Tet Offensives, Hungry China and Dumbed Down Americans

Click here to access article by Linh Dinh from OpEdNews. 

After describing the cartoonish nature--due to the influence of the ruling class's ideological institutions--of the views of ordinary Americans regarding history and countries, the author, who has recently returned to his native Vietnam, launches into the real history of China, southeast Asia, and Western countries. He concludes with a most important question that has been on my mind:

Drugged, decadent, easily manipulated, narcissistic and ignorant of history, how will Americans deal with the existential storm awaiting them?

Russian Historiography of the Korean War

Click here to access article by George Burchett, son of renowned independent journalist Wilfred Burchett. (Much of what I learned about the true story of the Vietnam War during that war was furnished by his father, Wilfred Burchett, an Australian independent journalist.)

George, who is an artist living in Hanoi, Vietnam, writes of the massive efforts in the continuing campaign of denial of bacteriological warfare engaged in by the US forces in the Korean War by subsequent propaganda agents of the class that rules the US-led Empire, particularly evidence sourced from supposedly recovered documents from old Soviet files in the 1990s. 

I strongly urge those who are interested in the US use of bio-weapons in the Korean War read a recent book by Dave Chaddock entitled This Must Be the Place (2013) in which he extensively covers the subject from both sides of the controversy and comes to the definite conclusion that the US did indeed use bacteriological weapons in Korea and adjacent areas of China. Chaddock also confirms what George Burchett writes about Unit 731 of the Japanese army headed by General Shiro Ishii in WWII. 

These “former officers” belonged to Unit 731. While many of the worst Japanese war criminals were tried and sentenced to death by a U.S. Military Court in Tokyo, the leader of Unit 731, General Shiro Ishii, and his top aides, were granted immunity and asked to work on the U.S. BW research and development program.

Recommended articles for 2/13/2018

• View these YouTube videos below that portray north and south Korea cordial gatherings in relation to the Winter Olympics in south Korea, and see what is causing fits among the US ruling class that has been promoting conflict between the two sides ever since the actual ceasing of hostilities during the Korean War. This cold war attitude was expressed by Yahoo Corporation in this post, and because of such coverage most uncritically thinking Americans will continue to hate and fear north Korea.  (You may need to wait a little until the videos upload.)

 

• Focus on China: The East is green? by Martin Empson from Socialist Review (Britain). I am offering this post to balance so much of the uncritical coverage in the left websites.

• What U.S. News Reports on Syria’s War Hide by Eric Zuesse from Washington's Blog. Zuesse tells you the straight story regarding US history in Syria, and, in addition, explains how you can critically think about news coverage especially in corporate media.

Billionaires have lots of clout. There’s talk about “manufactured consent,” and this is the way it is “manufactured.” It is manufactured by incessant lying, not only by the Government, but by the press.

A good rule is to distrust everything you read, and to click onto at least a sampling  of its sources and examine them yourself to see whether they support the allegations that they allegedly support; and to evaluate whether those sources are themselves trustworthy — and to ignore any ‘news’ medium that doesn’t link to its sources (doesn’t conveniently let you check out its truth or falsehood), which includes especially TV, radio, and print media. 

‘Lost Connections’ review: the material basis of depression

Click here to access article by Martin Swayne from In Defence of Marxism (British Trotskyist website). 

This is a book review of Lost Connections authored by Johann Hari, a British journalist. His book was obviously inspired by his own experience growing up with depression and being treated by the medical and pharmacological establishments who viewed depression as a chemical imbalance in the brain. This view supported the belief that the favored treatment was to ingest chemicals to restore balance. Hari's journey ended up challenging this belief. This parallels my own journey to unlearn so much of what I was taught growing in a capitalist society to where I am now with this blog challenging such an organization of society as the root cause of so many of the evils we experience everyday of our lives.

The reviewer writes:

It has been proved that depression is, to a significant degree, not a problem of the brain, but of life in general. In that sense, depression is not a mystical and irrational illness. It is a very rational and understandable response to the adverse conditions of capitalist society.

.... To his credit the author names disconnection from meaningful work as cause number one.

Hari finds the second cause to be "disconnection" from society. This flies in the face of capitalist ideology as interpreted by Margaret Thatcher who said "there is no such thing as society". Once again the extreme individualism of capitalist societies create many conditions that end up causing disconnection or isolation from society which often leads to depression.

