Major Major’s father

 

The latest Sagebrush rebels remind me of Major Major’s father, a fictional character in Joseph Heller’s classic novel Catch–22.

“Major Major’s father was a sober God-fearing man whose idea of a good joke was to lie about his age. He was a long-limbed farmer, a God-fearing, freedom-loving, law-abiding rugged individualist who held that federal aid to anyone but farmers was creeping socialism. He advocated thrift and hard work and disapproved of loose women who turned him down. His specialty was alfalfa, and he made a good thing out of not growing any. The government paid him well for every bushel of alfalfa he did not grow. The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce. Major Major’s father worked without rest at not growing alfalfa. On long winter evenings he remained indoors and did not mend harness, and he sprang out of bed at the crack of noon every day just to make certain that the chores would not be done. He invested in land wisely and soon was not growing more alfalfa than any other man in the county. Neighbors sought him out for advice on all subjects, for he had made much money and was therefore wise. “As ye sow, so shall ye reap,” he counseled one and all, and everyone said, “Amen.”

Major Major’s father was an outspoken champion of economy in government, provided it did not interfere with the sacred duty of government to pay farmers as much as they could get for all the alfalfa they produced that no one else wanted or for not producing any alfalfa at all. He was a proud and independent man who was opposed to unemployment insurance and never hesitated to whine, whimper, wheedle and extort for as much as he could get from whomever he could.”

The anti-government protestors occupying Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, are hypocrites, like Major Major’s father. They complain about an oppressive government that takes their taxes and gives it to those people, but they are among the largest beneficiaries of federal programs. This is nothing new. Since reconstruction westerners have claimed the mantel of rugged individualism and cast freed slaves as “takers.”

The modern conservative movement has been a study in marshaling these sentiments. After all, the modern conservative movement is not so much about small government as it is about ensuring government programs only benefit them, and not those people.

Major Major’s father would have understood completely.

 

 

 

 

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Priorities

 

The US is the greatest country the world has ever seen, proclaim our leaders.

It’s getting hard to take these kinds of statements seriously.

In Flint, Michigan we’ve decided that we really don’t give a fuck if the residents have clean water or that their children suffer from lead exposure, and now, Legionnaires disease.

As you might have heard, Michigan’s Republican governor, Rick Snyder, forced out the Flint mayor and installed a hand-picked emergency manager, who then “oversaw the poisoning of the town’s water source as a means to save money.”

This lack of concern about the most vulnerable is just par for the course in the USA. After all, in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash of 2007, we saved bankers rather than homeowners. Since then Americans have suffered a sharp drop in personal wealth. A story at Salon, entitled Myth of the middle class: Most Americans don’t even have $1,000 in savings 0.1% of Americans have as much wealth as the bottom 90%, suggests that the U.S. hardly even has a middle-class anymore.

“More than half of Americans — 56 percent, to be exact — have less than $1,000 combined in their checking and savings accounts, according to a recent survey, Forbes reported.

This is to say, most Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

Furthermore, almost two-thirds of Americans — 63 percent — do not have enough in their savings for an emergency. A substantial majority of Americans would need to borrow money if faced with an unexpected expense.

U.S. politicians frequently rant about supposed “American exceptionalism,” but, compared to other industrialized nations, the U.S. has grossly disproportionate poverty rates.”

However that may be, our government has other priorities. “President Barack Obama’s plans to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal over the next 30 years could cost taxpayers nearly $1 trillion, according to a new study that suggests the project’s long-term price tag will far outpace available Pentagon estimates.”

These are the priorities of a deep state, made up of banks and corporations and a secret government that values war more than people. The deep state is comfortable with a decaying infrastructure here at home. After all, their kids don’t have to worry about filthy water coming out of the taps, and they’re not living paycheck to paycheck. In fact, they have all the money.

“Politicians constantly insist that the U.S. is the putative “leader of the world,” but why does this matter if it does not translate into positive gains for actual working-class citizens? The U.S. may be the most powerful country in the world, economically and militarily speaking, but if this does not bring with it a high standard of living or ensure well-being for citizens, it ultimately does not matter; it simply benefits the rich, and the rich alone.” 

The priorities of the US deep state stand Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs on it’s head, where the basics like food and water and shelter are neglected so the deep state can become self-actualized.

In the homeland there’s the constant reminder that we’re in an endless war against evil terrorists. Yet the last time I checked ISIS, or Al-Qaeda, or whomever, didn’t have a nuclear arsenal.

