Lordre: May 2022

Imported government rule, or unpredictable uprising?

Pakistanis may be forced to choose between accepting the imported government that was imposed by the removal of PM Imran Khan, or setting a course into destabilisation as the West’s agents and local traitors use any trick to keep control.

Some commentators such as George Galloway (tweet deleted but I linked it when it was still live, anyway) seemed to suggest there could be some sort of conflict breaking out between the people and the imported government of Shehbaz Sharif. The demand of everyone concerned is just that there should be an election soon, rather than an acute political conflict, but how likely is a peaceful and valid election to happen in a country just recently subjected to US-led regime-change? It seems more likely that protesters would have to fight, just for this modest demand to be met. The question then is, is it really worth it?

State effective at suppressing the people

One must consider that any organised aspect of mass disobedience is always suppressed quickly if the state takes serious action to stop it (this applies in any country). The people themselves are never a sufficient force for regime change (or in this case, restoration), which is only ever orchestrated successfully by people with foreign backing or substantial state-like powers, regardless of how much support they have among everyday citizens.

When people, such as Donald Trump’s supporters in the United States, believe too much in American national founding myths and consequently think that popular disaffection alone can result in regime change, they are invariably disappointed. Real regime change, or even a successful movement, is coordinated by organised actors, whether for good or evil ends.

It is clear that the Shehbaz Sharif government (likely with the blessing of the Democrat-controlled White House) is okay with treating Imran Khan supporters in a repressive way via arrests, much the way Trump's supporters were treated after the Capitol Attack.

Even the most unpopular regimes are able to maintain their grip on power, only really losing it if they cannot maintain the living standards, food supply and necessities that keep the people indebted to their power.

If it were to happen, the only likely regime change or even guarantee of prompt elections in Pakistan would have to probably come from the intervention of the Pakistani Army, who are accused anyway of playing a big role in removing Imran Khan in the first place. And a scenario of the Army or security forces mutinying, even to side with the people, is dangerous, especially considering the possible foreign involvement of the US and its ability to sponsor violence if it does not like such a change of power.

First and foremost, the top concern should be that people of Pakistan should stay safe, even if it results in a puppet regime. It is a difficult moral choice between being a subservient nation for the sake of order and safety, or a defiant nation that could risk chaos and strife.

All stability is precious

Pakistan is by no means exceptionally vulnerable or contemptible, even as a US puppet. Britain is also not its own master, compelled by what are arguably pro-American and pro-European traitors into ignoring the national will or treating it with disdain, as seen with Brexit. It seems to be in our character that we make the choice for stability rather than for confrontation on an insurmountable issue, because people are just more worried about anarchy than injustice, and we have always been this way.

What marks good people apart from the kind of psychopathic warmongers who drive US foreign policy plotters and their coups is the view that stability is a precious oasis in a chaotic world. Order is invaluable to the lives of the vast majority of people, however suffocating the status quo may be to an idealist. US warmongers and Neocons cannot hold such a view, because their distorted morals hold that mass death and misery on any scale and for any duration are justifiable to satisfy their often crazed and anarchistic political demands (which are often based on propaganda and fakes anyway). They are uniquely evil among sentient beings for this reason (the only other faction like this being ISIS, which many Neocons were apologists for in Syria). Responsible players need not be like them, and should instead opt for stability and reconciliation even when their political wishes are not quite met.

Uprisings and acute political conflicts are tolerable only if the alternative is known to be worse. If the imported government in Pakistan creates intolerable conditions for the nation because it places Western masters over the people, then the time is right that the people and state must take risks to save themselves. Until then, everything should just be subjected to a risk-benefit assessment, with any sort of dramatic regime change or restoration being understood to be a dangerous course.

For Tony Blair to see hope in an unpopular centrist’s minoritarian grip on power tells us all we need to know about him and his ilk.

French president Emmanuel Macron is in power again, despite being unpopular, which hardly is a testament to the legitimacy of an advanced democracy.

Rule of the unpopular

Tony Blair evidently sees such figures as the ideal politicians of the future, which is unsurprising when we consider Blair is loathed by the British people. It is possible that finding inspiration in another minoritarian’s grip on managing a public that hates him is just a way for Tony Blair to cope with his own ruin.

Those who are participating in Tony Blair’s “Future of Britain” conference in June stand out as a veritable menagerie of snakes moved mainly by a hatred of the majority of people and an inability to identify with them, who are persistent about ruling them nonetheless. There are Labour defectors who fled their own constituents and party colleagues to the Liberal Democrats, evidently repeatedly frustrated at democratic results like Jeremy Corbyn's former Labour leadership and Brexit, and desperate to undo them.

Contempt for the people

To such people, the idea of minoritarian movements that primarily focus on their contempt for the people and placing their own snobbish authority on a pedestal is greatly appealing, which is why they turn to Emmanuel Macron for inspiration. Macron's ignorance of mass protests and ability to withstand deep unpopularity to be re-elected (mainly just by having a divided and diverse opposition) represents the ideal model regime to these people – one that can be devoid of democratic legitimacy but still use the language of democracy.

'Anti-populism' has increasingly become just a movement of misanthropes, for whom the biggest challenge of the day is their own nation's will and their need to suppress it.

Russia and China’s dismissals of the US and the West’s authority in the international system (the rules-based order) by pointing to Western wars such as the Iraq War of 2003 or the 2011 bombing of Libya are in turn rejected in Western circles as ‘whataboutism’. But is this succinct reply a sufficient defence of the West?

Someone saying 'what about', and bringing up the other fellow's own failings or sins, like any ad hominem attack, is not necessarily a false argument. If someone’s whole point in an argument is that you are a thief, and you are in fact a thief, then their argument is in fact valid.

In logic, ‘Whataboutism’ is only a false argument when its structure contains a conclusion that does not really follow, for example, 'you are a thief too, therefore I am not a thief'.

No-one really says anything so absurd, so to accuse someone of this logical fallacy is ridiculous. The Russians and Chinese have never made the claim that they are innocent of crimes because they can show the West also commits crimes.

Western hypocrisy is the point

When Russia and China defenders point to the West’s hypocrisy, they are never asserting a false conclusion or falsely claiming to refute a Western allegation. They are just refusing the discussion entirely, because they have another topic they would prefer to talk about.

To claim this refusal of the subject, in favour of attacking the West’s hypocrisy, is an ad hominem fallacy, is no more correct than to claim that Russian diplomats refusing to talk about hot dogs is an ad hominem attack on the intellects of American barbecue-goers, and that Russian answers must be about hot dogs or else they are doing ‘whataboutism’. If you think someone is talking nonsense, you don’t have to address the minutiae of it. If you want, you can wisely change the subject to their credibility, which should have been established first anyway.

As soon as ‘what about Iraq?’ is asked, the United States’ moral authority and its right to confront other nations on moral issues in the first place becomes the subject of the discussion. Under those conditions, whataboutism is a valid argument. We are rewinding the discussion to where it should really start. We are judging the moral character that the US and the West are tacitly claiming (which they need to establish first, before appointing themselves to accuse other nations), so facts that hurt their character are valid to bring up.

