War is Murder

I'm to the point now where I don't think I fought for the country. I fought for some politician's view on something. I remember one dude in particular that I killed him. I shot his buddy, and then I came through his room. I killed him in front of his wife in a bedroom because he went for a gun.

And I think about him now, and it's like, all right, why did I kill that guy? Well, because he went for a gun. Okay, but why did he go for a gun? Well, because I was in his fucking room at two in the morning. Well, why was that in his room at two in the morning? Well, because George fucking Bush was pissed that Saddam Hussein allegedly wanted to kill his dad. So we invaded.

And then I start to think, was this guy funny? What if I met him in Paris over a coffee? Would we actually have liked each other? I just killed him because a politician sent us here for weapons of mass destruction that didn't exist.

War is Murder. Time to kill the euphemism

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Chris Hedges Comments on the U.S. Security State and the DNC

Chris Hedges was recently on Glenn Greenwald's System Update offering a wide-ranging analysis of current events. I copied the following excerpts concerning the U.S. Security State and the disturbing transformation of the DNC:

G. Greenwald: Anyone covering foreign policy and covering wars as you did for so long, obviously has to deal with, in all sorts of ways, the U.S. security state, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, and sort of how it influences a lot of these policies. There's no way to understand one without the other. After 9/11, we saw this series of whistleblowers from within the U.S. Security State, and people like William Binney, Thomas Drake, and, of course, culminating with Edward Snowden, all have the same grievance, namely, that the whole foundation of this secret part of our government that would act without democratic accountability and outside of any transparency would be the one taboo would ever be turning their power inward to manipulate the American population and domestic population. And a lot of that came forward primarily based on their grievance, that that was the thing that they thought would never happen. And they were seeing that more and more and more and more, that almost as much as these agencies were focused on foreign governments, they were focused on our domestic politics as well. I know there's been a lot of that since the creation of the U.S. Security State, but do you agree that that has gotten worse and more dire, more evident – the idea that the U.S. Security State now plays a bigger role than ever before in our domestic politics?

Chris Hedges: Yeah, it's completely unaccountable and you can't control it. That's the problem. And Arnold Toynbee when he writes about the decline of the Empire, talks about these rogue intelligence, military complexes, institutions that essentially can no longer be regulated, can no longer be constrained. All of the people who led us into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Libya, you know, there should be accountability there. Not only is there no accountability, but the same people are leading us into the disasters in Ukraine and funneling weapons to sustain the genocide in Gaza. And that's very dangerous because, at the beginning of an empire, empires are very judicious, usually about the use of force. What characterizes declining dying empires is military adventurism, where they seek to gain a diminishing or a loss to Germany through a military fiasco. And I think we can start with Vietnam and go basically right through just one military debacle after another. What we've done in the Middle East is probably the greatest strategic blunder, you know, in American history.

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The Modern Democratic Party

I have voted Democrat almost my entire life, but I agree with Bret Weinstein:

"I want a coalition to redefine American politics, because frankly, we have a longstanding problem with corruption, which has now turned into something else with the modern Democratic Party.

We need to rethink the way we govern ourselves so that corruption is not the dominant force.

A coalition is the way we’re going to do that.”

“I think the modern Democratic Party is an existential threat to the Republic.

Although I am a Democrat, I’ve been a Democrat my whole life, the party that I see in front of me today is literally the inverse of the party I signed up for.

This is now the party of war, this is the party of racism, this is the party of censorship.

I don’t recognize this party.

There is no conceivable scenario in which I would vote for Kamala Harris.”"

Actually, I'd even go further . . .

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The Connection Between the War in Ukraine and the U.S. Censorship industrial Complex

You have a choice. One option is to follow the dictates of the U.S. warmongering uniparty, who tells you, "Putin is bad. So shut the fuck up and support our policy of endless treasury-draining war. Or you could listen to Mike Benz, Executive Director of Foundation for Freedom Online.

