The Role of the CIA and Military Intelligence in Crafting the Covid19 Narrative

In his last two chapters of The Real Anthony Fauci, Kennedy reveals how the CIA and military intelligence collaborated with Gates, Fauci and Big Pharma to meticulously craft the rollout of wall-to-wall propaganda that would ensure blind public obedience to totalitarian Covid19 measures in the vast majority of industrialized countries. They seem to have done so openly through 1) a series of pandemic war games starting in 1999 [1] and 2) a series of phony pandemics starting in 2003.[2]

The scenario planning war games were based largely on CIA psychological warfare manuals. In fact, the CIA itself launched Argus (under USAID [3] cover) in 2004 for the alleged purpose of 1) detecting foreign biological warfare events, 2) assessing millions of pieces of social behavior daily and 3) training officials in “pandemic preparedness.”

The SPARS scenario planning operation in October 2017 is especially noteworthy given that participants rehearsed the roll out of the exact same policies and narratives they would roll out for real in March 2020.  Fortunately one of pandemic scenario planners’ was dead wrong: that it would take populations more than 10 years to organize mass rebellion against the new tyranny and authoritarian clampdowns.

Specific skills elite planners were taught during the SPARS war games included

• Deflecting “nuisance” groups accusing the CDC of exaggerating death rates and the FDA inadequately testing the “SPARS” vaccine [4] and/or presenting scientific data showing “SPARS” to be no more lethal than seasonal flu.[5]
• Fear-driven propaganda techniques to induce unquestioning public obedience.

Chapters 11 and 12 also explore how US intelligence aided and abetted (beginning in the 1980s) Fauci’s aggressive drive to develop new vaccines as a cover for illegal US biological warfare research. They also carefully document Fauci’s involvement in gain-of-function biological warfare experiments in Wuhan, circumventing Obama’s 2014 law prohibiting biological warfare research in the US.

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[1] Which explains why nearly all developed countries were all in lockstep in enacting economically devastating (and scientifically unproven) lockdowns and other restrictive measures. List of health emergency scenario planning war games:

• 1999 Health and Human Services smallpox simulation – focused mainly on techniques for imposing mass obedience on global populations.
• 2000-2007 TOPOFF – four TOPOFF (Top Official) exercises mobilizing DOJ, FBI, and FEMA to stage fictitious chemical and bioweapons attacks on specific US cities.
• June 22-23 2001 Operation Dark Winter Andrews Air Force Base (nearly 3 months before 9/11 and the Antrhax letters) – sponsored by US intelligence in collaboration with Rockefeller Foundation and Big Pharma. Based on totally faulty assumptions about smallpox transmission and lethality, focused mainly on the quandary of how to impose mass obedience during public health emergencies.
• January 2003, January 2005 Atlantic Storm Summit: assembled 205 US and Europe military, intelligence and public health officials to agree on militarized strategies for public health emergencies, including police state controls, mass propaganda and censorship, and the suspension of civil rights and due process rulemaking in favor of healthy authority diktats, all aimed at coercive vaccination of the population.
• Sept 8-10 2003 Global Mercury – collaboration between CDC, the NIH,
  the FDA, the WHO, and the State Department. Over a fifty-six-hour
  period, public health technocrats coordinated communications and lockstep
  response between “trusted agents” from the GHSAG nations (the United
  States, the UK, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and Mexico), during
  a simulated outbreak caused by self-inoculated terrorists spreading smallpox to
  globally.
• May 2017 MARS Joint Exercise Scenario – all G20 health ministries assembled in  Berlin to participate in a Joint Exercise Scenario (together with Gates Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, World Bank, WHO and Rockefeller Foundation, the World Bank, the WHO, and the Robert Koch Institute).
• October 2017 SPARS Pandemic Joint Exercise Scenario at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security (the global) – participants (including Gates Foundation, NIAID, NIH, In-Q-Tel (the CIA’s for-profit arm), chronicled an imaginary coronavirus pandemic that would, supposedly, run from 2025 to 2028  The official 89-page
  summary is an uncanny month-by-month prediction of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic as it actually unfolded.
• May 15 2018 Clad X pandemic/biowarfare preparation exercise – daylong event responding to fictitious bioengineered pathogen for which there is no
  vaccine.
• Jan-Aug 2019 Crimson Contagion Exercise – under enforced secrecy, nationwide exercise involved 19 federal departments and agencies, 12 key states, 15 tribal nations and pueblos, 74 local health department and coalition regions, 87 hospitals, and over 100 healthcare and public health private sector partners to address H7N9, a “novel influenza” pandemic originating in
  China and rapidly spread by air travel.
• Oct 2019 Event 201 (3 weeks after US intelligence agencies believe Covid19 began circulating in Wuhan) – yet another training and signaling exercise (organized personally by Gates) involving four “tabletop” simulations of a worldwide coronavirus pandemic. Participants included a group of high-ranking
  officials from World Bank, World Economic Forum, Bloomberg/Johns Hopkins University Populations Center, CDC, mainstream media giants, Chinese government, a former CIA/NSA director, Johnson & Johnson, finance and biosecurity industry executives, and the president of Edelman, the world’s leading corporate PR firm. Exercise included drills in psychological warfare techniques for controlling official narratives, silencing dissent, forcibly masking large populations, promoting mandatory mass vaccinations and imposing draconian restrictions curtailing constitutionally protected civil rights.

