Exclusive: Claiming the right to launch preemptive wars and fighting an ill-defined “global war on terror,” the U.S. government has slaughtered vast numbers of civilians in defiance of international law, says Nicolas J S Davies.
By Nicolas J S Davies
Seventy-seven million people in North and South Korea find themselves directly in the line of fire from the threat of a Second Korean War. The rest of the world is recoiling in horror from the scale of civilian casualties such a war would cause and the unthinkable prospect that either side might actually use nuclear weapons.
In this July 1950 U.S. Army file photograph once classified “top secret,” South Korean soldiers walk among some of the thousands of South Korean political prisoners shot at Taejon, South Korea, early in the Korean War. (AP Photo/National Archives, Major Abbott/U.S. Army, File)
Since the first Korean War killed at least 20 percent of North Korea’s population and left the country in ruins, the U.S. has repeatedly failed to follow through on diplomacy to establish a lasting peace in Korea and has instead kept reverting to illegal and terrifying threats of war. Most significantly, the U.S. has waged a relentless propaganda campaign to discount North Korea’s legitimate defense concerns as it confronts the threat of a U.S. war machine that has only grown more dangerous since the last time it destroyed North Korea.
The North has lived under this threat for 65 years and has watched Iraq and Libya destroyed after they gave up their nuclear weapons programs. When North Korea discovered a U.S. plan for a Second Korean War on South Korea’s military computer network in September 2016, its leaders quite rationally concluded that a viable nuclear deterrent is the only way to guarantee their country’s safety.
What does it say about the role the U.S. is playing in the world that the only way North Korea’s leaders believe they can keep their own people safe is to develop weapons that could kill millions of Americans?
The Changing Face of War
The Second World War was the deadliest war ever fought, with at least 75 million people killed, about five times as many as in the First World War. When the slaughter ended in 1945, world leaders signed the United Nations Charter to try to ensure that that scale of mass killing and destruction would never happen again. The U.N. Charter is still in force, and it explicitly prohibits the threat or use of military force by any nation.
The mushroom cloud from the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945.
It was not just the scale of the slaughter that shocked the world’s leaders into that brief moment of sanity in 1945. It was also the identities of the dead. Two-thirds of the people killed in the Second World War were civilians, a drastic change from the First World War, only a few decades earlier, when an estimated 86 percent of the people killed were uniformed combatants. The use of nuclear weapons by the United States raised the specter that future wars could kill an exponentially greater numbers of civilians, or even end human civilization altogether.
War had become “total war,” no longer fought only on battlefields between soldiers, but between entire societies with ordinary people, their homes and their lives now on the front line. In the Second World War:
–Fleets of warplanes deliberately bombed cities to “dehouse” civilian populations, as British officials described their own bombing of Germany. “As I write this,” George Orwell wrote from London in 1941, “Highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”
–Submarines sank hundreds of merchant ships in an effort to starve their enemies into submission. General Carter Clarke, who was in charge of interpreting Japanese intelligence for President Truman, said in a 1959 interview that Japan surrendered because it faced mass starvation due to the sinking of its merchant shipping, not because of the gratuitous U.S. nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was estimated that 7 million more civilians would die of starvation if Japan fought on until 1946.
–Genocidal mass extermination campaigns killed civilians based only on their political affiliation or ethnicity. Under cross-examination by a young American prosecutor, Benjamin Ferencz, SS Gruppenfuhrer Dr. Otto Ohlendorf explained patiently to a courtroom in Nuremberg why he found it necessary for the “preemptive defense” of Germany to order the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. He explained that even children had to be killed to prevent them too becoming enemies of Germany when they grew up and found out what happened to their parents.
Despite the U.N. Charter and international efforts to prevent war, people in countries afflicted by war today still face the kind of total war that horrified world leaders in 1945. The main victims of total war in our “modern” world have been civilians in countries far removed from the safe havens of power and privilege where their fates are debated and decided: Yugoslavia; Afghanistan; Iraq; Somalia; Pakistan; Yemen; Libya; Syria; Ukraine. There has been no legal or political accountability for the mass destruction of their cities, their homes or their lives. Total war has not been prevented, or even punished, just externalized.
But thanks to billions of dollars invested in military propaganda and public relations and the corrupt nature of for-profit media systems, citizens of the countries responsible for the killing of millions of their fellow human beings live in near-total ignorance of the mass killing carried out in their name in these “red zones” around the world.
People in ever-spreading war zones are living under the very conditions of total war that the world recoiled from at the end of the Second World War. Like Orwell in London in 1941, they hear highly civilized human beings flying overhead trying to kill them, human beings who know nothing about them beyond the name of the city where they live and its strategic value in wars that offer them, the victims, nothing but death or destitution.
In the case of drones, the human beings trying to kill them from the other side of the world are so highly civilized that they can hop into cars and drive home to have dinner with their families at the end of their shifts, while another “team member” efficiently takes over the “joy-stick” and carries on killing.
People in Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Libya have been subjected to hunger and starvation under sieges and naval blockades that are as brutally effective as German and American submarines were in World War Two. Millions of people in Yemen face an imminent danger of starvation under the U.S.-backed naval blockade and Saudi and Emirati bombing of Yemeni ports.
In retaliation for one missile fired at Riyadh, the Saudi capital, last week, the U.S.-backed coalition completely closed all Yemen’s ports, tightening the blockade on millions of starving people. The requirements of necessity and proportionality, which have been basic principles of customary international law since the Nineteenth Century, lie buried in the graveyards of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Is the U.S. Guilty of Genocide?
The U.S. military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq quickly adopted “divide and rule” strategies that targeted Pashtuns in Afghanistan and Sunni Arabs in Iraq. When I pointed this out to a friend who teaches military history in 2005, he asked only, “How else can you do it?” I reminded him that “you” don’t have to “do it” at all.
American military police pose with naked detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
U.S. and allied forces in Iraq have killed at least 10-15 percent of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and displaced about half of them. Sunni Arabs have been relentlessly targeted for detention, torture and summary execution since 2004, when ex-Drug Enforcement Administration intelligence chief Steven Casteel, retired Colonel James Steele and a CIA team reportedly based on the eighth floor of the Iraqi Interior Ministry recruited, trained and equipped “Special Police” death squads to conduct a reign of terror that tortured and killed tens of thousands of men and boys in Baghdad and elsewhere.
After training by James Steele’s Special Police Training Teams, each Iraqi Special Police unit worked closely with a U.S. Special Police Transition Team (SPTT), and their operations were commanded and controlled from a high-tech command center staffed by U.S. and Iraqi personnel. An SPTT assigned to the notorious Wolf Brigade in Baghdad was from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the “Nightstalkers,” who usually provide helicopter transport for U.S. special operations but in this case appear to have used their helicopters mainly to fly detainees to their deaths.
