Tonight’s lecture by Professor Stan Grant on Annual History Lecture [Online] #HistoryWeek20 was a masterclass in rediscovering what “we’ve been fighting for”, The famous sentence often used by the dudes of Dad’s Army, especially when Godfrey’s cottage is about to be demolished to make way for an airfield. Freedom is precious… and sometimes demands sacrifices.

The Annual History Lecture is an event produced by the History Council of New South Wales every year in History Week, a state-wide celebration of History, which aims to engage and educate the community about the vitality, diversity and meaning of history and its practice. 

In 2020, the History Council of New South Wales was honoured that Professor Stan Grant delivered the Annual History Lecture with a paper entitled Coronavirus at the end of history. This presentation was streamed online on the night of 8 September.


Abstract

The coronavirus crisis has accelerated the ideological struggle of the 21st century: China versus the West. 30 years since political scientist Francis Fukuyama proclaimed ‘the end of history’ – the triumph of liberal democracy over Soviet communism – history is back.

China’s authoritarian capitalism is shaking the global liberal order. Chinese President Xi Jinping looks to return his nation to the apex of global power, at a time when the West is weakened and democracy is in retreat. Xi views the world through the lens of history: the Chinese people should never forget the ‘hundred years of humiliation’ by foreign powers. The world walks the fault lines of history, age old enmity and the clash of ideas. Coronavirus is a perfect storm coming after two decades of unending war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the still lingering effects of the 2008 global financial crisis.

As we emerge from lockdown, our world has been forever altered but worse may still be to come. In this Annual History Lecture, Professor Stan Grant asks:  are we condemned to ignore the lessons of history?

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Gus:

I hope the transcript will soon come. The “lecture”, more like an in confidence whisper between old friends of humanity, was incisive and precisely brilliant. Unlike us (me-Gus L.) on this site, Stan did not have a single moment of satire nor of sarcasm about our present detriment — in which our precious democracy is in trouble while having to face a health threat — and yet, as told by Stan Grant, democracy is our only defence against the coronavirus. If I understood well, avoidance of the "new normal", in which restriction and spying on citizen become the norm forever after, is a must. Stan Grant thus gave us one of the most rational fantastic lecture, based on history, that would inspire the future for all of us...

Yet, I am more grubby and less idealistic than Stan. Stan is a beautiful man who can rise above his own ancestry as well as use it — and push for a diversity that believes in Freedom for all, yet we know (and he does not shy from this this fact) that diversity breeds extremes — that do not have to be violent — from which people will seek control of (or destroy) the democratic social construct.

From branch stacking to restricting voters by whatever means, democracy can be controlled by those in power — and those seeking power. There are many tricks used to stifle real democracy, including the proliferation of ignorance, media lies and of beliefs systems (religions) that are anti-democratic by their structure, while the principle of democracy give us the freedom to choose.

Money is also a powerful tool that constantly corrupts democracy, as it is constructed in the Western world. As mentioned on this site and contrarily to Stan's views, America never was a beacon of democracy, but a land of opportunism. The system that elects presidents is convoluted and quite democratically fake. Either side of the coin are the same. American democracy can be easily corrupted and the standards of candidates is way way way below what should be acceptable. 

Fear of dying? Yes Stan, we’ve exposed this fear many times, possibly too often, while rejecting religious beliefs on this subject — and we have promoted the serene acceptance of death as an inevitability… And to some extend, we (me-Gus L.) don’t have regrets in pushing for greater scientific knowledge in order to improve our social interaction, including democratic freedom, in which we often have to still choose between our personal comfort and the impersonal infrastructure of the community. 

So, well done Stan. You've made this old kook reassess his navel gazing and look towards the stars... You have made us wish to improve the history of the future. We will.


