After two years, the election of Donald Trump has become a brilliant illustration of the limits of ‘ballot-box’ democracy: more often than by outside entities, it can be manipulated by unethical national actors, whether presidents, other elected officials, or private interests whose money has been determined by the Supreme Court to be ‘free speech’ [...]
Or at the very least, an incipient monarchy: the only problem is that the monarch — while having plenty of clothes — has no head.
The most famous twentieth century American journalist, Bob Woodward, who together with his buddy Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate story that forced President Richard Nixon to resign, has written a book that reveals White House palace intrigues worthy of any European king — although it is the French President, Emanuel Macron, who calls himself Jupiter.
Under the ominous title Fear, Woodward quotes high-ranking members of the White House staff as well as the heads of crucial departments affirming that, for the good of the country, they work to prevent Trump from signing dangerous documents. And like the proverbial cherry on the cake, in finely tuned coordination, on the day the book was released to the press, the New York Times broke with tradition to publish an anonymous op-ed by one of those senior White House officials whose first sentence is “I am part of the Resistance”, a phrase Americans know from watching World War II movies featuring European partisans fighting Germans in the woods.
Last year, a group of psychiatrists issued a book-length report on Donald Trump’s mental health, and recently a participant in the former Trump TV show THE APPRENTICE, who eventually made it into the White House, released a memoir of her time there. Biased against the flamboyant woman who wrote it, the press failed to take Manigault Newman’s book Unhinged seriously, however Bernstein’s book presents strikingly similar testimonies. Unless the political class is totally feckless — and that is not to be excluded — these revelations should bring down the presidency, because it details actions taken by senior cabinet members, such as Pentagon Secretary Jim Mattis removing from Trump’s desk a document that could have dire consequences if he signed it, knowing he will forget about it…. The news hunt is on to discover who actually wrote the oped, while vast part of the world continue in turmoil, totally ignored by the hourly newscasts. In fact, nothing better illustrates the state of the US media than the fact that twenty-four hour news (literally!) is devoted to detailed analyses and opinions about the ‘state of the Union’, down to a analyses of state candidates in nation-wide elections, rather than information about the rest of the world
The United States has the dubious honor of throwing up more scandals than any other ‘democracy’, their accelerating pace suggesting that the end of the current presidency is near. In an ominous sign, these events are taking place at the same time as the president’s latest pick for the Supreme Court is being evaluated by a Congress aware of his backing for a unitary — or ‘imperial’ presidency — but seemingly powerless to deny him their approval.
The decline of the American ‘system of checks and balances’ has been under way for decades, and is now terminal, demonstrating if need be that when all is said and done, a democracy is only as good as its ethics. The election of a brazen liar and proven cheat to the ‘highest office of the land’ is laid at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s door. However, pundits do not accuse Putin of actually tipping the election to a feckless ‘idiot’, knowing this would be impossible to prove, but of ‘dividing’ Americans. As if Americans are not already traditionally divided among Democrats and Republicans, elections serving to determine whose desires will prevail (while those of the minority are ‘protected’…). No one has asked in what way ‘Russian interference’ furtherdivided Americans.
In response to a growing wave of interest in Bernie Sanders’ socialist ideas, the Democratic Party dug its own grave by manipulating obscure rules in order to prevent him from becoming its candidate, thanks to the Clinton political ‘machine’ (the ominous synonym for a political party). These maneuvers, which would make front page headlines in any other democratic country, are business as usual in Washington, while the recently revealed $50,000 Russian ’contribution’ that bought four tickets to President Trump’s inauguration, is denounced as ‘interference’ — as if by the mere fact of being a spectator at the event a Russian could influence his presidency.
After two years, the election of Donald Trump has become a brilliant illustration of the limits of ‘ballot-box’ democracy: more often than by outside entities, it can be manipulated by unethical national actors, whether presidents, other elected officials, or private interests whose money has been determined by the Supreme Court to be ‘free speech’. The reluctance of both Democrats and Republicans in Congress to initiate impeachment proceedings — or even invoke Article 25 on presidential incapacity, is the final straw: give me a good King any day!
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The title page of Rūta Vanagaitė’s best-known book contains two pictures of young men. “This one is a Jew,” she said, pointing at the picture on the left. “He was a bicycle-racing champion. Good enough to represent Lithuania in international competitions, but not good enough to live.” He was executed during the Holocaust. The man in the picture on the right was a Lithuanian executioner. “They are both us,” Vanagaitė explained. “But Lithuanians don’t like to think of them as ‘us,’ because one is a Jew and the other is a killer.” Her book is called “Us.” (The title has ...
