PT — LARRY ROMANOFF: A Hasbara Judaica em Toda a sua Glória. Mentiras, Mentiras por Todo o Lado — Parte I

Chapter 11 – The Chimera of Democracy

Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

11. Chapter 11 – The Chimera of Democracy

BULGARIAN CHINESE ENGLISH ESTONIAN POLSKI ROMANIAN

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Americans often fervently and unquestioningly attribute a kind of divine origin for their treasured democracy with claims that it originated centuries ago in Greece, promoted by some of the world’s greatest thinkers like Plato and Socrates, and is the natural and permanent state of man. But once again the Americans are simply displaying their ignorance, with sound bytes taken out of context and substituted for knowledge. There is no evidence whatever that multi-party anything is natural, and even less evidence that it’s permanent, and belief in a nonsense does not make it true. A form of representative government did indeed appear in ancient Greece, but it was entirely bereft of the cloak of reverence with which Americans have since clothed it. Here is Socrates’ judgment of democracy, as reported by Plato in his ‘Republic’:

“The excess of liberty, whether in States or individuals, seems only to pass into excess of slavery. And so, tyranny naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme form of liberty.”

Plato wrote that democracy was not the zenith of government but only just above the nadir of complete anarchy. He wrote that democracy would inevitably degenerate into oligarchy and, finally, tyranny – a fascist police state. These identical sentiments have persisted throughout history to the present day: Willy Brandt, former German Chancellor, was quoted as saying that “Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship, and whether the dictation comes from a politburo or a junta will not make that much difference.”[1]

Contained in notes attributed to Scottish judge and historian Alexander Tytler, was the profound observation that:

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can exist only until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury.“ The passage continued on to say that a democracy would always collapse from the eventual wholesale looting, always to be followed by a dictatorship. The point was that democracy is always temporary in nature and prima facie cannot exist as a permanent form of government because a democracy naturally evolves into kleptocracy, two coyotes and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. In a book on John Adams, David McCullough wrote of Adams’ deep concerns that the American electoral process would degenerate into a two-party system where each “gang” would put its interests above the interests of the American people. It is difficult to argue against the thesis that the US has already travelled most of this path. That isn’t quite the same thing as the highest form of government system, or fulfilling the yearnings of all mankind. And in fact, Socrates’ words reflect precisely the same observations and conclusions echoed much later by Tytler, that democracy as a form of government is self-terminating because it is the only system open to the kind of insidious corruption that will permit the rich and powerful, those with a lust for power, to eventually arrogate all power to themselves and usurp the throne. Both these men, and others, are saying the same thing: democracy deteriorates into a fascist dictatorship. We will see there is much evidence this is already occurring.

Similarly, in his book ‘Sorrows of Empire’, Chalmers Johnson wrote that four sorrows were certain to be visited on the US, with the cumulative effect of destroying any semblance of ‘democracy’ and replacing it with a fascist military police state. His ‘four sorrows’ were: (1) a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans everywhere, (2) a loss of democracy and rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and transforms the ‘executive branch’ into a military junta (a fascist dictatorship), (3) the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, and (4) bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects. The first three of these have already been fulfilled, while the fourth may be only a matter of time.

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EN — LARRY ROMANOFF — Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion — Chapter 12 – Bernays and Democracy Control

October 12, 2024, 9:46 am

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December 21, 2022

Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

Chapter 11 – The Chimera of Democracy

12. Chapter 12 – Bernays and Democracy Control

Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

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From their experiences in the formulation, manipulation and control of public perception and opinion with the CPI, both Lippman and Bernays later wrote of their open contempt for a “malleable and hopelessly ill-informed public” in America.[1] Lippmann had already written that the people in a democracy were simply “a bewildered herd” of “ignorant and meddlesome outsiders”[2] who should be maintained only as “interested spectators”, to be controlled by the elite “secret government”. They concluded that in a multi-party electoral system (a democracy), public opinion had to be “created by an organized intelligence” and “engineered by an invisible government”, with the people relegated to the status of uninformed observers, a situation that has existed without interruption in the US for the past 95 years. Bernays believed that only a few possessed the necessary insight into the Big Picture to be entrusted with this sacred task, and considered himself as one member of this select few.

“Throughout his career, Bernays was utterly cynical in his manipulation of the masses. In complete disregard of the personal importance of their sincerely held values, aspirations, emotions, and beliefs, he saw them as having no significance beyond their use as tools in the furtherance of whatever were the commercial and political ends of his hirers.”

In his book ‘Propaganda’,[3][3a][4] Bernays wrote, “It was, of course, the astounding success of propaganda during the war that opened the eyes of the intelligent few in all departments of life to the possibilities of regimenting the public mind. It was only natural, after the war ended, that intelligent persons should ask themselves whether it was not possible to apply a similar technique to the problems of peace. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”

Bernays’ original project was to ensure US entry into the European war, but later he primarily concerned himself with the entrenchment of the twin systems of electoral democracy and unrestricted capitalism the elites had created for their benefit, and with their defense in the face of increased unrest, resistance, and ideological opposition. Discovering that the bewildered herd was not so compliant as he wished, Bernays claimed a necessity to apply “the discipline of science”, i.e., the psychology of propaganda, to the workings of democracy, where his social engineers “would provide the modern state with a foundation upon which a new stability might be realized”. This was what Lippmann termed the necessity of “intelligence and information control” in a democracy, stating that propaganda “has a legitimate and desirable part to play in our democratic system”. Both men pictured modern American society as being dominated by “a relatively small number of persons who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses”. To Bernays, this was the “logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized”, failing to note that it was his European handlers who organised it this way in the first place.

Lippman and Bernays were not independent in their perverted view of propaganda as a “necessity” of democracy, any more than they were in war marketing, drawing their theories and instruction from their Jewish masters in London. The multi-party electoral system was not designed and implemented because it was the most advanced form of government but rather because it alone offered the greatest opportunities to corrupt politicians through control of money and to manipulate public opinion through control of the press. In his book The Engineering of Consent,[5] [5a] Bernays baldly stated that “The engineering of consent is the very essence of the democratic process”. In other words, the essence of a democracy is that a few “invisible people” manipulate the bewildered herd into believing they are in control of a transparent system of government, by choosing one of two pre-selected candidates who are already bought and paid for by the same invisible people.

Even before the war, the ‘secret government’, i.e., the European Jewish handlers of Lippman and Bernays, had fully recognised the possibilities for large-scale population control and had developed far-reaching ambitions of their own in terms of “Democracy Control”, and using the US government once again as a tool. Their interest was not limited to merely the American population, but quickly included much of the Western world. With Lippman and Bernays as their agents, these invisible people had the US government applying Bernays’ principles in nations all over the world, adding the CIA Project Mockingbird[6][7][8][9][10], the VOA[11][12], Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, Radio Liberty, and much more to their tools of manipulation of the perceptions and beliefs of peoples of dozens of nations. The US State Department, by now totally onside, claimed that “propaganda abroad is indispensable” for what it termed “public information management”. It also recognised the need for absolute secrecy, stating that “if the American people ever get the idea that the high-powered propaganda machine was working on them, the result would be disaster”. But the high-powered machine was indeed working on them, and continued to an extent that might have impressed even Bernays.

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EN — LARRY ROMANOFF — Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion — Chapter 13 – Democracy to Fascism

October 13, 2024, 10:57 am

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Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

Chapter 11 – The Chimera of Democracy

Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

13. Chapter 13 – Democracy to Fascism

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Fascism is a political ideology fundamentally authoritarian in character, with a strong nationalism and an essentially belligerent militaristic outlook. Fascism carries primarily a corporate perspective as opposed to a socialist view, directed to satisfying the needs, values and objectives of finance and corporations, organising both the economy and the political system according to this agenda. A fascist government actively suppresses any objection to its ideology and will crush any movement which opposes it. In keeping with their belligerent nature, fascist governments generally view violence and war as stimulants to national spirit and vitality. Being politically Right-Wing, they maintain their position through firm control or compliance of the media, and most often engage in a vast array of lies and deception. These governments tend to be bigoted, if not racist, invariably require “enemies” to achieve public solidarity, and are often supremacist or at least ‘exceptional’ in their self-assessment. They either believe, or pretend to believe, that they have a license on truth. Large military budgets, the creation and demonisation of fictitious enemies to propagate fear and maintain population control, are all typical characteristics of a fascist regime, as is massive public surveillance.

In 1995 the Italian Scholar Umberto Eco produced a paper titled ‘Eternal Fascism’ in which he examined the characteristics of fascist regimes. In 2003, Laurence W. Britt did an excellent and scholarly work in dissecting and categorising past fascist regimes, in which he revealed common threads that linked all of them in “patterns of national behavior and abuse of power“. He wrote that “Even a cursory study of these fascist and protofascist regimes reveals the absolutely striking convergence of their modus operandi, (which is) not a revelation … but useful … to shed needed light on current circumstances.” I am including here a composite of edited extracts from these two papers with additional commentary of my own. Significant statements by these two authors are in quotation marks. This is a list of the characteristics of fascist states, taken from Britt’s original article:

13.1. Early Warning Signs of Fascism

- - Powerful and continuing nationalism
  - Supremacy of the military
  - Obsession with national security
  - Obsession with crime and punishment
  - Identification of enemies/scapegoats as a unifying cause
  - Disdain for human rights
  - Corporate power is protected while labor power is suppressed
  - Controlled mass media
  - Rampant cronyism and corruption
  - Intertwined religion and government
  - Fraudulent elections
  - Disdain for intellectuals and the arts
  - Rampant Sexism

If we examine the US on these categories, we find an almost perfect match. Certainly, the US has the most strident nationalism of all nations today, with the hysteria of patriotism and flag-worship unabated and even increasing, with the delusional theory of American Exceptionalism as virulent as ever. There is no question about military supremacy, with the US spending almost twice as much on its military as the rest of the world combined and being by an order of magnitude the world’s largest arms manufacturer and dealer. President Obama stated flatly that for the US to remain ‘peaceful and prosperous‘ it needed the world’s largest and most powerful military to maintain an overwhelming military supremacy. Obsession with issues of national security is so common in the US today it has become an object of ridicule. Every manner of information is withheld, every manner of lie is told, every manner of crime is committed, all with the excuse of ‘national security’. Britt noted that a national security apparatus was usually an instrument of oppression, operating in secret and beyond any constraints, with its actions always justified under the rubric of protecting “national security”, and that questioning these oppressive activities is now often portrayed as unpatriotic or even treasonous.

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EN — LARRY ROMANOFF — Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion — Chapter 14 –The Non-Imperial Empire

October 13, 2024, 11:53 am

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Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

Chapter 11 – The Chimera of Democracy

14. Part 14- The Non-Imperial Empire

Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

BULGARIAN CHINESE ENGLISH ESTONIAN POLSKI ROMANIAN

CONTENT

14.1. Introduction

14.2. Hurtling Into Darkness

Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion free e-book

14.1. Introduction

The powerful surreptitious development of fascism in the US as described earlier is only one link in a long chain, the end purpose which is to first remove all power from the people and then remove most of the power from domestic governments and other governing bodies. We have already seen that most of this has already been accomplished in America, but it has also been accomplished to almost the same degree in Europe. Few are aware that the European Union has been vehemently disparaged as not only un-democratic but as fundamentally anti-democratic, in other words, tending to the same authoritarian fascism as is the US.

One sign is its lack of transparency. Few are aware that in the past 20 years the EU has not managed to pass a single audit, and is so opaque, so controlled by a few individuals two levels removed from European national governments that no elected body has any access to information. The EU Commission’s Chief Accountant, Marta Andreasen, refused to sign off on the accounts, claiming the entire EU accounting system was open to fraud. She was suspended and later fired, and the EU’s accounts were never approved. The EU institutions have virtually waged a class war on not only its members but on their economies and populations, an economic war designed from the start to weaken the nation-states to a point of total dependence on Brussels, entrenching neo-liberalism in the hands of a non-elected elite who now hold all the power and who report to no one. The entire sovereignty of the individual European nations has been supplanted by a cabal of Zionist Jews operating from the City of London.

Privatisation of state assets has played a central role in this process, with all states being slowly forced to dispossess themselves of their entire national infrastructure, including gas utilities, transport and postal services, electricity generation, motorways, airports, regional ports and even water supplies. The nations are being hollowed-out in preparation for their surrender of sovereignty. The signs are clear, and they are everywhere. The budgets of member states are increasingly subject to the scrutinisation and approval of this same cabal, with new legislation and policies that increasingly transfer more authority away from the nation-states to the non-elected and unaccountable central administration. Decisions that now vitally affect every European citizen are taken by anonymous bureaucrats who have no stake in their nations.

None of this was an accident. The Imperial ambitions of this secret Eurocratic elite were hiding in plain sight for many years. In fact, one smug senior EU official, Manuel Durão Barroso, arrogantly boasted that this was the formation of the first ever “non-imperial empire“. In his words, 27 nations decided to work together to “pool their sovereignty“, the problem being, of course that they didn’t do it by choice, and in fact many flatly rejected that suggestion, but their nations have been pushed to this state nevertheless. One of the signs of the arrogance and control of this Jewish cabal is that in 2011 it simply replaced the elected governments of Greece and Italy with technocrats reporting to their central secret government – the same one that controls the US. One British Member of Parliament stated at the time that the people and their governments were cut out altogether, and that “the lamps are going out all over Europe”. And he was correct.

If we think back to the Article on Bernays and War Marketing, to the intense and relentless program of propaganda and disinformation, this thread of fascism was precisely the strategy these men created and followed to eliminate resistance to US entry to the First World War, and in fact to convert resistance to eagerness. Further, if we scour the Jewish-owned Western media today, we find constant attacks on socialism but not a word on fascism. More than this, we find severe personal attacks on anyone who dares introduce the topic of fascism in an American or even a European context, and nowhere can we find discussions of fascism in the Western media. As you will see later, the world is slowly proceeding toward fulfilment of a grand plan of what many have termed an endgame of ‘global tyranny’, essentially a worldwide fascist dictatorship. You have read of the group of Jewish bankers who attempted to overthrow the US government and install a fascist dictatorship, using General Smedley Butler as a front man. That plan has only been delayed, not forgotten, and the signs today are more than obvious in both the US and the European Union. The entire subject of fascism has been locked away in a closet, totally removed from the publication list, so as not to create premature alarm among the intelligent population.

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EN – LARRY ROMANOFF – Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion – Chapter 15 – China's Democracy Experiments

October 16, 2024, 8:30 am

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Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

Chapter 2 - The Jewish Origin

Chapter 8 - Rubber-Stamp Parliaments

Chapter 11 – The Chimera of Democracy

Chapter 15 – China's Democracy Experiments

Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

Part 8 – China's Democracy Experiments

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

CONTENT

15.1 Introduction

15.2. Kindergarten Democracy

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15.1 Introduction

I have written earlier that the multi-party electoral system ( “democracy” ) is the only form of government designed to be controlled by outsiders, naturally leaving it open to corruption and fraud. The Chinese, listening to the Americans, discovered all the proof of this in their own back yard. China has experimented with small-scale introductions of Western-style democratic elections for local officials in rural areas.

