We were “deceived and gaslit for years”, all in the name of “democracy”; then “poof”, it collapsed overnight

     BY Alastair Crooke

 

The Editor at Large for the Wall Street Journal, Gerry Baker, says: ‘We’ve been “gaslit’ and deceived” – for years – “all in the name of ‘democracy’”. That deceit “collapsed” with the Presidential debate, Thursday’.

“Until the world saw the truth … [against] the ‘misinformation’ … the fiction of Mr. Biden’s competence … suggests they [the Democrats] evidently thought they could get away with promoting it. [Yet] by perpetuating that fiction they were also revealing their contempt for the voters and for democracy itself”.

Baker continues:

“Biden succeeded because he made toeing the party line his life’s work. Like all politicians whose egos dwarf their talents, he ascended the greasy pole by slavishly following his party wherever it led … Finally—in the ultimate act of partisan servility, he became Barack Obama’s vice president, the summit of achievement for those incapable, yet loyal: the apex position for the consummate ‘yes man’”.

“But then, just as he was ready to drift into a comfortable and well-deserved obscurity, his party needed a front man … They sought a loyal and reliable figurehead, a flag of convenience, under which they could sail the progressive vessel into the deepest reaches of American life — on a mission to advance statism, climate extremism and self-lacerating wokery. There was no more loyal and convenient vehicle than Joe”.

If so, then who actually has been ‘pulling America’s strings’ these past years?

“You [the Democratic machine] don’t get to deceive, dissemble and gaslight us for years about how this man was both brilliantly competent at the job and a healing force for national unity – and now tell us, when your deception is uncovered, that it’s ‘bedtime for Bonzo’ – thanks for your service, and let’s move on”, Baker warns.

“[Now] it is going horribly wrong. Much of his party has no use for him anymore … in a remarkably cynical act of bait-and-switch, [they are trying to] swap him out for someone more useful to their cause. Part of me thinks they shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. I find myself in the odd position of wanting to root for poor mumbling Joe … It’s tempting to say to the Democratic machine frantically mobilizing against him: You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to deceive, dissemble and gaslight us for years”.

Something significant has snapped within ‘the system’. It is always tempting to situate such events in ‘immediate time’, but even Baker seems to allude to a longer cycle of gaslighting and deception – one that only now has suddenly burst into open view.

Such events – though seemingly ephemeral and of the moment – can be portents to deeper structural contradictions moving.

When Baker writes of Biden being the latest ‘flag of convenience’ under which the ruling strata could sail the progressive vessel into the deepest reaches of American life – “on a mission to advance statism, climate extremism and self-lacerating wokery” – it seems probable that he is referring to the 1970s era of the Trilateral Commission and the Club of Rome.

The 1970s and 1980s were the point at which the long arc of traditional liberalism gave place to an avowedly illiberal, mechanical ‘control system’ (managerial technocracy) that today fraudulently poses as liberal democracy.

Emmanuel Todd, the French anthropological historian, examines the longer dynamics to events unfolding in the present: The prime agent of change leading to the Decline of the West (La Défaite de l’Occident), he argues, was the implosion of ‘Anglo’ Protestantism in the U.S. (and England), with its entailed habits of work, individualism and industry – a creed whose qualities were held then to reflect God’s grace through material success, and, above all, to confirm membership of the divine ‘Elect’.

Whereas traditional liberalism had its mores, the decline of traditional values triggered the slide towards managerial technocracy, and to nihilism. Religion lingers on in the West, though in a ‘zombie’ state, Todd avers. Such societies, he argues, flounder – absent some guiding metaphysical sphere that provides people with non-material sustenance.

However, the incoming doctrine that only a wealthy financial élite, tech experts, leaders of multinational corporations and banks possess the required foresight and technological understanding to manipulate a complex and increasingly controlled system changed politics completely.

Mores were gone – and so was empathy. Many experienced the disconnect and the disregard of cold technocracy.

So when a senior WSJ editor tells us that the ‘deception and ‘gaslighting’ collapsed with the CNN Biden-Trump debate, we should surely pay attention; He is saying the scales finally fell from peoples’ eyes.

