Lew Rockwell Institute

This is Israel. This is what the Zionist project looks like. The dead kids. The blown-out hospitals. The desperate, starving civilians. This is it.

There is no alternate version of Israel where these things are not happening. The liberal Zionist vision of a two-state solution and a just and peaceful Israel exists solely in the imaginations of the people who envision it. Nothing like it has ever existed. Everything about the modern state of Israel is unyieldingly hostile to that vision.

You either support the existence of the Israel you see before you, or you support the end of the apartheid Zionist entity. There is no hidden third option. There are no other positions on the menu. To pretend otherwise is to live in a fantasy land.

You either want to burn children alive, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately starve civilians, or you don’t. You either want to bomb hospitals, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately assassinate Palestinian journalists while forbidding foreign journalists entry into Gaza, or you don’t. You either want to deliberately massacre civilians and systematically destroy civilian infrastructure in order to force the removal of Palestinians from a Palestinian territory, or you don’t. And if you don’t, you must oppose the state of Israel.

That’s Israel, the state. Not just Netanyahu. Not just extremist settlers. Not just “far right elements within the Israeli government”. Israel itself. Because everything we are seeing Israel do is the result of everything Israel is as a state.

Everything Israel is doing is the result of everything it has always been. As soon as the west decided to drop a settler-colonialist state on top of a pre-existing civilization wherein the new immigrants would receive preferential treatment over the indigenous inhabitants who were already living there, it became inevitable that Israel would wind up in the condition it’s in today.

Because there was no way to uphold that status quo without mass displacement and nonstop tyranny, violence and abuse. There was no way to set up a tiered society where one tier is placed above the other without indoctrinating the public to accept that apartheid system by systematically dehumanizing the members of the disempowered group.

Set up a status quo of dehumanizing a group of people and manufacturing consent for violence and abuse against them, and you will inevitably wind up with a far right apartheid state which is committing genocide, as surely as dropping a stone off a building will result in a stone falling to the ground.

What we are seeing in Gaza today was baked into the state of Israel ever since its inception.

All those dead kids on your social media feed are the fruit of a tree whose seed was planted after the second world war. That tree has been bearing more and more fruit, and it will continue to for as long as it remains standing. Because that’s just the kind of tree it is. The only kind of tree it ever could have been.

Saying “I support Israel but I don’t support the actions of Netanyahu in Gaza” is like saying “I like this apple tree but only when it sprouts coconuts instead of apples.” That is not the kind of tree it is. The apple tree will only produce apples, and the genocide tree will only produce genocide.

Israel’s supporters avoid confronting obvious truths like these. Support for Israel depends on mass-scale psychological compartmentalization. Everything about it revolves around avoiding unpleasant truths instead of deeply and viscerally reckoning with them.

Averting the eyes from the video footage of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. Averting the eyes from the contradictions between the values they purport to hold and everything Israel is as a state. Averting the eyes from the mountains upon mountains of evidence staring us all in the face. That’s the only way support for Israel is able to continue.

In order to become a truth-driven species, we need to stop hiding from uncomfortable truths. And one of our favorite hiding places for uncomfortable truths at this point in history is the modern state of Israel, and the western empire’s support for it.

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More than 100 years ago, the world went to war over a squabble in the Balkans and the assassination of a Balkan politico – the Archduke Franz Ferdinand – in Serbia. What followed was both ridiculous and tragic –  and it looks like it may happen again.

This time, over a ridiculous little comedian who plays the role of “president” of Ukraine, a piece of the old Soviet Union that is being used as a front for a proxy war on Russia, which has so far shown almost unbelievable restraint in the face of provocations so obnoxious only an American jingo could fail to see it. Of course, Americans are lectured endlessly about “Putin’s aggression” – nevermind the aggression of America in backing the loathsome little comedian with weapons and support. And nevermind that the whole dirty business was precipitated by obnoxious reneging on promises made to the Russians that Ukraine would not become a member of NATO, something the Russians understandably consider to be unacceptable for exactly the same reason Americans would consider it unacceptable if Mexico or Canada became a Warsaw Pact member. One does not need to be a genius to comprehend this. Just not a blinkered, flag-humping jingoist.

The Russians have put up with a lot. More than we would have put up with. It seems clear that Putin does not want to go to war with NATO, which would mean going to war with the United States. On the contrary, it seems very clear there are people occupying positions of authority in the United States – such as the loathsome Lindsey Graham, senator from Boeing – who want very much to goad the Russians into a war with NATO and so with the United States. If this happens – and at this point, it seems more likely than ever that it will happen, unless these maniacs are somehow dealt with – it will be even more ridiculous and far more tragic than the world going to war over the assassination of Franz Fucking Ferdinand. The latter was at least the heir to throne of Austria-Hungary – whereas the “president” of Ukraine is a third-rate comedian who played the president of Ukraine (literally) before he became “president” – which happened after he played the piano with his penis on TeeVee.

It is nothing less than astounding that – as of this writing – Keeeeeeeeeevv (as we’re superciliously expected to enunciate the name of the capital city of Ukraine) has not been flattened if not turned to glass in the wake of the mass drone attack the other day deep inside Russian territory that destroyed a number of Russia’s long-range strategic bombers, their counterparts of our B-52s.