We are often told that “first impressions” are the most important, that on initially meeting a person or entering a new situation, we see it most clearly at that first introduction. With the passage of time, our perceptions become clouded and dimmed by extraneous factors and our focus scattered by irrelevancies. On the introduction of “democracy” to the Chinese, they saw it very clearly as it really was – a system for obtaining political power that was just begging to be manipulated. In fact, it was seen as the very purpose of such a system and to have been designed specifically for such a purpose. And it was.

In early 2014, in Changsha, China's nursery of democracy and many other imaginative crimes, there was a massive vote-buying scandal where almost 60 individuals were charged for electoral fraud, dereliction of duty, disrupting elections, buying votes, bribery and related corruption, involving more than 500 governors and various local party officials who were disqualified and relieved of their posts , their crimes involving many thousands of citizens and more than 100 million yuan in bribes. And this was only one case of many.

In North China's Hebei province, one town had two failed elections within a month, corrupted by vote-buying with twice as many votes as eligible voters , stolen ballot boxes and much other electoral fraud. Many towns and villages introduced multi-party elections in the late 1980s, with many experiencing similar problems. In September of 2016, there was a massive election-Rigging Scandal in Liaoning, with more than 500 people paying bribes to get friends elected . China's National People's Congress expelled 45 governors, nearly half the number elected from Liaoning , because of bribery and election fraud. In addition, more than 500 lawmakers were dismissed or resigned from the 619-member Liaoning People's Congress , and several people were arrested.

I was surprised that anyone was surprised. That's democracy. That's how it works. It was designed to be wide open to corruption. In the West, we have more experience so we do it more quietly and in different ways, but the result is the same. Wherever money can buy legislative power, all open systems will become corrupted.

The Chinese saw “democracy” as it really was – a way to obtain control of a government by collecting votes. The easiest way to collect votes is to buy them , and there isn't even any morality here. Before moralizing about the Chinese, consider that if it's okay for AIPAC and corporations to buy politicians, why isn't it okay for politicians to buy voters? The next easiest way (if you're willing to be a bit dishonest) is to print excess ballots and stuff the ballot boxes . And let's not forget that stuffing ballot boxes was a tradition in the US and Canada 200 years ago.

But again, with this “new” political system, we are being offered full control of the government of a city, by the simple expedient of having people vote for us. There is no other requirement, and anyone can do it. It's obvious that someone with money and ambition will rise to this challenge and find a way, honest or otherwise, to get those votes.

These are serious issues in China because increasingly the king-makers in the background will be foreigners. Jewish Consulate staff, members of the US State Department, Embassy officials who are CIA but disguised as diplomats, the NED, USAID, AmCham and dozens of American NGOs, are all spending money and working in the background to influence government in China. That's the truth, and if it's apparent to me it should be obvious to many others. Their success in Hong Kong is stunning; the Americans have obtained enormous influence on the political landscape in Hong Kong and are so clever and experienced that the hundreds of thousands of little Hong Kong puppets cannot even see the strings. And they have every intention of doing the same in Mainland China.

15.2. Kindergarten Democracy

But these examples were nothing compared to what happened at the Chunhui Primary School in Zhengzhou , where 1,700 small children learned lessons about “democracy” that they will unfortunately never forget. These students used to have a “backward, old-fashioned, traditional, Chinese-style” system of choosing student leaders where the selection was based on silly things like scholastic merit and the recommendations of teachers as to character. But, thanks to American pressure, they “altered their tradition” and instead turned to modern, Western-style “democracy” .

And how did that work? Well, one student (with a very poor academic record) was chosen as a leader because he was “good at basketball” and was “friendly” . And how did they get themselves elected? Well, they learned to conduct democratic election campaigns, just like all Westerners. According to media reports, “Some played the saxophone, some danced, and some showed off their calligraphy or painting skills, played traditional Chinese musical instruments as a way of impressing voters.” One mother was so eager to make her little kid a king that she more printed than 1,000 pretty little blue election cards with his name, asking everyone to vote for him.

The Headmaster of the school, Hu Jianling, said the program aimed to encourage students to “bravely express their ideas” and to “participate in the school's management . ” In the opinion of the school, these student leaders proved Hu's plan “effective and perhaps even beneficial . ”

Let's examine what really happened here. I have no wish to embarrass Mr. Hu, who I am sure is a fine gentleman with good intentions, but what kind of devil possessed this man that he thought it was a good idea to get 1,700 10-year-old kids to “bravely participate in the school's management” ? What the hell does he think a school is? In this one experiment in this one school, we can see all the pathetic flaws of Western democracy, flaws apparently invisible to the teachers, the parents and especially to the students who have learned a corrupt lesson in living that they will probably never forget. If you want to corrupt the population, it is always best to begin with the children, because that will make the corruption permanent.

First, what was the purpose of these elections? It should be to select the most competent person for a job that carries responsibilities to the students, but nowhere in any of this little kindergarten travesty was there even a mention of competency or responsibility. None. These little politicians just wanted to be elected because they wanted to be elected, not because they had any ability or wanted to accomplish anything useful for their schoolmates. There were no students who campaigned to eliminate excessive homework or to have cleaner washrooms or more after-school tutoring. They just wanted to be leaders and to have the accompanying power and prestige, with not a thought to any obligation involved.

Even worse, how did these little political campaigns? How did they conduct themselves to convince their electorate to vote for them? Well, they “leveraged their personal popularity” ” from good looks or sports ability, or their father's money for buying pretty dresses and nice bicycles. They “leveraged their entertainment ability” by playing the saxophone or other instruments. They “leveraged their painting and calligraphy skills” , and they no doubt found many inventive 10-year-old ways to run around the school begging for votes. How wonderful. The mother who paid to print the cute little blue cards for her kid to pass out will next time have a 5-yuan note attached to them. Those little kids learned that the only real qualification for becoming a leader and taking power is a talent for psychological manipulation, that credentials are ignored in obtaining votes.

Are these the primary ingredients of a good leader? Is this how China chooses its General Secretary and Politburo members? Do they sit in Tiananmen Square and play a saxophone or a guitar, or paint caricature portraits of tourists? This is how the Americans select their leaders, but why teach this to Chinese children as an ideal?

But this was only the first attempt and our little politicians had no experience on which to draw. They will do much better the next time. They will quickly learn that you can buy votes, and will begin raising small amounts of money to give out more than cute blue cards to anyone who promises to vote for them. They will learn that you can attract votes by making promises – not by keeping them, but by making them. So, they will promise to reduce homework, with no idea of how to do that and with the knowledge that they have no power to accomplish such a result in any case. But they will promise, at least to try.

They will learn they have the power to grant gifts of patronage, and will promise to place popular voters on committees, with the expectation these individuals will help to sway other voters. They will promise to work for easier marking standards, better school lunches, and many other things that the smart candidates will know are fundamental issues for all students. They will learn to read the wishes of the student body and to turn desire those into votes and personal power. They will quickly learn to become real politicians. In short, they will learn to lie and manipulate.

They already know that a school year is a long time and that kids have short memories; they intuitively know they won't be held accountable for failing to deliver, and they also know there is no accountability anyway, that after they are elected, nobody can do anything to them. If there were personal responsibility, there would be no candidates.

And it gets worse. In all segments of society, including elementary schools, there are always 'king-makers' lurking in the background, those who don't want to be in the light but who prefer to sit in the shadows and pull the strings. These are the clever ones who amass the real power and who intuitively understand how to control events to their ultimate satisfaction regardless of the wishes of the greater group. These are the dangerous ones; they are too clever by half, and are naturally manipulative. Often, they have a mother who is of like mind and character, providing all the guidance necessary. The first thing they learn is that the power lies in the nominations, not in the voting.

And now we naturally enter the field of multi-party politics where we have two or three king-makers, each with a following, each selecting a likely candidate who will be obedient and controllable, and will say, “I can make you the leader . Would you like that?” And off we go, each king-maker (and his mother) designing a platform of campaign promises guaranteed to attract naive, innocent and inexperienced little voters.

This is where it will lead, and there is nothing the school or the teachers can do to prevent it. Why? Because the original premise, however nicely-worded, is false, flawed, and almost criminal. The purpose of this selection process should be to choose the best leaders for the school, mature, responsible little people of good character who can set an example for the other children, who care about the welfare of their school-mates and who will sincerely use their power to improve the school's environment. But we have discarded that objective and instead created a purposeless popularity contest that is wide open to every kind of social pressure and corruption. We are not selecting our leaders on their ability or their character or their sense of responsibility, but instead on their personal marketing ability – on their skills to influence and manipulate others to vote for them, honestly or otherwise.

In all of this, where is the discussion of credentials, of qualifications for a position of responsibility? Totally absent. In fact, the prior system of teacher character recommendations and scholastic excellence – in other words, credentials – which was a perfect system, was specifically abandoned so these idiotic yuppies could emulate the Americans and accommodate their foolish version of “democracy” .

There is no evidence that any of these little candidates had any leadership skills, good academic records, a sound character, or indeed any understanding whatever of the needs and wishes of either the students or the teachers. None would be old enough to have any appreciation of the meaning of participating in the management of the school. None will be selected on any of the necessary attributes of a leader. Few if any will have any real qualifications for a leadership position, and none will understand the responsibility they are accepting. They are little kids.

And what of the students who vote? What will they consider in casting their votes for a student leader? The ability to play a saxophone? Mama's pretty blue cards? Few if any will have an appreciation of their responsibility, few will know how to choose wisely, and none will have the ability to properly evaluate a (more or less) unknown person for a job whose duties they do not understand. My congratulations. Welcome to American-style politics, the one thing China was fortunate to not have.

But this is precisely what China now has in its rural areas with the introduction of Western-style democratic elections for local officials. These are much more serious because the participants are adults, the decisions affect real lives, and because too often the king-makers in the background are almost all American and Jewish.

Mr. Romanoff's writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai's Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney's new anthology 'When China Sneezes'. (Chapt. 2 - Dealing with Demons ).

His full archive can be seen at

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

This article may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. This content is being made available under the Fair Use doctrine, and is for educational and information purposes only. There is no commercial use of this content.

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EN – LARRY ROMANOFF – Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion – Chapter 16 – China is Not the West

October 16, 2024, 9:15 am

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Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

Chapter 11 – The Chimera of Democracy

Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion

16. Part 16 – China is Not the West

BULGARIAN CHINESE ENGLISH ESTONIAN POLSKI ROMANIAN

Democracy, The Most Dangerous Religion free e-book

CONTENT

16.1. Introduction

16.2. The Chinese are not Interested in “Politics”

16.3. Not Many Chinese are Interested in Government, Either

16.4. Foreign Resentment of China’s One-Party Government

16.5. The Compradors

16.1. Introduction

China is different in having a one-party government, which Americans consider a religious heresy, but the system has enormous advantages. Here, there is no forced separation of officials on the basis of political ideology. China’s entire social spectrum is represented in government in the same way as in Chinese or any other society. There is no partisan in-fighting. Unlike the West, China’s system looks for consensus rather than conflict. Government decision-making is not a sport where my team has to win. It is simply a group of people with various viewpoints working together to obtain a consensus for policy and action for the overall good of their nation. China’s one-party system is superior in virtually all respects to what we have in the West, and how can it be otherwise when the nation’s government officials don’t waste their time fighting juvenile ideological battles with opposition parties.

One of the greatest deciding factors permitting China’s rise is the lack of a belligerent political environment due to the absence of multi-party politics. China’s one-party government is in for the long term; it makes no short-term decisions for the sake of political expediency. China makes decisions for the good of the whole country and, having made them, implements them. There is no partisanship, there are no lobbyists or special interest groups with the power to skew important decisions and rob the population of what it might have had. The benefits of this system can be seen in its results. China has already far surpassed the undeveloped nations that adopted Western democratic governments, and likely has a brighter future than most of them. Why is the West so eager for China to abandon a centuries-old system that clearly works well, in favor of one designed for ideological battles, conflicts and shouting wars?

China’s one-party system is the only thing saving it from destruction, and China needs to stop apologising for it. It is precisely due to China’s so-called “authoritarian” system that only the smartest and most competent can get into leadership positions. It is due only to China’s one-party system that 800 million people have been lifted out of poverty and that China’s GDP has increased by 1700%, a feat never achieved in history by any so-called democracy. And while I don’t want to be unkind, if you’re Chinese, how do you imagine that your “democratic participation” would have improved the above results? My advice is to be grateful for what you have, because you really don’t know how lucky you are.

China’s government leaders manage by consensus, not by power, authority or bullying. It is their job to create agreement and unified willing participation in the country’s policies to meet its goals. At this level there are no children, and there is no one person with the power to start a war just because he doesn’t like someone, or who is free to alienate other nations on the basis of some blind personal ideology. In China, many people and industries are permitted to present their case, but private or short-term interests will not emerge victorious in this system. Your proposals will receive support and will succeed only if they are to the long-term benefit of the country as a whole – the greatest good for the nation and for the population. In the US system, corporations control the government; in China’s, the government controls the corporations. And those firms may often not get their way even if they are government-owned. On the introduction of HSR (High-Speed Rail) in China, some Chinese airlines (especially the state-owned ones) complained like hell, and with good reason, because many had to dramatically scale back their flight schedules since many people prefer the train. But the wide HSR network was seen as being in the best interests of the entire country and it went ahead. That is also why China has by far the best, and the least expensive, mobile phone system in the world.

One American was trying to convince some of my Chinese friends of the great benefits of the uninformed selecting the incompetent, claiming that American-style democracy “gives you more choices”. Choices of what? He was equating the task of selecting the senior management of one of the largest and most important countries in the world, with buying shampoo in the supermarket. “I can give you more choices.” The many senior officials of China’s government are the only people who truly and completely understand the challenges China faces, both from within and from without, and who know the kind and quality of people needed to guide the nation. They are the only people who are competent to evaluate and judge those who are best suited to lead China through the next decades. Nobody outside of those central departments knows how to identify and select those who are capable of leading and protecting China. China today has leaders with a competence unmatched anywhere in the world, men and women who have devoted their lives to the difficult magic of making China a first-world country in only one or two generations, bringing this wonderful country to the international prominence it once had and will have again. And too many Americans, including all of the US government, would like very much to prevent this from happening because it is a challenge to their worldwide domination.

In October of 2013, Qiushi published one of the most excellent and intelligent articles I have ever read on the subject of democracy and multi-party politics. I do not know the name of the author, but he is a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai, in the School of International Relations and Public Affairs. He wrote that:

The ‘benchmark for appraising democracy‘ is determined entirely by a small handful of countries who had “a contingent of campaigners paid by various foundations to go around the world delivering speeches and selling the case for democracy. Thus, democracy, together with the social sciences founded on its basis, is more like a propaganda tool employed by the West than anything else, and the resulting knowledge bubble is far from small. Under the Western-style appraisal mechanisms of democracy, there is only one precondition that needs to be met for a developing country to be considered a “democracy”, or to “graduate” from the class of authoritarian countries: that country must show obedience to Western countries, and must give up its independent foreign and domestic policies. Any country that does so is immediately rewarded with “international” praise”.

He also cautioned Chinese, as I strongly do myself, to stop apologising for China’s system of government because it is in fact one of the best in the world. And the Americans don’t have to like it.