After the exposure of their Al Jadiriyah torture prison in November 2005, the Special Police were rebranded as the National Police (and the Wolf Brigade, incongruously, as the Freedom Brigade). But their torture and killing raged on, under cover of an official narrative of “sectarian violence” which scrupulously ignored the command and control of these forces by the Iraqi Interior Ministry, the CIA and the U.S. military.
At the peak of this campaign in July-October 2006, supported by the U.S. Operations Together Forward I & II, National Police death squads flooded the main morgue in Baghdad with up to 1,600 bodies per month. Thousands more Iraqis were killed and buried elsewhere or just disappeared, while 2 million people were displaced inside Iraq and another 2 million fled the country.
This ethnic cleansing campaign has continued under the U.S-backed Shiite government and has kept driving Sunni Arab Iraqis into armed resistance groups, of which Islamic State is only the latest, creating pretexts for endless violence against them. Kurdish military intelligence reports have estimated that 40,000 civilians were killed in the recent U.S.-led assault on Mosul, by tens of thousands of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S. and “coalition” warplanes, U.S. Marine 220-lb HiMARS rockets and U.S., French and Iraqi heavy artillery. This is still only an estimate, and the true number of civilians killed in Mosul was probably higher.
From 2004 on, the ethnic cleansing of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs has been a deliberate, calculated element of the U.S.’s “divide and rule” policy in Iraq, with the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” That is the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The working title of my book about the U.S. invasion and destruction of Iraq was From Aggression to Genocide.
As for the killing of “enemy” children, President Obama justified the murder of 16-year-old American Abdulrahman al-Awlaki in Yemen in October 2011, two weeks after the assassination of his father, the Yemeni-American preacher Anwar al-Awlaki. In one of Donald Trump’s first acts as president, he authorized a U.S. special operations attack that killed Abdulrahman’s 8-year old sister Nawar and other family members in January 2017 – after Trump, on the campaign trail, had vowed to kill the families of suspected terrorists.
Benjamin Ferencz, the by then 81-year-old American lawyer who prosecuted SS Gruppenfuhrer Ohlendorf and his accomplices at Nuremberg, was interviewed by NPR eight days after the mass murders of Sept. 11, 2001.
“It is never a legitimate response to punish people who are not responsible for the wrong done,” Ferencz insisted. “We must make a distinction between punishing the guilty and punishing others. If you simply retaliate en masse by bombing Afghanistan, let us say, or the Taliban, you will kill many people who don’t approve of what has happened… I say to the skeptics, ‘Follow your procedure and you will see what happens.’ … We will have more fanatics and more zealots deciding to come and kill the evil, the United States.”
But in the courtroom of American politics, hopelessly corrupted by the CIA’s politicized intelligence and manufactured crises and the “unwarranted influence” of the Military Industrial Complex, our leaders chose Ohlendorf’s logic over Ferencz’s. Neither the millions of people killed in 16 years of war, nor its legacy of ruin and chaos in country after country, nor the utter failure of the “war on terror” on its own terms have led to any change in this illegitimate, criminal and, in the case of Sunni Arabs in Iraq, genocidal U.S. policy.
The Geneva Conventions
As well as the unfulfilled promise of peace in the U.N. Charter, the post-World War II effort to prevent the future mass slaughter of civilians led to a major revision of the Geneva Conventions in 1949. That included a brand new convention, the Fourth Geneva Convention, dedicated entirely to the protection of civilians in wartime or under military occupation.
High-ranking Nazis on trial at Nuremberg
Two additional protocols were added to the Geneva Conventions in 1977, to adapt them to the changing nature of war and to provide even greater protections to civilians. The First Additional Protocol has been signed and ratified by 174 countries and the Second by 168 countries. The United States has not ratified either of the Additional Protocols, but it is legally bound by them because treaties that have been ratified by large majorities of countries automatically become part of customary international law, which is universally binding.
To mark the 50th anniversary of the 1949 Conventions in 1999, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) conducted a survey of 17,000 people in 17 countries to see how well people around the world understood “the rules and limits of what is permissible in war” under the Geneva Conventions. The study was titled People on War – Civilians in the Line of Fire.
The 17 countries surveyed included 12 where wars had recently been fought, four of the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, and Switzerland, where the ICRC is based. The introduction to the People on War report noted that 90 percent of the people killed in recent wars were civilians and that, in today’s world, “war is war on civilians.” But the report went on:
“…the more these conflicts have degenerated into wars on civilians, the more people have reacted by reaffirming the norms, traditions, conventions and rules that seek to create a barrier between those who carry arms into battle and the civilian population… Large majorities in every war-torn country reject attacks on civilians in general and a wide range of actions that by design or default could harm the innocent.”
People interviewed in Switzerland and the four Security Council permanent member countries were asked to choose between a firm statement that armed forces “must attack only other combatants and leave civilians alone,” and a weaker statement that, “combatants should avoid civilians as much as possible.” About three-quarters of respondents in the U.K., Russia, France and Switzerland chose the first statement, which correctly summarizes the rules of the Fourth Geneva Convention, while 26 percent in the U.K. and 16-17 percent in Russia, France and Switzerland chose the weaker one.
When it came to the United States, though, a very different pattern emerged. Only 52 percent of Americans understood that attacking civilians is strictly prohibited, while 42 percent chose the weaker option, twice as many as in the other four countries. The ICRC report noted that, “Across a wide range of questions, in fact, American attitudes towards attacks on civilians were much more lax.”
The survey also asked whether it is lawful to attack “enemy combatants in populated villages or towns in order to weaken the enemy, knowing that many civilians would be killed.” Once again, while only 20-29 percent of people in the other four countries thought this was allowed, that increased to 38 percent among Americans. Since 1999, this question has arisen again and again across America’s war zones, most recently in the U.S.-led massacres of Iraqi and Syrian civilians in Mosul and Raqqa.
During the U.S. occupation of Iraq, U.N. human rights reports repeatedly reminded U.S. officials of their duty as an occupying power to protect civilians, and notified them that U.S. military operations in civilian areas were routinely violating international humanitarian law. John Pace, who headed the U.N. Assistance Mission to Iraq during the U.S. occupation, compared U.S. efforts to police Iraq by military force to “trying to swat a fly with a bomb,” a fitting metaphor for the entire “war on terror.”
The People on War survey also found large discrepancies in attitudes to the Geneva Conventions themselves. In countries that had recently experienced war, only 28 percent of people agreed with a statement that the Conventions “make no real difference” to the brutality of war. But in the U.S. (57 percent) and U.K. (55 percent), twice as many people agreed with that statement.