Chew on that. Try to not be a flag-humping jingo, if you are one (turn off that horrible jingo jerk-off Lee Greenwood song Trump loves to play) and imagine the Russians egging on the Cubans to launch a mass drone attack on American strategic assets such as B-52 bombers. Imagine even one of ours got bombed to smithereens on our soil by a Cuban drone probably supplied by the Russians and almost certainly guided to its target with the help of the Russians.

Of course, the Russians would never do that as they are not insane. More finely, that country is not under the control of lunatics, as here – all of whom, to a man, are old men with no skin in the game who believe they will be just fine, even if the Russians are goaded beyond what they can suffer and respond.

When they do, it will be something a sane mind has difficulty imagining. More finely, a sane mind has difficulty understanding why anyone not out of their mind would risk it, over Wlodomyr  Fucking Zelensky and that Balkan country which isn’t worth (to quote Bismarck) the bones of a single healthy Pomeranian grenadier.

Let alone an American.

Except, perhaps Graham and his ilk.

This article was originally published on Eric Peters Autos.

The post Today’s Franz Ferdinand appeared first on LewRockwell.

In 1976 the French anthropologist Emmanuel Todd predicted the down fall of the Soviet Union. In After The Empire, first published in French in 2001, he predicted the (relative) decline of the United States.

In his latest (and last) book, La Défaite de l’Occident (The Defeat of the West), he laments the West’s inability to distinguish facts from wishes, as seen in its behavior during the war in Ukraine. Nihilism, a lack of values and of acceptance of reality, has infested western thinking:

Trans ideology is therefore, in my opinion, one of the flags of this nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy not just things and people but reality.

Todd recently opened a substack where he is posting speeches and talks he has given.

Two of those, a recent talk given in Russia (in French) and one given in Hungary (in English) make (mostly) similar points.

The downfall of the Soviet Union led to deep psychological and societal dislocations in Russia. The defeat of the West, or ‘liberal democracy’,  is leading to similar consequences in Western societies.

While Todd had predicted the fall of the Soviet Union, he had not anticipated the consequences it would have for Russia:

But the collapse of Russia in the 1990s is something I would never have anticipated. The fundamental reason why I was unable to understand or anticipate the dislocation of Russia itself is that I had not understood that communism was not simply a means of organising economic activity in Russia, but also a kind of religion. It was belief that allowed the system to exist and the dissolution of that belief represented, of course, something at least as damaging as the dislocation of the economic system.

It took three decades for Russia to overcome the psychological dislocation that was the result of the destruction of its political and economical system.

Todd is suspecting that a similar process is currently happening in the West:

All of this has a bearing upon what is happening today. I will talk about two things in my lecture. I will talk about the defeat of the West, by which I mean something quite technical and specific, which is not very complex and has not surprised me. I had anticipated it, and to a certain extent it’s already under way in Ukraine. But we are now in the next phase, which is the dislocation of the West, and I have to say that, just as in the dislocation of communism, of the Soviet system, I am unable to understand exactly what is going on. The fundamental attitude that we need to have now is, I would say, an attitude of humility. Everything that’s happening, especially since the election of Donald Trump, surprises me.

I have been surprised by the violence with which Trump has turned against his Ukrainian and Europeans allies – or rather his vassals. The will of the Europeans to continue or restart the war – even though Europe is certainly the region of the world which would be most advantaged by a peace agreement – has also been a great surprise to me. We have to start from these surprises if we want to think properly about what’s going on.

I will discuss those surprises, some of which concern me a lot, in a later piece.

The defeat of the Soviet Union (and Russia) came after it had lost the economic war with the West. It had also lost a war in Afghanistan. The Soviet system had turned out to be a failure.

The West, or as Mearsheimer is arguing (vid), ‘liberal hegemony’, has been routed in Afghanistan. The attempts to ‘liberate’ Libya and Syria have failed to the point where the Western ‘war on terror’ launched against al-Qaeda has led to the installation of an al-Qaeda bigwig as the new president of Syria. The economic decline of the West is demonstrated by the rise of China. The West’s moral self-defeat of its ‘values’ can be daily witnessed in Gaza.

‘Liberal democracy’, the system of ideas that has for decades been the leading light of the West, has failed.

Like communism in Russia, ‘liberal democracy’ has not only an economic side but is also a kind of religion. The failure of this belief system is upon us.

The accumulation of defeat after defeat by the ‘liberal democracy’ system has led to a psychological breakdown, an internal dislocation of the West. This is now leading to irrational acts and to seeking refuge in wishful thinking.

Or, as Alastair Crooke is summarizing the phenomenon and warns:

The psychological dislocation caused by ‘defeat’ may explain (but not justify) the West’s ‘curious’ inability to understand world events: The almost pathological dissociation from the real world that it displays in its words and actions: It’s blindness – for example, to the Russian experience of history and to the long history behind Shi’a defiance in Iran. Yet, even as the political situation deteriorates … there is no sign of the West becoming more reality-based in its understanding – and it is very likely that it will continue to live in its alternative construction of reality – until it is forcibly expelled.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.

