the function of reason: it learns to “test” the reality, to distinguish between
good and bad, true and false, useful and harmful. Man acquires the faculties of
attention, memory, and judgment. He becomes a conscious, thinking subject,
geared to a rationality which is imposed upon him from outside. (pp.12-14)
The libido is the “amplifier” of human energy (all of which originates, of course, with sun light) and it nourishes these fundamental instincts of life and death, which manifest themselves in the ontogenesis of the repressed individual. According to Marcuse, Freudian terminology does not sufficiently differentiate between the biological and the socio-historical vicissitudes of the instincts. He attempts to correct this failing by introducing two new terms:
(a) Surplus-repression: the restrictions
necessitated by social domination. This is distinguished from (basic)
repression: the “modification” of the instincts necessary for the
perpetuation of the human race in civilization.
(b) Performance principle: the prevailing
historical form of the reality principle.
Behind
the reality principle lies the fundamental fact of Ananke
or scarcity (Lebensnot), which means that the
struggle for existence takes place in a world too poor for the satisfaction of
human needs without constant restraint, renunciation, delay. In other words,
whatever satisfaction is possible necessitates work, more or less
painful arrangements and undertakings for the procurement of the means for
satisfying needs. For the duration of work, which occupies practically the
entire existence of the mature individual, pleasure is ‘suspended” and pain
prevails. And since the basic instincts strive for the prevalence of pleasure
and the absence of pain, the pleasure principle is incompatible with reality,
and the instincts have to undergo a repressive regimentation.
However, this argument, which looms large in
Freud’s metapsychology, is fallacious in so far as it
applies to the brute fact of scarcity what actually is the consequence
of a specific organization of scarcity, and of a specific existential
attitude enforced by this organization. The prevalent scarcity has, throughout
civilization (although in very different modes), been organized in such a way
that it has not been distributed collectively in accordance with individual
needs, nor has the procurement of goods for the satisfaction of needs been
organized with the objective of best satisfying the developing needs of the
individuals. Instead, the distribution of scarcity as well as the effort of overcoming
it, the mode of work, have been imposed upon individuals – first
by mere violence, subsequently by a more rational utilization of power.
However, no matter how useful this rationality was for the progress of the
whole, it remained the rationality of domination, and the gradual conquest of
scarcity was inextricably bound up with and shaped by the interest of
domination. Domination differs from rational exercise of authority. The latter,
which is inherent in any societal division of labor, is derived from knowledge
and confined to the administration of functions and arrangements necessary for
the advancement of the whole. In contrast, domination is exercised by a
particular group or individual in order to sustain and enhance itself in a
privileged position. Such domination does not exclude technical, material, and
intellectual progress, but only as an unavoidable by-product while preserving
irrational scarcity, want, and constraint.
The various modes of domination (of man
and nature) result in various historical forms of the reality principle. For
example, a society in which all members normally work for a living requires
other modes of repression than a society in which labor is the exclusive
province of one specific group. Similarly, repression will be different in
scope and degree according to whether social production is oriented on
individual consumption or on profit; whether a market economy prevails or a
planned economy; whether private or collective property. These differences
affect the very content of the reality principle, for every form of the reality
principle must be embodied in a system of societal institutions and relations,
laws and values which transmit and enforced the required “modifications” of the
instincts. This “body” of the reality principle is different at the different
stages of civilization. Moreover, while any form of the reality principle
demands a considerable degree and scope of repressive control over the
instincts, the specific interests of domination introduce additional
controls over and above those indispensible for civilized human
association. These additional controls arising from the specific institutions
of domination are what we denote a surplus-repression.(pp.35-37)
The death wish and the aggression that it generates serve often to protect the organism against dangerous elements in the environment, but also against the uncritical Id, that is enslaved to the Pleasure Principle. Negotiations with the external enviroment and the management of internal energy are both conducted by the Ego, which unlike the id is in the service of the Reality Principle.
There is not societal organization of the death instinct paralleling
that of Eros: the very depth at which the instinct operates protects it from
such a systematic and methodical organization; only some of its derivative
manifestations are susceptible to control. As a component of sadomasochistic
gratification, it falls under the strict taboo on
perversions. Still, the entire progress of civilization is rendered possible
only by the transformation and utilization of the death instinct or its
derivatives. The diversion of primary destructiveness from the ego to the
external world feeds technological progress, and the use of the death instinct
for the formation of the superego achieves the punitive submission of the
pleasure ego to the reality principle and assures civilized morality. In
this transformation, the death instinct is brought into service of Eros; the
aggressive impulses provide energy for the continuous alterations, mastery, and
exploitation of nature to the advantage of mankind. In attacking, splitting,
changing, pulverizing things and animals (and, periodically, also men), man
extends his domination over the world and advances to ever richer stages of
civilization. But civilization preserves throughout the mark of its deadly
component:
. . . . we seem almost forced to
accept the dreadful hypothesis that in the very structure and human
constructive social efforts there is embodied a
principle of death, that there is no progressive impulse
but must become fatigue, that the intellect
can provide no permanent defense against a vigorous barbarism.
(from Instincts of the Herd in
Peace and War, by Wilfred Trotter, pp. 196-197)
The socially channeled destructiveness reveals time and again its
origins in a drive which defies all usefulness. Beneath the manifold rational
and rationalized motives for war against national and group enemies, for the
destructive conquest of time, space, and man, the deadly partner of Eros
becomes manifest in the persistent approval and participation of the
victims.(pp.51-53)
The id, the ego, and the super-ego usually function together to balance the organism, but frequently they fail to achieve an equilibrium.
The excessive severity of the superego,
which takes the wish for the deed and punishes even suppressed aggression, is
now explained in terms of the eternal struggle between Eros and the death
instinct: the aggressive impulse against the father (and his social successors)
is a derivation of the death instinct; in “separating’ the child from the
mother, the father also inhibits the death instinct the Nirvana impulse. He
thus does the work of Eros; love, too, operates in the formation of the superego.
The severe father, who as the forbidding representative of Eros subdues the
death instinct in the Oedipus conflict, enforces the first “communal” (social)
relations: his prohibitions create identification among the sons, aim-inhibited
love (affection), exogamy, sublimation. On the basis of renunciation, Eros
begins its cultural work of combining life into ever larger units. And as the
father is multiplied, supplemented, and replaced by the authorities of society,
as prohibitions and inhibitions spread, so do the aggressive impulse and its
objects. And with it grows, on the part of society, the need for strengthening
the defenses – the need for reinforcing the sense of guilt:
Since culture obeys an inner erotic
impulse which bids it bind mankind into a closely knit mass, it can achieve
this aim only by means of its vigilance in fomenting an ever-increasing sense
of guilt. That which began in relation to the father ends in relation to the
community. If civilization is an inevitable course of development for the group
of the family to the group of humanity as a whole, then an intensification of
the sense of guilt – resulting from the innate conflict of ambivalence, from
the eternal struggle between the love and the death trends – will be
inextricably bound up with it, until perhaps the sense of guilt may swell to a
magnitude that individuals can hardly support. (C&D, pp.121-122)
In this quantitative analysis of the growth
of the sense of guilt, the change in the quality of guiltiness, its growing
irrationality seems to disappear. Indeed, Freud’s central sociological position
prevented him from following this avenue. To him, there was no higher
rationality against which the prevailing one could be measured. If the
irrationality of guilt feeling is that of civilization itself, then it is
rational; and if the abolition of domination destroys culture itself, then it remains the supreme crime, and no effective
means for its prevention are irrational. However, Freud’s own theory of
instincts impelled him to go further and to unfold the entire fatality and
futility of this dynamic. Strengthened defense against aggression is necessary;
but in order to be effective the derfense against
emerged aggression would have to strengthen the sex instincts, for only a
strong Eros can effectively “bind” the destructive instincts. And this is
precisely what the developed civilization is incapable of doing because it
depends for its very existence on extended and intensified regimentation and
control. The chain of inhibitions and deflections of instinctual aims cannot be
broken. “Our civilization is, generally speaking, founded on the suppression of
instincts.”(from Freud, "Collected Papers", 1930, p.82)
Civilization is first of all progress in
work – that is, work for the procurement and augmentation of the necessities of
life. This work is normally without satisfaction in itself; to Freud it is unpleasurable, painful. In Freud’s metapsychology
there is no room for an original “instinct of workmanship,” “mastery instinct,” etc. The notion of the
conservative nature of the instincts under the rule of the pleasure and Nirvana
principles strictly precludes such assumptions. When Freud incidentally
mentions the “natural human aversion to work” (from "C&D," p.84), he only
draws the inference from his basic theoretical conception. The instinctual
syndrome “unhappiness and work” recurs throughout Freud’s writings, and his
interpretation of the Prometheus myth is centered on the connection between
curbing of sexual passion and civilized work. ("C&D," p.34) The basic work of
civilization is non-libidinal, is labor; labor is “unpleasantness,” and such
unpleasantness has to be enforced . . . .
