Alastair Crooke On Our May Turning Point

Today, on Judge Nap’s show, Alastair Crooke provided a masterful geopolitical overview of where we stand with Trump and the Anglo-Zionist establishment with regard to the war on Russia. I’ll get to the bottom lone right up front.

Crooke maintains, near the end, that what we’re seeing now, with the rampant Euro mongering for continued and even escalated war on Russia, is driven by hatred for and desperation to defeat Trump. Basically, the Euros understand that Trump’s economic program could destroy Europe. The only way to stop Trump is to draw the US into continued and heightened confrontation with Russia, and seriously angering the Russians is one way to accomplish that—no matter the human costs. Crooke maintains that the Anglo-Zionists—both in Europe and in the US political establishment—appear to have Trump “boxed in.”

So let’s work our way through this.

Crooke begins by describing the atmosphere that he experienced during his recent stay in St. Petersburg, Russia’s liberal window to the West. According to Crooke the atmosphere is drastically changed from even just a year ago. Liberal Russians are now as angry at the West as are more nationalist Russians. They are deeply offended at the West’s demonization of Russia and Russians and of their culture as barbaric. The push for sanctions upon sanctions, the constant lies about Russians’ supposed barbarity, has had a cumulative effect on the Russian psyche:

Everyone you speak to understands very clearly—the operation must go on, must continue, because otherwise all this expenditure of life to date is wasted. Because then there will be the next war, the next time the West comes back and attacks us, and then all this blood would have been for nothing. So we have to take this through to conclusion. Everyone understands that. Putin gets it.

And of course the effect is heightened by the grotesquery of current German politics, the movement of German troops to the Russian border with Lithuania.

After everything that St Petersburg went through [during the WW2 siege of Leningrad], when the Germans deliberately burnt down the Catherine Palace just as an icon of Russia. And now they see Germany leading the call for war on Russia—and they don't see Trump doing anything about it.

Russians also understand that Putin needs to play at negotiations to keep Russia’s partners (China and Iran) in line. But Trump has lost credibility, has blown the opportunity for a meaningful relationship:

Trump has missed the boat. He is not going to be able to come back because he's seen as weak. He's seen as unable to show that he has the political strength to mean what he says. This is what the Russians keep saying: ‘We're not asking for anything from America except for a relationship. What does a relationship mean? No, it doesn't mean a little bit more money here, or we will invest more with you in the Arctic. It means when you say something you mean it—and do it. And we mean it.’

In particular Russians are deeply offended by Trump’s crassly transactional approach to what he calls “peace”, the horse trading approach of, you give something and we’ll let you have something else: “We’ll get into a ceasefire and then we'll divide up a bit of territory.” For the Russians, says Crooke, peace can only come with a change of consciousness, and they are deeply angered at what they see as Trump’s demeaning of them, not to mention the hectoring tone of his statements. The Russians view is that Russia is engaged in an existential battle for survival against the predatory Anglo-Zionist West, and peace is not a matter of a grubby real estate style of deal making.

And especially the Russians are offended that this is coming from a president whom they now see as fundamentally weak. Crooke goes into some detail on this score. There are two salient points.

First, the Russians are fully aware that the CIA is in overall direction of the war on Russia. This has been admitted in the NYT but, in any case, Russian intel would have confirmed that long ago. The Russians, as serious practitioners of intelligence, make a study of US politics and governence. As Crooke points out, they will have known that Biden signed a “finding” instructing the CIA to oversee attacks into Russia. All of our legislators will understand that, as well. Without that “finding” no action would have been authorized. Trump could have come up with a new “finding”—but he hasn’t done so. Instead, he blathers on about how his war—the war he prepared and has now inherited—is actually someone else’s war. The Russians aren’t amused. And they know that the Euros do what Trump allows them to do. If Trump doesn’t change the “finding” it’s because he doesn’t want to—in which case his public statements about wanting peace are lies—or because he’s unable to do so politically. In either case, these are the acts of a weak president.

Second, the Russians have taken note of Rubio’s duplicitous Senate testimony about sanctions, suggesting that additional sanctions are up to the Senate and outside Trump’s control. Everyone knows that Trump can issue “findings” that would change matters. But he doesn’t do so. Again, the Russians are neither amused nor impressed. They may not care that much about sanctions, but this is one more sign that Trump can no longer be trusted or given the benefit of the doubt:

[Russians] now know perfectly well that Putin understands a deal is almost impossible to conceive with America now, unless Trump is able to show that he has the political clout to be able to say something and to mean it and to take it forward in political action. And they don't see That, of course, means that we're heading towards escalation.