I’ve said it before and I’m sure I’ll say it again–the war on terror is a hoax, and homeland security is just a cheap Orwellian slogan.

I believe that Orwell would feel perfectly comfortable in our present milieu of endless war.

“The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”

Endless war against Islamic terrorism is the bright shiny object that districts Americans from their banana-republic reality.

I don’t know about you, but I worry a lot more about neoliberal terrorism, where basic public utilities, like water, are seen as profit streams to be tapped into, public-health be damned.

Update:In the midst of growing anger over the poisoning of residents of Flint, Michigan and the exposure of criminal actions by state and local authorities, Governor Rick Snyder gave a State of the State address Tuesday night in which he insisted that neither he nor any other top official should be held accountable.”

 

 

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Monsters Among Us

 

Ever wondered why Hilary Clinton was such a horrible Secretary of State?

Wonder no longer.

Salon has a story out today entitled–E-mails expose close ties between Hillary Clinton and accused war criminal Henry Kissinger: Kissinger met regularly with Secretary Clinton, and applauded her hawkish foreign policy in a handwritten message.”

I mean, what the fuck?

If there were any semblance of justice in the world, Henry K. would have been hauled before a tribunal at the Hague a long time ago. It’s not like everyone doesn’t know that he’s a monster, Jesus, he can’t even travel to certain countries anymore because of fear of arrest.

“The late journalist Christopher Hitchens devoted an entire book to detailing the war crimes overseen by Kissinger, who infamously declared “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”

In “The Trial of Henry Kissinger,” Hitchens argues the former secretary of state should be tried “for war crimes, for crimes against humanity, and for offenses against common or customary or international law, including conspiracy to commit murder, kidnap and torture.”

Hitchens described Kissinger as a master of “depraved realpolitik” with “a callous indifference to human life and human rights,” who was behind U.S.-backed atrocities in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, East Timor, Chile, Bangladesh, Cyprus, Kurdish Iraq, Iran, South Africa, Angola and more.”

The problem with prosecuting Kissinger is that if they prosecute him, where would it end?

Who among American leaders isn’t a war criminal?

Certainly not President Hope and Change.

They say the good die young. Well, Kissinger’s 92, so evil must live forever.

Update: At least monsters eat well.

 

 

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Contradictions

What do secret wars, regime change, spying on Americans, and bailouts for Wall Street have in common?

They’re all policies of the deep state, according to Mike Lofgren, the Republican congressional staffer who wrote the groundbreaking essay Anatomy of a Deep State, and is the author of a new book, entitled DEEP STATE: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government.

This deep state hides in plain sight, says Lofgren, and is made up of the permanent parts of the US government, the military/industrial/complex, as well as Wall Street and Silicon Valley, and is “…a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.”

This unaccountable governing entity exercises more control over the US government than do our elected representatives.

Nevertheless, Lofgren argues that the American deep state contains the seeds of its own demise in that it has cynically stoked anti-intellectual energies as a means of gaining control of the nominal government. “Another problem the Deep State faces, although it is not yet an imminent threat, is the contradiction between the means of its survival and the cultural forces it has either unleashed or played a part in amplifying. At bottom, the military-industrial complex, Silicon Valley, and Wall Street are what Max Weber would have described as components of the process of modernization and rationalization of life: systematizing, quantifying, and bureaucratizing the spheres that they control. They are all dependent on the progress of science and technology…

The cultural forces that help politically sustain both the militaristic and the corporate functions of the Deep State, however, are growing more irrational and anti-science. A military tradition that glories in force and appeals to self-sacrifice is the polar opposite of the Enlightenment heritage of rationality, the search for peace, and a belief in the common destiny of mankind.

A similar paradox is observable in the relations between the business elites and the political movements they have funded. Rich corporations and their executives have spent decades egging on the foot soldiers of the conservative coalition to get the electoral results they desire: low marginal income tax rates on the wealthy, even lower tax rates on capital, and anti-regulatory and antilabor governance. Along with the laissez-faire economic agenda that the oligarchy wants, however, the contemporary conservative coalition has brought a cultural agenda the CEOs may sniff at as retrograde and silly, and that incidentally has the potential to undermine the rationalist foundations of the society they command.”

Lofgren points out that no one has been held accountable for recent catastrophic policy failures, like the invasion of Iraq, and Wall Street crash. Not only have these American elite been given a pass on criminal behavior, but their careers have flourished precisely because they were wrong. They were, however, wrong in a way that benefited their class. “Being in favor of the Iraq War may have been objectively wrong, but it was an astute career move for many government operatives and contractors.”

