Posts that I especially recommend today: Sunday, February 7, 2021

• Electoral Politics Use The Same Containment Strategies As Alzheimer’s Facilities by Caitlin Johnstone, an Australian, from her weblog. I think this article is the best post of all the more than my 10 years of posts. But I can't be sure. I've had a number of insightful posts on my journey to reach the hidden truths about our human existence. My commentary follows: 

Perhaps I was prepared for this article after some related thoughts that infiltrated my consciousness as I was gradually awakening this morning. In any case, this short article contains some fundamental gems of truth that powerfully connects with me, and it has stimulated my thinking with further questions. However, I don't think that this essay is merely about elections. This insight applies to all of the delusions that they impose on us to preserve their power.

To extend the metaphor of this Alzheimer's facility even more, I ask this pregnant question: What if the staff operating that facility are also filled with delusions of power and grandeur? What if their system of capitalism has so concentrated wealth and power in their hands that they see themselves as super-humans, as a species apart from ordinary humans? Then their actions make more sense--at least, to me.

But this is a dangerous thought. Imagine that our masters in the ruling class have in their deluded thinking reached a conclusion that in order to save themselves they must get rid of us untermenschen? They might in this belief decide that we ordinary humans are "useless eaters" and expendable, or worse yet like "communists" or anti-capitalists--class enemies, and kill us all in order to save themselves from the climate crisis, which they have caused, and they know is coming sooner or later. Perhaps the Great Reset is one such delusion.

• American Anosognosia—The Capitol Hill “Insurrection,” BLM/Antifa Riots, And Our National Reality Crisis by John Derbyshire from VDare. My reaction: Simply amazing! The NY Times reflects ruling class views!
  

• Mass Manipulation – How it Works by Robert Cialdini and Peter Koenig from "the Saker Blog".
  

• From “Event 201” to “Cyber Polygon”: The WEF’s Simulation of a Coming “Cyber Pandemic” by Johnny Vedmore and Whitney Webb from Unlimited Hangout. This is a best post. (Note: This report is a result of a prodigious amount of research that has been done by the two authors. They summarize their conclusions, which are the worst imaginable but reasonably possible, in the last 10 paragraphs following the section "Bringing Russia in from the Cold?".) My reaction follows: 

Given the history so far of the rich planners behind the coronavirus pandemic and their statements regarding the Great Reset, I think that a cyber-crime event on some scale is being crafted by at least the people involved in the Great Reset (which consist of the transnational ruling classes behind the US/Anglo/Zionist Empire). They are motivated to create this risky gamble by the following reasons: the basic conflict between capitalism and the stability of the climate, the potential possibilities created by privately-owned high tech corporations in the advances of artificial intelligence, the future of capitalist enterprises using automated technology that obviates the need for most workers, and the difficulties of capitalist financial institutions and the rich ruling classes to maintain their current existence in the face of so many debts.

• The Boiling Frog Effect featuring Dave Cullen, an Irishman, from his Bitchute channel Computing Forever. (Note: This video was banned from YouTube.)
  

• The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows by Glenn Greenwald from his Substack weblog.

• Beware the Information Lockdown by Geoff Shullenberger from The Bellows. 

• The Mainstream Bubble by Ralf Arnold, a German journalist, (translation by S. Robinson) from Off-Guardian (based in Britain).

• Ofcom outrage must be opposed by Hugh Goodacre from CGTN (China Global Television Network--a prominent Chinese TV network). (Note: "Ofcom" is the UK's Office of Communications.)

• Muslims and migrants in Spain: How fake news is keeping minorities sidelined by Inigo Alexander from Middle East Eye (based in London).

• China Detaining Millions of Uyghurs? Serious Problems With Claims by US-Backed NGO and Researcher ‘LED by God’ Against Beijing by Ajit Singh from Anti-Empire. 

Posts I recommend for today: Monday, October 21, 2019

• The Putin-Nazis Are Coming (Again)! by CJ Hopkins from his weblog Consent Factory, Inc. (Hopkins is America's best satirist.)
  