Mike discussed Ukraine and U.S. censorship recently on Twitter. I created a transcript of his conversation with Win Marshall:

Win Marshall

Do you not think America should have supported Ukraine in the war?

Mike Benz

It's good question. It's strange for-- You know, if I'm hesitating, it's because to answer that question, there are so many layers that come before it that I haven't even really honestly had to think about where I actually fall on the underlying issue, because the process is so corrupted. And we lived through Russiagate, this thing where anybody who supported a detente with Russia was it was effectively deemed to be a Putin puppet, and then you could launch a federal investigation. You could bring in indictments and domestic spycraft on, you know, Trump's whole campaign, because of his policy of neutrality, with with Russia effectively, or his NATO skepticism. They were able to argue, you know, that he was effectively a Russian puppet, and so they spied on his campaign.

Win Marshall

These things are happening today in Britain with Nigel Farage, and he's been called a Putin apologist. I think it's continuation

Mike Benz

It's the same thing. And so I think the way I would answer the question is: if you took the gun off of my head, where the state, the regime, the NGOs, the cutouts, the media, the lawyers, the federal investigators, all said, "Hey, you know what? If you have your own opinion on the Ukraine war, I'll put the gun down." Then maybe I'd think about and say, Okay, well maybe we can now talk about whether or not it actually redounds to US interests to try to secure these $12.4 trillion in the natural resources, whether it redounds to our benefit to have this elaborate CIA State Department operation to kill Gazprom and pry all the profits off with this endogenous, you know, Ukraine Petro industry and lifeline by all these US oil and gas companies and British companies like Shell. Maybe. But the answer is a hard no while they still have a gun to my head, because you can't, you can't do that.

Win Marshall

Okay, so let's say there's no gun to a head.

Mike Benz

That feels like a hypothetical that is kind of irresponsible for me to indulge in because there is a gun to my head. The censorship industry grew out of Ukraine. That whole infrastructure of censorship that Americans live under and inherited during the 2016 presidential election cycle came from the 2014 US-UK overthrow of the Ukrainian-democratically elected government. When, when we orchestrated that coup, when the head of the US Embassy was personally handing out cookies and water bottles to the January 6 style protesters surrounding the parliament building, pumping them full of money, when our own senators like John McCain were there on the ground calling for a transition of the government, when we overthrew that government and then did not expect the blowback, did not expect the counter coup.

When the entire eastern side of Ukraine broke away and declared itself a breakaway state in 2014 and when Crimea voted in its referendum to formally join the Russian Federation, this set off a total crisis across NATO and called for a fundamental reimagining of how NATO understood warfare. This gave rise to something which I've talked a lot about. You know, first was called the Gerasimov doctrine. Then it was called hybrid warfare, and now it's sort of called sharp power. But it was essentially this idea that NATO could no longer just be a military alliance. It had to expand its mandate, and this is a direct quote from Jen stellenberg, from tanks to tweets. The reason that we lost in Ukraine was because we lost the information war. We lost to Russian propaganda, infecting the mines of Ukrainians. And it was Russian propaganda who was infecting the mines of Germans, because at the time the German AFD party was on the rise. They were running on restoring gas relations with Russia, because they were mostly a sort of working class, sort of like Trump, Trumpism. They were running on, sort of because these sanctions that the US State Department and UK Foreign Office effectively imposed on all these different other European countries, after Crimea, to sanction Russian gas, which was the cheapest gas.

The alternative was LNG liquefied natural gas harvested in Houston, liquefy ship 5000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. You know, de-liquefied in ports in Portugal or in through the Baltic strait into Poland. You know, de-liquefied transported. That's orders of magnitude more expensive than Russia, which means the industries suffer, which means the middle class suffers. The welfare safety net suffers. So AFD was running on restoring gas relations with Russia. Marine. Le Pen was was running on the same from from France. So is the Vox party in Spain.

