More on the contents of the 3,000 files relating to JFK, which have recently been declassified. This is another short video from the Latin America news broadcaster, TeleSur. They reveal that the files show that the CIA was considering carrying out a series of false flag attacks in Miami and other cities in Florida, and even Washington. One of the possible tactics was to sink a Cuban refugee boat, which the Agency stated could be real or simulated, and encourage a series of murder attempts on Cuban refugees in America. This was to fool the American people into believing that there was a Communist terrorist campaign operating in America itself, backed by the Cubans, which would serve as a pretext for invading the country.
The files also reveal the various attempts the Americans made to assassinate Castro. But they also show that Cuba was not behind J.F.K’s assassination. The video ends by stating that the contents of these files makes you wonder what it is in the others, that have not been released.
The US has over the past few days released thousands of previously classified documents relating to JFK. I think this has mostly been of interested to that part of the parapolitics/ conspiracy theory crowd, who are skeptical of the official explanation of Kennedy’s assassination. But there’s also been some very disturbing revelations about America’s strategy for dealing with Cuba after Fidel Castro’s revelation overthrew the corrupt and brutal Bautista dictatorship.
This clip from Telesur English is less than a minute long. But it reveals that the Americans were at one time considering using biological weapons – that’s germ warfare to you and me – against Cuba’s crops. This would have caused mass starvation. In the end the plan was dropped because they feared that it could spread to America, and were also afraid of their scheme being traced back to the American government.
This is just one of long line of plots and schemes the Americans devised over the decades for trying to oust Castro and overthrow the Communist regime in Cuba. The video states that this plan was thought up when the Cuban regime was trying to improve conditions in the country for everyone. There are serious human rights issues in Cuba, but roughly, that’s correct. Conditions for ordinary, working Cubans have been improved immensely by the Communists, despite decades of being blockaded by the Americans.
This is in very stark contrast to the Bautista regime, which kept the majority of Cubans in grinding poverty for the benefit of the big plantation owners and industrialists with the support of Washington.
The attempts of the American government to overthrow Castro and reintroduce capitalism into Cuba are yet just another part of America’s long campaign in Latin America and elsewhere to overthrow liberal and left-wing regimes, which may not even have been Communist or even Socialist, if they threatened American corporate power. The only difference is that while they were successful in British Guiana, Guatemala, Chile and much of the rest of the Continent, Cuba successfully resisted them with the aid of the Soviets.
Well, not the real Sargon of Akkad, one of the great founders of Assyrian civilisation in ancient Mesopotamia, obviously. He’s been dead for about 3,000 years.
No, this Sargon of Akkad is a British vlogger from Swindon, real name Carl Benjamin, who was a major figure in the internet sceptics’ movement. Unfortunately, he moved from simply vlogging on subjects like atheism and scepticism, to becoming a mouthpiece for all manner of extreme right-wing views. I have a feeling he’s one of those people, who consider themselves politically moderate, while pushing all manner of racist, misogynist and generally politically extremely illiberal bilge. I think he’s turned up recently to at least one Alt Right or manospherian conferences.
In this very short little video, Kevin Logan calls him out for his defence of some truly astonishingly horrific comments by another right-wing blogger, Mouthy Buddha. Mouthy Buddha claimed that Hitler was very lenient with the Jews in the Holocaust, and ‘was a decent man’. And, oh yes, that the Jews got what they wanted after the war – a Jewish homeland – because of the Shoah.
Sargon goes on to say that Mouthy Buddha ‘did nothing wrong’ and that he was ‘steel-manning’ the argument for the Holocaust. Ominously, he goes on to say that he intends to do a series on ‘the Jewish question’.
Logan has responded by intercutting Sargon’s comments with footage from Mouthy Buddha himself, and a film clip of a bloke on a train saying exactly what these views about the Holocaust are: ‘Bullsh*t’.
He ends by putting up in front of Sargon’s face the words ‘You F***ing Pr*ck!’
Sorry for the language, peeps, but I think that the obscenity is entirely justified in the context of rebutting an obscene view. And the attitude that Hitler was somehow humane in his maltreatment of the Jews is far more obscene than any foul language or profanity.
The ‘steel-manning’ Sargon refers to is supposedly a rhetorical device in which one tries to undermine one’s opponent’s argument by putting in even stronger terms, as opposed to ‘straw-manning’, which is deliberately misstating it in far weaker terms. I hadn’t heard of ‘steel-manning’ before, and I don’t think many other people have either. One of the commenters on Logan’s video on YouTube states that it was thunk up by an internet group, and isn’t recognised by professional philosophers and scholars of logic and rhetoric.
