January has passed, and we still don't know who we are going to wage war on this year. The Establishment is trying very hard to fix something up, but it seems they are having problems.
I saw on Russia Today demonstrations outside the US Embassy in London with banners saying 'Don't attack Iran' (28 January).
The Anti-War Coalition held a 'Don't attack Iran' conference at which former MP George Galloway gave a dire warning of the consequences of going to war with Iran:
Link
Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Center for Research on Globalization, told Russia Today that suggestions that Iran's leaders had been involved in 9/11 was nothing but a ploy
They tried to implicate Saddam Hussain in 9/11, too, but that turned out to be just war propaganda. As with Iraq, they are now talking of weapons of mass destruction in Iran, when the main proliferation of nuclear weapons seems to have been in US bases in non-nuclear countries. On 30 January Michel Chossudovsky gave a further interview, saying that an invasion of Iran had been on the cards since 1995, and warning of an 'unthinkable outcome', a possible World War III scenario, if an attack were to take place (rt.com/ news/us-iran-ww3-chossudovsky-025).
"Almost the entire senior hierarchy of Israel's military and security establishment is worried about a premature attack on Iran and apprehensive about the possible repercussions, a former chief of the country's defence forces told The Independent yesterday".
Things are hotting up in Syria, too, but it is becoming more and more clear that things aren't as they appear in the mainstream media. The Guardian has now broken ranks, with a blog by Jonathan Steele on 17 January on its 'Comment is Free' site, with a headline: ' Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from western media'.
According to an opinion poll commissioned from Qatar, 55% of Syrians want Assad to stay, they say. "The pity is that it was ignored by almost all media outlets in every western country whose government has called for Assad to go", writes the blogger.
When news of that blog circulated in the UK truth movement, US researcher and writer Webster Tarpley wrote: "During my own trip to Syria last November, I estimated 65%. In any case, Assad has the support of an overwhelming landslide majority".
He also gave a link to an interview on France 24 with the Archbishop of Aleppo in Syria, Jean-Clément Jeanbart. The Archbishop estimated that about 70% of Syrians back Assad.
He also told listeners that most of Syria was in fact peaceful, a very different impression from the one one gets from the Western mainstream media.
And now, a leaked copy of the Observers' Mission Report of the League of Arab States to Syria has just appeared on the Internet.
Michel Chossudovsky concludes: "While the Mission does not identify the foreign powers behind 'the armed entity', the report dispels the mainstream media lies and fabrications. It largely confirms independent media reports including Global Research's coverage of the armed insurrection since April 2011".
A United Nations human rights panel expressed alarm at reports claiming that Syrian security forces were torturing children. Writing in Alex Jones' Prison Planet, Kurt Nimmo compares this with disinformation about Saddam Hussain's people throwing babies out of incubators in Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion of 1991 Link.
It turned out not to be true. But why would it be necessary to unleash such mendacious war propaganda on the US public when Saddam had just invaded a sovereign nation? That, in turn, is reminiscent of what historian monk Robert of Reims wrote some twenty years after the call to arms by Pope Urban II which led to the First Crusade: "They circumcise the Christians, and the blood of the circumcision they either spread upon the altars or pour into the vases of the baptismal font. When they wish to torture people by a base death, they perforate their navels, and dragging forth the extremity of the intestines, bind it to a stake; then with flogging they lead the victim around until the viscera having gushed forth the victim falls prostrate upon the ground. ..."
I doubt whether the pope actually said those words, but it was all part of the war machine. Isn't it about time, after nearly a thousand years, that we stopped believing them? Nick Kollerstrom wrote in Terror on the Tube: "Deep in the Anglo-Saxon psyche, one finds a collective reassurance, a togetherness, that is gained from that hate-and-fear image. People have been reared on films in which the enemy threatens our whole way of life, and has to be blasted to bits in the last reel, and ordinary citizens are actually grateful to their leader for telling them who to hate and fear - just as George Orwell predicted"
I think Anglo-Saxon acceptance of the ruling elite goes back to 1066, when the Normans became the ruling class. They were propagandist French-speaking Vikings who had overseas expansionism in their blood. Not much has changed since the days of Guillaume le Conquerant, and the crusading adventures of his great great grandson Richard Coer de Leon, who lived in the South West of France and spoke langue d'oil. Whilst we in state schools were learning "An Englishman's word is his bond", the ruling elite were earning the epithet "La perfide Albion".
