The following tweet sums it up. We’re “so f*cking screwed.” The following “recruitment” ad joins the list of absurd, ridiculous political correctness that is drowning our National Security agencies and institutions. Recruiting homosexuals and promoting homosexuals is the common theme in the recent release of CIA and Army recruitment propaganda.
Please understand my point. One’s sexuality should not matter. One’s skin color should not matter. What matters is whether the man or woman loves America and is willing to protect and defend the Constitution. Period.
But that is not the focus of these recruitment campaigns. Efforts are underway in the Army, Navy, Air Force and the Marine to seek out and promote as “normal” the weird, disturbed, dysfunctional people that in the past were shunned as officers and/or leaders in out intelligence and military organizations. No longer.
If you are a Caucasian male, born in a two parent heterosexual family and attended Church or Synagogue, you are now classified as the “extremist” by the very organizations that have depended on such people to stand on the bulwark to defend America.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not ignoring or trying to hide the shortcomings and, at times, slimey, depraved conduct of hetero white guys who dishonored themselves in the CIA or the Army. Former CIA Director John Brennan and retired General James Clapper come to mind.
Speaking of blackmailing a homosexual in the military:
“Debbins’ lawyer, David Benowitz, argued that Debbins caused minimal damage and that Russian agents had blackmailed Debbins by threatening to expose his same-sex attractions in a military era in which “don’t ask, don’t tell” was still in force.
Debbins, at Friday’s sentencing hearing in Alexandria, offered an apology of sorts in which he largely emphasized how he was victimized by the GRU, the Russian intelligence service, and said he’s put himself at danger of retaliation at their hands for admitting his service to them.
“I have suffered in lonely silence for 25 years,” Debbins said. As for the danger he faces from the GRU, he said, “The GRU does not make threats; they keep promises.”
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/05/14/former-army-green-beret-gets-15-years-russian-espionage.html
Saw one where the Queen’s Anglican church wants trannies to become priests, and where the Russian church suggests they see a psychiatrist.
Here’s a video where Putin explains why never takes his Cross off.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJHjvcwjI90
I am so happy you threw in a synagogue in there, Larry. You a mensch!
Larry, apologies for the length of my comment, I feel I have a lot to say on this subject.
This is an important topic and you are absolutely right that unless the relentless march of wokeness can be stopped perdition is where we are all headed. We may laugh at the ads, but I think it would be a huge mistake to consider the woke movement and momentum it has already gained a joke.
Some while back, David Habakkuk used a term here that I had not seen before which describes perfectly the ideology underlying wokeness: Marxism-Lennonism. I have subsequently seen the term used elsewhere (here, for example). It is the logical extension of the delusional thinking of progressives who believe that peace and eternal happiness can be attained simply by us all being nice to one another. “Lennonism” is a reference to Imagine the anthem of the ideology and verses 2 & 3 are worth reproducing to illustrate the point:
Here we see large parts of the woke manifesto:
-No countries (borders)
-No religion – Christianity, as the historically dominant religion in the US, particularly
-No possessions – the WEF’s “You will own nothing and you will be happy” anyone?
And most important; Nothing to kill or die for.
This is what it is all about; removing all differences between us so that there can be nothing to fight over. Race and gender are in there and of course a new universal language without horrible, discriminatory words like “he”, “she” and “America” is necessary, so that wrongthink is impossible. Under the shiny, happy surface it is a profoundly nihilist way of thinking that would destroy culture and humanity and enslave us all in a perpetual Orwellian fear of denunciation or cancellation as the penalties for being unwoke.
The old Marxist dream of uniting the world’s peoples and removing hierarchies, with its absolute intolerance of competing ideologies, completes the description.
So is the Biden administration run by hippy dreamers who just want us all to be happy? Well there are AOC’s in this category, but of course as always the ruthless are merely using them as useful idiots. It is not so much that those now in power subscribe to Lennon’s dream, but they see wokeness as a powerful tool of control – after all, anyone who argues against peace and love can easily be labeled a dangerous subversive.
Post the Trump interregnum, the globalists want to destroy all vestiges of resistance and patriotic, white conservatives are the first ones they are coming for (everyone else will follow). The Democrats, RINO’s and Deep State have common cause in perpetuating the swamp’s feeding trough behoven to corporatist interests. The destruction of American values like individual liberty and forthrightness of thought and deed are their mission. We must resist will all we have and reject the doctrine of “equality” which is simply code for the extermination of individualism.
……Nothing to live for either………
Precisely.
“Post the Trump interregnum, the globalists want to destroy all vestiges of resistance and patriotic, white conservatives are the first ones they are coming for (everyone else will follow)”
So the people who seek peace by eliminating all distinctions are creating distinctions and targeting certain groups for a destruction. So, it seems, self-reflection is not a super power of these mid-wits because they are doing exactly what they are wanting to put an end to (of course).