[2] Phony pandemics:

• 1976 Swine Flu – declared after one soldier died of a lung ailment following Fort Dix forced march. After CDC identified the malady as a swine flu, NIAID and the CDC spread terror of a catastrophic pandemic to stimulate public demand for a vaccine (which was withdrawn after killing 55 people).
• 2002-2004 SARS – declared a global pandemic despite killing only 800 people over three years.
• 2009 Hong Kong Swine Flu – after WHO detected some excess cases of seasonal flu, symptoms were mild and death rates very low—fewer than 145
  people globally over eight weeks – they held secret meetings to declare a global pandemic and executed agreements obligating signatory nations (including Germany, Great Britain, Italy, and France) to purchase 18 billion dollars of experimental, untested, fast-tracked, zero-liability H1N1 flu vaccines
• March 2016 Zika Virus – Although Zika has no record of causing microcephly, Fauci once again misled the public into believing it was causing an epidemic of microcephaly among newborn Brazilian babies and shook down Congress for $2 billion for vaccine to prevent Americans from catching it. It’s now believed Brazilian cases stemmed from heavy pesticide use.
• 2016 Dengue Fever – after a decade promoting the risks of a global Dengue fever pandemic, Gates and Fauci pressured WHO to recommend an insufficiently tested Dengue vaccine. The Philippines, the second country after Mexico to approve Dengvaxia, ultimately charged fourteen Philippines officials and six Sanofi executives with criminal homicide after 600 of the 800,000 children it inoculated died.

[3] The US Agency for International Development (USAID) was formed in 1961 to provide a cover for illegal CIA activities under the pretext of helping the third world.

[4] Several pandemic scenario planning exercises specifically predict waves of severe vaccine-linked neurological.

[5] Specific psyops techniques proposed by planners included repeating case and death counts, training public health communicators to deny vaccine side effects,  publicly shaming the vaccine hesitant as anti-science and unpatriotic, flooding the airwaves with good news about vaccine successes and enlisting trusted community leaders to respond to dismiss data as “conspiracy theory” and repeatedly recite the “safe and effective” mantra.

Just to let people know I’m moving to Substack and Telegram after several readers informed me I’ve been censored from WordPress Reader feed. The link to my Substack account is https://stuartbramhall.substack.com/. The link to my Telegram channel is https://t.me/themostrevolutionaryact I’ll continue to publish on WordPress as long as I’m able, but if my blog suddenly disappears you’ll know where to find me.

The 2013 CIA Coup in Ukraine

Ukraine on Fire

Directed by Igor Lopotanok (2016)

Film Review

This documentary explores the 2013 US color revolution in Ukraine that led to the replacement of Ukraine’s democratically elected government with a coalition of neo-Nazi groups covertly supported CIA-funded foundations. Late investigative journalist Robert Parry appears in the film to describe his investigations into the role of the US Embassy; CIA-funded foundations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID); George Soros’s Renaissance Foundation and the Dutch Embassy.

The film begins by exploring Hitler’s invasion of Ukraine in 1941. Western Ukraine welcomed the Nazis, as this liberated them from Soviet occupation. The OSS (which became the CIA in 1947) protected Ukraine’s Nazis (who had participated in genocidal terrorism against neighboring Poles and Ukrainian Jews) to ensure they never stood trial for war crimes at Nuremberg.