'What about whataboutism?'

In fact, invoking the term ‘whataboutism’ when facing Russian and Chinese claims about the West may itself be a form of ‘whataboutism’ (in this case it takes the form ‘what about whataboutism?’), and an example of this as a real logical fallacy. Western apologists in this case really are falsely inferring that they have refuted Russian and Chinese accusations of Western hypocrisy by dismissing them as logical fallacies, when the accusations may not be logical fallacies but distinct and accurate claims that hurt the West's standing.

Someone being guilty of a crime himself arguably destroys his moral authority to judge others committing the same crime and removes his right to take the podium to talk about another fellow's crime. His own actions in committing the crime make his moral authority and statements on anyone else’s crimes dubious, and call his motivations into question. It may show that he is actually just looking for a monopoly on force or the right to commit crimes, rather than sincerely addressing crimes.

When used to challenge someone’s moral authority or ideology, ‘whataboutism’ is a valid and healthy starting point before addressing someone’s claims in the first place. It is not only logically valid but devastating to an opponent, if they cannot withstand it.

WHOAREYOUism

Whataboutism is not a rude interruption to the West's accusations against any regime. It is a legitimate attempt to rewind the conversation to where it ought to begin. The correct phrasing actually goes: 'who are you'?

If the West’s claim is that it represents some kind of moral purity or higher authority, which is indeed its claim when it uses the term ‘rules-based order’ to describe a vision of itself safeguarding international rules and norms, then for Russia and China to point out that it is untrustworthy because of its hypocrisy is fatal to the West.

‘Whataboutism’ is the winner. A ‘rules-based order’ proposed by cockroaches is no way to start cleaning the world, because their very nature disqualifies them from talking about it.

While many on the pacifist left see Russia as hypocritical, modelling its actions in Ukraine on US aggression against countries like Iraq, it is once again the United States that seems to have brought faulty ideas about war and victory to Ukraine.

What kept causing defeat for the United States in foreign conflicts is not a weakness in its excellent military technology, but the intellectual bankruptcy of American leaders and strategists, many of whom are little more than dullards and thugs. For all their military might, such warriors don't understand what war even is.

Americans seem to regard war as nothing more than a shooting competition, getting overly fixated on acts of killing and talking about who they have killed. This may be because of the gun culture that the lives of most American military enthusiasts revolve around.

Killing the enemy

We saw the the trigger-happy approach on display by American leaders in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the mere deaths of insurgents or even civilians were portrayed as victories in the war. It was also a major weakness in the US strategy in Vietnam, which notoriously focused on body counts. Hence, attrition is always the main American goal in wars, despite there being no obvious end to it. It offers no threshold at which one can actually be calculated to win, or even any guarantee that the conflict will ever end.

American military leaders think war is defined as shooting the enemy, and victory is defined as the enemy being dead. The depth of their military thought goes no deeper than that. There is no thought to what happens next, and even less for any agency on the part of their targets.

Coincidently, I’m celebrating the 27,000 dead Russian soldiers and a bakers dozen dead GENERALS! How embarrassing for you!!#SlavaUkraine https://t.co/6n8F66y4ch
— Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) May 22, 2022

In the American military mind, if you kill the enemy, and you keep killing the enemy, eventually they will all be dead and the war will be won. It does not matter what anyone is trying to do, or who goes where, as long as the enemy is being shot. Based on the reports bragging about the allegedly killed Russian generals and high Russian casualties, this idea is now being applied by American warmongers to Russian forces in Ukraine, even though Russians are far better equipped and able to defend themselves than other factions the US and its allies failed to defeat when applying the same philosophy.

No-one needs to die

Although it will surprise people who play computer games, making sure enemy soldiers won't go home to their mothers is not in tune with how wars are really won. No-one is keeping a score, and it is very often the loser that manages to achieve more 'kills' before losing (just look up deaths in the American Civil War or World War Two). This is because war is not even about killing anyone.

As Clausewitz famously stated, war is the continuation of politics by other means. And we also cannot forget Sun Tzu’s formulation, “He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight”. In other words, winning wars is as much to do with not killing people as it is to do with killing them. For Russians to learn that they are being killed by American weapons will not make Russians think they live in a safe world where they do not need to apply military force, and should seek peace.

Imagine if the situation was reversed. This would mean Russia bragging about causing American troop deaths in a war, and expecting America to then withdraw from foreign conflicts and give up on military solutions to threats around the world. Imagine, also, that this foreign conflict is happening just across the border to the mainland United States, and could spill over into American cities or include artillery being fired at such cities, the way the war in Ukraine threatens Russian cities. Would Americans cave in to the pressure, maybe deciding that their military is not very good, and give up?

In fact, needlessly killing an enemy and threatening them with death is not only absolutely irrelevant to waging a war effectively but just complicates the ability to wage it by making the enemy double down, because now they are even more emotionally invested in the conflict and the war is more personal. This approach produces fiercer and more numerous people willing to fight, especially when the war is waged close to home, as the Ukraine war is for Russians.

Understanding how to win a war is all about defining victory, which is actually nothing to do with killing or dying and can be accomplished with no casualties (like Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea, which has no parallel in the pointlessly bloodthirsty history of the United States).

Russia brings rulebook for winning

From the start of its intervention, Russia took the opposite view to American warmakers, with no particular interest in how many people it would kill in Ukraine. Even just getting started in what may be a long war, Russia has been just as interested in rebuilding infrastructure as destroying it. The West, on the other hand, tells of Russian brutality and talks up the West's supposedly humanitarian approach to war, but this is drivel. Rebuilding the cities they destroy is something the US and UK never do, and would never do. People in the West are okay with Ukraine becoming a desolated boneyard, as we have no attachment to the country. It isn't our neighbour, we don't know anyone there.

The second reason the US cannot win wars is because it sets no realistic objective, resulting in 'mission creep' as politicians and military leaders continuously imagine how they can hurt their opponent, with no clear idea of where the process ends. This is already a criticism of the US approach to the war in Ukraine.

Defining victory

The objective of wars is to win them, not necessarily to kill anyone. This means putting the opponent at your mercy, whether now or in the future, and then negotiating the end of the war.

The Taliban, through superior endurance, put the American military and the American people at its mercy in Afghanistan and won. It did this not through might, but through endurance: America lost the will to go on, yielding to pressure, while the Taliban did not. It may take a long time, but the side that has the staying power will always win, and the other side will eventually be put at its mercy. Russia has the staying power to stay where Russia and Russians are, and Ukraine is a neighbour of Russia and home to 8 million Russians – more people than the population of Finland. The West's attachment to Ukraine and the need to prop the country's regime up is a recent scheme from 2014 onwards, as fake as our attachment to the cardboard cut-out Afghan regime that collapsed in Kabul.