If there is no original “work instinct,” then the energy required for (unpleasurable) work must be “withdrawn” from the primary
instincts – from the sexual and from the destructive instincts. Since
civilization is mainly the work of Eros, it is first of all withdrawal of
libido: culture “obtains a great part of the mental energy it needs by
subtracting it from sexuality.” (Marcuse, pp.79-82)
What we have examined is a philosophical treatise by Herbert Marcuse written in 1955. His later works, such as One Dimensional Man (1964) and Five Lectures (1970) represent a significant negation of ‘Freudian fatalism.” Nevertheless, his earlier intellectual experiences are not without importance.
We subscribe, as readers can see, to the age-old adage, OEITAD - “Of Equal Importance: Travel and
Destination”.
The 13 + items below offer readers yet another set of critical articles and essays discussing events that govern our lives today and the system that keeps on producing these events and people willing to collaborate with the reproduction of this “new totalitarian world order.”
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.
NSA Whistleblower:
Government Collecting
Everything You Do
by Empire Files
Abby Martin
interviews former Technical Director of the National Security Agency, Bill Binney, who blew the whistle on warrantless spying years
before Edward Snowden released the evidence. They discuss the US empire’s mass surveillance program and dangers of the
Intelligence Industrial Complex.
Today, the mass surveillance
of all Americans by the US government and its corporate partners is a totally
normalized reality. Despite its widespread acceptance, it is an outrageous,
blatant violation of our constitutional rights.
It’s difficult to ascertain
how the “chilling
effect” of dragnet spying has changed society in the post 9/11 world.
However, many insiders in
the intelligence community understood the dangers of these programs from the
beginning.
Edward Snowden is celebrated
as a hero for bringing proof of NSA’s mass spying and bulk collection to the
world.
But years prior, Bill Binney had blown the whistle on this very same program. A
36-year NSA veteran, Bill Binney was the technical
director, responsible for developing and overseeing the agency’s spying
technology.
He even developed Thin
Thread, the data monitoring program that was later hijacked by the Bush
administration to implement widespread warrantless surveillance.
Mounting pressure caused
Obama to pass the USA Freedom Act in 2015, which only outsourced it’s bulk acquisition to telecom companies, using the
secretive FISA court as an intermediary.
And nearly 20 years after
9/11 these unaccountable agencies are using new fears, like of Russian
cyber-warfare, to grow their power and operations.
+
God and U.S. Foreign Policy
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51365.htm
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/04/02/god-and-u-s-foreign-policy-an-analysis/
by Lawrence
Davidson
Mr.
Pompeo’s Unoriginal Assertion.
Well,
here we go again. God is back at work in support of the foreign policy of the
United States. In fact, this time around, God has apparently gone so far as to
rig the 2016 U.S. presidential election (and you thought it was the Russians!)
in order to assure Donald Trump’s election. And why did the deity do so? To protect Israel from the bad guys in Teheran.
I know
that many readers will find this scenario pretty far-fetched, but we do have it
all on good authority—U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Pompeo’s revelation came in late March during an
interview with the Christian Broadcast Network in Jerusalem. Asked if “it is
possible God raised Donald Trump to be President in order to protect Israel
from the Iranian menace,” Pompeo readily agreed. “As
a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible,” he said, and then
transformed a possibility into a sure thing. He continued, “I am confident that
the Lord is at work here when he sees the remarkable history of the faith in
this place [Israel] and the work that our [U.S.] administration’s done to make
sure that this democracy in the Middle East, that this
Jewish state, remains.” Note the contradiction here—the bit about democracy and
Jewish state. You can’t have a genuine democracy exclusively for one group
(Jews) amidst a sea of others (Palestinians). However, if as Pompeo suggests, his God favors democracy and, one might
logically assume, was the same God who brought down the white apartheid regime
in South Africa, one might ask why should that God let Israel get away with
what earned He, She, or Its wrath in apartheid South Africa? Could it be that
Mr. Pompeo believes that a combination of Protestant
fundamentalists and Zionists lobby in God’s realm just like they do in
Congress, and that makes the difference? I bet that’s it.
Part II—God-Blessed Foreign Policy and Its
Consequences.
Historically,
the Secretary of State’s faith, expressed in language that claims divine
guidance for American foreign affairs, is commonplace. Nonetheless, one can
ask, has this faith been justified? That is, has Mr. Pompeo’s
Protestant fundamentalist God been the unerring and blessed guide He, She, or
It is believed to be? Before we can answer that question, we have to establish
the criteria upon which we can judge this. At this point I am taking things out
of Mr. Pompeo’s hands and letting the reader know
that I will simply judge the quality of God’s alleged guidance of U.S. foreign
policy by the resulting body bag count.
Let’s
begin at the beginning, when foreign policy was really just new world colonial
expansion by a bunch of European adventurers. There is an
excellent, though unattributed essay that appears in Indian Country Today (10 September 2004) entitled “Manifest
Destiny and American Indians.” It sums up the religious rationalizations that
went along with the appropriation of Indian lands even before the founding of
the U.S.: “The English Crown’s charters to Cabot, Gilbert and Raleigh [late
15th and 16th centuries] were nearly identical to the Pope’s Bulls [15th
century] in commissioning expeditions to ‘heathen and barbarous lands.’ Pilgrim
and Puritan [17th century] sermons were replete with references to God’s
covenant with them, their divine mission, their ‘errand into the wilderness …
and manifest destiny.’” That made the whole affair a religiously rationalized
one. There is no accurate estimate of the death toll “God’s covenant” and
“divine mission” helped bring about. However, it had to be in the millions.
This
belief in a providential mission was picked up with enthusiasm by those who
would lead the United States. Here is how Malcolm
Magee, writing for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, puts it: “The United
States has been uniquely God-centered among Western nations, and that includes
its foreign policy. From George Washington to the present, all presidents and
policymakers have had to consider God in varying degrees either for their
domestic audience or because they believed in a version of providential mission
in the world. In time, the very idea of the United States became so entwined
with the sense of the Divine that American civil religion dominated even the
most secular acts of policymakers.”
+
Revealed: Trump-linked US Christian
‘fundamentalists’ pour millions of ‘dark money’ into Europe, boosting the far
right
MEPs call for action as openDemocracy analysis reveals ‘shocking’ flows of cash
crossing the Atlantic to push ultra-conservative agendas.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51360.htm
by Mary Fitzgerald and Claire Provost
US Christian right
‘fundamentalists’ linked to the Trump administration and Steve Bannon are among a dozen American groups that have poured
at least $50 million of ‘dark money’ into Europe over the last decade, openDemocracy can reveal today.
Between them, these groups
have backed ‘armies’ of ultra-conservative lawyers and political activists, as
well as ‘family values’ campaigns against LGBT rights, sex education and
abortion – and a number appear to have increasing links with Europe’s far
right.
They are spending money on a
scale “not previously imagined”, according to lawmakers and human rights
advocates, who have called our findings “shocking”. Reacting to openDemocracy’s findings, a cross-party group of more than
40 MEPs has called on the EU’s transparency tsar Frans
Timmermans to look into the influence of “US
Christian fundamentalists… with the greatest urgency” ahead of May’s European
Parliament elections.
Among the biggest spenders
is a group whose chief counsel is also Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow. Another organisation has
collaborated with a controversial Rome-based ‘institute’ backed by Steve Bannon. And a number of the groups are connected to the
World Congress of Families: a network of ultra-conservative activists which has
links to far-right politicians and movements in several European countries,
including Italy,
Hungary, Poland, Spain and Serbia.
None of these American
groups discloses who its donors are – though at least two have links to famous
conservative billionaires, such as the Koch brothers (who helped bankroll the
Tea Party Movement) and the family of Trump’s education secretary.
