Will Killary and the Generals Get Their War with Russia?

The news yesterday that a number of EU countries had followed Britain’s lead and expelled Russian diplomats is alarming. This is ratcheting up the tension with Russia to Cold War levels. Despite the lack of definitive evidence that the Russians were behind the poisoning of the Skripals, May and nearly the rest of the countries in the EU have decided that Putin is responsible. And I’m afraid that the tensions they’re fomenting will ultimately lead to war.

Killary began all this nonsense about Russia interfering in western elections as a way of diverting blame from herself for his massive failure to convince Americans to vote her. She’s a horrible candidate – a massively privileged, neoliberal corporatist, who has absolutely no sympathy for the working class, and whose policies on drugs with her husband actively damaged the Black community. She took working class votes for granted and didn’t even bother to campaign in many traditional Democrat states. Instead, she did what Blair did over here and went chasing the upper and upper-middle classes. As a result, she alienated many voters, who would otherwise have voted Democrat. She did get a million or so votes more than Trump, but lost through the machinations of the Electoral College, a very undemocratic institution that was originally set up to allow slave-holding states to count their slaves as less than human so they would have voting equality with free states. She could have blamed the electoral and demanded its abolition. Many others have. But she didn’t. Obviously, she’s quite happy with that very undemocratic part of the American electoral system.

Unable to accept her responsibility for losing the election, and a strong supporter of the status quo, she turned to blaming Russia. In doing so, she joined a number of far right organisations, including eugenicist groups founded by former Nazis, who believed that the poor and Blacks are biologically unfit and so should be denied state welfare. And even before she lost the election, she showed a very strong hostility to Russia.

From reading articles in Counterpunch, it appears that the current policy in the White House and the Pentagon is for ‘full spectrum dominance’. That means that America should be the world’s only superpower, with an unchallenged military dominance of the rest of the world. What America, and its elite leader, including Hillary Clinton, fear is the rise of the multipolar world. They cannot tolerate the emergence of political and economic rivals, such as Russia, or China, or India, for that matter. Hence the massive increase in military spending. Under Obama’s administration, Hillary’s foreign policy towards Russia and China was militantly hostile and she seemed keen to ramp hostility to both these nations to dangerous levels.

And on this side of the Pond, various NATO generals also forecast war with Russia. One of them, a deputy-head of NATO, actually had a book published a couple of years ago entitled 2017: War with Russia, in which he predicted last year that Russia would invade Latvia, and this would spark a war between Russia and NATO. He predicted it would all happen last May. Fortunately, the month came and went and Russia didn’t. But NATO troops were massing on Russia’s borders, which would serve as a provocation to the Russians. Russia is encircled by NATO bases, and has sent military advisers to the Fascist regime in Ukraine.

As I’ve blogged many times before, much of this renewed American hostility to Russia has nothing to do with concerns about democracy and human rights. It’s purely economic. The American multinationals that poured millions into backing Yeltsin at the end of the Cold War did so in the expectation that the ensuing massive privatisation of Russian state assets would allow them to dominate the Russian economy. But Putin has stopped that. Thus the massive corporate anger against Putin’s Russia. Putin is a thug, who has his critics and opponents beaten and killed, but that’s not the reason the American political elite and their counterparts over here hate him.

I’m very much afraid that this latest round of expulsions will end by creating more tension, in a cycle that will end in a war with Russia, perhaps using a manufactured incident as a pretext for invading them. The pressure the government placed on Porton Down to state that the chemical used to poison the Skripals was definitely Russian is very, very similar to the pressure Blair and his cronies put on MI6 to ‘sex up’ the dodgy dossier and claim that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that he could launch within 45 minutes. He didn’t. The British and American publics were lied to, and despite massive opposition the west invaded Iraq. And the result has been nearly two decades of chaos and carnage.

And I’m afraid the same process is going on here to create another war for the benefit of the American military-industrial complex and big corporations desperate to get their hands on Russian resources and industries.

It needs to be stopped. Now. Before war really does break out, a war that could see millions die, and our beautiful planet turned into an irradiated cinder.

What Horrors Have Our Imperial Governors Committed in Iraq?

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple of weeks now, ever since I read an op-ed piece in the I by Yasmin Alibhai-Browne. Alibhai-Browne’s an Muslim lady, whose family were Ugandan Asians, married to a White Brit. She writes about racism, multiculturalism and related issues. She’s a modern, tolerant Muslim, who attacks anti-White, as well as anti-Black racism. I’m not saying I always agree with what she says, but she offers a different perspective.

