Pelshval

Antropologiske betraktninger om pelshvaldrift

Tag: Klassekampen

Not the first time

17.01.2024 /

Many people in Europe are wondering why the Biden administration has not long since arrested Israel’s sadistic excesses in Palestine.

The US propaganda machine has been running full speed since Eisenhower’s days, and we have all, in the USA and in Europe, been inculcated with a number of assumptions that simply don’t add up. Today, I have been looking at NED, the National Endowment for Democracy, to all appearances a formidably reputable NGO. (Please note that the “non-governmental” part of the acronym NGO does not mean that the NGO isn’t funded by a government.)

If you google NED you will have few doubts about its formidable reputability, since it’s hardly likely that you will have the patience to scroll so far down as to reach Grayzone‘s analysis, which is, however, well worth your time. Here is a short foretaste of it. The impression you get in the “foretaste” is that the NED Communication Director is honestly unaware of what NED really is.

What caught my attention today and the reason for my interest in NED was yet an example of the near hysterical man-hunt conducted here in Norway against people who voice certain opinions – most notably the view that the Ukraine war is a US proxy war. Glenn Diesen (see examples of his extensive research in, for instance, The Think Tank Racket, 2023) is one of the victims of the man-hunt. On Twitter he explains and demonstrates that he is being ostracised by the Norwegian Helsinki Committee (NHC), an organisation he maintains is funded by the NED. I checked: Yes, that is true. By NED and others. (Sadly, I see that “Reporteurs sans frontieres” are also sponsored by the NED, which is a bad sign. A very bad sign, indeed.)

Now, most of those who work for the NHC are probably unaware of any sinister connections between their organisation and their benefactors.

What is, however manifestly clear is that the views expressed in Aage Borchgrevink’s defamatory article about Glenn Diesen (posted by Glenn Diesen himself on Twitter) reflect a supremely and ludicrously Manichean attitude and are certainly not Democratic in spirit. I happen to know that Aage Borchgrevink is neither stupid nor ignorant enough to be able to claim naiveté as an excuse. He must have an agenda, though I do not pretend to know what that agenda is.

It may be that of NED and of successive US administrations. Of their agenda, however, there is plenty of evidence and documentation: It is to maintain and uphold US global military and economic hegemony, no matter the cost to Democracy, to human lives and human welfare. Unfortunately, this agenda is by extension also the agenda of US vassal states, including my own country, where ridiculing the accepted view that Putin is the devil incarnate is now considered morally reprehensible.

But in Norway and in the USA and probably even in the UK, we can still, (gracias a Dios) publish dissenting views in blogs and on small independent sites where truly investigative journalists post the results of their painstaking and underpaid research. The late John Pilger very aptly collectively referred to such sites as “samizdat“.

We can still publish books such as Glenn Diesen’s The Think Tank Racket, Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes and, not least, Vincent Bevins’ The Jakarta Method. That freedom, I fear, will not last. Let us read, while we can before they start banning books.

Yes, let us read! And since we are now helplessly wondering why the USA, instead of stopping the ongoing genocide, seems determined at all costs to stop those who are trying to stop the genocide, let us read again The Jakarta Method. And please notice the book’s sub-title:

Washington’s Anti-Communist Crusade
& the Mas Murder Program that Shaped our World.

What I have learnt from that book is that Israel’s method in Palestine is no novelty to the USA. The USA actually invented it. So why should they “stop Israel’s sadism in Palestine”?

All members of the Norwegian press, including Aage Borchgrevink and also Jonas Bals (who writes for the erstwhile left-wing paper Klassekampen), should read the Jakarta Method and consider to what extent they are willing to defend US global military and economic hegemony by propagating Washington’s talking points and by defaming those who disagree with them. What are they willing to sacrifice? They should think about that, before it is too late.

