Beware of blowback.
Strategic Culture Foundation
Philip Giraldi, former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer, now Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest and founding member of the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
18 comments:
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Philip M. Giraldi needs some help. I shall oblige…
“The most recent is the new sanctioning of Russia over the” [ALLEGED] “Skripal poisoning. Washington imposed additional trade sanctions on Russia in the belief that Moscow ordered and carried out the” [ALLEGED] “poisoning of Skripal and his daughter on March 4th.”
There. Fixed it. No charge.
Giraldi discusses the use of military force, but in my opinion a far more powerful weapon is debt, which the USA has used to enslave and destroy much of the planet.
The IMF and World Bank (both headquartered in Washington DC) create dollars out of thin air, which they lend to foreign nations, which service the debt by imposing neoliberalism on their own people.
Neoliberalism includes austerity, mass privatization, the sacking of most government workers, the ending of subsidies for the poor, and the surrendering of natural resources to trans-national corporations. This has produced far more death, destruction, poverty and enslavement worldwide that the U.S. military alone could produce. Neoliberalism has also exacerbated pollution, environmental destruction, and species extinction.
Have you ever played a computer game in which you shoot soldiers, zombies, or other critters? You annihilate everything in sight, but your kill counter shows that you destroyed far fewer critters than you thought. Real life is similar. In real life, famine kills for more people than do wars, disease, or natural disasters.
Neoliberalism, trade sanctions, and weaponized credit are engineered famine.
Consider the “six million”™ hoax. To actually gas six million Jews to death, you would have to gas 137 Jews per hour, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, for 5 years. 137 Jews per hour, round the clock, every single day for five years. Ridiculous!
But wait…suppose you corralled six million Jews into an enclosed area and denied them food and water. Unless they started eating each other, the six million would all be dead in two or three weeks. And even if they ate each other, the six million couldn’t last more than a year. That’s how you kill millions. It’s how the Allies killed two million German citizens after the war…simply by keeping the Germans a concentration camp and starving them to death.
Therefore I say that neoliberalism and weaponized credit are ultimately more terrible than are most wars.
Statistically speaking, they the worst form of violence.
I bailed at "Washington has had a tendency to employ force to get what it has wanted ever since 9/11".
This has been going on non-stop since 1945, most notably North Korea (MIC profiteering and regional destabilization) and Vietnam (tungsten, MIC profiteering, and regional destabilization). It has also been going on long before that (Mexican American War, etc.).
Empires do anything they can to get whatever they want.
Philip Geraldi is a great guy!
Konrad, nobody says that the approximately 5-6 million Jews, as well as a roughly equal number of non-Jews directly murdered by the Nazis were gassed to death. There were many different methods used, including gassing.
Yes, if 2 million Germans had been intentionally starved to death by the Allies after WWII, that would have been a Bad Thing. But it did not happen.
The real Hunger Games that the Allies can be reasonably accused of, primarily Britain, occurred during - and more reprehensibly- after the First, not the Second World War. On the order of 100,000 deaths after the war of starvation, not millions. Some British Generals opposed this food blockade policy and tried to ameliorate it. The German memory of this immoral policy led to the greater, perhaps the greatest crime of the Second World War measured by casualties. The Germans ate quite well throughout the second war by systematically robbing the territories they conquered of their food, condemning millions to death by starvation. Far more were killed than even the highest figures for postwar German deaths due to the expulsions etc.
In the real world, the USA had been growing as much food as possible and stockpiling food for years, in anticipation of the dire postwar needs. Harvard agricultural economist John D. Black noted at the time - 1943?- the uniqueness in history of this now forgotten all-out food effort. Hathitrust has some books and reports on it. Another contemporary and reliable report is Victor Gollancz's From Darkest Germany (1947) complaining of the harshness of the postwar regime.
But compared to what the Germans had done? The Allies were saints. If not for that US / Allied food provision effort - untold millions all across Europe would have starved. Had the Allies, even including the Soviets behaved with the mercy the Germans had shown - well there probably would have been about as many Germans as there are Dutch.
But compared to what the Germans had done? The Allies were saints.
You have been well programmed.
Konrad, if you want to kill people in a war you do what Lt. Called did at My Lai, you dig a hole, march the people into it, shoot them in the head with a bullet, and cover them up. Gassing six million people would be ridiculous.