And a few weeks ago she published a piece attacking the former British diplomat, who said we should try to kill the various Brits, who’ve gone to Iraq to fight for the Islamists before they come home. Alibhai-Browne was shocked by this, as were a number of others, including Mike over at Vox Political. It is, after all, the attitude of the death squads. It’s extra-judicial execution, or political murder. But it’s in line with Obama’s and Trump’s policies. This is, after all, what drone strikes are. They’re sent into foreign countries, like Yemen, to kill terrorists, including American citizens. And their families, including their kids. The last are simply called ‘fun-sized terrorists’.

Those opposing the drone strikes have asked people to imagine what would happen if the situation was reversed. If an Islamic, or Black African, or Asian country sent drones into America to kill White, American terrorist groups like the Klan. Or perhaps a more appropriate target would be Henry Kissinger. Kissinger was responsible for various Fascist coups in Latin America, and supporting tyrants and mass-murders across Asia, from Pakistan to Indonesia, as well as the carpet-bombing of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. If anyone should be killed by agents of a foreign power, it should be Kissinger, simply because of the millions of people he’s had killed. I’m not recommending that anyone should do it. Just saying that if America has the right to send drones to kill terrorists, then the people of Latin America and Asia have the absolute right to blow him away.

One of the deeply disturbing facts Abby Martin revealed in the Empire Files, as well as other left-wing news networks, is how far out of control the American military and its private contractors – the mercenaries it hired – were in Iraq. They were running prostitutes and brutalised and murdered ordinary Iraqis. There are reports of these b*stards driving around, shooting ordinary men and women waiting to cross the street. Simply for sport. The butcher, whose career in Iraq was turned into a glowing cinematic celebration by Clint Eastwood in American Sniper was a Nazi, who boasted of killing women and children. Yeah, that’s who Eastwood decided to promote. His film so incensed the reviewer over at 366 Weird Movies that he broke with describing and cataloguing strange cinema, like the works of Ed Wood and co, to attack Eastwood and his oeuvre in an article. The reviewer described himself as an old-fashioned Conservative, and hated Eastwood because he wasn’t.

So you don’t have to be a lefty-liberal to be sickened by this. Just an ordinary person with a conscience.

And the American Empire was complicit in these murders. Martin also revealed how one of the military governors put in by Bush or Obama actually assisted the Shi’a assassination squads, which roamed Baghdad and the rest of the country kidnapping and murdering Sunni Muslims. Because the Sunnis were the dominant, privileged sect under Saddam Hussein, and now form the backbone of the insurgency.

Alibhai-Browne in her article on the British diplomat, who was all in favour of killing British Islamists before they could return to Blighty, noted that he came from a privileged class, which knew all about Islam but had no sympathy with Muslims or the ordinary people they governed. He was another public schoolboy, and Oxbridge graduate. He had a background in Arabic, and had a full diplomatic career in the Middle East. And he’d also served as governor in that part of Iraq run by Britain.

Which makes me wonder what atrocities he’s committed, or turned a blind eye to. A year or so ago I read a book by an Arab author and political scientist, A Brutal Friendship, which argued that the rulers installed by Britain, America and the West, were brutal dictators, who oppressed their people and ruled by terror. One example was the Prime Minister of Iraq in the 1950s. He was installed by us, and was hailed and promoted by the establishment as a great leader, wisely ruling his country. In fact, the man was so hated by ordinary Iraqis that they rose up against him. Not content with simply hacking him to pieces, they then ran over the pieces with cars.

Now I might be slandering the man. He might, for all I know, be perfectly blameless, and to have ruled well. Or as well as anybody could, given the circumstances, which were corrupt from the very beginning.

But I don’t know. I don’t think any of us will know, until we have a genuinely free press and free television in this country.

America has a genuine tradition of free speech, which was strengthened by Clinton’s passing of the Freedom of Information Act. The corporatist elite have been trying to weaken and undermine it ever since. Just as the political and corporate elites have been trying to do the same to its British counterpart. And that was already deliberately weaker than Clinton’s when Tony Blair introduced it. America has a tradition of genuine, radical, investigative journalism. The arch-neocon, Daniel Pipes, in his book on Conspiracy Theories, points out that much of the anti-American tropes going round the world, like ‘the almighty dollar’ have their roots in Americans’ own criticism of their country and its economic and political system. As an arch-Conservative, Pipes is definitely no fan of this. And the American elite are trying their best to stamp it out. Witness the attacks on RT, Al-Jazeera, the Real News, Democracy Now! and other, alternative news networks like the David Pakman Show, Sam Seders’ Majority Report, the Jimmy Dore show, The Young Turks and so on.