The Americans fill their media with articles on China’s government system, often posing disingenuous but supposedly-thoughtful questions like “What will democracy add to China’s efficiency?” This is clever propaganda since the question stakes out in advance the position that a multi-party system is naturally superior and more efficient, thereby framing our discussion and limiting it to a useless opinion-based debate. The simple truth, available to anyone who looks, is that China’s one-party system is almost infinitely more efficient and responsive than any Western model, and even a partial attempt to emulate the Western system, especially the American one, would automatically restrict further progress in China, and would likely work to eliminate the gains already made. To my mind, the most serious mistake the Chinese people can make is to attribute even a shred of credibility to claims of superiority or benefit in a multi-party political system. Rather than feelings of inferiority, the Chinese should be taking pride in their country’s political framework and stop apologising for its grand success.

Again, we need only look at the results to realise the truth of this. No nation in the history of the world has achieved China’s stunning level of progress and development, the credit for which goes in large part to China’s government system and its selection and training of leaders. It’s true the system must adapt to eliminate flaws but the basic framework is unassailable. It isn’t China that shut down half its government for lack of funding. It isn’t China where 30% of the population lost their homes to a fraudulent scheme by its bankers. It isn’t China where millions of educated jobless and homeless are sleeping in tent cities or in the sewers under Las Vegas, and where fully 25% of the people are living below the poverty line and dependent on government assistance for food. It isn’t China where 70% of parents believe their childrens’ lives will be worse than their own, nor is it China where the people have lost all hope for a better future. These distressing conditions, and many more, are all in America and credit for them must be given entirely to the corrupt and dysfunctional multi-party democratic system that Americans have been taught to venerate while it bleeds them dry.

Many foreign observers are now (finally) admitting openly that China’s form of government exhibits multiple signs of superiority over Western systems, and that it is largely responsible for China’s efficiency, for its rapid development, and for its speed of response in areas like the Sichuan earthquake and the planning and deployment of its high-speed train system. The West could learn a lot from China’s government system. It works, beautifully. It has transformed the economy, brought hundreds of millions out of poverty and caused incomes to triple or more in the past ten years alone. It has put men into space, built the world’s fastest trains, the longest undersea tunnels, the world’s longest bridges, the largest dams. It has produced a growth rate of over 10% per year for 30 years, compared to perhaps 3% in the West. Americans love to disparage China’s government as authoritarian, but this “authoritarian” government has almost entirely eliminated illiteracy, liberated Chinese women and extended life expectancy for all from 41 years in 1950 to 76 and still rising today. It has created an educational system that has few apologies to make, and its social welfare system will soon be the envy of many nations. It is rapidly creating the world’s largest genuine middle class. And it’s hardly begun.

16.2. The Chinese are not Interested in “Politics”

In any Western country, political discussions often become emotionally-heated rather quickly, since most everyone has an opinion and many hold those opinions very strongly. The only surprise is that the violent emotions don’t lead more often to physical violence. However, since China hasn’t politics but only government, the discussions are normally muted. Not everyone has an opinion, few of those opinions inspire emotion, and debates are most often rational. Moreover, these debates seldom occur, since few people in any population are sufficiently knowledgeable to intelligently discuss the operations of a national government. And even fewer are interested, unless the government appears to be functioning badly. Most people in China will freely confess that they lack the knowledge of government, primarily because it is outside their field of study and employment, and they have no illusions about their ability to affect their national or local governments in a positive way. They “participate” only if something actually goes wrong. And, sometimes things, at least at the local level, do go wrong, and then the “participation” is quite loud. And, in each such case, if the local authorities fail to act quickly, the national government will step in and force a rectification. In China, “mistakes” by a government are seldom allowed to persist, and they often have prison sentences attached to them.

It is always a shock to Westerners, especially Americans, that some countries don’t permit ‘the people’ to meddle in government unless they have serious credentials and know what they’re doing. In a recent NYT article, it was reflected that Chinese typically believe that peasants (small-town Americans) “are too unschooled to intelligently select the nation’s leaders“. I don’t see how we can avoid the conclusion that they have it right.

Few educated Chinese see the Western multi-party democratic model as particularly appealing because they don’t equate politics with government – as Westerners do – nor do they see sanity in the selection of national leaders as a team sport. The Chinese see the West as having a system where anyone, even a person with no education, training, knowledge, experience, ability – or even intelligence – can rise to become the President or Prime Minister, and where high government office requires no credentials other than popularity. They look on this with an interesting mixture of disbelief and disdain. They are also aware that a multi-party system requires the forcible division of a society into ideologically different groups with violently opposing interests. China has made no such social divisions, and the culture would mitigate against them since they would of necessity lead to conflict and biased ideological agendas, disregarding the good of the country as a whole. Divisions of this kind are anathema to the Chinese, as they should be to us Westerners. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the number of Chinese citizens interested in the US-style of multi-party democracy is about the same as the number of Americans interested in communism.

By contrast, Westerners often observe that the Chinese are apolitical or even apathetic, having no interest in politics. This is true, but it reflects a fundamental ignorance since China neither has nor wants “politics“, and treats government as “government“. The Chinese see government as an occupation, a career like any other. They do not view government through the chromatic and otherwise distorted political team-sport lens as Westerners do. Some people in every country may be attracted or tempted by the prospect of a powerful position in government or industry, but this tends to be a small minority. Most Chinese, as probably most people in every country, want stability and a chance to improve their lives. So long as the government is able to create an environment that offers hope and a stable platform for improvement, they have little interest in the functioning of the government and are happy to leave it to those who are in charge.

16.3. Not Many Chinese are Interested in Government, Either

The Chinese people have a much more mature and realistic attitude toward government than do people in the West, in that they look at government as government, not through the primitive psychological mask of party politics. And when they look at government, they do not delude themselves into believing that running a country is as simple as ordinary Western people think it is. They are aware that a government position necessarily means the assumption of great responsibility. They know it requires a high level of expertise to understand and deal with issues of social policy, population, international trade and finance, the national and international economy, the nation’s industrial policy, foreign policy, military matters, border disputes, friction with US imperialism, and dozens more major and serious topics. And, in the end, most Chinese don’t feel they have the knowledge or experience to affect the course of their country in any positive way – and of course they are correct. They recognise that their government officials have committed their lives to education and training, to acquire the knowledge and skills to manage and lead a country and a society, and they are justifiably aware of their own personal shortcomings. In China, a government career is a commitment requiring one’s full participation, but those not in the professional fields of national governance are not encouraged to do so because they are likely to be uninformed. We cannot argue that this is wrong, and it does seem a more intelligent and realistic way of thinking about government.

16.4. Foreign Resentment of China’s One-Party Government

The reason the Americans and the European Jewish mafia hate China’s one-party system is not because it’s a bad system, but because it cannot be controlled by external forces. China’s one-party system is a perfect form of government, as is obvious by the results it has produced, but the Americans and the Jews cannot get their fingers into it. If China has no political parties and no public elections, how can I buy the candidates? And if I cannot buy the candidates, how can I control the government?

These people are willing to spend huge sums of money to buy control of China’s government and then have the power to influence all its policies, to initiate legislation and to slowly take control of the government. But in China, I can do nothing. The selection of China’s leaders is done quietly, in private. I don’t even know how the system works, and if I don’t understand the system, I cannot manipulate it. That’s why the Americans scream so loudly about China needing more “transparency” in its leadership selection. Why should they care how China chooses its leaders? It’s none of their business. China doesn’t criticise the way Americans choose their leaders. The Americans propose their “transparency” in moral terms, as if China were committing a sin by not being more “open”, but the issue is that they need to understand how it works so they can try to figure out a way to manipulate it. The truth is that China’s one-party government is the main armor preventing the country from being destroyed by the Westerners one more time.

The Americans, and their European banker puppet-masters, know perfectly well that China’s leaders understand their intent and will never cooperate, so the American propaganda machine turns to the Chinese people. “You need democracy. You need multi-party politics. You deserve to have ‘choices’, because selecting a President is the same as buying shampoo in a supermarket. You should be like us, with the ‘freedom’ to choose your shampoo. Trust us. Have a revolution and overthrow your government. That’s what God wants you to do.”

It should be noted here that the Americans, as a fundamental part of their incessant interference in China’s internal affairs, make great effort to cultivate attitudes in China that will foster and support the development of a Left-Right political division in Chinese society, because the natural conflict inherent in this ideological divide is a prerequisite for the kind of political change the Americans want to inflict on China. In fact, the Americans have gone so far as to conduct extensive studies on the regional social structures of China to determine where in the country they might find the highest concentrations of those who might be considered “conservative” or “Right-Wing”, and this is where they look for puppets and “democratic dissidents” they can use to provoke China’s national leaders. This is the source of Ai Weiwei, Chen Guangcheng, Liu Xiaobo, and many others. The Americans incite these people to provoke and provoke until the government has no choice but to act, then flood the international media with stories of China “cracking down” on “political dissidents”. It’s all a huge fraud, a kind of game the Americans love to play. But in reality, it is always possible in any country to find a few disaffected individuals who are weak-minded and incite them to provoke their governments, usually to their great personal detriment, but then these individuals are always expendable. Witness the little American darling Joshua Wong in Hong Kong, inspired by the American Consulate in HK to push his luck far past the limit and now spend perhaps 20 years in prison as a reward. But, as I said, these puppet-idiots are all expendable.

There is one saving grace that may protect China from this disease called “democracy”, a matter that seems to be entirely unknown in the West. Instead of adopting a new policy and hoping it works as intended, the government will conduct small trials in selected areas, perhaps sometimes for years, to learn the real-world effects on all segments of society, adjusting as they go, until they believe they have something that can work nationwide. It is only after such focused trials that new directions will be taken. It is my fervent hope they are doing this with the introduction of elections for local rural officials. Also, one portion of “democracy with Chinese characteristics” is that there are, and have been, many policy proposals where the Chinese leaders are uncertain of the range of the welcome such legislation might receive from the general population, or of the potential economic or other effects a particular new legislation. In the first case, prior to proposing any legislation, the government will form literally thousands of teams to circulate among the population nationwide to discuss the new proposed legislation and obtain a clear picture of the views and preferences of the people. And the government definitely does listen to the will of the people, taking great pains to explain the reasons for various proposals and to arrive at a solution compatible with the overall aims for the nation, but one that will have the support of the people. If this isn’t “democracy”, I don’t know what would be.

In an interview published in the Huffington Post some years ago, Helmut Schmidt, German’s former Chancellor, had this to say about the multi-party electoral system (“democracy”) for China:[1]

“Democracy is not the end point of mankind. Democracy has a number of serious failures. For instance, you have to be elected every four years and you have to be re-elected after the next four years. So, you try to tell the people what they would like to hear. The multi-party system is not the crown of progress ” . . . I would not sell it to the Chinese. The British have sold it to the Indians and to the Pakistanis and the Dutch tried to sell it to the Indonesians. Democracy is not really working in India. I would not tell the Egyptians to introduce democracy; nor would I pitch it to the other Muslim countries like Malaysia, Iran and Pakistan. It is a Western invention. It was not invented by Confucius. It did not work in ancient Rome [nor in Athens], and then it had not functioned in any other country in the world. And whether you become a democracy or not remains to be seen. My feeling is that [China] will not become a democracy.”

As I have noted elsewhere, the disparity between the quality of elected politicians in Western countries and the analogous officials in China’s government, especially at the national level in the Central Government, is a discrepancy so vast that comparisons are largely meaningless. Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, praised China’s President Xi Jinping as “a man of great breadth” and put him in “the Nelson Mandela class of persons”, saying “that man has iron in his soul”, and Xi has been widely praised (except in the US) as a man who “will become the first truly global leader”. These are not compliments we see being paid to Western politicians. Why would China want to change?

16.5. The Compradors

Still, the American interference project is very active in China today, the US government spending (by its own admission) more than $300 million each year inside China, searching for and coaching ‘dissidents’ and ‘democracy activists’ as well as other yuppie compradors wanting to ‘restructure’ China’s government to permit more foreign control.

I have often discussed various topics related to government, politics, the West, with groups of people in China – mostly young professionals, all university graduates, and have been frequently surprised at the attitudes of some who have been strongly influenced by foreign sources. The attitudes expressed, and even the words and phrases used, were too similar, almost verbatim, appearing to have come from some American source that was listing all the advantages of US-style “democracy”. I heard many comments like “China needs two political parties”, or “The West is so rich because it has democracy and a superior education system.” And so many others, cut from the same cloth, all idealised and false American propaganda, baseless and uninformed, riddled with American moral superiority and battered with a list of China’s comparative failings.

But when I explained, for example, that the West was rich primarily due to colonialism, to extermination of populations and looting of resources, these people were speechless. None appeared to have any idea that the US was encircling China with propaganda, with military, trying to infiltrate and collapse both China’s government and economy. None understood that the form of China’s government made it closed to foreign interference, which was primarily the reason the US wants China to open up and adopt multiple political parties. Most people to whom I spoke were naive, innocent, and dangerously unaware of the political forces surrounding them. These people were spellbound as I outlined many of these issues; they simply had no idea.

I fully concur with James Petras’ observation that “These Chinese yuppies imitate the worst of Western consumerist life styles and their political outlooks are driven by these life styles and Westernized identities which preclude any sense of solidarity with their own working class.” Many of these people are now embedded in China’s economic or other systems and are in position to do real harm. Many of them, especially ‘dissidents’ or ‘activists’ are supported and financed by American NGOs, but in their ignorance, they perceive no threat. To the extent that these people gain influence, they distract and weaken China, just as their traitorous counterparts did 150 years ago by effectively being intermediaries for their own colonisers.” As Petras again pointed out, the entire last crop of these Chinese collaborators were totally discredited before the Chinese people, and the same needs to happen again today.

President Xi has warned of the necessity to eradicate “subversive currents coursing through Chinese society”, as well as the dangers of American-financed NGOs in China, quoting a government document stating that “Western forces hostile to China and dissidents within the country are still constantly infiltrating the ideological sphere” and have “stirred up trouble” in many sensitive areas. I couldn’t agree more.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ + https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

Notes

[1] Helmut Schmidt: ‘I Would Not Sell Democracy To The Chinese’

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/04/01/china-democracy_n_5067120.html

This article may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorised by the copyright owner. This content is being made available under the Fair Use doctrine, and is for educational and information purposes only. There is no commercial use of this content.

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EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America -- Chapter 1--The Rise of the Police State

October 17, 2024, 12:53 pm

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Police State America -- Volume One

Chapter 2 — The FBI

Chapter 3 –COINTELPRO

Chapter 4 — Universal Public Surveillance

Chapter 5 — Other Surveillance

Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists

Chapter 7 — Winning the Information War

Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement

Chapter 9 — The Militarisation of the Police

Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press

Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism

Chapter 13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil

Police State America

Chapter 1-The Rise of the Police State

By Larry Romanoff

By the end of the Vietnam war, US corporations were no longer competitive in the world economy and were losing the bulk of their domestic market to imports, leading to de-industrialisation and the large-scale relocation of manufacturing to Asia, primarily China. Since then, the US has experienced large and increasing trade deficits regardless of currency exchange rates or other external conditions. With its military adventures financed entirely on debt, the US also began running increasingly larger budget deficits, with increasingly fewer funds for public programs like social welfare or education, or to maintain or rebuild its already-dilapidated physical infrastructure.

After the US abandoned the gold standard and unilaterally scuttled the Bretton-Woods agreement, debt financing for the Vietnam war resulted in a massive expansion of the money supply, leading to a decade of ruinous inflation with the US dollar depreciating by about 95%.