Under socialism

by cartoonist Stephanie McMillan
 

Recommended articles for 2/12/2018

• Lovefest in Korea Leaves US Regime Fuming by David W. Pear from The Greanville Post.

• How The Establishment [capitalist ruling class's] Propaganda Machine Gaslights Us Into Submission by Caitlin Johnstone from ConsortiumNews.

• Lifting of US Propaganda Ban Gives New Meaning to Old Song by Whitney Webb from Mint Press News.

The war against our minds sponsored by the ruling class of the US Empire

by Ron Horn, administrator of this website.

Over the past decade I've witnessed with increasing alarm the use of carefully crafted capitalist propaganda the intent of which is to fill our minds with rubbish about the motivations of the US Empire to garner our support for their interests of profit and power. With the ruling class's history of increasingly fake news that really took off with the assassinations of prominent political figures, JF Kennedy, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and the official narrative about 9/11 which represented a coverup of their major false-flag crime, we are now seeing a daily dose of this sort of material as well as efforts to prevent access to alternative sources of information. 

What is startling clear to those of us who pay attention is that the ruling class are smearing, and preventing access to, alternative sources of information regarding the activities of their government. For example, compare two different posts on YouTube: one uploaded by a Russian news and analysis network, RT, and a second post regarding an organization sponsored by governments associated with the US Empire and developed by Netflix, a major US media corporation. Did you notice that the RT post on YouTube added the statement, "RT is funded in whole or in part by the Russian government", but the second Netflix post omitted any reference to the funding of the White Helmets organization? 1984 has arrived--a little late--but it has arrived in full bloom. What is so sad is that most Americans are completely unaware of this. 

Rebel Without a Clue: Autonomy and Authority in the American Public School

Click here to access article by Susan Cain and Mark Mason from Dissident Post. (This is a guest post by Caren Black, an engaged activist, whose career spans three decades as a teacher and administrator in private and public schools as well as business, Caren Black has taught eight grade levels and served as assistant principal and principal for middle schools in the public school system.)

Muda by Design

The Japanese term, "muda", which means waste, breakdown, failure, planned obsolescence, all familiar components of capitalism’s sales structure, extend to the much misunderstood American public school system. Here is an excerpt from my book Get Over It!  Education Reform Is Dead. Now What? that describes my view regarding this concept:

 A concept introduced by Toyota Production System creator, Taiichi Ohno, and defined as “any human activity which absorbs resources but creates no value” muda is, quite simply, waste….

In education, of course, waste takes human form:  students we cannot or do not serve, people who get excluded from societal roles because they are too slow, too kinesthetic, too bright, too poor, too abused or too non-white to pass easily along our lock-stepped graded conveyor belt. As in any assembly line, we still reject those who don’t come out in standardized form.  When our system was designed, dropouts could still make their way in the world quite successfully.  Today, that is no longer true. The human cost of the rejection from our educational assembly line is high. Where do we think kids go when the system rejects them?  How does our rejecting kids pollute our communities?

“I want that kid out of my class!” Out of the school, off the planet, far away. “He’s disruptive! He’s defiant! He’s behind! He doesn’t do any work! I can’t teach with him in here! The class is fine when he’s gone!” It’s all true and it’s definitely a problem.  He is a problem.  For him, life is a problem.  He needs an attitude adjustment.  He’s got some learning difficulties.  His mother was (pick a couple):

1. drinking
2. snorting
3. not eating
4. without medical care
5. being beaten
6. uneducated when she was carrying him fifteen years ago.

He’s either hyper or asleep (meaning he does ecstasy weekly at raves). He’s in a crew or being jumped into a gang. Maybe he’s already in a gang.  He reads English at a third grade level and doesn’t know his multiplication tables.  We want him out of the classroom. (Yes, but to where?) He can’t sit quietly at a desk for 45 minutes and take notes on what we tell him were the causes of the Civil War without bothering other students or interrupting us.

We’re covering curriculum.  Of course he’s disruptive! Of course he’s defiant!  But do we really want him on the streets with nothing to do all day except hang around outside our houses?  Are we really ready to consign him to jail at 14?  That’s where he’s headed.  Does it seem so farfetched to create alternative educational systems designs that might better address the needs of non-standardized students like him?  Still not convinced?  Let’s give him a face….