It’s been pretty obvious that the deep state primarily benefits the 1% at the expense to the rest of us. That’s really the purpose of a deep state, after all–to evade democracy and enable rule by elite.

The deep state should be the story of the 2016 election, but it won’t be.

The only bright spot to this dreary tale of intrigue is that the American deep state appears to be run by the gang that couldn’t shoot straight because of greedy/ideology, where they’re in thrall to ideology and to greed–the spawn of free-market magic thinking and the old-fashioned American desire to make a buck.

Update: Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change.”

 

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Two to Tango

 

We face a perfect storm of corruption in America, where corporations and the government conspire against we the people.

The ongoing campaign to be the next US president is a bright and shiny 2-year reality TV show that changes nothing in this calculation of power. Our all-American, representative democracy is Kabuki to distract the rubes while the looting goes on behind the curtain.

Liberals believe that all problems are caused by  mega-corporations. Likewise, conservatives believe that all problems are the fault of big-government.

The truth is that it takes two to tango. The corrupt, captured government and the mega-corporations are all part of a single malignant, symbiotic relationship.

Rereading Howard Zinn’s, Peoples History of the United States, I was struck by how often in American history there was a similar situation–where government sided with the wealthy and powerful over average Americans. The New Deal really was an aberration in the arc of American history. For the first time, the US government sided (to some degree) with the people rather than the powerful. It’s no wonder that the wealthy owners of our country have been so ferocious in their opposition to the reforms enacted by FDR.

The wealthy, and corporations they own, working through the government they likewise own have won the class war.

They rule America.

Because of this rarely acknowledged reality, there is a lot of unfocused rage out there, represented by the insurgent presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders.

The real goal of any reformer should be to unite these disparate factions.

To alter our present political dynamic we absolutely require a mass movement involving as many Americans as possible. One that operates independently of either political party. For, if there’s one thing that Obama has taught us, it’s this–hope and change enacted by our present system is for suckers.

As always, it’s up to us.

Now get busy. Talk to that crazy uncle that watches Fox News. You might have more in common than you know.

 

 

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Ideology

 

“So when they come with that opinion poll

Yeah, they better not use words like: Ideology...

Or try to tell me ’bout the issues, Ideology…Whose side are you on…”

Our world is ruled by dangerous ideologies.

Most American’s identify Islamic terrorism as the most dangerous ideology facing the world today. They are wrong.

The most destructive ideologies are our own–neoconservatism and neoliberalism.

Ian Welsh identifies the ideology behind neoliberalism. “The 1980s were the “Greed is Good” decade. What followed was the most unequal industrialized society in modern history–but the ideology came first. All inequality is, in part, the result of an ideological push. When we examine societies transitioning to higher inequality, it always includes the creation of an ideology which justifies it.

This is because all power within a human society (not between societies) is ideological at base. It may be enforced by men with weapons, but if those men stopped believing in the justifying ideology, or, in many cases, if most of the subjects stopped believing in it, the inequality would end. Power over people requires power over their imaginations, over what they think is right, their ideas about the natural order, and so on.”

Similarly, neoconservatism is driven by ideology. The small clique of neocons, responsible for millions killed, wounded or displaced, smugly insist that they are spreading democracy and freedom, and that any collateral damage is thebirth pangs of a new Middle East.” 

Paul Craig Roberts examines the end result of these neoconservative foreign policies.“Washington’s impulsive use of power is a danger to America and to the world. Arrogant Washington politicians and crazed neoconservatives are screaming that the US must shoot down Russian aircraft that are operating against the US-supplied forces that have brought death and destruction to Syria, unleashing millions of refugees on Europe, in Washington’s effort to overthrow the Syrian government.”

“Follow the money,” is usually a reliable means of understanding US economic and foreign policies.

Never forget ideology.

 

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Doublethink

 

Doublethink, or the act of ordinary people simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, is an essential means of population control for the U.S. government and corporate media. In this up-meets-down funhouse, destructive economic and foreign policies and narratives go largely unquestioned by the mainstream media and American public.

Michael Hudson’s new book, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroyed the Global Economy, examines how neoliberalism has perverted economic thought into a modern version of Orwellian doublethink.