Nobody should be in any doubt as to the insidious
nature of these fundamentalist groups.
The increasing ties between some of
these US Christian conservative groups and the European far right will be on
display this weekend at a summit of the World Congress of Families (WCF) in
Verona, Italy.
Right-wing politicians and their
supporters from across the continent are expected to attend – including the
Italian deputy prime minister, Matteo Salvini, who
has described the WCF as a showcase for “the
Europe that we like”.
In a letter copied to the presidents of
the European Council, European Commission and European Parliament, the
cross-party group of MEPs has demanded action to protect European democracy
“against nefarious outside influences”.
Scottish National Party MEP Alyn Smith, who sits on the European Parliament’s foreign
affairs committee and signed the letter, today said: "This investigation
by openDemocracy is extremely timely and shines a
light on a major challenge facing democracy in Europe.”
Our findings “are highly alarming and
nobody should be in any doubt as to the insidious nature of these
fundamentalist groups”, he continued. “No group of any kind should be able to
use dark money to distort debate and to subvert democracy in Europe, least of
all group such as these whose causes are deeply regressive”.
‘The Europe we like’
In the first analysis of its kind, openDemocracy has examined a
decade of US Christian organisations’ financial
accounts and found that several of them appear to have significantly
increased their spending in Europe over the past five years.
Our findings come as far-right parties
aim for big wins in the upcoming European Parliament elections in May, and show
how large amounts of foreign money have supported the spread of their
‘traditional values’ messages.
openDemocracy has reviewed
hundreds of pages of financial filings for a dozen religious conservative
groups that are registered in the US as tax-exempt non-profit organisations, and thus are required to disclose some
information about their foreign spending.
Some of these groups have been
previously accused of supporting campaigns to criminalise
homosexuality in Africa, “draconian”
anti-abortion laws in Latin America and controversial projects to encourage
gay people in the US to “leave
homosexuality”.
===========
b.
The Imperial Collapse
Playbook
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article40585.htm
https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-imperial-collapse-playbook.htm
by Dmitry Orlov
(First Posted
December 30, 2014)
Some people enjoy having the Big Picture laid out in front of them—the
biggest possible—on what is happening in the world at large, and I am happy to
oblige. The largest development of 2014 is, very broadly, this: the
Anglo-imperialists are finally being forced out of Eurasia. How can we tell?
Well, here is the Big Picture—the biggest I could find. I found it thanks to Nikolai Starikov
and a recent article of his.
Now, let's first define our terms. By Anglo-imperialists I mean the combination
of Britain and the United States. The latter took over for the former as it
failed, turning it into a protectorate. Now the latter is failing too, and
there are no new up-and-coming Anglo-imperialists to take over for it. But
throughout this process their common playbook had remained the same: pseudoliberal pseudocapitalism
for the insiders and military domination and economic exploitation for everyone
else. Much more specifically, their playbook always called for a certain strategem to be executed whenever their plans to dominate
and exploit any given country finally fail. On their way out, they do what they
can to compromise and weaken the entity they leave behind, by inflicting a
permanently oozing and festering political wound. “Poison all the wells” is the
last thing on their pre-departure checklist.
• When the British got tossed out of their American Colonies, they did all they
could, using a combination of import preferences and British “soft power,” to
bolster the plantation economy of the American South, helping set it up as a
sort of anti-United States, and the eventual result was the American Civil War.
• When the British got tossed out of Ireland, they set up Belfast as a sort of
anti-Ireland, with much blood shed as a result.
• When the British got tossed out of India, they set up Pakistan, as a sort of
anti-India, precipitating a nasty hot war, followed by a frozen conflict over
Kashmir.
• When the US lost China to the Communists, they evacuated the Nationalists to
Taiwan, and set it up as a sort of anti-China, and even gave it China's seat at
the United Nations.
The goal is always the same: if they can't have the run of the place, they make
sure that nobody else can either, by setting up a conflict scenario that nobody
there can ever hope to resolve. And so if you see Anglo-imperialists going out
of their way and spending lots of money to poison the political well somewhere
in the world, you can be sure that they are on their way out. Simply put, they
don't spend lots of money to set up intractable problems for themselves
to solve—it's always done for the benefit of others.
Fast-forward to 2014, and what we saw was the Anglo-imperialist attempt to set
up Ukraine as a sort of anti-Russia. They took a Slavic, mostly
Russian-speaking country and spent billions (that's with a “b”) of dollars
corrupting its politics to make the Ukrainians hate the Russians. For a good
while an average Ukrainian could earn a month's salary simply by turning up for
an anti-Russian demonstration in Kiev, and it was said that nobody in Ukraine
goes to protests free of charge; it's all paid for by the US State Department
and associated American NGOs. The result was what we saw this year: a bloody coup, and a civil war marked by numerous atrocities. Ukraine
is in the midst of economic collapse with power plants out of coal and lights
going off everywhere, while at the same time the Ukrainians are being drafted
into the army and indoctrinated to want to go fight against “the Muscovites.”
+
Empire of Chaos in Hybrid War Overdrive
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51355.htm
https://www.globalresearch.ca/empire-of-chaos-in-hybrid-war-overdrive/5673307
by
Pepe Escobar
“The Trump administration’s foreign policy
may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and late-night
comedy.”
Is this the
Age of Anxiety? The Age of Stupidity? The Age of Hybrid War? Or all of the
above?
As right
populism learns to use algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and media convergence, the Empire of Chaos, in parallel, is unleashing
all-out hybrid
and semiotic war.
Dick
Cheney’s Global War on Terror (GWOT) is back,
metastasized as a hybrid mongrel.
But GWOT
would not be GWOT without a Wild West scarecrow. Enter Hamza
bin Laden, son of Osama. On the same day the State Department announced a $1 million bounty on his head,
the so- called “UN Security Council IS and Al-Qaeda Sanctions Committee”
declared Hamza the next al-Qaeda leader.
Since
January 2017, Hamza has been a Specially Designated Global Terrorist by the State Department – on par with his
deceased Dad, back in the early 2000s. The Beltway intel community “believes” Hamza
resides “in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region.”
Remember
these are the same people who “believed” former Taliban leader Mullah Omar
resided in Quetta, Baluchistan, when in fact he was safely ensconced only a few
miles away from a massive U.S. military base in Zabul,
Afghanistan.
Considering
that Jabhat al-Nusra, or
al-Qaeda in Syria, for all practical purposes, was defined as no more than
“moderate rebels” by the Beltway intel
community, it’s safe to infer that new scarecrow Hamza
is also a “moderate”. And yet he’s more dangerous than vanished fake Caliph Abu
Baqr al-Baghdadi. Talk about a masterful example of
culture jamming.
Show Me The Big Picture
A hefty case can be made that the Empire
of Chaos currently has no allies; it’s essentially surrounded by an assortment
of vassals, puppets and comprador 5thcolumnist elites professing
varied degrees of – sometimes reluctant – obedience.
The Trump administration’s foreign
policy may be easily deconstructed as a crossover between The Sopranos and
late-night comedy – as in the whole episode of designating State Department/CIA
regime change, lab experiment Random Dude as President of Venezuela. Legendary
cultural critic Walter Benjamin would have called it “the aestheticization of politics,” (turning politics into art), as he did about the
Nazis, but this time it’s the Looney Tunes version.
To add to the conceptual confusion,
despite countless “an offer you can’t refuse” antics unleashed by psychopaths
of the John Bolton and Mike Pompeo variety, there’s
this startling nugget.
Former Iranian diplomat Amir Moussavi has revealed
that Trump himself demanded to visit Tehran, and was duly rebuffed. “Two
European states, two Arab countries and one Southeast Asian state” were
mediating a series of messages relayed by Trump and his son-in-law Jared “of
Arabia” Kushner, according to Moussavi.
Is there a method to this madness? An
attempt at a Grand Narrative would go something like this: ISIS/Daesh may have been sidelined – for now; they are not
useful anymore, so the U.S. must fight the larger “evil”: Tehran. GWOT has been
revived, and though Hamza bin Laden has been
designated the new Caliph, GWOT has shifted to Iran.
When we mix this with the recent
India-Pakistan scuffle, a wider message emerges. There was absolutely no
interest by Prime Minister Imran Kahn, the Pakistani
Army and the Pakistani intelligence, ISI, to launch an attack on India in
Kashmir. Pakistan was about to run out of money and about to be bolstered by
the U.S., via Saudi Arabia with $20 billion and an IMF loan.
