Hitler’s War Crimes vs. Those of Churchill & the Americans

When we want to demonize someone the worst epithet we can think of is to call him a Nazi or compare the person to Hitler, as Hillary Clinton did when she declared Russia’s President Putin “the new Hitler.” This ingrained habit comes from the influence of the massive anti-German World War II propaganda. Revisionist historians who have actually dug up the buried evidence and examined it have made a case that whatever the Nazi crimes, they were rivaled, if not exceeded, by those of Churchill and the Americans.

Unz, a prolific reader with a knack for tying things together reviews some of the true history in what follows. To condition yourself for the coming shock, keep in mind that the same Hitler that is said to have hated Jews and systematically gassed and burnt them, had 150,000 half-and quarter-Jews serving in his armies, “mostly as combat officers, and these included at least 15 half-Jewish generals and admirals, with another dozen quarter Jews holding those same high ranks. The most notable example was Field Marshal Erhard Milch, Hermann Goering’s powerful second-in-command, who played such an important operational role in creating the Luftwaffe. Milch certainly had a Jewish father, and according to some much less substantiated claims, perhaps even a Jewish mother as well, while his sister was married to an SS general.”

When truth-tellers rattle our cages, we get upset over having our comfortable make-believe world disturbed and shout invectives. Rather than condemn the messanger, the more mature response would be to condemn those who lied to us and institutionalized false history into our consciousness. Keep in mind that the few who tell you the truth pay a high price for doing so; therefore, you should refrain from adding your invective to the copious amount heaped on them by the Establishment. Think about it. Which is your true friend, the one who tells you the truth, or the one who controls the explanations you receive in order to advance his own agenda?

I again state my admiration of Ron Unz. He is Jewish. He is highly intelligent. He is a Harvard graduate. He is an entrepreneur who made himself a multi-millionaire. He could have held his fire and risen to the top of the establishment. Instead, he chose to tell us the truth. Ron Unz is the person who should be President. Unlike Trump, Unz would know how to staff a government that would put truth and morality back in charge of our future.

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China signs defence agreement with South Korea as US angers Seoul with demand for $5bn troop payment

The defence ministers of South Korea and China have agreed to develop their security ties to ensure stability in north-east Asia, the latest indication that Washington’s long-standing alliances in the region are fraying. 

On the sidelines of regional security talks in Bangkok on Sunday, Jeong Kyeong-doo, the South Korean minister of defence, and his Chinese counterpart, Wei Fenghe, agreed to set up more military hotlines and to push ahead with a visit by Mr Jeong to China next year to “foster bilateral exchanges and cooperation in defence”, South Korea’s defence ministry said.  

Seoul’s announcement coincided with growing resentment at the $5 billion (£3.9bn) annual fee that Washington is demanding to keep 28,500 US troops in South Korea.

That figure is a sharp increase from the $923 million that Seoul paid this year, which was an 8 per cent increase on the previous year. 

An editorial in Monday’s edition of The Korea Times warned that the security alliance between the two countries “may fall apart due to Washington’s blatantly excessive demands”. 
Mr Trump has previously threatened to withdraw US troops if his demands are not met, with the editorial accusing the president of regarding the Korea-US mutual defence treaty “as a property deal to make money”.

The vast majority of Koreans agree, with a recent survey by the Korea Institute for National Reunification showing that 96 per cent of people are opposed to Seoul paying more for the US military presence. 

There is also irritation at the pressure that Washington is applying to the South to make Seoul sign an extension to a three-way agreement on sharing military information with the US and Japan.

The General Security of Military Information Agreement is due to expire at midnight on November 23 and South Korea insists that it will only agree to an extension if Japan cancels restrictions on exports of chemicals critical to the South’s microchip industry. 

Japan is widely believed to have imposed the restrictions as the latest incident in its troubled relationship with South Korea, which includes the issue of compensation for labourers put to work during Japan’s colonial rule of the Korean Peninsula. 

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What You Are Hearing Are the Real Reasons the War Mongers Want Trump Out; They Want War

US Military Starting to Use China As 'Bad Guys' During War Games, Something Big Is Brewing

The Pentagon Wants More Control Over the News. What Could Go Wrong?