U.S. War Crimes
We could speculate on why Americans are so exceptionally “lax” in their attitudes toward protecting civilians in wartime. But in practice, the real-world impact of these exceptional attitudes could be overcome if Americans who joined the armed forces received serious training in their responsibilities under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Tragically, they do not.
At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, President George W. Bush ordered the U.S. military to conduct a devastating aerial assault on Baghdad, known as “shock and awe.”
U.S. military recruits receive only a 50-minute class on the laws of war, focused mainly on the Third Geneva Convention and the rights of POWs, and a refresher of the same 50-minute class before deployment. A retired JAG officer who taught law of war classes and veterans who have sat through them have all told me that the Fourth Geneva Convention and the rights of civilians as “protected persons” were barely mentioned, if at all.
The lax attitude of Americans toward the killing of civilians and the poor training of U.S. troops in their responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions have combined to make invasion and occupation by American forces especially deadly, dangerous and terrifying for civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq and wherever U.S. forces are deployed.
In practice, U.S. forces operate under much lower standards than those of the Geneva Conventions, and civilians whose countries have fallen prey to U.S. aggression do not enjoy the protections guaranteed to them under the laws of war. As I wrote in an article in 2016, this is a classic case of the “normalization of deviance,” a sociological term for the way that powerful institutions like the U.S. military tend to develop weaker, looser norms of conduct than the formal or legal rules that officially apply to them.
Illegal U.S. rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan have included: systematic, theater-wide use of torture; orders to “dead-check” or kill wounded enemy combatants; orders to “kill all military-age males” during certain operations; and “weapons-free” zones that mirror Vietnam-era “free-fire” zones. A U.S. Marine corporal told a court martial prosecuting one of his men for “dead-checking” a wounded Iraqi civilian that “Marines consider all Iraqi men part of the insurgency,” nullifying the critical distinction between combatants and civilians that is the very basis of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
When junior officers or enlisted troops have been charged with war crimes against civilians, they have often been exonerated or given light sentences because courts martial have found that they were acting on orders from more senior officers. But the senior officers implicated in these crimes have been allowed to testify in secret or not to appear in court at all, and have almost never been charged.
To make matters even worse for civilians in Iraq, U.S. military and civilian officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, misled the troops they sent to kill and die in Iraq with lies about shadowy connections between the people of Iraq and the young Saudis who committed the crimes of September 11th. In 2006, three years into the war, a Zogby poll of U.S. troops in Iraq found that 85 percent of them still believed that their mission in Iraq was to “retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9/11 attacks.”
A million Iraqis have paid with their lives for these American lies and the war crimes they have served to justify, while the U.S. officials involved are still walking free, and in many cases still climbing the twisted ladder of success inside the U.S. Military Industrial Complex. Colonel Jeffrey Buchanan, who headed a Special Police Transition Team in Iraq at the time of the exposure of the Al Jadiriyah torture prison in 2005, has been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General and is currently in charge of hurricane relief to Puerto Rico.
A New Body of Research
After 16 years of ever-spreading and intractable war, a significant body of research is finally emerging to clarify who exactly the U.S. is fighting in its ever-expanding war zones and what drives civilians to join armed groups like the Taliban, Al Qaeda or Islamic State.
Barack Obama and George W. Bush at the White House.
In the looking-glass world of U.S. propaganda, U.S. forces are “fighting them there” so that we don’t have to “fight them here.” But researchers are learning that, like the Iraqis who rose up to resist the illegal U.S. invasion and occupation of their country, most of the people joining armed groups across Africa and the Middle East are only fighting at all because U.S. and allied forces are “fighting them there,” in their countries, cities, villages and homes.
Researchers have interviewed people who have joined armed resistance groups in countries across the world to ask them about what drove them to join an armed group and take part in guerrilla warfare or terrorism. In 2015, the Center for Civilians in Conflict published the results of interviews with 250 people who joined armed groups in Bosnia, Somalia, Gaza and Libya in a report titled, The People’s Perspective: Civilian Involvement in Armed Conflict. One of its main findings was that, “The most common motivation for involvement, described by interviewees in all four case studies, was the protection of self or family.”
If most of the people fighting U.S. forces and their allies across the world, from Niger to Ukraine to the Philippines, are just trying to defend themselves and their families against our “counterterrorism” operations, that turns the whole basis of the U.S. “war on terror” on its head. The most effective way to reduce violence and terrorism would obviously be to stop putting them in such an intolerable position in the first place.
Also in 2015, Lydia Wilson, a researcher for the Center for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict at Oxford University, was allowed to interview a number of captured Islamic State fighters in Kirkuk, Iraq. Wilson’s fellow researchers included retired U.S. Major General Doug Stone, who managed U.S. military prisons in Iraq during the U.S. occupation and did some of the first serious Western research into the motivations of Iraqi resistance fighters.
It was hard for Wilson to find captured Islamic State fighters to interview, because Kurdish and U.S.-backed Iraqi government forces summarily execute Islamic State fighters that they capture. But the police in Kirkuk were at least putting prisoners on trial before killing them, so Wilson got permission from the police chief to talk to some prisoners who were awaiting execution.
The first prisoner Lydia Wilson interviewed was captured, tried and sentenced to death for exploding at least four car-bombs and a scooter-bomb in Kirkuk. But his interview was not exceptional – Wilson found that his account of his motivations was repeated by every other prisoner. He explained that his first loyalty was to his wife and two children, and that he joined ISIS (as Islamic State is commonly known) to support his family. He told Wilson, “We need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war… all I want is to be with my family, my children.”
At the end of the interview, Wilson asked the prisoner if he had any questions. By then he knew that General Stone, one of Wilson’s colleagues, was ex-U.S. military, and, instead of asking a question, he just exploded in anger at him, “The Americans came. They took away Saddam but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”
General Stone was not surprised. This was the same outraged speech he had heard from nearly every prisoner since he started interviewing his own prisoners in Iraq in 2007, identifying the poisonous and blood-soaked legacy of the U.S. invasion and occupation as the driving force behind their actions.
Lydia Wilson summarized what she learned about the prisoners in Kirkuk in an article for The Nation: “They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death by execution or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity, but cultural, tribal and land-based, too.”
The recent killing of four U.S. soldiers in Niger surprised many Americans, but the U.S. has 6,000 troops in 53 countries in Africa, so we should be ready to welcome home flag-draped coffins from seemingly random countries across the continent. But before our deluded leaders reduce the entire continent of Africa to a new U.S. “battlefield,” Americans should take note of a new report published by the U.N. Development Program (UNDP), titled Journey to Extremism in Africa: Drivers, Incentives and the Tipping Point for Recruitment.
British Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush shake hands after a joint White House press conference on Nov. 12, 2004. (White House photo)
This report is based on 500 interviews with militants from across Africa. As its title suggests, the interviewers questioned the militants specifically about the “tipping point” that decided each of them to actually join an armed group such as Boko Haram, Al-Shabab or Al Qaeda. By far the largest number (71 percent) said that some kind of “government action,” such as ”killing of a family member or friend” or “arrest of a family member or friend,” was the final straw that pushed them over the red line from civilian life to guerrilla war. By contrast, religious ideology was generally not a decisive factor in that decision.
The report concluded, “State security-actor conduct is revealed as a prominent accelerator of recruitment, rather than the reverse.” In its section on “Policy Implications,” it added, “The Journey to Extremism research provides startling new evidence of just how directly counter-productive security-driven responses can be when conducted insensitively.”
Across the world, it is obvious, and now well-documented, that U.S. aggression and militarism are causing the very problems they claim to be trying to solve. By design or default, U.S. policy is confusing cause and effect to justify military operations that turn civilians into combatants, fueling an ever-escalating, ever-spreading cycle of increasingly global violence and chaos.
As the world confronts critical problems and demands on its resources, from climate change to poverty and inequality, it can no longer afford to follow the pied piper of American “leadership” that leads only to war and chaos.
U.S. leaders often raise the specter of “appeasement” to guilt-trip reluctant allies into supporting U.S.-led wars. But maybe it is time for world leaders to recognize that the real appeasement they have been engaged in is the appeasement of the United States, by actively or tacitly encouraging it in an illegal policy of militarism and serial aggression that is spreading violence and chaos across the world.
Surely the real lesson of the 1930s and the Second World War, now reinforced by the experience of the past 20 years, is that it is not enough to simply sign treaties that prohibit aggression and war crimes. The world must be ready to actually enforce the prohibition against the threat or use of military force in customary international law, the 1928 Kellogg Brand Pact and the U.N. Charter – by uniting peacefully and diplomatically to stand up to U.S. aggression and militarism before they lead to a cataclysmic total war that will kill tens or even hundreds of millions of civilians, in Korea or somewhere else.
Nicolas J. S. Davies is the author of Blood On Our Hands: the American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq. He also wrote the chapter on “Obama at War” in Grading the 44th President: a Report Card on Barack Obama’s First Term as a Progressive Leader.
The people who really are at fault are 95-97% of the American people as well as the majority of the world’s population for not eradicating the 100% corrupt, inverted-totalitarian, police-state U.S. Government primarily by Guerilla Warfare. By not only allowing, worshipping this government/tyranny, people are the initial and ultimate murderers of humanity.
Every Remembrance Day I put on my White Poppy (from the Peace Pledge Union) and starting bringing up this exact point: Either NATO follows the UN Charter or it’s a criminal organization pissing on the 100 million+ victims of the World Wars.
Stick to this single point and you can make people queasy.
Sure the UN is corrupt, most legal bodies are, but it’s either Rule of Law or global anarchy. NATO operating on its own term is no different that a police department acting as the judge and jury. Korea and Desert Storm were wrong but still semi-legal, peace-keeping is corrupt but legal, every other aggressive movement of military force outside of a countries’ borders is Hitler-style crime. No exceptions for white people/NATO.
There is a whole bunch of “normalization of deviance” in North Americans, but forced to choose many people cannot embrace this open criminality.
If you do not actively tilt toward peace in this culture you are in trouble. The default setting is the acceptance of mass murder and all the other crimes contained in the “supreme international crime”.
If the enemy is going to hide amongst the civilians after committing their crimes, how do you go about rooting them out without putting your own troops in greater danger?
welcome to the Great Satan. Did’nt we used to crap on the germans for losing control of their government?…. Must consult my crystal ball got to be a harbinger or some omens in this….
Is this worth printing out?
Hasbara propaganda troll “koning279” previously posted information unsupported by facts under the alias “Andre de Koning”
Inverted Hasbara (false flag “anti-Semitic”) propaganda trolls make use of “Holocaust denial” literature that denies the Nazi genocide of European Jews during World War II.
The term holocaust comes from the Greek holokaustos: holos, “whole” and kaustos, “burnt offering”, “a sacrifice or offering entirely consumed by fire”. Later it came to denote large-scale destruction or slaughter.
The biblical term shoah, meaning “destruction”, became the standard Hebrew term, first used in a pamphlet in 1940, for the genocidal murder of the European Jews.
The Holocaust or Shoah refers to to the persecution and murder of Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators between 1933 and 1945.
While various historical controversies exist concerning Jewish persecution during the Nazi era, and Jewish suffering unquestionably has been exploited for financial and political gain by Jewish organizations and the state of Israel, the fundamental fact of the Nazi era genocide of European Jews is not a matter of historical debate.
“Holocaust denial” literature typically involves claims that Nazi Germany’s Final Solution was aimed only at deporting Jews from the Reich, but that it did not include the extermination of Jews;
“Holocaust deniers” usually hold that the actual number of Jews killed was significantly lower than the historically accepted figures, typically around a tenth of the figure.
“Holocaust denial” often focuses on aspects of the Nazi system of concentration camps (Konzentrationslager), particularly Auschwitz and the Aktion Reinhard camps
https://archive.org/details/BelzecSobiborTreblinka.HolocaustDenialAndOperationReinhard.ACritique
Scholars use the term “denial” to describe the views and methodology of “Holocaust deniers” in order to distinguish them from legitimate historical revisionists, who challenge orthodox interpretations of history using established historical methodologies.
“Holocaust deniers” generally do not accept the term “denial” as an appropriate description of their activities, and use the euphemism “revisionism” instead. However, the narratives of “Holocaust deniers” are typically based on a predetermined conclusion that ignores contrary historical evidence and established methodologies.
Most “Holocaust denial” claims imply, or openly state, that the Nazi genocide of European Jews is an “exaggeration” or a “hoax” arising out of a deliberate “Jewish conspiracy” to advance the interest of Jews at the expense of other peoples.
For this reason, “Holocaust denial” is generally considered to be an “anti-Semitic” form of “conspiracy theory”, and is illegal in several countries.
Another notorious piece “conspiracy theory” concerns the Rheinwiesenlager (Rhine meadow camps), a group of 19 camps built in the Allied-occupied part of Germany by the U.S. Army to hold captured German soldiers at the close of the Second World War.
Officially named Prisoner of War Temporary Enclosures (PWTE), the Rheinwiesenlager held between one and almost two million surrendered Wehrmacht personnel from April until September 1945. Prisoners held in the camps were designated Disarmed Enemy Forces, not POWs.