At the same time, there were two almost
simultaneous terrorist attacks launched from Pakistan – against Iran
and against India in mid-February. There’s no smoking gun yet, but these
attacks may have been manipulated by a foreign intelligence agency. The Cui
Bono riddle is which state would profit immensely from a war between Pakistan
and Iran and/or a war between Pakistan and India.
The bottom line: hiding in the shadow of
plausible deniability – according to which what we understand as reality is
nothing but pure perception – the Empire of Chaos will resort to the chaos of
no-holds-barred hybrid war to avoid “losing” the Eurasian heartland.
Show Me How Many Hybrid Plans You Got
+
The Making of a Monster: We’re All Lab Rats
in the Government’s Secret Experiments
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51351.htm
by John W.
Whitehead
“But
these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the
kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters
with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't
recognize them for what they are until it's too late.”
— Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for
Peculiar Children
The U.S. government, in its pursuit of
so-called monsters, has itself become a monster.
This is not a new development, nor is it
a revelation.
This is a government that has in recent decades unleashed untold horrors upon the world—including
its own citizenry—in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater
wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in
the guise of the greater good.
Mind you, there is no greater good when
the government is involved. There is only greater greed for money and power.
Unfortunately, the public has become so
easily distracted by the political spectacle coming out of Washington, DC, that
they are altogether oblivious to the grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and
inhumane conditions that have become synonymous with the U.S. government.
These horrors are being meted out
against humans and animals alike.
It’s heartbreaking enough when you hear
about police shooting family dogs that pose no threat—beloved pets that are “guilty”
of little more than barking, or wagging a tag, or racing towards them in
greeting—at an alarming rate somewhere in the vicinity of 500 dogs a day.
===========
c.
Ralph Nader Radio Hour
with Noam Chomsky
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69ullrWKD84&t=65s
(Published on Mar 2, 2019)
In only the third public conversation between these two progressive
icons, Ralph talks to Professor Chomsky about - among other things - the media,
the Green New Deal, nuclear war, Gaza, and Venezuela.
+
People Will Never, Ever Rebel
As Long As They’re Successfully Propagandized
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51368.htm
by Caitlin
Johnstone
Our predicament is simple to describe.
Since the dawn of civilization, powerful
individuals have controlled the stories people tell themselves about who they
are, who’s in charge, how a good citizen behaves, what groups should be loved,
what groups should be hated, and what’s really going on in the world. When you
study what we call history, you’re mostly just reading the ancient
proto-propaganda of whatever kingdom happened to win the last war during that
period of time. When you study what we call religion, you’re mostly reading
stories that were advanced by ancient governments explaining why the people
should be meek, forgiving taxpayers instead of rising up and killing their
wealthy exploiters.
This continues to this day. We fill our
children’s heads with lies about how the world works, how the government works,
how the media works, and, on a deeper level, how their own consciousness works, and the entire process
is shaped to funnel power toward the people who control our stories. The modern
schooling system was largely formed by John D Rockefeller, widely considered the wealthiest person in modern history, in order to create
generations of docile gear-turners for the industrial plutocratic machine.
Modern schooling is essentially mainstream media in a building; it promotes
authorized narratives day in and day out to ensure that children will have a
reaction of cognitive dissonance and rejection when confronted with information
which contradicts those narratives.
This funnels the populace seamlessly
into the narrative control matrix of adulthood, where childhood indoctrination
into mainstream narratives lubricates the way for continual programming of
credulous minds with mass media propaganda. All the print, TV and online media
they are presented with supports the status quo-supporting agendas of the same
plutocratic class that John D Rockefeller dominated all those years ago. This
ensures that no matter how bad things get, no matter how severely our spirits
are crushed by end-stage metastatic neoliberalism, no
matter how many stupid, pointless wars we’re duped into, no matter how much
further we are drawn along the path toward extinction via climate chaos or nuclear
war, we will never revolt to overthrow our rulers.
===========
d.
The
Price of Resistance
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-price-of-resistance/
by Chris Hedges
This is a talk that Chris Hedges gave on Monday (March 18) at
Princeton University in New Jersey.
In the conflicts I covered as a reporter in Latin America, Africa, the
Middle East and the Balkans, I encountered singular individuals of varying
creeds, religions, races and nationalities who majestically rose up to defy the
oppressor on behalf of the oppressed. Some of them are dead. Some of them are
forgotten. Most of them are unknown.
These individuals, despite their vast cultural differences, had common
traits—a profound commitment to the truth, incorruptibility, courage, a
distrust of power, a hatred of violence and a deep empathy that was extended to
people who were different from them, even to people defined by the dominant
culture as the enemy. They are the most remarkable men and women I met in my 20
years as a foreign correspondent. And to this day I set my life by the
standards they set.
+
The Democrats Are Self-Destructing
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51345.htm
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/03/28/the-democrats-are-self-destructing/
by Paul Craig Roberts
The Democrats cannot stop making fools of themselves.
Thom Hartmann is an example. He writes for Common Dreams and has a progressive talk radio program. During the George W. Bush regime I was a frequent guest on his program. It was OK to tell the truth about the Bush regime’s deceits and illegal wars of aggression. But telling the truth about the Obama regime’s deceits and illegal wars of aggression left me unqualified for his program. Hartmann, like the rest of them, will never escape from Democratic partisanship. He asserts that Attorney General William Barr, who he calls “cover-up general” covered up Mueller’s Russiagate report. Hartmann seems to think that Mueller found all sorts of damning evidence against Trump, but we will never know because Barr, “without showing us even a single complete sentence from the Mueller report decided that there are no crimes here.” He accuses Barr of “burying Mueller’s report and cherry-picking fragments of sentences from it to justify Trump’s behavior.” He tells his readers that “Barr’s history of doing just this sort of thing to help Republican presidents in legal crises explains why Trump brought him back in to head the Justice Department.” https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/03/26/has-cover-general-william-barr-struck-again
Hartmann
ignorantly accuses Barr of withholding Mueller’s report. To the
contrary, Barr’s summary of the report clearly states that federal laws, which
he identifies, govern the release of information that can be made public. Once
the DOJ has identified “material that by law cannot be made public,” the report
will be released.
+
Staring Into The Void
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51347.htm
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/03/29/staring-into-the-void/
by
Paul Edwards
|
Humans can’t duck
fatality. A terminally ill or addicted person has to accept the fact if
he hopes ever to be free the drug or to die at peace. The mortal
struggle with his hard reality begins, almost without exception, in denial. |
This had consequences. Sowing pyroclastic, penny-dreadful bullshit daily in the MSM to
hook the credulous, Dems morphed from a party lying
with Obama’s suavete and decorum to one lying with
vulgarity and desperation. That is to say, style change had no effect on
its real character at all, but by going all in on a lie they set off a powerful
petard with which they are now hoist. They have the choice of flogging
their dead hobbyhorse or admitting they indeed are the noisomely
discharging cloaca their lies baldly confirm.
===========
e.
Gaza
border protests: 190 killed and 28,000 injured
in
a year of bloodshed
by
Oliver
Holmes and Josh
Holder
Using UN data we explore who has been affected, how they were
injured and what life is like in Gaza today
+
Palestine in Pictures: March 2019
https://electronicintifada.net/content/palestine-pictures-march-2019/27041
+
From: "ana hona" <anahona366@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2019 1:16:47 AM
Subject: 5 martyrs and 500 wounded and the number is growing
.. Who will stand with us at this time..Do not
leave us please
On the first anniversary of the start of the return marches, the Israeli occupation forces killed 4 children under the age of 20 and wounded more than 500 people on the border east of the Gaza Strip.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians left Gaza on the first anniversary of the start of marches to demand their right to lift the siege on the Gaza Strip and the demonstrators came out with great violence, but the Israeli occupation forces began shooting at them since the beginning of the march.
And the Israeli occupation forces killed martyr Mohammed Jihad Saad, 20 years old, east of Gaza. The martyr Adham Nidal Amara, 17 years old; and Martyr Tamer Hashim Abou El Kheir, 17 years old; Martyr Bilal Mahmoud Al – Najjar, 17 years.
There are more than 6 cases in very critical condition, and more than 60 young people were hit in the head directly, and 16 people wounded in the chest, 18 people injured in the abdomen and pelvis, and more than 130 people in the foot.