The United States will lose for the same reason it always loses: disinterest in the people on the ground or the need to win their hearts and minds. The US is involved for its own glory and its need to kill people it sees as bad. US weapons will always kill people, but the end result will not be a favourable political outcome any more than it was in Vietnam, Afghanistan or Iraq.

Bill Gates seems to have developed an obsession with the conspiracy theories about him, while doing nothing to address them. His own obsession now goes far enough that everyone can be forgiven for taking an interest in those theories, too.

Back at the start of this month, Gates objected to Elon Musk’s desire to ease the moderation policies on Twitter. He seemed to be specifically pleading for his own protection from conspiracy theorists who propagate claims regarding his bizarre continuous attempts to involve himself in health policy, with which this billionaire software designer has no expertise.

Bill Gates' conspiracy theory obsession

Bill Gates asked of Musk, “How does he feel about something that says ‘vaccines kill people’ or that ‘Bill Gates is tracking people?’”, which is telling. This reveals that Gates’ main concern about medical disinformation and malpractice is all about himself. For him, it is not about whether members of the public have access to the accurate and diverse sources of information they deserve or their understanding of science is boosted. He has shown no interest in that issue.

On Saturday, a very unfavourable hashtag was trending on Twitter about Bill Gates.

As an entrepreneur, Bill Gates should take note. Now, as always, he is at the mercy of consumers. Demanding harsh control over what opinions those consumers can express among themselves, when the entire capitalist model depends on them making choices, is folly for one whose career success was based on the consumer's whims.

Bill Gates' scientism

To be on the wrong side of millions of people is dangerous. To cultishly repeat that being on the side of science is best, in the face of millions of worried people, is a disservice to science. It creates the impression that the natural sciences have carved in stone unchanging answers fundamental questions, and have now developed some social role to compel society into obedience, which is hardly a service to scientific inquiry or the public perception of science. Scientists are not parental figures and nannies, and no credible scientist ever assigned himself such a role. They do not compel the public to do anything, as society only ever consented to give them the role of investigators and sources of counsel. Right now, scientists are aware of many things that compromise people's health, and they do nothing about them, because that is not their purpose, which is only to inform.

Bill Gates’ condescending attitude puts him at risk of the millions of unscientific people he feels it is safe to mock, and who may eventually take worse action than yelling at him. Conspiracy theorists may seem like a laughing matter to those who know better than them, but the ones doing the mocking should take a look at what conspiracy theorists have actually done throughout history. It is not a pretty thing, to be in their sights.

Conspiracy theories are no laughing matter

Conspiracy theories are not new, or an internet phenomenon. Before the internet, they were conveyed in pamphlets. Historically, they are linked to eventual justifications for massacres and the rise of extreme ideologies, as most genocides and civil wars feature them as a key part in the formation of the prerequisite extreme views. They are possibly the single most radicalising phenomenon, not just in modern extremism but in history's most extreme revolutionary violence and massacres. As such, the current approach of denigrating conspiracy theorists and dismissing them as incompetent, even as they come to encompass half the population in places like the United States, presents a grave danger.

Most people would be very worried for their safety if they were accused of the diabolical things that Bill Gates is being accused of. However, this man seems to expect so little initiative from the people who accuse him of murder, that he is completely unconcerned.

Gates' persistent mockery of the fears of a growing number of people across the world, and continued involvement in health policy despite unnerving so many people, actually suggests he has a personality that is bizarre and maybe sociopathic (unable to empathise with or understand the fear he creates). This is a factor that likely only increases many people’s discomfort with him. Many people likely sense stench about him, and it is why they buy into paranoid claims about him.

If conspiracy theorists are mistaken, Bill Gates' best way of correcting the problem is still to withdraw from all his involvement or interest in health policy, as a way to reassure people, and apologise for the fears he created. This would actually do more to encourage vaccines than all his previous involvement in promoting them to date.

How Bill Gates can help

Bill Gates’ story is one of success with consumers. He should take note of his benefactors, and be aware that upsetting them and provoking them can have consequences just as as significant for his life as creating products for them.

Eventually, the crowds must be placated rather than dismissed, even if it means diminishing the authority of capable meritocrats and their role in society. Otherwise, uncontrollable and murderous crowds are inevitable.

Part of the role of leaders is to actually have the trust of society. If half the population really begins to believe Bill Gates is a murderer and a monster, this means that his most stabilising role in society is actually to keep his mouth shut and fade from public view, as would suit public safety and his own safety.

Former president George W. Bush accidentally stated the truth about his 2003 invasion of Iraq, referring to it as unjustified and brutal.

Rather than taking the chance to suggest that the American regime has changed since its aggression in 2003 (like Bush's fellow Iraq-era war criminal Antony Blinken did), media stories were instead trying to cover for Bush and convince us that this old war was in fact justified. This makes sense, because the same journalistic outlets helped to cause that war, so of course they have a reason to be apologists for the aggression.

Iraq and Ukraine wars incomparable

The Iraq War was much more brutal and lethal than the war in Ukraine, with no concern for mass civilian casualties during US attacks. In the opening days of the US attack on Iraq, American troops murdered far more people than their Russian counterparts did in the same length of time in their attack against Ukraine’s embattled regime.

The Iraq War is also obviously far harder to justify, waged far away from US shores (in contrast to the Russian intervention in the neighbouring state) and against a country that posed no threat, was at peace, and was receiving no foreign instruction and backing to a wage war (contrast Iraq with Ukraine, which was getting huge weapons deliveries specifically to kill Russian troops before the Russian attack).

It would have been a mistake if Bush had said that the Iraq and Ukraine wars are similarly brutal and unjustified. US actions in Iraq were far more brutal and difficult to justify than Russian actions in Ukraine. Again, Iraq was at peace and posed no imminent threat to the US. Ukraine was already at war with local rebels and was being equipped, to loud applause, specifically to pose a threat to Russian troops.

American superiority?

The Iraq invasion is only more justified than the Ukraine invasion if you subscribe to the idea that the US is simply better than other countries, being the indispensable country and thus more morally entitled to take direct action to defend its security than Russia. The people subscribing to this idea think it is great if the US attacks potential small threats thousands of miles away, but also believe Russia must never be allowed to use its military to penetrate across the border to address a far more substantial threat. Even more ridiculously, the proponents also think Russian leaders should base Russian foreign policy on this same idea: the US is indispensable and must never have its security undermined, whereas Russia is dispensable and it is okay for Russians to perish. Any suggestion by any nation that it might care about its own security more than the United States is deplored by the United States, which demands fawning and adoration by the whole world.

The preposterous idea described above is “American exceptionalism”, as famously affirmed by Barack Obama in a West Point speech. There, he said “The United States is the one indispensable nation”.

Others know this dispensable point of view simply as chauvinism and the unexceptional, historically unimaginative craving of each a powerful Western country to gain world domination. The same view was shared by Spain, the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, Germany, and now the United States. In the case of America, the asserted moral clarity (that America is a "force for good") turns mere exceptionalism into neoconservatism, which became guilty of war crimes, lies, torture and cancer-spreading weapons.