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As the media is reporting, Ukraine just launched a massive drone attack that wreaked major destruction deep inside Russia. Ukrainian officials smuggled the drones in trucks into Russia and launched them from inside the country. U.S. officials and the U.S. mainstream press are praising the attack as a brilliant maneuver. They are hoping that the attack will force Russia to the negotiating table with the aim of bringing an end to the war.

One thing is clear: the attack now escalates the conflict in a major way. Ukraine has now shown that it can attack military installations, towns, and cities deep inside Russia.

An important question that is not being asked is: Did Pentagon or CIA officials serve as secret advisors or directors in the drone operation? Since Congress is effectively owned by the U.S. national-security establishment, it’s a question that unfortunately is not going to be asked by any congressional committee. Given the longtime deference to the national-security establishment by the mainstream media, the question is unlikely to come from them either and even if it did, there is no doubt that the Pentagon and CIA would deny it even if they were involved.

Why is the question important? Well, think about it: The U.S. government furnishes weaponry to the Ukrainian government to use against Russian forces. But let’s assume that it goes one step further than that. Let’s assume that it also assists, advises, and directs Ukrainian officials in the use of such weaponry.

That would mean, as a practical matter, that it was the U.S. government that launched that drone attack and was simply using Ukraine as its agent — in order to preserve “plausible deniability.” It would mean, as a practical matter, that it is the U.S. government that is using its weaponry to kill and injure Russian soldiers and destroy Russian armaments, not only in Ukraine but also deep inside Russia.

Ukraine and U.S. officials are hoping that Ukraine’s drone attack will force Russia to end the war. But what they are ignoring in this calculus is the big elephant in the room — NATO. It was because of NATO’s expansion eastward and its threat to absorb Ukraine that caused Russia to invade Ukraine in the first place.

After considerable sacrifice of men, money, and armaments, how likely is it that Russia would agree to a peace treaty that leaves NATO on Ukraine’s border and ready to absorb Ukraine on a moment’s notice? I say: Not likely at all. Even if a peace treaty promised that NATO would not absorb Ukraine, everyone knows that the U.S. government cannot be trusted to keep its word. After all, let’s not forget that U.S. officials promised that NATO would not move eastward, and it broke that promise.

Thus, with NATO still in existence and still on Ukraine’s border, why would Russia be interested in settling the war, given that that’s what motivated Russia to invade Ukraine in the first place? And yet we all know that U.S. officials would not think of dismantling NATO or even just moving it back to Western Europe as part of a peace treaty.

Given these intractable positions, the war will inevitably continue, notwithstanding the fondest hopes of U.S. and Ukrainian officials. But the problem is that the longer it goes on, the more dangerous it is becoming. What if U.S. officials actually are secretly assisting, advising, and directing Ukrainian attacks on Russia? Wouldn’t this be sufficient importantly that Congress, not the Pentagon and the CIA, should decide it? Isn’t that why the Constitution places the decision to go to war against another nation-state in the hands of Congress rather than the Pentagon and the CIA?

One of the big problems with war is its unpredictable nature. How long will Russia put up with U.S. armaments being used to kill and maim Russian soldiers and destroy Russian armaments and property without attacking the armaments before they reach Ukraine, especially if Russia concludes that it is actually the Pentagon and the CIA who are waging the war using Ukraine as their agent? If Russia were to attack such armaments before they arrived in Ukraine, say in staging grounds in NATO member Poland, we all know what that would mean — all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia. Even if the U.S were to “win” such a war, the United States would cease to exist as a viable nation.

All this is simply to show that the U.S. national-security establishment, operating through its Cold War dinosaur NATO, is getting the United States ever close to the possibility of the nuclear destruction of our nation. Would “winning” a nuclear war with Russia be worth it? Is NATO worth it? I say no. I say it’s time to throw not only NATO into the dustbin of history but also the U.S. national-security state form of governmental structure that was foisted upon our land in the 1940s to protect us from the supposed international communist conspiracy that, U.S. officials claimed, was based in Moscow.

Reprinted with permission from Future of Freedom Foundation.

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I raise the question in the title because the Russian media looks askance at what it labels “a rise in the popularity of right-wing forces” in “recent elections in three EU countries.”  The Russian media describes as “right-wing” the awakened ethnic nationalities–the French of France, the Germans of Germany–as “right-wing.”  But President Putin of Russia describes Russia as Russian, even though the Federation is comprised of different nationalities.  Putin stresses that whatever the ethnicities of the Russian Federation, all are Russian.  This is likely the case as the non-Russian ethnicities have been part of Russia for a very long time, whereas in the West the newly-arriving immigrant-invaders are proving to be unassimilable hostiles.

Putin doesn’t regard Russian ethnicity, an ethnicity extended to the Muslim provinces of the Federation such as Chechnya, as right-wing. So why does Russia regard European ethnic nationality “right-wing?”

The answer, I think, is that the American, European and British left-wing have conflated an ethnic consciousness that constitutes a national state with Nazism.  The Nazis were a socialist party, not a right-wing one.  But they were National Socialists which the left-wing contrasted with approved international socialism associated with the Soviet Union. Right-wing became anything to the right  of  Trotskyist International Communism. Nationalism was seen as a barrier to the spread of Communism, and thus it was evil.