What was being gaslighted was the fiction of democracy and also that of America declaring itself – in its own scripture – to be the trailblazer and pathfinder of humanity: America as the exceptional nation: the singular, the pure-of-heart, the baptizer, and redeemer of all peoples despised and downtrodden; the “last, best hope of earth”.

The reality was very different. Of course, states can ‘live a lie’ for a long period. The underlying problem – the point Todd makes so compellingly – is that you can be successful in deceiving and manipulating public perceptions, but only up to a point.

The reality was, it simply was not working.

The same is true of ‘Europe’. The EU’s aspiration to become a global geo-political actor too, was contingent on gaslighting the public that France, Italy and Germany et al could continue to be real national entities – even as the EU scooped up all national decision-making prerogatives, by deceit. The mutiny at the recent European elections reflected this discontent.

Of course, Biden’s condition has been long known. So who then has been running affairs; making critical daily decisions about war, peace, the composition of the judiciary and the boundaries of state authority? The WSJ piece gives one answer: “Unelected advisers, party hacks, scheming family members and random hangers-on make the critical daily decisions” on these issues.

Maybe we have to reconcile to the fact that Biden is an angry, senile man who yells at his staff: “During meetings with aides who are putting together formal briefings, some senior officials have at times gone to great lengths to curate the information in an effort to avoid provoking a negative reaction”.

“It’s like, ‘You can’t include that, that will set him off’ or ‘Put that in, he likes that,’” said one senior administration official. “It’s very difficult and people are scared sh*tless of him.” The official added, “He doesn’t take advice from anyone other than those few top aides, and it becomes a perfect storm because he just gets more and more isolated from their efforts to control it”.

Seymour Hersh, the well-known investigative journalist reports:

“Biden’s drift into blankness has been ongoing for months, as he and his foreign policy aides have been urging a ceasefire that will not happen in Gaza whilst continuing to supply the weapons that make a ceasefire less likely. There’s a similar paradox in Ukraine, where Biden has been financing a war that cannot be won – yet refusing to participate in negotiations that could end the slaughter”.

“The reality behind all of this, as I’ve been told for months, is that Biden is simply ‘no longer there’ – in terms of understanding the contradictions of the policies he and his foreign policy advisers have been carrying out”.

On the one hand, Politico tells us: “Biden’s insular senior team are well acquainted with the longtime aides who continue to have the president’s ear: Mike Donilon, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed, as well as Ted Kaufman and Klain on the outside”.

“It’s the same people — he has not changed those people for 40 years … The number of people who have access to the president has gotten smaller and smaller and smaller. They’ve been digging deeper into the bunker for months now.” And, the strategist said, “the more you get into the bunker, the less you listen to anyone”.

In Todd’s words then, decisions are made by a small ‘Washington village’.

Of course, Jake Sullivan and Blinken sit at the centre of what is called the ‘inter-agency’ view. This where policy mostly is discussed. It is not coherent – with its locus in the National Security Committee – but rather is spread through a matrix of interlocking ‘clusters’ that includes the Military Industrial Complex, Congressional leaders, Big Donors, Wall Street, the Treasury, the CIA, the FBI, a few cosmopolitan oligarchs and the princelings of the security-intelligence world.

All these ‘princes’ pretend to have a foreign policy view, and fight like cats to protect their fiefdom’s autonomy. Sometimes they channel their ‘take’ via the NSC, but if they can, they will ‘stovepipe’ it directly to one or other ‘key actor’ with the ear of one, or other, Washington ‘village’.

Nonetheless, at bottom, the 1992 Wolfowitz doctrine which underscored American supremacy at all costs, in a post-Soviet world – together with “stamping out rivals, wherever they may emerge” – still today remains the ‘current doctrine’ framing the ‘inter-agency’ baseline.

Dysfunction at the heart of a seemingly functioning organization may persist for years without any real public awareness or appreciation of the descent into dysfunctionality. But then suddenly – when a crisis hits, or Presidential debate misfires – ‘poof’ and we see clearly the collapse of the manipulation that has confined discourse to within the various Washington villages.

