Politics, Narratives, Covid, Wars

It’s all a mix. Let’s start by reproducing an exchange in the comments this morning. It’s based in US politics, but there are far wider ramifications behind what made this assault on our constitutional order not only possible but even—to our rulers—desirable and necessary:

susan mullen

9/8/2018, Diana Johnstone: “When nobody, not even the President of the United States, has the right to meet and talk with Russian leaders, there is only one remaining form of exchange. When dialogue is impossible, all that is left is force and violence. That is what is being promoted by the most influential media in the United States.” (end of article)...https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-new-york-times-as-iago-undermining-peace-efforts-by-sowing-suspicion/5653375

Mark Wauck

Right. The enormity of what was done to the American Republic by Hillary, the Deep State, and the Political Establishment is almost unfathomable--using a hoax to deprive We the People of our rightful say in the direction of the country. [The effort to ban all counter discussion as “conspiracy theory” or to brand those who would question the hoax as traitors to the nation.]

ML

From JFK library website:

“Note: 1590 pages of letters, telegrams, and translations passed between John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev. This total does not include correspondence in draft form. The complete Kennedy-Khrushchev correspondence can be found in the online volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States.”

19 of those letters between October and December 1962 - Cuban missile crisis - enough said.

Mark Wauck

At the height of the Cold War. And with reasonable international accommodation within grasp, the Deep State and Political Establishment sided with an international Globalist/Neocon cabal bent on World Empire--sided with them against the American people and their choice for president. Breathtaking. Despicable.

As it happens, The Duran has hosted today a discussion that expands on these topics. I’ve transcribed a bare nine minutes out of the hour and a half video, Denying liberty, eroding democracy. Participants in the discussion are:

Alexander Mercouris;

John Laughland, a prominent British political philosopher;

Thierry Baudet, founder and leader of Forum for Democracy, author of Het Coronabedrog (The Covid Conspiracy--although the Dutch word 'bedrog' also has connotations of a hoax or scam to fool people).

In a lengthy prologue Baudet describes, from a Dutch perspective, the effect of the Covid Hoax and the Covid Regime of lockdowns and coercion on democracy in the West, and how that exposed the Globalist Conspiracy for what it is. He also describes how "useless" mainstream "conservatives" have been revealed to be when it comes to defending the actual principles of society that we're fighting for against the ravages of the Globalist Conspiracy. That leads to this exchange:

20:25

AM: The collapse of law. Because what has happened, what Thierry is describing, would not be possible without the collapse of law. And the collapse of law has been underway for some time. Now, I used to work in the Royal Courts of Justice in London. I was right at the heart of the legal system. I used to work with judges, High Court judges, people who it would have been inconceivable--to me, once upon a time--that they would be parties to this sort of thing. And yet they were. They let it happen. They're letting lots of other things happen. With every day that passes I see decisions coming out of courts which, as legal decisions, I truly don't understand.

In my opinion it started through quasi-international courts, as they're called. I remember reading many years ago a book that you [Laughland] wrote about the trial of Slobodan Milosevic. You discussed the whole way that the Hague tribunal that looked into war crimes in Yugoslavia was set up in a very strange way. It was changing precedents all the time, it was throwing out [legal] safeguards all the time. I know some of the people who were working in those kinds of international courts, tribunals. I've had arguments with them, and what is frightening to me is how the culture that started there--in those very international institutions, and this is where we're going to come to the topic of sovereignty and the disappearance of sovereignty--the culture that developed out of those international courts has now worked its way through into the national legal systems.

JL: Yeah, that's exactly what I wrote about when I wrote about the Milosevic trial, and the Hague tribunal, and the growth of international criminal law. My specific warning was that these bad practices would, indeed, percolate down. And so it has proved. These tribunals are a disgrace, they violate all the principles of due process--above all the [?] principle of the presumption of innocence, but many other rules, besides. I could see it coming, and so it has proved. What you say about the judiciary is very interesting. My own uncle was a High Court judge. He made his name defending a man you may remember named Clive Ponting--the thing with Michael Heseltine, the Falklands War, the Belgrano and so on. That was a generation or two ago, when judges stood up against the government--rather as journalists do--whereas now, as we know, for the last few decades it's exactly the opposite. Journalists, and now also the legal profession, regard themselves as the guard dogs of government.