The decision had been taken in March 1943 by SHAEF commander in chief Dwight D. Eisenhower because of the logistical problems adhering to the Geneva Convention. By not classifying the hundreds of thousand of captured troops as POWs, the problems associated with accommodating so many prisoners of war according to international treaties governing their treatment were negated.
Most estimates of German deaths in these camps range from 3,000 to 10,000. Many of these died from starvation, dehydration and exposure to the weather elements because no structures were built inside the prison compounds.
Canadian writer James Bacque wrote Other Losses, a 1989 book alleging that Eisenhower intentionally caused the deaths of around a million German soldiers held in the Western internment camps. Bacque asserts that roughly a million German prisoners – a so-called “Missing Million” – disappeared between two reports issued on June 2, 1945.
After the publication of Bacque’s book, historians reviewed Bacque’s work in 1990. Bacque’s claims were the result of faulty research practices: misusing and misreading documents, ignoring contrary evidence, employing a statistical methodology that is hopelessly compromised, making no attempt to view the evidence in relation to the broader situation, putting words into the mouths of the subjects of oral history, and ignoring readily available and critical source material that decisively dealt with the central accusation.
Eisenhower and the U.S. Army had to improvise for months in taking care of the masses of prisoners to prevent a catastrophe. Housing such a large number of German soldiers involved a number of problems: The number of prisoners greatly exceeded expectations; food and water supplies were insufficient during April and May 1945, though they later improved; the 1200 to 1500 calories ration that the Disarmed Enemy Forces were receiving in August 1945 was inadequate; lack of food led in some cases to serious malnutrition.
While harsh treatment of German prisoners occurred and there was misconduct by U.S. troops in Germany, no evidence exists that it was part of an organized systematic effort or “method of genocide” as Bacque claimed. All in all, Bacque’s thesis and mortality figures can be dismissed as “conspiracy theory”.
The Hasbara troll army makes use of “Holocaust denial” and “conspiracy theory” for propaganda purposes.
One wonders who this person is doing propaganda for. Or is he just a free-lancer?
At the end of WW2 the US suddenly acquired hundreds of thousands of extra mouths to feed when German POWs surrendered in huge groups. Remember, the Germans were desperate to be captured by the US or UK troops, knowing that whatever happened they’d be better off than with the Soviet army.
In a nutshell, the Western allies were overwhelmed. At the end of long supply lines themselves, they just didn’t have enough food or tents on hand. Complicating factors – incompetence and hatred of the POWs by some of the US soldiers. Bad weather played a part. And so did the poor condition of the Germans. Many were wounded and sick and they’d been badly fed for a fair while. It was a perfect storm which resulted in the deaths of many of the POWs.
Most, though not all, of the suffering was unavoidable. This theme is highly popular with a certain breed of US Libertarians and rightwingnuts for reasons I don’t clearly understand.
One is reminded of the Gandhi quote when he is asked by a reporter what he thinks of “Western Civilization?” He replies – “I think it would be a good idea.” It is quite obviously an “idea” whose time has not yet come as the West continues its mad drive to dominate and control the entire planet. You would think 500+ years of this would be enough.
Trump Pushes War with Iran
By Finian Cunningham
November 08, 2017 “Information Clearing House”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/48158.htm
More War Coming?
————————————————————
Israeli general in unprecedented public offer to share intelligence with Saudi Arabia as alarm grows over Iran
Raf Sanchez, jerusalem
Josie Ensor, beirut
16 NOVEMBER 2017 • 4:43PM
…
The Trump administration is eager to see Israel and Saudi Arabia, who are both American allies, work together against Iran. Gen Eisenkot said Donald Trump’s presidency created “an opportunity to build a new international coalition in the region”…. (emphasis added)
[read more at link below]
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/16/israeli-general-unprecedented-public-offer-share-intelligence/
From the link:
This is a win/win/win situation for Israel. They didn’t have to make that declaration public, but they did. Now they are certain the “Saudi public” knows about it. Internal destabilization! With any luck at all, the Saudi forces and infrastructure will absorb much of Iran’s counterattack. Many reports have the Saudis selling out the Palestinians as part of the package. Finally, corrupt Israeli officials are going to have fantastically nice retirement accounts in out-of-the-way nations. Maybe I ought to have said it was a 4*Win for Israel.
While the author’s focus is on US war crimes against civilian populations I find his historical memory lacking. While accurately pointing out that 2/3 of the 75 million deaths in WWll were those of civilians, he cites the militarily unjustified bombing of German and Japanese cities as examples. Disastrous as those were,however, in discussions of WWll, I find it disturbingly common to to omit mention of the unbelievable suffering of the Russian and Chinese people at the hands of the axis powers .It is a fact that 80% of the 50 million civilian deaths occurred in just three countries: the USSR, China, and Poland, with the USSR and China suffering about 17 million each. By contrast, the United States suffered 12,000 civilian deaths, a ratio of about 1500 to one.
Why do I keep seeing this nonsense over and over and …..
If this General said this (and believed it) then he was either badly informed or dumb as a post. Civilians being blasted to bits by US bombs; civilians being burned to ashes by US bombs – neither bothered the Japanese Army or Japanese Emperor one little bit. I believe it is safe to also say that civilians starving to death was not an issue for them, either. The Emperor surrendered for a number of reasons, and millions of dead Japanese wasn’t among them – no matter what he piously claimed afterwards.
By the way, sourcing to snippits selected by Gar Alperovitz is not a very good idea.
Lots and lots of good stuff in this essay, but somebody with a critical eye ought to have done some editing.
Ugh. Details, details! The public wants slogans, not details. Americans are a mighty and righteous people, a nation rooted in “peace, prospertiy and justice.” Never mind the facts, let’s rail against Ziono-Russian fascists while remaining hyper-vigilent to Islamo-fascist forces (sometimes) slithering out Korea, under the power of China! Because.
That said, the US has, by choice, remained engaged in wars more often than not for over a century. Today, war and prisons are our only remaining successful industries. Especially over the past quarter-century, we have come to be seen as the greatest potential threat to all life on Earth. US saber rattling of this era has worked to bring nuclear powers China and Russia together, working out their years of conflict in view of the potential world threat. Us. All the American hubris we can muster isn’t going to save us.
I thought this was an excellent article, and it covered many of our multiple war crimes, but of course it couldn’t cover them all, that would require a book, a tome Few American’s are aware of our history when it comes to our wars, both past and present, and they are bogged down in trivia, even on a political level. What is also unfortunate is that if you try to inform them, they don’t want to hear it, and many will think of you as Un-American. They even revise what has been shown to be true, like Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, shown to be true, and I’ve heard college educated people revise it, and say yes he did but he got them out of the country before we could find them. I heard this from a whole group of people, and people who would define themselves as liberals, which really means they are democrats, and democrats see themselves that way, another lie. The democrats push some liberal polices, but they are war mongers, and corporate whores too.