Obedience

12.06.2023 /

To be honest, I know next to nothing about conditions for the press in Russia. I expect there is little if any room for dissent. Would-be critical journalists are up against not only powerful people, but also Government, as the Navalnyj example has demonstrated so dramatically. But then again, Russians don’t expect a free press. Critics were brutally persecuted under the czars (e.g. Dostoevskij was sentenced to death) less so under Lenin, it is true, but certainly under Stalin. Then there was a brief “thaw”, before business as usual resumed with Leonid Brezhnev, as dreadfully dreary a chap as you ever saw. Russians don’t expect a free press. They never had it and they doubt they ever will. People in Russia find out, somehow, what they need to know.

That’s the difference between here and there: knowing what you need to know.

In Five Eyes countries and Europe, people honestly believe they enjoy a free press. All over the world, we watch and ridicule the circus of US politics with its plethora of partisan media outlets, dissent, vitriolic criticism of the currently ruling Democratic Party and even the President, on all sorts of issues. Yet, US citizens can’t seem to find out what they need to know. Else, why is 50–90 per cent of the population there just getting poorer? Why is the top decile just getting very much richer, year by year, regardless of whether the president is from one or the other party?

Have I quoted this guy before?:

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.

Chomsky, of course. Not that I agree with everything he has written – far from it! In the field of linguistics, for instance…. be that as it may

Take the issue of abortion as an example, a tremendously hot topic in the USA. In effect, if abortions are prohibited, premarital sex will basically be off bounds. Think about it, that is really hot stuff! True, there are contraceptives, but they are not fool-proof or without side-effects. For the Democratic Party, the assault on abortion rights (supported almost exclusively by voters of the Republican Party) must be conceived as a blessing, because many traditionally Republican voters will secretly cast their ballots for the “other side”, the Dems, not least since the two parties no longer differ all that much on key issues.

Both parties are, after all, neo-liberal to the core and basically also militaristic. How much of US tax payers’ money has disappeared, under Biden, into the abyss of an extremely corrupt Ukraine, with support from most of the Republican Party? I am not going to look it up for you. I’m tired of producing facts that are blithely disregarded.

Why do I go on and on, you ask, about the USA? I keep harping, you say, about US iniquities although I live in Europe. True. Guilty as charged. WHY? Because European NATO member states are US vassals, that’s why.

So yes, let’s look at those of us who live in Europe? Do we know what we need to know? “As long as it takes,” Biden said, but what he seems to have meant was: “no matter what it takes”. Do we, in Europe, understand Biden’s and Stoltenberg’s gamble? Have we, in all our European Democracies, been asked what we think about being the playthings of US attempts to crush a rival? We were told only that:

1) “Every country must be allowed to decide what kids to invite to its birthday party” and

2) “He punched first.”

Repeated every day, many times a day, over I-have-lost-count-of-the-number of days, these two puerile arguments have turned Europe into a gigantic kindergarten.

Do we who live in Europe know that we would be well advised to enjoy every last drop of what may prove to be our last months or maybe even weeks? Do we realise we should be making peace with family members we haven’t spoken to for years? Do we understand that we should imagine ourselves terminally ill? In plain words: What would you do, if you knew you might die within the next six months?

In the late 1970-s, I ridiculed USSR animosity to US chewing gum and Levies. Now I understand that the USSR had every reason to fear what we now understand as US “soft power”. Europe flew right into the net of soft power and is now – forgive my French – a Eunuch.

I put to you, though I may be wrong, that holding dissenting views here, in Norway, is now more personally damning than it is in Russia. A friend of mine who has actually survived being a dissenter in a dictatorship, said: This is worse than in a dictatorship, because, there, you had at least fellow-dissenters. Here, in Norway, none are visible. Here, in Norway, if you disagree with the US/NATO destruction of Europe, you shut up.

In this country, Norway, nobody who is not suicidal will dare publish, in any paper – academic, journalistic or otherwise – any criticism of the US/NATO proxy war against Russia.

You will know, by now, that I maintain that the Ukraine issue is not as simple as the New York Times or Klassekampen would have us believe.

So I end my diatribe with a link to a source I happen to trust more than I trust the CIA or even the New York Times:

The article is called: “Where do you get your Ukraine news?”

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