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.

Continue ReadingPiers Morgan to Jeffrey Sachs: Why Do You Trust Putin?

Why Constant War?

Why is the United Stated constantly engaged in war? Jeffrey Sachs answered this question in a discussion with Glenn Greenwald:

The fundamental problem is that American foreign policy is against the interests of the American people, and therefore it is based on continuous lying. This is not new to Ukraine or to Gaza. Of course, it was part of the Iraq War. It was part of Syria. How many Americans understand that Obama ordered the CIA to overthrow the Syrian government? Almost not discussed. U.S. foreign policy is based on the idea that the U.S. should be the world's hegemonic power, the unchallenged, unrivaled power in every region of the world: full-spectrum dominance, meaning economic, military, technological, diplomatic, and financial dominance in every part of the world. It's completely delusional. It's delusional. Well, maybe there was a brief period after World War II when the U.S. stood dominant because the U.S. hadn't been destroyed militarily. Maybe there was a moment, and there was, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, when the U.S., in a way, was unrivaled. But life is a little bit more complicated than the United States holding all the pieces in the world. Since we don't, trying to do so means nonstop wars. And if it was explained to the American people, “Hey, Americans, how do you feel about nonstop wars so that the U.S. can be the unchallenged power of the whole world?” People would say, “Are you crazy? Leave me alone. I gotta go back to work. I'm trying to raise my kids. You stop sending us so many threats, taxes, trillions of military spending, and so on. They never buy this stuff.

And so, the whole thing is based on lies. We have to go into Iraq. We know it's not us in Syria, it's the Russians in Syria. It's not us in Ukraine, it's Putin, unprovoked, and on and on. It's such sad nonsense. But since it's based on lies, it has to be secret. Also, it cannot be that there's open discourse. You cannot allow open discourse when the lying is so relentless. And so, it comes naturally that if you want to do something that is not possible, that is delusional and is not what the public wants, and you have at least a formal structure of democracy that we have elections and so forth and there's supposed to be some voice of the people, then you have to lie, and when you have to lie, then everything has to be confidential. Then the worst crime in America, as you know very well because you reported on it more than anyone else in our country, is that you have to make the greatest criminal, the one who tells the truth, or the one who leaks the truth, or the one who exposes the lie, and that becomes the modus operandi of the Imperial State. So, to my mind, the whole thing starts with the wrong premise, which is that the only way the United States can be safe in the world is to run the world, which is both impossible extraordinarily costly, and extraordinarily threatening to our survival.

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Dave Smith Offers and A/B Illustration of How Corporate Media-Concocted Narratives Masquerade as Facts

A protest is a protest, right? No, not when an election is looming. Corporate media (including NPR) specializes in telling us just enough of the right kind of facts to get the right person elected. Dave Smith offers this excellent illustration comparing the George Floyd protests to the current protests regarding the war involving Israel and Gaza.

The text of Dave's tweet:

Four years ago, after George Floyd’s death, a massive protest movement started across the country. The protests quickly turned violent. Almost nightly, in cities across the country, riots broke out. Many people were murdered, thousands were assaulted and billions of dollars in property damage was committed.

In the face of this, the corporate media sided with the rioters. They stood in front of fires calling the riots “mostly peaceful”

Our cartoonishly militarized police, seeming to finally have a purpose for existing, stood down and allowed the mob to terrorize American citizens.

Objectively, the current “free Palestine” protests are nothing like this. They actually have been “mostly peaceful.” There have been isolated instances of violence and a few made up hoaxes.

Watching the media coverage and police response has been sickening, particularly when you remember 2020.

The bottom line is that they thought those protests hurt Trump and these ones hurt Biden.

There are a lot of things I don’t like about these protests but the major issues come down to the words they’re hollering or blocking college kids from a building. It’s important to remember the real story here isn’t some left wing 20 yr olds. It’s what Israel is doing to Gaza and our criminal government funding and arming it.

Continue ReadingDave Smith Offers and A/B Illustration of How Corporate Media-Concocted Narratives Masquerade as Facts

The United States Empire as a Configuration of Dots

As Jimmy Dore points out, each dot is a United States Military base, part of our Department of DEFENSE.

This is called Empire. This is imperialism. These are all the military bases the United States has around the world. You know, no other country has this just the United States as this. Nobody else does this. China, Russia. They don't have bases all over the world. Who does? We do, because that's how capitalism ends up.

You have to use a gun to keep it going. And you have to become fascists, which is what Joe Biden did to the railroad workers when he crushed her railroad strike. That's called fascism. The stuff that they that you hear all the time and on TV as fascism isn't. That was actual fascism. And this is why our country is going down the shitter and we're ending like all great empires. And we're overextending militarily while we won't take care of our own people at home.

We just said $15 billion, which could take care of everybody here in the United States. We just send it to Ukraine with no debate, no talking about it. And we're we just built another military base in Syria. We built three more in the Philippines just in the last couple of months. That's where your money's going. Because your government is 100% corrupt. Not regular corrupt. It's 100%. corrupt. This is called corruption. You see this? Do you know what this is called? This is called a trillion dollars a year in corruption because that's all this is. These military bases are there to make sure American corporations can extract natural resources from these places. Look at all the bases we have outside of China. Look at this. Here comes South America, Central America. Look at that! Imagine if China had these many bases in South and Central America or anywhere? Imagine if China had all these bases in the Middle East Imagine.

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