That is why the Covid issue is so important. The Covid issue--although it sprung upon us, and we didn't expect it, we didn't see it coming--now that it's come and, we hope, gone at least for the time being, we can see--I'm sure you agree with me--that the way the Covid pandemic was treated--Covid is obviously an illness--was itself the symptom of a sick society, of a society that was already sick, of states that were already sick. They were already corrupted, by various weaknesses, by various political viruses, which meant that when the initial panic struck they were unable to react in the proper way. And when I say sick societies, one of the things that strikes me most about the horrible way that Covid was dealt with is that it was precisely the most liberal societies--supposedly liberal societies, Canada, Australia, France to a large extent, although France is much less liberal than the other Anglo-Saxon countries--those countries with long liberal traditions became the most dictatorial. Now, why is that?

In my view it's because those societies--those liberal societies with their post national, post historical, post Christian, postmodern ethic--have created entirely dislocated societies. People don't know where they're from, they don't know whether they're a man or a woman, they have no sense of history, no sense of rootedness. And it's precisely in that sense of unrootedness, or deracination, that people coalesce against a scapegoat. And that, of course, is what we saw in Covid. People were scapegoated if they were anti-vax or whatever. In other words, the virulence of the reaction was itself a symptom of societies that had already become sick through liberalism.

This is something that I’ve repeated endlessly. At its core, in its philosophical DNA, classical liberalism rejects a common human nature as speculative and unknowable and instead embraces the nominalist idea that only individuals exist. This false philosophy undermines all independent social sources of authority and leads liberalism of both the Left (Marxism) and the Right (Libertarianism) to open society up to various forms of totalitarianism. When this idea of individualism takes hold of society, social and even traditional family bonds break down—each and every man becomes an island. The individual is on his own, and turns to government rather than to purely social and religious institutions—which whither and weaken. And because the individual is unable to effectively stand up against the full weight of government without the strong support of social institutions that are independent of government, the tendency has always and everywhere been towards authoritarian and even totalitarian government.

Thierry has titled his book The Covid Conspiracy. Conspiracy. So that's a radical title and it's a provocative one. But what you just said, Thierry, about the narrative--you said that there's only one narrative. We should never forget that on the seventh of April, 2020, a press conference was given in Downing Street by the Chief of the General Staff of the British Army, General Nick Carter. The British Army at that point was building the 19 [?] hospitals, so you can say it was OK for the army to be giving a press conference, because they were actually doing stuff. But, in his press conference he mentioned not just the hospitals they were building--which, by the way, were never used--but also the important work that the 77th Brigade was doing in countering Covid disinformation. 77th Brigade is a psyops unit, a psychological operations unit in the British army, and its role was to control the narrative. The seventh of April, 2020! There was no counter narrative yet, on the seventh of April, 2020! The few little glimmers of resistance in this country had not even started. If I'm not mistaken, The Daily Skeptic, Toby Young's website, was created on the fifth or sixth of April--it had hardly got going!

In other words, they went straight for the jugular. They already knew--at a time when most people were still quite frightened and were probably happy to go along with lockdowns--they already knew that their goal was to control the narrative. And that has now become the primary action of Western societies--controlling the narrative. We recently had, at the end of May, the Dutch intelligence services published a report suggesting the criteria for forbidding political parties, closing down political parties. It's absolutely obvious when you read this report that it's Forum for Democracy that's the target. What is the argument? The argument is that a danger to democracy is posed if there are narratives, if people believe certain narratives--in this case [Forum for Democracy] that there is an evil global elite governing the world. The idea that has taken root in many countries--above all, I would say, in intelligence services--is that narratives pose a danger to the state.

The idea that the “primary action of Western societies”—and certainly of the rulers—is to “control the narrative” has reached perhaps its reductio ad absurdam in the notion that Putin can be defeated by controlling the narrative, rather than through military victory.