There was nothing humane or restrained about the Nazis’ brutalisation of the Jews. Nothing at all. And the evidence for their extreme cruelty is so widespread and well-known that it isn’t necessary to provide any sources for it. All you have to do is go and look at any of the books on the Third Reich or the Holocaust by a mainstream publisher to see for yourself how horrific the Holocaust was.
As for the ‘Jews’ getting what they wanted from the Holocaust in the foundation of Israel as an independent state three years after Nazi Germany’s defeat, in 1948, it’s true that some Zionist groups and organisations were certainly more than happy to collaborate with the Nazis in the hope of creating further Jewish emigration to Palestine, such as during the brief Ha’avara agreement and the Sterngang. That’s established historical fact. It’s acknowledge by Zionist historians, like David Cesarani. It is only apparently denied by some Zionist groups, who attempt to defend themselves from the charge of collaboration by smearing those, who raise the issue of ‘anti-Semites’.
However, the Zionists were only one section of the Jewish community. The vast majority of Jews wanted to remain in the countries of their birth, as fellow citizens with the same rights and privileges as their gentile fellow countrymen. And they fought hard and bitterly against the Nazis and the other Fascist, anti-Semitic regimes. Those Zionists, who collaborated with the Nazis are entirely unrepresentative of the Jewish people as a whole. This has been pointed out again and again by anti-Zionists, including self-respecting Jewish scholars and activists like Tony Greenstein.
But Israel as a settler colony for European Jews was founded before the Holocaust, after Britain obtained control of Palestine during the period of the Mandate granted by the League of Nations. The followed the Balfour Declaration, in which the British Foreign Minister, Arthur Balfour, pledged that the British Empire would support a Jewish state in the area.
So Mouthy Buddha’s very, very wrong there. Norman Finkelstein and other anti-Zionist writers have pointed out how the Holocaust has been exploited by Israel and its supporters to garner international support, and that, quite understandably, Jewish emigration to Palestine did increase after the War. But reputable historians have also pointed out that during the War comparatively few Jews went to Palestine. The majority fled elsewhere, particularly to America.
As for writing blog posts about ‘the Jewish Question’, there is no question at all about the Holocaust. I’ve already blogged about how an American judge in California officially ruled that the evidence for the Holocaust was so plentiful that it could not reasonably be doubted. The same should go for the brutality of the Nazis and their collaborators, who instituted and conducted it.
It is, however, entirely fair and reasonable to discuss the historical complicity of various Zionist groups and individual Zionists, who hoped to exploit Nazi and anti-Semitic persecution generally to support their political goals of an independent Jewish homeland in Palestine, but this is very different from claiming that the Jews as a whole were somehow complicit in their own persecution. And it is this latter claim Mouthy Buddha has apparently made here, and it can rightly be attacked as anti-Semitic.
I am absolutely astonished that anyone outside of the various Nazi groups and their own twisted, ahistorical worldview, could ever make those comments, and if they were intended as a rhetorical tactic, it was certainly a poor one. Not least because of the way such comments and will be used by the extreme Right to encourage support. But that’s if Mouthy Buddha’s remarks were simply a piece of ill-judged rhetoric as Sargon says. But from the looks of it, it doesn’t seem that it was. Either way, Sargon is wrong about Mouthy Buddha having done nothing wrong. His comments were abhorrent and dangerous, and he should never have made them. The Alt Right have risen to prominence through their use of the internet. They and their vile views should be attacked and refuted at every turn, not given more ammunition to assault democracy and decency.
Mike’s put up a lot of material on his blog, which deserves to be read and commented on. But I really couldn’t let this one pass.
Norman Tebbit, the noted opponent of LGBTQ rights, has risen once again to show his ignorance and bigotry.
Pink News reported that the elderly Thatcherite appeared in the pages of the Torygraph to claim that transgenderism is a new phenomenon. He said he couldn’t remember there being any other children, who were unhappy with their sex at his school, or amongst his intake for National Service or in his children’s school. He wants research conducted into it to examine its extent in time and geographical space. He also states that it’s unknown whether ours or other species are affected, and stated that some scientists believe it could be caused by air pollution. Pink News concluded that it was unclear what scientists he was referring to.
Mike makes the point that there have always been people unhappy with their gender, and that he wouldn’t be surprised if there were people at his school or amongst his cohort for National Service, who weren’t happy with the sex into which they were born. They kept silent, and hid it, because of the very strong hostility towards it. Those were more primitive times, and what has changed is that society has become more tolerant.
He concludes
The current situation is far from enlightened, but progress has been made – as a result of decades of campaigning against oppressive prejudice such as that displayed by Lord Tebbit.