So what happens if there's another event like 7/7 in London during the Olympic Games? With 13 000 troops in the capital it sounds as if there'd be a military clamp-down, like that following the burning of the Reichstag in 1933. Or what happens if they start bombing Syria or Iran or Pakistan, or Somalia? It will not only be an excellent opportunity for burying bad news, but an opporunity to ban demonstrations in London. People could be thrown into jail as terrorists for merely opposing the government in its latter-day Viking quest for conquest. Perhaps the same could be said of anyone protesting about the sponsorship by Dow Chemical, the company which shirked its responsibility in Bhopal for compensating the human beings whose lives they wrecked in 1984. I think with knowledge of all this if I were involved with the Olympic Games by now I'd have withdrawn.
This isn't just speculation. Banning demonstrations during the Olympic Games has been on the agenda since last year, when The Independent reported: "Ministers are planning legal action to restrict public protests during the Olympics, amid fears that Britain could be disrupted by lengthy and high-profile demonstrations".
"The coalition appears to be abandoning any attempt to behave like a democratic government", said one protester at the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest outside St Paul's.
Protesters were reported to be infuriated by a police memo which put the London Occupy movement in the same context as Al Qaeda. "We are clearly nothing to do with extremists or terrorists, we are a peaceful group and we do use direct action to raise our point but definitely not terrorism", said one protester.
The police document mentions a forthcoming 'Bank of Ideas' meeting, suggesting that that may lead to an increase in "urban exploration activity". The opening of the Bank of Ideas was reported in The Independent: "The Occupy London group, who have also occupied space outside St Paul's Cathedral and Finsbury Square in Islington, north London, have organised a series of events to mark the opening".
"We have raised one important issue, which is that the financial system is corrupt.", says the video, "It's about bringing people together; it's about solidarity". Now I know one or two people who went to the Bank of Ideas meeting and did some filming. Mark Windows showed the video at the January meeting of Keep Talking in London, and then posted it on the Internet as 'INSIDE OCCUPY AND BANK OF IDEAS with land of the free uk'.
"We just ask questions", says the video. The process used was the Delphi Technique, but what they seemed to be finding was an "invisible hierarchy". The first question that cropped up was on how the Climate Camp was associated with the action, and why the finances were going into their bank account. Later in the video they go to the camp outside St Paul's, where one of the protesters says, "Well when I first came down here it was a real grass-roots movement … since the GA's have moved in and started to take control over the camp a lot has changed, and the way they did it was very stealthily … they began to enforce rules …". Mark Windows then states: "There's no reason why we can't film here now, but they've gone to get their Tranquility Team now. This is how it's turned out at St Paul's. It seems it's no longer the 99%".
One guy in the video offers a possible explanation: "There are some people who are travelling around this planet, who are training people in countries all over the world, and train people on how to hold these revolutions that are democratic - new democracy revolutions - and what we're experiencing on the ground, inside of this thing, is it's basically the government that's pushing a New Age agenda". So are government agent provocateurs taking over the Occupy movement in London in time for the Olympics?
Meanwhile, BBC's Newsnight has been figuring out what British troops were doing in the Libyan campaign last year. Despite a UN resolution, Newsnight found that UK forces were on the ground in Libya, alongside the anti-Gaddafi forces.
An analysis appeared in The Daily Bell, a free-market alternative news site based in Liechtenstein, under the heading 'BBC admits anglosphere destabilised Libya'
Well, it's not quite the BBC itself; the BBC is not yet a homogenous beaurocracy headed by a Stalinist clique, though since the coup of 2004 when their Director General, Greg Dyke, was forced to resign because he let out a bit of truth about the Weapons of Mass Destruction deception, it does seem to be going in that direction.
The BBC's best-known journalist, Jeremy Paxman, giving a lecture about Newsnight in August 2007, stated about the BBC: "Working for it has always been a bit like living in Stalin's Russia, with one five-year-plan, one resoundingly empty slogan after another. One BBC, Making it Happen, Creative Futures, they all blur into one great vacuous blur. I can't even recall what the current one is. Rather like Stalin's Russia, they express a belief that the system will go on forever".