If there’s a worse idea than the Pentagon becoming Editor-in-Chief of America, I can’t remember it. But we’re getting there:

From Bloomberg over Labor Day weekend:

Fake news and social media posts are such a threat to U.S. security that the Defense Department is launching a project to repel “large-scale, automated disinformation attacks,” as the top Republican in Congress blocks efforts to protect the integrity of elections.

One of the Pentagon’s most secretive agencies, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is developing “custom software that can unearth fakes hidden among more than 500,000 stories, photos, video and audio clips.”

Once upon a time, when progressives still reflexively distrusted the military, DARPA was a liberal punchline, known for helping invent the Internet but also for developing lunatic privacy-invading projects like LifeLog, a program to “gather in a single place just about everything an individual says, sees, or does.”

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We're Listening to the Wrong Voices on Syria

Once upon a time, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard traveled to Syria and met with the strongman President Bashar Assad. She considered her willingness to engage all sides of the country’s bloody civil war to be an important step toward peace. For this bold action, she was widely pilloried at the time and considered by some an authoritarian apologist or outright traitor. The claim was repeated again recently by the ever-so-mainstream California Sen. Kamala Harris, a fellow Democratic presidential hopeful. The attacks on Gabbard’s Syria record have been quite regular among Washington insiders, who considered the congresswoman foolish. But was she? More than two years later, given events in Syria, one must conclude that she certainly was not. Indeed, Gabbard was right all along.

Recently, Assad’s Syrian Arab Army (SAA) has squeezed the anti-regime rebels in their last major stronghold of Idlib, in the country’s northwest. Thus, the latest phase of Syria’s civil war is nearly over. And Assad, along with his Russian and Iranian backers, have won. Perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. Un-American blasphemy, right? Hardly.

For years, the West and its Gulf State theocratic partners decried the admittedly brutal Assad and sold their populations the fantasy that there were “moderate,” non-Islamist rebels. The reality is that the rebels were infused with, and quickly dominated by, various jihadist fighters from the very start. Yes, Assad is a veritable monster; but what of the Nusra Front (an al-Qaida franchise) and the even more extreme Islamic State—are they not equally deplorable, and, frankly, more of a transnational threat to the U.S.? Of course they are. Assad, at least, posed no serious threat to the United States (neither did his neighbor, Saddam Hussein, by the way) and both suppressed Sunni jihadism and protected Syria’s plethora of Christian, Allawi and other minority populations.

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Watch the 9 minutes that has America searching Tulsi Gabbard

Manufacturing War With Russia

Despite the Robert Mueller report’s conclusion that Donald Trump and his campaign did not collude with Russia during the 2016 presidential race, the new Cold War with Moscow shows little sign of abating. It is used to justify the expansion of NATO to Russia’s borders, a move that has made billions in profits for U.S. arms manufacturers. It is used to demonize domestic critics and alternative media outlets as agents of a foreign power. It is used to paper over the Democratic Party’s betrayal of the working class and the party’s subservience to corporate power. It is used to discredit détente between the world’s two largest nuclear powers. It is used to justify both the curtailment of civil liberties in the United States and U.S. interventions overseas—including in countries such as Syria and Venezuela. This new Cold War predates the Trump presidential campaign. It was manufactured over a decade ago by a war industry and intelligence community that understood that, by fueling a conflict with Russia, they could consolidate their power and increase their profits. (Seventy percent of intelligence is carried out by private corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, which has been called the world’s most profitable spy operation.)

“This began long before Trump and ‘Russiagate,’ ” Stephen F. Cohen said when I interviewed him for my television show, “On Contact.” Cohen is professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University, where he was the director of the Russian studies program, and professor emeritus of Russian studies and history at New York University. “You have to ask yourself, why is it that Washington had no problem doing productive diplomacy with Soviet communist leaders. Remember Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev? It was a love fest. They went hunting together [in the Soviet Union]. Yet along comes a post-Soviet leader, Vladimir Putin, who is not only not a communist but a professed anti-communist. Washington has been hating on him ever since 2003, 2004. It requires some explanation. Why do we like communist leaders in Russia better than we like Russia’s anti-communist leader? It’s a riddle.”