Do Russians comprehend that European ethnic states are being over run by non-European ethniticies and that France is ceasing to be France, that Britain is ceasing to be British, that Germany is ceasing to be German?

The efforts of European peoples to defend their ethnicities is not right-wing. If Marine Le Pen is a Nazi because she speaks for the ethnic French people, so is Putin who describes Russia as Russian.

Russians should understand that the reappearance of ethnic nationalism in Europe is a demand for sovereignty and is compatible with Putin’s demand for Russian sovereignty.  Instead of falling into the narrative that ethnic nationalism is right-wing, hence Nazi, Russians should realize that ethnic European national states are allies who wish to be free of open borders that are overwhelming Europe with immigrant-invaders.

French President General Charles de Gaulle was the last independent European leader.  He refused Franch’s entry into the American empire and refused to submit France to NATO.  If European ethnic nationalism can be revived, it means the end of Washington’s European empire.  

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The United States, formerly these united colonies, is preparing for its 250th anniversary of its break-up from that era’s Great Satan by reminding us of what brought it about, such as the Battle of Lexington and Concord and subsequent battles of 1775, along with issues that preceded them.  In spite of all the bloodshed and fiery tavern rhetoric, most members of the Continental Congress wanted reconciliation from Britain, not independence, even after the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense on January 10, 1776.

“Nobody whose voice counted within the American colonies,” writes John Keane in Tom Paine: A Political Life, “thought outside the existing terms of the British Empire.” At the same time, the colonists’ “fearless love of English liberties [made] them in spirit more English than the English.”

As Paine’s pamphlet “poured off the presses in a never-ending stream” during the spring and summer of 1776, it not only roused the rabble but swayed key military personnel such as George Washington, Commander in Chief of the Continental Army, who described it as “working a wonderful change in the minds of many men” while pronouncing its reasoning “unanswerable” and converting him in full to independence.

By April 1776 Paine estimated that 120,000 copies of his pamphlet had already been published and was spreading far and wide.  As Keane tells us,

Common Sense fueled the desire of some Virginia tobacco planters to repudiate their large debts to British merchants, fanned the ambitions of certain colonial leaders to boost their reputations by declaring the colonies independent, and fired the aspirations of some colonial merchants and producers to escape the trading restrictions imposed by British navigation acts.

Its impact on all areas of colonial life would be difficult to exaggerate.  “Whether intended or not, Paine had succeeded in outflanking the very body that was supposed to be the mouthpiece of the American colonists.”  Founder Benjamin Rush, who suggested the title “Common Sense,” claimed it was “delivered from the pulpit instead of a sermon by a clergyman in Connecticut.”  Silas Deane, a commercial agent for Congress in France, said it “has a greater run, if possible, here than in America.”

How did Paine suddenly show up?

Members of the Continental Congress were not all rich, possessed of prestigious degrees, or lawyers.  But many had established leadership skills and could generally be considered successful individuals. Paine had none of these attributes.  In no sense could he be considered an elite.  His life until late 1774 was a train of personal and occupational failures. So how did he become, in some 13 months, the American Revolution’s major catalyst?

We can get some idea of his sudden emergence from his character and three strong influences.

Paine was born in Thetford, England on January 1737 to a Quaker father and an Anglican mother.  What made Thetford special — and his first influence — was its close proximity to an annual execution site called Gallows Hill. A bureaucrat with the title Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas traveled from Cambridge to Thetford each spring to conduct the executions. “His arrival in Paine’s hometown was bathed in pomp,” Keane writes, “above all because the Lord Chief Justice symbolized the power of George II’s government over outlying courts and regions.”

The accused had no say in their trials.  They stood mute, awaiting their punishment.  Most were accused of petty offenses.  Of these, they were “ordered to be branded, put in the town pillory, publicly or privately whipped, or fined and imprisoned.”  Criminal cases typically involved “ad hoc acts against property — that is, driven by material desperation and not by any widespread culture of criminality within the ranks of the poor.”  The Lord Chief Justice would hang a beggar (never a gentleman) for stealing a bushel of wheat or purchasing a stolen horse.  On Gallows Hill they were dressed in blue coats, made to listen to some prayers and hymns, then ordered to mount the scaffold before being hanged and left to dangle in public for a day.

Paine witnessed this ritual for the first 19 years of his life.

During the next two decades Paine “relentlessly failed in everything personal and professional” he attempted, writes Craig Nelson in Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations, including staymaker, taxman, grocer, teacher, and husband (twice), his last marriage ending in divorce.

Paine meets Franklin

At this point, with nothing to lose, he decided to see what London had to offer, where he met some scientists and American diplomat Benjamin Franklin.  Paine’s sharp wit and keen interest in science impressed Franklin, leading to the second key influence of his life when Franklin, on September 30, 1774, wrote a letter of recommendation for Paine to carry to his son-in-law Richard Bache (“Beech”) in Philadelphia: “If you can put him [Paine] in a way of obtaining employment as a clerk, or assistant tutor in a school,” as a means of subsistence, you “much oblige your affectionate father.”

