The Rise of GloboHate; Washington’s Doctrine of Bullying and Ethno-Hatred Inspires its Admirers.

Uncle Volodya says, “Never do a wrong thing to make a friend, or to keep one.”

Well, we’ve come a long, long way..
Look at everything we know;
We’re getting smarter every day
Ah, but where’s it gonna go?
For all the words that go by,
I’ve got a feeling inside,
That after it’s all said and done:
Though we’ve come a long, long way.
This old world’s not much better than it was…

Ian Thomas, from “Long Long Way”

So we learned recently, via the intertubes, that celebrated American horror writer Stephen King has entered the political fray – unsurprisingly, on the side of Ukraine. In addition to sternly ordering Russia to get the fuck out of Ukraine, he has officially suspended the publication of all his new books in Russia, and also banned the renewal of expired previous rights.

Of course, that’s his privilege, and I wish I could say I never acted like an arsehole through ignorance, but that would be a lie. It’s not my purpose to hold him up to ridicule for his political beliefs or suggest his opinions are of no consequence; I’ve always enjoyed his fiction and have read nearly everything he’s ever written. In fact, in writing, I learned to use snatches of popular music or poetry to set the stage for things I wanted to say or to establish mood from reading King, and it remains a favourite technique. I think he’s wrong on this issue, but we can’t be right all the time, and in most cases we can say later, “You know, on that thing we talked about – I was wrong”, and the world will continue to turn with no serious harm done.

Nor can we guess much, from a short social-media statement, of what he actually knows about this subject, or if the belief he expresses holds true for all countries – if it’s not your country, you have no business there in a military capacity uninvited – although I am bound to say if the latter is true, he must not get out much. The country of his birth, residence and which he doubtless supports (considering he could probably live anywhere he likes) has never been shy about entering other countries with military forces, and when it cannot think of an excuse for doing so which will be broadly accepted, it simply makes one up.

No; the real reason I wanted to feature his declaration up front, together with all it implies about any belief he might harbor that he speaks for the nation, is because of a delicious serendipity. You see, in ‘The Stand’ – one of his best books, in my opinion – and through the character of Harold Lauder, King wrote a mini-manifesto that rings like he was speaking of America itself.

It’s said that the two great human sins are pride and hate. Are they? I choose to think of them as the two great virtues. To give away pride and hate is to say you will change for the good of the world. To embrace them, to vent them, is more noble. The world must change for the good of you.

If you ordered The United States from Jeff Bezos, when the Amazon box with the big smile showed up on your doorstep, the packing slip would read “The United States of America. The world must change for the good of you.” Because America considers itself the original model, upon which all others are based; you don’t have to pattern yourself after us. But if you want our endorsement, you will, and you can’t be a real country without it. And don’t try that “Hi; I’m your new neighbour. Any chance I could borrow a cup of democracy?” because we own the trademark on democracy, and if it don’t read “Made in the USA”, it ain’t the real thing.

Did the United States invent democracy? Hardly. The modern concept is generally acknowledged to have its origins in 5th-century BC Athens, although social groups which arrive at decisions through consensus predate that by a significant period, a social construct referred to as ‘tribalism’. That term, in fact, much more accurately describes the political environment in Washington today. Anyway, when democracy was a’borning, there wasn’t anything in what today is the United States, not even beavers and Indians, although it’s not polite to call them that anymore.

Oh: but look at this, though.

“Modern representative democracies attempt to bridge the gulf between the Hobbesian ‘state of nature’ and the grip of authoritarianism through ‘social contracts’ that enshrine the rights of the citizens, curtail the power of the state, and grant agency through the right to vote. While they engage populations with some level of decision-making, they are defined by the premise of distrust in the ability of human populations to make a direct judgement about candidates or decisions on issues.”

Is the present-day United States even a democracy? Is there a social contract between the US government and the people which enshrines the rights of citizens? Sure is; it’s called the Constitution; more accurately, the Bill of Rights, which is the first ten amendments to the Constitution. Saying a document has the force of law, though, is not the same as saying it protects citizens from violations of it by government. Let’s just look at a ‘for instance’; the First Amendment provides that the government “shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech.” But further back than The Creepiest White House Press Secretary Ever, Ari Fleischer, who told Americans they ‘have to watch what they say, watch what they do’, the United States government has taken steps to limit the freedom of speech, and along about 2020 they discovered the magic formula – if you say Things We Don’t Like To Hear, you are ‘spreading disinformation’, and we have to shut that down hard, to protect right-thinking citizens. Since then, Watching What You Say has gone into high gear.