“If you’re trying to explain how the Washington establishment has dealt with Putin in a hateful and demonizing way, you have to go back to the 1990s before Putin,” said Cohen, whose new book is “War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate.” The first post-Soviet leader is Boris Yeltsin. Clinton is president. And they have this fake, pseudo-partnership and friendship, whereas essentially the Clinton administration took advantage of the fact that Russia was in collapse. It almost lost its sovereignty. I lived there in the ’90s. Middle-class people lost their professions. Elderly people lost their pensions. I think it’s correct to say that industrial production fell more in the Russian 1990s than it did during our own Great Depression. It was the worst economic and social depression ever in peacetime. It was a catastrophe for Russia.”

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How the War Party Broke Trump

Only rarely have I agreed with Trump on anything. His frequent and apparently sincere denunciations of our various wars in the Greater Middle East stand as the principal exception to that statement. As both candidate and president, Trump has repeatedly made clear his intention to extricate the United States from the vast military quagmire that his several predecessors, both Republicans and Democrats, have created in that region.

Consistency has not been a strong suit of Trump’s administration. Yet terminating our interminable wars while lowering the U.S. military profile in the Islamic world does seem to be something to which the president is actually committed.

Yet the national security apparatus and members of his own administration have opposed him every step of the way. Trump wanted U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. They are still there. He wanted U.S. troops out of Syria. They are still there. So, too, are 5,000 more in neighboring Iraq—more than 16 years after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

The nominal rationale for the U.S. military presence and combat actions in the Greater Middle East changes with dizzying frequency. It once had something to do with overthrowing dictators, spreading democracy, and promoting human rights. Then, for a time, the mission was to eliminate terrorism. Somewhere along the line, it changed to promoting stability. Now, the focus has shifted to Iran, assigned a place in the pecking order of official U.S. adversaries that once belonged to Saddam, then to al-Qaeda, and then to ISIS.

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MEMORIAL DAY WEEKEND / 2019

As we all know, Memorial Day is a federal holiday in the United States for remembering the men (and many misguided women now too!) who died while serving in America's armed forces. The holiday, which is observed on the last Monday of May, originated after the U.S. Civil War, in 1868 as Decoration Day.

Families of the Northern dead would decorate the graves of their kinfolk with flags and flowers. By 1900, competing Union and Confederate holiday traditions, celebrated on different days, had merged into a single Memorial Day, which was eventually extended to honor all Americans who died in military service.

Since World War II, the stupid cliche of "thank our veterans for our freedom" was unofficially attached to the day. Of course, American haven't died in defense of freedom since the complicated and nuanced Civil War -- with northerners dying to remain free of the dangers of a Rothschild-divided America; and southerners dying for the right of state sovereignty.

So, this Memorial Day, with all due respect to the veterans, let us dispense with all this "thank you for our freedom" bullshit and declare a more historically accurate "gratitude" to the deserving parties (cough cough)

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White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran, in Echoes of Iraq War

At a meeting of President Trump’s top national security aides last Thursday, Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons, administration officials said.

The revisions were ordered by hard-liners led by John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s national security adviser. They do not call for a land invasion of Iran, which would require vastly more troops, officials said.

The development reflects the influence of Mr. Bolton, one of the administration’s most virulent Iran hawks, whose push for confrontation with Tehran was ignored more than a decade ago by President George W. Bush.

It is highly uncertain whether Mr. Trump, who has sought to disentangle the United States from Afghanistan and Syria, ultimately would send so many American forces back to the Middle East.

It is also unclear whether the president has been briefed on the number of troops or other details in the plans. On Monday, asked about if he was seeking regime change in Iran, Mr. Trump said: “We’ll see what happens with Iran. If they do anything, it would be a very bad mistake.”

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Bolton Is Spinning Israeli ‘Intelligence’ to Push for War Against Iran

John Bolton has gotten away with a dangerous deception. The national security adviser’s announcement Sunday that the Pentagon has deployed air and naval forces to the Middle East, which he combined with a threat to Iran, points to a new maneuver to prepare the ground for an incident that could justify a retaliatory attack against Iran.