Cal, you need to do dome more reading. The last time I asked you for proof you said to Google it. That meant you have no proof.
“Cal, you need to do dome more reading”
Going on the internet and finding the writing of some other biased anti war conspiracy theorist doesn’t count either...
No foreign claims were ever established under the Marshall Plan in contrast...
https://www.chron.com/life/article/The-Conquerors-by-Michael-Beschloss-2128771.php
“What actually happened after the war seemed at the time only remotely probable: that Germany, and later Japan, would evolve into democratic, peaceful nations, something neither had managed to do during their brief experience with democratic institutions.“
@ Calgacus - it is estimated that up to 2/3 of all casualties in WWII were the result of starvation. Much of this was the result of redirecting commercial cargo from food and goods to roops and armaments. Britain itself very nearly starved.
Germany, and later Japan, would evolve into democratic, peaceful nations,
Both ate still occupied by US troops and the governments are always US vassal. Moreover the governments in both countries are elites that are pretty much the same elites that controlled these countries before and during WWII.
In addition, there are no actual democracies among modern so-called democracies, they are liberal republics under bourgeois liberalism, the elites of which own the countries and dictates laws and policy.
This is the facade of democracy, which is rule of the people, by the people and for the people as a whole, not rule by a single class from whom or by whom political candidates are selected.
Capitalism, where property ownership (financial and non-financial capital) is favored, is simply an integration of feudalism, where land title is favored. They have a somewhat different structure with the addition of popular elections, but otherwise ta similar structure. History is path-dependent.
Popular elections are largely a sham, as is being demonstrated now with the bipartisan full court press to remove the popularly elected president of the US, even though he is a (billionaire) member of the elite — just not the right faction of it.
"But compared to what the Germans had done? The Allies were saints."
I'm sorry, but Konrad is right to pull this up, but not for the reasons he has. In reality, and by COMPARISON, the Allies were angels. The crucial word is "comparison". The Allies were war criminals by any standard, and accepted that in private on many occasions. But it is impossible to compare regular barbaric war criminals who deserved hanging with psychopathic monsters who deserve the pits of hell.
By the way, Konrad, you do a great injustice to your very many excellent insights by writing about the Holocaust in the way you do. I don't particularly mind the "TM" addition: it has a lot of credence given the way the Holocaust has been made into a shakedown operation by racist Zionist ubermensch and Wall Street thieves and racketeers. But calling it a "hoax" is outrageous. No one can stop you saying these things, nor do I wish to impede freedom of speech, but not only is there zero evidence for what you say but staggering amounts of evidence for a Holocaust that took the lives of anywhere between 4.7 million and 7 million Jews, and many millions of gypsies, homosexuals, socialists, communists, anarchists, trade unionists, pacifists, ant-Nazi nationalists and conservatives etc.
Seven million? That’s blasphemy. The sacred “six million” number may not be added to or subtracted from. It is holy writ, etched on stone tablets by the finger of Yahweh. The "six million" number started appearing in English language publications in the 1800s.
Even worse, you claim that the hoax killed more than only Jews. Everyone knows that only Jews may claim to be victims of the hoax. We know that the hoax is a "fact," since the number of Jewish “survivors” continues to multiply, 73 years after the end of WW II.
This situation is much more complicated and nuanced historically than the stories that the sides are telling, which, as Konrad has correctly observed, has devolved into rewriting history (from different points of view), largely for purposes of persuasion.
As some that studies the logic of language and the use of rhetoric for persuasion, I would agree that "holocaust" is a term that has been charged with a conniption for rhetorical purposes that is being used to steamroller a point of view, e.g., by demonizing not only opposition but also questioning the basis of it.
The historical facts are another matter and this is greatly complicated by at least a thousand years of European history, and this didn't start just a thousand years ago either. Historically, this has been an era of tribal (ethnic) conflict for ages. WWI and WWII didn't arise out of nowhere but rather out of the ashes of previous conflicts with scores to settle and agenda to push.