Today’s vocabulary is what Orwell would call doublethink. If you’re going to call something anti-liberal and against what Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill and other classical economists described as free markets, you pretend to be neoliberal. The focus of Smith, Mill, Quesnay and the whole of 19th-century classical economics was to draw a distinction between productive and unproductive labor – that is, between people who earn wages and profits, and rentiers who, as Mill said, “get rich in their sleep.” That is how he described landowners receiving groundrent. It also describes the financial sector receiving interest and “capital” gains.

Hudson explains how neoliberals have propagated doublethink as means to loot countries and productive businesses, all under the rubric of “freeing the economy from the jack-boot of  oppressive governments”. In a modern development, this economic newspeak has largely replaced force as a means of control. Back in 1973, neoliberal economists from the University of Chicago were required to deploy General Pinochet and the Chilean army against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in order to seize power and carry out a test run of neoliberal orthodoxy.

The first thing the neoliberal Chicago School did when they took over Chile was to close down every economics department in the country except the one they controlled at the Catholic University. They started an assassination program of left wing professors, labor leaders and politicians, and imposed neoliberalism by gunpoint. Their idea is you cannot have anti-labor, deregulated “free markets” stripping away social protections and benefits unless you have totalitarian control. You have to censor any idea that there’s ever been an alternative, by rewriting economic history to deny the progressive tax and regulatory reforms that Smith, Mill, and other classical economists urged to free industrial capitalism from the surviving feudal privileges of landlords and predatory finance.

Today in America there really is no need for such an overt deployment of force. In conjunction with doublethink, advertising, public relation and propaganda suffice to maintain a quiescent population even with an economy whose gains largely go to the financial sector.

About that financial sector, Hudson asks an important question. “If government is not the director and planner of the economy, then who is? It’s the financial sector. It’s Wall Street. So the essence of neoliberalism that you were mentioning before, is indeed a doctrine of central planning. It states that the central planning should be done by Wall Street, by the financial sector.”

And, pray tell, what is the financial sectors objective?

Hudson states plainly that looting is the objective. “The problem is, what is the objective of central planning by Wall Street? It’s not to raise living standards, and it’s not to increase employment. It is to smash and grab. That is the society we’re in now.”

All this present day looting was made possible by the ultimate doublethink Presidential candidate–Barak Obama, with his slogan of hope and change. “He ran as the candidate of Hope and Change, but his real role was to smash hope and prevent change. By keeping the debts in place instead of writing them down as he had promised, he oversaw the wrecking of the American economy.

 The moment he came to power was a critical moment when action was needed. Not only did he not take the right action, he did exactly what Wall Street wanted. In many ways we can look back to 2008 when he was championing the TARP, the bailout, and all the rest of that. None of that would have been possible without Obama. That’s something that Democrats like to avoid in their conversations.

He had done something similar in Chicago, when he worked as a community organizer for the big real estate interests to tear up the poorer neighborhoods where the lower income Blacks lived. His role was to gentrify them and jack up property prices to move in higher-income Blacks. This made billions for the Pritzker family. So Penny Pritzker introduced him to Robert Rubin. Obama evidently promised to let Rubin appoint his cabinet, so they appointed the vicious anti-labor Rahm Emanuel, now Chicago’s mayor, as his Chief of Staff to drive any Democrat to the left of Herbert Hoover out of the party. Obama essentially pushed the Democrats to the right.” 

Maybe Obama’s Presidential Library will have an exhibit on Orwell’s 1984, and the use of doublethink–by the dastardly Republicans against Obama.

Of course.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Factions

 

Seymour Hersh’s new article makes abundantly clear that the American deep state has factions that are vying for supremacy.

“…at some point some other military leaders decided that they couldn’t follow the policy, because it was nonsensical, and did something about it. I don’t think there was any attempt here to undermine the government. I think the attempt of everything that was done by the Joint Chiefs and other members in the military, in terms of trying to do something to—it was really an attempt to change—make a midcourse correction in a policy they saw that was deadly wrong.”

So, the Joint Chiefs are essentially running their own foreign policy because they think that Obama and his group of neocon harpies are fucking things up with their embrace of Sunni terrorism to bring about regime change in Syria? Something like that. President Obama is playing golf in Hawaii and his administration hasn’t commented on the article by Hersh.

And, in the meantime, that Trump fellow keeps raising some very interesting questions. For all the semi-fascist rhetoric coming out of Trump’s pie-hole, there have also been some rather direct attacks against the  economic and foreign policies of the American ruling elite. Trump offended Wall Street with his proposal to end the carried-interest tax loophole. He criticizes the US foreign policy of regime change, and has confounded our lapdog corporate media with his defense of Vladimir Putin–the official villain of Washington.

