Reichstagsbrand II

Image taken from The Dreadful Story of Pauline and the Matches, Heinrich Hoffmann, 1858

 
So there was another mass shooting this weekend, and as usual, I found out about it several hours after it happened, since I have no TV.  And once again, an Arab with ties to ISIS is being blamed for the massacre.  And once again, I am inclined to think that this was a false flag attack.  For one thing, the alleged assailant is no longer alive to stand trial or to defend himself.  (How convenient!)  For another thing, the alleged assailant proclaimed his allegiance to ISIS just before the attack, and as I have written previously, ISIS has served the United States well as a conveniently manufactured bogeyman (just as Al-Qaeda did before ISIS).  Indeed, there are too many similarities between this attack and previous highly questionable "terror attacks" that have taken place within the last two years. 

For those who think that all Arabs - or all Muslims - are incredibly emotional, fanatic, and stupid, consider this.  Any sane person does not pick a fight with an opponent unless there is a good strategy for winning.  Senseless, high-drama "terror attacks" perpetrated by the Muslim world do not fall into the category of a good strategy for winning.  Rather, those who perpetrate such attacks merely strengthen the hand of their adversaries.  If the Muslim world was actually trying to pick a fight with the West (or especially, with the red-white-and blue Cowboy on a White Horse), surely they would use a smarter strategy than this.

So who benefits from such terror attacks?  Is it not the same people who have worked tirelessly in Europe to demonize immigrants and refugees, in order to exclude them and loot their countries?  And who now is the chief spokesman and proponent of pushing the United States to do the same thing?  The spokesman I am thinking of has indeed gone into full loose cannon mode over the last 24 hours.  He has made himself the point man for a group of people who have long been used to supremacy and a unipolar world which they regarded as their oyster.  Now that such a world is slipping from their grasp, they are full of rage and terror.  Such emotions can move people to do some really creepy things. 

Deep Fiction and Hip Boots

It's been interesting to read much of what has been written within the last three months about Syria and the Western "fight against terror," both from the mainstream media and from those American bloggers whom Walter M. Miller would have described as a "fine patriotic opinionated rabble."  The mainstream media line began with an insistence in September and October that Russian intervention in Syria was killing "moderate Syrian rebels opposed to Assad".  Later, after several bloggers cited mainstream media sources and Wikileaks documents showing that the "moderate rebels" funded by the U.S. were one and the same as ISIS, the line shifted to statements that, "well, we made some mistakes.  But while ISIS may have arisen from groups originally funded by the West, it has taken on an identity of its own.  We have lost control of it.  It is self-funded and self-supporting, and is therefore really the bogeyman we have made it out to be!  Support our fight against ISIS!!!"

So many mainstream outlets are spouting that line nowadays that it's becoming increasingly hard to go back to the primary sources which show that all that noise is in fact a pack of lies.  But if one is determined and has the time for it, one can still dig out the truth.  This weekend, I have a rare bit of spare time, and that is exactly what I've been doing with my time.  Today's post is designed to equip you, the reader with a sturdy, leak-proof pair of hip boots so that you may be able to wade through piles of "deep fiction" without being sullied and without losing your footing on the firm ground of truth.  Let's go for a walk, shall we?

First, then, let's discuss the origins of the movement now known as ISIS.  Those origins go back to the late 1970's, when a pro-Marxist government came to power in Afghanistan, and Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security advisor,  proposed a program of fomenting armed rebellion against the new regime.  In an interview later, Brzezinski admitted that one of his goals was to draw the Soviet Union into a bloody armed conflict in Afghanistan.  Unfortunately, the Soviets fell for the gambit, and sent in troops in December 1979.  The Soviets found themselves facing an armed opposition which was largely drawn from radicalized Muslims who were foreign to Afghanistan, who had been recruited by the United States or its proxy countries.  These warriors were at first deemed by the CIA to be more reliable for American interests than the native Afghans.  However, a program was begun to radicalize the Afghan population, and this program reached even into Afghan schools with the supply of very violent propagandistic textbooks to Afghan children.  (See this also.)  The documents to which I have linked also show that U.S. funding of jihadist groups continued even after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, and into the 1990's.

From 1992 until circa 2005, the trail of money and arms becomes somewhat harder to trace.  I am sure that it could be traced, but it would take me quite a bit longer than a weekend to do so.  (Here's a homework assignment for some adventurous soul, if you want it.  And here is a good starting place.)  However, the trail becomes easy to pick up again if we look at the last decade and a half.  The trail is crystal-clear in Syria.