Bolton presented his threat and the deployments as a response to alleged intelligence about a possible Iranian attack on U.S. targets in the Middle East. But what has emerged indicates that the alleged intelligence does not actually reflect any dramatic new information or analysis from the US intelligence community. Instead, it has all the hallmarks of a highly political case concocted by Bolton.

Further underscoring the deceptive character of Bolton’s maneuver is evidence that senior Israeli national security officials played a key role in creating the alleged intelligence rationale for the case.

The new initiative follows an audacious ruse carried out last fall by Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, detailed in Truthdig in February, to cast the firing of a few mortar rounds in the vicinity of the US Embassy and a consulate in Iraq as evidence of an effort by Tehran to harm US diplomats. Bolton exploited that opportunity to press Pentagon officials to provide retaliatory military options, which they did, reluctantly.

Bolton and Pompeo thus established a policy that the Trump administration would hold Iran responsible for any incident involving forces supported by Iran that could be portrayed as an attack on either US personnel or US“interests.”

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Bolton’s Vague Press Release Lays Foundation for Military Attack Against Iran

In a late Sunday press release, National Security Advisor John Bolton announced the deployment of the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group (ABECSG) and a bomber task force to U.S. Central Command as a “clear and unmistakable message to Iran.” The press release claims that the move was made “in response to a number of troubling and escalatory indications and warnings,” which were left unspecified.

The statement further claims that “any attack on United States interests or on those of our allies will be met with unrelenting force” and that, while “the United States is not seeking war with the Iranian regime,” the Trump administration is “fully prepared to respond to any attack, whether by proxy, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or regular Iranian forces.”

Last month, in a move that many viewed as a set-up for a war with Iran — which has long been sought by Bolton as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, even prior to their posts in the current administration — the Trump administration labeled the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of Iran as a terrorist organization. Iran’s government subsequently responded in kind, labeling U.S. soldiers of Central Command as terrorists and designating the U.S. government as a state sponsor of terrorism.

While Bolton framed the latest move as a “warning” to Iran, it turns out that the deployment of the Lincoln Carrier Strike Group to U.S. Central Command was actually announced last month with no mention at all of Iran. Indeed, a Navy press release published on April 8 stated that “the Abraham Lincoln Carrier Strike Group (ABECSG) departed Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, April 1, for a regularly scheduled deployment.” The fleet has already been stationed in the Central Command region since at least April 15, when the U.S. Naval Institute announced that it was anchored off the coast of Spain.

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Never Forget That Israel Attacked the USS Liberty in 1967

Saudi Arabia & the Middle East Nuclear Arms Race Nightmare

Why NATO's Official Purpose Makes No Sense, but It Is Likely To Outlive Us All

This year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of NATO, but the question is, is this a happy birthday for a lively meaningful organization or time for us to pull the plug on a Cold War dreg that has lived well past its purpose?

After WWII it was inevitable that there would be a conflict between the Liberal Capitalist world and the growing Red Communist one. Perhaps if the Soviet Union would have resigned itself to being the only Communist nation rejecting any form of proselytization and rebranding itself as some kind of Democracy B as a mild alternative to the West’s Democracy A then the Cold War could have been avoided.

But this did not happen and was very unlikely to do so. The motto of the Soviet Union on its seal was “Workers of the World Unite!”. That was workers of the “world” not “only Russia”. So it is not surprising that the West took a preemptive move and formed NATO to gang up on the USSR.

However now the Soviet Union is dead and gone. NATO fulfilled its mission a little after turning 40. Sadly rather than phasing out and riding off into the sunset it had a midlife crisis, bought a Camaro and continued to not only exist but expand and bomb. But should it exist? Why is this organization still around at 70 years old posing as if we are still living in some sort of Cold War dynamic where if we don’t bomb Libya back to the stone age somehow Belgium and Greece will fall to evil ideologically different invaders.

NATO relies heavily on the idea that the weakest members benefit from being treated as “equals” in the security organization. Many tiny nations would be militarily helpless otherwise. At first this logic makes sense. Little nations need a boost to help them maintain a stable defense.

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Rethinking America's Military Industrial Complex

The US Military Industrial Complex no longer needs neither actual wars nor the threat of war for its own survival. This factor could actually change dynamic of this institution/bureaucracy in our lifetimes and it may actually be changing as we speak.