There will always be hierarchies because humans are born with differing levels of abilities and competency in areas of focus grows from a combination of those innate abilities and dedications to further development of them. Anyone who doesn’t recognize that is a delusional idiot.
I mean I can just look in the “mirror” under a bright light and know that there are some things I’m better than average at doing and lots of things I’m worse than average despite trying. Maybe a thing or two that I rate as superior and a thing or two where I rate as a true dud. Again, within honest self-reflection, one can find a microcosm of the world and an associated understanding of it. Those who cannot self-reflect honestly should not be in charge of anything.
Ever since the Sumerian civilizations in the Fertile Crescent – societies have stratified. Local indigenous Chumash on the west coast evolved a stratified society. There is nothing “western” in this concept. Typically: Leaders, priests, craftsmen, workers and drones.
Americas lasting appeal is having no hereditary leaders that inherently limits movement within the various strata – top or bottom.
Along with universal access to any degree of upward mobility that one’s talent, efforts and cultivated connections can offer. There is also little to protect against downward mobility, which is viewed more as choice, rather than fated consequences.
A generous social safety net is also funded by the common weal, for those passing into the bottom rung. But even free stuff still needs to be earned and granted by public will. There is no right to not be a productive member of this type of stratified society.
Eric, yes wokeness’ lack of internal logic is no barrier to its success it seems.
It is a trait of people who indulge in such thinking that they seek to externalize the causes for their problems. This behavior is encouraged by the woke ideology’s seemingly endless capacity to invent new grievances to explain ‘inequality’. We are being taught that the route to being the best one can be lies simply in finding the right party to blame for one’s failings.
Someone mentioned Bronze Age Mindset a few posts back. It does not surprise me at all that the counter reaction to wokeness and its celebration of the aberrant and inferiour includes fans of Nietzsche yearning for a return to a time when beauty and power (god-like qualities) where society’s prized values. The last leader who arose under such conditions went a little too far in the other direction.
And most important; Nothing to kill or die for.
Interesting to what extent David Habakkuk is still present not on people’s minds. On mine too.
One of David’s arguments, for me at least was, that intelligence once was great and now is reduced to a vague shadow of what it once was. And yes, I am surely glad the Brits cracked enigma.
Your argument may or may not support his basic take, we would need to ask him. But yes the US interior services, the FBI, watched Lennon in the US, and may not even have needed to recruit someone to kill him, since a vast majority of Americans considered him an existential danger to their way of life. (?) … The one that killed him in other words represented some type of the will of the American people, collectively?
The label “Lennonism” has nothing to do with Lennon the man or his fate, it is merely a useful shorthand for utopian thinking taken to extremes and of course a clever/amusing play on “Leninism”.
Wokeness is a totalitarian ideology of cultural revolution and excellent example of where unchecked utopian thinking invariably leads; dystopia.
And, I would add, that if one believes in the spiritual side of life, as I do, that all kinds of different souls are entering this world, strong, weak, old, new, good, evil. There’s all kinds of karma for them to work out and that means all kinds of different conditions and dramas. The biological often is a reflection of these soul issues.
Of course the lefties don’t believe in spirituality, but their claimed belief in “science” should be sufficient to realize that we are not all born the same. IMO, they’re just a bunch of power hungry snakes that only believe in their own self-importance and they are manipulating the delusional unhappy losers of life with promises of removing their loser status, with a little revenge against the winners mixed in.
they are manipulating the delusional unhappy losers of life with promises of removing their loser status, with a little revenge against the winners mixed in.
“The Left”, I cannot speak for ‘the left’ collectively–Groucho Marx’ statement concerning clubs in mind here–but I find it hard to disconnect religion (spirituality) completely from science or the love of wisdom. 😉
Mirror image? We are all chasing our shadow to some extent. Comfortable to have it out there.
Personally I found Philip Sheldrake’s Brief History of Spirituality helpful especially on American religion.
https://www.academia.edu/15829441/A_Brief_History_of_Spirituality?auto=download
I tend to see life through ideological eyes. I knew the meaning b/h “Imagine” when it first appeared. Nothing to live for, nothing to die for; we are all ants in the ant hill. Imagine.
Barbara Ann, LeaNder,
Good to see ‘Lennonism’ brought up. The idea originated, I think, in an excellent discussion by Michael Barone in October 2016, which illuminated some of the reasons why the challenge to Hillary Clinton by Donald Trump would be far more successful than was generally expected, and why so much ‘Establishment’ opinion was completely unable to cope intellectually with what was happening.
(See https://www.investors.com/politics/columnists/michael-barone-voters-reject-john-lennons-world-as-one/ )
One quibble: Of the ‘Imagine’ lyrics, Barone writes: ‘It’s an appealing vision but perhaps an odd one for someone born, as Lennon was, when and where the Battle of Britain was raging in the skies overhead.’ Actually, the man who would say the Beatles were ‘more popular than Jesus’ first appeared on earth not during the Battle of Britain but during one of the early attacks on Liverpool during the Blitz that followed it, when the city was a prime target for German bombers, because of its key role in our links to the wider world.