Bush’s gaffe and the media’s attempts to cover for him reveal the vacuous, fake morality governing all the outraged Western responses to the war in Ukraine. The people wanting to punish Russia are not really unnerved by scenes of death or the inhumanity of any atrocity, as they themselves are responsible for worse crimes and continue to give justifications for those acts.

Turkey has too many grievances against Washington's foreign policy to just yield to American demands concerning NATO expansion in Scandinavia.

What we will see, as the US tries to overcome resistance from Turkey, is that the initiative to expand NATO does not at all come from Finland or Sweden’s leadership. It comes entirely from the regime in the United States, which always relied on what it calls influence operations and suitcases of cash to achieve its selfish foreign policy objectives.

Pushing NATO to the limit

Turkey essentially demands that its NATO allies stop supporting its foreign and domestic enemies, and is looking to get US sanctions reversed in exchange for its cooperation on NATO expansion. These are reasonable demands of an ally.

However, in the above link, where the demands are listed, American Iraq War lunatic Michael Rubin does an adequate job expressing how NATO heads will probably react to the defiance expressed by a member state. They will argue that Turkey should be expelled from NATO, for which there is no mechanism, and neither is there a mechanism that may override the veto right of Turkey.

Some NATO ideologues will probably say that Turkey's president Recep Tayyip Erdogan should be killed, as this reflects the kind of damaged and deranged ideation in American foreign policy now.

A more and more coercive NATO, in which the US government simply compels member states to obey it and serve its narrow foreign policy interests, is a NATO that could fall apart.

Is NATO dead?

The standoff could reveal that, far from being reinvigorated by Russia's actions in Ukraine, NATO is dead.

The lack of a mechanism to remove Turkey from NATO means that the NATO members will have to all become law-breakers and fail to follow their own founding document, if they want to cast Turkey out. If, alternatively, the US decides to place additional sanctions on Turkey, this will likely backfire and result in Turkey using its veto more regularly, as well as even more cooperation by the NATO member with Russia and China, making the alliance an increasingly meaningless dead weight.

What is happening suggests that NATO at least does not function very well for US foreign goals. This only raises the question as to why anyone would want to expand an alliance that is dead and simply retains the bulk of the members from a bygone political constellation in the Cold War. The current standoff makes a much better case for dissolving and replacing NATO than expanding it, even if one holds the aggressive American views that guide foreign policy in the North Atlantic Area now.

NATO and the EU could both be replaced by smaller blocs, with the EU also experiencing a similar impasse with Poland and Hungary and the ideologues similarly threatening expulsion.

Popular billionaire tycoon Elon Musk has been the target of sexual harassment allegations reminiscent of those against Donald Trump, including the familiar claim of paying for an individual’s silence.

Such claims against Musk are carried by journalists, and occurred at a time when he was clashing with the very same journalistic community about freedom of speech. This indicates that what is happening is a smear campaign, likely by elements associated with the Democratic Party in the United States

Journalists lie

Journalists and mainstream media outlets cannot be trusted. They are able to lie, and then later retract their claims and apologise when the damage is done, thereby continuing to maintain their supposed reputation for journalistic integrity. This 'oops' model of disinformation means that none of the current headlines can be taken seriously, since every point they make may simply be retracted quietly later.

It is entirely possible that some months after all the damage is done, it will quietly emerge that Elon Musk didn't do anything. One could point to Musk's ability to sue for defamation, but this can neither undo the damage to him, nor necessarily cause damage to the business of the offending publication or network.

It could alternatively be the case that Elon Musk’s transgressions are true, but that they are true of virtually all celebrities of similar status in the US. It may be that journalists just use this as a way of attacking the person if they become a political enemy. There seems to be virtually no high-profile individual, especially a political target, in the United States. who doesn't eventually get accused of something grave.

Non sequitur in the free speech debate

Finally, people should bear in mind that Elon Musk’s personal character has little to do with his disputes with journalists and management at Twitter after securing a deal to buy the company. It does nothing to discredit his views of journalistic and online freedoms, any more than spurious and eventually withdrawn rape allegations discredited Julian Assange's journalistic work.

Rand Paul delaying military aid to the central government of the Ukraine, in the hope Americans can get better assurances about how their money is being spent, was unquestionably a good thing.

One thing the media is getting right is that Americans need to think more about their country’s foreign policy, and they need to think more about how it affects them. Unfortunately, the majority of opinions being presented amount to a simplistic pro-Ukraine messaging campaign, undoubtedly also sponsored by the US government.

Costs of interventionism

Previous adventurism and foreign entanglements were at very little cost to Americans, compared to the possible fallout over the Ukraine. Biden himself warned of pain when it comes to Americans affording gas, connecting it with the conflict he wants to intensify in the Ukraine.

There is ample reason to think the war in the Ukraine will be lost by the West, however long it takes. The two-decade War in Afghanistan was more likely to succeed than a war on the Russian steppes of the Ukraine, where Russia is highly invested and sufficient millions of ethnic Russians reside, enough to justify not just a temporary Russian presence but a permanent one, even with great loss of life.

No hope of Western glory

The Ukraine conflict offers no hope of Western victory and expansion, just like Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Revelling in Russian soldiers dying, which has been the case anyway for local Russian civilians in the Donbass since 2014, won’t change the connection of these people to a land they long possessed and have the ability to at least control a great deal of. For us to think killing Russians is the answer to the West's problem here is nothing more than a manifestation of violent urges to compensate for the Western flight from Afghanistan, and no more than a continuation of killing the Taliban, which turned out to be pointless. In the end, the land will always be possessed by the people who live and die on that land, and not by those who want to brag about how many people they killed there, which is all the US does in every conflict it loses.

Conflict with Russia exposes countries to potential famine, as Biden blamed food shortages on Russia. Western countries are not immune to this problem, and the West could be swamped with the emaciated fleeing migrants from other countries. Given that global warming can affect crop yields, we could end up facing famines in our own countries, the UK and US, if the war lasts a long time and the Russians are willing to endure it for decades.

Notice the unelected parasites of US policy

For the first time in recent history, foreign policy issues seriously affect Americans, such that their welfare may depend on identifying and removing the long-term US foreign policy strategists guiding successive administrations into failed wars. Unfortunately, there is no clear means to achieve this. The revolving door between so-called "journalism" and foreign policy advisory roles exposes that the junta of undemocratic maggots stays in control, no matter what administration replaces the last, and these maggots never leave.

Look at Antony Blinken, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan and Ned Price, as a few examples of varied importance. While sharing the same murderous neoconservative glare, responsible for thousands of deaths in failed wars in the Middle East, each such person has never stood for election, instead cowering from the people and worming their way around them, and yet still shaping policy and laying out the only options available to the administration. The American people will need special tweezers or an iron fist to remove these unelected parasites, or their ideas will be responsible for creating unmanageable costs for citizens.