“We’ve spent $4 trillion trying to topple various people. If we could’ve spent that $4 trillion in the United States to fix our roads, our bridges and all of the other problems—our airports and all of the other problems we’ve had—we would’ve been a lot better off. I can tell you that right now.”

Jesus, sometimes I feel like a Kremlinologist, studying my own country for small signs of significance amidst the cacophony of a reality TV world, because from the vantage point of this interested observer, there appears to be seismic rumblings going on below the tranquil surface of the American republic.

This could get interesting.

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The Shotgun Sings the Song

 

It’s becoming clear just what Margaret Thatcher meant when she told everyone that there was no alternative to neoliberalism.

In an absolutely stunning article, economist Michael Hudson explains how the US is wielding the International Monetary Fund (IMF) as a weapon against Russia and China as part a new Cold War. “In this U.S.-centered worldview, China and Russia loom as the great potential adversaries – defined as independent power centers from the United States as they create the Shanghai Cooperation Organization as an alternative to NATO, and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) as an alternative to the IMF and World Bank tandem.”

The IMF has quietly changed its rules on paying back loans. Ukraine owes $3 billion to Russia, and the note comes due December 20, 2015. Ukraine, the U.S.-backed regime, has announced its intention to default. Normally a country in arrears is not qualified for new loans. U.S. lobbyists have just changed the IMF rules to remove a critical lever on which Russia and other governments use to enforce payment of their loans.

According to Hudson, the underlying motivation for changing the IMF’s rules was, “…the threat that Chinese lending would provide an alternative to IMF loans and its demands for austerity. “IMF-watchers said the fund was originally thinking of ensuring China wouldn’t be able to foil IMF lending to member countries seeking bailouts as Beijing ramped up loans to developing economies around the world.”[6] In short, U.S. strategists have designed a policy to block trade and financial agreements organized outside of U.S. control and that of the IMF and World Bank in which it holds unique veto power.

This is a pretty amazing demonstration of the power the US maintains through its  manipulation of supposedly non-partisan institutions like the IMF. Anyway, Hudson is a better story teller, so I’m going to quote more from his article.

Read the whole thing.

“This is the back story of the U.S. fight to control the rest of the world. Tearing apart the IMF’s rules is only the most recent chapter. The broad drive against Russia, China and their prospective Eurasian allies has deteriorated into tactics without a realistic understanding of how they are bringing about precisely the kind of world they are seeking to prevent – a multilateral world.

Arena by arena, the core values of what used to be American and European social democratic ideology are being uprooted. The Enlightenment’s ideals of secular democracy and the rule of international law applied equally to all nations, classical free market theory (of markets free from unearned income and rent extraction by special vested interests), and public investment in infrastructure to hold down the cost of living and doing business are to be sacrificed to a militant U.S. unilateralism as “the indispensible nation.” Standing above the rule of law and national interests, American neocons proclaim that their nation’s destiny is to wage war to prevent foreign secular democracy from acting in ways other than submission to U.S. diplomacy. In practice, this means favoring special U.S. financial and corporate interests that control American foreign policy.

The upshot – and new basic guideline for IMF lending – is to create a new Iron Curtain splitting the world into pro-U.S. economies going neoliberal, and all other economies, including those seeking to maintain public investment in infrastructure, progressive taxation and what used to be viewed as progressive capitalism.”

And, here we can see the outlines of a new world order–corporate neofeudalism, where the rule of law is for suckers, and there is no alternative.

“They decide and the shotgun sings the song.”

Update: Naked Capitalism is celebrating their 9th birthday. Bravo!

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Rollback

 

The US is waging a novel type of hybrid warfare in a desperate attempt to maintain its hegemony and counter the rise of a multi-polar world led by Russia and China. The war on terror is a hoax, used as a convenient cover story to mask the US’s true intentions.