For instance, we now know without a doubt that a major goal of U.S. policy from 2005 onward has been the overthrow of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.  The chosen pretext for this overthrow has been concern that President Assad stood in opposition to "human rights" and "democracy" in Syria.  (Bloody hypocrites!  If you're so concerned about "human rights," why are so many of you silent in the face of the abuses perpetrated by the prison-industrial complex, the police and the schools against people of color and dark-skinned immigrants right here in the U.S.?  Serpents!  Brood of vipers!)  So starting from 2005 onward, various foreign actors (including Israeli and Turkish special operatives) staged "incidents" which "proved" that Assad was "abusing his people" and had to be removed.  (There's also this, this and this.  Note that the Turkish journalists who reported the role of Turkey in Syria are now in Turkish jails.)

So it was that the U.S. found it desirable to create, fund and grow an "opposition" movement in Syria, a movement which quickly became an armed rebellion with arms supplied by the U.S.  As it was in Afghanistan, so in Syria also this movement is largely composed of fighters who are foreigners to Syria, fighters who are loyal to al-Qaeda, who was the bogeyman du jour prior to the emergence of ISIS (and whom the U.S. blamed for the 9/11 attacks, thus starting the American "War on Terror").  Here is a list of sources who trace the direct funding and equipping of these fighters by the United States from 2013 onward:

• "Arms Airlift to Syria Rebels Expands, With Aid from CIA"
• "West Training Syria Rebels In Jordan"
• "Americans Are Training Syria Rebels In Jordan: Spiegel"
• "Secret CIA Effort In Syria Faces Large Spending Cut"

As to my assertion at the beginning that we know with dead certainty that many, if not all of the "moderate rebels" who were trained and equipped by the U.S. to overthrow Assad are one and the same as ISIS, see this, this and this.  The last link in that previous sentence shows that the Pentagon saw ISIS as a strategic asset to weaken Shia influence in the Mideast.

So then, what exactly has the U.S. been doing in its "fight against ISIS"?  First of all, the U.S. has been knowingly fighting a bogeyman of whom it is well known that it poses no threat to the U.S.  The fight has also been a sham fight, in which after Obama's public vow to "crush ISIS," ISIS managed to overrun more than 70 percent of Syrian territory and large swaths of Iraq while U.S. warplanes destroyed infrastructure (oil refineries and other petroleum facilities, power plants, water treatment plants, and the like) located in territory belonging to President Assad, thus helping to create the current refugee crisis.  Note also that U.S. warplanes recently bombed Syrian troops under the pretext of "fighting terror," then lied about it.  Meanwhile, the U.S. was, until very recently, very sparing in its attacks against known ISIS targets - until the Russian intervention in October, which targeted, among other things, ISIS convoys illegally smuggling oil out of Syria and into Turkey.  The fact that Russia is genuinely trying to crush these terrorists and is not playing games became a major embarrassment to the U.S., which responded by delivering an airstrike of its own against an ISIS oil convoy - but not without dropping leaflets warning ISIS truck drivers of the attack nearly an hour beforehand.

As for that stolen oil, it is also well known that ISIS has been benefiting the West by providing illegal sales of stolen Iraqi, Libyan and Syrian oil at less than half the fair market value, and that one of the major beneficiaries of this oil has been Turkey.  (See this also.)  This illegal oil trade has been known for at least a year, by the way.

So there you have it - ISIS as a bogeyman who is also a secret teddy bear of some well-placed, powerful interests in the West, and specifically in the United States.  You can see how ISIS the bogeyman has been used as an instrument to divide and break strong sovereign states into failed states that are easily controlled and looted by the West.  (You can also see the parallels between the uses made of ISIS and the use by the West of a bunch of foreign mercenaries and thugs of the worst type to break up the Ukraine.  Too many of our "revolutions" have relied on "lewd fellows of the baser sort.")

You also have a bit of history to put the ISIS bogeyman into proper perspective.  Out of that history I have fashioned a sturdy pair of hip boots.  Yet I know that there are those, both great and small, in America who would rather wade through fields of deep fiction without any protection for their feet, because, while the truth will set a person free, it will also smash any patriotic narcissistic "grandiose self" he or she may have erected.  There are those as well who want you to wind up with stinky feet, as the mainstream media engages in a frenzied effort to distort and bury the history of the last several years.  (This is why, for instance, after the beginning of Russian military action, there were ludicrous assertions in mainstream outlets that U.S. efforts to train and arm "moderate Syrian rebels" were really for the purpose of training these "rebels" to fight ISIS.  What a bunch of - er, um, ahem, "deep fiction"!)

The trouble is, lying to oneself and distorting one's personal history are the marks of a personality-disordered person.  And some suggest that the longer a disordered person engages in such a game with himself, the more likely he is to wind up in a permanently demented condition.  (See this and this also.)  I am thinking of President Reagan, who testified during the Congressional hearings into the Iran-Contra affair that there were some things he simply couldn't remember.  A few years later, he began to suffer from an actual inability to remember anything.  Maybe he is a warning.