Here’s Crooke’s good news/bad news take:

I don't think it's going to lead to a wider European war because the Europeans are not capable of it. … But what they are intent on doing is to try and push Trump increasingly into an escalation against Russia. They want to do this to undermine Trump and to undermine his program because they first of all hate him and, secondly, it's because they fear the consequences of his economic program. The economic program can destroy Europe and they understand that, so they don't want that to happen.

It's not just Russia, it's Iran seeing the same thing—seeing that [Trump] does not have the capability to have a relationship where he can say something and mean it it. Because one day it's one thing, the next day it's a different thing, then it's something else. When he was at West Point just over the weekend he said, "The power of the military is to crush our adversaries to kill our enemies and keep the American flag flying across the globe." Does that sound to you like someone who wants a relationship with Russia and Iran, or someone who's interested in global hegemony? That's what it sounds like to the rest of the world, and the credibility of America is going down the drain with it.

This calls to mind the very weak sounding statement that Trump made last week about his genocide in Gaza, which is garnering—at long last—worldwide opprobrium. "We are having talks with Israel about ending the Gaza war as quickly as possible". If anything confirmed for the entire world that Trump isn’t running the show, that statement did.

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Finally, I’ve had this article by Ron Unz open in a tab for, it must be, two weeks. I can’t even recall how I came across it and I didn’t read it until yesterday. Anyway, like all Unz articles, it’s long. So I’ll offer a teaser that is actually rather brief compared to the whole of it:

Elon Musk and the True History of the ADL

Elon Musk controls one of the world’s most powerful media megaphones. If he chose to do so, he could easily ensure that tens of millions of Americans learned the true origins and history of the ADL, an organization that today controls much of what our citizens are allowed to read or see. Such a bold stroke might completely break the power the ADL possesses over him and the rest of our society—Ron Unz, Editor, The Unz Review

Question 1: The Nature of the ADL

Let’s talk about the ADL. Some of your readers may not know that you have written extensively on the ADL and that your analysis prompted Paul Craig Roberts to call you “the bravest man I know.” What Roberts was referring to, I think, is your riveting 2018 account of the ADL’s shadowy history as well as its controversial activities and methods. Here’s a short excerpt from a piece you wrote in 2018 that helps to illustrate what I’m talking about:

In January 1993, the San Francisco Police Department reported that it had recently raided the Northern California headquarters of the ADL based upon information provided by the FBI. The SFPD discovered that the organization had been keeping intelligence files on more than 600 civic organizations and 10,000 individuals, overwhelmingly of a liberal orientation, with the SFPD inspector estimating that 75% of the material had been illegally obtained, much of it by secret payments to police officials. This was merely the tip of the iceberg in what clearly amounted to the largest domestic spying operation by any private organization in American history, and according to some sources, ADL agents across the country had targeted over 1,000 political, religious, labor, and civil rights organizations, with the New York headquarters of the ADL maintaining active dossiers on more than a million Americans.”

This is shocking information that perhaps only a handful of Americans know anything about. The recent dust-up with Elon Musk has put the ADL’s methods under a microscope particularly their alleged role in censoring people on the Internet. So, my question to you is this: What is the ADL? Is it really a civil rights organization that “combats extremism and antisemitism” or is it something else altogether?

Ron Unz—Founded in 1913, the ADL—the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith—is a very formidable Jewish activist organization that has great influence over the media and other important elements of American society, and therefore is widely feared in elite circles. As I explained in my 2018 article:

In our modern era, there are surely few organizations that so terrify powerful Americans as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith, a central organ of the organized Jewish community.