In this light, some of the structural contradictions that Todd noted as contributory factors to western decline become unexpectedly ‘illuminated’ by events: Baker highlighted one: The key Faustian bargain: the pretence of a liberal democracy operating in tandem with a ‘classic’ liberal economy versus the reality of an illiberal oligarchic leadership sitting atop a hyper-financialised corporate economy that has both sucked the life from the classic organic economy, and created toxic inequalities too.

The second agent of western decline is Todd’s observation that the implosion of the Soviet Union rendered the U.S. so cock-a-hoop that the latter triggered a paradoxical unleashing of global ‘Rules-Based Order’ expansion of empire versus the reality that the West was already being consumed from its roots upwards.

The third agent to decline lay, Todd argues, with America declaring itself to be the greatest military nation on earth – versus the reality of an America that has long rid itself of much of its manufacturing capacity (particularly the military capacity), yet elects to clash with a stabilized Russia, a great power returned, and with China which has instantiated itself as the world’s manufacturing Behemoth (including militarily).

These unresolved paradoxes became the agents of western decline, Todd maintained. He has a point.

https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/07/08/we-were-deceived-and-gaslit-for-years-all-in-the-name-of-democracy-then-poof-it-collapsed-overnight/

 

 

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NATO chief reveals ‘greatest’ risk for bloc      A Russian victory in Ukraine would change the global security system, Jens Stoltenberg has said

 

Outgoing NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg has claimed that a Russian victory in the Ukraine conflict is the biggest risk the US-led military bloc faces and urged member states to bolster aid to Kiev.

Speaking at the NATO leaders summit on Tuesday in Washington, Stoltenberg claimed that the conflict between Moscow and Kiev would shape the global security system for the decades to come.

“The biggest cost and the greatest risk will be if Russia wins in Ukraine; we cannot let that happen,” Stoltenberg stated, in a speech marking the military bloc's 75th anniversary.

According to him, a Russian victory would “embolden” other opponents of the military bloc, including Iran, North Korea, and China, who support Moscow and “want NATO to fail.”

While casting the stakes of the Ukraine conflict in historic terms, Stoltenberg, however, chose not to mention Kiev’s prospects of joining NATO.

Ukraine maintains that its fight with Russia gives it the right to fast-track accession to the bloc. But NATO’s leadership and its member states have insisted that the country will not join while hostilities with Russia continue.

Moscow has named Ukraine’s moves to join NATO as one of the key reasons for the start of the conflict in 2022.

Addressing the NATO summit, US President Joe Biden said that Washington and other bloc members intend to provide Kiev with “dozens” of additional tactical air-defense missile systems in the coming months.

The US, Germany, and Romania will donate a new Patriot battery each, while the Netherlands “and other partners” will supply components to “enable the operation of an additional Patriot battery,” according to a statement signed by several NATO members and Ukraine. Italy has pledged to deliver an additional SAMP-T system.

Russia has maintained that the deliveries of Western weapons will lead to more escalation, but will ultimately fail to stop the Russian military from achieving its aims in the conflict.

On Tuesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said that Moscow would pay “maximum attention” to whatever decisions are announced at the NATO summit.

He reiterated that the bloc, which has repeatedly declared its intent to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia on the battlefield, “is directly involved in the Ukrainian conflict on the side of Ukraine.”

 

https://www.rt.com/news/600789-nato-greatest-risk-stoltenberg/

 

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A time for multipolar peace    By Warwick Powell

 

NATO has been shaping up to go global for quite some time. It has singularly failed as a so-called ‘defensive alliance’, having been involved in assorted bouts of warfare and bloodshed in Europe over the past three decades. Having come into existence ostensibly as a defensive bulwark against the threat of the Soviet Union, the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 should have spelled the end of NATO. It didn’t.