And it is oppressive. It is an attempt to tell other people how to live. How would you like it?
There are a number of aspects to this, which do need to be carefully dissected and commented on.
First of all, I think somewhere along the line Tebbit has come across some entirely respectable research into the growth of reproductive abnormalities and intersex conditions in male animals, and then got it somehow twisted in his weird, bigoted little mind. Scientists have become worried about the increase in malformed sexual organs and female characteristics amongst some animals, such as frogs. I can remember reading an article in New Scientist back in the 1990s that reported that scientists had found an increase in these, as well as other birth defects, in areas in Canada and America that were particularly heavily polluted. I don’t think this was air pollution. It was chemical pollution from factories entering the water table. Amongst the human population, there was a growing gender imbalance with an abnormally low incidence of male births.
In short, there is plenty of evidence which shows that industrial pollution is feminizing animal populations, including humans. And I think it is reasonable to conclude that this process is connected with the fall in sperm vitality in developed, industrial countries, that will leave half of all men classified as clinically infertile by the middle of this century.
But this is not the same as transvestism or transgenderism. This has always been present in human societies. It’s condemned, along with homosexuality, in Leviticus in the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible. Other cultures have been more accepting. For example, in Polynesian culture there were homosexuals, who dressed as women and did female tasks, and were accepted. Herodotus, the Father of History, states that the upper class of the Scythians were not only impotent, but they also dressed as women and did women’s work. The Scythians were a nomadic people on the steppes of central Asia and Siberia. And many of the shamans in Siberian spirituality were transvestites.
In the west, transvestism and transgenderism remained very illegal until very recently. Not only was it frowned upon, but it could also get the transvestite thrown in jail. There was a notorious case in the 19th century of two men, who dressed in drag as part of their music hall act, who were prosecuted because they went out in public wearing their female togs ‘for immoral purposes’, according to the prosecution. Transvestism has also been called Eonism, after the Chevalier d’Eon, a French nobleman and spy, who was also a transvestite. He was also very good at it. He lived as a woman for 20 years, and the woman, who shared his accommodation with him said that in all that time she didn’t know he was a man. One of the small press magazines that emerged in the great flourishing of independent zines in the 1990s was entitled Eon: The Magazine of Transkind, which was dedicated to defending transvestite/ transgender people and their rights.
Western society has become more tolerant towards the transgendered as part of the gay rights campaign that began in the 1950s and ’60s. And at the popular level a strong influence was David Bowie and Glam Rock. Bowie in the ’60s and ’70s adopted a very strongly sexually ambiguous persona. There are photos on the web of him with long hair wearing a man dress. Bowie inspired parts of the pop and rock scene to adopt a similarly androgynous image. Thus the number of Rock and Heavy Metal bands, who also sported long hair and the spandex clothes they’d bought from Chelsea Girl with their sisters. This whole attitude could be summed up in Twisted Sister’s old maxim, ‘Dress like women, sing like men, play like Motherf***ers’. These ’80s monsters of metal arguably achieved their ambition when, in 1987, they were voted America’s ‘worst dressed women’.
It wasn’t just down to Bowie, of course. And despite the massive hair, make-up and spandex, Rock and Heavy Metal are very aggressively masculine musical genres, although certainly not without their female fans and stars. The Goth subculture, or parts of it, also took up the androgynous look as well as a certain tolerance towards bisexuality, which was also becoming increasingly common across popular music generally as part of the changes in sexual attitudes amongst young people.
As for the prevalence of transvestism and transsexuality across different cultures through time, there have been a number of histories of sex written by serious anthropologists, archaeologists and historians, one of whom was also interviewed about his work and book by New Scientist. These issues have also been explored by some of the gay historians. A friend of mine used to have one lying around, which did cover homosexuality and related queer issues as a global phenomenon, from Asia and Europe to Africa and elsewhere.
If Tebbit wants to know more about the Scythians and their sexual habits, he can read Herodotus: The Histories, and the collection of ancient Greek medical writings ascribed to Hippocrates, The Hippocratic Writings. Both are, or were, in Penguin Classics. I’m afraid I can’t remember the titles and authors of the books on the history of sex, although one of them I think was simply titled, The History of Sex, and published by a mainstream publisher. The gay history book was, I think, published by one of the gay publishers.
The Oxbow Book Catalogue for autumn 2017 also contains a recent book, Exploring Sex and Gender in Bioarchaeology, ed. by Sabrina C. Agarwal and Julie K. Wesp (University of New Mexico Press 2017).
