- US Drone War In Africa Set To Expand In Coming Months
The US Air Force is nearing completion of a secret $100 million drone base in northern Niger that will target militant groups operating in the area. Foreign Policy says weaponized drones could be ready for action in the coming months, marking a significant escalation in the war against terrorists in Africa.
The base is located in the northern city of Agadez, in the Sahara Desert. General Atomics MQ-9 Reapers, an unmanned aerial vehicle, will patrol the skies targeting militants and smugglers that traverse between Niger and Libya, Algeria, Mali, and Chad.
Until recently, the drones were based in Niger’s capital and were used solely for surveillance purposes. But that is all changing.
Preliminary reports suggest approximately 650 US military members will be deployed to the new airfield once it is operational.
The Air Force said an undetermined number of military drones, including MQ-9s, will also be transferred to the base.
Nigerien Defense Minister Kalla Mountari confirmed that his government requested the Air Force’s presence to aid in the battle against armed terrorist groups.
Aerial view of the American drone base in Agadez, Niger, on June 4, 2017 (Source/ Google Earth)
Airmen from the 724th Expeditionary Air Base Squadron take down tents at Air Base 201 in Agadez, Niger, to move to a new location Sept 2017 (Source/ US Air Force)
US military support via Niger surged last November after an attack killed five Nigerien and four American special operations personnel near the village of Tongo Tongo.
“The Tongo Tongo ambush spotlighted a policy issue that draws little public attention in the United States—the ongoing war in Africa’s Sahel region against militant groups emboldened by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria,” said Foreign Policy.
The incident brought some scrutiny to the Agadez drone base, offering new insight into the upcoming military operations in Africa.
“I suspect it is part of this concern around the terrorist organizations in the Sahel region that give no sign of being defeated anytime soon,” said Joshua Meservey, a senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation, who spoke with Foreign Policy about armed terrorist groups such as the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, and Boko Haram.
“They have carried out a number of attacks that have been high profile and very concerning,” he said, adding that much of the violence is centered in Niger’s volatile southwest region.
Niger, one of Africa’s most impoverished countries, has out of control violence due to economic woes, an illicit drug and weapons trade, human trafficking, and dangerous borders with volatile nations, notably Libya and Mali.
However, the Americans are not the only foreigners based in the country. The French have also given military assistance to the country, deploying troops across the country to fight Islamist militants.
The Pentagon has said US troops have no direct combat missions in Niger. But the deaths of four US soldiers in Tongo Tongo have raised serious questions about official military statements.
Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser, the head of US Africa Command, said soldiers were playing a backup role for Nigerien forces on a mission against jihadis and did not intend to get involved in direct combat.
“The direct cause of the enemy attack in Tongo Tongo is that the enemy achieved tactical surprise there, and our forces were outnumbered approximately 3 to 1,” said Maj. Gen. Roger L. Cloutier Jr., who was then Africom’s chief of staff and now commands U.S. Army Africa.
“There was some processes at all levels of the chain of command that need to be improved.”
Agadez will be the second US drone base in Africa. Drones are currently stationed in Djibouti are used for airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia.
Meservey said the deployment of armed drones in Agadez would “give a little bit more teeth to the ongoing operations.”
The Agadez drone base coincides with calls within the Pentagon to decrease troops in the region. After the Tongo Tongo ambush, Waldhauser proposed winding down operations of special operation missions on the continent.
“That has caused the Pentagon to rethink … the special operators’ posture in that region,” Meservey said.
“Drones have a smaller footprint, they are easier to run and deploy, and they don’t [attract as much] attention.”
Maj. Karl Wiest, a spokesman for Africom, told Foreign Policy that the Pentagon is pivoting away from counterterrorism operations in hybrid wars and toward tackling traditional threats posed by Russia and China.
Alice Hunt Friend, a senior fellow in the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the critical question would be whether reaper drones make the region safe.
“I think the government-to-government relationship with Niger for the moment will hold steady, but from a community relations perspective and from a public relations perspective … African communities are extremely sensitive to U.S. presence,” Friend said. “Drones could certainly upset that latent anxiety.”
While the Pentagon is constructing a new drone base in Niger, Chinese President Xi Jinping met with his Nigerien counterpart Mahamadou Issoufou on Friday, to discuss the building of new medical care, infrastructure, energy, and transportation projects. Xi said China firmly supports the efforts of maintaining national security and stability in the African country.
So maybe, the Pentagon is neglecting to tell the American people why their tax dollars are hard at work in the most impoverished country in Africa, as it seems it could be all about deterring China.
- Luongo: The Great Realignment Is Coming To Europe
A League Of Leagues Of Their Own In Europe
“There’s no crying in baseball!”
— A League of Their OwnThe Great Realignment is coming to Europe next year. All the writing is on the wall.
This summer saw German Chancellor Angela Merkel survive a leadership challenge by her coalition partner Horst Seehofer over her immigration policy.
She needs political wins to maintain her hold on power. Standing firm against President Trump on the Nordstream 2 pipeline and having a cordial summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin is a good start.
Because most of Europe is tired of 1) Germany setting policy for the entire EU and 2) anti-Russian sanctions killing their trade.
But week-long protests in the Saxony town of Chemnitz over the stabbing of a local man are dogging her. Germany’s polling numbers continue ebbing away from Merkel.
The more she is weakened the more emboldened her opposition becomes.
Cue Italian Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini and Hungarian President Viktor Orban. They met to openly strategize over ending open migration into the EU. On the surface Italy and Hungary seem at odds on this issue.
Italy wants its borders closed and its migrants distributed throughout Europe.
Hungary steadfastly refuses to take even one migrant.
This dichotomy is what the European media and politicians think will keep these two rising titans in conflict.
But, as Mike Shedlock pointed out recently at Townhall.com, these two men have bigger goals which they are in total agreement on — securing their borders to preserve their cultural and national identities.
That’s why Salvini is calling for “A League of Leagues” across Europe. He will succeed.
This is the guy who successfully rebranded the secessionist Northern League into the MIGA party – Make Italy Great Again.
Then he and Five Star Movement leader Luigi Di Maio navigated the Italian Swamp to form a government experts said couldn’t work, while simultaneously neutering establishment stalking horse Silvio Berlusconi.
Thanks to Salvini’s strategic genius Italian politics will never be the same again. His League now polls around 30%, which bodes well for it in next year’s European Parliamentary Elections.
Because now his sights are MEGA – Make Europe Great Again.
The quisling European media pounce breathlessly whenever there is a perceived difference of opinion between Salvini and Di Maio, portraying the coalition as weak and tenuous.
Talks between Orban and Salvini were reported alongside Di Maio’s call for migrant burden sharing across the EU. This is to sow discord where there is none.