BMNT/EENT As A Dangerous Time

Once again, I find myself writing about a gruesome subject, in the aftermath of the mass shooting in San Bernardino.  I certainly do not wish to make light of the loss of life or of the pain being endured by the survivors and the relatives of the deceased.  Yet I believe that the best way to honor the victims is to look at this incident dispassionately and analytically, in order to discern those factors which may reduce the likelihood of similar incidents in the future.

So I thought it good to discuss ISIS again, since this incident is being treated by authorities and the mainstream media as an ISIS attack.  As I have pointed out in a previous post, inciting fear in Western populations by raising up a bogeyman like ISIS is very convenient for those now in charge of Western governments, particularly the United States government and various State governments now controlled by Republicans.  It also bears mentioning that the "moderate rebels" and "freedom fighters" whom the United States has been supplying with money and arms in the Mideast have turned out to be one and the same as the supposed ISIS whom the United States is supposed to be fighting.  (See this and this also.)

Also, there are the similarities between the San Bernardino massacre, the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the Paris massacre, such as:

• The deaths of all immediate witnesses to the attack;
• The use of a getaway vehicle by the attackers;
• A very public attempt to link the attackers to ISIS, the Mideast, and Islam (or to any other party whom the United States deems to be a convenient enemy);
• The fact that all the attackers are eventually killed by police, and thus are never brought to a public trial;
• And the fact that the attacks make no tactical or strategic sense, but only serve to provoke and justify increasingly fascist and destructive responses from the very nations who are supposedly being attacked.

Lastly, it bears mention that there is an increasing backlash of an unexpected kind against such "terror" attacks: namely, the rise of an increasing number of people who refuse to believe the official government/mainstream media narrative of the incidents, and who choose instead to believe that these are false flag operations.  Such people increasingly believe that those who run Western governments, Western media and Western economies are manufacturing external enemies who are actually bogeymen created to keep Western populations in line and to justify Western resource wars.

The point of view which therefore doubts the official mainstream narrative ought therefore to be publicly examined and logically discussed.  Until recently, this has not been done.  Instead, the dominant voices in American and Western society have sought to silence the doubters by ad hominem attacks, asserting that to doubt the official narrative was somehow a distasteful, improper and uncouth act in and of itself, regardless of the evidence.  It's sort of like the people in the story of the Emperor's new clothes who were cowed into believing that it would be ill-mannered and utterly uncouth to accept or point out the visual evidence that the Emperor was actually naked.

Therefore, I think it would be good to have a very open and public discussion of the belief that the "War on Terror" has been marked by a number of false flag incidents perpetrated by the very governments who are supposed to be "fighting terror."  We should openly discuss the evidence for and against this belief, and should discuss the criteria by which people would be able to accurately judge the evidence.  This is particularly important now, because the United States is losing its reason du jour for meddling in the Mideast, as Russia is systematically destroying ISIS in Syria, and has been invited by the Iraqi government to do the same thing in Iraq.  Thus we are now living in a dangerous twilight time.  By this I mean that if the U.S. were really corrupt enough to stoop to the level of false flag attacks to get its way, we'd be faced with three possible outcomes.  First, if the U.S. was at the moment enjoying having everything its way, false flag terror attacks would be unnecessary, and thus the likelihood of such attacks would be greatly diminished.  (Only idiots do things which are totally unnecessary.)  Similarly, if an overwhelming majority of American citizens responded with jaded cynicism to supposed terror attacks, there would be no point in perpetrating false flag terror, and again, the likelihood of further attacks would be greatly diminished.  (Only the insane do things that clearly don't work.)

But it is the territory between these two extremes which is so dangerous, as an increasing number of people begin to very publicly question the official narrative, and as a result, those who would benefit from false flag operations are motivated to push those operations into overdrive in order to "prove" to the skeptics that the bogeymen whom we have been taught to fear are for real (and are distinct from us).  Thus it would not surprise me if there was an escalation of terror attacks in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West in coming days.

Munchausen's Empire: A False Flag Primer

France is using last Friday's "terror attack" exactly as I predicted in my most recent two posts.  Indeed, they seem to be almost exactly copying the script the U.S. followed after the 9/11 "terror attacks", except that they are more rabid and vehement and less interested in appearing to be "compassionate" conservatives.  They intend to target "ISIS" in West Africa as well as Syria, Libya and Iraq.  This should lead the serious student of world affairs to ask what natural resources, and especially mineral resources reside in the Sahel of West Africa.  That will give students a clear idea as to why France decided that ISIS is a "threat" there.  (Serious students can also look at Haiti's natural resources and the percentage of that country owned by foreign interests, and decide what the U.S. was really trying to "protect" when it sent thousands of troops there after the devastating earthquake in 2010.)