Ronald Wilson Reagan, the 40th president of the United States. A former actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild, he was elected governor of California in 1966 and US president in 1981. He is standing in front of a sign reading 'Let's Make America Great Again', during his electoral campaign. (Photo by MPI/Getty Images)）

It was then, at the end of the 1970s, that the US experienced the biggest political upheaval in its recent history, what James Petras appropriately called "The Great Transformation", brought about by Bernays' secret government. In another Volume, I will detail the massive corporate social changes that occurred in the US in the early 1980s, but will discuss some here.

It was during this time under President Ronald Reagan that the invisible elite took the US government and the nation on an alarming ideological turn to the extreme right, and everything changed. In addition to the mass deindustrialisation of the country and the destruction of labor unions and workers' rights, Reagan opened the doors to deregulation and privatisation, and effectively turned the keys of the country over to the elites and their large corporations and banks. It was this that paved the way for the parade of human, economic, political and military atrocities that continue to this day.

President Ronald Reagan addresses the nation from the Oval Office ontax reduction legislation. Source

This was when Reagan, under the advice of his handlers, proclaimed at least 200 Presidential Directives designed almost without exception for the benefit of the secret government and their banks and corporations. One need only look at the historical record to prove this point. Reagan was painfully unintelligent, without the mental capacity to have even conceived of such plans for the devastation and cannibalisation of so many nations, all of which were illegal by every measure and concocted solely to satisfy the commercial greed of Bernays' invisible people. These were primarily private laws dictated by the secret government which authorised the use of the US military and CIA to overthrow dozens of governments and to fund and install dictators that would permit the wholesale plundering of nations with unconscionable civilian repression resulting in at least 10 million deaths. This was when US militarism and military repression became openly mainstream activities, and which continued until the world could no longer stomach the tales of atrocities. This was when the CIA dusted off its 1,000-page torture manual, accumulated from long experience in the Philippines and Indonesia, and distributed it widely for decades to America's puppet dictators. It was when we saw an explosion in the US military budget as well, tripling in a short time to the extent that the US today spends almost twice as much on its military as the entire rest of the world combined, when the US global military expansion accelerated even as the domestic economic situation degenerated.

This was when Washington's neocon Zionists took virtually full control of US foreign policy, especially including the Middle East but also utilising the US military for their aggressive financial predation of South and Central America. This was when the US Congress began to lose the final vestiges of a democratic government, surrendering its legislative and oversight powers to the White House and AIPAC. This was when the US entered its long series of current wars, from Afghanistan to Iraq and Syria, meant to end with the destruction of Iran and Somalia, all to ensure the American Jews' (many of whom are dual US-Israeli citizens) plans of solidifying Israel's overwhelming power in the Middle East.

And in all of this, we witnessed a steady growth of the domestic police state apparatus conducted with military aggressiveness. You will recall from the Chapter on Bernays and Democracy Control the report produced for the Trilateral Commission by Samuel Huntington, where he complained that the civil protests and disobedience were a crisis of democracy and that the public needed to be properly indoctrinated. This was the origin of America's decisive swing to civil repression and fear as a means to ensure the desired apathy and noninvolvement of the people in the affairs of their government.

This was when the NSA so broadly expanded both its domestic and international espionage activities into ever more illegal areas and methods, and when the FBI became increasingly involved in suppressing dissension in all its forms. This was when we began to see the enormous growth of the domestic security and quasi-military agencies like Homeland Security and the proliferation of a multitude of repressive government powers and policing agencies involved in every aspect of civilian life. It was when decisions were made to create an enormous civil-military bureaucracy focused on domestic civilian control, when the Department of Homeland Security built and staffed its 800 internment camps in preparation for the civil unrest that would be unleashed from the invisible government's planned economic and social policies.

A large FEMA trailer park is seen next to the University of New Orleans campus in the Lakeview area August 25, 2006 in New Orleans, LA.MARIO TAMA/GETTY IMAGES

Naturally, there was increasingly less funding available for the nation's social programs, resulting in the gradual evisceration of all social services, primarily education and health care, the huge budget deficits and national debt being used to justify dismantling the social safety net. This was when Reagan claimed that a universal health care plan "would mean the end of freedom in America". Included here was the new hysteria for privatisation, the prison system perhaps most worthy of note since it reflected a planned return to the world of slavery and convict leasing.

This was when Bernays' elite bankers began the push to the extreme financialisation of the US economy and for deregulation, especially of the US financial system. When we look at the facts, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that these massive financial and tax changes occurred primarily to assist the Jewish bankers and elite industrialists in a vast plan to eviscerate the lower and middle classes and embark on what was perhaps the greatest planned transfer of wealth in human history.

President Bill Clinton addressing a White House conference to discuss ideas about how best to reform Social Security to ensure its solvency well into the 21st century, 1998. (Credit: Robert Giroux/Getty Images)

As Reagan, and then Bush Sr. disappeared from the political scene, Clinton had already been primed to complete the transition. It was under Clinton's watch that the invisible government effectively legitimised a war on social policy and completed the removal of worker protection. It was his weakness and virtual treason that conspired to de-regulate the US banking system, repealing the Glass-Steagal Act, opening wide the doors to the financialisation of the economy, abandoning US economic policy to the FED and the Jewish bankers of Wall Street, paving the way for their massive profits leading to the 2008 social collapse.

It was also under Clinton that American Jews were inserted in about 80% of all strategic posts, effectively taking control of US foreign policy in the Middle East, thus ensuring Israel's military and hegemonic ambitions were fully imported into the White House and that the US military would execute them by proxy. It was also Clinton who initiated the expansion of the prison system and much of the repressive police state anti-terrorist legislation. It is true the US has never been a paragon of socialism but it was Clinton's conversion to Zionism and his own ideological orientation that strongly propelled the US on its path from the remaining vestiges of humane social policy and good government to a police state.

Under George Bush, America more or less completed the transition to surrendering full control of its legislative and executive branches to AIPAC and the invisible government. In many respects Bush was the ideal puppet; gullible, grateful, eager to please, surprisingly unintelligent and uninformed, weak and easily-led; putty in the hands of his neocon Zionist masters.

The multiple outrageous wars, the massive increase in military spending, the vast network of torture prisons, the unlimited unregulated freedom for the FED and Wall Street to work their magic of financial destruction and wealth transfer. There was also a new campaign with heavy media support, to demonise Muslims and to repress domestic activists, especially anyone critical of Israel. And of course, coincident with the financialisation of the US economy and the evisceration of the middle class, under Bush we saw the continued dumbing-down of education, a devastating rollback of social programs and the rise of a vast political-police apparatus designed for domestic suppression and civil war.

Obama inherited these social, financial and military crises and may well have harbored hopes for a change in direction but, due in equal parts to naivete, ambition and cowardice, he capitulated to the demands of the Jewish secret government, with all parts of the grand plan continuing unabated and some increasing in both scope and brutality. Under Obama and an increasingly compliant and complicit Congress, the falsely-christened "Homeland Security" apparatus has grown exponentially, today comprising almost 400,000 employees and a budget of almost $200 billion. And few military actions deserve more vicious condemnation than his destruction and looting of Libya by proxy for his Jewish masters.

The essential point is that all of these items, programs, processes and events were related, part of the same plan concocted by the same invisible government. Today we are in the final stages of the deep structural changes involved in this grand process, witnessing more dismantling of social services and education, a still-increasing financialisation of the economy, the continued impoverishment of society, and a vast increase in both domestic and international espionage and surveillance as part of the support mechanism for the police state. It is partially due to the fact that the event of 9-11 formed such an integral part of this program that a great many remain firmly convinced 9-11 was a planned event meant to facilitate and justify much of the remainder of the agenda, especially civilian repression and curtailing of civil rights, and to justify the perpetual war on terror that would itself be used as a kind of proxy for increasing world domination.

David Rockefeller (L) with his brothers in New York in September 1967; (L-R) David, Winthrop, John D Rockefeller III, Nelson and Laurance

In case you're tempted to dismiss the above comment as an over-reaction or a kind of 'conspiracy theory', consider this quote by David Rockefeller in an address to the Trilateral Commission. Rockefeller is referring to the Bilderberg Group - whose existence was hotly denied for decades and derided as just another conspiracy theory: "We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of public scrutiny during those years. But the world is now more sophisticated and fully prepared to march towards our one world-government. The supranational sovereignty of our intellectual elites and world bankers is surely preferable to the globe as a whole." It was also Rockefeller who stated that his group needed one final dramatic impetus, "another Pearl Harbor event", to bring this New World Government to the throne. 9-11 was that event.

The Jewish Zionists who hold, or have held, key positions in various presidential administrations and in the scaffold that supports the police state, have featured prominently in smoothing the transition. James Petras pointed out that it was Michael Chertoff who intervened immediately after 9/11 "to free scores of Israeli spy suspects and 5 Israeli Mossad agents who had been witnessed filming and celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center and were under active investigation by the FBI". Chertoff was also the chief architect of the global war on terror and of the Patriot Act, both of which have served to severely limit civil and legal rights and to accelerate the transition to a police state. In no small part, their support emerges from the majority of members of the US Congress who define themselves as "Israel First", and who appear more than willing to place the interests of that nation second to those of their own.

In 2013, Finian Cunningham wrote a valuable article in which he critically and bluntly outlined concerns about the US totalitarian system, claiming that US democracy was for all intents and purposes a dead corpse. He began by stating that the desperate US manhunt for Snowden showed above all else how petrified US leaders have become of ordinary citizens revealing the truths about their despotic rule. He wrote:

"American society is collapsing from the sheer weight of its decrepit capitalist economy. The social system is unsustainable. It is like a distended rotten sack that is coming apart at the seams from inexorable burgeoning pressure. Today, the US has evolved into a dystopia, not a democracy, where obscene wealth and privilege stand in the face of massive poverty and misery. One indicator of this abysmal inequality is the fact that the 400 richest Americans have more material wealth than 155 million of their fellow citizens combined. Another datum: some 50 million Americans – a sixth of the population – are surviving on food handouts. Unemployment, homelessness, suicide rates, prescription drug addiction, rampant gun crime all speak in different ways of social meltdown."

He wrote that it was hard to believe that not so long ago the US was regarded as the economic paradigm of the world, but now increasingly resembles a giant sprawling ghetto of unremitting poverty interspersed with a few gated rich communities populated by the top one percent of society. "The American ruling class, as with their elite counterparts around the world, are figuratively sitting within their privileged niches and petrified by the mounting discontent 'outside'. Through their criminal ransacking and rigging of wealth, the powers-that-be have through their own insatiable greed created a powerful potential enemy - virtually the entire population, both in the US and around the world. In this highly unstable situation of elites and masses that bankrupt capitalism has furnished, "democracy" can no longer be tolerated by the rulers. That is why the rulers have embarked on massive information gathering, monitoring, spying and surveillance. It is all about maintaining "control" of a precarious and explosive disequilibrium."

Cunningham again: "One basic duty of any state is to protect its citizens from foreign enemies who are conventionally understood to be state militaries or non-state terrorist groups. But from Snowden’s revelations of US government surveillance of telecommunications, the vast bulk of America’s spying is on civilians. Snowden disclosed in one instance how Chinese hospitals and universities – not military installations – were among the many international civilian targets for American government snooping. US national security officials defend this global dragnet method as a necessary way to trawl for terrorists." But we now know that no terrorist plots have been uncovered anywhere, at least none that were not fabricated by the FBI, and in truth the only dangers from terrorism today are those created by the US itself. Journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote that Americans have learned that the US surveillance apparatus is not directed primarily at the Chinese or Russian governments or terrorists, but at them, and that "what has been 'harmed' is not the national security of the US but the ability of its political leaders to work against their own citizens and citizens around the world in the dark, with zero transparency or real accountability."

Cunningham wrote, and I concur, that America's increasing militarism and an imperative to assert control over social meltdown and rebellion, were the result of the imploding neocon capitalist system. He said this "historic failure of capitalism explains the alarming growth in militarism and the intensification of domestic surveillance powers and civil repression. It was in this context where he claimed "American democracy is, for all intents and purposes, a dead corpse. Only criminal wars and repression of its citizens are keeping the moribund system on a life-support system." In the 1970s, US Senator Frank Church led an investigation into illicit American government covert operations and warned that if the NSA were to ever become deployed against the American public, as opposed to foreign enemies, then that country’s democracy would be finished. That is precisely the present abysmal outcome of secret US state powers.

No police state can function without a centralisation of power. This is especially important in areas of surveillance and espionage coupled with a reliable and ruthless quasi-military and police for control of civilian conduct and political dissension. It's not for nothing that power has been increasingly concentrated in the White House for several decades now, nor is it an accident that we have seen legislative changes creating the immense Homeland Security apparatus, as well as the illegal creation of a widespread domestic surveillance network. Successive US Presidents have not only assumed powers not entirely theirs but have increasingly taken advantage of what are called Presidential Directives, which are one-man executive orders made under the guise of advice from the National Security Council and which have the full force and effect of law. Given their presumed connection with national security, many of these are classified Top Secret and cannot be revealed even to the elected Congress or the courts. It is by these 'laws' that the government prosecuted the Occupy Wall Street protestors and that political dissidents are convicted of 'terrorism'. In court, the government charges a dissident with breaking a secret law, the content of which cannot be revealed for reasons of national security, and for which crime the evidence also cannot be revealed for the same reason. Every day, individuals are prosecuted and foreign policy initiatives taken, none of which can be disclosed. If this isn't a fascist police state, what would be?

Media control is an essential and integral part of a functioning police state, centralisation being necessary to distribute propaganda and censor information and to help maintain and manipulate the climate of fear which permits the reduction of civil liberties. It is therefore not an accident that US legislative changes permitting corporate concentration have especially included the mass media. This control of public opinion has steadily increased and become more powerful over the years through media concentration. The US government has increasingly responded to intense lobbying and finally permitted media monopolies and oligopolies to emerge, resulting in the extreme centralisation and control of content and ideology we see today.

In November of 2014, Dave Lindorff wrote an article titled "Metastasizing of the Police State of America", which he opened by stating "One can no longer speak in terms of the US as a country that is moving towards becoming a police state. We are living in a police state". He noted that "at least 40 agencies of the US government from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Supreme Court are using undercover agents to spy on ... citizens", and says the US has "passed the tipping point" of being a police state. He noted too that, according to a New York Times report, "even NASA and the Smithsonian Institution have undercover operatives. Undercover cops and agents are assuming the identities of teachers, doctors, journalists and even priests". Lindorff wrote, "This information has to be put together with the rampant militarization of local police forces, who have become an occupying army, and with the proliferation of spying activities by state and local police agencies, encouraged by the establishment by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security of myriad “Joint Anti-Terrorism Strike Forces, and of 76 so-called Fusion Centers."

Lindorff said he used to scoff at what he saw as wild claims that Americans were living in a police state, but that he's changed his mind, and that Americans are totally ignorant of the fact that they are being constantly watched and subject to arbitrary arrest, that they discover the truth only when they cross a line. In discussing the freedom of Americans to criticize and protest against the ruling elites, he wrote that while they may feel free to act, Americans must note "the terrible lengths to which this government is going to repress political activists. The list of people being hounded and persecuted by the US police state is far too long to publish. Suffice to say if police repression can happen to the people on that list, it can happen to all of us." And that says it all.