In my country, it seems Ukraine is a successful feelgood cause.

And who can doubt the ability of the British to recognise good causes, and support them? The eventual Sir Volodymyr Zelensky is most probably adored in households across Britain, in a similar way to Sir Jimmy Savile, who was to be followed by Sir Tony Blair.

What surer security is there against being discredited, than the favour of the British public?

The movie

Everyone in Britain seems to assume the war in Ukraine will end swiftly and righteously in Ukraine’s favour, for no reason other than our belief that Ukrainians are playing the hero role and the Russians are the villains of the story. Many people are so accustomed to dramatic structure, from the entertainment they consume, that they are quick to assume they know how history ends. They think we are just a little more than half way through this story.

But what if the war doesn’t end? What if, like the War on Terror, this movie just goes on and on, until we just decide to leave the cinema?

The arrest

What if Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky’s term goes on and on, with no elections, due to the war and the complete lack of opposition in the country? What if we see him presiding over a country in ruins, inhabited by a disease-ridden, war-fatigued, starving population with no way out in the conflict with an uncompromising Russia, even while retaining power after five or even ten years? What if, under the pressure of the war, there are increasing arbitrary executions of suspected traitors and defeatists by his regime? Worse for audiences, what if his beard grows long and he becomes unsightly, unsanitary or insane? What storytelling would work for him, then?

Eventually, prolonged war could turn Ukrainians against Zelensky or turn our own country against him, as he could be associated with a certain phase of war that could become inconvenient to us as we become more level-headed about the conflict. Zelensky himself may try to stay in power indefinitely, afraid that he will be used as a scapegoat or face some sort of prosecution under the next administration, if he leaves office. Remember that he himself tried to have his political rivals arrested, including former president Petro Poroshenko.

If Zelensky is arrested, then our obligation to encourage Ukraine as an ally will require our media to go after Zelensky and destroy him, just as easily as we had built him up and lionised him.

The long struggle

In the West, the public will become fatigued by the propaganda if the war drags on, like it did with the former Syrian rebels, now reduced to shabby terrorists at the country's fringes. We originally thought the Syrian rebels were brave, portraying them like rock stars, but that image sagged as ISIS grew and the image of those rebels turned into dying victims in Aleppo, rather than brave victors marching on Damascus for democracy.

People are receptive to simplistic messages and marketing at first, but it begins to wear thin if the same level of enthusiasm is being continuously demanded of them. If a face is shown to us long enough, we will begin to find it ugly. Zelensky's scowling, bearded face will be no different and people will begin to suspect something is hideous about him.

Wars are no longer fought over a few years, with a clearly marked turning point or end. Almost every war now seems to last immeasurably long, and only be ended out of fatigue. The Russians feel they have a centuries-long bond of blood with lands that encompass Ukraine, where millions of Russian soldiers died in the Second World War, whereas our connection to that land is nothing more than a simplistic marketing and messaging campaign that began in February 2022. An influx of Ukrainian refugees does not create any strong personal or cultural bond between Britain and Ukraine, other than as a fleeting illusion. As such, the long-term investment, emotional commitment and willingness to endure hardship in this conflict is more likely to be on the Russian side than ours.

Fatigue

As the hardship of the Ukrainian conflict may really affect us, like Covid measures did, Western populations could become fatigued by the efforts to prop up Ukraine after only two years, thereafter deciding to actively scorn and mock the Ukrainian cause. This would be in stark contrast to the twenty years it took for us to give up in Afghanistan and no longer care what happened to the regime in Kabul. The handling of dissent in Western regimes, where authorities simply try to brand anyone who raises questions as an enemy or a cretin, is also extremely ineffective and just increases resistance to whatever message the government tries to spread.

It is likely that the Russians will never grow tired of the conflict in Ukraine, no matter how bad we try to make it for them, as to them Ukraine is sacred ground lit by their memorials and eternal flames. Western media can claim the Russians are just temporary invaders, but the Russians see themselves as holy warriors fighting on their own territory. Our pretence as if Russia had just invaded Switzerland, and so doesn't belong there, is purposely ignorant and we know it.

Donald Trump's opponents ridiculed the US Space Force, which was originally presented as a flagship policy of his presidency and somehow indicative of the flaws of his leadership.

We were expected to believe that the Space Force somehow distinguished Trump from what would have been Clinton’s policies. However, in reality, everything would be the same, regardless of who led it and took responsibility.

Joe Biden, far from scrapping the "Trumpian" branch of the US military, kept and is expected to expand the Space Force, creating a Space National Guard, this being one of his own supposedly unique decisions. This time, the initiative for more of exactly the same thing is coming from the other party, as if the two parties are one and the same.

President poser

The same tendency to have a leader claiming responsibility for whatever the state desired anyway, is true of other moves, such as the withdrawal from Afghanistan. Had Trump ordered that withdrawal, it would have be portrayed as a uniquely “Trumpian” move by the idiots who instead made apologies for it only because Biden did it.

What we see clearly shows that presidents are just opportunists and posers for photo ops, who have no real policy ideas and just claim ownership for whatever the permanently attached limpets and advisers from the military and intelligence junta are simply doing anyway.

The unelected state

The US state places no value in the American people, and everything it does is for the expansion of its own power at the nation's expense. The corrupt intelligence services who spied on their own people, and were exposed by Edward Snowden as crooks, were driven to protect themselves from the people. The most aggressive American policies, such as propaganda and torture, are devised not to help the American people but to protect the self-serving individuals in charge from embarrassment, overthrow or prosecution. We can see this from the pursuit of Julian Assange, whose only threat was to the careers of torturers and war criminals, and he will now be handed over to them for torture.

The real leaders, who govern by expertise rather than the approval of the public, really invent American policies and oversee them over decades.

The real leaders are the statist party of “professionals” who wander in and out of government, the press and think tanks, being respected wherever they go, regardless of the results of their ideas. Hapless elected officials act as empty suits for the junta’s agenda, showing no difference from each other except the manner of their words. This reduces democracy to a puppet show for the weak-minded, as the “professionals” purposely avoid standing for election and likely don't bother even voting, yet frequently mention the word "democracy" as deception.

Western media sources are trying to rattle Russians into thinking their country’s actions in Ukraine backfired and that they are in greater peril, owing to Finland and Sweden joining NATO.

Some fans of Russia see a sudden Russian military offensive on Finland, like the attack deep into Ukraine in February, as a realistic possibility. Finland may well be much more vulnerable than Ukraine, as it has a much smaller military than Ukraine, although it boasts a better history of military success against Russia.

The Kremlin certainly is not happy about Finland joining NATO, saying an unspecified response will follow. Meanwhile, Sweden is a power in the Baltic Sea, but has already cooperated with the NATO powers and labelled Russia as hostile, and should have been expected to join sooner or later.

Russia should expect NATO in Finland

Finland has a small population and military, so the issue is more about NATO deploying to Finland than Finland joining NATO. Russia will have to target US forces in Finland, where it previously had no interest.