An Ipsos survey in 2020 found that more than half of Americans said they had become more concerned about their online safety and were spending more time trying to determine if their Internet searches were safe. That’s good news but also an unfortunate sign of the times that so many of us have become paranoid about what we read online.

Determining if their internet searches were safe…from whom? The Russians? The Chinese? Or their own government? How many people said ‘their own government’?

In response to the international public outcry triggered by the Snowden revelations, the Obama administration went to great lengths to justify the U.S. intelligence community’s invasion into the private lives of its citizens. In a speech during a visit to Berlin in 2013, Obama claimed he knew of over 50 terrorist threats that had been thwarted due to the information collected by the NSA’s unlawful spying operations, but did not offer examples. In October of the same year, the then-NSA director, General Keith Alexander, was called to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee and failed to substantiate the stated justifications for the surveillance programs. “Alexander cited only one instance when an intercept detected a potential threat: a Somali taxi driver living in San Diego who sent $8,500 to al-Shabab, his home country’s notorious terrorist group,” reported Foreign Policy.

In December 2013, a panel established to review NSA operations came to the conclusion that zero terrorist attacks were prevented by the NSA under any legislation that was claimed to have been passed for the purpose of thwarting attacks. In 2014, the independent Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board further confirmed this in their report on mass surveillance. In the meantime, the civil liberties of U.S. citizens and people all around the world had been dismantled. They had been replaced by what law professors Jack Balkin and Sandy Levinson termed a “national surveillance state” – one devoid of new laws to protect individual privacy and counter government abuse.

100% warrantless spying. Intercepted phone conversations which could be played back in their entirety for 30 days. Zero evidence that any of this prevented any terrorist attacks, which was the justification for intelligence agencies getting their cheap thrills. If it happened in Russia or China, the US Department of State would be yelling about it until the judgement trump.

Speaking of Trump, remember the Democrats’ relentless pursuit of General Flynn? A highly-decorated member of the nation’s military who served the United States to the best of his ability for over 30 years, yet when the Democratic party’s special prosecutor could not get him to admit lying to investigators, the investigators threatened his family members even though there was no suspicion they had done anything wrong – simply to drive up his legal bills, which were bankrupting the Flynns, and wring a confession out of him. Despicable? Uh huh, I don’t think that would be too strong a word.

In a democracy – keeping it simple and sticking just to the basics – the citizenry agrees to be ruled by the government and to provide it with income through taxation, while the government agrees to govern in accordance with the rules established at the outset and to not change the rules without public debate.

But governments among the world’s ‘democracies’ have learned ways around the system which allow them to declare themselves democracies with the utmost piety, while making all manner of decisions which would never gain popular support if the electorate really knew what was going on. Therefore, the electorate is instead fed a flash flood of bullshit about the cruel dictator killing his own people, machine-gunning echelons of peaceful protesters, atrocity, atrocity, atrocity, send in the Marines. And it works like a charm, because the people are mostly dumb and do not want to believe their government would lie to them, especially about something so important that a mistake will not only carry potential global consequences, it will also directly impact their own lives right here on Tranquility Street.

The Iraq model is a classic, mostly because the US government officials involved have mostly admitted they lied the western population into supporting a war which was never about a cruel dictator – although nobody would call Saddam Hussein a frustrated social worker – and was all about gaining American control over an oil-rich country. Donald Rumsfeld did much of the legwork, declaring that while bin Laden was probably hiding out in Afghanistan, there were no good targets in Afghanistan, there were plenty of good targets in Iraq. Remarkable – you can get on the Pentagon must-have scoreboard just by having lots of good targets in your country. But once the US federal government started to taste the idea of rolling over Iraq, and liked it, propaganda campaigns were initiated to get the western electorates onside. I’ve mentioned this several times over the years, but a classic of audacity never goes out of style; the Government of Kuwait hired British PR firm Hill & Knowlton to sell the west a stirring story of brave but puny Kuwait standing up to a dictator. Hill & Knowlton conducted focus-group studies to determine which strategies would pluck most energetically at public heartstrings, and together with a fake Kuwaiti nurse, told a tearjerking story of cold-hearted Iraqi soldiers ripping babies out of incubators in Kuwaiti hospitals, leaving them to die on the cold floors while they carried the incubators back to Iraq. Those whose ears are attuned to propaganda, and know that it need not make sense, will recognize a common thread with Ukraine’s current ludicrous stories of Russian soldiers stealing toilet bowls from Ukrainian homes. The Hill & Knowlton story was a smashing success; I can remember my own mother nearly weeping with rage at how that Ay-rab needed someone to take him up and no mistake – have you ever seen such cruelty? Amnesty International initially supported the fabrication, but later not only retracted it, but also accused the US government of “opportunistic manipulation of the international human rights movement.”