• General strike paralyzes Catalonia as over half-a-million demonstrate in Barcelona by Alejandro López from World Socialist Web Site.

• Kurdistan, imagined by French colonialism by Thierry Meyssan from his weblog Voltaire Network.

• A Panicked Israel Is a Dangerous Israel by Alastair Crooke from Strategic Culture Foundation. 

• Oligarchs Will Crash System to Boot Trump. An online video in an interview with Paul Craig Roberts conducted by Greg Hunter from his weblog USAWatchdog. (Thanks go to an activist for alerting me to this interview.)

• We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe by Joel M. Moskowitz from Scientific American. 

• The Hong Kong protests fit the definition of a fascist movement by Rainer Shea from his weblog. 

Catalan independence forces win majority

Click here to access article by Jack Hazeldine from CounterFire (Britain). 

I'm mainly posting this article as an illustration of leftist journalism that very much annoys me. So much of left journalism functions like a cheerleader to lead a more left crowd in cheering for progressive measures, movements, or entire countries, but sadly often at the expense of reporting the truth regardless of its nature. Hazeldine does get around to reporting the rightward political movement of recent elections in Catalonia, but the headline and the opening paragraphs paint quite another picture. If we are to become truly informed about the ongoing ruling capitalist class war against workers, we desperately need, and require, the truth about events. Here is his first paragraph:

Catalan independence forces have won a 5-seat majority and 47.5% of the vote in Parliament on a 82% turnout and against the full political force of the Spanish state which as tried every tactic they could to delegitimise and destabilise them. Unionist parties garnered 43.5% of the vote.

Only when we read further on down do we become aware that the "Unionist" parties are against Catalonia independence. I guess we should have known by the name alone that this was so, but proper names, such as this capitalized one (it should not have been capitalized because there is no "Unionist" party), can mean anything. So, then, should we conclude that 47.5% versus 43.5% is a smashing victory as suggested by the headline and early paragraphs? Apparently not, because after reading several paragraphs down, we learn that the leftist parties suffered defeats, and there was a decided shift toward the right and centrist parties among the pro-independence voters. 

This reminds me of the elections held during the last days I lived in San Francisco when proponents of a new baseball stadium wanted to build it on a site closer to the downtown area. They kept holding such referendums for voters to decide until they finally got the vote they wanted. Then they went ahead to build the stadium. It looks like the Spanish government is using the same strategy and introducing measures to pressure the voters of Catalonia until they get a vote they want. Hazeldine alludes to pressures, but he doesn't elaborate.

A combination of political pessimism and the pressures of repression brought about a quite inward-looking and closed campaign generally....

A better report is, sad to say, from the NY Times. In this report we learn of the difficulties that separatist leaders confronted in the campaign: one was in prison and the other in exile.

The best report I have read this morning comes from a British Marxist website called In Defense of Marxism in a report entitled "Catalan elections: Rajoy's strategy defeated".

The struggle for a Catalan Republic enters a new stage

Click here to access article by Jorge Martin from In Defense of Marxism.

The proclamation of the Republic by the Catalan Parliament on October 27th was short-lived. The Spanish state was ready to crush it decisively, while the Catalan government had no plans and no strategy to defend it. That, however, is not the end of the movement.

The author uses a class analysis to frame the future of the Catalan movement for independence. He sees an organization the emergence of the Committees for the Defence of the Republic as a constructive step toward a revolutionary movement of the people instead of merely the capitalist class in the Catalan province. (This step reminds one of the broad steps of the 1917 Russian Revolution.) The next official step of the Spanish government will be the holding of elections in Catalonia on December 21. 

Spain imposes military rule in Catalonia to preempt independence bid

Click here to access article by Alex Lantier and Alejandro López from World Socialist Web Site.

The turn to authoritarian rule in Spain is an urgent warning to the working class. Decades of deep austerity, imperialist war and the promotion of law-and-order measures across Europe since the Stalinist dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, and particularly since the 2008 Wall Street crash, have produced a mortal crisis of capitalist rule. With tens of millions of workers unemployed across Europe, the ruling class is aware of explosive social anger. Its response when it encounters opposition is a rapid resort to dictatorial measures.