But we don’t have that tradition in England. Not since the decline of the genuinely left-wing press in the 1950s. We don’t have a written constitution, and there is no guarantee of freedom of speech in this country. Not necessarily a bad thing – it means we can ban hate speech, like calls from the Nazi fringe to murder Jews, Blacks, Muslims, ‘Reds’, the disabled and anyone who ever looked at them funny at the bus stop.

And our press is very deferential. A while ago Channel 4 broadcast a documentary showing just how much power the Queen has to censor information about the royal family. Far more power than the other ‘bicycling monarchies’ on the continent, like Denmark.

And the state has covered up horrendous atrocities committed by the British Empire. It was only the other year that Kenyans imprisoned and tortured during the Mao Mao insurgency actually won the court case, and the British state declassified the documents showing how Britain was running interment camps. This has formed the subject of a book, Africa’s Secret Gulags. But we also have the thirty year rule, to prevent the release of sensitive information, and the state can withhold it for even longer, if it thinks it’s necessary.

So we have no way of knowing what our troops – and our imperial staff – were really doing in Iraq. All we have are assurances from our leaders and our own self-image that, as Brits, we are all that is good, noble and right in the world. And that we would never butcher civilians.

But we have. And we may still be doing so. We won’t know, until we get rid of the crushing censorship and our investigative reporters are free and willing to expose what’s really going on.

Which, I hope, will be that we aren’t. But until that day comes, we will never know for sure. And there is absolutely no cause for complacency.

Russian Hacking Allegations: Democrats Refused to Allow FBI Access to Servers

In this little video from The Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian discusses a report in the American magazine, The Hill, that the Democratic National Convention, the party’s central party machine, refused to allow the FBI access to their servers following the accusations they made that they had been hacked by the Russians. FBI director James Comey stated he had no idea why they refused to let the Agency examine them. Instead, the examination of the computers was handed over to an agreed third party, CrowdStrike, which specialises in military investigations. It was CrowdStrike that provided the alleged proof showing that the Russians had supposedly hacked into the Democrats’ computers.

Dore here points out that the allegations of hacking by Putin’s minions were designed to divert attention from the Democrats’ own role in creating the massive poverty now afflicting millions of Americans. The Democrats as a party are funded by Wall Street and the corporations. These sources of highly lucrative funding would be cut off, if the Democrats actually started doing what parties are supposed to do, and worked for the electorate, not corporate interests. It’s because the Dems (and Republicans) do exactly the opposite that half of America is poor while Wall Street and the corporations are enjoying massive profits.

Dore pointedly asks why the Democrats’ weren’t keen to have the FBI examine their computers, and also mocks the article’s assertion that CrowdStrike proved that the Russians were responsible for the hacking. And he makes the point that even if the Russians were responsible, that does not falsify what was revealed by WikiLeaks: the massive corporate corruption of the Democrat party.

He states forcefully that these allegations, and the refusal to allow the FBI to examine the computers, were a deliberate strategy by the Democrats to divert attention away from the Democrats’ business connections. He concludes by stating that this whole scandal will be over by Valentine’s Day. And then the Dems will have won.

This is another piece of evidence showing just how flimsy the allegations of Russian hacking are. I’ve put up a number of pieces from news sources like The Young Turks and The Jimmy Dore Show, as well as Counterpunch, showing that the Russians weren’t responsible for the WikiLeaks material. It all came from disgruntled Democrat insiders, according to the British former diplomat who took custody of the information. The documents showing the Russians hacked the DNC do nothing of the sort. And now there’s this little piece of news, which shows that the Democrats were afraid of letting the FBI do its job and examine their machines.

It seems from this that Dore is exactly right. This is just a baseless assertion designed to divert attention from the Democrat’s own responsibility for their massive electoral wipe-out by the Republicans, and their impoverishment of millions of Americans. And in so doing the Dems have also raised tensions with the Russians to a dangerous level, just for their own political advantage.

Jimmy Dore: Real Journalist Tells News Anchor CIA Is Lying about Trump

I’ve put up a number of blog posts recently arguing that the accusations that Russian hacking was responsible for the embarrassing leaks of information about Killary’s corruption and corporate interests are lies concocted by the CIA, FBI and other intelligence agencies for their own purposes. Quite apart from them being a deliberate strategy by Clinton herself and the corporatist Democrats to deflect attention from her numerous failings and abysmal failure to govern in the interests of ordinary voters against big business.

It also seems that the CIA and the rest have also put together a very short, two-page dossier, claiming that the Russians have recorded Trump performing various perverted or scatological acts during his visits there, and are using it to blackmail him. In this segment from the Jimmy Dore Show, the American comedian shows how this is sheer rubbish.

He firstly argues that Trump himself is such a shameless figure with no qualms about lying about Muslims and Latinos, claiming the latter are largely rapists, that even if the story about him urinating on the bed is true, he wouldn’t be at all worried about this coming out.