The two are in lock-step in confronting Brussels over its IMF-backed austerity program. They rightly see it as destroying Italy’s economy and its culture. The program is no different than the one imposed on Greece and is destroying Argentina again, whose currency imploded last week.
They hope this wave of populism sweeping Europe is just a tantrum that eventually will end in tears.
But, there’s no crying in power politics.
Neither Salvini nor Orban are weak men given to fits of doubt. And their forming an alliance here is bigger than grandstanding on immigration policy.
With Merkel weak they will isolate French President Emmanuel Macron, make him their nemesis and remake the European Parliament after next year’s elections.
Because the real goal is to take control of the European Commission Presidency, ousting the odious Jean-Claude Juncker.
A “League of Leagues” would unite sovereigntist parties across Europe under one party in the European Parliament. The European People’s Party rules alongside the Social Democrats in a German-style grand coalition that stands for nothing except more centralized control by EU technocrats.
Like Juncker.
Salvini and Orban want other the Visigrad countries as well as Austria to form the basis for this coalition.
Is it enough? The 800 lb. Gorilla in this room is Alternative for Germany (AfD). The official opposition party in the Bundestag, AfD will pick up seats in the European Parliament where they currently have just one.
They are the wild card in this gambit by Salvini and Orban.
As I’ve discussed in the past, AfD is in the process of “Crossing the Chasm” from minor party to major one. The latest polls, now nearly a month old, have AfD polling between 16 and 18% nationally.
If AfD has a League-like surge from the mid-teens to 30% support, Merkel’s government will fall.
AfD will enter the EU parliament with a tailwind to see Salvini and Orban’s wish fulfilled.
This is why the protests in Chemnitz are important. It’s why AfD’s rise in CSU-dominated Bavaria is so important.Public frustration with immigrant violence could shift the German electorate between now and May’s elections that far as more and more Germans embrace local community pride.
Then there’s the Trump Factor.
The harder Donald Trump pushes EU leadership to actually lead at home the more they are exposed as weak fools. Despite Juncker, Merkel and Macron talking a good game, European companies are abandoning their business with Iran over Trump pulling the U.S. out of the JCPOA.
The more they try to scuttle Brexit and reveal themselves as anti-democratic globalists, the worse the blowback on them is getting.
The new Spanish government willing to discuss greater Catalonian autonomy versus jailing everyone they can and cracking the skulls of old women on the streets of Barcelona.
Images like that are the face of Merkel’s EU. So are the people in Chemnitz, dressed in black, wearing placards with the pictures of victims of migrant violence on them in silent vigil.
This isn’t a tantrum. This is real emotion. Real consequence.
Their tears are real and they are not for sale.
The markets always bet that those in power will remain in power. The euro refuses to handicap these shifts in the political winds. No one in power wants it to fall too far too fast, or like Merkel, at all.
Because a strong euro to her is the main mechanism for keeping her opposition weak, blaming profligacy and sloth of Italians when it is the mis-pricing of Italian labor via the same over-valued euro that is the reason why Italy cannot grow. out of its debts.
By forming an alliance to reform the EU from within, Salvini and Orban counter that argument while taking the politically-viable path given the strong popular support the EU still has with many voters.
It gives Salvini the cudgel to bludgeon the EU over its intransigence on budget matters. It allows him to say, “See, I don’t want to leave the euro, but Brussels won’t negotiate for a better Italy.”
And given this guy’s track record so far, I wouldn’t bet against him making his case to angry European voters this winter.
And then it’ll be the globalists who will be crying.
* * *
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- Visualizing The Other Gender-Gap That No One Is Talking About
A major global study published in The Lancet has found the there is no safe level of alcohol consumption. The research compared levels of alcohol use and its impact on health across 195 countries from 1990 to 2016. In many countries, moderate drinking has been associated with health benefits for years and in places like France, a daily glass of red wine has been viewed as good for the heart.
The new research claims that the harmful impact of alcohol far outweighs any benefits with even an occasional drink proving harmful. As Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes, the authors of the report say that governments should recommend people abstain from alcohol consumption entirely. In 2016, 2.8 million deaths were attributed to alcohol and it was the leading risk factor for premature mortality and disability among people in the 15-49 age bracket.
All of which suggests, given the historical ‘we know what is best for you’ attitude of The West’s increasingly ‘nanny state’ that prohibition is just around the corner.
The following infographic focuses on the top-10 countries for alcohol attributable deaths, as listed in the report.
You will find more infographics at Statista
Specifically, it highlights the massive gender gap in mortality.
In The United States, alcohol caused 71,00 male deaths and 19,000 female deaths in 2016, but that 3.74x gender bias is dwarved by China’s 11-times-higher male alcohol-attributable deaths than women’s.
This is likely one area where activist women will not be pushing for government support to bring equality with men…or does this just prove that men are bigger idiots than women?
- Leaked Report Exposes Britain Questioning Cost/Benefit Of Saudi Relationship
Authored by James Dorsey via Mid East Soccer blog,
Signs of opposition to policies of Saudi King Salman and his son, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and potentially increased domestic polarization have in the past week spilled on to the streets of London while a just released report questioned the economic and political benefits of Britain’s relationship with the kingdom.
The London incidents, involving a brother of King Salman as well as an assault on a Saudi critic, suggest a long suspected greater degree of domestic questioning of Saudi Arabia’s 3.5-year-old ill-fated war in Yemen than has been publicly evident until now.
The Salmans have sought to crush dissent with mass arrests of activists, religious scholars, businessmen and members of the ruling Al Saud family; a power and asset grab last November under the mum of an anti-corruption campaign that targeted some of Saudi elite’s most prominent figures; and legal measures criminalizing criticism.
Although focused on British-Saudi economic and political relations, the report by King’s College London and the Oxford Research Group calls into question not only British but also by implication long-standing Western willingness to turn a blind eye to the kingdom’s violations of human rights and its conduct of the Yemen war that has produced one of the worst humanitarian crises in post-World War Two history.
The London incidents coupled with increasing European questioning of arms sales to Saudi Arabia, including this week’s cancellation by Spain of the sale of 400 laser-guided precision bombs, suggests that Saudi Arabia is finding it more difficult to keep domestic dissent and international criticism under wraps. Spain follows in the footsteps of Germany, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium who have suspended some military sales.
The Spanish cancellation came on the heels of last month’s Saudi-Canadian spat sparked by a call on Saudi Arabia by Canada’s ambassador to the kingdom, Dennis Horak, to release detained women activists, including Samar Badawi, the sister-in-law of a recently naturalized Canadian citizen, Ensaf Haidar.
Ms. Haidar is married to Ms. Badawi’s brother, Raif Badawi, who was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to ten years in prison and 1,000 lashes for promoting freedom of expression and women’s rights.