In 1989, as the Soviet Union began to disintegrate, Ukrainian fascists the CIA had incubated formed the Ukrainian nationalist neo-Nazi group Svoboda. In 1994, three years after Ukraine declared independence, others would form the far right paramilitary organization Tryzub.

These and other US-funded groups were extremely instrumental in Ukraine’s first color revolution in 2005. The “Orange Revolution,” as it was known, displayed the same characteristic hallmarks as CIA-inspired “color revolutions” (eg coups) in Yemen, Syria, Libya, Georgia, Lebanon and elsewhere.

2013 witnessed a a similar color revolution after Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych rejected a pending EU association agreement.* When Yanukovych turned to Russia instead for financial support, the US-backed fascist groups began a campaign of “peaceful protests” in Kiev’s Maidan. As happens with many US-sponsored color revolutions, fascist and neo-Nazi instigators quickly escalated their nonviolent protests into violent attacks against police and government officials with rocks, bats, metal bars, Molotov cocktails and bulldozers.

With the help of three EU leaders, government officials negotiated a truce with opposition leaders, which the violent protestors refused to to honor. After being informed by Ukrainian intelligence that mercenaries had been hired to assassinate him, Yanukovich sought asylum in Russia. Violent protestors immediately occupied Yanukovich’s home and public office.

Although a parliamentary proposal to remove Yanukovich from the presidency lost by 68 votes, the US immediately recognized the head of the Ukrainian parliament as the new president.

A leaked phone conversation between Victoria Nuland, the lead US diplomat during the Ukraine crisis, confirms direct US involvement in the 2014 coup. During the call, Nuland is heard instructing coup leaders on US choices to form the new government.

This documentary also refutes the widespread MSM myth concerning a Russian invasion** of Crimea that never occurred. Concerned the US would organize a similar coup in the province of Crimea, the predominantly Russian-speaking residents of Crimea seized the Crimean Parliament in on February 27, 2014. On March 17, they organized a popular referendum in which 96.77% of voters (with 90% turnout) opted to leave Ukraine and request reunification with the Russian Federation.*

Russian-speaking residents of the western provinces of Luhansk and Donestsk also seized the government buildings in both provinces and declared the entire region as the People’s Republic of Donetsk. The military conflict between the Republic of Donetsk, which receives military and humanitarian support from Russia, is ongoing.

For me, the most interesting part of the film is Oliver Stone’s interview with Vladimir Putin.

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*Yanukovych worried that punitive IMF loans required to implement the agreement would destroy Ukraine’s economy.

**In 1954, Ukrainian native Nikita Khrushchev transferred governance of Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. Following the Soviet collapse, Russian maintained (via a treaty with Ukraine) a military force of 2,000 troops in Crimea following Ukrainian independence, largely to protect the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol.

Did John Dean Instigate the Watergate Coup?

Watergate Chapter 4

The History Channel (20160

Film Review

In this episode, the History Channel replays video footage of John Dean testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee. There is also a clear attempt to elicit sympathy for Dean as the inexperienced dupe of Nixon. I don’t buy it. Neither does Russ Baker in his 2009 Family of Secrets (see Was Nixon Set Up?).

In “Chapter 11 Downing Nixon Part II The Execution,” he reveals (based on range of resources, including unclassified documents, first hand accounts of White House staff and congressional records) that it was Dean who instigated and engineered both the Watergate break-in and cover-up (as Nixon claimed at the time): 

• In November 1971, it was Dean who recruited two private eyes to do a “walk-through” of Watergate.
• It was Dean who ordered Jeb Magruder (deputy director of the Committee to Reelect the President) to ask CIA asset and Watergate burglar Gordon Liddy: “Do you think you can get into Watergate?”
• It was Dean who paid hush money to CIA assets and Watergate burglars as part of the coverup.

After Dean spends two days reading his 245-page testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Nixon issues a statement accusing Dean of orchestrating the coverup without the knowledge of his superiors. Although no one believed him at the time, he seems to have been telling the truth.

After Dean, Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman and White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman are summoned to testify, White House aide (and CIA asset, according to Baker) Alexander Butterfield reveals that Nixon records all Oval Office conversations. A week later, Judge Sirica (responsible for advising the grand jury, Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox and the Senate Judiciary Committee) orders the White House to turn over the tapes.