The blurb for this runs
Archaeologists have long used skeletal remains to identify gender. Contemporary bioarchaeologists, however, have begun to challenge the theoretical and methodological basis for sex assignment from the skeletons. Simultaneously, they have started to consider the cultural construction of gender roles, recognising the body as uniquely fashioned from the interaction of biological, social, and environmental factors. As the contributors to this volume reveal, combining skeletal data with contextual information can provide a richer understanding of life in the past.
(Page 6 of the catalogue).
This book ain’t cheap, however. The hardback edition is £88.95. But as Tebbit was a Tory cabinet minister, he can probably afford it. As for the other books, he could simply go on Amazon to find them, or simply look round his local branch of Waterstones.
As it is, it looks as if Tebbit has simply been watching too much Alex Jones, the bonkers American conspiracy theorist, and his foam-flecked rant about ‘the globalists’ putting chemicals in the water ‘to turn the frickin’ frogs gay!’
And here’s some light relief at the great conspiracy theorist’s expense:
More from a growing pile of already abundant evidence that Betsy DeVos should not be in charge of education in America. Actually, I wouldn’t trust her to run a pre-school or kindergarten. In this piece from The Young Turks, Jeff Waldorf reports and comments on the move by DeVos to rescind the 72 official documents, which explain to students and their parents, what the rights of disabled people are when they go to Uni. American universities are granted money by the federal government to support the needs of disabled students. DeVos hasn’t revoked these. She’s just making sure that disabled students, their carers and relatives, don’t know what they are.
One of these documents translates the official jargon of the legislation into ordinary plain English, so that regular peeps don’t need a lawyer to interpret it for them. Now it’s gone, things are going to be made difficult so that people will need a lawyer, which only the wealthy will be able to afford.
Waldorf states that not only is this move contradictory, as she hasn’t repealed the legislation itself, but it’s the first step to depriving disable people of the state support they need. He aptly describes it as ‘weaponising ignorance’.
DeVos is coming for the very weakest members of American society. That includes transgender people. She got rid of a whole load of federal directives demanding that the transgendered should be allowed to use the toilet facilities of the sex they identified with, on the grounds that this should be left to state and local government.
And she’s done the same with official legislation detailing how universities should deal with sexual assault on campus. That too, should be left to state and local authorities to decide, as well as the unis themselves.
Waldorf parodies the old Pastor Niemoller poem, ‘First they came for…’, with ‘First they came for the transgender, then the sexual assault victims, then the disabled’. He concludes that DeVos and her government are terrible people.
This is truly disgusting. It’s another attempt by the Republicans to restrict access to higher education, so that only the rich can afford it. And the able-bodied. I thought I’d post it here, as I know that many of the readers of the blog are either disabled, or the carers and relatives of people with disabilities. The people this government despise.
Waldorf is absolutely right about ‘weaponised ignorance’. Since John Major’s day there has been a culture of silence with the DSS/ Benefits Agency/ DWP. People are not being told their rights by DWP staff, and it’s been part of a campaign to make sure that benefits are not taken up. The government can then claim that millions of pounds in benefits are going unclaimed, and so appear generous when announcing this fact, while at the same time planning to cut the amount of benefit. That’s how it’s worked out for several decades. And the delays in the benefits system now and the sanctions system has created a murderous system of ‘checkbook euthanasia’ in which the government is apparently trying to make sure that people die of starvation before they get anything from the state.
As for transgender people, they’ve been vilified as potential sexual predators and a danger to women and children based on a single incident, if that. Some commenters have made the point that Trump and the Republicans are turning on them, because they lost the argument about gay rights and marriage.
They’ve also shown how hypocritical their attitude to sexual violence is by repealing the legislation regulating the way universities should handle real sexual assault. So they’re only worried about rape and sexual assault if it involves the transgender. If it’s carried out by cis-gendered people, then apparently they’re completely indifferent to it.
Despite the recent revelations of the sexual assault and exploitation of women – and men – in the movie business by predatory moguls like Harvey Weinstein.
This is being done in America. But the Republicans over here absolutely love every nasty trick the party of Ronald Reagan has ever played, and it will come over here. No doubt loudly supported by the Heil and the Torygraph.
This video from RT over here in Blighty discusses the controversy surrounding the plans to commemorate the centenary of the Balfour Declaration. This was the pledge by the British foreign minister, Arthur Balfour, that the British would support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. There have been protests and demonstrations by Palestinians in London, who argue that the Declaration should not be celebrated. Instead, the centenary should be used to apologise for the historic crimes and injustice meted out to the Palestinian people.