It also came in the wake of the withdrawal of Malaysian troops from the 41-nation, Saudi-sponsored Islamic Military Counter Terrorism Coalition (IMCTC) and the closure in Malaysia of the Saudi-backed King Salman Centre for International Peace (KSCIP).
In a rare public distancing from the Salmans, Saudi Prince Ahmed bin Abdelaziz – one of the few still living sons of the founder of Saudi Arabia and a younger brother of King Salman, asked anti-Saudi protesters on a London street chanting “down, down Al Saud” and “Al Saud criminal family”: “What does the al-Saud family have to do with your chants? We have nothing to do with what is happening (in Yemen). Certain officials are responsible.”
Asked by protesters who he held responsible, Prince Ahmed, who served as deputy interior minister for 37 years and briefly as interior minister under King Salman’s predecessor, King Abdullah, said “the king and his heir apparent,” a reference to King Salman and Prince Mohammed.
The state-run Saudi News Agency subsequently quoted Prince Ahmed as seeking to roll back his comments captured on video by saying that he said that “the King and the Crown Prince are responsible for the state and its decisions. This is true for the security and stability of the country and the people.”
Meanwhile, video on social media showed Ghanem al-Dosari, who hosts a satirical show on YouTube critical of Saudi Arabia, being accosted by supporters of King Salman and Prince Mohammed.
In a bid to stymie criticism, Saudi prosecutors this week reportedly sought the death penalty against prominent cleric Salman Al-Odah who was detained a year ago.
“The Saudi attorney general accused my father @salman_alodah of 37 charges and asked for his execution,” his son Abdullah said in a tweet. He said some of the charges were related to comments Mr. Al-Odah had posted on Twitter and membership in organizations associated with Qatar and Qatari-Egyptian Islamic scholar Sheikh Yousef al-Qaradawi, who is close to the Muslim Brotherhood. Mr. Al-Odah has 14 million Twitter followers.
Prosecutors last month demanded the death sentence for five human rights activists, including Israa al-Ghomgham, a Shiite activist arrested with her husband in 2015. Ms. Al-Ghomgham is thought to be the first female Saudi campaigner to face execution.
Applying a cost-benefit analysis, The Kings College/Oxford Research Group report concluded that, contrary to the projections of the government of Prime Minister Theresa May and popular perception, Britain enjoyed limited economic benefit from its relationship with Saudi Arabia while suffering considerable reputational damage.
The report noted that Britain’s US$ 8 billion in exports to Saudi Arabia accounted for a mere one percent of total exports in 2016. The British Treasury reaped US$ 38.5 million in revenues from arms sales or a paltry 0.004 percent of the Treasury’s total income in 2016. Overall, Britain’s defense industry produced in 2010/11 only one percent of the country’s total output and created a meagre 0.6 percent of all jobs.
The analysis stroked with the conclusion of a 2016 study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) and Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) that “arms exports cannot be said to represent an important part of the UK economy, and even less so of the labour market, despite the prominence of the ‘jobs argument’ amongst politicians and industry figures seeking to promote and defend arms exports.”
The King’s College/Oxford Research report took issue with assertions by successive British governments that trade and weapons sales as well as support for Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reform programme enabled Britain to influence Saudi policy and introduce democratic and human rights values.
“There is little evidence, based on publicly available information, that the UK exerts either influence or leverage over Saudi Arabia. In fact, there is greater evidence that Saudi Arabia exerts influence over the UK. There is a contradiction between the UK presenting itself as a progressive, liberal country and defender of the international rules-based order, while at the same time providing diplomatic cover for a regime, which, based on our analysis, is undermining that rules-based order,” the report said.
It warned that “the UK appears to be incurring reputational costs as a result of its relationship with Saudi Arabia, while the economic benefits to the UK are questionable.”
The report’s call on the British government to critically analyse its foreign policy and limit and be more selective and transparent in in its engagement with Saudi Arabia could constitute an approach that would appeal to other European governments.
It could also attract support from some members of the US Congress, despite US President Donald J. Trump’s backing of Saudi policies, with public criticism of the kingdom mounting in Europe and the United States as well as growing unease among some officials and politicians.
Saudi Arabia “is a case study in what happens when a country’s supposed economic interests come into conflict with its stated norms and values and its international obligations. The situation cannot carry on indefinitely,” said Armida van Rij, one of the report’s authors.
- Japan To Test Mini "Cosmic Elevator" In World First
A Japanese team of researchers at Shizuoka University will experiment this month in low-Earth orbit to eventually develop a “cosmic elevator” connecting Earth and the space station by cable.
The International Space Station (ISS) will launch two miniature satellites later this month, tied together by a 10-meter long steel cable, as it is the first step towards what could eventually become a large space elevator in the decades to come.
According to a report in Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun news service, two ultra-small cubic satellites, which were developed by Shizuoka University Faculty of Engineering, will be released from the ISS after September 11, joined together via a 10-meter-long steel cable.
Once released from the ISS, the satellites will deploy the cable and a motorized container simulating an elevator car. A series of tests will be conducted with the container moving up and down on the wire, as sensors on the satellites will record the movements of the object in a weightlessness environment.
Mainichi Shimbun notes that an experiment to extend a cable in space has been carried out before, the upcoming test will be the first to move a container on a wire in low-Earth orbit. If all goes well, it will provide proof of concept, as it will serve as a step forward toward realizing cosmic elevators.
“In theory, a space elevator is highly plausible. Space travel may become something popular in the future,” said Yoji Ishikawa, 63, who leads the research team.
Major contractor Obayashi Corp., which is participating in the experiment as a technical adviser, is examining a space elevator of its own. The company has conceptualized a space elevator pod — each measuring 18 meters long and 7.2 meters in diameter will have a load capacity of roughly 30 people. The Earth-based platform would be set up at sea and connect with a space station some 36,000 kilometers in altitude will be used to move the elevator up and down using an electric motor pulley.
Should a space elevator be realized, the Obayahi elevator system could be built by the year 2050 and have an estimated cost of roughly $9 billion.
So far, Obayashi’s technology is many decades away as the material for special cable is still in the development phase. In 2015, Elon Musk tweets that space elevators cannot exist until carbon nanotube or graphene structures are built longer than a footbridge…
And pls don’t ask me about space elevators until someone at least builds a carbon nanotube structure longer than a footbridge
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 26, 2015
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Professor Yoshio Aoki of Nihon University College of Science and Technology, who supervises Obayashi Corp.’s space elevator project, said, “It is essential for industries, educational institutions and the government to join hands together for technological development.”