Hill & Knowlton (H&K) conducted a $1 million study to determine the best way to win broad U.S. support for strong action in Kuwait. H&K had the Wirthington Group conduct focus groups to determine the best strategy that would influence public opinion. The study found that an emphasis on atrocities — particularly the incubator story — was the most effective. H&K is estimated to have pocketed $12 million from the Kuwaitis for their public relations campaign.

A couple of points should be highlighted here, just in case they are not immediately obvious; one, Amnesty International filed ‘independent stories’ which corroborated the ‘nurse’s’ account. They were in bed with Hill & Knowlton’s creation from the starting gun, and only pretended they had been taken advantage of – pulled me skirts right over me ‘ead, ‘e did, and ‘ad his way, oh, pity a poor lass – when ABC reporters went to Kuwait and interviewed hospital staff, and discovered who the ‘nurse’ was and that the story was complete bullshit. Two, the Congressional Human Rights Congress of the US Congress, before whom she testified, did not in even the most cursory way try to establish her credentials; you could have walked any college girl in there and nobody would have been the wiser. Those people make decisions that affect Americans’ lives – are you okay with them being so gullible? The only alternative is even less appealing – that they were in on the deception as well, and were just going through the motions.

Know how long ago that was? Thirty-two years; 1990. Have western governments learned anything from it? Not so you’d notice, since they have continued to use the same shaken-not-stirred cocktail of direct fabrication of atrocities, projection and censorship of denials to ram support-inducing narratives down the public’s throat. Have the people learned not to be taken in? What do you think? Has that angry sheep Wolf Blitzer still got a job? Thanks to a wide audience still yearning to be fooled, he sure does; he started his career with CNN the year the first Gulf War was revving up, 1990, and until just last year he was CNN’s lead political anchor.

Back then, Iraq and Muslims were the enemy. Muslims were relentlessly demonized and portrayed as the face of terror, and in 2003 George W. Bush decided to finish the job his dad started, and invaded Iraq again. But before that, between 2000 and 2001, hate crimes in America against Muslims rose 1,617% according to FBI figures.

Now the enemy is Russia and China, but mostly Russia. The Ukrainians are playing Kuwait, the plucky little country standing up to the looming evil. And American politicians are so happy to be fooled that they don’t bother to check anything. This time, because the US government got an unpleasant surprise when its we-must-help-Kuwait stage productions were exposed as cynical lies, there are no journalists blowing the whistle. So when a Ukrainian delegation visited the USA to testify before a Congressional panel of the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee, headed by career wooden-head Senator James Inhofe, nobody blinked when the delegation (headed by ‘Dr.’ Phillip Karber) produced photographs authenticated by Karber and passed them off as incursions of Russian armor into Ukraine…when they actually depicted a line of Russian tanks entering Georgia in 2008. It fell to independent interests to point out the lie, and I first saw the correction in the Washington Free Beacon. But Dr. Karber claimed to have simply been confused because he was rushing to catch a plane, said the Ukrainians pulled a fast one on him, and he was allowed to get away with it. There was never any serious discussion whether the USA would support Ukraine even though they had just been caught lying to the government of a foreign nation they were trying to persuade to give them money and weapons, because the USA would give money and weapons to Satan if he appeared in a cloud of scorching brimstone and offered to fight Russia. Bad optics have a way of being minimized when important foreign-policy goals have the prospect of succeeding. For his part, although Foreign Policy author Jeffrey Lewis expressed disappointment in Karber, it quickly became clear that he was more upset at him for having clumsily gotten caught – Lewis was happy to stipulate that Russia actually was in Ukraine with tanks and pro-Russian ‘separatists’ were killing innocent Ukrainians in cold blood, he just couldn’t prove it. Karber did a fade, and before you could say, “You lying bullshitter”, he was back in thinktankland’s good graces, giving speeches and informative talks as a ‘security expert’.