Mr. Romanoff’s writing has been translated into 32 languages and his articles posted on more than 150 foreign-language news and politics websites in more than 30 countries, as well as more than 100 English language platforms. Larry Romanoff is a retired management consultant and businessman. He has held senior executive positions in international consulting firms, and owned an international import-export business. He has been a visiting professor at Shanghai’s Fudan University, presenting case studies in international affairs to senior EMBA classes. Mr. Romanoff lives in Shanghai and is currently writing a series of ten books generally related to China and the West. He is one of the contributing authors to Cynthia McKinney’s new anthology ‘When China Sneezes’. (Chapt. 2 — Dealing with Demons).

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

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EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America -- Chapter 2 -- The FBI

October 17, 2024, 1:01 pm

≫ Next: EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America -- Chapter 3 -- COINTELPRO

≪ Previous: EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America -- Chapter 1--The Rise of the Police State

Police State America -- Volume One

Chapter 3 –COINTELPRO

Chapter 4 — Universal Public Surveillance

Chapter 5 — Other Surveillance

Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists

Chapter 7 — Winning the Information War

Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement

Chapter 9 — The Militarisation of the Police

Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press

Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism

Chapter 13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil

Chapter 2 -- The FBI

By Larry Romanoff

Most people, including most Americans, are surprised to learn of the history of the FBI’s involvement in monitoring and disrupting peaceful, dissident activity in the United States. This agency has a long history dating back to the 1950s of mass surveillance, of targeting of people based on political ideology, of efforts to disrupt the movements for social justice, for efforts to shut down black liberation movement, the antiwar movement. Despite its fabricated image as America's highest-level police force, the FBI has always functioned primarily as America's political police force, with a responsibility to undermine and destroy any political developments that would challenge the existing order. The FBI has for the best part of a century operated as the secret police of the elite establishment against the people, similar to the political police forces in any repressive fascist state, and engaging in all manner of illegal acts which often included murder. It has developed to an art the techniques of performing "sting" and entrapment operations. Its agents have on countless occasions planned and initiated acts of terrorism and violence through the use of dissidents they had cultured and trained, often infiltrating opposing groups, inciting them to violence, and providing them with weapons and explosives. The Church Congressional Committee produced documentation of the White House use of the FBI or previous agencies for the purpose of political repression as far back as 1920, with these practices continuing into the present, and by the 1970s and 1980s there were countless revelations about the abuses of the FBI, the CIA, and other security agencies.

J Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigaton, (right) and his associate, Clyde Tolson at the Joe Louis and Jack Sharkey fight at Yankee Stadium, New York on 18th August 1936. This image is from the files of the United States National Archives. (Photo by Popperfoto via Getty Images/Getty Images)

The FBI has always been willing to use false claimsand false charges to eliminate real or imagined political threats. The Director of the FBI, Edgar J. Hoover, once wrote that "The purpose of counterintelligence action is to disrupt(political enemies) and it is immaterial whether facts exist to substantiate the charge." One needn't have been dangerous or threatening to attract the attention of the FBI; it was often sufficient to be politically objectionable in some way. Many political dissidents in the US have been killed, with many more framed and convicted for crimes of which they were innocent, spending decades in prison. Countless numbers of political activists were simply neutralised through a long list of illegal tactics. The record of these activities is long and frightening; there has been little the FBI would not do to prevent American citizens from engaging in unapproved political activity.

The FBI has a long history of having people imprisoned and even executed on flimsy or false evidence, many of whom have been proven innocent in later years. The Washington Post reported in 2013 that authorities had known for years that flawed forensic work by FBI examiners had led to convictions of innocent people, but FBI officials had never investigated the cases. This has been a repeated pattern for the agency. Multiple problems of false convictions have appeared several times in the past, usually when whistle-blowers revealed the problems to the media. Very recently, the Department of Justice began an unprecedented review of old criminal cases and found many in which FBI "experts" convicted innocent people by using exaggerated scientific testimony. In one case, a Supreme Court stayed the conviction of a man only hours before he was to die by lethal injection. He had been convicted on FBI testimony of a double homicide, but evidence of his innocence that had been hidden by the FBI surfaced at the last moment.

Federal prosecutors in DC have in recent years increasingly acknowledged that "errors by an elite FBI forensic unit" led to wrongful convictions, many of those wrongfully convicted having spent 25 or more years in prison before being cleared. One of the difficulties in re-opening these cases is that too often the original evidence somehow 'disappeared' when challenged, requiring other forms of modern testing necessary to prove innocence. There are now thousands of these questionable convictions being re-examined, almost all of them originating from the early 1980s and onward, false FBI convictions being yet another part of the Great Transformation. More than that, for decades the justice system refused to release information as to which convictions relied on the potentially-tainted evidence of this 'elite FBI forensic unit'.

This saga of tainted FBI prosecutions is resembling the auto recalls by General Motors - increasing by the week, with no end in sight. In 2014 it was revealed that nearly every FBI criminal case examined by the Justice Department included flawed or fraudulent forensic testimony. It was so bad that the massive examination of past cases that was mandated by the Justice Department was put on hold by the FBI because it was simply incapable of facing the vast extent of past manipulation and illegality. It required a year of increasing pressure by the Justice Department to re-commence the investigations, which revealed that almost every single FBI case reviewed, covering the past at least 20 years, was hopelessly tainted. And contrary to FBI claims of a 'rogue examiner', this has proven to be a systemic weakness infecting the entire justice system in America.

In May of 2014, Clyde Haberman wrote an article in the NYT detailing how the FBI's vaunted crime lab had convicted countless thousands of innocent people on supposed 'scientific' evidence that has now been proven false. A 2009 Report by the National Academy of Sciences found "serious problems" with methods routinely relied on by prosecutors and the police that included fingerprinting, blood typing, weapons identification, shoe print comparisons, handwriting, bite marks and hair testing. DNA has now been added to the list. One non-profit group specialising in freeing those wrongly convicted has succeeded in hundreds of false DNA matches alone. As far back as 1997, the FBI's own inspector general reported that the bureau’s crime lab was often sloppy. "Technicians were found to have exaggerated the reliability of their findings beyond the bounds of science, typically slanting their conclusions in the prosecution’s favor. A forensics expert who used to work in the federal lab, claimed there was "absolutely a disconnect between what I could say as a scientist and what the prosecutors, or the defense attorneys, wanted me to say". In 2012, the FBI reached an understanding where it agreed to "stay within the confines of known science", and is examining several thousand old cases to determine if faulty lab evidence played a role in guilty verdicts. It appears so far that innocence is proven in about half of all old cases subject to new DNA testing.

Newly-released documents show that the FBI has consistently targeted all political activist groups for surveillance, typically categorising them as criminal, subversive or terrorist. Groups devoted to such diverse activities as animal rights, promoting bicycle lanes, or complaining of increases in electricity rates, have been infiltrated, spied upon, labeled as subversive anarchists, and often threatened, intimidated and arrested. One group protesting the Iraq war was designated as an anarchist white supremacist group and therefore dangerous to the nation. Many individuals have been included in a nationwide US terrorist database, for just such activities. The list of tactics and dirty tricks engaged in by the FBI over many decades, is astonishing to non-Americans and could never exist in a civilised nation. Americans are misled into believing that because one of them can make disparaging political comments without apparent state censure, this applies to the entire nation. But if that one person's views surface in the public realm and begin to gain traction, the full brutal power of the state will quickly descend. Ask Martin Luther King.

When the FBI took a dislike to a person, they would do any or all of the following: they would spread derogatory information and circulate vicious false rumors to the victim's family, friends and business associates, often by planting false information in the media. They would send anonymous letters containing death threats or accusations of marital infidelity; they would bully and frighten employers into firing their victims, or coerce landlords into evicting victims from their homes or places of business. The FBI specialised in having the IRS perform spurious tax audits and prosecuting fictitious violations. They would often interrogate a victim and his associates, making their interest publicly known, so as to intimidate the victim and destroy his reputation. They would intimidate groups into cancelling speaking invitations by political activists and would often arrest and prosecute these people on fabricated charges. The FBI performed vast numbers of illegal wiretaps and surveillance activities on victims and their associates, often threatening them, and more than occasionally would physically assault activists, sometimes causing serious injuries. And they were well-known for breaking into their victims' homes and offices and vandalising the premises. All of these were commonly done to intimidate dissidents or truth-tellers into silence, and to destroy them if they could not be silenced. In addition to their own actions, FBI agents would often make use of impressionable people who could be used as dupes to further the agency's work. They would incite these people to forcefully disrupt meetings, infiltrate peaceful demonstrations and turn them violent, attack local police, and often perform bombings and other acts of violence.

Martin Luther King friend and photographer was FBI informant. Ernest Withers, who was trusted by civil rights leader to sit in on strategy meetings spied on black activists and white radicals. Source

Since the early days of Edgar J. Hoover, theFBI has been notorious for compiling lists of names and histories to accompanythose names, all having proven useful for various acts of intimidation, blackmail and extortion. Today,the FBI receives much local competition from the NSA, especially in the areas of extortion and blackmail of public figures and politicians, but still seems to have the lower-level terrorists all to itself. One of its more despicable activities is entrapping or setting up individuals to commit crimes - in circumstances where they would never have done so on their own - only so it can arrest them for doing so. But much worse, it appears to have developed a habit of doing domestically within the US what the CIA and the NED do so proficiently outside the US - searching out radicals and extremists, inciting their passions, inflaming their emotions, funding them, providing them with arms and explosives and encouraging them to commit various acts of violence or terrorism, in service of the state. One judge stated that "Only the government could have made a ‘‘terrorist' out of" a person charged in her courtroom. There have been a great many of these sting operations conducted during the past 10 or 12 years, and no small number prior to that time.

The situation has become so uncontrolled that when the FBI claims to have stopped 50 terrorist acts in recent years - as they did claim - it was proven that 49 of them were fabricated, and the 50th was trivial. It now seems that virtually every "terror" case in the US in recent years has had the FBI’s fingerprints all over it, including the Boston Marathon 'bombing'. "According to the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, nearly every major post-9/11 terrorism-related prosecution has involved an FBI sting operation. The FBI typically uses informers or dupe agents to establish relations with these people and act as messengers to carry out the FBI sting. The informers are often criminals or ex-criminals who participate because they are seeking leniency on criminal charges and hope to avoid prison or obtain a reduced sentence. They encourage and assist others to participate in plots that are largely scripted by the FBI and, under the FBI’s guiding hand, they provide the weapons, suggest the targets and even initiate the inflammatory political rhetoric that later elevates the charges to the level of terrorism." I won't reproduce a list here; a quick internet search for "FBI entrapment" will tell you most of what you need to know.

According to an article published in the New York Times on April 28, 2012, titled, "Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the FBI": "The United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years - or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.

But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested." And further, "The FBI has for many years mounted carefully orchestrated sting operations or 'entrapment', where even individuals with no apparent predisposition to commit a crime are induced to do so by US government agents. They seek out susceptible individuals and set traps for them, encouraging and inciting them to commit acts of violence, and then arresting these dupes on charges of terrorism when they attempt to carry out these acts. Often, they find people whose only 'crime' would appear to consist of comments made in a public chat room."

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

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EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America -- Chapter 3 -- COINTELPRO

October 19, 2024, 8:07 am

≫ Next: EN — LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America — Chapter 4 — Universal Public Surveillance

≪ Previous: EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America -- Chapter 2 -- The FBI

Police State America --Volume One

Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists

Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement

Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press

Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism

Chapter 13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil

Police State America --CHAPTER 3 --COINTELPRO

By Larry Romanoff

J. Edgar Hoover at Oval Office, White House, Washington, D.C., July 24, 1967. Yoichi R. Okamoto / Wikimedia

This section should be of particular interest to all those who believe or promulgate the fiction of America as a bastion of freedom of speech and assembly, most especially the freedom to criticise and speak out against the policies of the US government. The FBI has been used as a rather brutal tool against dissenting domestic political groups for many decades, primarily to discredit all those revealing illegalities of government agencies, protesting for change or seeking independence for Puerto Rico or Hawaii or, particularly, those revealing truths of the government's false flag operations. The program is still in full force today.

COINTELPRO was a secret program operated by the FBI that was meant to undermine the popular upsurge of political dissension which began to sweep the US during the late 1960s and early 1970s, partly in response to the Vietnam war which most people were beginning to see as an inhuman travesty of immense proportion. The name stands for "Counterintelligence Program", a plan hatched by the FBI to eliminate political opposition inside the US. Working in full cooperation with local police and prosecutors, the FBI created myriad schemes to "misdirect, discredit, disrupt and otherwise neutralize" the many individuals and groups that were politically active and demanding change in the government. The programs, following Bernays' principles, were meant to distort the public's view of dissident political groups, to isolate them as enemies of the state, and to use this misinformation to legitimize the brutal repression of political dissension within the US. "By operating covertly, the FBI and police were able to severely weaken domestic political opposition without shaking the conviction of most US people that they live in a democracy with free speech and the rule of law."

At first, they tried traditional methods of repression, using harassment and prosecution for political crimes, but when these methods failed the FBI secretly used fraud and violence to sabotage this political activity which was supposed to have been guaranteed by the US constitution. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance and intimidation, and eventually came to imitate a domestic version of the same covert actions for which the CIA has become infamous. As measures to intimidate political dissidents, the agency arranged evictions from homes and offices, the loss of employment, frame-ups and false arrests, break-ins and vandalism, and physical attacks and violence. Many of these actions involved serious physical assaults and the killing of political dissidents. They became so extensive and vicious that as one writer claimed, they "amounted to terrorism on the part of the government". I have included below details of some of these cases. During this long period of COINTELPRO activity, the FBI openly boasted of its success in having local militants repeatedly "arrested on every possible charge until they could no longer make bail". Though most people were eventually released, many were convicted of serious charges on the basis of perjured testimony by FBI agents, with more false convictions coming to light even today. This intense legal and police harassment had several objectives.One was that the false arrests would remove the dissident leaders from their activity and from contact with supporters; another was to create huge legal expenses for individuals and groups that might eventually bankrupt anyone who dared to mount political protests in the US. They also spared no effort to paint these political dissidents and protestors as dangerous criminals.

In stark contrast to jingoistic American claims of the independence of the judiciary, the FBI and the US Department of Justice also used these processes to turn US courts into FBI-controlled instruments of political repression. Forced appearances by thousands of individuals before grand juries on charges of being terrorists, were sufficient to dissuade dissidents from further political activity. And in contrast to the utopian American claims about a rule of law, many individuals were jailed during this period without criminal charges or trials, in the same kind of political internment that had been practiced in the most brutal dictatorships. This was neither the first nor the last time the US government would resort to such tactics to silence political dissension, with the US media almost invariably suppressing the information.

The CIA was also heavily involved in this political repression, having infiltrated the Black, student and antiwar movements, and also using its power and contacts to make extensive use of university professors, journalists, labor leaders, publishing houses, cultural organizations and Foundations to mold US public opinion against any political dissension. In recent years there has been increased cooperation between the FBI, the military and the CIA, with political repression within the US now much more sophisticated. Special elite units within the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and the US military are now trained and equipped for what is called "counter-insurgency" or "low-intensity warfare". These manuals still teach the essential methodology of COINTELPRO, and focus on early intervention to neutralize political opposition before it can take hold. These clandestine operations to discredit and disrupt any sign of political dissension in the US are now institutionalised.