We are sure the Bank of Japan would be a prime candidate to fund space elevators…
- Beijing's Bid For Global Power In The Age Of Trump
Authored by Alfred McCoy via TomDispatch.com,
As the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping’s draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power. Just as conflicts between American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George produced a failed peace after World War I, competition between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and American President Harry Truman sparked the Cold War, and the rivalry between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, so the empowered presidents of the United States and China are now pursuing bold, intensely personal visions of new global orders that could potentially reshape the trajectory of the twenty-first century — or bring it all down.
The countries, like their leaders, are a study in contrasts.
China is an ascending superpower, riding a wave of rapid economic expansion with a burgeoning industrial and technological infrastructure, a growing share of world trade, and surging self-confidence.
The United States is a declining hegemon, with a crumbling infrastructure, a failing educational system, a shrinking slice of the global economy, and a deeply polarized, divided citizenry.
After a lifetime as the ultimate political insider, Xi Jinping became China’s president in 2013, bringing with him a bold internationalist vision for the economic integration of Asia, Africa, and Europe through monumental investment in infrastructure that could ultimately expand and extend the current global economy. After a short political apprenticeship as a conspiracy advocate, Donald Trump took office in 2017 as an ardent America First nationalist determined to disrupt or even dismantle an American-built-and-dominated international order he disdained for supposedly constraining his country’s strength.
Although they started this century on generally amicable terms, China and the U.S. have, in recent years, moved toward military competition and open economic conflict. When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, Washington was confident that Beijing would play by the established rules and become a compliant member of an American-led international community. There was almost no awareness of what might happen when a fifth of humanity joined the world system as an economic equal for the first time in five centuries.
By the time Xi Jinping became China’s seventh president, a decade of rapid economic growth averaging 11% annually and currency reserves surging toward an unprecedented $4 trillion had created the economic potential for a rapid, radical shift in the global balance of power. After just a few months in office, Xi began tapping those vast reserves to launch a bold geopolitical gambit, a genuine challenge to U.S. dominion over Eurasia and the world beyond. Aglow in its status as the world’s sole superpower after “winning” the Cold War, Washington had difficulty at first even grasping such newly developing global realities and was slow to react.
China’s bid couldn’t have been more fortuitous in its timing. After nearly 70 years as the globe’s hegemon, Washington’s dominance over the world economy had begun to wither and its once-superior work force to lose its competitive edge. By 2016, in fact, the dislocations brought on by the economic globalization that had gone with American dominion sparked a revolt of the dispossessed in democracies worldwide and in the American heartland, bringing the self-proclaimed “populist” Donald Trump to power. Determined to check his country’s decline, he has adopted an aggressive and divisive foreign policy that has roiled long-established alliances in both Asia and Europe and is undoubtedly giving that decline new impetus.
Within months of Trump’s entry into the Oval Office, the world was already witnessing a sharp rivalry between Xi’s advocacy of a new form of global collaboration and Trump’s version of economic nationalism. In the process, humanity seems to be entering a rare historical moment when national leadership and global circumstances have coincided to create an opening for a major shift in the nature of the world order.
Trump’s Disruptive Foreign Policy
Despite their constant criticism of Donald Trump’s leadership, few among Washington’s corps of foreign policy experts have grasped his full impact on the historic foundations of American global power. The world order that Washington built after World War II rested upon what I’ve called a “delicate duality”: an American imperium of raw military and economic power married to a community of sovereign nations, equal under the rule of law and governed through international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.
On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier apparatus – military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine – to advance a global dominion of unprecedented wealth and power. This apparatus rested on hundreds of military bases in Europe and Asia that made the U.S. the first power in history to dominate (if not control) the Eurasian continent.
Even after the Cold War ended, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that Washington would remain the world’s preeminent power only as long as it maintained its geopolitical dominion over Eurasia. In the decade before Trump’s election, there were, however, already signs that America’s hegemony was on a downward trajectory as its share of global economic power fell from 50% in 1950 to just 15% in 2017. Many financial forecasts now project that China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s number one economy by 2030, if not before.
In this era of decline, there has emerged from President Trump’s torrent of tweets and off-the-cuff remarks a surprisingly coherent and grim vision of America’s place in the present world order. Instead of reigning confidently over international organizations, multilateral alliances, and a globalized economy, Trump evidently sees America standing alone and beleaguered in an increasingly troubled world — exploited by self-aggrandizing allies, battered by unequal trade terms, threatened by tides of undocumented immigrants, and betrayed by self-serving elites too timid or compromised to defend the nation’s interests.
Instead of multilateral trade pacts like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or even the WTO, Trump favors bilateral deals rewritten to the (supposed) advantage of the United States. In place of the usual democratic allies like Canada and Germany, he is trying to weave a web of personal ties to avowedly nationalist and autocratic leaders of a sort he clearly admires: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Adel Fatah el-Sisi in Egypt, and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.
Instead of old alliances like NATO, Trump favors loose coalitions of like-minded countries. As he sees it, a resurgent America will carry the world along, while crushing terrorists and dealing in uniquely personal ways with rogue states like Iran and North Korea.
His version of a foreign policy has found its fullest statement in his administration’s December 2017 National Security Strategy. As he took office, the nation, it claimed, faced “an extraordinarily dangerous world, filled with a wide range of threats.” But in less than a year of his leadership, it insisted, “We have renewed our friendships in the Middle East… to help drive out terrorists and extremists… America’s allies are now contributing more to our common defense, strengthening even our strongest alliances.” Humankind will benefit from the president’s “beautiful vision” that “puts America First” and promotes “a balance of power that favors the United States.” The whole world will, in short, be “lifted by America’s renewal.”
Despite such grandiose claims, each of President Trump’s overseas trips has been a mission of destruction in terms of American global power. Each, seemingly by design, disrupted and possibly damaged alliances that have been the foundation for Washington’s global power since the 1950s. During the president’s first foreign trip in May 2017, he promptly voiced withering complaints about the supposed refusal of Washington’s European allies to pay their “fair share” of NATO’s military costs, leaving the U.S. stuck with the bill and, in a fashion unknown to American presidents, refused even to endorse the alliance’s core principle of collective defense. It was a position so extreme in terms of the global politics of the previous half-century that he was later forced to formally back down. (By then, however, he had registered his contempt for those allies in an unforgettable fashion.)
During a second, no-less-divisive NATO visit in July, he charged that Germany was “a captive of Russia” and pressed the allies to immediately double their share of defense spending to a staggering 4% of gross domestic product (a level even Washington, with its monumental Pentagon budget, hasn’t reached) — a demand they all ignored. Just days later, he again questioned the very idea of a common defense, remarking that if “tiny” NATO ally Montenegro decided to “get aggressive,” then “congratulations, you’re in World War III.”