This may help make the vision seem less odd, as may other features of Lennon’s birthplace.
There was already a substantial Irish presence there before the 1845 famine, which that event strengthened. Ironically, if one has ever lived in the city, one knows that familiar stereotypes – the witty, feckless, Irish Catholic, and the disciplined, driving, somewhat hysterical, Protestant ‘matriarch’ – have a limited relation to a complex reality. However, in a city where religion-based ‘tribalisms’ remained very powerful, Lennon’s largely absent father Alf, and the aunt who brought him up, Mimi Smith, were close to being caricature versions of the opposing stereotypes. That background is I think relevant to Lennon’s ability to articulate the vision – to my mind utterly delusional – of a happy utopia, to be achieved through the breaking down of boundaries, and restraints, so persuasively.
A second quibble is that I was pairing ‘Lennonism’ with ‘Fukuyamism’, rather than any variety of Marxism. Here, the reference was to the – in my view bizarrely stupid – resurrection of the reading of the German philosopher Hegel by the Stalinist-turned-EEC bureaucrat Alexander Kojève by the then deputy director of the State Department’s policy planning staff, Francis Fukuyama, in the article on ‘The End of History’ he published in 1989.
A key paragraph:
‘Kojève sought to resurrect the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind, the Hegel who proclaimed history to be at an end in 1806. For as early as this Hegel saw in Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena the victory of the ideals of the French Revolution, and the imminent universalization of the state incorporating the principles of liberty and equality. Kojève, far from rejecting Hegel in light of the turbulent events of the next century and a half, insisted that the latter had been essentially correct. The Battle of Jena marked the end of history because it was at that point that the vanguard of humanity (a term quite familiar to Marxists) actualized the principles of the French Revolution. While there was considerable work to be done after 1806 – abolishing slavery and the slave trade, extending the franchise to workers, women, blacks, and other racial minorities, etc. – the basic principles of the liberal democratic state could not be improved upon. The two world wars in this century and their attendant revolutions and upheavals simply had the effect of extending those principles spatially, such that the various provinces of human civilization were brought up to the level of its most advanced outposts, and of forcing those societies in Europe and North America at the vanguard of civilization to implement their liberalism more fully.’
(See https://www.embl.de/aboutus/science_society/discussion/discussion_2006/ref1-22june06.pdf .)
Actually, to use Hegel in support of a simplistic vision of the conflicts of the Napoleonic era as between ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’, ‘white hats’ and ‘black hats’, is perhaps even more inane than attempts to use Marxist notions of a ‘vanguard’ for the same purpose.
Much of modern culture is shaped by the ambiguities of people’s responses to the events of that time, in ways that have continuing relevance. So that pioneering statement of ‘human rights’, the ‘Declaration of Rights and Man and of the Citizen’, passed by the Constituent Assembly in August 1787, was followed by the descent of France into the Terror, where the ‘right to life’ came to be in question, and not simply for representatives of the ‘ancien régime.’
As to Napoleon, he could be, and frequently was, viewed as the figure who had curbed the anarchic propensities of the Revolution, while preserving many of its emancipatory features. But to others, the rhetoric of emancipation came to be seen as a veil for a new kind of French imperialism, simply offering to replace existing ‘servitudes’ with new ones, to a culturally alien invader. And also at issue was how far what was at driving events was the personal will to power, and self-aggrandisement, of Napoleon, on behalf of himself, his family, and his cronies.
Moreover, not simply in countries where the armies of France entered, but in that country itself, the emancipatory vision produced savage counter-reactions from people who saw beliefs, and ways of life, they were not prepared to abandon as under ‘existential threat.’
Perhaps Kojève, and after him Fukuyama, could usefully have reflected further on the fact that Napoleon’s spectacular triumphs were followed by defeats quite as spectacular. It is generally suspected that Americans do not like ‘losers’: so, why seek to imitate someone, who, for all the spectacular nature of his successes, turned out to be just that.
Of course, if one wants to, one can believe that the fact that Napoleon ended up on St Helena was simply because the ‘vanguard’ was too far in advance. More insights, I suggest, are to be obtained from some of the great artworks of the time, and subsequently, which dealt with crucial Napoleonic defeats – those in Portugal and Spain, and in Russia. Out of the first came the – agonisingly ambiguous – depictions by Francisco Goya of the savageries of the ‘Peninsular War’, which started the year after Jena. Decades later, in ‘War and Peace’, Leo Tolstory would relive his grandparents’ experiences in the 1812 campaign in which Napoleon’s ‘hubris’ – and misunderstanding of Russia – led to ‘nemesis.’