He also plays a very interesting clip from the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, in which a journalist, Richard Engel, goes through these allegations and states why he doesn’t believe them.

Engel says that he’s heard these allegations for months now, complete with details about where some of these events supposedly occurred, and naming the individuals that were allegedly involved. But when he’s tried to corroborate them, he’s been unsuccessful. He finds it extremely suspicious that this information is supposedly coming out now. He thinks it’s because the intelligence services are angry at Trump, and are trying to warn him to pay more attention to and support them.

The reaction from Rachel Maddow herself is also very revealing. MSNBC as a channel supports the Democrats, although as Dore, The Young Turks and others have argued, this is not the same as being left-wing or liberal. MSNBC isn’t. It has staunchly supported Hillary Clinton against the party’s progressive wing, headed by Bernie Sanders. And Maddow herself earns $30,000 a day, far more than the average American earns in a year.

He points out that Maddow really doesn’t want to hear this, and curtly thanks Engel for his information with the comment that it’s blackmail, ‘even if it isn’t true’. It clearly shows the network’s bias towards the Clintons and these allegations.

This is important, as these allegations of Russian hacking and blackmailing of the president elect are being used to promote a far more aggressive policy towards Russia, one that could take us to war. But as has been pointed out time and again, there seems to be little foundation, if any, to these rumours. At the end of last week, the newspapers announced that a British diplomat, Steel, who had obtained information about the Russians’ hacking, had fled into hiding. This seems to add verisimilitude to the allegations. Despite this, Craig Murray, the former British diplomat, who took custody of the WikiLeaks material, has said that it didn’t come from the Russians. It came from disaffected Democrat insiders. And now this journalist, who makes the point that most of the other foreign correspondents aren’t in Syria, has been unable to verify the stories of Trump’s mucky shenanigans. Even when he checked with the Russians and senior intelligence officers.

These allegations about the Russians are, simply put, rubbish. It’s disinformation – false information put out by the western intelligence agencies and the corporatist Democrats. It serves the Clintonites by reinforcing their power in the party and that of big business, and the American secret state and military-industrial complex in their campaign to shore up American global military power.

Trump is truly a foul man, and his policies are going to hurt millions of Americans. But in this matter he’s the innocent victim, however, bizarre that sounds. The Democrats and spy agencies are lying. They are pushing us towards confrontation with Russia, a confrontation that could result in nuclear war.

Vox Political on America Raising Tariffs Against Chinese Steel

Mike over at Vox Political has posted a piece from the Mirror about the US slapping a massive protection barrier of 522% on Chinese steel to stop it flooding the market and destroying their domestic steel industries. However, the unions are impatient with Brussels and the British government, which are currently dragging their heels. At the moment the EU tariff placed on Chinese manufactured goods is only 16%.

Mike comments:

Neoliberals would have you believe that any increase in the tariff on Chinese steel is protectionism that would harm the economy in the long run.

But this is nonsense.

It seems likely that China is subsidising its steel industry in order to flood the world markets with cheap product. The aim would be to cripple the profitability – and therefore the viability – of non-Chinese steelmakers, and shut them down.

This would leave China alone in the market and able to set whatever price it wanted.

Mike’s exactly right, and to be fair, the British diplomatic corps know it, and have known it for a very long time. It’s only David Cameron and his cabinet of overpaid, over-privileged numbskulls and parasites that don’t.

Years ago I used to work with a former diplomat. I can remember talking to him once about China, its emergence as an industrial power, and the lingering, bitter resentment that still exists in the Middle Kingdom about the way we conquered and ruled it with the other European powers in the 19th century. Others I have spoken to about the situation told me that they believed that China would deliberately set out to destroy this country economically. I told my colleague about this, and he agreed. They would, he said, first set about destroying the Japanese. And then they would come after us. They would do it thoroughly and very politely.

The Chinese government’s subsidization of their steel industry, and their determination to flood the global market and so close everyone else’s industries down, seems to me to confirm this amply. The conversation took place about a decade ago, if not more.

So as I said, this has been known and forecast for a very, very long time. But of course, it’s given no account by Cameron and his fellows, because they’ve grown up with the self-serving economic dogma that manufacturing industry in the West is somehow passé. Besides, it creates a tightly organised, skilled workforce than when really annoyed and well-led, can bring down Tory governments, like the miners and Ted Heath.

And professional selfishness is also involved. Cameron’s a PR man, and most of the Tories come from the financial sector. They have no interest or experience of manufacturing, and so are quite happy to let the manufacturing sector of this country be destroyed. Because no matter how many British workers are put out work, no matter how badly the overall economy is damaged, they can always get another job in another bank or investment house.