Moving on to England, he promptly kneecapped close ally Theresa May, telling a British tabloid that the prime minister had bungled her country’s Brexit withdrawal from the European Union and “killed off any chance of a vital U.S. trade deal.” He then went on to Helsinki for a summit with Vladimir Putin, where he visibly abased himself before NATO’s nominal nemesis, completely enough that there were even brief, angry protests from leaders of his own party.
During Trump’s major Asia tour in November 2017, he addressed the Asian-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) in Vietnam, offering an extended “tirade” against multilateral trade agreements, particularly the WTO. To counter intolerable “trade abuses,” such as “product dumping, subsidized goods, currency manipulation, and predatory industrial policies,” he swore that he would always “put America first” and not let it “be taken advantage of anymore.” Having denounced a litany of trade violations that he termed nothing less than “economic aggression” against America, he invited everyone there to share his “Indo-Pacific dream” of the world as a “beautiful constellation” of “strong, sovereign, and independent nations,” each working like the United States to build “wealth and freedom.”
Responding to such a display of narrow economic nationalism from the globe’s leading power, Xi Jinping had a perfect opportunity to play the world statesman and he took it, calling upon APEC to support an economic order that is “more open, inclusive, and balanced.” He spoke of China’s future economic plans as an historic bid for “interconnected development to achieve common prosperity… on the Asian, European, and African continents.”
As China has lifted 60 million of its own people out of poverty in just a few years and was committed to its complete eradication by 2020, so he urged a more equitable world order “to bring the benefits of development to countries across the globe.” For its part, China, he assured his listeners, was ready to make “$2 trillion of outbound investment” — much of it for the development of Eurasia and Africa (in ways, of course, that would link that vast region more closely to China). In other words, he sounded like a twenty-first century Chinese version of a twentieth-century American president, while Donald Trump acted more like Argentina’s former presidente Juan Perón, minus the medals. As if to put another nail in the coffin of American global dominion, the remaining 11 Trans-Pacific trade pact partners, led by Japan and Canada, announced major progress in finalizing that agreement — without the United States.
In addition to undermining NATO, America’s Pacific alliances, long its historic fulcrum for the defense of North America and the dominance of Asia, are eroding, too. Even after 10 personal meetings and frequent phone calls between Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump during his first 18 months in office, the president’s America First trade policy has placeda “major strain” on Washington’s most crucial alliance in the region. First, he ignored Abe’s pleas and cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and then, as if his message hadn’t been strong enough, he promptly imposed heavy tariffs on Japanese steel imports. Similarly, he’s denounced the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest” and mimicked Indian Prime Minister Modi’s accent, even as he made chummy with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and then claimed, inaccurately, that his country was “no longer a nuclear threat.”
It all adds up to a formula for further decline at a faster pace.
Beijing’s Grand Strategy
While Washington’s influence in Asia recedes, Beijing’s grows ever stronger. As China’s currency reserves climbed rapidly from $200 billion in 2001 to a peak of $4 trillion in 2014, President Xi launched a new initiative of historic import. In September 2013, speaking in Kazakhstan, the heart of Asia’s ancient Silk Road caravan route, he proclaimed a “one belt, one road initiative” aimed at economically integrating the enormous Eurasian land mass around Beijing’s leadership. Through “unimpeded trade” and infrastructure investment, he suggested, it would be possible to connect “the Pacific and the Baltic Sea” in a proposed “economic belt along the Silk Road,” a region “inhabited by close to 3 billion people.” It could become, he predicted, “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”
Within a year, Beijing had established a Chinese-dominated Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank with 56 member nations and an impressive $100 billion in capital, while launching its own $40 billion Silk Road Fund for private equity projects. When China convened what it called a “belt and road summit” of 28 world leaders in Beijing in May 2017, Xi could, with good reason, hail his initiative as the “project of the century.”
Although the U.S. media has often described the individual projects involved in his “one belt, one road” project as wasteful, sybaritic, exploitative, or even neo-colonial, its sheer scale and scope merits closer consideration. Beijing is expected to put a mind-boggling $1.3 trillion into the initiative by 2027, the largest investment in human history, more than 10 times the famed American Marshall Plan, the only comparable program, which spent a more modest $110 billion (when adjusted for inflation) to rebuild a ravaged Europe after World War II.
Beijing’s low-cost infrastructure loans for 70 countries from the Baltic to the Pacific are already funding construction of the Mediterranean’s busiest port at Piraeus, Greece, a major nuclear power plant in England, a $6 billion railroad through rugged Laos, and a $46 billion transport corridor across Pakistan. If successful, such infrastructure investments could help knit two dynamic continents, Europe and Asia — home to a full 70% percent of the world’s population and its resources — into a unified market without peer on the planet.
Underlying this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, the Chinese leadership seems to have a design for transcending the vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. As a start, Beijing is building a comprehensive network of trans-continental gas and oil pipelines to import fuels from Siberia and Central Asia for its own population centers. When the system is complete, there will be an integrated inland energy grid (including Russia’s extensive network of pipelines) that will extend 6,000 miles across Eurasia, from the North Atlantic to the South China Sea. Next, Beijing is working to link Europe’s extensive rail network with its own expanded high-speed rail system via transcontinental lines through Central Asia, supplemented by spur lines running due south to Singapore and southwest through Pakistan.
Finally, to facilitate sea transport around the sprawling continent’s southern rim, China has already bought into or is in the process of building more than 30 major port facilities, stretching from the Straits of Malacca across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along Europe’s extended coastline. In January, to take advantage of Arctic waters opened by global warming, Beijing began planning for a “Polar Silk Road,” a scheme that fits well with ambitious Russian and Scandinavian projects to establish a shorter shipping route around the continent’s northern coast to Europe.
Though Eurasia is its prime focus, China is also pursuing economic expansion in Africa and Latin America to create what might be dubbed the strategy of the four continents. To tie Africa into its projected Eurasian network, Beijing already had doubled its annual trade there by 2015 to $222 billion, three times that of the United States, thanks to a massive infusion of capital expected to reach a trillion dollars by 2025. Much of it is financing the sort of commodities extraction that has already made the continent China’s second largest source of crude oil. Similarly, Beijing has invested heavily in Latin America, acquiring, for instance, control over 90% of Ecuador’s oil reserves. As a result, its commerce with that continent doubled in a decade, reaching $244 billion in 2017, topping U.S. trade with what once was known as its own “backyard.”
A Conflict with Consequences
This contest between Xi’s globalism and Trump’s nationalism has not been safely confined to an innocuous marketplace of ideas. Over the past four years, the two powers have engaged in an escalating military rivalry and a cutthroat commercial competition. Apart from a shadowy struggle for dominance in space and cyberspace, there has also been a visible, potentially volatile naval arms race to control the sea lanes surrounding Asia, specifically in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In a 2015 white paper, Beijing stated that “it is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force structure commensurate with its national security.” Backed by lethal land-based missiles, jet fighters, and a global satellite system, China has built just such a modernized fleet of 320 ships, including nuclear submarines and its first aircraft carriers.