Nixon, following the precedent set by both Truman and Eisenhower, declines, citing executive privilege.

Meanwhile Vice President Spiro Agnew is charged with for accepting bribes as governor of Maryland, the Yum Kippur War breaks out in the Middle East and in October 1973 the oil-producing Arab countries declare an oil embargo against all western countries supplying military aid to Israel.

On October 30, 1973, the House begins impeachment hearings against Nixon.

The film can be viewed free on Kanopy

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/watergate-0

Watergate: The Oval Office Tapes

Watergate Chapter 3

The History Channel (2016)

Film Review

Chapter 3 mainly concerns the discovery of the Oval Office tapes. For me the most interesting section concerns the conflict between Nixon and his legal counsel John Dean over whether to cooperate with the Senate Judiciary Committee. According to the tapes, in March 1973 Nixon ordered Dean to issue a statement expressing the White House’s general willingness to cooperate in any investigation. Dean never did so. Instead (according to subsequent tapes), Dean advises him not to cooperate by claiming executive immunity.

By the spring of 1973, six defendants had been sentenced in the Watergate burglaries and Watergate hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee are about to begin. Around the same time former CIA operative and Watergate burglar James McCord begins testifying to the grand jury about the White House staff who orchestrated the break-in.

By mid-1973, new scandals linking Watergate to the White House are breaking daily. John Dean hires a criminal lawyer and begins negotiations with the Senate Committee to trade testimony about White House involvement in the break-in and coverup for immunity from prosecution.

Nixon accepts the resignation of John Ehrlichman and Robert Haldeman, as their staff are heavily implicated in the cover-up. He simultaneously fires Dean, Attorney General Gordon Kleindienst and FBI Director L Patrick Gray.

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*Driven mainly by paranoia, Nixon recorded all his Oval Office conversations for most of his presidency.

**Gray was the first FBI director after Hoover’s mysterious death a month before Watergate. See http://www.maebrussell.com/Mae%20Brussell%20Articles/Watergate%20Deaths.html

This film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/watergate-0

 

Watergate: Was Nixon Set Up?

Watergate – Chapter 1

The History Channel (2016)

Film Review

While this six-part series is rich in intriguing detail, people need to be aware it ignores extensive evidence Russ Baker compiled for his 2009 book Family of Secrets. In the later, Baker concluded Nixon was the victim, not the perpetrator, of Watergate. In other words, Watergate (like the JFK assassination) was a coup to remove a democratically elected president from power. *

Chapter 1 starts with background about Nixon’s initial escalation of the Vietnam War, via secret (and illegal) bombings of Laos and Cambodia.

It also plays excerpts of the infamous White House tapes** revealing Nixon was extremely paranoid, particularly of the CIA. With good reason. As Baker reveals in “Chapter 10 Downing Nixon” in Family of Secrets, Nixon had been at war with the CIA ever since his 1969 inauguration. This was mainly due to his demand that they provide him classified records of their role in the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, the assassination of South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in November 1963 and the CIA overthrow of the elected government of the Dominican Republic in 1954. (The History Channel documentary “Watergate” reveals none of this.)

Nixon feared (with good reason) he could become a CIA target like Kennedy and strongly suspected the CIA had infiltrated both his White House staff and re-election committee. Baker provides extensive evidence Nixon’s legal counsel John Dean,*** deputy assistant to the president Alexander Butterfield and deputy director of the Committee to Re-Elect the President Jeb Magruder all helped end the Nixon presidency by orchestrating both the Watergate scandal and the coverup that ensued.

The best part of Chapter 1 is when the History Channel pays excerpts of the Nixon tapes where he expresses his belief the CIA orchestrated the Watergate break-in*** and Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman asserts the FBI also believes the CIA is behind the burglary. However the filmmakers neglect to link these statements to orders Nixon later gives for the CIA (given their responsibility for the operation) to instruct the FBI to shut down their investigation. Without this context, this documentary makes it look like Nixon is guilty of obstruction of justice.

Although this episode notes that this was the second time (CIA) “plumbers” had broken into the Democratic headquarters, it passes over the distinct difference between the two events. With the first (a May 28, 1972 clandestine operation to bug the telephones), the “burglars” left no trace of their illegal entry. With the second (three weeks later), the intruders pried the door open with a crowbar, smashed windows and vandalized the office. It’s Baker’s belief they did so to make sure to generate a burglary report, which would bring the incident to court and ultimately to public view.