The only catch was Paine had to sail to Philadelphia first.  As Nelson writes,

Traveling to the other side of the world meant facing the threats of marine storms, becalmings, icebergs, pilot error, and rotted food, not to mention state-sanctioned buccaneering.

At age 37, Paine had already surpassed his life expectancy of 36.6 years. What would drive him to board a ship when his likely future was so uninspiring and uncertain?  Nevertheless, he did, and it almost killed him, as he wrote to Franklin later:

I had very little hope that the Captain or myself would live to see America. Dr. Kearsley of this place, attended the ship on her arrival, and when he understood that I was on your recommendation he provided a lodging for me, and sent two of his men with a chaise to bring me on shore, for I could not at that time turn in my bed without help.

After six weeks of bed rest in Kearsley’s home, Paine found other lodging and a job as editor of a new monthly periodical, The Pennsylvania Magazine.  The city in which he now lived, with a population of 30,000, was the wealthiest and largest in America.  His job as editor was to inform its readers, per the magazine’s owner Robert Aiken, not to create controversy, a rule Paine violated often.

The colonies were such a motley lot that “the entire continent teetered at the edge of civil war,” Nelson writes.  The population was too heterogeneous a mix “of class, religion, traditions, food, and beliefs [to expect them to] cohere into a unified nation.  Though two-thirds of colonial America had come from one tiny island, and the vast majority of them from a very narrow socioeconomic range, they had, in every other way measurable, absolutely nothing in common.”

Paine was too happy in America to let such things bother him, as he wrote in the magazine’s first issue, January 24, 1775:

America yet inherits a large portion of her first-imported virtue. Degeneracy is here almost a useless word. Those who are conversant with Europe would be tempted to believe that even the air of the Atlantic disagrees with the constitution of foreign vices; if they survive the voyage, they [the vices] either expire on their arrival, or linger away in an incurable consumption. There is a happy something in the climate of America, which disarms them of all their power both of infection and attraction. [my emphasis]

Further on, he mentioned that wit, “though it attacks with more subtlety than science, has often defeated a whole regiment of heavy artillery.”

It turned out that many of the motley mix did have something in common, a love of liberty and a hatred of arbitrary authority.  ”With a high rate of literacy in the colonies,” writes Jack Fruchtman, Jr., in Thomas Paine: Apostle of Freedom, “even the artisans and craftsmen read the newspapers and pamphlets of the day,” thus providing Paine an eager audience.

Paine’s skillful writing brought the motley mix together when Benjamin Rush encouraged him to write a pamphlet.  According to Rush’s “not entirely accurate memoirs,” Nelson asserts, “[Paine] readily assented to the proposal, and from time to time he called at my house, and read to me every chapter of the proposed pamphlet as he composed it.”

Common Sense had many influences, but the words were Paine’s alone.  No member of Congress, not even Sam Adams, had the audacity to say that kings originally were “nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, whose savage manners or pre-eminence in subtlety obtained him the title of chief among plunderers.”

It is such bold, direct language that won the day then and serves to sustain us now.

P.S.  For a researched account of Paine’s role in the Revolution, see my speculative screenplay, “Eyes of Fire: Thomas Paine and the American Revolution.”  Or see my more reader-friendly book of the same name.

The post The Failure To Stop Thomas Paine appeared first on LewRockwell.

POTUS better wake up. Quick. The Deep State is in the midst of f#cking him yet again.

We are referring, of course, to Sunday’s utterly reckless attack on Russia’s strategic nuclear deterrent, allegedly by the Ukrainian military. Yes, the one that’s so feeble and incompetent that thus far it has lost one-fifth of its territory—despite upwards 150,000 dead soldiers according to Col. Douglas Macgregor and more than $200 billion of US and European military and economic aid.

That is to say, the Sunday drone attack according to Zelensky himself was nearly 20 months in the making. So it was surely hatched, kitted, trained and pre-positioned with heavy duty support from US covert operations and then actually triggered, launched and guided by US intelligence assets.

Stated inversely, it appears that forces which were most surely not the bedraggled Ukrainian military operating in rogue fashion attacked the heart of Russia’s nuclear deterrent. And yet and yet: It is likely that the Donald was also not honestly informed ahead of time!

After all, when Trump had his “Putin’s gone crazy” outburst a few days ago he didn’t even know—by his own public admission—that a swarm of Ukrainian drones had attacked Putin’s helicopter while the latter was being transported inside it. And again, given the in-depth layers of protection around Putin, there is not a snowball’s chance in the hot place that the Ukrainian military pulled off this near-miss on Russia’s demonized dictator without heavy duty intelligence support from the US.

Therefore, we are strongly inclined to believe that the Deep State is once again sabotaging the Donald while keeping him in the dark about crucial operations that bear heavily on the risk of escalation and war with Russia. To be sure, in connection with his outburst at Putin, Trump did warn that something “VERY BAD” could happen to Russia without him, but when you see all caps you know it’s just regular Trumpian bluster of the kind that is now being emitted from the man’s social media accounts on nearly a daily basis.