Whether Fukuyama, with his rigid ‘good guys’ versus ‘bad guys’ approach, could make anything of such works seems to me questionable. Likewise, I find it hard to imagine how he could read the great theorist of the new style of ‘People’s War’ that arose out of the Revolution, and of which Napoleon was the most dramatic exemplar, Carl von Clausewitz. After all, what words of obloquy can be adequate for a figure who, having been part of the Prussian Army which the ‘vanguard’ defeated at Jena, would later be awarded a ‘Golden sword for bravery’ by the Emperor Alexander I, for his role in the Battle of Borodino six years later, where Napoleon’s failure to secure victory consigned him to destruction?
An irony is that precisely what one finds alike in Goya and Tolstoy is the story of how a very deep attraction to French culture was replaced by disillusionment: the opening scene of ‘War and Peace’ refers to ‘that refined French in which our grandfathers not only spoke but thought.’ As it happens, there is ample evidence that in the ‘legitimacy crisis’ of the Soviet system, which Fukuyama as it were, ‘saw through a glass darkly’, the impact of the attractiveness of so much of the culture of the ‘Pax Americana’ created after the war, by contrast to that produced by Soviet communism, was critical. And, there is also plenty of evidence that the visions of emancipation in Western popular music played a very significant role in this process.
(For interesting comments, see https://theculturetrip.com/europe/russia/articles/how-western-music-subverted-the-ussr/ .)
There is also, however, ample evidence of the way that the efforts of people in the West, since 1989, to ‘implement their liberalism more fully’, alike in the non-Western world and in their own countries, have increasingly seen generated forms of scepticism not altogether dissimilar from those which came to be directed towards France, in the decades after 1789. However, within the intellectual frameworks of ‘Fukuyamism-Lennonism’, support for Trump, as also ‘Brexit’ can only be seen as an inexplicable, and necessarily ephemeral, manifestations of a kind of ‘last ditch stand’ by the ‘rearguard.’ In combating such a monstrous deviation from the ‘natural’ course of history, of course, the ‘ends’ justify the ‘means’ – as they commonly did for ‘Marxist-Leninists.’
The relevance of the notion of ‘Fukuyamism-Lennonism’ is, I think, rather well brought out by the use of the name ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ for the FBI investigation in supposed links between associates of Donald Trump and Russia. The allusion stems from the first line of the song ‘Jumping Jack Flash’ by the ‘Rolling Stones’, in which the line ‘I was born in a crossfire hurricane’ apparently refers to the claim by Keith Richards to have been born, like Lennon, during a German air raid.
Evidence for such links was supposed to have been been provided in the dossier published by ‘BuzzFeed’ on 10 January 2017, whose author was rapidly named as the former head of the MI6 Russia Desk, Christopher Steele. On this document, in my view, by far the most significant analysis is that published on 17 March 2018, on his ‘Illustrated Primer’ blog, by Yaacov Apelbaum, under the title ‘The Mechanics of Deception.’
(See https://apelbaum.wpcomstaging.com/2018/03/17/the-mechanics-of-deception/ .)
The interpretation to which this led was that the dossier was actually a ‘camel produced by a committee’, with the essential role of Steele being to give a veneer of intelligence legitimacy to an essentially spurious set of allegations, and disguise their actual sources, insofar as there were any. If Apelbaum is right, a natural conclusion is that the subsequent ‘revelations’ about Steele’s sources – insofar as there were any – are likely to be the product of a deft exploitation of his actual role by his co-conspirators, so as to make him the ‘patsy’, and divert attention from their own culpability.
The scale of the ‘legitimacy crisis’ which could be triggered, were the actual truth about what people in the FBI, CIA, and NSA have done to come to light, is such that ‘Russiagate’ has become ‘too big to fail’ (an analogy with the position of the criminally incompetent banks in the 2008 financial crisis made by Patrick Lawrence.) As there is no longer any way of preventing some of the truth being exposed, a range of what one might call ‘limited hangout artists’ have been kept very busy.
Most recently, Barry Meier of the ‘New York Times’ has produced a book entitled ‘Spooked: The Trump Dossier, Black Cube, and the Rise of Private Spies, which appears tomorrow. Some lines from an article in his paper, announcing the book, produced in me wry amusement:
‘Mr Steele was described to journalists as having played a pivotal role in breaking huge cases, including the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a former K.G.B. agent …
‘Mr Steele had talents. And as with many private spies, his past was his selling point. But his purported exploits were hard to examine since they were by nature secretive.
‘The best friend of Mr. Litvinenko, the murdered ex-K.G.B. agent, said neither he nor Mr. Litvinenko’s wife had heard of Mr. Steele. Neither had a former Times reporter, Alan Cowell, who wrote a book about the Litvinenko case.’
(See https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/15/business/media/spooked-private-spies-news-media.html?smid=tw-share .)