See also: https://historycouncilnsw.org.au/whats-on/events/annual-history-lecture-2020/

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LOTS OF PEOPLE have ridiculed President Donald Trump for telling journalist Bob Woodward that he “wanted to always play [Covid-19] down … because I don’t want to create a panic.” That’s hilarious, because Trump obviously loves creating panics — about Mexican immigrants, antifa, single-family zoning, and, scariest of all, low-flow toilets.

But Trump was, as he often does, telling us by accident something profound about American politics.

Nineteen years ago today, a group of men from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates hijacked four passenger jets. They successfully flew three of them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. All in all, they murdered 2,977 people in one day.

By March 19, the day Trump explained his reasoning to Woodward, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had already predicted that the coronavirus would kill hundreds of thousands of Americans and possibly as many as 1.7 million.

In the first situation, George W. Bush, then the president of the United States, actively fomented panic. Americans could not sleep safely in their beds unless we invaded Afghanistan. The FBI should be able to obtain the bank records or internet activity of citizens anytime it wanted without a warrant. Saddam Hussein was hiding anthrax in his mustache.

In the second situation, one that was objectively much more frightening, the president of the United States openly acknowledged that he played the danger down. This goes not just for the danger of Covid-19 itself: His administration has also played down the continuing economic danger to tens of millions of Americans.

What accounts for the glaring disparity in reactions?

History shows the answer is as obvious as it is bizarre: Reality often has nothing to do with gigantic government actions. Instead, politics is mostly about illusions that leaders strive to create inside our heads.

Bush wanted a pretext to do a lot of things that were unnecessary, while Trump wanted an excuse to do nothing when, in fact, a lot really needed to be done.

 

In the case of 9/11, the Bush administration did not attempt to respond rationally to the actual events. Instead, they used it as a justification to do what they had always wanted to do but couldn’t get away with. An influential think tank, the Project for a New American Century, had explained the year before that “the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security,” a goal that “transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.” Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told an aide just hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon that he wanted to “go massive — sweep it all up, things related and not,” including Iraq if possible. Both Bush and his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, soon explained that they saw 9/11 as an “opportunity.”

By contrast, Covid-19 really did demand a large-scale government response, but there was little that Trump wanted to do. So Trump has delivered hours of a TV show in which he starred, but not enough PPE for doctors and nurses, or contact tracing, or desperately needed funding for states and cities, and people thrown out of work. Bush wanted a pretext to do a lot of things that were unnecessary, such as invading Iraq, while Trump wanted an excuse to do nothing when, in fact, a lot really needed to be done.

ANY LOOK AT history shows that this is how the world works. Governments decide what they want to do, and then search for some public rationale.

On December 16, 1989, Panamanian troops shot a U.S. soldier and threatened to rape the wife of a Navy officer. But in the world of political illusion, President George H.W. Bush explained that this meant that we had to invade Panama, which we did, killing hundreds or thousands of people (the precise toll is disputed). An anonymous member of Congress accurately said at the time that “the December 16 incidents were the excuse, and not the reason, for the invasion.” There was no actual connection between the attack on Panama and what had happened to the American troops, which would have been totally ignored if Bush hadn’t wanted a war to oust the country’s military leader, Manuel Noriega, who had once been a CIA asset but had turned into an antagonist to U.S. interests.

On August 2, 1964 the U.S.S. Maddox exchanged fire with North Vietnamese ships in the Gulf of Tonkin. No U.S. sailors were killed; the Maddox suffered a single bullet hole. Then on August 4, nothing at all happened, although the U.S. dreamed up an imaginary second attack on the Maddox. In the world of political illusion, the U.S. used these events as justification to escalate a war that ended up killing millions of people in Indochina.

 

This isn’t just an American thing.

In April 1980, members of Islamic Dawa, an Iraqi Shia organization opposed to Saddam and backed by Iran, threw a grenade at Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minster of Iraq. According to Saddam, this meant that Iraq had to go to war with Iran, which it did, leading to the deaths of a million people on both sides.