I have noticed that there are two audiences of this blog.  The first consists of those who have studied the impact of resource depletion on industrial societies and the global economy.  I am flattered by your readership, especially since many of you know much more than I do about these things.  The second audience is more recent, and consists of those who have been interested in my analysis of the dysfunctional psychology of an empire in decline.  Some in the second audience may be unfamiliar with terms familiar to the first group.  One of those terms is "false flag operation."

For those of you who want to know what that means, and why it matters (especially why it matters whether the Paris attack was a false flag operation), here are a few links to help introduce you to the subject.

This Wikipedia article defines the term, and provides historical examples of false flag operations.

This article examines some disturbing characteristics of the Paris massacre.  (Language warning.)

This article provides testimony from a retired member of the U.S. military concerning American uses of false flag operations.

This article provides background information on the origins of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

Here and here are articles listing several admitted false flag operations that were either planned or planned and executed by various governments.  See where the U.S. is in this list.  Here is an article describing Turkey's role in false flag operations in Syria.

And lastly, here is an article describing Munchausen syndrome, a serious personality disorder.  (Munchausen's by proxy is even worse.)

These sources should provide a few hours of riveting, yet macabre, reading.

Why I don't Entirely Believe In The ISIS Crisis

ISIS has been in the news a lot lately. I don't have a lot of time to search out links, but I will give a summary of my impression of the news. According to American media, ISIS has grown from a smattering of formerly American-funded and American-trained Islamic militants into a powerhouse of radical terrorist jihadism threatening to destabilize the entire Middle East. Not only that, but they are behind the barbarous beheadings of a number of foreign journalists who were unwise enough to be caught hanging out in places where they should not have been. And to top it all off, several ISIS plots have been uncovered recently to attack public targets in the United States, Australia and France.

In response to all of these things, President Barack Obama has declared a war to the finish against ISIS. (Never mind that we attacked ISIS first, thus prompting the first beheading of a foreign journalist.) So far, this has involved American and British airstrikes against targets in Syria and Iraq. Some members of the U.S. government have also talked of the need to initiate a ground campaign in the Mideast in order to eradicate ISIS.

That's my impression of the official story line, anyway. Now, I am not a national security analyst, but a few things smell quite fishy about the official story line. They have to do with how the U.S. and Britain are using the ISIS crisis (hey, that rhymes!) to accomplish a few policy objectives which they have long wanted to achieve, but which have to date been stymied. First is the overthrow of the Syrian government and its replacement by a puppet government constructed by the United States, which tried for many months to find a pretext for military operations against President Hassad, and which failed to motivate enough Americans to back such a stinky business. First, we tried to foment a fake revolution. Then we carried out a number of false flag operations. Then certain highly placed government officials told outright lies to a bunch of “news” outlets unworthy of the title of journalists. Now ISIS provides a convenient excuse to do something which was never legitimate in the first place.

So what about those beheadings? Well, all I know for sure is that they were carried out by a bunch of guys in Arab costumes with masks on their faces and speaking in funny accents. No sane or reasonable person would venture to try to identify any of those masked men by name – or by nationality. In the absence of more substantive identification, I feel the same way I felt after watching a grainy, low-resolution video broadcast by some mainstream media outlets purporting to prove that someone who looked like Michael Brown held up a convenience store before he was shot to death by a white cop while unarmed. Pardon me, but I need to see faces that I can recognize before I will even begin to consider any video “evidence.” Who knows, the beheaders might be my next door neighbors in Halloween costumes.

Compare the Anglo-American portrayal of ISIS to the portrayal of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, and you'll notice a striking number of similarities. Bin Laden served for years as America's bogeyman in order to legitimize two stupid wars, huge losses of life, oppression of two nations (three if you count the progress that has been made in turning the U.S. into a police state), and untold damage. Osama was America's Goldstein from 2001 until his untimely death at the tusks of a bunch of trained seals in 2011. I guess it was time for a new bogeyman, a new La_Llorona to keep us properly scared, compliant and willing to support our raging, uncontrollable addiction to war. Thanks, ISIS!

Oh, and one other thing. ISIS is being used to help us conveniently forget our own self-inflicted problems, such as the oppression of people of color by holders of white privilege in this country, the continued oppression of women by dominating, narcissistic men who legitimize domestic violence and rape, the oppression of sick people by a predatory system of “insurance”, “medicine” and Big Pharma, the environmental consequences we are now suffering due to the non-negotiable American way of life, the predation of the poor by the rich, etc, etc.