The film also conveniently overlooks the point Baker makes in his book: once left-wing peace candidate George McGovern became the Democratic front runner, Nixon faced an easy victory (he went on to win all but one state) and there was no rationale for his re-election committee to organize a break-in to Democratic headquarters.

This sanitized Watergate series also neglects to mention Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward’s**** historic links to the CIA through his work in Naval Intelligence.

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*Baker cites three books (each relying on very different facts and sources) that support this assertion:  Jim Hougan’s 1984 Secret Agenda, the 1991 Silent Coup by Len Colodny and Robert Gettlin and James Rosen’s 2008 The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate.

**Baker indicates that Cold War hawks in the CIA were angry about Nixon’s efforts to improve relations with the Soviet Union and China. Ironically towards the end of his presidency, Nixon was fighting with the same special interests (independent oil barons) as JFK over the same issue (the oil depletion allowance). In 1973, Nixon’s Justice Department was investigating close friends and associates of George Bush Senior (who Baker suspects of helping to orchestrate the Watergate scandal) for antitrust violations.

***According to Baker, Nixon recognized the name of some of the so-called “burglars” owing to their involvement in the CIA-orchestrated 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

****The Woodward-Bernstein series on the Watergate break-ins was essential in mobilizing public pressure for both a grand jury and a congressional investigation.

The series can be viewed free on Kanopy

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/watergate-0

Suppressed Film: 1972 Free the Army Tour

F.T.A.*

Directed by Francine Parker (1972)

Film Review

This is a long suppressed documentary about tours conducted by Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Soul and R&B artist Swamp Dog and other anti-war actors and musicians during the early 1970s. The brainchild of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, tours featured songs and skits from newsletters published by serving GIs. They were performed outside military bases in Hawaii, the Philippines, Okinawa and mainland Japan, the main staging areas for troops bound for Vietnam. It was enormously popular with troops.

Skits songs that were especially popular concerned “fragging”* and other forms of non-cooperation with officers, the Black Convention movement that formed among African American GIs, narcotics smuggling by the CIA and South Vietnamese Army and the blatantly sexist treatment of female recruits.

The film intersperses actual footage of tours with GI interviews at each of the bases. The majority of interviewees have been deeply politicized by their Vietnam experiences. The film also backgrounds the long time US occupation of the island of Okinawa. During their stay in Okinawa, tour members participate in a picket of striking Okinawa workers employed at the US military base. At the time, their average pay was less than a dollar a day.

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*The title FTA refers to the tour’s theme song “Foxtrot, Tango, Alpha – Free the Army.” “Free the Army” was a euphemism for “Fuck the Army,” a parody on the 1970s Army slogan “Fun, Travel and Adventure.”

**Fragging refers to the deliberate killing or attempted killing of superior officers by the troops serving under them.

The film can be viewed free at Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/fta

Plutocracy V: America’s Brutal Treatment of Its Working Class

Plutocracy V: Subterranean Fire

Directed by Scott Noble (2017)

Film Review

This documentary provides a comprehensive labor history of the United States, involving the most violent history of union repression in the world.

Largely owing to inhuman pay and working conditions, American workers first attempted to organization soon after the birth of large scale industrialization in the US. Prior to the passage of Roosevelt’s National Labor Relations Act, most worker strikes were suppressed violently by the National Guard, the US Army or private armies hired by factory owners.

The initial era of radical unionizing (1870-1914) abated with World War I and brutal government repression via the Red Scare and Palmer Raids. (1) Despite massive profits Wall Street businesses amassed during the so-called “Roaring” Twenties, more than 60% of US families were earning less than $2,000 a year (with $2,500 the minimum income necessary for a family four).

With the 1929 Wall Street crash came the Great Depression. Unemployment surged to 25% and skyrocketing poverty led to a resurgence in union organizing and strikes. Pay cuts and worsening working conditions would give rise to the “sit down” strike, in which striking workers occupied their factories. Loathe to damage their valuable machinery, employers refrained from launching violent attacks on sit down strikes. In this way workers at many companies (including GM, Chrysler and Ford) won the right to form unions.

In 1935, John L Lewis formed the Congress of Industrial Organization (CIO), which unlike the American Federation Labor (which only represented skilled workers), represented all industrial workers regardless of sex, race or national origin.