Within two years, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reported that China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional American advantage in the Pacific, and warned that “we must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.” Under Trump’s latest $700-billion-plus defense budget, Washington has responded to this challenge with a crash program to build 46 new ships, which will raise its total to 326 by 2023. As China builds new naval bases bristling with armaments in the Arabian and South China seas, the U.S. Navy has begun conducting assertive “freedom-of-navigation” patrols near many of those same installations, heightening the potential for conflict.
It is in the commercial realm of trade and tariffs, however, where competition has segued into overt conflict. Acting on his belief that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” President Trump slapped heavy tariffs, targeted above all at China, on steel imports in March and, just a few weeks later, punished that country’s intellectual property theft by promising tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports. When those tariffs finally hit in July, China immediately retaliated against what it called “typical trade bullying” with similar tariffs on U.S. goods. The Financial Times warned that this “tit-for-tat” can escalate into a “full bore trade war… that will be very bad for the global economy.” As Trump threatened to tax $500 billion more in Chinese imports and issuedconfusing, even contradictory demands that made it unlikely Beijing could ever comply, observers became concerned that a long-lasting trade war could destabilize what the New York Times called the “mountain of debt” that sustains much of China’s economy. In Washington, the usually taciturn Federal Reserve chairman issued an uncommon warning that “trade tensions… could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global economy.”
China as Global Hegemon?
Although a withering of Washington’s global reach, abetted and possibly accelerated by the Trump presidency, is already underway, the shape of any future world order is still anything but clear. At present, China is the sole state with the obvious requisites for becoming the planet’s new hegemon. Its phenomenal economic rise, coupled with its expanding military and growing technological prowess, provide that country with the obvious fundamentals for superpower status.
Yet neither China nor any other state seems to have the full imperial complement of attributes to replace the United States as the dominant world leader. Apart from its rising economic and military clout, China, like its sometime ally Russia, has a self-referential culture, non-democratic political structures, and a developing legal system that could deny it some of the key instruments for global leadership.
In addition to the fundamentals of military and economic power, “every successful empire,” observes Cambridge University historian Joya Chatterji, “had to elaborate a universalist and inclusive discourse” to win support from the world’s subordinate states and their leaders. Successful imperial transitions driven by the hard power of guns and money also require the soft-power salve of cultural suasion for sustained and successful global dominion. Spain espoused Catholicism and Hispanism, the Ottomans Islam, the Soviets communism, France a cultural francophonie, and Britain an Anglophone culture. Indeed, during its century of global dominion from 1850 to 1940, Britain was the exemplar par excellence of such soft power, evincing an enticing cultural ethos of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the Anglican church, the English language and its literature, and the virtual invention of modern athletics (cricket, soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). Similarly, at the dawn of its global dominion, the United States courted allies worldwide through soft-power programs promoting democracy and development. These were made all the more palatable by the appeal of such things as Hollywood films, civic organizations like Rotary International, and popular sports like basketball and baseball.
China has nothing comparable. Its writing system has some 7,000 characters, not 26 letters. Its communist ideology and popular culture are remarkably, even avowedly, particularistic. And you don’t have to look far for another Asian power that attempted Pacific dominion without the salve of soft power. During Japan’s occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II, its troops went from being hailed as liberators to facing open revolt across the region after they failed to propagate their similarly particularistic culture.
As command-economy states for much of the past century, neither China nor Russia developed an independent judiciary or the autonomous rules-based order that undergirds the modern international system. From the foundation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 1899 through the formation of the International Court of Justice under the U.N.’s 1945 charter, the world’s nations have aspired to the resolution of conflicts via arbitration or litigation rather than armed conflict. More broadly, the modern globalized economy is held together by a web of conventions, treaties, patents, and contracts grounded in law.
From its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China gave primacy to the party and state, slowing the growth of an autonomous legal system and the rule of law. A test of its attitude toward this system of global governance came in 2016 when the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled unanimously that China’s claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea “are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful effect.” Beijing’s Foreign Ministry simply dismissed the adverse decision as “invalid” and without “binding force.” President Xi insisted China’s “territorial sovereignty and maritime rights” were unchanged, while the state Xinhua news agency called the ruling “naturally null and void.” Although China might be well placed to supplant Washington’s economic and military power, its capacity to assume leadership via that other aspect of the delicate duality of global power, a network of international organizations grounded in the rule of law, is still open to question.
If Donald Trump’s vision of world disorder is a sign of the American future and if Beijing’s projected $2 trillion in infrastructure investments, history’s largest by far, succeed in unifying the commerce and transport of Asia, Africa, and Europe, then perhaps the currents of financial power and global leadership will indeed transcend all barriers and flow inexorably toward Beijing, as if by natural law. But if that bold initiative ultimately fails, then for the first time in five centuries the world may face an imperial transition without a clear successor as global hegemon. Moreover, it will do so on a planet where the “new normal” of climate change — the heating of the atmosphere and the oceans, the intensification of flood, drought, and fire, the rising seas that will devastate coastal cities, and the cascading damage to a densely populated world — could mean that the very idea of a global hegemon is fast becoming a thing of the past.
- Man Pleads Guilty To Stealing $2 Million Of Crypto In Sensational Kidnapping
The grey-market appeal of cryptocurrencies, and the finality of every transaction encoded on a blockchain, has made them a choice target for hackers. This is something that those who lost money during the collapse of Mt. Gox know all too well. Earlier this year, cybersecurity company Carbon Black determined that roughly $1.1 billion worth of the digital currency had been stolen during the first half of 2018 alone. And while most of these were taken via digital finesse, some criminals have decided to go about stealing their bitcoin the old fashioned way.
Louis Meza (courtesy of the New York Daily News)
A New Jersey man named Louis Meza pled guilty to kidnapping an acquaintance and stealing a hard drive containing nearly $2 million in ethereum. The heist, which was orchestrated and carried out by Meza and several associates, was carried out late last year. After the sentencing, the Manhattan District Attorney’s office said that while it has prosecuted 25 cases involving the theft of crypto over the past year, Meza’s case stood out.
Here’s the WSJ:
A New Jersey man admitted in court Wednesday to kidnapping a friend and then stealing more than a million dollars in cryptocurrency from him, an unusual crime that is among the first major cryptocurrency cases brought by Manhattan prosecutors.
Louis Meza, of Passaic, N.J., pleaded guilty to second-degree kidnapping and first-degree grand larceny in state Supreme Court in Manhattan. Under the plea agreement, he agreed to a 10-year prison term, although his sentence will ultimately be determined by the judge.