That intelligence services—in the US the FBI and CIA—should embrace these notions is hardly surprising. Their power and influence is enhanced. The same actually goes for much of the legal establishment and the lickspittle establishment media.

AM: Which is an astonishing development. It's an extraordinary state of mind. Because the people who promote narratives are the very people who are imposing and enforcing all these things [the Covid Regime]. They're the people who don't want to discuss facts. We're talking about debate, we're talking about discussion--but they don't want discussion! On the contrary, they want to impose narratives ...

29:00

So there we are. We live in an age of narratives. When men lose their grasp of principles of human nature and of reality their resort is to narratives and hoaxes. A hoax society.

But back to reality. I want to cite Simplicius with regard to the question: Why aren’t the Russians going on the offensive—in a big way. Doug Macgregor and others have been telling us that it’s just around the corner—this corner or the next corner, or …

My view, which I’ve expressed numerous times in the past, is that the Russians understand the new nature of warfare. There is no hiding on the modern battlefield and, despite its superiority, the Russian army will not undertake actions that lead to high casualties. Manpower in this day and age is precious and not to be wasted. The Neocons are happy to use Ukrainians as cannon fodder, but Putin will not do that to the Russian people. That’s one of the lessons from WW2. Putin is looking to Russia’s future, and that future does not lie in killing off a generation of young men. The Neocons foolishly thought they could trick Putin into the cannon fodder approach, but Putin the judo master flipped that strategy on its head.

And so, buried in the middle of Simplicius’ usual lengthy article today, we read this:

So, things are getting disastrous for Ukraine—but the question on everyone’s mind is what’s next?

On the one hand, a growing chorus of increasingly prominent voices believes that Russia itself is gearing up for a major offensive of its own. No one can agree on when, though—and estimates range from by end of August, to next spring-summer.

Respected Russian ex-general Konstantin Pulikovsky says that, ultimately, no matter how good your defense, victory can only be achieved through offensive operations. He says Russia will definitely begin an offensive, but only when it senses the enemy is completely exhausted:

💥💥💥Lieutenant General Pulikovsky, former commander of the group of troops in Chechnya:

The most important thing we must understand is that defence, even the most active, the best defence, is a forced method of fighting. It is impossible to achieve victory in defence, victory is achieved only in offensive operations. There will be an offensive, there will definitely be an offensive. But it usually begins when we feel that the enemy is really exhausted. Because the offensive is always associated with its own heavy losses. And defence, on the contrary, leads to heavy losses of the enemy, which is what is happening now. But there will be an offensive, I have no doubt about that.

When it will happen depends not on the armed forces of Ukraine, but on the socio-political situation, which is controlled by the NATO bloc and directly by the United States. That is where our main enemy is. Depending on this situation, a decision will be taken as to when we will go on the offensive.💥💥💥

Interestingly, assistant to DPR head Yan Gagin echoed this view:

[video]

What he says is very interesting. That Russia is ready for a major offensive operations [in terms of training a equipment] but right now, it continues to conduct defense simply because it’s very profitable at the moment to do so. The reasoning he gives is strong: Ukraine is so desperate to achieve any kind of visible breakthrough that they pour their forces forward in completely unfavorable conditions which allow Russia to decimate them. Thus, he seems to imply that for the time being, as long as the AFU continues their ‘meat-assaults’ Russia will happily go on liquidating them out in the open where it’s quite easy and profitable to do so. Then when the time comes, they’ll launch an offensive.

The Neocons believe that they’re winning the narrative, and that the delay of the Russian offensive is a sign of Putin’s weakness. On the contrary, I believe that the strategy of biding his time is a sign of Putin’s great confidence. That’s the confidence he displayed in 2018 when announcing deployment of Russia’s hypersonic missiles: ‘You wouldn’t listen to us before; now you will listen to us.’ That’s the same confidence in December, 2021, in openly presenting Russia’s demands in the form of two draft treaties. That wasn’t a bluff, as we now know, but should have known before—had we listened. No narratives here.