Mel Gibson had long been one of the most popular stars in Hollywood and his 2004 film The Passion of the Christ became among the most profitable in world history, yet the ADL and its allies destroyed his career, and he eventually donated millions of dollars to Jewish groups in desperate hopes of regaining some of his public standing. When the ADL criticized a cartoon that had appeared in one of his newspapers, media titan Rupert Murdoch provided his personal apology to that organization, and the editors of The Economist quickly retracted a different cartoon once it came under ADL fire. Billionaire Tom Perkins, a famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist, was forced to issue a heartfelt apology after coming under ADL criticism for his choice of words in a Wall Street Journal column. These were all proud, powerful individuals, and they must have deeply resented being forced to seek such abject public forgiveness, but they did so nonetheless. The total list of ADL supplicants over the years is a very long one.

Because of its media influence, the ADL’s coverage has almost always been extremely favorable, portraying it as one of America’s leading watchdogs against dangerous extremism, especially anti-Semitism or racism. Given this powerful, positive image, the ADL successfully gained the role of content gatekeeper at some of America’s largest Internet companies, helping to determine what may or may not be said on such important platforms as Facebook, Youtube, and Twitter. Indeed, a few years ago Silicon Valley’s San Jose Mercury News profiled the ADL Director who was responsible for policing “hate speech” across the American-dominated global Internet.

Meanwhile, that same media influence has ensured that only very few people have ever become aware of the organization’s long history of illegal spying upon enormous numbers of Americans, including such notable figures as Martin Luther King. Jr. I discussed this in my 2018 article:

The choice of the ADL as the primary ideological overseer of America’s Internet may seem natural and appropriate to politically-ignorant Americans, a category that unfortunately includes the technology executives leading the companies involved. But this reflects the remarkable cowardice and dishonesty of the American media from which all these individuals derive their knowledge of our world. The true recent history of the ADL is actually a sordid and disreputable tale.

In January 1993, the San Francisco Police Department reported that it had recently raided the Northern California headquarters of the ADL based upon information provided by the FBI. The SFPD discovered that the organization had been keeping intelligence files on more than 600 civic organizations and 10,000 individuals, overwhelmingly of a liberal orientation, with the SFPD inspector estimating that 75% of the material had been illegally obtained, much of it by secret payments to police officials. This was merely the tip of the iceberg in what clearly amounted to the largest domestic spying operation by any private organization in American history, and according to some sources, ADL agents across the country had targeted over 1,000 political, religious, labor, and civil rights organizations, with the New York headquarters of the ADL maintaining active dossiers on more than a million Americans.

Not long afterward, an ACLU official who had previously held a high-ranking position with the ADL revealed in an interview that his organization had been the actual source of the highly controversial 1960s surveillance on Martin Luther King, Jr., which it had then provided to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. For many years Hoover had been furiously denounced in the national media headlines for his use of tapes and other secret information on King’s activities, but when a local San Francisco newspaper revealed that an ADL spying operation had actually been the source of all that sordid material, the bombshell revelation was totally ignored in the national media and only reported by fringe organizations, so that today almost no Americans are aware of that fact.

I know of no other private organization in American history that has been involved in even a sliver of such illegal domestic espionage activity, which appears to have been directed against almost all groups and prominent individuals—left, right, and center—suspected of being insufficiently aligned with Jewish and Israeli interests. Some of the illegal material found in the ADL’s possession even raised dark suspicions that it had played a role in domestic terrorist attacks and political assassinations directed against foreign leaders. I am no legal expert, but given the massive scale of such illegal ADL activities, I wonder whether a plausible case might have been made to prosecute the entire organization under RICO statutes and sentence all of its leaders to long prison terms.

Instead, the resulting government charges were quickly settled with merely a trivial fine and a legal slap on the wrist, demonstrating the near-total impunity provided by massive Jewish political power in modern American society.

In effect, the ADL seems to have long operated as a privatized version of our country’s secret political police, monitoring and enforcing its ideological doctrines on behalf of Jewish groups much as the Stasi did for the Communist rulers of East Germany. Given such a long history of criminal activity, allowing the ADL to extend its oversight to our largest Social Media platforms amounts to appointing the Mafia to supervise the FBI and the NSA, or taking a very large step towards implementing George Orwell’s ” Ministry of Truth” on behalf of Jewish interests.

In his 1981 memoirs, the far right Classics scholar Revilo P. Oliver characterized the ADL as “the formidable organization of Jewish cowboys who ride herd on their American cattle” and this seems a reasonably apt description to me.

• American Pravda: The ADL in American Society
  The ADL Censors the Internet and Hides Its Sordid Past
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 15, 2018 • 7,300 Words

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