As I discussed in an earlier post, the return of Russia to the Middle-East with its defense of Syria has meant that the neoconservatives are constrained from outright invasions, like Iraq, and are forced into indirect attacks. This new form of warfare is aimed at removing countries in Russia’s “sphere of influence,” controlling vital resources from North Africa through the Middle East and across Central Asia, establishing military bases wherever necessary, and, most importantly, maintaining the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Andrew Horybko’s book, Hybrid Wars, offers an excellent deconstruction of this new type of warfare. In the case of US foreign policy, a hybrid war is where US intelligence agencies foster civil unrest aimed at regime change within a targeted state/society, which is any country whose leaders choose to support their own citizens’ well-being, independence and quality of life over US transnational corporate interests. The targeted country is attacked economically through sanctions and embargos, politically through propaganda, lies and threats, or militarily, through acts of terrorism, coups and assassinations. Think NGO’s, social media, Color Revolutions, terrorists and Nazi’s

The book focuses on the new strategy of indirect warfare that the US has demonstrated during the Syrian and Ukrainian Crises. Both situations left many wondering whether they were observing the export of Color Revolutions to the Mideast, the arrival of the Arab Spring to Europe, or perhaps some kind of Frankenstein hybrid. It is asserted that when the US’ actions in both countries are objectively compared, one can discern a new patterned approach towards regime change. This model begins by deploying a Color Revolution as a soft coup attempt, only to be followed up by a hard coup Unconventional War if the first plan fails. Unconventional Warfare is defined in this book as any type of nonconventional (i.e. non-official military) force engaged in largely asymmetrical combat against a traditional adversary. Taken together in a two-pronged approach, Color Revolutions and Unconventional Warfare represent the two components that form the theory of Hybrid War, the new method of indirect warfare being waged by the US.

US behavior is a throw back to Cold War doctrine. On one side were US planners who argued for containment, while on the other were the hawks who wanted the Soviets attacked on all fronts as a way to rollback the Iron Curtain.

The policy of rollback is alive and well. Horybko argues that US planners are still seeking to undermine Russia, “Instead of directly confronting the targets on their home turf, proxy conflicts will be waged in their near vicinity in order to destabilize their periphery.”

One of the key elements in hybrid warfare is the media, with its ability to propagandize the masses of an attacked country. These same techniques are imported back to the homeland. The US media is essentially conducting a public diplomacy operation against the American populace, employing advertising, public relations and propaganda. The ease at which they’ve whipped the American populace into a war frenzy over ISIS is a case in point. Even the exposure of the propaganda leading to the invasion of Iraq has not blunted the ability of the corporate media to sell war.

Then, of course, there’s social media.

Horybko, examines how the hybrid warriors utilize this new form of communication. “Nowadays, Google Maps, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter are integral parts of the “armory” that Hybrid Warriors use. Recent news stories suggest that instigating civil unrest and fostering a hive mind in targeted states is the true objective of the US government’s covert involvement in Facebook and other social media networks. Facebook conducted secret psychological experiments on over half a million of its users in order “to study how emotional states are transmitted over the platform. The study was called “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks” and concluded the same, namely that “emotions spread via contagion through a network”, thereby increasing the ability for an intelligence organization to socially engineer a hive mind. In the context of Hybrid War, this is the masses swarming the authorities’ symbolic and administrative centers of power as a unified (if decentralized) whole in order to lead to regime change by mob rule (i.e. organized and directed chaos).

Weaponized chaos is an essential component of hybrid warfare, Horybko writes. “The purpose is to engage in de-facto or de-jure strategic state fracturing to destabilize the Eurasian Great Powers (Russia, China, Iran) and prolong American primacy over the supercontinent.”

This is our American foreign policy. It’s not about keeping the American people safe from terrorism, it’s all about maintaining an empire at any cost. For the American people, there’s not a lot of up-side to these policies. Like our economy, the gains of empire disproportionately go to the 1%.

Sadly to say, I’m not sure the American people are capable of comprehending the enormity of our foreign policies and how dangerous they are.

Here’s Colonel Pat Lang discussing these realities with a neighbor. “A well educated woman neighbor explained to me that the American people lack the “software” in their heads to grasp what is being written here on Sic Semper Tyrannis about the Middle East.  I agree.  Borgist repetitive propaganda has IMO re-structured the collective American brain to such an extent that the truth is for most unfathomable.” 

Update: There’s a textbook example of hybrid warfare being carried out in Montenegro, in real time.

“Since Montenegro had regained its independence the U.S. and the EU have created a multi-layered hierarchical system comprising multiple structures and organizations in order to reshape the public consciousness of Montenegrins and guarantee that the country joins NATO. This sophisticated ‘network of networks’ has engulfed government structures, NGOs and commercial companies working for one purpose. This method proved to be successful in Ukraine, where the U.S. and EU have achieved their goals. As for Montenegro, only time will tell.”

 

 

 

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