* Direct targeting of medical staff, leading to / *
\uD83D\uDEA8 3 injuries among paramedics
\uD83D\uDE91 3 car partially damaged
\uD83D\uDECC Infection 7 journalists
We hope that you will support us and will not let us go in this bad situation. We need your strong support.
For our support, please support and publish this link
https://gogetfunding.com/amal/
Very sorry for the pictures
+
“Our Will of Life Is Stronger Than Despair”:
Palestinian Ahmed Abu Artema on Israeli Attacks on
Gaza
https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/1/our_will_of_life_is_stronger
Israeli forces killed four Palestinians, including
three teenagers, at a mass demonstration Saturday on the first anniversary of
the Great March of Return in Gaza. Israeli soldiers used live ammunition, tear
gas and rubber bullets on the protesters. As tens of thousands of Palestinians
came out to demand an end to the ongoing siege of Gaza and the right to return
to their ancestral land, we speak with Ahmed Abu Artema,
the Palestinian poet, journalist and peace activist who inspired the Great
March of Return and helped organize it as a cry for help. Artema
was frustrated by Israel’s more than decade-long land, sea and air blockade of
the Gaza Strip, upon which it has waged three wars in the past 10 years.
+
Gaza
protests: Thousands mark 'Great Return' anniversary
Tense scenes unfold at the Gaza-Israel border fence area
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-47758369
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have demonstrated in Gaza
to mark the anniversary of the start of weekly protests on the boundary with
Israel.
Demonstrators threw stones and burned tyres,
with Israeli troops using tear-gas and live rounds in response.
Three protesters died in the clashes, Palestinian officials say, with
another killed earlier on Saturday.
The protests back the declared right of Palestinian refugees to return
to ancestral homes in what is now Israel.
At least 189 Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed between
March and December 2018, the UN says.
A UN inquiry says Israeli soldiers may have committed war crimes during
the protest marches - a charge Israel rejects.
Did
Israel use excessive force at Gaza protests?
This day of protests is a serious test of the fragile calm between
Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that runs the Palestinian-controlled Gaza
Strip, says the BBC's Yolande Knell in Jerusalem.
What has happened so far?
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) estimated the number of protesters at
about 40,000 and several thousand Israeli troops were deployed along the
border.
The IDF said explosive devices had been thrown over the border fence
and Israeli forces had responded with "riot dispersal means" and live
bullets.
+
From: "ana hona"
<anahona366@gmail.com>
Sent: Tuesday, April 2, 2019 1:11:37 AM
Subject: Saving limbs as a medical act of humanitarian defiance
One year after the Great March of Return began, health workers in
Gaza are facing an unprecedented challenge: salvaging the limbs of protestors
that Israeli forces have targeted. During the year, more than 29000 people have
been injured, with over 7000 of the injured shot using military ammunition,
many by army snipers. Around 90% of those shot were injured in the lower limbs.
Sniper bullets, designed to kill at distances of 1000m, are being
fired at targets from a much shorter range. The devastating injuries that this
causes means that on average each patient needs between 5 and 9 surgeries
before their wounds can heal. This treatment journey will last for a minimum of
2 years.
These injuries are inflicted on protestors in response to their
calls for a return to their land and an end to the siege on Gaza that has
lasted for more than a decade. There is something distinctly cynical about
targeting peoples’ limbs as a response to them walking to the fence of their
prison to protest.
Last week, a medical experts meeting was held by Medecins sans
Frontieres / Doctors without Borders (MSF) in Brussels to discuss the challenge
of providing reconstructive surgery to these patients. On the basis of data
from Palestinian surgeons and international organizations currently in Gaza,
there are between 800 and 1200 young Palestinians still awaiting lower limb
reconstructive surgery. Palestinian surgeons from Shifa Hospital, Gaza’s
largest hospital, described how the majority of those shot in the lower limbs
were targeted in the lower thigh and back of knee where a single bullet can
find its way to nerves, arteries and the knee joint all at once.
The devastating nature of the injuries means that around 20 to 40%
of patients will sustain bacterial bone infections, further complicating the
clinical management of their wounds and burdening an already struggling health
system. The presence of multidrug resistant bacteria makes treating these
infections both difficult and costly. These infections, if not promptly
treated, risk adding to the already 124 Palestinians who have thus far needed
amputation of an unsalvageable limb. A further 15% (approximately 980 people)
have permanent nerve injury leading to more disability.
The people of Gaza are being debilitated for their demonstrations
against the siege and for the right of return. This is the epitome of
disproportionality. The act of salvaging those limbs targeted by Israeli forces
is a medical act of humanitarian defiance.
In response to the need for specialized limb reconstruction
surgery, MSF has tripled its capacity to provide medical activities in the Gaza
strip. One project is in partnering with the Union of Health Work Committees to
set up a specialist limb salvage unit at Al-Awdah Hospital in Jabalya Camp in
northern Gaza Strip. Palestinian and international health professionals of all
specialities and disciplines work together in providing complex medical care
that aims to reduce the disabling effect of these injuries on such a large
number of previously able young people.
These activities occur within a health system already under
strain. Electricity shortages, stock ruptures of medical supplies, severe
over-crowding, vast infrastructural damage and unemployment are all the
policy-inflicted force multipliers of the Israeli occupation. These conditions
make the bullet wounds far more dangerous.
For the abandoned people of Gaza, there is no such thing as an
‘international community’ that will address this crisis. There are a collection
of political interests, with the most powerful of them entirely backing the
occupation. Bilateral aid is channelled at an unprecedented level to Israel,
while being entirely cut off from the humanitarian mechanisms needed to deal
with the consequences of never ending occupation and siege.
What health professionals can do is to defy these policies by
continuing to save lives and alleviate suffering. In the case of Gaza, that
means salvaging the limbs that are being targeted with the intention to
debilitate.
To help save these young people please support us we need your
support
https://gogetfunding.com/amal/
=======
f.
Why Does the US
Continue to Grovel to Israel?
U.S. Embassy Tel Aviv • Public domain
Is there any other country on Earth with which America would dare
collude on such a scale? Forget the “special relationship” with the crackpots
in Britain, or the New World coming to the rescue of the Old World in the
Second World War. There’s only one special relationship that matters right now
– and we all know what that is. Having given its blessing to all Jerusalem
as Israeli property and having now handed Golan to
Israel as a possession – for “to annex” means “to take possession”, does it
not? – Donald Trump has undermined the entire foundation of “land for
peace” enshrined in Security Council Resolution 242. And Israel is happy.
A gift for Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election, we are told.
True, the Middle East “peace process” died years ago – if it ever
existed, or was meant to work – but Trump’s ostentatious signature on Israel’s
annexation of Golan on Monday tore up the documents, the paragraphs, the very
basis for the two-state Israeli-Palestinian settlement which might have ended
the longest military occupation of our generation. And the United States has
now given its open, public and wholehearted support to Israel’s side in the
world’s last colonial war. And if Golan is now part of Israel because of the
threat of Iran, then southern Lebanon can become part of Israel. Isn’t
Hezbollah also an Iranian “threat”? And how
quickly will we see the West Bank annexed by Israel with the approval of the
United States?
Notice two things about the above paragraphs. Firstly, the number of
times I have been forced to use quotation marks around verbs and nouns and
adjectives which would normally never need them. And secondly, how one word –
Syria – simply did not occur. Syria’s loss of Golan in 1967 is so long ago and
has become so normalised that in a perverse way, its
real ownership had ceased to exist; Trump’s recognition of Israel’s own
“annexation” – unrecognised anywhere else in the
world – merely accepted what we’d all secretly gone along with. That the theft of Syria’s land was now perfectly legal. Or “legal”. It was highly instructive that when the BBC
website chose to cover the story about Trump’s Golan mischief, it ran a story
headlined “What it all means” – but which did not mention Syria until the
fifth paragraph.
+
'Why not give Israel North & South Carolina?'
Syrian envoy asks US at UN
https://www.rt.com/news/454934-golan-heights-south-carolina/
+
The
Case Against AIPAC
https://theintercept.com/2019/03/28/the-case-against-aipac/
This week AIPAC held its annual policy conference in the
capital, with speakers including Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Minority
Leader Chuck Schumer, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But the
biggest name at this year’s event wasn’t even in the room. Speaker after
speaker took turns taking veiled (and not so veiled) jabs at freshman Rep. Ilhan Omar for comments she made on Twitter in February
about the nature of AIPAC’s influence in Washington. Chuck Schumer equated
Omar’s critique of AIPAC with Donald Trump’s praising of neo-nazis in Charlottesville. Others including Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell attacked Omar for her claim at a public event in D.C.
last month that AIPAC promotes “allegiance to a foreign country.”