We must learn to wage peace in a multi-polar world or we are doomed. It would be nice if we learned this lesson before, rather than after, a nuclear holocaust, but I suspect we won’t.
i believe the corporate media are propaganda pushers for the war criminals. More info at link below:
December 19, 2016
“The Propaganda Peddlers, the War Criminals and Their 21st Century War Crimes”
…
There is overwhelming evidence that wars on a number of countries were planned. Yet, this evidence is censored and covered up by many of the so-called “searchers for truth,” in the “investigative media.” The TV “news” parrots propaganda daily and the “newspapers” do likewise….
[read more at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2016/12/the-propaganda-peddlers-war-criminals.html
Excellent article. I believe present day Nuremberg Trials are needed. More info at link below:
——————————————————————-
November 6, 2017
Who Will Remember the Victims of Present Day War Criminals?
…
These present-day mass murderers in expensive suits pretend to honour the victims of past wars, when in fact they are the present day perpetrators of millions of war victims (dead and alive) around the world. One could call them “War Criminals At Large.”…
[read more at link below]
http://graysinfo.blogspot.ca/2017/11/who-will-remember-victims-of-present.html
a few more bits to confirm needed journalism(see links) N0 matter how underground, an effective means to distribute these kinds of messages is needed, not just to Americans, but to the entire world, Because humanity is lazy, it falls prey to those few among its mist that behave as modern cave dwellers. What ended the Viet Nam war was a single picture in life magazine. did that picture invoke anger, surprise, or guilt?
http://www.presstv.com/Detail/2017/11/15/542295/yemen-houthi-Saudi-Trump-Congress-Springmann
The house voted 366 to 30 to a resolution that the house has not authorized (Trump or the Military) to use military force against parties participating in the Yemeni civil war that are not otherwise subject to” the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force or the 2003 AUMF in Iraq.
https://friendsofsyria.wordpress.com see also http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/raqqas_dirty_secret
http://www.moonofalabama.org
Fudmier, thanks for your comments and links which seem to corroborate the one I suggested, except your first one. I, too, had read about that disagreement with Congress so am waiting to see if that lasts. Maybe our Representatives are beginning to listen to We the People. BUT can they and still keep their jobs? Our answer does lie with the People, if there’s to be a positive outcome.
There is ONE important issue, that believe, many Americans fail to consider when it comes to your Congress.
The FACT is, your Congress was THREATENED during Sept 11 with Anthrax derived from a Government Source.
People DIED from that attack and the perpetrators were never found. whilst the F.B.I. closed the books on their investigation. BUT, no one considered the IMPACT of that threat on the members of Congress. It would have been clear as day to them all, if they don’t follow the line, we can get you, even right here in the halls of Congress.
Politicians in general, are a cowardly lot, and would not fail to pick up such a threat and toe the line.
As they have been doing ever since. Ask yourselves, who has the power to carry out such a threat ?
Then you will discover who is orchestrating events in the U.S. today.
It’s hard for me to believe where my research over the past couple of years has led me. Down paths I never would have imagined! I’m beginning to connect the dots whereas before there were no dots to connect. Consortium News has been a major educator for me with its contributors and commentators, as has rt.com. With these sources, I’ve often followed through on suggested links,
which always led to more dots and understanding. I highly recommend your taking a look at the following site which I think ultimately explains almost everything that we see in our world today.
https://youtu.be/mDaKtZuOmOU. Hope to hear back with what you think. For one thing, this analysis gets into why there is so much divisiveness among us and how it fits into a final one world government controlled by the very elite – wealthy money controllers. You thinkers, how do we make sure they do not win? There is always an answer, I firmly believe.
Hi Virginia, I watched your video which was interesting and great fun. I don’t say there’s nothing in it, but I fear you have been down too many rabbit holes and endlessly through Alice’s many mirrors. I have to say, the more I read great sites like this one and others I become ever more confused. Of course, there is a lot of skullduggary going on but whether its as elaborate as your video suggests I don’t know. Anyway, keep reading and watching. Good luck.
John, I thought the link I suggested cleared up what appeared to be too complicated to unravel. It was illuminating (pun intended).
The illuminati stuff is unnecessarily complicated, although there are some truths in it. My advice is to keep your thinking simple about the struggle of good and evil. It is just that – don’t make it too complex or confusing.
I don’t agree, Mike, to keep the blinders on. AND, it only seems complicated until the pieces start to fit together, which they will and do for those whose goal is to pursue truth. Those of us who converse here will not take to being patronized or discounted or influenced away from our individual pursuits, gut feelings, intuitions, or reasoning coupled with growing understanding, try as you may.
You are accusing me of doing something I had no intention of doing. Please think twice before sowing discord yourself. You could respond to your sharing being respectfully differed from without indulging in an ad hominem attack. I have no antipathy towards you; we all including myself, get carried way by our feelings sometimes. No big deal. Let’s be friends, or at least agree to differ respectfully?
Mike, When you give gratuitous advice, you are being both condescending and patronizing. There was nothing emotional nor adhominen in calling you out on that.
And just to add another link, Putin himself has mentioned The Illuminati in speeches. He’s on the right track, and knows the Illuminati’s long existence, who’s in charge, and what their goals are. For those interested, see the link above and also this one: http://yournewswire.com/putin-illuminati-plans-to-use-islam-to-spark-world-war-3/
The UN charter prohibiting preemptive war is clearly not still in force because the Americans, we British and others ignore with impunity and there are no consequences. Let’s face it; the UN has about as much bite as a kitten without any teeth. Its full of yes men who grovel before the Yankee imperial state and the security council is a private club with absolutely no legitimacy whatever. The UN is like some kind of film premier where no one goes to actually watch the film, but go there just to be seen. The terrible photograph of Abu Grhaib glorifying a hideous form of bestiality by a couple of Yankee hoodlum soldiers sums up what the American military and their masters really are. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the American people in the deep state and various shadowy think tanks don’t have enlarged picture of this vile assault from Abu Grhaib hanging on their bedroom walls for them to have orgasms in front of it ! You can be sure the shock they exhibited when they first saw these photos was a masterly piece of feigned outrage worthy of the most skilled thespian.
Yes. Those who torture others are deep in Evil. Evil is not some fanciful idea – it is a terrible reality.
Those who are Evil would very much like you to think there is no such thing, but it is only too real.
A very strong article, indeed.
Not only should Americans be disgusted with themselves, so should all that support these operations as they happen today, including my own country and most of Western and Central Europe.