The critical question today is the mobilization of workers in Catalonia, in Spain and across Europe in struggle against a return to authoritarian forms of rule.  

Spain & the EU’s ‘Oriental despotism’ is legitimizing Catalonia as a leftist cause

Click here to access article by Ramin Mazaheri from A bird's eye view of the Vineyard.

The author. in his analysis of the Catalonia-Madrid standoff, illustrates true leftist thinking at its best in analyzing this issue.

What does it mean to be a true leftist or a true socialist? It means believing thoroughly, genuinely, and completely in DEMOCRACY--the rule of the people, by the people, and for the people. (These exact words were included in the US Declaration of Independence from Britain. The ruling embryonic capitalist class wanted ordinary people to support their drive to separate the American colonies from Britain for the capitalists' benefit. Outside of this context, have you ever heard such words?) If you, because of long years of indoctrination in capitalist controlled schools and following corporate media, can not understand this last sentence, read it over several times until you get it. (It's almost comical the way most people, including authorities, so casually affirm they are for "democracy", but have little idea of what it means.) It means that every institution of society, including especially the economy (socialism), must serve and be controlled by the people--that means ALL of the people.

True, most ordinary people as they are now are not equipped to participate in governing. But this is due to long years of indoctrination in capitalist controlled schools and following corporate media, as a result they are poorly equipped to participate in governing themselves. This is not because they are inherently ignorant and thus they must follow the guidance of "wise" authorities or "experts", it is because they have been dumbed-down and brainwashed because of long years of indoctrination and poor education. (They are primarily excluded from any significant decision-making because they don't control huge amounts of wealth. Occasionally one of the ruling class's "morons" gets elected to office.) This is a major problem for all true leftists or democrats to deal with.

Anyway read the article to see how a genuine democrat, also known as a leftist, analyzes the issue of Catalonian independence.

Living Dangerously in Catalonia

Click here to access article by "Don Quijones" from Rigged Game. ("Don Quijones" is a pseudonym for a Brit who lives with his Mexican wife mostly in Barcelona.)

The province of Catalonia in Spain

This is the best article (together with its linked-to 2013 article by the same author) that I have read about the developing crisis in Barcelona and its province Catalonia. I have read several books (including Orwell's Homage to Catalonia) about the Spanish Civil War that began in 1936, and have wondered if this pivotal historical event were a direct antecedent of the current split between Madrid and Catalonia. Catalonia was the ideological and military center that defended the young, leftist Spanish republic from the attacks of Spanish, German, and Italian fascist armies. (Meanwhile the Western "democracies" stood passively by in neutrality and watched the destruction.) His linked-to article of 2013 affirms that this history has a very strong influence on what is happening today. I strongly encourage you to read it.

In the 2013 article he insightfully writes about the developing hostile relationship between the Spanish government and Catalonia and relates it to the earlier Civil War:

Franco’s dictatorship ended only 38 years ago — a mere blink of the eye in the great scheme of things — and Spain’s “transition” into a full-fledged constitutional democracy remains very much half-finished. Its institutions of democracy and civil society are still precariously young and extremely fragile.

Perhaps most importantly, Spain, as a living, breathing whole, is yet to come to terms with its recent past. The reason for this is simple: In the wake of Franco’s death in 1975, rather than confronting and reconciling themselves to the injustices and horrors perpetrated in his name, most Spanish people, including many on the left, simply swept all memory of them under the rug of collective amnesia.

Instead of confronting the fear and loathing that had built up during 36 years of brutal dictatorship, not to mention three years of bloody civil war, the Spanish people, egged on by the political and business establishment, chose to simply forget.

In today's article he writes about the current situation: 

...while all this frenetic flag buying, selling, waving and draping may be good business for some, it points to a very dark reality for society as a whole: two deeply rooted, diametrically opposed forms of nationalism with a bleak not-so-distant past are on the verge of a head-on clash. And it’s already having devastating effects on the social fabric as communities in Catalonia fracture, families splinter and friendships break apart.