The same year Roosevelt, courting the union vote in the 1936 election, introduced the National Labor Relations Act. The Act gave all Americans (except for domestic and agricultural workers) the right to unionize.

A typical politician, following reelection, Roosevelt ordered the FBI to “monitor” radical unions and other groups, including the CIO, United Auto Workers, United Mine Workers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples (NAACP).

With the approach of World War II, federal forces of repression overtly suppressed union organizing, via the Smith Act (2), and the formation (in 1938) of the House on Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). In 1939, the US Supreme Court would declare sit-down strikes illegal.

Following World War II, the 1947 Taft Hartley Act (4) would deal the single biggest blow to trade unionism in the US. This law. combined with fanatical anti-communist hysteria promoted by HUAC (3), the CIA, the US State Department and the mainstream media would lead to top down trade union organizing that discouraged strike action in favor of a bloated trade union bureaucracy and sweetheart (5) deals with management.

The end result would be one of the lowest levels of union representation in the developed world.

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(1) The Red Scare was a campaign of anti-radical hysteria launched under Woodrow Wilson. Its goal was to promote the irrational fear that a Bolshevik revolution was imminent in the US. The Palmer Raids were a series of raids the Wilson administration conducted between November 1919 and January 1920 under to arrest suspected leftists, mostly Italian immigrants and Eastern European immigrants, and deport them (without trial).

(2) Passed in 1940, the Smith Act set down criminal penalties for advocating the overthrow of the US government. The Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional (for violating the First Amendment) in 1957.

(3) The Taft Hartley Act banned wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, closed shops, union donations for political purposes and the election of communists and other radicals to union leadership. It also permitted states to pass Right To Work laws (under right to laws, there is a ban on union contracts forcing non-union members to contribute to the costs of union representation).

(4) Although Hollywood celebrities received the most publicity when they were subpoenaed for being suspected communists, most of the individuals summoned before HUAC were union organizers.

(5) A sweetheart contract is a contractual agreement inappropriately advantages some parties over others. The term was coined in the 1940s to describe corrupt labor contracts unduly favorable to the employer. They usually involved some kind of kickback or special treatment for the labor negotiator.

 

Why Billionaire Peter Thiel Opposes Direct Democracy

David Graeber vs Peter Thiel: Where Did the Future Go?

The Baffler Magazine (2020)

Film Review

This documentary is a very odd debate between billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel* and the late anarchist David Graeber. For me, the body language says it all. Thiel, who describes himself as a libertarian, is very tense and doesn’t smile once. .

The two of them debate the following three questions:

1. What’s the matter with America?
2. What does technology have to do with it? and
3. What happened to the future?

Graeber starts, giving many examples of technological innovation (eg aeronautics, medicine, renewable energy) which entered slow stagnation after the 1970s. He blames this decline in innovation on the “financialization” of the global economy (ie corporations becoming more interested in selling financial products than manufactured goods).

In his view, the total domination of the global economy by mega monopolies obsessed with “rent extraction”** has left the world’s creative thinkers “out in the cold.”

Both men agree that the US political system can’t be reformed. However Thiel maintains that billionaire-financed start-ups are a better approach to reform than grassroots movements. He opposes direct democracy because systems that allow too many people input means you spend all your time talking and nothing happens.

He also disagrees with Graeber’s assertion that changing the way money is created (ie ending the creation of 98% of our money by private banks) could unleash creativity, by providing a means (eg Unconditional Basic Income) for artists, musicians and inventors to be paid for their work.

The best part of the debate is when the moderator asks Thiel about the role his company Pallantir plays in assisting the CIA, the military and JP Morgan in spying on Americans. Thiel maintains he’s facilitating in important work, namely because US intelligence failed to predict and prevent the 9-11 attacks.

Graeber blames the failure on the CIA and FBI becoming too preoccupied with spying on people like him.

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*Peter Thiel, cofounder of PayPal and surveillance software giant Palantir (which helps the NSA and CIA spy on us), was secretly granted New Zealand citizenship, despite failing to meet the 5-year residency requirement in 2011: Revealed How Peter Thiel Got New Zealand Citizenship

**Rent seeking and rent extraction describe a process that occurs when wealthy members of society seek to gain added wealth without any reciprocal contribution of productivity

 

 

 

 

 

The Cultural Roots of Brexit and Make America Great Again

I Can’t Get You Out of My Head

Part 5 The Lordly Ones

Directed by Adam Curtis (2021)

Film Review

Part 5 traces the ideological origins of Brexit and Trump’s Make America Great Again campaign.