Eisa Ali, one of the presenters of this piece, then discusses how the Palestinian Mission here commissioned a series of posters to show the oppression and ethnic cleansing suffered by the Palestinians under what critics, like the Palestinian ambassador Manuel Hassassian, have rightly described as an apartheid regime. These show a series of ‘before’ and ‘after’ images. One is of a thriving Arab town, full of homes and with its mosque, as it was before the Israeli occupation. After the creation of Israel, it becomes ruins, containing nothing but rubble, although the mosque still stands.
These posters were banned by Transport For London, which didn’t want to put them up. However, some individual black cabs are showing them. The Palestinian ambassador states that he believes that there was pressure on TFL from two sides, including the government, not to show these posters. He states that to add insult to injury, Theresa May has also invited Benjamin Netanyahu over for a meeting.
Looking at Mr. Hassassian’s name, it seems to me that he might be a Christian, or of Christian descent. It should be remembered that 25 per cent of Palestinians were Christian before the establishment of the state of Israel. That proportion has gone down to one per cent. The American religious right has claimed that this is due to Muslim intolerance. That’s certainly there, as Christians have been victimised by Muslim Palestinians as suspected collaborators. But it’s also because they’ve also been subject to massacre and expulsion as Arabs, just like their Muslim friends, relatives and neighbours. As for Jewish Palestinians, they were tolerated only because their labour was needed. The leaders had inherited all the racist assumptions about Arab inferiority of the European countries they came from, and they believed that the Mizrahim, Jewish Arabs, like Arabs generally, were culturally if not racially inferior. In the 1960s tens of thousands of Jewish Palestinians were officially expelled from Israel, because they were held to be Arabs, not Jews, on the grounds of their cultural assimilation.
I mention the decline of the Christian Palestinian population simply to put the matter straight, not to stir up any more Christian anti-Semitism, which I absolutely condemn.
I just want to make the point that Christians in America are being deliberately given a very distorted view of events in order to bolster western colonialist attitudes towards the Palestinians as a whole, and generate Islamophobia against the Muslim population, in order to manufacture support for what is a White, imperialist settler state.
Theresa May has also said in the Commons that the Balfour declaration should be celebrated.
No. It shouldn’t.
This doesn’t come from any racism towards Judaism or the Jewish people. This country has benefited immensely from the contribution of its Jewish people in just about all areas of life, culture and endeavour.
It simply comes from the fact that Palestine was not ours to give. Its indigenous people had been there for millennia, even if Arabs were relative newcomers, having conquered the region in the 7th century AD. Palestine contained not only Muslims, but also Arabs and Jews, as well as the Samaritans, who are mentioned in the Bible, and who are gaining in numbers.
The result of the Balfour Declaration was their massacre and expulsion from their historic lands. Those that remain are forced into what have been described, with more than a little justification, as ghettoes, and are subject to a form of apartheid. This has all been described by many highly courageous Jewish and Israeli journalists, writers, and activists, as well as by the Palestinians themselves and others.
It has also resulted in immense harm to the wider Jewish people. At the time of the Declaration, the majority of Britain’s Jewish community, including its leading families, who had been here since the 17th century, were resolutely against it. They wanted to be accepted as fellow Brits, and were afraid that the passage of the Declaration would mean that they would be suspected of dual loyalty. The businessman and presenter of the British version of The Apprentice, Sir Alan Sugar, said in one programme that he had been a member of the Jewish version of the Boy’s Brigade. He didn’t mention it, but the lads enrolled swore an oath ‘to be a good Englishman and a good Jew’. You can also see the pride in British citizenship in paintings such as David Blomberg’s modernist depiction of the interior of a Jewish bath house, which is painted in the red, white and blue of the Union flag.
Similar views were held by the Jewish communities elsewhere across Europe and the world, in Germany, where there was originally much less anti-Semitism than Britain, and Poland. But the Declaration has contributed to anti-Semitism through the fear that Jews, or an influential portion of them, have more loyalty to Israel beyond that of the other nations in which they live. And Zionist groups have at time collaborated with the real anti-Semites, in the hope that rising persecution of Diaspora Jews will result in more of them emigrating to Israel. Tony Greenstein and others have shown on their blogs and writings, over and over again, using and reproducing contemporary documents, that this was the case. But simply repeating this historical fact will get you smeared as an anti-Semite.
This should not be to condemn Israelis. Professor Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian, now at Exeter University, who was driven from his homeland because of his courageous defence of the truth against official lies and persecution, has defended his former compatriots as decent people. In one interview he described how he opened his house up, every Thursday night, to anyone, who wanted to visit him to hear his side of the story. He shortly found that his front room was full of people wanting to hear what he had to say, and find out for themselves whether he was the terrible anti-Semite the officials claimed.