In June 1982, Palestinian terrorists attempted to assassinate the Israeli ambassador to the U.K. in London. According to Israel, this meant that it had to invade Lebanon, leading to the deaths of thousands and the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

In September 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, who was Jewish, shot a German diplomat in Paris. According to the Nazi Party’s SA paramilitaries, this required them to carry out Kristallnacht.

Today more than any other, we should understand how much Trump’s berserk honesty tells us about life on earth. Our lives have value insofar as the powerful can use them to create whatever “panic” they desire. If not, we Americans will die quietly in a void, as a thousand of us are currently doing every day from Covid-19.

 

 

Read more:

https://theintercept.com/2020/09/11/911-covid-19-and-the-politics-of-illusion/

 

 

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I have not found transcripts for Stan Grant's lecture... But it can be seen at :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXYrOYN4YR4&feature=youtu.be

 

By PETER VAN BUREN

Like me, until recently you got most of your news from PeaceData.net. It was where you looked to form your opinions, including the all-important one about which way to vote. What you missed on PeaceData you caught up with via Facebook memes and Tweets from people you do not know.

Or maybe not. Maybe like nearly everyone on planet Earth you have no idea what I’m talking about and never looked at the now-defunct PeaceData site. That reality should pretty much end the discussion, but this is 2020. So you must know by now that Facebook claims an unvisited web site named PeaceData was actually a Russian influence operation targeting voters in the United States, all the while posing as an independent news outlet. PeaceData’s sneaky tactics included hiring real freelance “journalists” to write about U.S. politics and racial tensions from their parents’ basements.

PeaceData also operated 13 Facebook accounts, now suspended, supposedly using fake identities and “coordinated inauthentic behavior” by people with some kind of link “to individuals associated with past activity by the Internet Research Agency,” the Russkie company which U.S. intelligence officials say was part of Comrade Trump’s 2016 win.

Yep, that old story: Russians, social media, blah. To say PeaceData itself truly does not matter, especially in relation to the attention it has received in death, gives too much credit to not mattering. What does matter is how the intel community, quasi-private tech firms, the media, and the Democrats worked together to exaggerate the threat and create the narrative outcome of “foreign influence.” Pay attention; this is the magician revealing how the trick is done.

It seems the Russians have gotten so good at influencing cow-like Americans that only five percent of English-language articles on PeaceData actually concerned the U.S. election, out of over 700 articles published. You’d think no one would have even noticed they existed. However, a company called Graphika nonetheless told Facebook to conclude “this facet of the operation suggests an attempt to build a left-wing audience and steer it away from Biden’s campaign.” See, the conclusion from Graphika is by making almost no impact whatsoever, PeaceData was actually “trying harder and harder to hide.” It worked; Graphika found most of the English-language posts achieved only single-digit engagement.

Back to net nanny Graphika for a moment. We don’t know who funds them. Their venture capital was raised privately, in two tranches of about three million dollars each, in 2014 and 2019. We do know who they work with. Their current “Innovation Officer” is Camille François, who once worked for Google’s analytics offshoot Jigsaw before quitting to run a project for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, alongside now Graphika CEO John Kelly (no relation to the Marine.) Their December 2018 reporting helped Democrats “prove” the Russians used Facebook and Twitter to influence the 2016 election. Graphika also has ties to the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the Defense Department’s Minerva Initiative. If you look at their stuff you realize they write like spooks, talk like spooks, and snitch out news sites like spooks.

What is missing from Graphika’s spooky work is any evidence whatsoever of any actual influence on the only thing that matters: how people vote. Graphika offers nothing quantitative, claiming only that by using American freelancers PeaceData was part of the “fabric” of communities and this made them credible. A step up from 2016 efforts, which relied on what Graphika said were foreign “trolls who typically researched American life so they could more effectively pose as U.S. citizens online. One key trick was to watch American TV shows like House of Cards.”

One is inclined to imagine here the customer service rep with a south Indian accent who asks you to call him “Mike” and wonders “How it goes my man in that American town of Iowa?” Older readers, please substitute Boris and Natasha voices.