Veterans Day has passed. The annual ritual never changes. Politicians who didn’t serve in the armed services start unnecessary wars, killing military personnel whose sacrifices are then lauded. Officials say these heroes died defending our freedom. That is almost always a lie.Sometimes Washington must go to war. Not often, however. Despite the endless claims that we live in a dangerous world, America is amazingly safe. No other power could defeat, let alone conquer, the United States. Only Russia has a comparable nuclear arsenal, but it would be destroyed if Moscow targeted America. China and Russia trail U.S. conventional military strength ...
Many articles in the US press have speculated at length in an attempt to define a new ideology called “Putinism.” The pieces serve as an attempt to fit Putin into an outdated Cold War narrative, as if some new ideology in the Russian Federation is playing the role that Marxism-Leninism once played in the Soviet Union, though the current Russian constitution forbids this.The notable leaders of history are rarely ideologues. History judges people mainly by what they achieve, not what they write or say. As Chinese President Xi Jinping recently put it: “The worth of any plan is in its ...
During World War II, hundreds of thousands of foreign peoples joined with Hitler's legions to bring theirs people into special status in Hitler's New Order. Tens of thousands among them were Muslims, where the majority of them came from Soviet Union. Under the banner of the crescent and the swastika, these Soviet Muslims believe to become holy warriors to liberated theirs land. But the end of this unholy alliance was a disaster for them.The Pro-Nazi Soviet Muslims When the German Army invaded Soviet Russia on June 22, 1941 they saw many of their opponent inhabitants welcomed them as liberators. One ...
In an interview for the German news magazine Zuerst! (April 2015) Srdja Trifkovic considers the significance of Otto von Bismarck’s legacy, 200 years after his birth.Dr. Trifkovic, how would Bismarck react if he could see today’s map of Europe?Trifkovic: He would be initially shocked that the German eastern border now runs along the Oder and Neisse rivers. Otto von Bismarck was a true Prussian. In his view, cities such as Königsberg, Danzig or Breslau were more properly “German” than those in the Rhineland. His first impression therefore would be that Germany has “shifted” to the West, and that an important social and ...
There is an astounding double standard being applied to the US presidential election result.A few weeks ago the corporate media were appalled that Donald Trump demurred on whether he would accept the vote if it went against him. It was proof of his anti-democratic, authoritarian instincts.But now he has won, the same media outlets are cheerleading the establishment’s full-frontal assault on the legitimacy of a Trump presidency. That campaign is being headed by the failed candidate, Hillary Clinton, after a lengthy softening-up operation by US intelligence agencies, led by the CIA.According to the prevailing claim, Russian president Vladimir Putin stole the election on ...
Edward S. Herman died on November 11, 2017, at the age of 92. Fortunately, it was a peaceful death for a supremely peaceful man. In all he did, Ed Herman was a tireless champion of peace.Ed Herman could be considered the godfather of antiwar media critique, both because of his own contributions and because of the many writers he encouraged to pursue that work. Thanks to his logical mind and sense of justice, he sharply grasped the crucial role and diverse techniques of media propaganda in promoting war. He immediately saw through lies, including those so insidious that few dare ...
The recent arrest of 40 alleged Islamic radicals in Kosovo together with the arrest of one of the Kosovo Imams suspected of being an inspirer of jihad in the region brought serious questions about the radicalisation of Islam and terrorism in Kosovo, in the Balkans and in Europe. Even though the issue of Kosovo Albanian volunteers or mercenaries fighting alongside the anti-Bashar forces in Syria and supporting the radical leadership of the Islamic State (earlier the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) has been present in the public debate in Kosovo for at least a year, the debate itself was ...
Having already violated every tenet of international law in its proxy jihadist war against Syria, including the seizure of one-third of the country, the United States invoked a Non-Law, a Law That Never Was, to justify its missile strikes against fictitious “chemical warfare” facilities. Syrian President Assad “kills his own people,” said Trump, leader of the nation whose police kill more of its “own people” than any country except (fellow white settler state) Brazil, and whose prisons entomb one-quarter of all the world’s inmates. (One out of every eight prisoners on the planet is an African American.)On the Saturday morning ...
The UK Parliament just confirmed what the alternative media has been saying for years.Specifically, a new report from the bipartisan House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee – based on interviews with all of the key British decision-makers, review of documents, and on-the-ground investigations in Africa – found that the Libyan war was based on lies, that it destroyed the country, and that it spread terrorism far and wide.The War Based On Bogus Intelligence … Like the Iraq WarInitially, the report finds that the threat to civilians from Libyan government forces was dramatically overstated:Former French Foreign Minister Alain Juppé, who introduced ...
Crimea’s breakaway from Ukraine and rejoining Russia is treated in the US-and-allied world as being justification for the explosive re-emergence in 2014 of America’s Cold War NATO alliance as being a restored war against Russia; and, so, whether or not that ‘justification’ is truthful is the paramount geopolitical issue in our era; and it will therefore be discussed and (via the links here) documented in this article.Though international law is generally an unenforced mess that is interpretable far more by partisanship than by any clearly applicable principles, the US Government does quite blatantly violate it on a routine basis, by ...