In fact, there is every reason to believe that Steele was the MI6 ‘handler’ for Litvinenko, who was referred to by that figure’s supposed assassin, Andrei Lugovoi, back in June 2007, and whose existence was finally admitted by Marina Litvinenko’s counsel, after she had produced repeated mendacious denials, clearly in collusion with MI6, in December 2012.
As I have documented on ‘Sic Semper Tyrannis’ and elsewhere, Steele’s great exploit was in masterminding a cover-up of the fact that the gruesome death of Litvinenko was almost certainly the result of his having handled polonium ‘incautiously’, precisely as Lugovoi has repeatedly claimed. In achieving what might once have seemed to me a remarkable feat, Steele has been greatly helped by the willing collaboration of Alan Cowell and other ‘mainstream’ journalists in obscuring the truth. But, in the end, a massive suppression, and fabrication, of evidence, came to be necessary. This, however, was clearly achieved with ample aid and assistance from Steele’s collaborators on your side.
To some of us familiar with this history, elements of the strategy which are being deployed to defend the actual truth about ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ being revealed are glaringly obvious. Going back to the defeat of Napoleon, one might say it is reminiscent of the Lines of Torres Vedras, which the Duke of Wellington had built, to defend his key base in Lisbon.
The first line of defence consists of delaying actions, in which declassification of key documents is postponed, and they are then released in progressively less redacted forms: distracting gullible fools with the ‘excitement of the chase.’ A crucial line, which so far has not been attacked seriously, except, ironically, in generally ignored remarks by Steele himself, is the December 2019 report of IG Michael Horowitz. The belief that this deserved to be treated as an honest attempt to get at the truth clearly depended upon acceptance of the – patently ludicrous – premise that figures like FBI Special Agent Stephen Somma could be accused, without this giving any reason to contemplate the possibility that their ‘evidence’ could be unreliable.
A third line of defence, in which the British end is critical, has consisted of fending off the challenge posed by the lawsuits brought against Steele in relation to memoranda in the dossier he almost certainly did not write, in a manner which prevents the ‘patsy’ role being so onerous that he ‘blows the gaffe.’ Meanwhile, carefully timed concessions, retreating from the initial claim that the FBI had no involvement in the investigation of the murder of Seth Rich, or any material relevant to it, can be used to blind people to the possibility that the materials which are finally produced, may have been fabricated, or at least ‘doctored.’
Anyhow, having let off steam, I must now go back to the serious business of defending a fellow-countryman against the attempt to make him the ‘patsy’ by his ‘confederates in crime’, by providing a more accurate account of elements of their earlier collaborations.
Part of the actual truth, I now think, may be that in the post-Soviet space, as in the Middle East, people like Christopher Steele, and also Richard Dearlove and John Scarlett, like Peter Strzok, John Brennan, James Clapper, et al, have tried to apply the kind of simplistic historical ‘narrative’ which ‘Fukuyamism-Lennonism’ has in common with ‘Marxism-Leninism.’ In so doing, they have got themselves involved in political contests where ‘good guys/bad guys’, ‘white hats/black hats’ frames of thinking are a very bad starting point. As a result, they have become entangled in intrigues where they are way out of their depth, and then got caught in the kind of ‘escalatory logic’ common alike to wars, and ‘information operations.’
David Habakkuk
Great to see your comment – though that word hardly does justice to your encyclopedic contribution tour de force.
I apologize that I did not make the effort to properly cite your use of “Lennonism” on SST and I hope you will forgive my co-opting the word in another, albeit related context.
If the fellow-countryman in need of defense is one Craig Murray I wish you Godspeed. Of course the real reason Murray is being persecuted is very much related to Crossfire Hurricane. For those interested, it was well described in this 2016 SST post: https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2016/12/httpswwwcraigmurrayorgukarchives201612cias-absence-conviction.html
First of all, pleased you are still around.
was almost certainly the result of his having handled polonium ‘incautiously’, precisely as Lugovoi has repeatedly claimed.
I may have missed that rather essential link. Not that I ever dived as deeply into matters as you did. But: Why do you think he ‘handled’ it? What for, use it or sell it to someone?
I do recall the post 1989 hysteria about atomic matters being sold on grounds where they didn’t belong. OK Polonium seems to belong into the larger expert scenario out there. … Anything I should know in this context?
LeaNder,
With Litvinenko, as also with the bogus intelligence used to facilitate our disastrous invasion of Iraq, and ‘Russiagate’, the answer to key questions lies in Italy. A précis of much of the material I was at the time submitting to Sir Robert Owen’s team, in which I attempted to explain this, is contained in three posts which my Rome-based collaborator David Loepp and I put up on the ‘European Tribune’ site in December 2012. The critical research which uncovered the extraordinarily lurid ‘strategic communications’ operations in which Litvinenko and his Italian collaborator Mario Scaramella, together with others, had been involved in the months leading up to the former’s death, was his.
(You need to scroll slightly down from the top of David’s page on the site, which is under his ‘blogging name, ‘de Gondi’, at https://www.eurotrib.com/user/uid:46/diary .)