Inconveniently for AIPAC, one of their biggest donors, Adam Milstein, had
recently accused Rep. Omar and her fellow Muslim American lawmaker Rep. Rashida Tlaib of being
representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood, saying that their values “clash with
American values.” Yousef Munayyer
of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights and Debra Shushan
of Americans for Peace Now join Mehdi Hasan to discuss AIPAC’s obsession with Rep. Omar and its Islamophobia problem.
+
In a destructive
decade, why has no one tried to rein in Netanyahu?
+
America
has shown its approval of territorial theft
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51357.htm
https://www.21cir.com/2019/04/america-has-shown-its-approval-of-territorial-theft/
by Robert Fisk
Is there any other country on Earth with
which America would dare collude on such a scale? Forget the “special
relationship” with the crackpots in Britain, or the New World coming to the
rescue of the Old World in the Second World War. There’s only one special
relationship that matters right now – and we all know what that is. Having
given its blessing to all Jerusalem as Israeli property and
having now handed Golan to Israel as a possession – for “to annex” means
“to take possession”, does it not? – Donald Trump has undermined the entire
foundation of “land for peace” enshrined in Security Council Resolution
242. And Israel is happy. A gift for Benjamin Netanyahu’s re-election, we are
told.
True, the Middle East “peace process”
died years ago – if it ever existed, or was meant to work – but Trump’s
ostentatious signature on Israel’s annexation of Golan on Monday tore up the
documents, the paragraphs, the very basis for the two-state Israeli-Palestinian
settlement which might have ended the longest military occupation of our generation.
And the United States has now given its open, public and wholehearted support
to Israel’s side in the world’s last colonial war. And if Golan is now part of
Israel because of the threat of Iran, then southern Lebanon can become part of
Israel. Isn’t Hezbollah also an Iranian
“threat”? And how quickly will we see the West Bank annexed by Israel with the
approval of the United States?
Notice two things about the above
paragraphs. Firstly, the number of times I have been forced to use quotation
marks around verbs and nouns and adjectives which would normally never need
them. And secondly, how one word – Syria – simply did not occur. Syria’s loss
of Golan in 1967 is so long ago and has become so normalised
that in a perverse way, its real ownership had ceased to exist; Trump’s
recognition of Israel’s own “annexation” – unrecognised
anywhere else in the world – merely accepted what we’d all secretly gone along
with. That the theft of Syria’s land was now perfectly legal.
Or “legal”. It was highly instructive that when the
BBC website chose to cover the story about Trump’s Golan mischief, it ran a
story headlined “What it all means” – but which did not mention Syria until the
fifth paragraph.
===========
g.
From:
Medea Benjamin
Sent: Sun, 24
Mar 2019
Hate speech in the
Washington Post
Opening
the Washington Post today, we were aghast. Prominently displayed on page 8 was
a full-page ad falsely accusing Representative Ilhan
Omar of being anti-semitic. “The Jews control the world with their money” - words Rep.
Omar NEVER said - were splattered next to her face, leaving readers to assume
it was a quote.
The
ad was produced and purchased by the notorious Rabbi Shmuley,
a hate-monger whose agenda is well-known: to demand U.S. compliance with
Israel’s status quo of occupation and apartheid. Why is the Washington Post
allowing Shmuley to purchase such an outrageous ad
inciting hatred against the first black, Muslim hijab-wearing
member of Congress? Contact the Washington Post now. Tell them to apologize to
Rep. Omar and promise not to print ads that propagate lies and hate <https://www.codepink.org/no_hate_ads>.
We will hand deliver your signatures to the Post.
As Congresswoman Rashida
Tlaib wrote: “This is a false ad that only serves to
incite violence toward a Black Muslim woman. It’s
fear-mongering and we need to stand together and say this type of hate should
not have a place in our newspapers or society.”
We
know the results of inciting such hatred: We just saw the murder of 50 Muslims
in New Zealand with the shooter crediting President Trump as an inspiration to
white nationalists across the world.
The
stakes are higher than ever right now. After years and years of Congress
providing unquestioned support for Israel and kowtowing to the Israel lobby, we
now have members of Congress openly supporting the boycott, divestment, and
sanctions movement. And for the first time ever, nearly every Democratic
presidential candidate is refusing to attend the AIPAC conference happening in
Washington, D.C.
Skipping
AIPAC used to be considered political suicide, but now it’s AIPAC that is toxic.
No one looking to establish their progressive credentials wants to be
associated with blind support for the apartheid state. That’s why Rabbi Shmuley is desperate to frame Rep. Ilhan
Omar as an enemy of the Jewish people.
The
Washington Post knows what Rep. Omar has and has not said; it knows that Rabbi Shmuley’s ad is misleading and repulsive. So why print it?
Do
you have a moment to contact the Washington Post? Tell them you expect better
from them, especially during this time of heightened violence and while Rep.
Omar is experiencing very real death threats. They should promise to never
again sell space in their paper for ads promoting any kind of hatred! <https://www.codepink.org/no_hate_ads>
Towards
safety for all,
Ann,
Ariel, Carley, Caroline, Jodie, Kelly, Kirsten, Lily,
Maya, Mark, Medea, Nancy, Paki, Ryan, Sarah, Tighe, Ursula and Zena
+
Alleged
Khashoggi killers received training in US
https://www.rt.com/news/455219-khashoggi-saudi-killers-trained-us/
At least some Saudi agents involved in the grisly murder of journalist
Jamal Khashoggi were trained in the US as part of
Washington’s broader plan to ‘modernize’ Saudi intelligence, a new report by
the Washington Post says.
Members of the 'Saudi Rapid Intervention Group', which was allegedly
sent to the Istanbul Consulate in October 2018 to deal with the self-exiled
journalist and critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman,
underwent training in America as part of a program launched under a State
Department license, Washington Post columnist David Ignatius wrote, citing Saudi and US sources.
+
Intelligence
report appeared to endorse view
leftwing
protesters were 'terrorists'
by
Jason Wilson
Experts say the report produced before the Charlottesville rally
mischaracterizes the dynamics of the street violence
An intelligence report produced for law enforcement agencies in the
months before the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, in which a neo-Nazi
killed one protester by driving a car into a crowd, appeared to endorse a view
that leftist demonstrators were “terrorists” and at least equally as
responsible for street violence as white nationalists, the Guardian can reveal.
The report, Antifa/Anti-antifa:
Violence in the Streets, was produced by the Regional
Organized Crime Information Center (ROCIC) in May 2017. It was obtained with a Foia request from the not-for-profit transparency group Property of the People. Antifa is the name given to groups of leftwing protests who
confront white nationalists, often violently.
Experts say the report mischaracterizes the dynamics of the street
violence that was emerging at that time, and is mistaken in characterizing
white nationalist groups as “anti-antifa”, suggesting
they act in opposition to leftwing groups or out of a sense of anarchism rather
than having their own political and violent agenda.
ROCIC is one of six Regional Intelligence Sharing System (RISS) Centers
throughout the country. RISS is a federally funded program designed to share
intelligence between federal, state and local agencies. ROCIC serves 14
southern states, including Virginia, the site of the 2017 Unite the Right
rally.
Documents accompanying the Foia request
indicate that the US Secret Service was among the agencies that the report was
provided to.
===========
h.
From: Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2019
Subject: [MCM] For Julian Assange, and anyone
who tries to visit him, Ecuador has turned into London embassy into a high-tech
Alctaraz
EXCLUSIVE: Julian Assange Clashes With Ecuadorian Officials After Embassy Locks US Journalist in a Surveilled
Room
http://archive.is/PH6Sr#selection-335.0-479.72
by Cassandra Fairbanks
It was meant to be a routine visit by a journalist to another
journalist. Instead, I found myself locked in a cold, surveilled
room for over an hour by Ecuadorian officials, as a furious argument raged
between the country’s ambassador and Julian Assange.