One can conclude that, far from being taken by surprise, Russia probably expected NATO to compensate elsewhere for the disappearance of Ukraine’s NATO membership prospects due to the Russian military presence in that country. That compensation is likely to now happen in Scandinavia, unless vetoed by NATO members such as Turkey.

Russians would be wrong to get too flustered about Finland joining NATO. One must remember that Finland was always tacitly aligned with the West. NATO and Finnish troops were likely under the mutual understanding that Finland would let Western forces use or pass through that territory during any conflict with Russia, even during the Cold War height of Finnish neutrality. Also, recall that Finland had no hesitation about even aligning with the Axis in World War Two to strike at Russia.

There is a certain peril to Russia associated with Finland’s entry to NATO, but it is solely a conventional military threat and a missile threat, perhaps mainly a threat that US military air power could be permanently based there. Finland’s population and military are likely to be too small to significantly threaten Russia, so Russian troops will be facing US and other NATO troops across that frontier. However, this is far less of a severe threat than what could arise in the much more populous Ukraine, so any claim that the Kremlin now has a bigger problem on its hands is just false.

Ukraine as NATO's 4GW base

Ukraine is highly populated, capable of enormous manpower. It was a viable springboard for fourth-generation warfare (4GW), which is the only reliable means of destroying targets in a nuclear-armed power's territory without provoking a direct conflict with it. Densely populated areas, zealous paramilitary formations practicing Syria-like hit and run tactics using pickup trucks, and sustained political extremism and grievances, all defined what was happening in Ukraine even before the Russian invasion. The war of 2014 to present created a threat in Ukraine that would have spilled over into Russian territory even if Russia did nothing. Supposing the West also funded mass protests within Russia with the aim of toppling Russian president Vladimir Putin, violence and insecurity could have spread across Russia, joined by people crossing over the border from Ukraine.

The Western strategy of creating security threats on the Russian periphery would eventually create conditions of civil war creeping into Russia like Syria, sufficient to destroy the Russian state but not obvious enough to trigger a retaliatory nuclear strike by Moscow. In fact, NATO would have used its current Ukraine pressure tactics to suppress Russia's ability to confront threats on its own territory at that stage, threatening intervention inside Russia if Putin uses chemical weapons, and all such claims that always arise under the NATO watch. What is being played out in Ukraine now is likely exactly what NATO intended to do inside Russia itself, sooner or later, all to the same applause of those who currently praise Ukraine. Putin's intervention likely pre-empted and forced the confrontation on Ukrainian territory rather than Russian territory, but even now there are Western officials expressing their support for the spill-over of the violence to Russian territory and US officials declaring that the violence is aimed to weaken Russia. If Western statements are not gaffes, then Russia's military action in Ukraine provides increased security for Russian people by keeping the confrontation as far outside Russia's borders and as far from Russian civilians as possible, which was also the Russian defence of their intervention in Syria. Such an action is, by definition, a success for the Russian soldier even if he is killed, if his task is to prevent Russian civilian deaths.

Finland as a quiet front

Finland isn't a place of great tension, extreme nationalism and unrest, like Ukraine. If Finland became a springboard to provoke Russia, it would be only a base for conventional warfare, and an ineffective one. As someone who walked in that part of Finland, I can tell you it is all densely wooded terrain in a sparsely populated wilderness, surely still unsuitable for conventional warfare as it was in the Winter War of 1940. Attacking forces would be constrained by the roads. As such, a war in Finland would be an almost entirely aerial and missile war, monitored by radar and missile troops and provoking mutual destruction if anything happened at all. Western attempts to undermine Russia have been desperately trying to dodge a direct military conflict and find unconventional forms of attack, such as those where local civilian hatreds and provocations can give rise to the murk of civil war, like in Syria from 2011 and Ukraine from 2014. Mere tourism-level numbers of Russians live in Finland compared to more than eight million in Ukraine, so Finland's internal affairs don't concern Russia.

On the Finnish frontier, following the country's accession to NATO, whichever side has aggressive intentions is going to either fail spectacularly to advance, or simply provoke everyone's destruction in a nuclear war, which means there will be no change in the calculus on either the Russian or NATO side. US nuclear missiles placed in Finland are a possibility, which will create an increased threat to the adjacent St Petersburg, but not much more than the existing Baltic NATO countries.

The possibility of US biological warfare facilities at the Russian border exists but does not require Finland's membership of NATO, if there is a determined US plan to introduce diseases into Russia as per Russian suspicions. It is hard to see how gaining a tenuous military hold on some forests in Finland at the expense of Russian soldiers' lives would provide much protection against such a threat, if it exists. A better move by Russia might simply be to create its own retaliatory biowarfare programs, as they developed their nuclear arsenal to counter the US.

Finnish cannon fodder for US wars

Finland reacted in a nervous and short-sighted way by deciding to join NATO and announcing it without debate. Its leaders underestimate the value of neutrality and the costs of NATO membership. They now risk selling their souls to a very dangerous neoconservative devil that still is in power in Washington and still believes the West’s destiny is to invade other continents to spread “democracy” and pacify hostile regimes.

Far from defending against Russian invaders, Finnish membership in NATO will most likely result in more Finnish troops dying in Middle Eastern countries invaded by the US in the future, and being deployed to Asia to confront China. NATO’s mission is being constantly expanded to a greater and more aggressive scope (“Global NATO”, as Liz Truss puts it), so there is no limit to what NATO may try to conquer next, with the increased cannon fodder and confidence it gets from the growing list of member states. There is also the potential for terrorist attacks to occur in Finland, as NATO countries all share the burdens, casualties, and inevitable consequences of the dream of Western conquest.

One must always be cautious of simplistic claims and laymen’s theories about the source of destructive governance and the loss of collective prosperity. Such are the most common claims of agitators, but they often have no validity when assessed rationally.

The notion of an exclusive club of rich people, the billionaires, deciding our fate, is one such kind of mistaken simplistic theory. It proposes a link between people’s net worth and their attraction to Malthusian or dystopian visions of the world, which are then pursued to the detriment of the masses.

Great Reset as the work of the rich?

Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom (of fame for Megaupload and later the cloud service Mega) was recently tweeting about the ‘Great Reset’, positing that the ‘elite’ want to shield themselves from the shocks of a plan they have to preserve their own wealth at our expense.

The only problem with this idea is that Kim Dotcom’s own 10-million-dollar net worth is higher than Great Reset mastermind Klaus Schwab’s rumoured 1-million-dollar net worth. Such a discrepancy would appear to throw any kind of analysis suggesting a Malthusian billionaire elite, planning mass serfdom of the people through the Great Reset, into doubt.

In addition, other perceived heroes of the masses against a Great Reset-pushing elite include Donald Trump and Elon Musk, net worth 2 billion dollars and 290 billion dollars respectively.

Such numbers are arrived at simply by searching on the internet. They are not hidden.