As of a few years ago, the Manhattan district attorney’s office rarely investigated cases involving cryptocurrency. This year, it has had more than 25 investigations. Still, Mr. Meza’s case was unusual because he stole the currency not by hacking but through an elaborate, although old-fashioned, robbery.
“Louis Meza orchestrated a 21st-century stickup,” Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. said in a statement. “Then 21st-century investigators brought him swiftly to justice, securing a landmark conviction in an undeveloped area of the law.”
In an amusing twist, Meza met the victim – an old friend – at the Ruby Tuesday in Times Square. After enjoying a few drinks, Meza offered the victim a ride home in what he said was an Uber. However, once the two got in, one of Meza’s co-conspirators who was driving the vehicle pulled out a gun and threatened the victim. The three men then drove to the victim’s apartment, where they retrieved a hard drive containing more than one million in ether.
One evening in November, Mr. Meza and a longtime friend met for drinks at the Ruby Tuesday in Times Square. Afterward, when the friend said he would head home on the subway, prosecutors said, Mr. Meza steered him into a minivan that he claimed was an Uber.
Prosecutors said Mr. Meza met up with his co-conspirators in the Bronx, where they handed him the keys. Then, they said, Mr. Meza used the keys to let himself into his friend’s apartment and steal a small drive holding the cryptocurrency.
Meza acknowledged committing the crime in open court.
“You stole property valued over one million dollars?” Justice Melissa Jackson asked Mr. Meza on Wednesday.
Mr. Meza, wearing handcuffs and khaki jail scrubs, nodded.
“You, in the county of New York, on or about Nov. 4, abducted another person?” the judge asked.
Mr. Meza nodded again.
According to his lawyer, Meza is a “businessman” who has never before been in trouble with the law.
Moshe Horn, an attorney for Mr. Meza, said outside the courtroom that his client had been a businessman his whole life. “He had never been in trouble until now,” Mr. Horn said.
For what it’s worth, three other co-conspirators have been charged in the heist, but Meza refused to snitch on them. In addition to the prison time, Meza was forced to surrender nearly $1 million in cryptocurrency.
In June, three other men were indicted for participating in the robbery scheme. Those cases are pending. In his plea agreement, Mr. Meza didn’t agree to cooperate against them, according to his lawyer, Mr. Horn.
Under his agreement with prosecutors, Mr. Meza agreed to forfeit about 84 bitcoin – now worth roughly $589,000 – and 269,000 SALT lending tokens, a loan product backed by cryptocurrency.
Even as the price of a bitcoin has continued to unravel, we imagine we’ll be seeing more heists like these. After all, it’s much easier to jack a hard drive than an ATM.
- How People Become Easily Controlled By Tyrants
Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,
The question often arises in liberty movement circles as to how we get to the point of full blown tyranny within a society. There are numerous factors that determine this outcome, but through all the various totalitarian systems in history there are common denominators – elements that must be there for tyrants to prevail. When we can identify these common elements in an objective manner, we make it far more difficult for despotic structures to stand.
This is a very complex issue, but I’ll break it down as best as I’m able…
The Psychology Of The Tyrant
To come to terms with how tyrants control society, we must first examine how the mind of a tyrant operates, because these people do not in most cases think the way average human beings think. It is one of the few cases in which I would encourage people to “otherize” another group. Tyrants are psychologically abnormal to such an extreme that is is difficult to classify them as human.
I believe the key to understanding the motivations of tyrants and where these people come from rests on our understanding of narcissistic sociopathy. I wrote about this extensively in my article ‘Global Elitists Are Not Human,’ so I will only give a summary here.
Narcissistic and sociopathic traits, like many psychological traits, are inborn. They are present in about 5% to 10% of any society at any given time. In the vast majority of cases, these traits remain “latent” and do not affect a person’s actions or relationships to a great extent. In a minority of cases, however, narcissism and sociopathy become the defining factors of a person’s psyche. This occurs in less that 1% of a population.
To be clear, not all narcissists are sociopaths and not all sociopaths are narcissists. There are people who are low level narcissists who excel in society and retain a conscience. There are low level sociopaths in society that serve important functions in careers that empathetic people would find difficult, such as certain jobs in the military, or in the medical field. What I am referring to here are HIGH LEVEL narcissistic sociopaths – the kind of people that become murderers, rapists, pedophiles, and yes, tyrants.
A sociopathic narcissist is motivated by personal desire only. They are incapable of empathy for others and see people as a kind of food and fuel source rather than fellow travelers in life. They consider their lack of conscience as an evolutionary advantage; a tool that helps them to survive and thrive by trampling, stealing, manipulating and killing if necessary without guilt or regret.
You would think these creatures would be easy to pick out in a crowd, but it is not always so simple. They have the ability to mimic behaviors of those around them in order to appear more human. Sometimes this does give them away because they can’t help but parrot or steal behaviors and mannerisms from people they meet to the point of obviousness. For those inexperienced with narcissistic sociopaths, though, the tactic works for a time, because what people think they see is someone just like them; a reflection. Imagine it as a survival mechanism, like a chameleon.
For some tyrants, the ability makes them endearing to the public for a time. They can be many things to many groups, and their ability to lie convincingly is exceptional. They climb the ladder of success quickly, and build systems that allow them to prosper. They do have doubts and weaknesses, though.
They are in most cases cowardly. They prefer to get what they want through subversion and trickery, and they run from direct confrontation. They prefer to use other people (useful idiots) as weapons or shields rather than risk facing off with their ideological opponents. As parasites, they focus on the weak minded or the fragile.
They desperately want admiration from the very people they victimize. Therefore, they are constantly forced to play roles in order to appear normal. They do not like this. They feel that it is below their station in life to pander, and they are convinced that they should be worshiped as they are, not worshiped for the fraudulent image they have constructed. They want to “come out of the closet,” in a sense, as a narcissistic sociopath, but if they do under a stable social climate they will be shunned or burned at the stake. They sometimes band together for protection, and are willing to work with each other as long as there is mutual benefit.
Thus, these “people” seek to create chaos, and then to reorder society to act more like they act, or think more like they think. When the masses have been convinced to abandon conscience, then the monsters can come out into the light of day without fear.
Here is how they achieve this goal, and how average people help them do it…
False Assumptions
Almost all bad situations start with false assumptions based on bias rather than facts or evidence. The most dangerous assumption when it comes to tyranny is to say “we are in the right, therefore we are not supporting tyranny.” The question that needs to be asked, though, is are they really “right” according to the facts? If the answer is “no,” then they are probably fueling a tyrannical system.
First and foremost, many human beings want to be “right” more than they want to be correct. That is to say, they are happy to “win” arguments and conflicts regardless of whether or not the truth is on their side. This bias is the root of many catastrophes in history.