The room was inside the Ecuadorian Embassy
in London, where 2019 Nobel Peace Prize nominee Julian Assange
currently lives under the ostensible protection of political asylum. Yet the WikiLeaks publisher was barred from entering the room,
where he was supposed to join me for a pre-approved meeting, because he refused
to submit to a full-body search and continuous surveillance.
In the fireworks that followed,
Assange accused the ambassador of being an agent of
the United States government.
The crackdown on visitors was felt before I
even entered the embassy. It’s the third time I’ve visited in the past year,
and each time the atmosphere seems progressively worse.
Just like my previous visit,
since new rules for visitors were enacted, I couldn’t take my phone into the
meeting without giving the Ecuadorian officials a swathe of data. If you want
to take it in with you, they request its brand, model, serial number, IMEI
number, and telephone number. I was also advised that Ecuador could not be
trusted to hold my phone while I met with Assange, so
I left it behind and walked to the embassy phoneless, several minutes early to
make sure I was on time.
When I arrived, embassy staff checked my
passport and letter of approval and pointed at the time on the letter. I was
six minutes early. Instead of allowing me to wait inside, they told me to come
back at the appropriate time — despite knowing that I did not have a phone or
watch on me.
When I visited for the first time, which I
believe was a year ago to the day, the atmosphere was
far more welcoming. The staff and ambassador that were there during my first
visit have since been replaced.
After being searched, the staff directed me
into the conference room, where two large visible cameras were pointed at the
table. Those were there last time too. I knew the drill — or so I thought. They
reminded me multiple times that my visit was only approved until 5 p.m. and that
I would need to leave on the dot.
“Just doing my job,” the staff member told
me.
A few moments later Assange
walked by the door, but could not enter. Embassy staff demanded that he submit
to a full-body scan with a metal detector before allowing him in the room. They
have not done this with any other visitor in the nearly seven years that he has
lived there, including during my previous visits.
“I don’t want to do the body
scan. It is undignified and not appropriate,” I heard Assange
say. “I am just trying to have a private meeting with a journalist.”
The door was slammed shut by someone from
the embassy. I decided to sit and wait.
Not only would they not let Assange in to see me without a body-scan, they also forced
his lawyer to be scanned before he could come in to update me on the situation.
After roughly 20 minutes, the lawyer came
in and informed me that they were demanding to search Assange.
Moreover, we would not be permitted to talk anywhere outside the highly-surveilled room where the Ecuadorians had confined me.
Agreeing to these draconian terms would set a bad precedent — so he was unsure
if the meeting would go ahead. After appraising me of
the situation, he left the room.
A bit later, I decided to leave the room
myself for an update from embassy staff. I quickly discovered that the door was
locked from the outside. So I went to the second door — that was locked too.
That was when I realized that Ecuadorian officials had deliberately imprisoned
me in a room.
As this ominous realization dawned on me, I
heard a dramatic confrontation unfolding outside.
“What are you frightened of in
relation to me meeting with a journalist? What is the embassy afraid of?” Assange asks. I can’t hear the response.
Assange is arguing that as a political refugee the embassy has a duty
to protect him — not to treat him as a prisoner.
“Is this a prison?” Assange
asks.
“It’s not,” they reply. “You know it’s
not.”
The visit to the publisher had, in fact,
become eerily similar to visits I have made to inmates at federal penitentiaries
in the US. It seemed our government was getting what they wanted from Ecuador,
as a former senior State Department official told Buzzfeed
Assange,
clearly agitated, demands to know “why are you surveilling me speaking to a US
journalist? Do you think it’s unreasonable for me to expect privacy when I meet
with a journalist? Why are you silent?”
The
embassy staff member responded that he “can’t say anything.”
“Why
can’t you say anything? Don’t you have an excuse? What is the basis? Why are
you surveilling an American journalist? What reason should we tell her?”
Assange asks.
The
conversation becomes hard to hear, as I am still locked in the room.
+
A
Year of Silencing Julian Assange
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/03/28/a-year-of-silencing-julian-assange/
+
Freedom
Rider: Julian Assange and Robert Mueller
Russiagate
has imploded, but the Democratic Party still wants to stifle dissent and make
certain that there will be no Wikileaks in the future.
https://www.blackagendareport.com/freedom-rider-julian-assange-and-robert-mueller
by
Margaret Kimberley
“The
plights of Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange reveal the hypocrisy and
hollowness of liberal America.”
The
investigation known as Russiagate has officially wrapped up. Special counsel
Robert Mueller submitted his report to the Attorney General who promptly
announced that it contained no proof of Trump campaign collusion with
the Russian government. The daily onslaught of misleading and in some cases
false assertions will diminish. But Russiagate will never truly go away.
The Democrats will milk it for as long as they can.
The
faux scandal was kept alive by lies which the misinformed public were
exposed to for more than two years. One of those lies was a claim that
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange worked with the Russian government to hack
Democratic National Committee emails in 2016.
There
is no independent corroboration of a hacktaking place at all. However
there is evidence of a leak coming from a DNC insider. But the Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and
other experts who madethis case are unknown to all but a few.They
have been excluded from the corporate media and only those with the most
dogged desire to find information are aware of their findings.
“The
demonization of Assange goes on . . . . .”
===========
i.
Noam
Chomsky on Trump-Russia Collusion
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtqWezfIhMY&feature=youtu.be
In
March 2019, weeks before the Mueller Report was finalized, acclaimed scholar
and "Manufacturing Consent" author Noam Chomsky explained in an
interview why accusations of Russian meddling and Trump-Russia collusion were
"a joke."
+
The Real Costs of Russiagate
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-real-costs-of-russiagate/
by
Stephen F. Cohen
Its perpetrators, not Putin or
Trump, “attacked American democracy.”
The very few of us who publicly challenged
and deplored Russiagate allegations against candidate and then President Donald
Trump from the time they first began to appear in mid-2016 should not gloat or
rejoice over the US attorney general’s summary of Robert S. Mueller’s key
finding: “The Special Counsel’s investigation did not find that the
Trump campaign or anyone associated with it conspired or coordinated with
Russia in its efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election.” (On the
other hand, those of us repeatedly slurred as Trump and/or Putin “apologists”
might feel some vindication.)
But
what about the legions of high-ranking intelligence officials, politicians,
editorial writers, television producers, and other opinion-makers, and their
eager media outlets that perpetuated, inflated, and prolonged this
unprecedented political scandal in American history—those who did not stop
short of accusing the president of the United States of being a Kremlin
“agent,” “asset,” “puppet,” “Manchurian candidate,” and who characterized his
conduct and policies as “treasonous”? (These and other examples are cited in my
book War
with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate, and
in a
recent piece by Paul Starobin in City
Journal.) Will they now apologize, as decency requires, or, more
importantly, explain their motives so that we might understand and avoid
another such national trauma?
+
Roaming
Charges: Rachel Maddow and the Muellers of Invention
===========
j.
From:
Mark Crispin Miller
Sent: Saturday, March 30, 2019
Subject: [MCM] Meryl Nass on the
hysteria (or trial balloon) in Rockland County (letter to the British Medical
Journal)
Re:
US county bars unvaccinated children from public spaces
amid
measles emergency
https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.l1481/rr-1
by
Meryl J Nass
New York state is one of 47 states that
allow parents to claim a religious exemption from their children's vaccines.
One to two percent of parents take advantage of this legal avenue to avoid
vaccinating their children.
The
US has about 10-20 outbreaks of measles yearly (there were 17 in 2018)[1],
usually initiated by visitors who were incubating measles when they entered the
country. Health departments perform case-finding, track exposures, apply
quarantines, and these outbreaks generally resolve quickly. The Disneyland
outbreak of 2014-2015 lasted under 2 months.[2]
In
Rockland county, New York, things have gone differently. The current measles
epidemic (156 total cases) has been ongoing for more than 5 months, longer than
any outbreak since endemic measles was declared eradicated. While it is
attributed to 7 infected overseas visitors, they all arrived in October. Why
are there still cases? We don't know whether the response by the health
department was thorough, and if it followed standard procedures.
Orthodox
Hasidic Jews and others with unvaccinated children in Rockland county, had
their children removed from schools as a consequence of the epidemic, beginning
in December--even when there had been no measles cases in the school and no
identified exposure to a case. A tense situation developed. Some parents sued
the health department; their request for a restraining order was denied,
although the lawsuit continues.
While
some parents chose to vaccinate, others held back. Meanwhile, the outbreak
slowed down, with currently "under ten" active cases.[3] I was told
there are 4 current measles cases.