Just one fairly minor example of the demonization of Russia, of the tactical introduction of ‘atrocities’ just when allies need that extra little push to get them to pull together as a team and damage their own interests and economies in order to help Washington achieve its goals. A much more ambitious propaganda coup was the destruction of MH-17. The timing of that atrocity was exquisite, coming just as Washington was pushing its allies hard to unite behind sanctions against Russia, and some key players remained reluctant. I won’t go into detail here, I did that already in a previous post which covered the technical points. I will, however, summarize the most egregious lies in the western case for Russia having supplied the system to the ‘separatists’, whom – as the narrative eventually settled upon. A brief effort was made to have the Russians doing it themselves, but that was abandoned. Anyway, (1) nobody else who uses that system ever uses only a single launcher with the radar in the nose, because it is not a search radar and consequently the single component would be useless for air defense; (2) efforts to finger the Russians by ‘discovering’ pieces of the missile in the wreckage at the site of the Boeing’s crash rely on the idiocy prevalent in the western population. The missile does not actually hit the aircraft; a proximity fuse causes it to explode close to the aircraft, and the missile certainly does not embed its casing into the target, nor does it fly alongside after destroying the plane so it can come helpfully to rest in the wreckage. Pieces of the missile ‘found in the wreckage’ were planted there or simply introduced as evidence with the stupid explanation that they had been found in the wreckage, because stupid people will buy a stupid explanation. (3) the serial number of the missile the Ukrainians offered as ‘the smoking gun’ was visible, and shortly thereafter Russia provided detailed records which demonstrated that missile was sent directly from assembly to Ukraine, and had never been in Russia except for that trip. The western reaction was scornful dismissal of such a transparent forgery. (4) the airliner was struck at its cruising altitude. A single Buk TELAR could only have seen it if it had been pointed directly at it when it turned on, because the radar is not designed for searching. Who would be looking at 33 kft for an air-defense threat? Is that where the Ukrainian Air Force typically flies? (5) the Fire Dome radar has integrated IFF, so if by some incredible leap of miracle technology the radar was looking directly at the aircraft when it turned on, and detected it, the IFF signal would have told the operator he was looking at a civil airliner. Nobody is suggesting (now) that whoever did it did so deliberately, but that it was a mistake. How would such a mistake occur? By an operator searching for Ukrainian attack aircraft at 33 kft and ignoring system information that the target was an airliner? Uh huh; sure. That makes sense.

Then there was the ‘state-sponsored doping system’ scandal at the Olympics, which saw Russian athletes stripped of their medals…only to have nearly all of them returned when the west’s star witness imploded and burned like The Hindenburg, and the Court of Arbitration for Sport was unable to make any charges stick in a case which the special commission reporter had claimed to have found so much evidence it was embarrassing. The attempts to hack the French election. Steering the BREXIT vote. Tampering with the US power grid. And, of course, getting Trump elected President, which I touched on earlier in the discussion of General Flynn.

Also, more recently, the Bucha massacre. After Russian forces withdrew from the town of Bucha, near Kiev, the streets were discovered to be littered with the bodies of citizens, arms bound behind their backs, shot in the head and some bearing signs of torture. This was immediately blamed on the Russians. Russia countered with video of the Mayor of Bucha, smiling and posing and telling the camera how pleased he was that control of his town had been returned to Ukrainian forces, and that the Russians were gone. It was uploaded March 31st, and no bodies were discovered before April 2nd at the earliest. Perhaps the mayor never goes beyond the doorstep of City Hall, or is otherwise oblivious of what is going on in the town and simply did not notice the streets were full of bodies. Maybe he is high-strung, and his fellow citizens did not want to upset him, but I think you will agree neither of these scenarios is very believable.

“March 31 will go down in the history of our Bucha community as the Day of Liberation. The liberation by our Armed Forces of Ukraine from Russian orcs, from Russian occupiers. So today, I state that this day is joyful. Joyful and this is a great victory in Kyiv region! And we will definitely wait so that there is a great victory all over Ukraine,” Fedoruk said.