Rather, NATO has – not unlike bureaucracies of times past – confected purposes for its perpetuation. Those purposes, much as was the case with its genesis, related to the presence of an external ‘enemy’ or ‘threat’. Without the Soviet Union, there would have been no NATO. Now, without the Soviet Union, there had to be someone else.

The ongoing eastward expansion of NATO – forsworn by the Americans in their negotiations with Gorbachev at the time – was pursued relentlessly in three rounds. Warnings about the risks to European peace and security were ignored; NATO and its American underwriter would insist that it was a ‘defensive’ alliance and no-one had anything to worry about.

Now, as NATO stares defeat in the face in Ukraine, it has set its sights on a global expansion. It has already had so-called ‘partners’ in Asia for some time. Japan, Republic of Korea, New Zealand and Australia all attended the NATO summit for the first time in 2022 where statements about the geopolitical challenges China poses were made. China was emerging as NATO’s new global bête noire. Russia was the immediate enfant terrible, but China was the real threat.

NATO tried to set up an office in Japan but was rebuffed by the French Government in 2023. Undeterred, however, NATO has chipped away and has in recent times worked to drag China into the Ukraine conflict, accusing China of supporting Russia through the provision of dual-use equipment. Jens Stoltenberg accused China of “inciting the largest military conflict in Europe since World War 2”. The US Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith had claimed that ‘China has taken a side”. The Wall Street Journal (from the News Limited stable) on 7 July 2024 headlined an article with this: “China’s Support for Russia’s War in Ukraine Puts Beijing on NATO’s Threat List’.

All these accusations came in a flurry of a little over a week, in the lead-up to NATO’s Washington confab (9 July). Clearly orchestrated, with the view of rationalising NATO’s impending globalisation.

Where ‘A’ once stood for Atlantic, it would now include Asia.

While NATO’s expansion to Asia may be welcomed by the ‘insecurity apparatuses of state’ in Japan, ROK, Australia and New Zealand, it actually poses a substantial risk to the future of peace and security in the region. What NATO has done in Europe, it can do the same in Asia.

The reasons are straightforward and endemic to the rationale of NATO’s existence and modus operandi. In short, it is premised on the limited and often flawed ideas of ‘military deterrence’ as the principal means towards security, stability and peace.

‘Military deterrence’ is an approach that can deliver, at best, a negative peace. That is, so long as other assumptions hold (on which more shortly), military conflict can be avoided (deterred / prevented / deferred). But, deterrence doesn’t contribute meaningfully to the forging of the conditions and institutions necessary for a sustained positive peace.

You can’t achieve peace through security, but you can achieve security through peace, once remarked Johan Galtung, an early proponent of peace studies as an antidote to a militarised framework of ‘security’. Achieving a peace requires strategy, and an approach that is inclusive rather than exclusive.

By definition, NATO’s modus operandi is exclusionary; its existence is defined against a ‘hostile other’. To maintain a negative peace, a deterrence strategy can only work while one party is obviously more powerful than the others, and that the others are cowered into subordination. That’s what is sometimes described as achieving a balance of power where the ‘balance’ is, oxymoronically, in the favour of one amongst many. Asymmetry is not a condition for sustained stability, let alone peace.

Deterrence in fact is a strategy that has a high risk of failure. The best that anyone can get out of deterrence is that it buys you time. But, it cannot forswear others building themselves up (catalysing a security dilemma / arms race); indeed, arguably, efforts to impose an asymmetric power relationship is a surefire recipe for generating resentment. At some point, the risk is that such resentments boil over. The failure of deterrence doctrine in Gaza is a recent case in point, as Lawrence Freedman pointed out. Despite Israel’s obvious preponderance in hard power terms, Hamas nonetheless launched an attack on Israel forces in October last year.

Deterrence can become self-defeating, as it avoids the underlying issues that germinate conflict and focus, instead, of manipulating a narrowly defined military risk environment. So long as I am stronger than the others, the sources of conflict can be ignored. The risk is not only of attacks such as those mounted by Hamas, for a general increase in the probability of terrorist attacks. Little wonder that American political scientists Graham Allison and Michael Morrell have recently warned of the intensification of terrorism risks against the US and its resources.