It should be to condemn the actions of successive Israeli governments, in constructing a racist, genocidal state. And the actions of Britain itself, and our officials and politicians, for their part in the massacre and dispossession of an entire people.
This is a great little video from RT America, where their Editor-in-Chief, Margarita Simonyan, responds to the political and corporate witch-hunt against RT by pretending to show how the Russian-owned broadcaster really operates. It shows her counting out her ill-gotten gains in the company of a bear, natch – this is a Russian company. She moves around dressed in the characteristic Russian fur hat, as do many of her workers, who are shown as the bullied drones of Russian industry. And even the cleaning ladies take their orders directly from Moscow. The expats are kept shackled in the basement as evil defectors, and in the studio for foreign news all the supposed ‘live’ footage from places like Syria are in fact fakes, generated through computer graphics and the green screen. Further consultation with her senior staff takes place in a darkened room where everyone is wearing Red Army uniforms. And the news readers themselves are kept chained to their desks.
The clip concludes with a selection of various quotes on the screen by alarmed political figures and former journalists with the network, all going on about how it’s a terrible threat to American freedom and democracy. You won’t be surprised to see that amongst the Republicans there are various figures from Hillary’s branch of the Democrat Party.
The video then ends with the promise ‘Don’t worry – we’ll keep annoying them!’
This puts the lie to the stereotype that the Russians are naturally dour with no sense of humour. Yes, they have a word for ‘funny’ – it’s ‘smeeshno’, and this is very smeeshno indeed. And much of that humour was expressed in political satire. Try Gogol’s The Government Inspector. Written in the 19th century by the great Ukrainian writer, this is about a corrupt post office manager, who opens the letters coming through his office and reads them.
The late Peter Ustinov, in an interview in the 1980s described how he was walking around Moscow when a spiv sidled out of an alley. The man asked him if he wanted to buy any videos. So Ustinov said he was interested, and followed him back down the alley, wondering just what videos the man had for sale. The black marketer opened his coat to reveal-
-videos of the British Whitehall sitcom, Yes, Minister.
This was during Perestroika, and the Russians liked it, because it satirised state bureaucracy, just like so much of their great literature.
There are issues of bias, of course. The presenter of The Empire Files, Abi Martin, left RT, or was sacked, because she criticised a Russian military action on air. But that should not put people off watching RT, any more than watching the Beeb uncritically support the current regime of gangsters and Nazis in the Ukraine. I watch and reblog videos from RT on this site, because they cover issues from a left-wing perspective that you don’t see in the mainstream media. And if RT is growing, it isn’t because they are engaged in a fiendish plot to bring down our governments. It’s because they’re actually doing their job as journalists, and holding government and corporations to account, which the Western media has given up doing since they were taken over by big corporate conglomerates in the 1980s.
The American media and political establishment have launched a witch-hunt against left-wing alternative media, and especially RT, because of the way these news outlets are becoming increasingly popular. People are becoming disenchanted with the lamestream media, just as they are heartily fed up with establishment, corporate politicians. And that has got the media-industrial-political complex very worried.
RT is being particularly targeted for suspicion, ’caused it’s owned by the Russian state, and so must be part of a terrible plot by Putin and his minions to undermine America and destroy capitalism by, er, doing their job as reporters properly and holding government to account. Which means covering Killary’s corruption.
Now the New York Times has joined the witch-hunt with an article attacking RT.
In this clip from RT America, Ashley Banks and the media commentator, Lionel, of Lionel Media, discuss this story. They make the point that it’s based fear much in fear of Russia, and that RT is doing nothing more than every other media outlet. They’re expanding, yes, but every media outlet wishes to pursue excellence. RT has 2.1 billion views worldwide, and 2.2 million subscribers. But Pewdiepie has 57 million subscribers. Lionel goes on to say that the NY Times article is ‘confused and envious’, embarrassing, and looks like it was written by someone, who has only just found out what the Internet is and that it helps people. It’s like the Saturday Night Live sketch about the caveman, who says he just a simple man and doesn’t understand your modern ways.
He also makes the point that perhaps if the New York Times paid the same attention to their own affairs and developing their audience, they wouldn’t now have to sell off several of the floors in their 8th Avenue office block.