My colleague Wes Beach described its effect on students from a different capitalist class in his book Forging Paths:  Beyond Traditional Schooling:

Compulsory education is based on compulsion. Compulsion requires power over students and control of them. Power and control often become the chief concerns.

School officials were…incapable of understanding, or unwilling to acknowledge that they understood, the fact that there are many perfectly legitimate and real reasons why some kids hate school.

Many students find no challenging material to study; they are capable of working at a much higher level than the curriculum allows. Their interests are not addressed; the academic curriculum in traditional high schools has little to offer someone who wants to be, or already is, a photographer, dancer, auto mechanic, or makeup artist. They do not like the social environment; they want to talk about topics beyond the latest clothing fad or the next party, football game, or sexual encounter. They find their teachers disinterested and sometimes incompetent. They find the environment oppressive and limiting, determining not only what they study but also when they can go to the bathroom or chew gum. They hate being controlled at every turn. They don’t like being on leashes held by administrators, counselors, and teachers. They resent it when their talents and goals are not respected. While this kind of rigid structure may work well for some students, this determination should still be made by the student with his or her parents.

Complaining about the public school system is a popular pastime while “reforming” it is a pundit’s playground, but few writers have actually taught in one or served in administration and fewer still have tried to effect change from within the system -- as both educator Wes Beach and I have, in addition to establishing independent schools of our own and working with two different groups of students, from two different classes of society, who did not “fit in”. This article captured the attention of us both, renewing our online discussions after many years’ lapse.

Susan Cain and Mark Mason, authors of this article, demonstrate their homework prowess by accurately assessing the creation of public education as a tool for instilling “a common political creed…in all citizens” (Spring, p.8) and its use as a bulwark for capitalism by creating the illusion of “equal opportunities” through schooling. 

While my first book was a guide for teachers working toward education reform, my second was an exposé on why reform couldn’t work. Had I written a third, it would have focused on why the power structure would not allow reform anyway because, contrary to popular misunderstanding, our school system is most definitely not broken:  It is doing exactly what it’s intended to do.

“Rebel Without a Clue” gets an “A” for research, writing and analysis.

Recommended articles for 2/11/2018

• Downed Russian Warplane Illustrates Enduring Danger of US-Backed Terrorism by Tony Cartalucci from New Eastern Outlook. Read the well-documented article to see how Cartalucci reaches this conclusion:
  

US-backed terrorism has recently claimed a Russian pilot, amid a war that has cost tens of thousands their lives over the course of several years and threatened the stability of an entire region. But long after the war ends, whenever it ends, this threat as a result of America’s state-sponsorship of terrorism will endure for many more years to come, manifesting itself not only on battlefields but also in cities and towns, targeting soldiers and civilians alike – not just in Syria but around the planet.

• Amerika, the Cartoon: The “Good Guys”, The “Bad Guys”… Reality TV Becomes President by Philip A Farruggio from Global Research. Does the author really describe the political consciousness of most Americans? My god, I hope and pray that he is wrong!

• China’s latest move in the graveyard of empires by Pepe Escobar from Asia Times. 

How F-Book, Goo ogle, & You Tuube Collude To Crush Dissent

This post features Lee Camp exclaiming about social media and internet corporations attempting to reduce people's access to alternative media. Clearly there is an information war going on by the ruling capitalist class for your political consciousness.

Russia: How the Bureaucracy Seized Power ‒ part four: the bureaucratic counter-revolution

Click here to access article by George Collins and posted on In Defence of Marxism (a British Trotskyist organization). Note: this recent post is really an excerpt from Collins book published in 1987 with the above title. Although I believe that it is an accurate portrayal of Stalin's rule, the Trotsky bias becomes evident in the final paragraphs.

The lengthy articles goes into the details of the takeover of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union by Stalin after the death of Vladimir Lenin in early 1924. Stalin's actions were not based in a theoretical analysis that Lenin or Trotsky expressed, but became motivated by the allure of power. The details are reported in the article which consisted of various twists to the extreme right, and turns to the extreme left, then settling on building socialism in one country, all of which he also used to eliminate any competitors to power in the Soviet government. Thus many of Stalin's critics accuse him of sheer opportunism in quest of dictatorial power. However, his popularity has gained in recent decades in Russia among people who view him as saving them--because he began a campaign (although ruthless) of forced industrialization in the 1930s--from slavery to the German Third Reich during WWII.