Out-escalating an opponent may work for a while, but it is no panacea. In the end, the risk is that others join forces and can match up.

Yet, this is precisely the NATO doctrine. No wonder it has failed miserably to bring stability and peace to Europe during the years of American (western) unipolar superiority. On the face of it, despite being in its most secure position in living memory, the fact that the US initiated more military interventions between 1990 and 2019 than in any previous era is a paradox. But, understood through the lens of ‘deterrence doctrine’ it isn’t incomprehensible at all.

And so, NATO is angling to come to Asia. The black thumb of death and destruction has been the US-led collective west’s calling card. It’s about to leave it on our region’s doorstep.

There are better ways. They are the ways of indivisible security, in which prosperity and peace are symbiotic. They are the ways of focusing on building a peace, rather than engaging in an arms war in the name of deterring war. They are the ways of a multipolar peace, in which security is found through peace and peace is built with collective prosperity.

A growing group of social media platforms have recently joined forces to amplify the voices of multipolar peace. We welcome the participation of others: www.multipolarpeace.com.

https://johnmenadue.com/a-time-for-multipolar-peace/

 

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Fact-checking the attack on the kyiv pediatric hospital on 08/07/2024

   

The pathetic lying propaganda of the Atlanticist media is once again faulted: the attack on the Kiev pediatric hospital on 08/07/2024 was carried out not by a Russian missile but was the result of a failure of the Ukrainian air defense.

Atlanticist… 

On the other hand, radio silence on the Calibration of the “Artyom” factory in kyiv by a salvo of Russian missiles… 

Thanks to Erwan Castel for this real fact-check! 

*

The West, for centuries, has been lying to establish its ideological, economic and military hegemony on a crude Manichean fabrication of the enemy and thus justify wars without any rules.

And when these wars break out, Western war propaganda reaches a limitless fever pitch.

The latest example of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict is the so-called “Russian bombing” with an X-101 cruise missile of the Okhmatdyt children's hospital in kyiv.

Immediately, the Ukrainian-Atlanticist political and media networks rushed to the tragedy to accuse Russia of a heinous war crime.

Except that…

The bombing in question was filmed by surveillance cameras (video 1) thanks to which it is easy to identify the missile which struck the Okhmatdyt hospital area.

The reality is that it is an AIM-120 missile from a NATO NASAMS anti-aircraft system.

This military identification is made incontestable by:

– The characteristic shape of the missile and its fins,

– Its dimensions and linear proportions (diameter and length)

– The anti-aircraft conical dispersion of multiple fragments.

To complete the dismantling of this crude Western lie (but which I am sure will convince a large part of the herd) it is enough to compare the AIM-120 missile (measuring 366 cm long, 17,8 cm in diameter and has a ratio length/diameter of 1/20,6) with the denounced Russian X-101 whose measurements are 745 cm, 74,2 cm, ratio 1/10, for the X-55 588 cm, 51,4 cm, ratio 1 /11,4. We can observe in the images that the length of the missile exceeds its diameter by more than 15 times.

Finally, other details such as the absence of the characteristic arrival whistle of the Russian X 101, the fact that the trajectory came from the West (and not from Russia), that the Ukrainian authorities had the area evacuated to prohibit collection debris etc.

It is therefore a tragic fallout from an anti-aircraft missile having missed its target. A “news item” that arrives on each side of the front.

What is abnormal, however, is when propagandists without ethics or brains attempt to distort reality for the benefit of demonizing the adversary.

Obviously this disinformation campaign must be put into perspective with the imminent next NATO summit where the Ukrainian-Atlanticist rhetoric needs to be nourished by fantasies.

In the 21st century, at a time when the image imposes the Truth in real time, this kind of manipulation (also unfortunately sometimes visible on the Russian side) is totally counterproductive to the causes defended, except for morons and fanatics.

https://en.reseauinternational.net/fact-checking-de-lattaque-de-lhopital-pediatrique-de-kiev-du-08-07-2024/

 

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