The initial post was a response to the second successful prosecution of Scaramella on charges of ‘aggravated calumny’ the previous month.
Ironically, Stephen McIntyre linked to the final one in a series of ‘tweets’ in March 2018 – the month after the ‘Nunes Memo’ appeared.
(See https://twitter.com/ClimateAudit/status/972932060842098688 .)
He summarised my interpretation as follows:
‘1/ Litvinenko was mostly poisoned by Mario Scaramella, his Italian associate.
2/ Steele colluded with Berezovsky group to frame Lugovoi (and thus Russian state) for Litvinenko poisoning
3/ Litvinenko, Scaramella and Shvets had attempted to frame Mogilevich, supposedly acting as agent for FSB and Putin, as trying to supply a ‘mini atomic bomb’ to Al Qaeda.
4/ Berezovsky network collaborated with MI6 and StratCom
5/ Berezovsky and Shvets fabricated evidence to implicate Iran in ongoing nuclear program and to implicate Russia in supplying program’
Unfortunately, although Steve is a diligent researcher, critical analysis of evidence is not really his ‘thing’, as his suggestion that I argued that Scaramella poisoned Litvinenko demonstrates. As, more recently, he has been displaying his incompetence in the identification of the supposed ‘Primary Sub-source’ for the dossier attributed to Christopher Steele as an – apparently somewhat alcoholic – former associate of Fiona Hill at Brookings, Igor Danchenko, further explanation seems in order.
Points 2 to 5 of his summary, clearly based not just on the ‘European Tribune’ pieces David and I produced but on what I have written subsequently on ‘SST,’ provides a largely accurate account of what emerged about the bizarre scenarios these people created. I do not think we mentioned the ‘mini atomic bomb’ in the 2012 posts, as I have repeatedly in these later discussions. But the letter containing this allegation, which Litvinenko sent on 1 December 2005, to the ‘Mitrokhin Commission’, for which Scaramella worked, just prior to the latter’s departure on a visit to the U.S., had been unearthed by David back in 2010.
As it happened, putting what he discovered in Italy together with material from Karon von Gerhke, a long time contact of Shvets based in Alexandria, Virginia, who had heard about Scaramella’s visit from him at the time, generated a kind of ‘explosive reaction.’ One result was that she sent the ‘mini atomic bomb’ letter and other material directly to the contacts she had made in the British investigation as a result of the information she had received from the figure she would later describe, accurately, as ‘Berezovsky’s disinformation specialist.’ Actually David had expressly asked both of us to keep the material he had discovered to ourselves until we had discussed it properly, but Karon disregarded this.
This clearly had the effect of setting the proverbial ‘cat among the pigeons’, in a number of ways. It may well have been responsible for the fact that the letter was actually admitted into evidence at Owen’s Inquiry. If you look at the ‘Hearings’ page on the archived website, you will find that, on Day 27, held on 18 March 2015, Scaramella, and also Alex Goldfarb, presented ‘Theories regarding responsibility for Alexander Litvinenko’s death.’ There is a link to an English translation of the letter on the page. But the discussion, clearly deliberately, avoided the most important parts. In particular, the claim about the ‘mini nuclear bomb’, which is, in my view, absolutely central to making reasonable conjectures about why polonium came to appear in London in October-November of the year after it was made, was left unmentioned. As a proper discussion of the letter would have exposed the need to take any theories produced by Scaramella, or indeed Shvets, not so much with a pinch of salt, as with the whole salt cellar, this was unfortunate.
(See https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090328/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/hearings )
The second of our December 2012 posts, which we entitled ‘Litvinenko’s final frame-up?’ explored some implications of the first. It provided what we thought was a cogent explanation of the decision by Litvinenko and Akhmed Zakayev, when they first broke the story of the poisoning on the ‘Chechenpress’ website, on 11 November 2006, to point the finger of suspicion at Scaramella.
An irony, however, was that the ‘Chechenpress’ report situated this incrimination, clearly deliberately, in the context of the same ‘narrative’ of Putin and the FSB attempting to eliminate those who were exposing their crimes, which was central to Litvinenko’s ‘information operations’, and can be found in the letter to the ‘Mitrokhin Commission.’ In a deft ‘switch’ to the ‘narrative’, however, Scaramella was himself implicated in these, as he was ‘reported to maintain close business relations with deputy FSB director Kolmogorov and to have visited the FSB central office in Lubyanka several times.’
As much, if not all, of the material that David Loepp unearthed was clearly already familiar to people in Russian intelligence, one can imagine their jaws, as it were, hitting the proverbial floor at the vision of Scaramella as one of their ‘hitmen.’ On 15 November 2006, an article appeared in ‘Moskovsky Komsomolets’, in which they made use of the ‘switch’, deftly exploiting one of the Italian’s most ludicrous claims, which David and I discussed in the first of our December 2012 pieces: that a Soviet submarine had laid a kind of minefield of nuclear torpedoes in the Bay of Naples in January 1970.