The Republicans hate the New York Times, as they somehow perceive it as a ‘liberal’ paper. But Counterpunch has repeatedly shown how it has a very corporatist, very pro-War bias. It was consistently for the Iraq invasion, and Chris Hedges, the Socialist journo and war correspondent, was sacked because he wrote opposing the War. Much of this new ‘Red Scare’ about supposed Russian interference comes from the corporate Democrats trying to find a scapegoat for Killary’s failure to win the American presidency, supported by some very unpleasant, extremely right-wing organisations. Like the Von Mises Institute, which used to publish pro-eugenics material and argued that Americans shouldn’t have a welfare state, because it would just keep the biologically unfit alive. Like Blacks. You won’t be surprised to hear that they also subscribed to pseudo-scientific racism, and so put out article which supposedly showed how Blacks were thicker than Whites etc. These are the people that Killary and her supporters have now allied with in their determination to close down RT and other left-wing or alternative media news outlets.
On Thursday, the news broke that Chris Heaton-Harris, a Tory whip, had written to the universities demanding details of the courses they were running on international relations, and particularly those on Brexit, asking for the names of the lecturers taking the course.
In this video lasting six minutes, the speaker takes you through the issues involved and explains the danger of a personal witch-hunt instigated by a Eurosceptic government. It’s clear that the speaker is a British scientist, who teaches at one of our unis. The blurb for the video runs
The letter from Tory Eurosceptic whip Chis Heaton-Harris to University V-Cs demanding “names of professors” that lecture on Brexit is sinister. What could the purpose of his efforts be, if not to make some kind of report to attack universities or individuals? For example, though the tabloid press? This is a classic totalitarian tactic, from Lenin to McCarthy, to politically go after and remove wider societal resistance to a government line. Universities are a common target to both left & right-wing totalitarianism because of their public voice. To drive public opinion against universities for political/power expedience is damaging both to trust across wider society and to the independence of universities. We already saw this during the referendum when Daniel Hannan peddled the notion that British Universities are paid off “sock puppets” of the EU and part of an elite, not part of “the people”.
Apparently, Hannan initially started by claiming that the universities would love it, when they were freed of EU control. When he found out that most were against leaving the EU, he then changed his tune to this populist, anti-intellectual rhetoric.
Hannan himself is a vile specimen. He’s a Dorset Tory MEP, and so, as the speaker here points out, like Nigel Farage is more than willing to get his salary from the EU. But he resents British universities, who only have a little money from the European Community, getting funding from them. The French philosophical feline, Guy Debord’s Cat, has also pointed out in frequent posts that Hannan is, or used to be, a columnist for the Torygraph Blogs. Not only is he Eurosceptic, but he also openly wants to privatise the NHS. And he lies so much that Buddy Hell calls him ‘the Lyin’ King’.
The Scientist for the EU also goes on to state that Heaton-Harris’/ Daily Heil’s anger that the overwhelming majority of universities don’t reflect the wider views of British society is wrong by pointing out that other parts of British society also don’t. Like the fishing community. But no-one tells them that 48 per cent of fishing people should now support the Remain campaign. He states that different sectors of British society have different views on the issue, according to the circumstances as it affects them.
The anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organisation and site, Hope Not Hate, has put up on their site any number of stories showing how bonkers, ridiculous, and ultimately sad the Far Right are. These include details of their attempts to style themselves as the new Mussolinis, Hitlers and Mosleys, complete with cod Fascist uniforms. The megalomania of their leaders, as shown by the demand of one of these sawdust Caesars, that the assembled squadristi kiss his ring. One of them refused on the grounds that it was ‘homoerotic’. No! Really? This from a movement which has, historically, been fully of self-hating gays.
Then you have the sordid details about how these brave patriots, determined to save Britain from the menace posed by Jews, Muslims, Asians, Blacks, trade unions, gays, Gypsies, Socialists, Communists, and that bloke, who looked at them in a funny way once, have run away from the fights they’ve caused when they’re outnumbered. Or have beaten each other up because of disputes about money, stealing other people’s girl- and boyfriends. HNH has also mocked them because of their hypocrisy for engaging themselves in the type of sordid activities they blame on ‘Jewish big business wideboys’ and people of colour. Like drug peddling.
And they can hardly claim to be standing up for innocent, virginal White people and wholesome sexual morality against ‘Jewish pornographers’, when they themselves have, er, ‘private’ shops selling such magazines and other material. Which includes interracial porn. One female contributor to Counterpunch, looking at the marching morons in Charlottesville, stated that Fascists generally tend to be repressed self-hating gays, or, if not, be massively fixated on Black men pleasuring their wives with their enormous members. The Alt Right regularly uses the term ‘cuck’ as a form of abuse for their opponents. It’s short for ‘cuckold’, meaning a man, whose wife has been unfaithful to him. It also refers to a sexual perversion, where a man gets off on watching his wife have sex with other men. So in the case of the assembled Nazis, the term ‘cuck’ would seem to be self-referential.