My mother was born in the Austrian Empire. Her family was Germanic ethically and their native language was German. BTW, this applies to Hitler also, who did not become a citizen of Germany until 1932. The Austrian Empire abutted the Russian Empire in the east. There were many different ethnicities speaking different languages in this area (including eastern Russia) that came into contact and often into conflict historically. My grandfather was a civil engineer working for the railroads and he travelled a lot since this was the time that they were laying track there. He spoke five languages, none of them English, al though my grandmother did speak English. My mother was born in what is now Romania, and an uncle was born in Lemberg, which was historically Galicia then and is now in Ukraine and called Lvov (Lviv). I am aware anecdotally of this, which is not exactly historical but it gives a first hand knowledge of what and how some people thought.
I am also aware of the genetic and ethnic story, since my wife and her sister are big into genealogy and, of course, DNA is the big thing now with Ancestry pushing it. So they had to learn something of the history of these areas, and I picked some of it up from them.
In addition my wife was married to a German and lived in Germany for seven years. She was only a couple of degrees of separation from Joseph Goebbels (through his wife Magda) and Hermann Göring. So the family had to be "Nazi," but only in designation. They were like most Germans dragged along by the march of time.
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I don't want to get into the "the Jewish question" here, but suffice it say it is more complicated and nuanced than the superficial stories tell of it. And it is far from resolved in this area of the world, just as other historical issues that are ethnically related. It's not possible to understand what is now going on on the ground there without knowledge of this.
Moreover, the British elite was bound up in this historically owing to the custom of royal families intermarrying. In addition, historically there was a struggle over power in Europe and eastern Russia that involved alliances and lots of intrigue.
The European Jews were also caught up in this, and they stood out since they subscribe to ethnic purity and therefore did not assimilate, even though the learned the language, became established and otherwise fit in. But in a social structure based on ethnicity, which was later associated with nationalism, they stood out by standing apart. This made them targets if for no other reason than that kinship (and therefore difference as threat) is an evolutionary trait.
The upshot is that a lot of people got killed just for who they were ethnically. And it was not just Jews, although Jews were especially targeted in Nazi propaganda as a device. Obviously this could not have happened if there were no historical basis for it, and "anti-Semitism" in the West has a two thousand year history.
And this is just a rough outline that would need to be filled in with a lot of detail and nuance.
And this applies to most other regions of the world, since it is not only historically complicated but also a result of evolutionary development and group selection, so it is complex.
The takeaway is that this is still going on. Americans tend to be oblivious to this going on in their own country now as well as historically, e.g, the Native Americans, imported Africans (and Asians to build the railroad), and the waves of ethnic migrations from Europe and Latin America. This has involved a lot of prejudice, discrimination and violence. Many have been killed.
If one reads the Nazi propaganda or has seen some of the propaganda films, it is undeniable that "Jews" were targeted as "Untermenschen" (subhuman). But so were other ethnicities, including Slavs and Russians, if not so directly. Untermenschen meant "non-Aryan people from the East" for the Nazis, but the Nazis did not originate this concept.
Although usually incorrectly considered to have been coined by the Nazis, the term "under man" was first used by American author and Klansman Lothrop Stoddard in the title of his 1922 book The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Under-man.[8] It was later adopted by the Nazis from that book's German version Der Kulturumsturz: Die Drohung des Untermenschen (1925).[9]
Did lots of Jews die because this? That, too, is undeniable. But so did millions and millions of others, supposedly in the interest of genetic purity and eugenics, but there was more to it than that in that another objective wasLebensraum on a continent where land was scarce. The Nazis did not originate this concept either.
The difference is that some parties have spokespeople today and other don't, and as a result have begun to fade into history.
Ironically, something similar is going on in Palestine now.
Ironically, something similar is going on in Palestine now.
I should have added "in Ukraine."
And Palestine and Ukraine are just examples that stand out. They do not stand alone.
Konrad: "...since the number of Jewish “survivors” continues to multiply, 73 years after the end of WW II."
That doesn't disprove the Holocaust. All that proves is how many unscrupulous and immoral shysters there are in the world. In this case a load of shysters in the Jewish community saw a once in a millennium opportunity for a multi-billion shakedown. Norman Finkelstein's book "The Holocaust Industry" documents all this. The shysters who took any number of people, companies and countries for a ride ensured that not one Holocaust survivor got a penny. That's how unethical they are.