Wall Street and City of London Press Panic Button on Catalonia

Click here to access article by "Don Quijones" from Wolf Street.

The author, who is a British ex-patriot and mostly lives in Spain, gives an excellent report about the financial factors behind the resistance of Western financial centers against the independence movement in Catalonia from Spain. As such the author provides an excellent illustration of the power and influence that major financial centers of Wall Street and the City of London, whose capitalists make up a core part of the ruling classes of the US-led Empire, have on political events in many countries. This is a further illustration of how contemporary capitalists control all major policy decisions both political and economic wherever they hold populations in debt. If this weapon fails to control populations, then the "jackals" are sent in, as John Perkins so well explained in his book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. How did this weapon of debt used by the Empire's ruling class come about?

It developed over many years of capitalist rule whereby the capitalist classes accumulated more and more wealth extracted from exploited worker populations and stole cheap resources from countries they dominated. Think British Empire, the many years of exploitation of workers, the kidnapping of millions of African slaves, think US control over much of Latin America through occasional invasions to remind leaders of US power as well described by Major General Smedley Butler in his book War Is a Racket (1935), WWI, the emergence of US power after WWII, etc. This wealth was accumulated over many years in the Anglo-American empires which developed into today's US-led Empire. Now for anyone or any nation to purchase anything, they usually have to borrow money from a bank. And, now the Empire's capitalist financiers hold nearly everyone and "sovereign" nations in debt, and exercise considerable control over them with these debt obligations always backed by the threat of violence from their police and military. 

The is the inevitable evolution of capitalism into the advanced form we see today all over the Empire.

Fueling Fascism: The Secret History of How Texaco Supplied Oil to Fascists in Spain

Click here if you wish to access the transcript of the 13:20m interview with author, journalist, and lecturer Adam Hochschild from Democracy Now!.

It is very important to realize that Texaco's history of supporting fascist powers in the Spanish Civil War, which extended into WWII, is only one illustration of a number of such corporations that supported fascism. (IT&T, General Motors, Ford are among many others that I immediately recall.) It is very important to obtain a meaningful understanding of this devastating war to see it as a dress rehearsal for WWII. This history has been subject to gross distortions by capitalist historians in an effort to portray it as a kind of folklore for their subjects--ordinary workers and their families--as a contest between us "good guys", the "democratic" powers, against the fascist "bad guys".

The history is much too complicated to review for this blog. Thus I recommend that you read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell and The Spanish Civil War by Paul Preston among others. The important factors in the war were the following: the Soviet revolution of 1917, the anarcho-communists that dominated the defense of the Spanish Republic, and the natural fascist proclivities (see this, this, and this) of the capitalist ruling classes of Western countries.

Orwell and the Spanish Civil War

Click here to access this 53 minute interview with Adam Hochschild from KPFA, a listener sponsored radio station in Berkeley, California, 

This interview is for younger Americans who have no idea what happened in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. This ignorance is no accident because our masters in the One Percent do not want people to know about the dangerous (to them) ideas and practices that emerged during this period in Spain, and because of their embarrassment about the history of all the major capitalist countries of that time in relation to this war: US, Britain, France, Germany, and Italy.

I listened to most of this recording and found that Hochschild's understanding of this war corresponds with my own. There were only a few indications of a liberal bias in the form of references to the "democratic" countries. Both Hochschild and the interviewer, C.S. Soong, made such references to the capitalist fake version of democracy found in US, Britain, and France. Like all liberals, both regard this version of democracy as in a different category from fascism when in reality the latter is simply capitalist class rule without the soft gloves of their fake democratic forms.

The great significance of this event was clearly the revolutionary ideas and practices that the anarchists and other leftists put in practice in this brief period in Spain. They were fundamentally at odds with the entire history of class rule that has plagued societies since the beginning of civilization. Obviously, the directors of capitalist countries, whether fascist or pseudo-democratic, could not let this exist. Meanwhile Russian policies toward Spain, under Stalin's leadership and narrow nationalist perspective, was only looking out for Russian security in the face of the growing fascist threat.