In the final part of George Collins' history of the rise of Stalinism, he explains the bureaucracy's final victory over Trotsky's Left Opposition; their shameful co-operation with fascism and imperialism; and the brutal, counter-revolutionary role they played in suppressing the working class in Russia and internationally.

The Libertarian Ideology of Bitcoin

Click here to access a 55 minute interview conduct by Sasha Lilley of KPFA (Berkeley, CA) with David Golumbia, author of The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism. 

Can an anonymous alternative currency — not tethered to the oppressive arm of the state — make us free? That’s the premise behind Bitcoin, invented less than 10 years ago, which has soared stratospherically and then, recently, fallen sharply. David Golumbia reflects on the rightwing libertarian ideas behind Bitcoin.

U.S. ‘Plan B’ for the Middle East and the occupation of a third of Syria’s territory – Analysis

Click here to access article by Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli, SWEDHR chairman and chief-editor of The Indicter, and posted on The Indicter.

The television network RT asked me for a comment around the recent visit to Raqqa done by the USAID program chief together with the CENTCOM Commander. [1]

Before to answer the items on the humanitarian situation in Raqqa associated with the reconstruction issue –80 percent of Raqqa dwellings remain “inhabitable”, according to the UN–, I will develop on the current U.S. geopolitics in the area, against the backdrop of the U.S. emerging ‘Plan B’ on Syria ....

So far, the implementation of this new design has signified the virtual occupation of nearly a third of Syria’s territory. A hallmark of the situation consisting in the illegal character of the occupation.

NBC Hires CIA Boss For News Role - Not Kidding

Click here to access a 25:05m video of The Jimmy Dore Show. 

I'll have to admit that the content of this show quite shocked me. Jimmy Dore essentially argues that Orwell's 1984 has now been established in the USA. It's also clear that unwitting Americans are still not conscious of this new reality. The accelerating downward trend toward an Orwellian nation is now in full operation with the 24/7 surveillance of social and other media by US intelligence agencies, the efforts by social media corporations to prevent the access of people to alternative or independent websites, the appointment of military generals to key foreign policy positions in the government, and now the appointment of CIA officials to prominent positions in media corporations. Dore does not explicitly show how all these trends are driven by an increasingly threatened ruling capitalist class, but all of his content clearly supports this view.

Rich boys' health clinic

by Brian McFadden

Some recommended posts for 2/9/2018

• "What You Aren't Being Told About NPR" by Lee Camp of RT's Redacted Tonight program. Because I've seen the former liberal (this label means that they favored popular interests within a capitalist society) National Public Radio morph over the past 40 years into a right-wing propaganda radio network called "NPR" that is sponsored by right-wing people like the Koch brothers, I delight in posting this Lee Camp's satire of the radio network.

• "Corruption is Legal in America". This YouTube video was uploaded by apparently well-meaning people at Represent.Us, a group that advocates citizens' use of referendums to by-pass legislatures and Congress to prevent big capitalists from funding candidates and their support for the interests of the rich. However, seeing that they have received favorable media exposure from The Washington Post, The New York Times, CNN, NBC, etc., I rather doubt their sincerity. It is likely an example of how the capitalist ruling class prefers to co-opt any studies and reforms groups in order to lead them into dead-end political activity--much like the Bernie Sanders campaign of last year in the Democratic Party. Anyway, the Princeton study is a very worthy one, and one that I referred to last year here on my website. This 5:50m YouTube video summarizes the study very well.

• "Why is U.S. not globally condemned for its military occupation of Syria?" by Eric Zuesse from The Greanville Post. Although the author denies that Trump is the contemporary version of Hitler, Trump is a corporate fascist because he loves the military establishment and the generals, and he doesn't hesitate to use, or threaten to use, actual military violence to get his way. That is the authentic face of advanced capitalism once it decides to take off the mask of their fake version of democracy. In this post I don't think that Zuesse makes a solid argument to support the title of the post. I think he is only referring to the many nations under the US-led Empire, but not the whole world. Here in the USA very little has been broadcast or publicized in corporate media about the incident; and what little there was, was mostly lies.