Besides, we believe Trump is attempting to function as an honest peace-maker on the Ukraine front because he suffers badly from NPPE (Nobel Peace Prize Envy). In turn, the latter is due to Obama’s surely undeserved snaring of the award within months of taking office. Accordingly, the Donald may well be playing an amateur “art of the deal” game with Putin on Ukraine, but we don’t think for a moment that he would have been knowingly reckless enough to put his prize in jeopardy by authorizing attacks on four or five of Russia’s strategic bomber airfields.

And we do mean “knowing” in the sense of comprehending as opposed to the wild ass bluster Trump frequently emits—even when he doesn’t vaguely appreciate the stakes, such as was evident in his 72-hour threat to put a 50% tariff on $600 billion of imports from the EU. So it needs be understood that what is reported to be the destruction or serious impairment of between 20 and 40 of Russia’s heavy intercontinental strategic bombers at at least four different Russian bases thousands of miles from both Ukraine’s borders and from each other constitutes a drastic escalation of the proxy war on Russia, veering toward the precipice of nuclear confrontation.

These hits on Russia’s strategic bombers by the nominally “Ukrainian” drone swarms—about 120 devices in total—account for upwards of 20-25% of the bomber leg of Russia’s triad nuclear deterrent. Yet these long range heavy bombers have had almost no role in Russia’s attacks on Ukraine because in the actual war theater it primarily uses intermediate range bombers to launch cruise missile assaults, and, if need be, could use ground based launching pads, as well.

So the Sunday drone attack had no resemblance whatsoever to a militarily-relevant knock-out blow. Instead, it amounted to an order of magnitude escalation toward nuclear confrontation designed to prolong and intensify Washington’s proxy war on Russia and throw immense new roadblocks in the path of a negotiated peace agreement.

Most especially, these reckless attacks were irrelevant to Ukraine’s rapidly deteriorating position on the battle front at the line of contact in eastern Ukraine. In fact, just during the last week of May the Russian forces captured another 18 settlements and villages and over 200 square kilometers of territory, meaning that the Ukrainian army is no longer capable to hold its defense lines and that the end is near.

At the same time, this drone attack hugely implicated the core strategic nuclear equation between the world’s two nuclear superpowers. To wit, the attack broke the rules of the strategic deterrence game and what remains of the 2010 New Start arms control agreements that nominally remains in effect through February 2026.

Although New Start was suspended by Russia in response to the US sanctions and NATO seizure of $300 billion of Russian assets in the global banking system, the limits and enforcement protocols have been largely observed by both sides. This included retaining the limit of 700 deployed strategic nuclear delivery vehicles.

Moreover, New Start’s inspection regime had provided for substantial transparency as to the locations and operational particulars of each land, sea and air-based delivery vehicle that had been declared under the 700 deployed vehicle limit. So to now use this New Start based compliance information to unilaterally attack and destroy previously declared weapons systems was a blatant breach of the entire arms control confidence building regime that had evolved over the decades since the 1970s and Soviet times.

In Russia’s case, it had chosen to list and have inspected 300-400 land-based ICBMs, 200-300 sea-based ballistic missiles and 50-60 heavy bombers. Among the latter was 40-50 Tu-95MS bombers and @15 Tu-160 bombers of the type that were destroyed in Sunday’s attack and about which the US has abundant detailed knowledge. That’s because the inspection and enforcement protocols with respect to these disclosed delivery vehicles included biannual data exchanges, notifications of changes in status (e.g., silo activation/deactivation), and up to 18 annual inspections.

In Russia’s case it generally kept its heavy bombers—which were subject to this comprehensive inspection regime—visible on open airfields per the illustrative photo shown below. There was nothing to hide, anyway.

So to repeat: the wanton attack on the known locations and regularly inspected strategic bombers in Russia’s nuclear deterrent like those depicted here was a radical breach of the whole arms control regime itself.

Equally importantly, it is damn obvious that Washington was in full cahoots with the Ukrainian military. The 120 or so drones used to attack the Russian bombers in the vastly scattered locations shown in the map above were surreptitiously smuggled into Russia in the covered containers shown in this photo. They were then secretly transported to near the Russian airfield locations and prepped for the eventual simultaneous launches.

Again, the odds that no one in the US military or the upper rungs of the Deep State in Washington was involved in this extensive and daring operation are somewhere between slim, none and hideously impossible.

At length, of course, after being pre-positioned near the target airfields, the crates shown above were opened, revealing that attack drones inside. We long ago gave up wearing our tinfoil hats, but are damn sure that the simultaneous launch of 120 of these little buggers at the same moment across thousands of miles of Russian territory was indeed the result of an intricate Washington-driven plot and conspiracy.

No Ukrainian cowboys could have pulled this off on their own steam.

At the very same moment, therefore, heavy Russian bombers spread across the Eurasian continent met the fate depicted below. And while this feat has the Washington and NATO warhawks and neocons gloating over the alleged brilliance of the scheme, that’s not even the half of it.

The real purpose of the attack was to destroy any vestige of trust that remains between the Donald and Putin, and leave the latter with no choice except to retaliate in kind. But further escalation into the zone of MAD (mutually assured destruction) that has kept the nuclear era peace for 60 years is surely the most dangerous thing that has happened since October 1962 when the Cuban Missile Crisis brought the world to the brink of annihilation.