On
March 26, Ed Day, the Rockland county executive officer and former police
detective, issued an inflammatory order. All unvaccinated (but still
uninfected) children would be prohibited from all indoor public spaces for 30
days, or until they got an MMR. While the order was framed as a means of
protecting the public, it was timed to coincide with (and disrupt) Easter and
Passover holiday gatherings.[4]
"Day
said the order was not about enforcement but rather is to garner attention so
people get vaccinated and educate residents about the seriousness of the highly
contagious virus."[5]
Public
officials in authority cannot be unaware of state law granting religious
exemptions. Yet, "officials say there are no religious exemptions, and
that they have been working with area rabbis who have been encouraging their
members to get vaccinated."[6]
It
is well known that vaccine efficacy is reduced when given to children under 12
months old, and those children vaccinated early will require an additional (3d)
MMR dose before school entry. Furthermore, safety of the mumps and rubella
components in children under 12 months has not been established. From the MMR
label[7]:
"Infants
Between 6 to 12 Months of Age. Local health authorities may recommend measles
vaccination of infants between 6 to 12 months of age in outbreak situations.
This population may fail to respond to the components of the vaccine. Safety
and effectiveness of mumps and rubella vaccine in infants less than 12 months
of age have not been established. The younger the infant, the lower the
likelihood of seroconversion. Such infants should receive a second dose of M-M-R
II between 12 to 15 months of age followed by revaccination at elementary
school entry."
Despite
this warning, children as young as six months old are being vaccinated with the
MMR at clinics throughout Rockland county.
During
the Disneyland outbreak year of 2015, CDC genotyped reported measles cases, and
found that 73 of the tested strains (38%) were vaccine strain measles.[8] But
CDC has been silent about these cases. Instead, CDC's website states,
"Analysis by CDC scientists showed that the measles virus type in this
outbreak (B3) was identical to the virus type that caused the large measles
outbreak in the Philippines in 2014".[9]
Are
any Rockland cases are due to recent vaccinations?
In
the midst of a 156 case measles outbreak which has caused no deaths, a county
administration has ignored religious freedom laws and is taking multiple,
unprecedented measures that are designed to thwart parental authority around
vaccinations. Is this a trial balloon, or a taste of things to come?
The
real question is whether epidemics of vaccine-preventable diseases are going to
be managed by knowledgeable, capable physicians who provide the public with the
facts, or will they continue to be stage-managed for maximal media attention,
using extraordinary means to force greater vaccine uptake?
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6406a5.htm
[3] https://www.lohud.com/story/news/local/rockland/new-hempstead/2019/03/27...
[4] https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2019-03-26/county-bans-...
[5] https://abc7ny.com/health/measles-outbreak-rockland-bars-unvaccinated-fr...
[6] https://abc7ny.com/health/measles-outbreak-rockland-bars-unvaccinated-fr...
[7] https://www.fda.gov/downloads/BiologicsBloodVaccines/Vaccines/ApprovedPr...
[8]https://jcm.asm.org/content/55/3/735 "Of
the 194 measles virus sequences obtained in the United States in 2015, 73 were
identified as vaccine sequences (RJ McNall, unpublished data)." RJ McNall
is a CDC virologist and coauthor of this paper.
[9] https://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html
+
An
op-ed in the Bangor Daily News, as Maine considers mandatory
vaccinations.
MCM
Contributors
Why
Americans don’t trust vaccine makers
https://bangordailynews.com/2019/03/28/opinion/contributors/why-americans-dont-trust-vaccine-makers/?fbclid=IwAR0gVXRAWm_5eaf2TU69NA8d_Z6s-fJoluZGgLXF8OGJJfQBsptgtZLazrQ
Trust in the pharmaceutical business hit a low in 2018. Only 38 percent of those Americans polled by the Edelman Trust Barometer said they trusted the industry. Some of the reasons for this are likely high prices, false advertising, and concealing of side effects that harm and kill consumers, as happened with Vioxx, an anti-inflammatory medication. A Lancet study estimates that Vioxx caused 38,000 deaths from heart attacks.
Five and a half years after it was licensed, Merck was forced to withdraw Vioxx. A total of 80 million patients had taken it, and annual sales had topped $2.5 billion.
===========
k.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/only-the-struggle-matters/
by
Chris Hedges
PARIS—In
the small chapel to the right at the entrance of the neoclassical Church of
Saint-Sulpice is a
large mural by Eugène
Delacroix. The painter, at the end of his career and suffering from the
tuberculous laryngitis that would soon kill him, depicted a story from Genesis.
“Jacob is travelling with the flocks and other gifts he is taking to his
brother Esau in
the hope of appeasing his anger,” Delacroix wrote in 1861 when the
painting was completed. “A stranger appears, blocking his path, and engages him
in a fierce struggle – The holy books see this struggle as a symbol of the
trials God sometimes sends His chosen ones.”
Delacroix
shows the stranger—an angel—and Jacob wrestling in a sunlit clearing in a thick
forest. Jacob, bent with exertion, the muscles on his back tense, attempts to
push back against the angel, who stands implacably upright. The mural, created
with layers of paint and bold, thick brush strokes that would later inspire the
Impressionists,
was Delacroix’s final testament to the inherent struggle—a struggle he was
acutely aware he would soon lose—with mortality.
Delacroix
asks us what constitutes victory in life. What gives life meaning? How are we
to live? Why struggle against forces that we can never overcome? In the
biblical story, Jacob is crippled in the long night’s fight, then blessed at
dawn by the departing angel. He begs the angel’s name. But that name remains
unspoken. Delacroix painted the inscription “Deliver me out of the mire, and
let me not sink,” from Psalm 69, over the entrance to the Chapel of the Holy
Angels, which holds two other
murals by Delacroix portraying clashes with angels. On the ceiling is
the Archangel Michael driving the demons from heaven. On the wall opposite
Jacob and the angel, Heliodorus
is attacked by angels as he attempts to steal the treasures from the temple in
Jerusalem. A large window in the church’s stone wall spills sunlight over the
paintings.
+
Macron:
Paris protest 'battle scenes' could hurt France's image
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/26/paris-begins-clean-up-after-gilets-jaunes-clash-protest-with-police
+
Le
Media
GILETS
JAUNES : COMMENT RÉSISTER ? - VRAIMENT
POLITIQUE | Le Média
+
Thousands
protest against Macron under heavy security in Paris
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/05/thousands-protest-against-emmanuel-macron-under-heavy-security-in-paris
+
French
banks call for end to 'yellow vest' violence
https://www.thelocal.fr/20190330/french-banks-call-for-end-to-yellow-vest-violence
+
Emmanuel
Macron news: French President faces a 'PRESIDENCY-DEFINING moment'
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/1107890/emmanuel-macron-news-yellow-vest-protest-march-violence-france-news-charles-de-gaulle
How
an elderly female protester became a symbol of defiance against Macron’s
repression
https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2019/03/how-elderly-female-protester-became-symbol-defiance-against-macron-s-repression
===========
l.
Venezuela
is ‘most open US coup’, pundit tells RT as WSJ talks ‘getting Russia out of
Caracas’
People
protest against a US-led intervention in Venezuela in front of the White House
on March 16, 2019 © AFP / Eric BARADAT
A short but emotive editorial piece by the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) said President Donald Trump should not let himself be “humiliated in our own hemisphere” by Vladimir Putin. The neocon paper was at their finest when they claimed Putin has built “a career of intervening abroad and seeing if the world lets him get away with it,” including in Georgia, Ukraine, and Syria.
This didn’t play well with some American pundits who offered a dissenting opinion. Georgia, where the US was encouraging the pro-Western government to start a war, and Ukraine, which saw the American-backed coup, were “Russian reaction to US action,” Daniel McAdams, Executive Director at Ron Paul Institute, told RT.
Moscow has reacted “when a US action has caused a Russian ally to come under some stress,” McAdams offered, adding, “the same is true in Syria.”
===========
m.
'Obscene' Bipartisan Applause for NATO in Congress
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnx5hzDa0Fo
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg addresses a joint session of the U.S. Congress fanning the fire of a 'Russian threat.' Peter Kuznick says it is an 'obscene bipartisan spectacle applauding war'; Pietro Shakarian discusses the self-serving NATO expansion and the hyperbolic Russia threat narrative.