So who are these nefarious American writers unknowingly selling out their country? The New York Times tracked down one who ended up writing for no money somehow, though PeaceData rates of $75-$200 per article fluttered below average (lots of unknown sites recruit freelancers for small payouts; PeaceData used Guru). This particular PeaceData journalist also once played Rusty in Starlight Expressbefore selling insurance. One of his recent articles outlines his battle with dementia. Sorry to pick on the poor guy, but the NYT profiled him and it seems using such services to influence an election may not be the best use of those rubles.

He did write a nice piece claiming Susan Rice would have made a fine Vice President. One point in her favor was “I challenge anyone to find a video, or statement which shows Susan Rice raising her temper, shouting, acting hysterical or making comments.” Rice of course is known for her signature profanity and temper; here’s The Washington Post calling her out for describing Lindsey Graham as a “piece of sh*t.” Her f-bombs are legendary. She famously flipped the bird at Richard Holbrooke, told France’s UN. ambassador “you’re not going to drag us into your sh*tty war” and drew complaints of disrespect from allies on the UN Security Council.

But before just calling a Susan Rice-like bullsh*t on this whole sad attempt to frighten Americans into believing foreigners are here to steal our precious bodily Internet fluids, let’s go have a look at some of what else PeaceData had to say.

For example, here’s a quote from a PeaceData article about Q-Anon: “The effort to mainstream conspiracy is meant to distract from the true mechanisms of exploitation and alienation, while allowing for the continued consolidation of capital and upending norms with power grabs. As liberal institutions fail and capitalism continues to deliver uncertainty, the extension of a false mythos—that promises to yield revolutionary change and free the masses—gives allure to desperately confused people.”

Ok, that was too easy, somebody just held on to their Socialism 101 textbook. Another PeaceData article, on the post office, is lifted idea-for-idea from the NYT: “One way or another, the truth always comes out and with President Donald Trump, his motives were especially apparent after a news conference in the White House Briefing Room. He admitted on Thursday he opposed additional funding for the United States Postal Service (USPS) in order to make it more difficult to deliver mail-in ballots. Trump’s desire to not expand on voting by mail further sent society into a chaotic state amidst a pandemic.” The NYT said “President Trump stirred new questions on Thursday about whether he would seek to hold up new money to the Postal Service to impede mail-in voting this fall in the middle of the pandemic.” Kinda the same thing, but one is Russkie propaganda and the other is The New York Times.

It is very unclear that any of this is illegal. Foreign organizations hire American writers all the time. And the line between “taking an editorial stance” and “influencing an election” lies closer to how paranoid you are than anything in the law. That did not stop the FBI from telling social media to act against PeaceData based on Graphika tattling. The action Facebook (and Twitter, who called PeaceData “Russian state actors”) took against PeaceData was based entirely on so-called violations of Terms of Service. That allows the social media giants to show off how they are doing something to, whatever, save democracy. Facebook was not asked to return $480 in advertising money PeaceData spent.

PeaceData doesn’t matter by itself. The real value in this fluffy jihad against a no-name site is to create a talking point to allow the MSM and Democrats to announce again that Trump is being helped by a foreign power, that our electoral process is corrupt if Trump wins, and to revive whatever distant warm, wet memories the faithful had of Russiagate. A little daydreaming that maybe the old tricks will work this time where they have failed ever before.

For the rest of us, no big deal, just a glimpse behind the scenes of another Deep State information op where under the cover of blaming foreign collusion, corporate America, the intel community, and the media hide their own collusion, here, in the Twilight Zone of democracy.

 

 

Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well: How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People, Hooper’s War: A Novel of WWII Japan, and Ghosts of Tom Joad: A Story of the 99 Percent.

 

 

Read more:

 

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/election-meddlers-find-a-scapegoat/

 

 

 

My first idea for a headline was "a house of turdy dolls"...but this would be a waste of a couple of good words... Great satire by PVB though... 

 

 

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