So the hour is late indeed. The Warfare State and the MIC (military-industrial complex) are about to establish dominance over the Donald once again. This time with virtually existential implications.

So man up, POTUS, and cut off Zelensky and his Deep State puppeteers at the knees. That is, shut off the spigot of all aid, all weapons delivery, all intelligence and all other operational support, demand a cease fire and invite both Zelensky and Putin to Camp David.

Then, keep them there until they agree to dismantle the handiwork of Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev. After all, the latter were the actual bloody authors of today’s dubious borders and a Ukrainian state that had never existed before in all of history prior to 1922.

It shouldn’t take long to partition the map and allow Crimea and the four provinces of the Donbas and south to go their separate ways back to Mother Russia. And the only “guarantees” that would be needed would be a Russian pledge to not allow the partitioned provinces to attack the rump of Ukraine, and for the US to guarantee that the shrunken state of Ukraine will not join NATO or attack the lost provinces.

As it happens, that’s all that Putin has ever wanted. And for the US it would mean not only closing another hideously stupid chapter in the Forever Wars, but also the chance start down a new path toward global peace and disarmament that might actually offer the Donald a real chance to get his Nobel Prize.

Needless to say, a 11th hour Camp David summit would also give the Donald a chance to reclaim his own presidency, which was clearly usurped when the Senate’s two leading Ukraine warmongers—Graham and Blumenthal—showed up in Kiev last week on the eve of this insane escalation.

And we do mean insane. The Ukraine warhawks led by the despicable Lindsay Graham, in fact, are now so far off the deep-end that they have introduced in the Senate new out-of-this-world sanctions on Russia which would impose a 500% tariff on countries that buy Russian energy, uranium, and other raw materials – measures aimed chiefly at India and China. Can you say, “WWW III here we come!”

Indeed, putting the three stooges of Ukraine’s latest disaster back in the dunce’s corner where they belong would be progress in itself. Self-evidently, Graham and Blumenthal knew what was coming but not the Donald, at least according to a leak to Tanya Noury of NewsNation by a high administration official: Like in the case of the attack on Putin’s helicopter, Trump was not informed of the drone caper, either.

Well, now the Donald surely knows they are coming for him again. So he better get busy taking names, kicking ass and cleaning house or his second Administration will be done before its gets started. And that’s to say nothing of the rest of us, too.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman’s Contra Corner.

The post The Deep State’s Drone Attack Was Aimed To Escalate the Ukraine War and Deny Trump His Nobel Peace Prize appeared first on LewRockwell.

The leaked Liturgical Norms document from Bishop Michael Martin of the Diocese of Charlotte reads like a parody of 1970s fervor, delivered by a tyrannical hand through a series of ironically rigid dictates. They are poised to cause direct harm to the priests of the diocese and, through their pain, to faithful parishioners.

The man who claims that the liturgy is not the place for “our preferences” has decided to turn it into his playground. While slighting the decisions of individual parishes that reflect pastoral choices, he exercised his own whim with disregard to nuance. He claimed that “there are no particularities that would allow any of us to contravene the magisterium of the Church or the rich tradition that has been handed down to us,” and then he dictated changes that are in violation of the GIRM and which denigrate every traditional practice that he had seen being exercised in the diocese.

An area that hasn’t been considered enough is the effect upon priests who have offered their lives in service to God and who now face what can only be described as abuse. In refusing pastoral discretion and personal acts of piety, a priest is denied the fullness of his vocation and is reduced to a mere executor of another man’s frivolous preferences. His role as alter Christus—another Christ—is denied as he is reduced to a mere liturgical functionary.

Those who love God enough to sacrifice themselves for Him lose the ability to celebrate Mass with the reverence that is due—with symbolic acts that reflect their devotion and love of Christ. The priest participates in the power of consecrating the Body and Blood of Christ, which he exercises in the person of Christ. To interfere in this sacred exercise and reduce every element to a diocesan policy, detached from the universal tradition of the Church, is to dishonor the very nature of Holy Orders. Ironically, it is a hyper-clericalism that denies hierarchy.

Let us be clear: it is not the case that this bishop is merely bringing Vatican II to fruition, as he claims. Rather, his exhortations run contrary to it. Instead, he is bringing the worst of 1970s liturgical abuses to bear. While citing Sacrosanctum Concilium selectively, he demands the removal of all Latin from the liturgy, including as chants and responses, while the very same document that he quotes says the opposite: “The use of the Latin language is to be preserved in the Latin rites.”

Thus, the commands of the bishop become expressions from outside of the larger body and universal tradition of the Church. They form a diocese that reflects the iron hand of one man’s preferences. The proposed norms are rigid enough to dictate almost every motion by priests, ironically under the guise of openness.

Such dictatorialism denies that a pastor might have well-contemplated reasons for his choices. St. Gregory the Great insisted in Pastoral Rule that the priest must be rooted in what might be called “contemplative dignity,” learning in stillness what he is to proclaim outwardly in his speech and actions. But if his outward decisions cannot reflect that contemplation and personal piety, his dignity is eviscerated by the hollowness of callous decisions made above him.