He doesn’t say anything about the streets of his town being filled with murdered citizens, instead appearing to be in a relieved and celebratory mood and claiming the day is ‘joyful’. By the way, that video is getting hard to find; in short order Fedoruk rushed out sombre video claiming that Russia would never ever be forgiven for the horrible things it had done, and announcing that sad as he was to say it, he blamed all the Russian people. The usual hand-waving look-over-here distractors set up a clamor that Russia was obviously lying with its denials, because…well, because Russians are liars and Ukrainians are not. Journalists could verify that bodies they photographed were most likely those of dead people, and that they appeared to have been shot, but contrary to the blithe assurances that they were ‘shot by Russians’, there was no evidence of that and it was yet another contention which was simply taken at Ukraine’s word. Likewise, when video clips uploaded by one Serhiy Korotkykh, who calls himself ‘Boatsman’ or ‘Boatswain’ appeared to prove violent reprisals by Ukrainian troops, Vox Ukraina leaped in to assert that the video had been edited and altered, there were no shots in the original and that voices pleading for mercy were in fact indecipherable in the original – just another crude fake by Russia. But the stitched-together ‘intercepts’ the Ukrainian SBU keeps coming up with, in which Russians helpfully admit they shot down MH-17 and they sure hope the Ukrainians don’t find out, are solid gold and the most criticism they earn in the international arena is to acknowledge their provenance is disputed by Russia. That’s after independent professionals from Malaysia examined the recordings and declared them to have been heavily edited. Nothing, but nothing is going to be accepted as evidence of Ukrainian malfeasance or worse, while Ukraine only has to accuse Russia of the craziest things to have the western media immediately circulate it as fact. After all, as embarrassing Canadian vacuum-head Melanie Joly offers smugly, “We’re not naive”. We’re totally wise to the Russians, and we know that they blew up the Nord Stream gas pipelines to Europe themselves. We know that because the Americans told us. Where did they ever get such a lunatic idea? Oh; Andriy Kobolyev, the former head of Navtogaz, told them. According to him, this actually is an old Soviet trick; the explosives were placed in the pipeline when it was built. Do tell, Andriy; you obviously did not think that one through very well, because both Nord Stream lines were blown, but Nord Stream I has been operational since 2011, so those explosives have been there, underwater for 11 years – now that’s engineering for you! Well, Melanie Joly totally buys it. I wish I could say she’s just an escaped mental patient who seized the microphone during a press conference, but we almost never institutionalize people for mental illness in Canada, and she’s actually the Foreign Minister. If you know anything about the Prime Minister, or about Canadian politics, that might come as less of a surprise.

This might be great fun for the west – who doesn’t like to get the green light to hate someone, after years of listening to endless preaching about diversity and bullying and acceptance? Fuck that, right? But it’s not going to come without cost, so start getting used to that reality. The United States cannot – that’s ‘can’ and ‘not’ – replace Russian pipeline gas supplies with shipborne LNG; we’ve been over this and over this and although some people obviously are stupid enough to accept the pie-in-the-sky, stream-of-consciousness Green space cadets like Annelina Baerbock and Robert Habeck, ‘renewables’ are not going to take its place, either. For example, a study conducted by British scientists in 2019 concluded that electrifying all the UK’s cars by 2050 (a current government ambition) would require twice the currently available global output of cobalt, almost the total amount of neodymium produced globally each year, three quarters of the world’s lithium, and “at least half” of the world’s copper. That’s just the UK – not all of Europe. But it helpfully highlights the totally unsupported belief that future technologies will overcome any problems, which takes the power of positive thinking to lunatic levels. Fossil-fuel energy is going to be around for awhile – unless you prefer nuclear, and while that is a relatively clean energy, the near-constant shelling of the nuclear power plant in Zaporozhye (something else Ukraine blames on Russia, because Russians shooting at a power plant which is under Russian control just makes sense) has made people a little leery of nuclear power. So while Europe is having a tremendous time hurling secondhand Ukrainian smack at Russia, the bill that is coming due will be long-term, very expensive and substantially inadequate energy supplies from the United States. No battlefield miracle is going to occur that will see Ukraine triumphing over Russia, and the longer it drags out the more of a ruin end-state Ukraine will be, when it’s looking for its Good Friends for whom it fought so hard to bail it out.

Zbigniew Brzezinski said, in his well known, “The Grand Chessboard”; “After the victory over communism, we need a split of Orthodoxy and the breakdown of Russia, and Ukraine, where betrayal is the norm of public morality, will help us in this.” He apparently had an enviable grasp of character, although I doubt even he foresaw the brainless alacrity with which the west would embrace even Ukraine’s most ludicrous claims. The west wants to believe Ukraine is the Good Guy, because it does not want to imagine itself helping the Bad Guy.

Here’s how the Russians see this existential conflict, because that’s what it is. So take a moment to think about the consequences to whoever loses an existential conflict. Because somebody has to lose – there can’t be two winners.

In one of Stephen King’s novels, a face slides down from the vanquished devil — a nice, interesting, familiar human face-and from under its fragments a vicious monster, the true owner of the human shell, climbs into the light.

This is exactly what is happening now on our western borders.

And do not la-la here about the fact that Russia behaved somehow wrongly, and America decided to punish it.

We simply lived too calmly, were too independent, allowed ourselves to protect our friends and fight back against our enemies.

Well, the evil of the world has come for us.

It couldn’t have failed to come.

It has been preparing for this for a very long time.

Now we must do everything we can to defeat it..

You know, that might do very well as an epitaph. For someone.

Editor’s note: As always, I am indebted to the readers for links, ideas and supporting references which are featured in this post. Any errors are my own.

Read more: The Rise of GloboHate; Washington’s Doctrine of Bullying and Ethno-Hatred Inspires its Admirers.