Whilst some programmes, such as their 'Consipracy Files', could be mistaken for, if not Stalinist propaganda, Nazi-type propaganda, there are still investigative journalists there who are doing what they can under difficult circumstances. Jeremy Paxman does an excellent job in trying to squeeze drips of truth out of politicians, but often he's interviewing the wrong people. Here's what he said in the same lecture: "When we learned a few weeks ago that 'tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime' meant that thousands of prisoners were going to be released early, it was an opportunity to have a sensible, grown-up discussion about why we lock so many people up in this country, what we do with them while they're there, and whether releasing them a few weeks early makes any difference. That discussion might have involved people who know about penal policy, maybe a prison governor, and perhaps a thoughtful ex-con. Instead of which what did we end up with on Newsnight (and elsewhere)? The latest prison minister and his conservative shadow. Why do we do that? Because we're too close to Westminster politics, and because when the production desk is being run ragged, looking for guests, the one thing you can be sure about is a politician's willingness to spout confidently". So there's hope yet!
Of even greater concern now is freedom of speech over the Internet. On Wednesday, 18th January Wikipedia shut down access to its English-language pages for the day, in protest against new legislation being talked about in Washington, which could bring to an end the Internet as we know it.
"SOPA and PIPA represent two bills in the United States House of Representatives and the United States Senate respectively", they explain, "SOPA is short for the 'Stop Online Piracy Act,' and PIPA is an acronym for the 'Protect IP Act.' ('IP' stands for 'intellectual property.') In short, these bills are efforts to stop copyright infringement committed by foreign web sites, but, in our opinion, they do so in a way that actually infringes free expression while harming the Internet". They add that, the bill would give the US government extraordinary, ambiguous, and loosely-defined powers to take control over content and information on the free web".
But it gets worse. There have been large-scale demonstrations in Poland in protest at the signing by their government of an international copyright agreement ACTA in Poznan. The Western media have been rather quiet about this, but Russia Today reported: "In Poland, the cyber-offensive has sparked massive protests since Tuesday. On Thursday, tens of thousands flooded onto the streets, with demonstrators clashing with police in Kielche. With public anger still high, the demos are expected to continue". Activists are saying that the ACTA treaty amounts to Internet censorship and gross violation of human rights.
I found a page of explanations about ACTA headed: 'ACTA = Global Internet Censorship - Now Even Foreign Governments Will Be Able To Have Your Website Shut Down'.
The technical news site The Register has reported on the signing of ACTA amongst EU states, under the heading 'Most EU states sign away internet rights, ratify ACTA treaty'. Out of the EU countries, they say, only Cyprus, Germany, Estonia, Slovakia, and the Netherlands have held off on signing the treaty, which will give authorities even more power to enforce copyright than was contained in aforementioned online-piracy legislation currently on hold in the US. So why should the Poles be holding widespread demonstrations, in temperatures of -15C, when others are remaining quiet? When I was in Poznan recently I got the impression that the Poles were good at interpreting old Soviet-style propaganda but rather unsuspecting when it came to more subtle Western propaganda. Perhaps I didn't speak with enough people there, or perhaps the honeymoon with Western democracy is now over. Poland has throughout history been caught between the East and the West, which is why the idea of Esperanto started there. Perhaps the Poles are waking up. I see this as a positive development, one that is essential if the truth movement is to survive. Let us join together in a spirit of solidarnosc.
I wrote at the beginning of this newsletter that we still don't know who we are going to wage war on this year. David Cameron keeps telling us, "We are all in this together". He's right; they are all in this together. As the late US comedian George Carlyn pointed out, "It's a big club, and you ain't in it". We aren't waging war; they are. 'They' includes Hillary Clinton, who in March 2011 declared that they are losing the information war.
SOPA, PIPA and ACTA clearly form part of their new offensive for 2012 to regain control in the dissemination of untruths, and malicious war propaganda that will enable them to expand the anglosphere empire. As George Carlyn concluded in the same speech, "It's called the American dream cause you have to be asleep to believe it".
If governments and corporations have to resort to such crude devices to suppress the truth, rather than the more traditional and subtle manipulation from within, then they must really be feeling under pressure. It gives the truth movement the moral highground. As Gandhi said: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win". One more step to go!
We need to bring governments to account. Why are they quietly signing such draconian legislation in our name? What do they have to hide? Wherever you do that, whether in the streets, in the pub, at your Internet terminal, or in your MPs surgery, do keep talking.