America, as "the land of the free" is a complete myth, an imaginary fairy-tale existing only in the minds of the gullible and uninformed which definition sadly includes a great many Americans.

The FBI also acts to protect the US military and the CIA from public exposure. Over the years, when the US was involved in its brutal and repressive activities in other nations, especially the massive deaths and savage political repressions in South and Central America, it was the FBI who acted to intimidate and threaten political dissidents in the US. When American citizens wanted to travel to Nicaragua or El Salvador to see for themselves the human catastrophes the US had unleashed in those countries, the FBI immediately categorised those citizens with a "terrorist" label, claiming they were traitors to America. They had their trips disrupted, airline and hotel reservations cancelled, their passports and private papers confiscated, their homes and offices burglarised and ransacked, and they were constantly harassed by FBI agents demanding political information. These police actions created such an envelope of fear that it became virtually impossible for American citizens to sustain any kind of political movement or to challenge US government policy.

COINTELPRO was discovered in 1971, when political dissidents broke into an FBI office, stole all their secret files on this activity, and released them to the news media. Until this point, nobody would have believed the US government and its agencies capable of such brutal and illegal political repression. Further information obtained by lawsuits and the public confessions of former agents, eventually created an enormous scandal that threatened the very legitimacy of the American government. In response, the US Congress compelled the FBI (and only the FBI) to reveal part of what it had done, and to promise it would not engage in such activities again. But in the end, nothing changed, and the FBI today is far more criminal than in those earlier years.

Even the US Congress had admitted that the FBI has recently created many fake "terrorist" events in its fabricated sting operations. Operations like COINTELPRO, CHAOS, and OPERATION GARDEN PLOT, or the HOUSTON PLAN were all evidence of a virulent fascism arising in America, all involving the highest levels of military and civilian intelligence and all levels of police agencies in a full-scale attempt to discredit, disrupt and destroy all political dissension and activist movements that sprang up from the 1960s to today. These plans led directly to the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, as unacceptable"Black Messiahs", who might constitute a threat to the ruling elite and the control they exercise through their so-called democratic parties.

When a San Diego newspaper published articles exposing the President's friends, it was immediately attacked. Bullets were fired into the office, paint splashed over furniture, equipment smashed, records and subscription lists stolen, staff cars firebombed, vending machines vandalized. When the newspaper attempted to relocate to new offices, their prospective landlord was arrested by the police on a fabricated murder charge. Released after an hour of "interrogation", he told the newspaper they would have to find new offices somewhere else.

Many independent newspapers had their premises or printing presses bombed, some many times, by the FBI for failure to heed warnings about political content. The FBI would publish fabricated stories of sexual or financial misdeeds in "friendly" newspapers. They would give private warnings to radio stations that their broadcast licenses would be revoked if they aired "dissident" content. The objective of these COINTELPRO activities was to block the penetration of political dissension into any channel of American life where public opinion might be molded, to prevent opposing political ideas from attaining any influence over the people. Very simply, any media outlet that was politically objectionable to the secret government was a victim of this kind of brutal political repression by the FBI. The process exists today in more clever, more sophisticated, and more brutal form.

Noam Chomsky wrote of COINTELPRO many years ago in a 2002 book titled Understanding Power, when he stated the following:

"At the exact same time that Watergate was discovered, there were exposures in the courts and through the Freedom of Information Act of massive FBI operations to undermine political freedom in the United States, running back to Roosevelt but really picking up under Kennedy. It was called 'COINTRELPRO' and it included a vast range of things ... the straight Gestapo-style assassination of a Black Panther leader ... organizing race riots in an effort to destroy black movements … attacks on the American Indian Movement, the women’s movement, you name it … fifteen years of FBI disruption of the Socialist Workers Party – that meant regular FBI burglaries, stealing membership lists and using them to threaten people, going to businesses and getting people fired from their jobs and so on. That fact alone … is already vastly more important than … a bunch of Keystone Kops [breaking] into the Democratic National Committee headquarters one time. The Socialist Workers Party is a legal political party after all … And this wasn’t just a bunch of gangsters, this was the national political police; that’s very serious. In comparison to this, Watergate is a tea party."

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

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EN — LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America — Chapter 4 — Universal Public Surveillance

October 19, 2024, 8:34 am

≫ Next: Peter Thiel: From Gaza AI War Criminal To White House Puppet Master

≪ Previous: EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America -- Chapter 3 -- COINTELPRO

Police State America --Volume One

Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists

Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement

Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press

Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism

Chapter 13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil

Police State America -- Chapter 4 -- Universal Public Surveillance

We have read about the NSA domestic espionage network, about the CIA and Google collecting data, about Facebook and Twitter, about Microsoft's operating systems and most other software containing back doors for the NSA or other agencies, and of all the other personal data being collected and mined. But all these are only a small part of a comprehensive surveillance system that contains other and more frightening components, many with a physical presence and lethal capabilities.

IMSI catchers

IMSI (or ISMI) means 'Mobile Subscriber Identity'. This is an inexpensive and relatively simple technology used to intercept mobile phone calls and text messages by imitating mobile phone towers. These devices mimic the signals from telecom towers and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information. But, having made contact, they do much more. They can listen to and record conversations, and disrupt calls. They can retrieve all data from replying phones including text messages and emails, contact data, communication history and photos. These devices have been used by the US military and intelligence officials since the early days of mobile phones, for more than twenty years, and are commonly used today in foreign countries where the CIA or NSA want to intercept communications between government or military officials. This was one of the first breakthroughs in covert surveillance by US agencies, and are used 24 hours a day within the US, attempting intercept communications from all foreign embassies and consulates, and all foreign dignitaries and diplomatic staff located in the US.

Naturally, the US government claims it uses this technology to locate criminals or, as always, "terrorists", a claim that needs to be strongly ridiculed as the patent rubbish that it is. For one thing, if law enforcement wants to find a criminal, the sensible approach is to have the phone company monitor that one phone, not to indiscriminately and covertly contact millions of phones hoping to find that one. Secondly, there is no evidence that there are now, or have ever been, terrorists within the US, and there is no record of either law enforcement or the intelligence agencies having ever located even one such person during the past 25 years of spying. This is simply one more part of the extent to which fascism has infiltrated the US mentality. Previously, these agencies collected this data and more from the telecom firms themselves but, in final efforts to avoid the legal necessity of judicial oversight and the 'paper trail' left by using a middleman, they now collect the data privately with no trail and no accountability.

These devices, commonly known as 'dirtbags', used to be located on the ground, carried in vehicles that relentlessly scanned the immediate area for all signals that might be useful for American espionage against foreign government officials located within the US. One such device was known as a Stingray, and manufactured by Boeing Aircraft, and the US government spent tens of millions of dollars obtaining Stingrays for many local areas. However, these devices are now airborne in a major way. The US government has an entire fleet of small Cessna aircraft equipped with IMSI catchers that cover virtually all of the populated area of the US and operate on a daily basis, a far more sophisticated program than anything previously understood about covert use of such technology. Again, the Washington DC area is the one hardest hit with this program, the authorities using a wide array of aircraft and other airborne devices in their surveillance and monitoring of the activities of foreign diplomats in the city. Call interception and recording are high on their list of objectives.

The category of "other airborne devices" is worthy of attention, since mini-drone aircraft are now fully capable of carrying one of these interception devices. These little drones are inexpensive, silent or virtually so, can fly much closer to the ground than can larger aircraft, and often go unnoticed by the public. Many of these are now used by private individuals for aerial photography, for news gathering and other useful purposes, with no easy way to distinguish espionage drones from any other. This is again one more ominous indication of the 'Terminator Society' that the US is rapidly becoming.

The US Congress has passed new laws permitting US airspace to be filled with unmanned military drones which will be used for unspecified "domestic operations". The FAA claims that 30,000 or more drones will be airborne in the next five or six years. That's 1,000 drones flying over each and every city with a population above one million, or 100 drones over every city with a population of 100,000 or more. The legislation demands the FAA arrange clearance, airspace and infrastructure for the highest possible number of drones to be active. Deployment and operational tests will be conducted by many agencies including NASA and the Department of Defense, and of course local police forces, but perhaps the primary deployment will fall to DHS - the Department of so-called Homeland Security. It is worth noting that many American educational institutions are involved in every stage of this new plan, including MIT with its long history of military research. Google and Facebook, being CIA clones, are hotly pursuing the extremely profitable commercial drone market to keep the technology in the family.

Authorities claim their initial plan is to give these drones "non-lethal weapons" capability, but we need no predictive ability to know they will very soon be firing lethal weapons and executing people on the ground, since there is no historical evidence of the US government or any of its branches ever drawing a line at non-lethal anything. These drone aircraft were developed as weapons for cowardly surveillance and targeted killings of civilians in foreign countries and will not change their purposes or methods when applied to domestic applications. Domestic law enforcement agencies appear excessively anxious to do broad scale civil surveillance, primarily to control civil unrest and political dissension such as street protests and the like. Firing tear gas and small-caliber ammunition, these drones are the perfect crowd-control devices, permitting the agencies to monitor and attack participants in a civil disturbance while sitting comfortably and risk-free in a control room that might be thousands of miles away. Using their CIA-Google face-recognition technology, they can also identify and target the leaders and will be able to pursue those who escape their initial attacks. Drones can carry scanners not only for facial recognition, but for license plates, thermal imaging, Wi-Fi and more. They can be armed, and can be as small as birds, in which case the numbers could become unlimited. The US is heading for a "Terminator-style" civil environment and I see nothing that will change the direction. The drones are already flying over the US, with laws being changed to permit unlimited air access and eliminate all restrictions on civilian surveillance. To look at all the current signs and connect all the disparate pieces, is frightening.

"These weapons fulfill the US Air Force’s fantasy of "death from above", carried out by pilots working in the security and comfort of US bases who, acting as judge, jury, and executioner, destroy supposed enemies from computer consoles as if it were a video game. The cowardliness of wars of aggression being conducted against innocent people in dirt-poor lands by unseen "UAV pilots" in air-conditioned offices thousands of miles away cannot be over-emphasized. This is what unmanned aircraft have brought so far to the reputation of the United States – a new low in the entire universe of human ethics."

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

http://www.defenddemocracy.press/peter-thiel-from-gaza-ai-war-criminal-to-white-house-puppet-master/

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Peter Thiel: From Gaza AI War Criminal To White House Puppet Master

October 19, 2024, 8:47 am

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Dear Friends,

When you have time please read this article till the end. Thanks.

Peter Thiel: From Gaza AI War Criminal To White House Puppet Master

17/10/2024

By Alan Macleod
Oct 9, 2024

The screams of babies as buildings collapse in Gaza. Terrified parents carrying the remains of their children away in plastic carrier bags. These scenes – altogether too familiar today – come enabled by German-American tech billionaire Peter Thiel and his company, Palantir, whose software uses AI and big data to help the Israeli military surveil, target and slaughter hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It is also used by ICE, the FBI and U.S. law enforcement to destroy privacy, to attack whistleblowers, and to turn the Orwellian concept of “pre-crime” (identifying and tracking potential subversives before they commit any offense) into a reality.

The Silicon Valley oligarch has deep ties to the CIA and the military-industrial complex and is one of the Republican Party’s most powerful backers. Already one of the world’s most influential individuals, if Donald Trump wins in November, Thiel has set himself up to become a “shadow president,” wielding gigantic power over us all. This is his story.

Shadow President

Donald Trump is surging. A recent New York Times poll found the former president is ahead in several key battleground states, making the coming election too close to call. One man undoubtedly heartened by this news is Peter Thiel, the German-born tech entrepreneur and co-founder of such companies as PayPal and Palantir. Thiel, whose net worth stands at $10 billion, bankrolled Trump’s successful 2016 campaign when few others would. He served on his transition team and as an advisor, leading commentators to label him a “shadow president.”

This time, however, Thiel will enjoy even more influence in the White House, as Trump has selected Ohio Senator and Thiel protégé J.D. Vance as his vice president. Thiel – who has previously stated that freedom and democracy are incompatible- bemoaned the extension of the vote to women and denounced the public as an “unthinking demos” – took Vance under his wing when the latter was still at college. From there, Thiel secured Vance his first job in 2013. Two years later, Vance joined his venture capital firm, and in 2020, he provided the seed money for Vance to start his own investment group.

Vance is a political neophyte, first running for Senate only in 2021. He was able to do so thanks to an enormous $15 million donation from Thiel – the largest ever amount to a Senate candidate. That Thiel had plucked someone from his own firm and bankrolled his political career raised many eyebrows at the time, with many feeling the billionaire had essentially bought a senate seat and put a pawn in his place. However, the stakes have been raised considerably now that Trump has selected Vance as his running mate. “J.D. Vance owes both his political career and his previous venture capital career to Peter Thiel,” Whitney Webb, an investigative journalist who has closely tracked Thiel’s exploits, told MintPress News.

It has not always been plain sailing between Trump and Vance. The latter began his political career as a vocal “Never Trump” Republican, describing the 45th president as an “idiot” and “America’s Hitler.” It was Thiel himself who personally escorted Vance to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort to smooth over the relationship. The tech mogul’s pitch was successful, and in July, Trump shocked many by picking the inexperienced senator as his VP – a decision that gave Thiel unprecedented power and influence over the country’s direction.

AI War Criminal

The United States government has unequivocally backed Israeli aggression in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria. And central to that support has been the role that Thiel has played. Thiel’s company, Palantir, is using AI to surveil the Palestinian population and help generate massive kill lists for the Israeli military based on that data.

According to an investigation by an Israeli outlet, +972 Magazine, Israel is using a piece of software called Lavender, which develops profiles on every person in Gaza, assigning them a score of 1-100 based on individuals’ perceived connections to Hamas. A wide range of characteristics, including sharing similar work schedules to or being in a WhatsApp group with a known Hamas member, would raise one’s score. If an individual’s number reached a certain level, they would automatically be put on a kill list. In the first months of the war alone, Lavender identified over 37,000 Palestinians to be executed.

Although not mentioned explicitly by name in the +972 Magazine report, Palantir is widely assumed to be part of the Lavender project. The group has long provided the Israeli military with vast amounts of AI hardware and software. Moreover, at the height of the Gaza onslaught, it announced it had entered into a new “strategic partnership” with the Israeli Defense Ministry to “supply technology to help the country’s war effort.” “Both parties have mutually agreed to harness Palantir’s advanced technology in support of war-related missions,” the company’s executive vice-president, Josh Harris, said, adding: “This strategic partnership aims to significantly aid the Israeli Ministry of Defense in addressing the current situation in Israel.”

Lavender is known to be distinctly hit-or-miss. Many professions with similar communication patterns to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad operatives, including police and firefighters, or even people with the same name as a resistance fighter, were flagged for execution. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) sources suggest a 10% false positive rate.

Nevertheless, IDF analysts were told to treat Lavender suggestions as orders, turning the program into an automated kill list. One individual said that they devoted only 20 seconds to each target, only to check if the individual Thiel’s software marked for execution was male. Other than that, humans were there only to “rubber stamp” Lavender’s decisions.

Today, Israel also uses AI-powered “Smart Shooter” guns at checkpoints, capable of mowing down dozens of Palestinians without any human input whatsoever.