Having suggested, very possibly correctly, that Scaramella had visited Moscow in an attempt to find ‘evidence’ to substantiate what is actually militarily illiterate nonsense, the sources for ‘Moskovsky Komsomolets’ then put their own ‘spin’ on the story. They claimed that Litvinenko himself had visited Moscow, to provide evidence to Russian prosecutors. What they were suggesting was that he had actually been contemplating a deal, whereby he would buy immunity for his own actions by providing information on ‘partners in crime.’ Doubtless he did suspect Scaramella: but the obvious conclusion to be drawn from their collaboration in anti-Russian disinformation was what the basis of this – very likely justified – suspicion was that some of those who had everything to fear from Litvinenko turning ‘state’s evidence’ had tasked the Italian to forestall the possibility.
The case that David Loepp and I were in fact making, in our December 2012 posts, rested on a quite different reading of the patent absurdity of the notion of Scaramella as an FSB ‘hut man.’ In the light of what could be established about their cooperation in ‘information operations’, we suggested, what was likely to have been at issue was a – rather bizarre – kind of ‘frame-up.’ It was at least worth considering the possibility that he, and Zakayev, were looking for a means of breaking the story of his poisoning, which would however avoid the risks of being candid about what had actually happened. A further advantage of pointing the finger at Scaramella was that the ‘partners in crime’ would need to enlist Litvinenko’s cooperation, in finding an alternative explanation which could be used to prevent people exploring what he and the Italian had actually been doing. Precisely the kind of scenario which might make sense of an apparently bizarre sequence of events was that which was implicit in Lugovoi’s suggestion that Litvinenko might have died as a result of handling polonium ‘incautiously’. This then, at the least, merited serious examination, rather than the rejection out of hand, without supplying any kind of evidence or argument, which Owen would provide in his ‘Ruling on Scope’ on 17 January 2013.
So, it should I think be clear that I can only regard the Steve’s suggestion that I believe that ‘Litvinenko was mostly poisoned by Mario Scaramella’ as demonstrating, in reading any analysis he produces, one needs, as it were, to keep the salt cellar at hand.
My view of Steve as an indefatigable researcher, who however simply lacks the basic intellectual skills required to produce reliable work, has also been confirmed by my contacts with him prior to his involvement in producing the current ‘conventional wisdom’, according to which there was an actual ‘Primary Sub-source’ – ‘PSS’ – and he was Danchenko.
So, early last year, out of the blue, he sent me a draft of the piece he and his colleagues would publish on ‘Scribd’, on 19 March 2020, in which they suggested that this figure might be Yuri Shvets.
(See https://www.scribd.com/document/452403558/Primary-Sub-Source .)
As I tried to explain to him, politely, one would have to be hopeless naive to take for granted that the – very valuable – material he and his collaborators had assembled provided accurate pointers to an actually existing ‘PSS.’ Anyone familiar with the way that Shvets had been brought out, to buttress what was clearly a largely false account of how Litvinenko died and lived at Owen’s Inquiry, would want at least to consider the possibility that this figure was fictional, or semi-fictional. A further interesting comparison to the early ‘information operations’ was that, at the outset, it is unlikely that Steele and his collaborators contemplated the possibility that they would manoeuvred – largely by Lugovoi – into resuming the Inquest, which made an ‘industrial scale’ suppression, and forgery, of evidence, necessary.
Particularly as some of the same people, on the U.S. side, had clearly been ‘up to the hilt’ in this process, including the decision to place Shvets ‘centre stage’, it was quite likely that, early on, they realised that they might very well have, sooner or later, to produce someone who could, more or less convincingly ‘act the part’ of the, probably essentially fictitious, ‘PSS.’ And indeed, it was not at all impossible that, at some point, he had been, as it were, ‘auditioned for the role.’
However, as it turned out, the conviction of Steve and his colleagues that one could discount the possibility that, for instance, the report of IG Horowitz could not automatically be treated as a totally reliable source, could not be dented. Accordingly, any intellectually serious analyst will treat anything that he and his colleagues say about Steele’s supposed source network with extreme scepticism. That said, however, their work should not simply be ignored. It seems likely that the clues they have spent so much time patiently unravelling to generate their identifications have been deliberately placed in the documents they are using, precisely in order that people like Steve should uncover them. Accordingly, as is also likely to be the case with Barry Meier’s new book, as it certainly was with his account of the career of Robert Levinson, someone who approaches this kind of material with appropriate scepticism can learn a lot from it.