In attempting to follow their bishop, priests necessarily become the unwilling instrument of pain for their flocks, denying the faithful the reverent Masses that have formed them and in which they find the recognizable sacrifice of Our Lord. Denied even a crucifix on the altar, for the visual representation of Christ is reduced to a “visual impairment,” they are made to stand before their people and perform a gesture that wounds both priest and laity: a liturgy stripped of sacred orientation, emptied of its symbolic transcendence, and recast as a horizontal display. It is a humiliation not only of their priesthood but of their humanity, as they must act against both conscience and formation, offering not what they know to be fitting but what they are told is expedient.

There is a cruelty to a set of commands that target those, clergy and laity, who merely wish to show the utmost respect to God—denying them the spiritual nourishment that can satisfy and then attempting to turn that former source of consolation into an entertainment service. Nobody can be entertained into fullness, but rather, that is the vain temptation of the world. They will be left empty by mandate, grieved at the abuse of their Lord. Under the veneer of accessibility, they are denied access to that which they were made for. After all, reverence is not just due; such acts symbolize reality and help to remind us of our place, of the smallness of our trials, and of His Greatness.

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that in sacraments the signification ought to be expressive because they are signs of something sacred insofar as they sanctify men. Therefore, they ought to signify the effect which they produce.

Our acts of reverence during the Mass ought to be fitting toward what they signify. The rite of the Mass is framed to make present again the Passion of Christ, which justly demands our shared respect, thanks, and grief. When the symbolism is flattened and replaced with banality, there is a failure of our behaviors to reflect the truth of what is being executed. When the focus is migrated from Christ to the laity, it teaches falsely and forms them incorrectly. Under the proposed plans, priests are forced to play a role in this reductionism.

Read the Whole Article

The post Charlotte’s War on Reverence: A Priesthood Undone appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks,  John Frahm.

Wray Lied About Extent Of FBI’s Anti-Catholic Surveillance.

See here.

The post Evil FBI appeared first on LewRockwell.

On Tim McGraw wrote:

AI… I’m always reminded of the great Sci-Fi short story by Ray Bradbury. “There Will Come Soft Rains” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(short_story)

A nuclear war has killed mankind, but a house run by AI stays alive as if the humans in it were still alive.

Eventually, a windstorm drops a tree branch onto the house. This causes a fire and all kinds of mayhem that the AI can’t control.

The house burns to the ground to join humanity.

That’s the future of humans and AI. Eventually, all those nukes will be used unless they are disassembled. I don’t see that happening.

Make the most of each day.

The post “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury appeared first on LewRockwell.

Mark Seiler wrote:

Dear Lew,

Charles Burris’ piece on The State replacing The Church can best be seen when watching a National Football League game.

At the beginning all are told to rise, men to remove their head coverings, place their hand on their heart and sing the National Hymn, aka, The Star Spangled Banner. Said banner is held over the entire field by dozens of people shaking it to simulate waving in the breeze. At this point a military flyover is done while trailing red, white and blue smoke much as incense is burned to sanctify the field and the event itself.

ALL HAIL THE EMPIRE!

The post State Replaces Church appeared first on LewRockwell.

David Martin wrote:

Reminds me of Zionism founder Theodor Herzl’s family life.  His son Hans shot himself to death.  His daughter Paulina died of a drug overdose.  His youngest offspring, Trude, gave him his one grandchild, who after having a somewhat successful career, jumped to his death off the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge over Rock Creek in DC. 

Theodor Herzl – Wikipedia

The post Karl Marx’s Father Warned the World—And He Was Right appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Antiwar.com Blog

The post Tory Leader Blurts Out the Truth: Britain Is at the Heart of Gaza ‘Proxy War’ appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, John Smith. 

Middle East Eye

The post Exclusive: US warns UK and France not to recognise Palestinian state appeared first on LewRockwell.

Peter Bohn wrote:

“Europe Is Awesome”

Wasn’t Belgium the country in which the Germans of 1914 needed to cross,  used in their Schlieffen Plan, against the French who declared war on Germany. 
And so upset London, that they had to enter the war, because German soldiers were Bayoneting Belgium babies, proven false after the First World War. 

100+ years later, Belgium, is populated by non Belgium ethnicities and the gross beaches.  See this.

Was this worth men dying for? 

“O Fortuna”! 

The post 100+ years After WWI, this is the state of Belgium appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Bruce McLane.

See here.

The post Interesting take on Orwell appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Gail Appel.

Snopes

The post Did Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Say ‘Jewish Space Lasers’ Caused California Wildfires? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Gail Appel wrote:

Lara Loomer did her homework!

The post Was Moody’s U.S. Credit Downgrade Influenced By Their Anti-Trump CEO and Moody’s Commitments to DEI & ESG? appeared first on LewRockwell.

Thanks, Chris Condon.

World Net Daily

The post The raw truth about Biden dying of cancer appeared first on LewRockwell.

The post Elon-quake! Musk Shocks Washington With Anti-BBB X Post! appeared first on LewRockwell.