A massive destruction of the Ottoman (Orthodox Christian) Armenian population in 1915−1916 is probably the greatest atrocity committed during the WWI and for sure a first 20th century case of the genocide as up to 1.500.000 ethnic Armenians were executed by the Ottoman authorities and their collaborators (the Kurds). As a consequence, the survivors are scattered across the globe. Today it is already a century old event, but the issue of the 1915−1916 Armenian Genocide is undoubtedly still alive and divisive political issue firstly between the Armenians and the Turks[1] but also and among the western “liberal democracies” on the ...
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The Asia Minor and Pontos Hellenic Research Center is pleased to announce a new book, Genocide in the Ottoman Empire: Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, 1913-1923. Edited by George N. Shirinian. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2017. 433 pages.The final years of the Ottoman Empire were catastrophic for its non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities. From 1913 to 1923, its rulers deported, killed, or otherwise persecuted staggering numbers of men, women and children in an attempt to preserve “Turkey for the Turks,” setting a modern precedent for how a regime can commit genocide against its own citizens in pursuit of political ends, while ...
In 1999, when he was the President of Finland, Marti Ahtisaari’s government wanted to honor and to commemorate the 3,000 Finnish Nazi Waffen SS volunteers that served in Heinrich Himmler’s SS. Why would any government, indeed, why would anyone, want to honor and commemorate SS troops? Why would anyone want to honor and commemorate Nazis and Nazism? This is the question that has remained unanswered in the US and Western media about Marti Ahtisaari. As a sock puppet for the US, NATO, and EU, Ahtisaari’s role in honoring and commemorating the Nazi Waffen SS has been suppressed. As a Chairman ...
My work documenting how the law was lost began about a quarter of a century ago. A close friend and distinguished attorney, Dean Booth, first brought to my attention the erosion of the legal principles on which rests the rule of law in the United States. My columns on the subject got the attention of an educational institution that invited me to give a lecture on the subject. Subsequently, I was invited to give a lecture on “How The Law Was Lost” at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York City.The work coalesced into a book, The Tyranny Of ...
The US, Britain, and France trampled international law to launch missiles against Syria, claiming to have “evidence” of the government’s use of chemical weapons. That evidence is based on terrorist lies.After a week of outrageous tweets and proclamations by POTUS Trump, which included continued accusations that Syria’s president ordered a chemical weapons attack on civilians in Douma, east of Damascus, with Trump using grotesque and juvenile terminology, such as “animal Assad,” the very evening before chemical weapons inspectors of the OPCW were to visit Douma, America and allies launched illegal bombings against Syria. The illegal bombings included 103 missiles, 71 of ...
The WarmongersThe war, which began in August 1914 – to contemporaries the Great War, to posterity the First World War – marked the end of one period of history and the beginning of another. Starting as a European war, it turned in 1917, with the entrance of the US into a world war. The spark that triggered it off was the assassination of the Austrian heir-presumptive, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1864−1914), by a Bosnian nationalist of Serb origin – Gavrilo Princip[1], a member of the Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna) movement, in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914 on his official visit to ...
When the Warsaw Pact ended, after the collapse of communism, some optimists might have expected Nato to be broken up too.After all, the Labour Party in Britain had been opposed to Nato in the mid-1980s. But that was not to be. The US, which had always dominated Nato, quickly began to reinvent Nato and furthermore to expand it.Following the end of the Warsaw Pact many central and east European governments wanted to join Nato.This of course was music to the ears of the US military manufacturers. Indeed, the chair of the expand Nato committee, Bruce Jackson, was technical director of ...
Under the ominous title Fear, Woodward quotes high-ranking members of the White House staff as well as the heads of crucial departments affirming that, for the good of the country, they work to prevent Trump from signing dangerous documents. And like the proverbial cherry on the cake, in finely tuned coordination, on the day the book was released to the press, the New York Times broke with tradition to publish an anonymous op-ed by one of those senior White House officials whose first sentence is “I am part of the Resistance”, a phrase Americans know from watching World War II movies featuring European partisans fighting Germans in the woods.
In response to a growing wave of interest in Bernie Sanders’ socialist ideas, the Democratic Party dug its own grave by manipulating obscure rules in order to prevent him from becoming its candidate, thanks to the Clinton political ‘machine’ (the ominous synonym for a political party). These maneuvers, which would make front page headlines in any other democratic country, are business as usual in Washington, while the recently revealed $50,000 Russian ’contribution’ that bought four tickets to President Trump’s inauguration, is denounced as ‘interference’ — as if by the mere fact of being a spectator at the event a Russian could influence his presidency.