This is not to say that they don’t have a conscience. Most people in fact do have a conscience that tells them their assumptions are wrong, but they can still commit acts of stupidity and atrocity. This is where tyrannical manipulators tend to help them along.
Tyrants find great joy in creating all kinds of logical fallacies, mental gymnastics and morally relative sales pitches in order to convince a group of people that their wrong assumptions are right. The truth becomes foggy and evidence becomes unnecessary. In this state of mind, when individuals melt together into a mob, assumptions become cult dictates and “winning” becomes paramount. False assumptions and biases can be used to turn normal upstanding people into monsters, all because they refused to accept that their ideological position was flawed; all because they were afraid to feel embarrassed or admit they had been conned.
False Sides
The taking of sides in political discourse is natural and normal. Even when people are entirely honest about the facts on hand and agree on basic principles of human decency and freedom, they will STILL disagree on what solutions should be used to deal with the problems in front of them. This creates a spectrum within society that is ever present; it cannot be helped or avoided. Tyrants understand the basis of this spectrum and try to use it to their advantage to manipulate people away from thoughtful discourse and towards mindless conflict.
Tyrants exploit the masses more easily when people assume that corrupt political and social leaders are working for “their side” against the “other side.” Often these leaders can be bought or threatened into subservience. Tyrants then use them to drive the spectrum to the furthest opposites, until both sides adopt an attitude of zealotry.
This happens not only in politics, but in geopolitics, as entire nations are driven to war with each other by puppet presidents and governments over engineered conflicts that only ever benefit the cabal of tyrants behind the curtain.
Zealotry And False Narratives
I view zealotry as a kind of psychological disease that is actually communicable – it spreads like a virus through a culture until everyone is infected. Zealotry happens when a person embraces an ideology to the point that it overrides their personality and their soul, and they are no longer able to think clearly as an individual. This includes considering the possibility that they are on the wrong side of history and morality.
Zealotry on a mass scale depends on a number of dominoes set in succession. The threat of civil breakdown and economic suffering helps. Ideological opponents must be painted as an imminent and vile threat to the very fabric of society. In some cases they are a real and created threat (controlled opposition); in other cases they are a paper tiger meant to drive another group to support tyrannical measures.
Tyrants build false narratives. This is what they do best. They encourage people to unknowingly become villains, or they accuse innocent groups of villainy in order to sow division. They need all sides to see everyone else either as an ally or an enemy. There is no in-between. If a person does not conform to the views of the zealot, then he must be immediately treated as a threat. This causes an endless echo chamber which destroys all dissent or disagreement, no matter how rational.
Zealots operate primarily on fear, making them easy prey for tyrants. And as some nerd somewhere once said, “Fear is the mind killer; fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.”
Apathy And False Hope
More than anything else, tyrants desire an apathetic population. Apathy breeds complacency and inaction, and it also encourages delusional thinking. Apathetic people tend towards the philosophy of pacifism as a means to vindicate their own behavior, but this is merely a mask designed to hide their fear. They might fear suffering, they might fear loss, they might fear failure, but they certainly have fear, and it stops them from standing in the way of developments that they know are evil in nature and that require an aggressive response.
Apathy can also be bred into a society through the use of false hopes. Tyrants conjure scenarios in which the public is made to believe positive “change” is about to take place, usually through politics. But, there will be no change for the better beyond the cosmetic. Things only get worse. In this process of conditioning, tyrants raise up the hopes of the masses, and then dash them to the ground over and over, until the public gives up.
The problem is not that things cannot change for the better, but that the public keeps playing by the rules of a game fabricated by the very people that are causing their misery. Stepping outside the constraints of that game requires us to take matters into our own hands rather than waiting around for others to make changes for us. It requires risk. If the farce of tyranny is to ever end, all awake and aware people will have to take many risks.
I have heard it argued that tyranny is a natural and inevitable product of human society. That tyrants cannot be avoided, that they will always exist and any attempt to remove them will result in them only being replaced with other tyrants. This is the pinnacle of the pathetic mindset. It is the dark void of nihilism.
One could also argue that there is no point to washing ourselves because we are just going to get dirty again tomorrow. But these people would eventually die of disease. If tyranny is a human constant, then rebellion must also be a human constant, otherwise, humanity dies or is turned into something unrecognizable.
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- Israel's Military Censor Removed News Report Detailing IDF Support To Anti-Assad Fighters
The Jerusalem Post has confirmed it was told to remove a story on Israel providing weapons and supplies to anti-Assad factions fighting in Syria by the Israeli army’s military censor.
In a written statement to RT News, the Jerusalem Post said, “We were told by the army’s military censor to remove that part of the story.”
It’s been long known that Israel has assisted armed groups seeking to topple the Syrian government, especially those operating in Syria’s south and along the Golan Heights region throughout the past years of the war.
But the report, ‘IDF confirms: Israel provided light-weapons to Syrian rebels,’ is the first time the IDF publicly acknowledged the program, which involved the transfer of significant amounts of cash, weapons and ammunition to militants operating near the border with Israel. The bombshell report was removed from the Jerusalem Post’s website a mere hours after publication, but can still be accessed using Google cache.
The now censored article explicitly negates prior claims by the IDF that it had not intervened in the war in Syria, and further confirmed that prior charges made by President Assad that the Syrian Army had routinely recovered weapons and supplies with Hebrew inscriptions from insurgent positions were in reality accurate even though widely dismissed at the time in international media.
The cached piece begins by highlighting that “Bashar Assad claimed that Israel had been providing arms to terror groups and its forces had regularly seized arms and munitions with inscriptions in Hebrew.”
And it goes on to confirm that this was indeed the case, saying the IDF “on Monday confirmed that as part of Operation Good Neighbor Israel had been regularly supplying Syrian rebels near its border with light weapons and ammunition in order to defend themselves from attacks and a substantial amount of cash to buy additional arms.”
The Jerusalem Post’s statement to RT confirming the take down noted it was “for security reasons evidently.”
A prior widely circulated photograph showing IDF soldiers at a border checkpoint speaking to al-Qaeda linked (Nusra) insurgents.
The report further detailed that “Israel had been arming at least seven different rebel groups in Syria’s Golan Heights, including the Fursan al-Joulan rebel group which had around 400 fighters and had been given an estimated $5,000 per month by Israel.” The IDF had called its long-running assistance to the groups, many of which have had an established history of cooperation with al-Qaeda, “the right decision”.
Meanwhile, in a separate Jerusalem Post story published at the start of this week, the IDF admitted that Israel has carried out over 200 strikes on targets inside Syria during the past year and a half. The report claimed these were primarily missions against Iranian targets and assets in the country.
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