And so NATO is saying, Oh, my God, these right wing populist parties are all running on this economic nationalist what's best for us. Don't care what the US or UK says about, you know, being a good Global Citizen and sanctioning Russia, we want to do what's economically best for our own middle class citizens. And so our intelligence State, the trans military alliance of NATO, at that point in 2014 declared this hybrid warfare doctrine. Said war is actually not about tanks anymore. It's about tweets. It's about control over social media. Because we lost to Russia without Russia firing a bullet, Crimea voted itself to join the Russian Federation. It's the same thing as if they had rolled into Crimea with tanks and submarines, they now control it because of the referendum of the people.

Well, where are they getting their information?

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Piers Morgan to Jeffrey Sachs: Why Do You Trust Putin?

Piers Morgan to Jeffrey Sachs: Why Do You Trust Putin? Jeffrey Sachs proceeds to school Morgan on the history of United States meddling in the affairs of other countries, including the fact that we have repeatedly overthrown democratically elected governments. Here is the discussion:

Piers Morgan:

You seem very reliant on accepting Putin's world view rather than perhaps the stark reality of the barbarism with which he's executed this war.

Jeffrey Sachs:

Yeah, maybe because I know too much about the United States.

Because the first war in Europe after World War II was the US bombing of Belgrade for 78 days to change borders of a European state. The idea was to break Serbia, to create Kosovo as an enclave, and then to install bond to steel, which is the largest NATO base in the Balkans, in the southwest Balkans. So the US started this under Clinton, that we will break the borders, we will illegally bomb another country. We didn't have any UN authority. This was a quote NATO mission to do that.

Then I know the United States went to war repeatedly, illegally in what it did in Afghanistan, and then what it did in Iraq, and then what it did in Syria, which was the Obama administration, especially Obama and Hillary Clinton, tasking the CIA to overthrow Bashar Al Assad. And then what it did with NATO illegally bombing Libya to topple norm or Gaddafi.

And then what it did in Kyiv in February 2014 I happened to see some of that with my own eyes. The US overthrew Yanukovych, together with right wing Ukrainian military forces, we overthrew a president. And what's interesting, by the way, is we overthrew Yanukovych the day after the European union representatives had reached an agreement with Yanukovych to have early elections, a government of national unity and a stand down of both sides that was agreed. The next thing that happens is the opposition, quote, unquote, says, we don't agree. They stormed the government buildings and they deposed Yanukovych, and within hours, the United States says, Yes, we support the new government. It didn't say, Oh, we had an agreement that's unconstitutional. What you did.

So we overthrew a government contrary to a promise that the European Union had made. And by the way, Russia, the United States and the EU were parties to that agreement, and the United States, an hour afterwards, backed the coup. Okay, so everyone's got a little bit to answer for in 2015 the Russians did not say we want the Donbas back. They said peace should come through negotiations. And negotiations between the ethnic Russians in the east of Ukraine and this new regime in Kyiv led to the Minsk two agreement. The Minsk two agreement was voted by the UN Security Council unanimously. It was signed by the Government of Ukraine. It was guaranteed explicitly by Germany and France. And you know what? And it's been explained to me in person. It was laughed at inside the US government. This is after the UN Security Council unanimously accepted it. The Ukrainians said, We don't want to give autonomy to the region. Oh, but that's part of the treaty. The US told them, Don't worry about it. Angela Merkel explained in design in a notorious interview after the 2022 escalation, she said, Oh, you know we knew that Minsk two was just a holding pattern to give Ukraine time to build its strength. No, mins too. Was a UN Security Council unanimously adopted treaty that was supposed to end the war.

So when it comes to who's trustworthy, who to believe, and so forth, I guess my problem, Piers, is I know the United States government. I know it very well. I don't trust. For a moment, I want these two sides actually to sit down in front of the whole world and say, these are the terms then the world can judge, because we could get on paper clearly for both sides of the world, we're not going to overthrow governments anymore. The United States needs to say, we accept this agreement, the United States needs to say, Russia needs to say, we're not stepping one foot farther than whatever the boundary is actually reached, and NATO is not going to enlarge. And let's put it for the whole world to see. You know, once in a while, treaties actually hold.

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