That obnoxious recruiting cartoon may presage even worse things than staffing anti-aircraft installations with women with voices of six year olds raised by California lesbians. The key is it’s an animated ‘toon. Maybe TPTB have wised up to the unforeseen often embarrassing side-effects of the proliferation of smartphones with video cameras in the hands of virtually everyone on earth. Their solution may be to present the “news” in cartoon animation form so that the inhabitants of Oceania never need be troubled, in the future, with scenes of military or other conflict in Eastasia or Eurasia. Or domestically within Oceania. Instead of newsreels of the Bulge, or firebombing Tokyo — why not purely unobjectionable nice little squeaky cartoons!?
By the way, the Soviets had a war movie in the early seventies “The Dawns Here are Quiet” (A zori zdes tikhie) which centered around the heroic endeavors of a crew of women soldiers who defended against luftwaffe attacks by operating AA batteries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawns_Here_Are_Quiet
It’s a moving tale. The link contains spoilers so be warned. But more moving is the recent reprise (2015) released as a TV series with same title:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawns_Here_Are_Quiet_(2015_film)
That’s on Amazon Prime with English subtitles (and some very beautiful actresses).
But those female Russian soldiers were not cartoon characters raised by California lesbians. The dramatic series goes into the girl’s personal stories at length. It’s enough to make the chauvinistically termed “grown man” cry. Watch the that TV series and compare with the tragedy of transgender fairy soldiers forced to drink soy milk from a non-renewable container on which the LGBTQ++ rainbow flag is missing. The agony. The unadulterated persecution of it all.
The series is also on YouTube, just search on: The Dawns Here Are Quiet and it will pop up (I’m 15 minutes into episode one and no commercials so far, if I didn’t have stuff to get done this morning I’d be glued to it).
I saw the 1972 two part movie on UTube and it was impressive. Thanks for bringing it up. Maybe someday I will try the more recent and longer version. The story and the characters are worth a revisit.
I’m contemplating an essay on recruiting videos. Having driven my eyeballs through 20 or 30 I’m developing the tentative conclusion that (woke ones aside — they’re something very new) that US/UK videos focus on team, sharing, making something of yourself while Russian/Chinese are about defending the wife, parents homeland. (All of course have lots of jumping out of planes and loud bangs) The conclusion is that US/UK know
that their soldiers aren’t going to be defending home while Chinese and Russians know they will be. (Also a slight hint that life in the West is pretty screwed up and lots of young people have no purpose — excellent UK vid on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMkLWNh37cI
A Canadian one is just about doing good things while inexplicably wearing a green suit and a metal hat.
Hey, this is an interesting video.
But then, as to full discovery, I found a British Afghan War recruitment TV series quite interesting too.
There was an Russian one, somewhere linked around here earlier maybe in your comment section, I found quite interesting too. Although, I am not at all with you concerning this:
while Russian/Chinese are about defending the wife, parents homeland.
Babble Alert: Basically studying images while they unfold before you is a bit more complex than the linearity of language. Which is pretty complex itself.
Ok, ok, “a” Russian. Like Grigori Kozintsev? One among the collective Russian?
They should hire whoever is keeping the name of the Capitol Hill Cop who shot Ashli Barret hidden; at least they can keep a secret.
More Biden era cancel culture: Wuhan Virology Lab scrubs its association with NIH from its new website in 2021, along with other notable institutions all of whom are still found in its archived records:
https://thenationalpulse.com/exclusive/wuhan-lab-erases-nih-ties-gof-research/
The Amazing Dr Fauxchee strikes again.
Deap,
You are implying Fauci runs China’s virus labratory.
I am implying Fauci lied in his most recent response to Senator Rand Paul..although he didqueity sneak in the word “now” when emphatically denying NIH was supporting the Wuhan Lab research. (now)
Deap,
The article clearly points out the lab is in China and run by China. All you are accomplishing is helping China spread their propaganda that this virus is America’s fault because their agents were smart enough to get the US to give them money.
Truth will out. It always does. Step aside.
This recent conviction may be relevant – at least given the convicted Green Beret Russian spy’s statements:
https://colonelcassad.livejournal.com/6776894.html
Is there a trick to getting the English translation for colcassad? Although English is selected (upper right corner of site), everything at that site displays in Russian only, on my laptop (Firefox on mac). Tried selecting French and Spanish – still only Russian display.
Part One: On Biden’s Watch – since Biden has engaged the DOJ to monitor state 2020 election audits:
Windham County, NH – audit attorney’s office broken into:
https://conservativeplaybook.com/2021/05/17/antrim-audit-attorney-matt-depernos-office-broken-into-after-announcing-upcoming-bombshell/
Correction – Part One – Antrim MI county attorney office broken into; not Windham County NH
Part Two: On Biden’s Watch – Windham County NH 2020 election audit – curious state ass’t AG after hours visit prior to hour long black out of election audit site, caught on surveillance cameras.
https://100percentfedup.com/new-hampshire-forensic-election-audit-update-asst-ag-seen-walking-toward-table-covered-with-secured-ballots-at-1115-pm-before-camera-footage-went-out-for-an-hour/