The Far Right are a real menace and a growing threat. But they’re also so grotesque and incompetent that they’re also blackly funny. Hope Not Hate laughs at their stupidity, calling them ‘Nutzis’ and ‘Boneheads’. So did Private Eye. After running a series of stories about the bizarre antics of the BNP in Dagenham and Barking, and Tower Hamlets, the satirical magazine somehow got hold of an internal document showing that many of their stormtroopers had resigned. Among the various reasons was that the party had been made to look silly in the Eye.
Now the silliness continues in the form of the banned Nazi group, National Action, having sent a begging email to Tony Greenstein. I’ve blogged about and linked to several of Greenstein’s posts before, because he’s a bitter critic of Israeli racism and their ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. He’s also very anti-racist generally, and is a staunch opponent of Fascism. Quite apart from the fact that he is Jewish. His Zionist opponents have smeared him as anti-Semitic, but anyone reading his column will find plenty of evidence to refute that. He’s a secular atheist, like so many people, but that does not mean he hates his own ethnic group. Reading his posts, you find that he is very active within other Jewish Socialist organisations and those of Jews, who share his own fierce opposition to Israel and its ethnic cleansing of the country’s indigenous Arabs. In one article about a genuine Jewish anti-Semite, Gilad Atzmon, Greenstein has stated that the constitution of the pro-Palestinian group to which he belongs makes it clear that anti-Semites are very definitely denied membership.
All this, apparently, has been lost on the leadership of the Nazi outfit, National Action. Greenstein says he’s been receiving emails from them over the past few months asking him if he would like to make a donation. He tried to unsubscribe from their list, but they’ve come back.
They want his money because two of the Nazi organisation’s wretched leadership, Paul Golding and Jayda Fransen, have jumped bail and gone on the lam. They want the money to overturn the bail conditions that were imposed on them for demonstrating against the ‘Muslim child rapists’. Presumably this would be one of the groups of Asian men responsible for the serial assault and sexual enslavement of hundreds of young girls.
No decent person has any time for child abusers and people do have legitimate reasons for protesting against the Asian paedophile gangs. Not because the gangs were Asian, but because the council knew about it and allowed them to continue because of the perceived threat to racial harmony. Since the scandal broke, there have been Asian writers commenting in the papers that the authorities smeared their communities by assuming that Muslims and/or Asians generally would riot if these men were arrested and brought to justice.
They also point out that the majority of paedophiles in this country are White. And there certainly is an element of selective outrage amongst the British Far Right, as several of those claiming to be defending girls and young women from these predators have themselves been sentenced to prison for sexual abuse and assault.
Greenstein suspects that the reason the Nazis have come back to ask him for cash is the result of some dirty tricks between the Zionist organisations that have set out to smear him as an Anti-Semite. He writes
Why have I been resubscribed? I suspect it is dirty tricks from one Jonathan Hoffman whose best friend is Britain First’s ‘Intelligence’ Chief Paul Besser. Both like to picket Palestinian and other meetings on the grounds of ‘anti-Semitism’.
This is a reference to a Palestinian civil rights conference which the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism declared was ‘anti-Semitic’ even before it started. Hoffman, a leading member of one of these anti-Palestinian groups, was caught standing next to Besser at the demo. Which shows how selective and hypocritical the Zionist’s definition of anti-Semitism is. As for Besser and Britain First, the real anti-Semites always had a very flexible attitude to who was Jewish when it suited them. Karl von Luegerer,, then anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, whom Hitler admired, had numerous Jewish friends. When asked about them by one of his fellow bigots, Luegerer replied ‘I say who’s a Jew and who isn’t’.
Greenstein concludes his comments by saying
I guess it’s kind of flattering to be told that they need me, even if they offer me the alternative of signing up or do nothing. At least, it would seem they take Jews!
Dig deep for these two neo-Nazi nuts. You know they’re worth it.
This is obviously very heavy irony. National Action have been banned as a terrorist group. They’re very openly Nazi. There’s footage of them at a demonstration in Liverpool screaming ‘Sieg Heil!’ and raising their right arms in the Fascist salute. Hope Not Hate also obtained a copy of a speech one of their leaders, Kevin Layzell, gave up north, which followed the usual Nazi conspiracy theory about the Jews using non-White immigration to destroy the White race.
They clearly don’t want Jews at all. On the other hand, someone might think that they could be useful for smearing a genuine anti-racist by association. Or it could be simply colossal, asinine stupidity. Which, given the massive lack of competence these thugs have shown over the years, is also a very plausible factor.
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