Billionaire power

It is striking that the people positing the sinister plans of the billionaires often rally behind individual millionaires and billionaires as their heroes, while many of their adversaries pushing such things as the Great Reset possess poultry sums of money that are expected simply of random politicians and economists.

What is happening is that many people are convinced that power is just a direct extension of money. They succumb to the simplistic assumption that whoever has the gold makes the rules. However, it is better to say that whoever has the power makes the rules, and power derives often from knowledge rather than wealth. Furthermore, those who have power gain wealth, whereas those with pre-existing wealth often just lose it.

There is indeed an elite responsible for policy in Western countries, which looks upon the masses with scorn and condescension, but any assertion that they are a group of super-rich property owners or royals misses the real point.

Whatever the threat to the welfare of the public from the halls of power may be, it is not necessarily the work of the rich, and not even the malign doings of the royal family of Saudi Arabia or the United Kingdom. Many agitators simply point to those with more wealth or property than us as a way of getting an emotional response from their audience, based on envy.

In reality, a rich person or celebrity is just as likely to sense something wrong with the world as a poor person, and be just as powerless to act. On the other hand, a poor person may indeed have the knowledge from which to derive power, and so be able to act.

Then who are the 'elite'?

Meritocrats.

Our politics and our perceptions are shaped not by a moneyed elite, but rather by a self-appointed ‘power elite’ that consists of people who merely curried favour enough to pass through the revolving doors of think tanks, mainstream media and the government, allowing them to create ideas (think tanks), manufacture consent for them (media), and implement them (government). At no point in this process does this powered elite have any empathy with the public, merely viewing them as a hurdle to the implementation of their own vision. Such individuals will repeatedly hold offices to which they are appointed and that do not require a democratic election (National Security Adviser in the United States, for example). While no single such post is necessarily powerful, together these unelected posts allow a narrow group of people cut from the same statist ideological cloth to continuously guide the nation state on a course opposite to the wishes of the people, regardless of electoral outcomes. It is this meritocratic group spanning think tanks, government agencies, and media conglomerates, that all think alike in their will to subvert democracy, to compel the regime against the wishes of the people.

One thing to bear in mind is that what is being described here is not a flaw of any kind of system that can ever be corrected by the law, nor is the diminishing of democracy by the hands of meritocrats necessarily a bad thing. It may well be that this professional governing corps really does produce the best outcomes for a nation, whereas the people are foolish. The meritocrats are simply an element that can be either ripe or rotten within any organisation, and there is a good case that this element has become fully rotten in Western democracies, having become obsessed only with its own security, fearing the nation as a hostile mob to be monitored and suppressed.

The elite are not especially rich, but merely favoured. Many of them could be nice people, in the manner of a prince, but amenable only to those they know or meet, and that is an exceedingly narrow group. This persistence of the same narrow group of meritocrats for too long can become inimical to any authentic idea of democracy or republic, which are reduced to lies.

Sinn Féin is set to be the largest party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, after the results in local elections that took place in the United Kingdom on May 5.

What has happened pushes the UK towards a perhaps inevitable breakup, as Sinn Féin has long sought a united island of Ireland, which would be noble if they can secure majority support in Northern Ireland for it.

A return to Great Britain?

The people of Britain actually have no need for Ireland. If we were to lose Northern Ireland, the imposing name of the “Kingdom of Great Britain” (or just Great Britain) could be restored as the official one, as could the flag of 1707-1801, which British troops carried to war against America and France. Such days were hardly those of a lesser power, as we are now.

Even if things went a step further, and Scotland was also to gain independence, England would likely remain a powerhouse, keeping the neighbouring countries in its influence, unless the European Union was to actively work against such sway

Unionist backlash

The only peril may come from unionists in Northern Ireland, and their ties to that land, in the event that they refuse to accept the breakup of the country they were loyal to. Political radicals and aggrieved parties often end up punching above their weight, and it is not atypical that they can take a whole country hostage with their politics.

As well as a surge in violence taking place within a united Ireland, possibly drawing in outside forces such as the European Union, there is a greater risk of political radicals fleeing Northern Ireland to assume huge influence within the newly diminished Great Britain. Should anything atrocious befall the unionists residing in the united Ireland, or even a murmur of it, it would result in radical transformations of opinion in Great Britain, creating increasingly hostile English feelings towards Ireland and its EU backers. As well as undermining Scottish independence (assuming Irish unity occurs first), a wave of unionism finding a home in Great Britain could also be big enough to turn policy in London in an aggressive or revanchist direction. If Scotland in turn got independence, further flight of radical British nationalists into England could make them even more concentrated and capable of influencing London.

The return of England

In the most extreme course of future events, breakup could result in an English war not just with Scotland and Ireland but, by proxy, with old enemies like France, Spain and Germany via the European Union as the Scots and Irish will warm to them rather than the ostracised England.

The war on Russia's periphery in Ukraine exposes new vulnerabilities for all nuclear-armed powers, revealing that they are not as invulnerable as they had assumed and that the victors of the Second World War have no guarantee of security. Having a nuclear deterrent doesn't prevent conflict being actively inflamed by outside competitors on your doorstep, or result in the adjacent non-nuclear power standing down if you use force. The informal understanding that nuclear powers cannot incite a proxy to directly attack each other's territory and infrastructure is also gone, now. Now, everyone will be just expected to refrain from using nuclear weapons, as long as sneaky enough methods are being used to kill us and there is not a direct clash. This change may cause huge displeasure to Britain in the future, since it creates new rules that put the country in a new state of vulnerability. It allows the peril of a return to past ages, when Scotland was eligible as a French proxy against England.

Restored medieval conflicts

The idea of an English-EU clash reigniting Medieval-era tensions may seem farfetched, but it is not. Medieval leaders were not less civilised or educated in statehood than modern leaders. Some conflicts are inevitable, just because of the configuration of pieces on the board.

England has a much vaster population than Scotland or Ireland. It is not too hard to predict, if the UK breaks up, that these countries will be afraid and possibly even hateful of the economically and militarily giant England after being estranged from it. The temptation to bring in France or other European powers as protectors, and English resentment at this course of events, would be almost inevitable.

Nationalism, however benign at first, can unleash unpredictable and long-buried forces, as it did after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It can create opportunities for outside interference that will jeopardise a country’s security.

When an arrangement works peacefully, like the Union, it is best to treasure it and not to change it, even if we would personally prefer things to be different. This is the same case with the monarchy.

Pope Francis claimed that NATO "barking" at Russia’s frontier may be responsible for the ongoing war in Ukraine.

This will have led to rage from many, who believe that the only acceptable position on Ukraine is a one-sided condemnation of Russia.

Pope doesn't respect Western foreign policy

Interestingly, the Pope had previously seemed to align with NATO and Ukraine by kissing a Ukrainian flag. In reality, he was just trying to encourage peace, not giving his blessing to Ukraine's savage interethnic conflict of 2014 to present, to which Russia merely introduced itself as an apparently unwelcome belligerent in 2022.