Thanks for chiming in – this is a global problem, a problem of Humankind.
Absolutely correct. The word “appeasement” comes to mind. The Global Humanity must CEASE appeasing America’s demands and hold them accountable for it’s crimes. Until that happens, it will be business as usual.
I disagree with Orwell’s statement that “highly civilized human beings” were trying to kill him. The human race still remains, after thousands of years, a primitive, ignorant and savage species. A civilized and intelligent species would never consider war as a solution to any problem. A civilized and intelligent species would find the concept of war contemptible. Needless to say, a civilized and intelligent species would never possess weapons, like our nuclear ones, that could lead to its extinction. We have indeed made great progress in our weapon technology and other technologies. But highly advanced technologies do not make a species civilized or intelligent. Murderous thugs can develop advanced technologies. Will the human race ever become a civilized and intelligent species? A review of our history makes me think that our species will become extinct before that happens. But my optimistic nature still gives me hope that the goodness, the kindness, and the love that I have seen and felt in many people over almost seven decades of life will triumph.
Orwell was probably considering that the bombers were the descendants of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, etc.
I wonder if Orwell reflected on the fact that his government declared war on Germany after it sabotaged the Polish-German border negotiations specifically to create a casus belli. German expatriates had convinced Chamberlain’s government that a declaration of war would trigger the immediate overthrow of the Hitler regime, or failing that, that the war would be a repeat of the Great War in which the Royal navy would starve into submission a nation that experience showed could not be defeated on the battlefield.
And one might consider that the day after Churchill ousted Chamberlain as Prime Minister, on May 11, 1940, eighteen Whitley bombers staged the first night attack on a German city, initiating an air campaign that would continue almost every night for the next five years. Churchill and his advisors extended the definition of acceptable military objectives to include factories, public buildings, essentially entire towns and villages. On August 25, 1940, 81 British bombers made the first of six surprise night raids on neighborhoods in Berlin itself. Finally on September 6, the Luftwaffe launched its first retaliatory strikes on England, and kept flying as long as the RAF attacks continued.
Churchill remarked in 1938, “What we desire is the complete destruction of the German economy.” After the war he reportedly told Conservative MP Lord Robert Boothby that “Germany’s most unforgivable crime before the Second World War was her attempt to extricate her economic power from the world’s trading system and to create her own exchange mechanism which would deny world finance its opportunity to profit.”
In an article in the 1942 Flying Magazine Arthur Harris remarks that raid was against a railroad yard. Remember, the Battle of France had just begun the day before.
In his book “The Race on the Edge of Time” David Fisher writes of a probably accidental German bombing raid on London (August 24) in defiance of Hitler’s direct orders not to do so. The next night an infuriated Churchill sent 81 Wellington and Hampden bomber towards Berlin, of which 29 actually located the city. The author claims nobody in Berlin was killed, and that toilets were included in the “bomb” load.
On a side note, I’m amazed how difficult it was to locate this bit of information, and how unsure I am about the reliability of that information. I’d assumed Max Hastings’ Bomber Command would tell all about it, and it might, but the book is so chaotic I couldn’t locate anything useful.
You are spot on right on that one Zachary!! The German Bombers could not find their target and had insufficient fuel to make it back with its bomb load so jettisoned them over London. I lived practically next door to the Spitfires based in Hornchurch, East Anglia which the Germans attacked several times. My home was 70% destroyed when German bombers attacked a searchlight battery 30 yards from our home. An AA gun used to fire a couple of shots 45 feet from our home. Maybe they were bombing that spot.
There have been much more peaceful cultures. Today some cultures are more restrained than others.
There is no human cultural progress over time.
” There is no human cultural progress over time. ”
Agreed. I would argue , using a different term , that “human nature” simply hasn’t evolved in a positive direction – more like the opposite , in fact – because of the absence of any selective pressure that would drive such positive evolution.
Technology , animate and inanimate , evolves rapidly in the desired direction because of the intense selective pressure applied by humans. For human nature to evolve positively , the good , ethical people of the world would need to have a reproductive advantage , and the unethical people , and particularly the truly evil psychopaths , a reproductive disadvantage. If anything , the opposite has obtained historically :
” 1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan ”
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/08/1-in-200-men-direct-descendants-of-genghis-khan/
True, the instigators of war are not obviously subject to enhanced natural selection, except possibly that of Universal Laws such as Karma.
The dupes of the Masters of War definitely are subject to elimination by war.
I believe as far as the balance of good and evil there is no change over time, except, now the evil may result in worldwide destruction.
Hope for the right thing is always a valuable resource – one that strengthens us to work to make it come true. The Good, the True, and the Beautiful are our goal, and at the same time our inspiration and support.
Seriously Thomas, civilisations on earth, have been here, where we are today. There’s nothing left of them but scraps we might find occassionly. But there are definate signs of their advanced science as is signs they perished probably by that same science. Thus it can be said, we seem to be repeating events that have happened in our long forgotten past and not learned a thing. I would not say, doing so was a sign of high intelligence.
I believe humans have not evolved enough on this planet,to live in peace with each other, if we must constantly revert to war, to make a living possible. Surely, it must eventually sink in, our way of life is WRONG.
Those who refuse to look at the Dark Side, will be condemned to live in it.
The trouble is, Mike; you can’t really see into the darkness of a black heart because they decorate the outside with glitter baubles and candy. The only decent heart in this whole cabal of butchers is the one in Richard Cheney’s chest which he got from someone else! Its one thing to look into the dark, but its another thing to actually see what’s there.
Getting people to look directly and deeply into the darkness within us is the only way to change it. The multiple forms of denial and evasion that help people avoid the frightening encounter with and acknowledgment of Evil in themselves, others, and our culture as a whole historical system is what prevents us from dealing with it. You cannot remove what you do not see.
How many will read this article? The vast majority of Americans carefully avoid even glancing at anything that begins to tell the truth about who we really are. The last thing anyone wants is the naked truth of our crimes. Like many who share here, I have been socially shunned by those clinging to their comforting illusions, and branded as a “downer” and a “conspiracy nut.” Nevertheless I began learning to resist group pressure early in life, and I continue voice my understandings in spite of criticism or being ignored.
Ignorance is strength
The critical nexus is at what point does the ignorant’s humanity disappear and how does the truth make them aware of this?
Thanksgiving is a primary holiday that reinforces ignorance, this year I propose we thank the US for being the largest threat to peace in the world anf see how many eyes we might open.
Mike, that’s exactly what I’m talking about.