Curtis maintains the American and British middle class have yet to come to grips with  their unconscious guilt over colonialism and slavery. Instead they paper over these feelings with a nostalgic nationalism harkening back to a mythical past that predates the rise of mass democracy.

In post-World War I Britain, this took the form of heightened interest in rural folk music and dancing (eg Morris Dancing). Examples in the US include the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan following the release of D W Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation. The twentieth century Klan copied the white robes and hoods and cross-burning from Griffith’s film, based on medieval Scottish rituals described in Thomas Dixon Jr’s novel The Clansmen.

Although Britain lost her empire following World War II, British intelligence maintained the appearance of power by creating a magical world in which they could bug, burgle and even assassinate enemies – just as the Empire had done.

Like the UK, the US also uses its spies to maintain the fiction of US supremacy. Since its formation in 1947, the CIA has made 66 attempts to overthrow foreign governments via and/or vote rigging. They were successful in 26 (including Italy, Greece, Syria, Indonesia, Chile and Iran).

Curtis believes this US/British tendency to make real life decisions based on a romanticized past was largely responsible for the debacle in Iraq.

Part 5 also traces how the brutal effects of deindustrialization marginalized nearly the entire working class in both countries. Trump would appeal to these workers by promising to recreate a lost America, just as Brexit promised to restore Britain’s lost greatness by leaving the EU.

The video can’t be embedded because of age restrictions.

https://thoughtmaybe.com/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head/#top

JSOC: America’s Secret Killing Squads

Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield

Directed by Richard Rowley (2013)

Film Review

In this highly troubling documentary (based on Cahill’s book by the same name), investigative journalist Jeremy Cahill describes how he first learned about the Joint Special Operations Campaign (JSOC). He describes in detail how all extrajudicial raids and killings increased substantially under Barack Obama (and Joe Biden, who directed his foreign policy), who used JSOC as their own private assassination squads.

Cahill first crossed paths with JSOC while investigating 2010 night raids killing Afghan civilians in rural areas under Taliban control. He was particularly concerned about a raid that occurred at Gardez, in which a police commander trained by the US and two pregnant women were killed. Surviving families referred to the bearded gunmen (with no apparent link to official US occupying forces) as the American Taliban. The Obama administration totally denied involvement in the Gardez massacre – until a cellphone video surfaced showing bearded English-speaking Americans searching and rearranging the bodies. At this point JSOC admitted responsibility and offered survivors a sacrificial goat as compensation.

During the period Cahill covered Afghanistan, JSOC undertook roughly 1700 night raids a month.

Cahill would go on to investigate similar JSOC night raids in Iraq, as well as illegal US drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen. The latter occurred well before US ally Saudi Arabia declared war on Yemen in 2015. The prominent Yemeni reporter Abdulelah Haider Shaye was arrested and imprisoned for exposing the U.S. cruise missile attack on the Yemeni village of al-Majalah that killed 41 people, including 14 women and 21 children in December 2009. Then Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh announced his intention to pardon Shaye. However he changed his mind after a personal phone call from Obama.

Scahill published a number of articles in the Nation and elsewhere about illegal CIA and special forces activities in Yemen, especially after the father of US citizen Anwar Alawki filed a 2010 lawsuit (with ACLU support) to stop Obama (who had placed him on the kill list) from assassinating him. Despite the suit and the publicity it generated (and a congressional bill seeking to ban extrajudicial assassinations of US citizens), Obama had no qualms about using JSOC to murder Alawki in with a drone strike September 2011 . Two years later, the president would also kill Alawki’s 16 year old son in a drone strike.

For me, the final section of the film was the most interesting. It begins by tracing Alawki’s history as an extremely popular imam in San Diego. Following 9-11, he and hundreds of other US Muslims faced growing harassment and persecution by the US government. In 2006, at the direction of the US government, Yemeni authorities imprisoned Alawki for 1 1/2 years.

Public library patrons can view the full film free at Beamafield.

https://beamafilm-com.eznewplymouth.kotui.org.nz/watch/dirty-wars