Very often something will evolve and become ubiquitous to the degree that we forget its origin. Putting a dead tree in your house on Christmas is a good example, few people think of why this is done, they just do it because it has been done for a long time and thus seems completely natural and important to do so every year. A justification for doing it is no longer needed, it is something done by default. In some ways the necessity to start questionable wars of luxury is much like that Christmas tree – an odd tradition that is not of an importance or value anymore.

In order to break this down we need to go back to the start.

It is hard for people in our times, especially foreign people to understand the fact that the United States was not a massive military power until WWII. Today sole hyperpower was at a time not that long ago a much different nation militarily and foreign policy speaking. In 1914 at the start of the Great War in Europe the territorially massive United States had a total armed forces of around 166,000 men. From 1776 until that point the manpower of US forces was minimal by European standards. That America of those times was an isolated self-focused America that many today long for. When the US entered WWI shedding the binds of its isolationist tendencies it bulked up to nearly 3,000,000 soldiers by the end of 1918. However, directly after the Great War finally ended the military severely deflated itself back down much closer to its original size.

“The Good War” in the 1940’s was the final nail in the isolationist coffin as American forces would forever remain in the millions of men after the defeat of Germany and Japan by the Allies.

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Revealed: U.S. Spy Operation Manipulating Social Media!

Washington Finally Acknowledges Defeat In Syria

In a succinct tweet on Wednesday, Donald Trump has announced a momentous policy decision that the Trump administration will soon be pulling out the US troops from Syria and Iraq. Although the current redeployment of American troops will only be limited to northern Syria to appease the US-ally Turkey where it has been a longstanding demand of President Erdogan that Turkey will not tolerate the presence of the US-backed Kurdish forces west of Euphrates River, it can be expected in the coming months that Washington will withdraw American forces from eastern Syria and Iraq as well.

President Trump said in the tweet, “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency.” Thus, Washington has finally acknowledged its humiliating defeat in a country it never formally invaded, but where it waged a devastating proxy war for the last seven years that gave birth to myriads of militant groups, including the Islamic State. 

It is an irrefutable fact that the United States sponsors militants, but only for a limited period of time in order to achieve certain policy objectives. For instance: the United States nurtured the  It is an irrefutable fact that the United States sponsors militants, but only for a limited period of time in order to achieve certain policy objectives. For instance: the United States nurtured the Afghan jihadists during the Cold War against the former Soviet Union from 1979 to 1988, but after the signing of the Geneva Accords and consequent withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, the United States withdrew its support from the Afghan jihadists. 

Similarly, the United States lent its support to the militants during the Libyan and Syrian proxy wars, but after achieving the policy objectives of toppling the Arab nationalist Gaddafi regime in Libya and weakening the anti-Israel Assad regime in Syria, the United States relinquished its blanket support to the militants and eventually declared a war against a faction of Sunni militants battling the Syrian government, the Islamic State, when the latter transgressed its mandate in Syria and dared to occupy Mosul and Anbar in Iraq in June 2014 from where the US had withdrawn its troops only a couple of years ago in December 2011. 

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Is the Purge of Independent Media a Coordinated Attack by the Military Industrial Complex?

Victims of Facebook’s most recent purge should not forget the connections between the social media giant and the Western Military-Industrial Complex.

On Thursday, Facebook announced they were unpublishing, or purging, over 500 pages and 200 accounts who are accused of spreading political spam. Several of these pages and writers were also removed from Twitter on the same day.

“Today, we’re removing 559 Pages and 251 accounts that have consistently broken our rules against spam and coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Facebook stated in a blog post. Facebook states that the people behind this alleged spam “create networks of Pages using fake accounts or multiple accounts with the same names” and “post the same clickbait posts in dozens of Facebook Groups.”

Essentially, Facebook is accusing these pages of writing articles related to politics and then using the social media platform to…. post the articles in as many places as possible to reach as many people as possible. Hardly dangerous or scary stuff. However, these actions are in violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service. Facebook also accused the pages and accounts of using their fake accounts to generate fake likes and shares which may artificially inflate their reach and mislead people about their popularity. According to Facebook, “This activity goes against what people expect on Facebook, and it violates our policies against spam.”

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