After listening to this, I recommend that you continue your studies of this event by reading George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia.

Freedom or Subjugation: It’s (Not) Your Choice

Click here to access article by Don Quijones from his blog Raging Bull-Shit. (a must-read)

This article is, in my opinion, not important for the conclusion it draws in support of the devolution of nation-states into smaller ones, such as Catalonia or Scotland (the separation of these regions into nation-states will have little benefit to their citizens in a globalized neoliberal world); rather the author provides within his argument some blockbuster revelations that can serve to inform an accurate understanding of power in today's world.  If I am correct, then it is necessary that we study and understand them to enable us to wrest control from capitalist elites who currently rule the world (of humans) and are driving it toward the cliffs of a nuclear holocaust and climate destabilization.

His argument in favor of devolution is frequently espoused by capitalist ideologists ranging from liberal (Sen. Bernie Sanders) to libertarian views (Ron and Rand Paul). They want to re-establish an earlier stage of capitalist development which they tend to idealize either as providing social safety nets for workers (the former) or providing many opportunities for small businessmen (the latter). This is simply not possible. Also, I think that a lot of the strident opposition emanating from Spain and Britain is because of the fact that some influential members of the Empire will lose influence due to the reduction of their fiefdoms within the Empire.

Capitalism is a dynamic process that goes through many stages until in reaches a concentration of wealth/power that characterizes what we see today. It is very much like a cancer in that it starts to feed on a small body part until it reaches a level of power that starts spreading (metastasizing) to all other parts. And, you know the end of this development.

Okay, so you ask: what are these all important revelations referred to above? Most important of all is his citation of a global power study in his link "explosive 2011 Swiss study"; but also to the quoted writings of one of the Empire's chief ideological exponents, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who really understands (and approves) where capitalism is leading societies, and to allegations by a former insider at the World Bank, Karen Hudes.

The Swiss study attempts empirically to unravel the very complex world of capitalist power as exercised by the US-led Empire and therefore requires some level of social research training to fully understand it. Having just perused it, I do not fully understand it, but I understand enough to realize that it is worth much more study. 

The basic concept used to measure power by the researchers was "ownership", a key component of capitalism which can be ascertained by share ownership in economic entities. Using this component they found networks of power, in which a core network consisting of well-known financial institutions the owners of which possess a very high degree of concentrated control over world affairs. This important conclusion lends support to the intuitive understandings of many critics of power in today's world. 

Freedom Or Subjugation? It’s (Not) Your Choice

Click here to access article by Don Quijones from Raging Bull-Shit. 

With each passing day it becomes increasingly clear what this new economic system would look like. As the welfare state continues to disintegrate here in Europe, leaving the vast majority of us to grind out a precarious living in a dog-eat-dog world of hyper consumerism, the mega banks and super corporations are fast erecting the castles, moats and citadels of a neo-feudal global economic order.

While the article provides a good description of the ominous growth of transnational governing agencies in this age of neoliberalism, his focus is limited by a middle-class perspective. This is evident when he justifies his support for political independence for Scotland and Catalonia with this quote attributed to John Raston Saul:

“The question that was never really raised through all of this was that if you’re going to weaken the nation state in the name of economics and you’re happy to get rid of nasty nationalism what about the really important thing — which is that we spent a couple of hundred years creating citizens who are the source of legitimacy for the lives of their nation states."

His lack of a class analysis, and specifically his unconscious middle-class perspective, prohibits him from any understanding of class rule, and hence his understanding of the significance of the neoliberal agenda of a capitalist class that has outgrown the confines of nation-states. The political independence of Scotland and Catalonia will not magically return some limited influence to middle class citizens of these regions as long as their economies are owned and controlled by trans-national elites. And, if the ownership of their regional economies could be magically transferred back to some local citizens, this would do little for working people who are the vast majority.