The Israeli military systematically targeted Gazans at night while entire families were in their own homes, sleeping. “We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one intelligence officer said, adding: “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in [their] homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.” Israelis called this system “Where’s Daddy?” presumably a reference to the cries of newly orphaned Gazan children.

For most of these assassinations, the Israeli military preferred to use cheaper, unguided missiles, commonly referred to as “dumb bombs.” Unlike guided missiles, these munitions lacked precision targeting, and so needed to be larger and pack more explosives, causing massive collateral damage. Israel would use these bombs to destroy entire apartment buildings if Lavender identified even a suspected junior Hamas member living there.

For the IDF, it was simply a question of resources. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of precision guided bombs],” explained one intelligence officer. The massive collateral damage barely factored into the equation. Palestinian lives were considered so unimportant that Israeli commanders accepted up to 100 civilian deaths per Hamas target.

It was this deliberate destruction of entire apartment complexes that led to the unprecedented wiping out of entire extended families. Palestinian families often lived together in the same building. And when those buildings were felled every night, bloodlines would be extinguished with one keystroke or mouse click. MintPress News recently spoke to Ahmed al-Naouq, a Gazan who lost 21 members of his family to Israeli bombing.

Perhaps most controversially, Lavender also gave children a score of 1-100 and recommended many for execution. Israel was delighted with Lavender’s performance, with one commander explaining that human targeting produced “bottlenecks” that limited the IDF’s capacity for violence. “We [humans] cannot process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per day,” they said. The IDF’s insatiable thirst for destruction could only be quenched through AI Lavender only became less useful after Israel had leveled the strip, displacing nearly the entire population and causing complete chaos. This made the system less able to track individuals’ movements.

Israel’s Biggest Supporters

The level of destruction in such a short period of time is nearly unprecedented in the modern era. Serious estimates suggest that up to 335,000 people have been killed in less than one year. “The situation today in Gaza cannot be analyzed or qualified otherwise than as a genocide. I have not seen a genocide where the intent was so ostentatious and vindicated over and over,” Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in the Palestinian Territories, said. “This is one of the most critical cases of genocide, a tragedy foretold, because of the intent to eliminate the Palestinians with all means available – be it transferring them or neutralizing them or segregating them,” she added.

Israel is currently being investigated for genocide by the International Court of Justice. And Thiel is one of its key enablers.

When asked a question about Lavender at the Cambridge University Union, Thiel was flustered, stating:

“My bias is to defer to Israel. It’s not for us to second-guess everything. And I believe that, broadly, the IDF gets to decide what it wants to do, and that they’re broadly in the right and that’s the sort of the perspective I come back to. And if I fall into the trap of arguing you on every detailed point, I would actually be conceding the broader issue that the Middle East should be micromanaged from Cambridge. And I think that’s just simply absurd. And so I’m not going to concede that point.”

Thiel has done more than just defer to Israel, however. In January, he flew Palantir executives out to Tel Aviv to host a board meeting in “solidarity” with Israel. It was there that Palantir announced its new strategic partnership with the Israeli military. In October 2023, Palantir also took out a full-page advertisement in The New York Times, expressing its total commitment to the Israeli war effort. “Certain kinds of evil can only be fought with force. Palantir stands with Israel,” the company posted on Twitter. These actions precipitated an exodus of employees from the organization, as numerous staff members refused to be complicit in the violence.

Since October 7, Palantir has been the target of numerous protests, with groups condemning the company’s complicity in the slaughter. Palantir’s actions are so unethical that they have even caused significant cognitive dissonance for company executives. “I have asked myself, ‘If I were younger at college, would I be protesting me?’” Palantir CEO Alex Karp once admitted. Nevertheless, Karp has denounced the student protests against Israel as “antisemitic” and warned that they pose a threat to the military-industrial complex, saying: “If we lose the intellectual debate, you will not be able to deploy any army in the West again.”

One group pushing for an end to the partnership between Silicon Valley and the Israeli military is Tech for Palestine, a community of tech workers who support Palestinian liberation. “I would like to see the tech industry fully divest from Israel. That would be a major step forward,” Paul Biggar, founder of Tech For Palestine, told MintPress, adding that Silicon Valley is directly contributing to Palestinian suffering:

“The goals should be that Palestinian people are afforded full equality and freedom from the Apartheid and oppression of Israel. Any acts that are committed by tech companies that support the Israeli state are de facto apartheid actions. And any involvement in Israel’s war economy is supporting the violation of international humanitarian law and involvement in crimes against humanity.”

The Brains of Ukraine

Thanks to its use in Gaza, Palantir markets its products as battle-tested. But the company is deeply involved in the war in Ukraine as well, providing surveillance, intelligence and targeting solutions for the Ukrainian government. Palantir was one of the first Western corporations on the ground after the Russian invasion and has deeply embedded itself into the Zelensky administration. More than half a dozen ministries, including the Ministry of Defense, depend on its software. Palantir uses satellite imagery and artificial intelligence to assess battlefield situations and provide the military with digital kill lists, similar to what they do in Israel. The company is responsible for most of the Ukrainian military’s targeting capability. “It’s like a superpower,” one Ukrainian minister said of Palantir.

The organization presents its actions in Ukraine as a moral crusade for righteousness:

“We believe that when we can make a difference in the service of a just cause, such as in the defense of Ukraine, we carry a moral responsibility to do so. And so, we are proud to provide our technical experience and technology to Ukrainian forces defending their homeland, national sovereignty, and personal freedoms.”

Yet, given its other actions around the world, it seems to act less as a champion for human rights and more as an extension of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. national security state.

“CIA Front”

Today, Palantir is a digital juggernaut valued at over $79 billion. But it was not always like that. In its early days in the 2000s, the business floundered and could find neither clients nor investors. A cash injection from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s investments arm, rescued it from oblivion.

In-Q-Tel was founded in 1999 and seeks to nurture and sponsor new companies that can supply the intelligence community with cutting-edge technologies to keep them one step ahead of their competitors. The “Q” in its name is a reference to “Q” from the James Bond franchise – a creative inventor who supplies the spy with the latest in futuristic tech. Many top tech firms today, including Google and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, enjoyed intimate relationships with the CIA and owe their prominence to the agency.

Palantir is no different, growing up alongside the burgeoning post-9/11 national security state. Its first customers were primarily intelligence agencies. Indeed, until 2008, the CIA was its only client. The government remains its most important customer; it currently possesses more than $1.5 billion in government contracts, including with the CIA, FBI, NSA, U.S. Army, Navy, and Space Force. Many of these were secured during the Trump presidency when Thiel had unparalleled access to the presidency. In 2020, it moved its headquarters away from the Bay Area to Denver, cementing its attempt to position itself less as a tech group and more alongside military contractors such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen Hamilton. Palantir is “arguably a CIA front company,” Webb told MintPress.

Real-Life Minority Report

The 2002 movie “Minority Report” is set in a dystopian future where corrupt police arrest citizens before they commit any crimes. But thanks to Palantir, the concept of “pre-crime” has become less science fiction and more a reality.

The group works with law enforcement across the country, using big data to track Americans’ movements, interactions with other people, social media posts and more. It builds up a complex web of information predicting which individuals are more likely to be gang members or perpetrators of violent crime.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) also uses Palantir software to surveil, arrest and deport undocumented immigrants, causing fear, alarm, and panic in immigrant communities across the country. Palantir renewed its contract with ICE, even over objections from its own employees, many of whom resigned in protest.

“Tech companies such as Palantir provide the digital backbone that allows for ICE to carry out raids, arrests and mass deportations,” Jesse Franzblau, Senior Policy Analyst with the National Immigrant Justice Center, told MintPress. “In the past, ICE has relied on Palantir to target the parents and caregivers of unaccompanied children and to coordinate workplace raids. The government should not be allowed to contract with companies that help ICE put a target on the back of immigrant communities.”

Thus, today, the same group that helps Israel carry out its onslaught against Palestinians also tears families apart inside the United States – an illustration of how America’s imperial projects abroad are fundamentally intertwined with the war on black and brown people at home.

Perhaps even more dystopian is that it also works with government agencies to build profiles on employees that identify which are most likely to become whistleblowers. These “subversives” can then be isolated, investigated or punished. Moreover, it has developed complex software to ensure leakers of classified information can always be caught.

This war on whistleblowers reached new levels in 2010 when Palantir published a plan to undermine, attack and destroy WikiLeaks and its supporters. The document, entitled “The WikiLeaks Threat,” recommended that the U.S. government carry out cyberattacks and spread “disinformation” about the organization by creating a “media campaign to push the radical and reckless nature of WikiLeaks activities.”

It suggested cutting off funding sources for WikiLeaks by spreading fear among its supporters that they would be arrested for donating and carrying out targeted attacks against prominent WikiLeaks supporters, such as journalist Glenn Greenwald.

The document was hacked and circulated online, causing a huge scandal for Palantir. Although the company offered a full apology to both WikiLeaks and Greenwald, Webb’s investigation noted that most of Palantir’s anti-WikiLeaks lines of attack were indeed carried out.

Palantir also likely has access to your most sensitive health data. The company works with health providers in the United States and Great Britain. This has triggered a reaction in the U.K., where the group No Palantir in Our NHS was formed. A statement on their website explains their objections:

“Palantir is a U.S. tech and security corporation with a terrible track record. They help governments, intelligence agencies, and border forces to spy on innocent citizens and target minorities and the poor.

We don’t trust them with our health data, and we don’t trust them to respect the values of our National Health Service… Palantir operates so far under the radar, it is special ops.”

PayPal Mafioso

By the time he started Palantir in 2003, Thiel was already extremely wealthy. He had previously co-founded online payment service PayPal, which was sold to eBay for $1.5 billion the previous year. There, he made connections with another early PayPal investor, Elon Musk.

Early PayPal employees went on to develop an extraordinary amount of the modern tech economy, so much so that they are widely referred to as the “PayPal Mafia.” Members of this mafia went on to found the video platform YouTube, the review site Yelp, and the business social network LinkedIn. Others sit on the boards of Microsoft and Reddit.

Thiel is universally described as the “don” of the PayPal Mafia. The billionaire was Facebook’s first outside investor, buying over 10% of the company for a paltry $500,000. He also served on its board of directors from 2005 until 2022. This savvy investment netted him a gigantic return on his investment.

Thiel also had ulterior motives in founding PayPal, seeing the project as an attempt to use the power of money to overturn democracy as we know it and allow him to implement his deeply conservative agenda. “The initial founding vision was that we were going to use technology to change the whole world and basically overturn the monetary system of the world,” he said. However, he knew his ideology could never stand up to public scrutiny and would never be accepted by society. As he noted:

“We could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority, but maybe you could unilateral change the world without having to constantly convince people and beg people and plead with people who are never going to agree with you through technological means, and this is where I think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”

Vampire Capitalist

Like many individuals working in Silicon Valley, Thiel holds many controversial beliefs about society that should be better understood, given that he may become the shadow president in November.

While still a student, he founded The Stanford Review, a deeply conservative newspaper that attacked attempts to diversify the student body and anyone who challenged American exceptionalism or the superiority of Western culture.

In 1995, alongside fellow future PayPal mafioso David Sacks, he wrote and published the book, “The Diversity Myth: Multiculturalism and Political Intolerance on Campus: Multiculturalism and the Political Intolerance on Campus.” The book warned against multiculturalism, argued that racism and sexism were greatly exaggerated and that U.S. universities displayed a profound anti-Americanism and intolerance of all things Western.

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These arguments would later become standard conservative talking points. Thiel has also personally bemoaned the extension of the franchise to women and stated that freedom and democracy are incompatible because of the stupidity of the American population, whom he calls the “unthinking demos.”

And while Thiel claimed that racism was largely a thing of the past, in 2016, the U.S. Department of Labor sued Palantir for egregiously racist hiring practices. The government’s case noted that 85% of Palantir software engineer applicants were Asian, but despite this, Palantir still hired significantly more non-Asians than Asians. This meant that Asians were four times less likely to be hired. Palantir eventually agreed to pay nearly $1.7 million to settle the lawsuit.

Thiel often identifies a supposed woke agenda as one of America’s more pressing problems. In a recent interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, he compared wokeism to Saudi Arabian Wahhabism. Unlike many Trump supporters, however, he blamed the Christian Church for its ubiquity, stating:

“[Christianity] always takes the side of the victim and there’s something where it is like some kind of deformation or intensification… And maybe you should think of wokeness as ultra-Christianity or hyper-Christianity.”

If even the American Christian Church is too liberal for Thiel, then where does he see a future? In cyberspace, outer space, and in building floating towns in the ocean where people can finally be free from government interference and the woke agenda. The 56-year-old entrepreneur sees the Internet, human colonization of other planets, and building autonomous cities on the water as potential libertarian utopias.

These are far from Thiel’s only quixotic schemes. Like many Silicon Valley executives, he also has many alternative beliefs about health. His, however, go further than many others. On a quest to live indefinitely, he follows a strict anti-aging routine, including taking human growth hormone pills and reportedly harvesting the blood of poor but healthy teenagers and injecting it into his body to boost his immune system. “Peter Thiel Is Very, Very Interested in Young People’s Blood,” reads one headline from American Business magazine, Inc.

Thiel funds several biology and anti-aging start-ups, including those that use stem cells to treat medical ailments. He believes society has been hoodwinked by “the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual” and has suggested immortality could be achievable, a notion that has deeply concerned academics and commentators alike. As a last resort, he plans to have his body cryogenically frozen if his endeavors do not succeed.

Free Speech Champion?

In addition to funding big online media like Facebook and Reddit, Thiel (alongside Vance) invested heavily in video platform Rumble. Launched in 2013, Rumble saw little success for years. But after Thiel and Vance sunk their money into it, it has become a conservative media stalwart, marketing itself as a “free speech app” that will not censor its users.

Yet Thiel’s commitment to the free flow of information has not always been consistent. Famously, he funded multiple lawsuits, to the tune of around $10 million, against Gawker, which eventually caused the news website to close its doors. In a 2009 interview, he argued that Gawker journalists “should be described as terrorists, not as writers or reporters” and claimed that they were Silicon Valley’s al-Qaeda. Considering how Palantir was aiding the U.S. government with its occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and how the U.S. was treating its enemies in its War on Terror, Thiel’s words could be seen as quite the threat.

The lawsuits were roundly condemned as having a “chilling effect” on the free press. For instance, the editor-in-chief of the politics magazine Mother Jones described it as part of a campaign of “press intimidation.” Gawker had drawn Thiel’s ire for previously outing him as gay. Thus, instead of promoting a new era of free speech online, Thiel’s Rumble venture appears more likely to be an attempt to construct a conservative media in his image, just as he is rebuilding the modern Republican Party.

Ultimately, Thiel is a walking contradiction: a libertarian who got rich from fat military contracts, an immigrant working with ICE and a free speech advocate who attacks media outlets. He presents himself as an outsider. Yet he is a mainstay at many of the world’s most elite institutions and conferences, including the Bilderberg Group, the Munich Security Conference, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

In many ways, his persona is almost out of a comic book, a real-life Lex Luthor. From aiding an Israeli genocide in Gaza to using AI to surveil immigrants at home to spearheading a war against whistleblowers, Thiel’s story perfectly encapsulates how Silicon Valley has been folded into the national security state and works to maintain the American empire well into the 21st century.