In a film I saw once, one character says with obvious distaste: "That man would sell his own mother." The other says, "Most people would". That's the Holocaust industry for you. Not only would they would sell their own mothers, they would sell them time and time again...and it's not their mother but some poor bastard they claim is their mother.
But none of this has any bearing to the historical reality of the horrors inflicted by the Nazis. If the Holocaust isn't real, for which there is more evidence than almost any other incident in history, then nothing is true by the standards of history.
The history of man's inhumanity to man is long and gruesome.
Focusing on the Nazis or whomever is the current enemy obscures this and overlooks the sad record of those doing the condemning. "Let those who are without sin cast the first stone."
German war crimes, perpetrated by both Nazi paramilitaries and security services, and in some cases the Wehrmacht as well, are documented, e.g., in the record of the Nuremberg trials. Not all was brought to light at the time.
The Independent (UK), NAZI WAR CRIMINALS GOT AWAY WITH ATROCITIES BECAUSE OF EVIDENCE HIDDEN IN UK AND US ARCHIVESl
The issue under consideration here is the Holocaust. As I said previously, this terms comes with an emotional charge and implies that Jews were the target. This is only partially the case. Generally, people associate the term with the concentration camps, but that were many other instances of mass murder and it was exclusively Jews.
This tends to be overlooked as a result of the way history has been narrated. The consequence of this is that most Americans and probably many elsewhere are unaware of what is now going on in Eastern Europe and Ukraine in particular, where a neo-Nazi element has risen aided and abetted by US crazies like John McCain.
What do I mean by neo-Nazis? While these people claim to be nationalists and populists, they are not only using Nazi insignia and gesture but they are also promulgating a version of the Untermenschen "theory" and acting on it. The Israeli leadership is doing something similar with respect to the Palestinians as anyone with eyes can see even through they are doing their best to conceal it by shooting reporters.
I don't have to draw more parallels. Go figure for the US and UK, for example. Both cultures are racist in the above sense, too, but more with respect to non-whites than different ethnicities as in central and eastern Europe. The record is not pretty in either case. And it was France that drove the Libya affairs, recalling their colonial role in Africa. Whose hands are clean?
Previously it was the Mongols against the Europeans, then the Mughals against India, then the Islamic invasions of Europe. Before that it was the Persian Empire against Greece, until Alexander turned the tables.
And now here we go again as the West faces off with the rest of the world (considering Russia non-Western in ethnicity or values).
What else is new?
Matt:“Cal, you need to do dome more reading”
Going on the internet and finding the writing of some other biased anti war conspiracy theorist doesn’t count either...
No foreign claims were ever established under the Marshall Plan in contrast...
I have no idea what you are saying. I am presenting the standard view that one can find anywhere, supported by an enormous amount of evidence, supported by what memory that still lives, and which is basically unanimous. The view that everybody agreed on after and even during the war. Konrad (and GLH) are presenting a fringe view based on extremely biased weighing of meager or no evidence. What do you mean about the Marshall plan?
I might suggest that I am not the one here who could do with more reading.
From that review, the book by Beschloss is one of the many pieces of unserious garbage out there, the mirror image of the fringe stuff whitewashing Germany; one of the legion shamefully exploiting the holocaust and propagating insane slanders of FDR & his administration. Genuine scholars knew that the decision to not bomb was well explored long before Beschloss's book. Pretty much the same conclusion that FDR came to, following the advice of all military experts and almost all Jewish leaders at the time, was reached - it was (a) almost impossible (b) quite unlikely to do any good (c) the Germans had threated to put the inmates on the roofs if the camps were bombed etc etc. Take a look at William Rubinstein's The Myth of Rescue for a sane account. Basically there was hardly anything that FDR could have done that he did not do; there was no one in the world who was more actively engaged in preventing the mass murders of Jews in Europe - for there was only one way to do that: win the war.
I would just add to this that while Jews were target specifically in a highly explicit way, they were not the only targets and the Nazi plan included removal of Untermenschen in the East to make Lebensraum while "optimizing" the human gene pool.
This aspect is ignored and it is now going on with different ethnicities target in Eastern Europe and Palestine.
WWII and and the narrative of the "Holocaust" was supposed to ensure that this did not happen again. This time is not Germans that are doing it, but parties the US and other NATO countries —the Allies of WWII — are backing, funding, and arming and advising.
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