While it may seem obvious that the Catholic Church is a Western organisation with commitments to a Western-led international order, shared by the supporters of NATO, this is not true. Pope Francis is not the Pope of white people, liberals or Westerners, but of the people in the slums of Argentina, whose views he is more likely to be receptive to.

Vatican staying above the fray

The Pope was trying to be neutral and not be seen as a participant in the conflict, as taking a side could undermine his international standing. We should bear in mind that the majority of practicing Catholics reside in the Southern Hemisphere, in developing countries, outside the exclusive zone of NATO political and military propaganda monopoly. For the Pope to align himself with NATO, against the better judgment of many Catholics, would be potentially damaging to the authority and credibility of the Vatican rather than any help to NATO.

At the same time, the Pope does not want to be seen as allying with Russia, since Russian troop presence in Ukraine is unauthorised by the United Nations. Russia violated the letter of the UN Charter by sending troops into Ukraine, albeit only as seriously as Turkey and the US are violating the Charter in Syria and hardly warranting the disproportionate, Russophobic Western response.

The Pope cannot be seen as an aggressive proponent of one side or the other, in a conflict in which Russia may expand with small territorial acquisitions and NATO is fully loyal to the bloody neoconservative dream of a new American century.

Pope Francis is right

The Pope is correct to accuse NATO of provoking the evil it supposedly wants to deliver us from. NATO is desperate to preserve itself as an organisation, therefore encouraging adversaries to be more aggressive so that people will be scared into believing they need NATO. NATO creates disaster by insensitively ignoring the security concerns of other powers, encroaching on them, declaring them ideological enemies, and declaring any subsequent response to be unprovoked and proof that the target began acting strangely.

NATO is worse than a barking dog. It yearns to create the threats it will shield us from. If neoconservative hawks did not have Russian and Chinese villains to talk about, they would only cook up some other villain. They might restart their so-called war on terror, combing the world again for the next imaginary or fantasy threat we can imagine to be menacing the fragile West.

News stories recently started covering an FBI disclosure of a connection between Saudi intelligence services, a Saudi national named Omar al-Bayoumi, and the hijackers responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

The idea being asserted in such stories is that Bayoumi was undoubtedly a Saudi spy, and could have had advance knowledge of the oncoming suicide attacks on the World Trade Centre in 2001.

Suspicious timing of revelations

First of all, the US government may have cynically timed the revelations due to current problems in the relationship with Saudi Arabia. Numerous moves, or lack thereof, in support of United States foreign policy objectives, suggest the Saudis are losing interest in supporting Western strategic aims in the Middle East.

The United States is becoming increasingly frustrated by oil-producing nations' lack of interest in helping the West manage the price of oil its confrontation with Russia, one of the dominant oil-producing nations. This can be observed with the passing of the so-called NOPEC bill at the US Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, as the US hopes to sue OPEC members over oil prices. Such attempts probably coincide with other pressure tactics, with Saudi Arabia being a big target of American lawmakers right now.

A history of dark deeds and redactions

Before embracing the FBI's supposedly brave revelations about the truth of 9/11, people should consider that the information was redacted in the first place by the US government. In other words, the US government was actively concealing information about the possible chain of responsibility for 9/11 from the victims, while repudiating people for suggesting such concealment as conspiracy theorists.

It is almost certain that the US is still redacting additional information about 9/11, because such information is not convenient to them. The 9/11 Commission Report is thrown into doubt by these recent amendments to the story, and that is hardly a good look for the US government's credibility.

What else will be amended about the story, in another 20 years? Will the families of victims ever actually know the truth, while they are alive?

The US government may have accidentally encouraged suspicions about its own potential murderous involvement in 9/11. Saudi defence and intelligence activities are so deeply connected with US defence and intelligence activities, dating back to the days of Operation Cyclone, when the US encouraged radical insurgents against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan, that any Saudi involvement in 9/11 would point to possible US involvement in 9/11 as well.

Shifting blame for 9/11

Let us state once again, emphatically: the US government was the party redacting information about possible Saudi involvement. The US government, therefore, probably knew and still knows far more than it allowed the public to know. It hid, and is probably still hiding, the truth from the victims.

There was a time when alleging the Saudis 'did 9/11' would be outrageous. Now, that seems to be changing. It may simply be that Saudi Arabia did coordinate the 9/11 attacks, but what next? In another 20 years, further disclosures may show that US agents were leading Saudi agents in turn, thus placing responsibility for 9/11 with the US government, just as conspiracy theorists had claimed all along.

The US government has accused everyone of 'doing 9/11', except itself. Blame for 9/11 has always been used as a political device to attack people. Blame for 9/11 shifted over time from al-Qaeda, to Iraq, to Iran, to Saudi Arabia, and aggressive action always followed such blame. For people to suspect the US government of murdering its citizens on 9/11 is a normal thing, and for people to act aggressively on that suspicion is at least as reasonable as everything else that happened after 9/11.

If the information being released by the FBI leads to lawsuits alleging the Saudis carried out, or by failure of action caused, the mass murder of 9/11, it would be interesting to see the Saudi response. Did they themselves redact information incriminating US agents, and if US accusations become more serious, will they reveal such secrets in turn?

If you are seeing a lot of stories saying something bad about China in your news feed, don’t bother clicking on any of them. They are all paid for by the US government.

Last year, the US government allocated a quarter of a trillion dollars from its budget to simply stifling China, all out of resentment at that country’s competition with the United States.

Since that time, the US government allocated half a billion dollars specifically to negative news coverage of China, with or without any relationship to the truth.

Whether it relates to the pandemic, to the situation in Xinjiang, to the Solomon Islands, to Taiwan, or whatever else, every negative story about China may as well have been spotted being printed at a US government office. It all ought to be rejected as rubbish, without us even looking at it.

Racist state propaganda

The stories about China are despicable and racist in character, and have likely contributed to soaring anti-Asian hate crime in the United States. This rivals how the establishment press cultivated Islamophobia during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

It is as if, even as it condemns racism, the warmongering armada we call the "West" bumps into civilisations and races it deems inferior, declaring war on them one after the other. However, each and every case it attempts to build against these victims consists of lies and recycled canards of past centuries, including vile rumours that the supposedly inferior races are the source of plagues.

Sponsoring conflicts on rivals' borders

The US is actively pursuing a policy to aggravate all conflict with China, under the same model as it did against Russia in Ukraine, where it fanned the flames of war on the Russian periphery for no purpose other than creating endless security threats to a "rival". That model is applied, in almost exactly the same way, with regard to Taiwan. There is clearly a strategy to drag China down into misery and conflict, out of resentment at its development.

Fortunately for the Russians and Chinese, the US and Britain seem to be acting on a very tight schedule, attempting a Herculean task of trying to defeat all the rival states across the world in the course of only a few years, beginning with the strongest - Russia and China. Whether this will be more successful than the failed attempts to bring down Iran, North Korea, Cuba and even the Taliban, is yet to be seen.

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