Reading this makes me sick that I am a citizen of the US. We are the primary force for Evil on Earth. Martin Luther King was correct to point that out – and he was murdered by the mass murderers at the CIA for saying that and otherwise calling out their crimes. We in the US are the most disgusting hypocrites of the planet – pretending to do good, when we are the most Evil. Torturing, murdering, starving our fellow humans – what more Evil can we devise to do? Those who pretend to justify all of this awful behavior are equally complicit in it’s execution. We have plumbed the depths of Evil in our actions, and I can only pray that somehow our reign of terror will finally end.
Mike K…
I couldn’t agree with you more as I am an American citizen myself. However, the problem that every US citizen is facing now with the massively dysfunctional and corrupt government we are all living under is that increasingly there is only one solution left to the problem; take up arms to overthrow the government. That is a very frightening prospect given that by now most citizens expect to believing in a peaceful society. And who will form a legion to do this? There are many good organizations out there who are still trying to overcome this horrific issue through political resistance. But unfortunately, that is not working out very well.
The result is that everyone remains to frightened to contemplate the realistic possibilities of what actually needs to be done. The result of this in turn then is that what will most likely happen will happen spontaneously and will probably wreak untold havoc on the US state as people so disgusted and tired of this renegade and rogue government come to the conclusion they have nothing to lose any longer and viciously attack the Washington elites destroying everything in site.
If the US population does not take control over their own destiny, this is exactly what is in store for our future…
Violent overthrow of the US government is not a solution. Our problems are deeply involved with our tendency to think of violence and coercion as answers to our difficulties. The answer as King, Gandhi and many others have known is through a nonviolent spiritual revolution. Will this be very hard to bring about? Yes, but it is the only way out of our deepening moral collapse. I wish there were an easier or quicker way, but there is not. The hole we have dug ourselves into has been deepening over centuries and resists any but the most truth based methods of solution.
THIS, Steve…
You’ve just shared what so many of us are thinking. You’re not alone.
In his book, “People of the Lie”, M. Scott Peck addresses the psychological implications of war upon Americans via the Vietnam War. He said that Americans are not likely to act until they are PERSONALLY affected by war. This happened with Vietnam. What was the difference between then and now with war?
The DRAFT. And war was televised. The CIA/MIC criminals learned from their mistakes.
There are many people who do not know that we have been at war since the Iraq invasion. They are not personally affected by images on their TV screens and their loved ones are not being pulled into war.
Were there to be a draft, the US population would awaken quickly. Perhaps this is why the US CIA/MIC/MOSSAD are not calling people up. It’s just so much easier to nuke a country then to send hundreds of thousands of troops they DO NOT have because with all the WAR going on the Us military is starved of recruits. They still have not met their quota THIS year. But more importantly they would be exposed on a level with a huge outreach. Americans would go IMMEDIATELY anti war. The elite do not want the American public to know what they are doing.
A larger scale war would put the US population over the edge and people then would be PERSONALLY affected.
I agree with you in that it’s too late for a political resistance. Every four years after an election I hear that it’s time for a third party.
No, what is needed is to over throw the Government.
That isn’t just a matter of if but WHEN, Secondly, what will be the trigger that will create the tipping point of collective outrage? Will it be too late by then?
Fear prevents Americans from purging their psychopathic abusers. But when they are PERSONALLY affected it will be a different story.
Also, it’s not a surprise we are hated abroad with our constant wars. I can’t help but think that we will PAY DEARLY for our ignorance, denial and the illusion that we are safe within our borders. What we have right now is the CIA/MIC/MOSSAD overreach. They are in power and Trump is their puppet, just like previous Administration’s. But due to their pathological pursuit of war, and weapons sales, our borders become increasingly unsafe and it’s not out of the question that our own Government would create another 9/11. I no longer believe the US, Saudis and Israel to have been innocent in that attack. Our real enemy is NOT Russia, N. Korea, China, Iran. It’s the US Government.
It is now not out of the field of my psychological vision to see bombs dropped here. I have nightmares about it.
That would certainly mean that we are ALL personally affected, wouldn’t it? And that would make 9/11 look like a cake walk…
And the rest of the world would see us as deserving of it. One cannot continue to commit the atrocities our government does without paying for it. Maybe other countries will begin to recognize too, that playing ball with the US, Saudi Arabia and ISRAEL, means nothing more than pain.
Our media is painting a picture of another axis of evil with Russia, Iran and N. Korea (the goal being China there).
The true axis of evil is the US/ISRAEL/SAUDI ARABIA.. .
Great comment, Steve..
I’m sorry Steve, but I disagree with your post. Note though, I am not American, but am a Vietnam Vet, so very familiar with the behaviour of the American military and Government machine.
In responce to your post, the PEOPLE of America, do not strike me, as being too concerned by the behaviour of their ALLEGEDLY elected leaders. Secondly, I believe the people are too AFRAID of the consequences of standing up to their leaders in the first instance. This is supported by the continuing militarisation of the Police forces, and the constant getting out of gaol free card, when these Police murder innocent people on an escalating basis. Let’s face it, we have KIDS, Pensioners, retarded people, deaf people all being targeted and butchered by your Police forces who get away with it every time. What sort of conditioning would you consider, such behaviour to be on the people ? When you look at your Police not to help you, but to ne AFRAID of them, for your very life ????
From where I sit, the corruption is so endemic within American society, I dont believe for a second, that any uprising would resolve the issue. In fact I believe the only chance Americans “MIGHT” have in their redemption, would be a cataclysmic earth shattering event, that would bring the U.S. to it’s knees, then the people who believe they MAY have a chance, to step up and do something constructive to recapture and rebuild the U.S. as it was ALLEGEDLY meant to be.
Mike, You are not alone; I too am sick at the thought that I am a US citizen. Reading this article has nauseated me to the point where I could actually throw up tonight’s dinner. Instead, I will just shed the tears welling up inside of me. When will enough people wake up and stop this insanity?
Rest in peace, what goes around, eventually come around. Justice, will prevail.
I was discussing this with a long time friend in the U.K., where I was born. I served in their military in WW11. He was equally disturbed by our actions around the world. The call was intercepted by NASA and immediately my emails were blocked to him. I used my Skype to contact him and it,too, was hacked and now I can only Air Mail him. This is what America has become. A nation totally indicted on False Flags [Vietnam, 911, Iraq] and violence everywhere. That the American people support this kind of violence is fully understandable=brainwashed that we are an an exceptional nation that can do no wrong. I was taught the same thing about “protecting our Empire”.: Looking back I am ashamed of what I did as I am sure many ex G.Is now do feel. We have become a Rogue nation in more ways than one. We are a violent nation, we have more people in prison than China, we have 25% of the World’s prison population. We rank third behind South Africa, Russian Federation in homicides. Sad to say you cannot make this up. It is not the America that came to 70 years ago. I prospered and did well. It saddens me to say these things.