Yet his latest venture into politics could arguably be his most consequential project. He has always had a close relationship with the U.S. government. However, a Trump/Vance White House could bring the billionaire a level of influence he previously could only have dreamed of. Thiel does not particularly seek out the limelight. However, with Trump surging in the polls, there is an increasing chance that he will soon have an even more profound influence over our lives, whether we like it or not. Therefore, it is crucial that we understand the man who could be calling the shots come November.

Feature photo | Illustration by MintPress News

* Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017, he published two books, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreamspeace with Russia, more wars in…Russia Says ‘Let’s Be Realistic’ About Chances of…Climate …

SOURCEwww.mintpressnews.com

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PT -- MANLIO DINUCCI: Bombas Nucleares Debaixo dos Nossos Pés

October 19, 2024, 12:31 pm

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≪ Previous: Peter Thiel: From Gaza AI War Criminal To White House Puppet Master

Bombas Nucleares Debaixo dos Nossos Pés

Manlio Dinucci

NATO Steadfast Noon Exercise and Nuclear Modernization in Europe. Source

A NATO anunciou que teve início a 14 de Outubro de 2024, o seu exercício nuclear anual, Steadfast Noon, com a duração de duas semanas, com mais de 60 aviões de 13 países a realizarem voos de treino sobre a Europa Ocidental. Participam caças capazes de transportar ogivas nucleares norte-americanas, incluindo os primeiros caças F-35A da NATO declarados aptos para o uso nuclear. Participam bombardeiros pesados, caças de escolta, aviões de reabastecimento em voo e aviões de guerra electrónica, com um efectivo de 2.000militares de oito bases aéreas.

No exercício de guerra nuclear, claramente dirigido contra a Rússia, participa também a Itália, que - juntamente com a Alemanha, a Bélgica e a Holanda - adere à “Partilha Nuclear” da NATO.

Qual é o grau de “partilha”, explica a própria NATO num texto oficial:

1) “O planeamento nuclear da NATO é levado a cabo pelo Grupo de Alto Nível, presidido pelos Estados Unidos”.

2) “Os Estados Unidos mantêm o controlo e a custódia absolutos das suas armas nucleares implantadas na Europa, enquanto os Aliados fornecem apoio militar.”

Por outras palavras, são os EUA que fornecem aos Aliados europeus as armas nucleares sobre as quais mantêm o controlo absoluto, enquanto os Aliados europeus fornecem aviões e pessoal militar preparados para armas nucleares sob o comando absoluto dos EUA.

A “partilha nuclear" está a estender-se para além dos países que oficialmente fazem parte dela: esta situação é demonstrada pelo facto da Polónia, da Roménia e da Finlândia estarem a participar no exercício de guerra nuclear. Visto que os aviões da NATO, com dupla capacidade convencional e nuclear, também estão posicionados nos Estados Bálticos, este facto significa que os EUA criaram uma frente avançada na Europa a partir da qual pode ser lançado um ataque nuclear contra a Rússia.

Ao mesmo tempo, os EUA “revitalizaram” as bases nucleares na Europa, equipando-as com caças F-35A e com as recentes bombas nucleares B61-12. Em Itália, a base de Ghedi, onde está estacionada a 6ª Ala da Força Aérea Italiana e a base de Aviano, onde está estacionada a 31ª Ala de Caças dos EUA, foram “remodeladas”. As outras bases nucleares “actualizadas” são as de Kleine Brogel, na Bélgica, Volkel, nos Países Baixos e Büchel, na Alemanha, às quais se junta a base de Lakenheasth, na Grã-Bretanha, “requalificada” em segredo.

Os Estados Unidos estão a “renovar” o seu arsenal nuclear com uma despesa prevista de 1,7 biliões de dólares, conduzindo uma corrida ao armamento que se está a tornar mais perigosa do que a ocorrida durante a Guerra Fria. Basta dizer que as armas nucleares americanas instaladas na Europa, perto da Rússia, podem atingir São Petersburgo ou Moscovo em poucos minutos.

Site original: https://www.perunmondosenzaguerre.eu/2024/10/19/le-bombe-nucleari-sotto-i-nostri-piedi-20241018-pangea-grandangolo/

Tradutora:

Maria Luísa de Vasconcellos

Email: luisavasconcellos@gmail.com

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EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America --Volume One -- Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

October 20, 2024, 1:17 am

≫ Next: EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America --Volume One -- Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting

≪ Previous: PT -- MANLIO DINUCCI: Bombas Nucleares Debaixo dos Nossos Pés

Police State America --Volume One

Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists

Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement

Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press

Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism

Chapter 13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil

Police State America

Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

By Larry Romanoff

Occupy Wall Street protestors march down Fifth Avenue towards Union Square during a May Day rally in New York City. Photograph: Monika Graff/Getty Images

CHINESE ENGLISH

LARRY ROMANOFF FREE E-BOOKS& PDF ARTICLES

Most people know about the massive "Occupy Wall Street" protests that occurred in the US during 2011 and 2012. Briefly,these were spontaneous protests that began in the US and spread to other Western countries, involving hundreds of thousands of people in the US and attracting tens of thousands in cities in other nations.These protests arose not so much because of the US banker-caused financial crisis, but when it became clear the US government planned no action either to punish those responsible or to initiate reforms to prevent such disasters from recurring, but instead to protect and reward the perpetrators.The main issues raised by this civil society movement were social and economic inequality in America, the institutionalised greed and corruption of US multinational business,and the enormous influence of corporations on the US government, especially from the large banks and financial companies.

In 2012, American police harshly, and often brutally, dispersed protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement that had been proceeding for nearly two months, the extremely harsh actions of law enforcement agents causing first outrage on the Internet, and then in the streets. The campaign spread across other cities in the US, then to dozens of other nations, culminating in bloody riots and widespread fires in the UK. Despite the fact that the protesters were supported by almost half of the US population, the authorities had no dialogue with them, preferring the language of batons and clubs, water cannons and tear gas. Newly-released documents show that the violent crackdown on the Occupy movement was coordinated not only by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and local police, but was coordinated with the big banks themselves. The evidence reveals a terrifying network of coordinated activity by US government agencies "working for and with the big banks"to silence and politically disable the protestors. It is now apparent that plans had been made months in advance by the banks, the FED, state and local police departments, and FBI officials to share information and crush all public opposition to the banks that had engineered one of the greatest social disasters in US history.

ACLU: FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act reveal that FBI agents surveilled Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protestors, questioned activists about an OWS organizer, and in one internal memorandum listed the peaceful protest movement as domestic terrorists. Government agencies such as DHS, the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, the Domestic Security Alliance Council, the Federal Reserve are all included in FBI correspondences concerning OWS. Source

In a truly frightening event, the FBI broadcast a letter to various law enforcement agencies, titled: "International Terrorism Matters",to inform these agencies that the Occupy Wall Street movement "has been determined to be an organisation which is opposed to the US war with Iraq", i.e., they were now officially classified as "low-level terrorists", and that this information could be used to justify "any action deemed appropriate". And you know what that means.

I have discussed elsewhere the many US financial crises. Our focus here is not the 2008 crisis nor the protests against those responsible, but rather the response of the US government - which was not focused on either those who caused the social and economic collapse or on remedial regulation and legislation,but entirely on containing protests by the public who had been financially devastated.While the American public waited patiently for several years for their government to take some leadership action, the government itself wasted no time in taking action against its own public who were the victims of the collapse. In the background, recently-released government documents revealed that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had not only been monitoring these civil movementsbut had classified them as domestic terrorist organisations and targeted them for severe treatment.The FBI launched a massive espionage campaign meant to infiltrate and disrupt these movements. The latest photo identification technology was applied, searching all government database records including medical, military and even driving licenses in attempts to identify the leaders and specifically target them for intimidation and violence. Not only that, these agencies shared their collective information with the very bankers and other corporations against which the public was protesting.

Source

It is now apparent that a great amount of collusion existed between the government, the Wall Street Bankers and the FED, various police and enforcement agencies, the media, and many local governments as well, producing coordinated attempts to intimidate, silence and suppress public disaffection and protests against the US government and its "friends".The FBI and DHS arranged conferences with the mayors of large US cities, where suppression of public discontent was discussed, the consensus being that these widespread public protests could "not be allowed to gain any credibility".After these organised meetings, the US government began orchestrated and systematic waves of attacks on the protesters, many of them involving substantial violence. These concerted actions by the FBI and related agencies fell firmly under the definition of "domestic terrorism". In other words, the government had classified a peaceful civil society movement as terrorism and then itself moved to apply genuine terrorism against these people, using physical force and violence against a civilian population for purposes that were purely political. Many foreign media commented on the fact that the US mainstream media failed to cover this massive movement adequately, in many cases ignoring the protests altogether even though they continued for over a year. Many single protest events that involved as many as 100,000 individuals passed virtually unnoticed due to a media conspiracy of silence.

But President Obama comments serve only to highlight that US politicians, including the President, have almost totally lost control of the government of the nation, and that it is the major private interests - the banks, the owners of the FED, the large corporations, and the CIA/military that control the country.

Even President Obama noted that, in the wake of the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression, with huge social and financial damage throughout the country, the same people who acted irresponsibly in causing the crisis were now acting irresponsibly in preventing protest against those same abusive practices. But his comments serve only to highlight that US politicians, including the President, have almost totally lost control of the government of the nation, and that it is the major private interests - the banks, the owners of the FED, the large corporations, and the CIA/military that control the country. In any case, the powers in control did indeed launch a major military-style offensive against these civil society groups in a manner that would do credit to an axis of evil dictatorship. In addition to the espionage, the intimidation, and the widespread use of force, US government agencies arrested more than 10,000 individuals who were considered leaders, and initiated widespread violent assaults on many tens of thousands more.Most of this was quietly ignored by the US media.

So much for fabled democracy and freedom of assembly. Leading media outlets of the country tried to ignore the campaign for a long time, preferring to talk about the "march of democracy" in Libya and Syria, or the "bad policy" of Russia, China or Venezuela in dealing with political unrest.According to Americans, protests in other countries are cries for freedom and good government, but these same protests in the US are caused by criminals and terrorists fully deserving of police abuse.In the meantime, of course, the US spends huge amounts of money and effort to sponsor these dissidents in other countries, solely for the pleasure of being able to point an accusing finger at the 'unfair' treatment they receive at home.

Medical attention: Cecily McMillan collapsed at the Occupy protest on March 17 in Zuccotti Park after reportedly being dragged by police.

Cecily McMillan, a 25-year-old student was attending an Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Manhattan when she was seized by police, beaten so ferociously that she was black and blue on her ribs and arms and went into a seizure.Media photographs show a policeman grabbing her breast from behind, and McMillan instinctively throwing up an elbow to protect herself, catching a policeman under the eye. After being beaten, she was arrested and is now slated to serve a seven-year prison term for "assaulting a police officer". She was only one of more than 700 protestors brutally treated and arrested in what was described in the media as "an orgy of police misconduct". Professors from two New York law schools produced a scrupulously detailed report of the police routinely using excessive force to crush the protest movement, and New York was by no means the only city where this occurred. Los Angeles was far worse, but the media and all outsiders were prohibited from viewing the police violence, and no charges have ever been laid against the officers. In one case, the Oakland Policeintentionallyshot US Marine veteran Scott Olsenin the head during a protest.

Photojournalist Kristyna Wentz-Graff, her Journal Sentinel ID badge clearly visible, is handcuffed Wednesday while covering a protest. Credit: Lita Medinger. Source

Almost all reporters covering the protests were immediately arrested and thrown into prison, to prevent public knowledge of the police violence. Anyone with a camera or mobile phone, especially those attempting to photograph the many instances of police brutality, was arrested or threatened with arrest and the device seized and destroyed. Reporters were often arrested on falsified charges that would later have to be dismissed for lack of evidence, but the arrests served to intimidate the media into silence. Many reporters, and those with cameras, were physically attacked by the police, thrown to the ground, pepper-sprayed, beaten and kicked, and then arrested on trumped-up charges of "civil disobedience, disorderly conduct, criminal trespassing, unlawful assembly, and even public drunkenness".Any journalists covering the police brutality toward the protesters were specifically identified and targeted by the police. Many demonstrators attempted to use video recording of the many instances of police violence and brutality as a way to document and to deter this behavior, but the position of the US government and its law-enforcement agencies was that"the public use of cameras to document police brutality is an illegal act".

ACLU: The Military Commissions Act of 2006 gives the president absolute power to decide who is an enemy of our country and to imprison people indefinitely without charging them with a crime. Source/来源

It is in this light that the US government labeled as terrorists anyone active in this movement or even supporting the movement.It is astonishing that Americans will still attempt to defend their so-called 'freedoms', claiming particularly of speech and assembly, in direct contradiction to the facts on the ground. One government official quoted the US Military Commissions Act, which states that, "Anyone who speaks out against the government’s policies can be declared an "unlawful enemy combatant"and imprisoned indefinitely (without trial or recourse).That includes American citizens". How do we reconcile this statement with claims of freedom of speech?

FBI DOCUMENT ‘[DELETED’] PLOTS TO KILL OCCUPY LEADERS BY SNIPER RIFLES ‘IF DEEMED NECESSARY’

But it's much worse than this. Documents were obtained from the FBI office in Houston, Texas, that outlined a plan to use mercenaries to kill the leaders of this Occupy Wall Street movement if it progressed much further.In that city as in many others, official reaction to the demonstrations involved violent assaults by police on the activists, and this is where the assassination plot was hatched.To quote the FBI document, "(An organisation) planned to engage in sniper attacks against protestors in Houston, Texas . . . planned to gather intelligence against the leaders of the protest groups and obtain photographs, then formulate a plan to kill the leadership via suppressed sniper rifles". The FBI confirmed that the document was genuine and that it originated in the FBI's Houston office. It offered neither explanation nor apology. It appears that the organisation involved was an FBI/CIA-linked mercenary-for-hire organization called Craft International, which has a contract funded by the US Department of Homeland Security. This is America today, where Hollywood and the media daily pump out propaganda on the treasured democratic values of freedom of expression and assembly.

Protesters affiliated with Occupy Wall Street march down Broadway in Manhattan towards Wall Street on May 1, 2012 in New York City. Occupy Wall Street has joined with unions during the May Day protests, a traditional day of global protests in sympathy with unions and leftist politics. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

His full archive can be seen at

https://www.bluemoonofshanghai.com/ and https://www.moonofshanghai.com/

He can be contacted at:

2186604556@qq.com

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EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America --Volume One -- Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting

October 20, 2024, 3:01 am

≫ Next: PT -- Manlio Dinucci -- Pangea/Grandangolo --- ELEIÇÕES USA: OS MECANISMOS DA FRAUDE

≪ Previous: EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF: Police State America --Volume One -- Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

Police State America --Volume One

Chapter 6 — Searching for Anarchists, or Maybe Just Political Activists

Chapter 8 — Arbitrary and Unaccountable Law Enforcement

Chapter 10 — Occupy Wall Street

Chapter 11 — Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press

Chapter 12 — The Short Road: Democracy to Fascism

Chapter 13 — The Next American Revolution? Anticipated Civil Unrest

Chapter 11 -- Intimidating the Media & Subverting the Press

By Larry Romanoff

CHINESE ENGLISH