Recommended articles for 2/8/2018

• Propaganda! Pardon Me, Is Mine Really Bigger than Yours? by Andre Vltchek from New Eastern Outlook. Vltchek reviews his life journey to illustrate how be developed from a "totally indoctrinated, endlessly brainwashed by Western propaganda" in his youth in Czechoslovakia where, as a dissident, he listened to Western capitalist propaganda spread by BBC, Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, West German television channels and other European radio stations. Now after living in 160 countries and seeing reality first hand, he is free to write about his own perceptions. He differentiates two types of propaganda: 1) carefully crafted news and information designed by the rich and powerful to convince you of their virtue and to support their interests; and 2) people honestly and sincerely writing about how they perceive the various realities that they experience. It is a journey of discovery of realty that is far different from his early conditioning by Western capitalist propaganda.

• Syria - U.S. May Have Arranged "Self Defense" Attack On Syrian Government Forces by Bernhard from Moon of Alabama. The author carefully examines the evidence of an attack by US forces from their occupied territory in Syria on Syrian government forces that suggest that the US military are playing dirty while issuing a steady stream of anti-Assad propaganda. Meanwhile, the American people are fed only the latter by media corporations.

Recommended articles for 2/7/2018

• US Jingoism vs. Russian Propaganda: From ‘The List’ To Social Media Censorship by "_anonym" from The Greanville Post.

American culture places an extreme emphasis on the right to hold an opinion with next to none on the actual ability to form one. We are, as a people, uneducated for democracy, which is to a large extent why we do not have one, and why the powers that be feel obliged to rely on censorship: people can’t be trusted to think for themselves. If Americans have neither the moral nor intellectual capacity to distinguish truth from lies, good argument form cheesy propaganda, enter the anti-propagandist and ‘censor-as-a-public-service’ to tell them what to believe.

Thankfully there is a large and growing number of Americans with no such moral or intellectual deficit, who have educated themselves for democracy since the system does not.

•  Kurds, Out of Options, Look to Syria’s Assad for Help by Jim Carey, editor of Geopolitics Alert. This is a well-documented look at the twists and turns of the Syrian Kurdish leadership and their current usefulness to the US Empire to destabilize Syria. For more background information I suggest you read my post of 2/25/2017 entitled "The Myth of the Kurdish YPG’s Moral Excellence". Also, for more historical background for the Empire's on again, off again, use of the Kurds, read an article entitled "America, the Kurds, and History: Only a Pawn in Their Game".

Why Steemit Is The Platform Of The People And The Answer To Censorship

Click here to access article by Elizabeth Vos from Disobedient Media. 

More people are joining Steemit, an alternative social media platform. (I have no opinion on this issue.)

Along with myself and Dawson, anti-establishment journalists including Caitlin Johnstone, Redacted Tonight’s Lee Camp, HA Goodman, and many others have joined the platform and begun to publish or re-publish their work there. The move has made waves within Steemit, with one prominent user devoting an entire article to the shift.

Mainstream Media Outlets Keep Hiring CIA/Intel Veterans, And It’s Gross

Click here to access article by Caitlin Johnstone from The Greanville Post.  (Note: Additional material added at 5:15 PM Seattle time.)

Brennan, who played a key role in the construction of the establishment Russia narrative that has been used to manufacture public consent for world-threatening new cold war escalations, is just the latest addition in an ongoing trend of trusted mainstream media outlets being packed to the gills with establishment stalwarts from the US intelligence community.

"It is the function of the CIA to keep the world unstable, and to propagandize and teach the American people to hate, so we will let the Establishment spend any amount of money on arms." -- John Stockwell, former CIA official and author

We must credit Wolfgang Streeck, an economic sociologist, who first brought our attention to the concept of post-factual politics. Of course, he did not bring our attention to the constant lies fed to us by the ruling class's media corporations--that has been obvious to people who are awake and pay attention. 

Just this morning I was jarred awake by an obvious propaganda segment in NPR's Morning Edition "news" program. Because of my location I can only receive a Tacoma NPR station (it seems to be ubiquitous by using repeater frequencies to cover all of northwestern Washington state), and I use it on my alarm radio to wake me up in the morning. However, this morning the station not only wakened me, but jarred me awake with complete disgust as it, once again, hammered away on the Russiagate theme. I turned the radio off after the segment and got dressed. Listen to the following segment to see if you agree with my reaction:


Christopher, an engaged activist, did some internet sleuthing and found some very interesting background material on Molly McKew who was featured in the above NPR broadcast. Thank you, Christopher!