Edward Snowden’s book is not a ‘coming-of-age’ saga. It is necessary to say that at the outset. One of the peculiarities of our times is the penchant for rendering everything in terms of so-called ‘human interest.’  The most profound events, the most penetrating analysis, the most stirring ideas – all are reduced to personality. Whether it is the personality of the author, a representation of the subject, or some background character, we wonder: Who can write about Hillary without immediately bringing up Bill?

So, it is no surprise that the reviews of Snowden’s revelatory and instructive account of his experience place undue stress on background, his relationship with his now wife Lindsay Mills (an admirable person), his workplace colleagues. They come up dry in terms of the man. They are totally irrelevant to the crucial issues of America’s Intelligence obsession/abuse.

Admittedly, Snowden does offer us a descriptive account of his life’s progression – but it is all quite prosaic. You don’t find either ‘Snowden’ or the meaning of what his has exposed (in the book as well as in the ‘papers’) by looking at the outer contours of his life. That does not deter reviewers, of course. They are driven by three things: our culture’s pervasive voyeurism, the bottom line of whatever media company they’re writing for, and – most powerfully – an escape from the responsibility to address the grave and shameful matters that he discusses. The last is at once an intellectual challenge and a career risk.

Snowden’s awakening to the distressing illegal activities of the NSA/CIA nexus was gradual. Omens were there early on – as was his discomfort with the Intelligence world’s ethics. He joined the CIA in 2007 just a few years after the 9/11 trauma. Let us recall that period. The country was panicked; a quiet hysteria was everywhere. So was a thirst for vengeance. Official Washington lived with the dread of more attacks to come. Few understood the dimensions of the threat or its mainsprings. The brooding atmosphere was like a lingering winter ground-fog. It has yet to fully disperse. The Intelligence agencies felt the imperative to act, i.e. to do something without delay. Thinking it all through was neither any office’s clear responsibility nor seen as a logical prelude to taking action.

In typical fashion the impulsive response was to mobilize resources – money and technology, the two prized assets in the United States’ Intelligence arsenal. The money was duly appropriated. How to spend it was the challenge. Disposing of $75 billion a year is not easy when you already possess an apparatus larger than that of all the world’s other Intelligence services combined. Technology came to the rescue as the quickest way to absorb all those dollars. That is to say, technology and its human consorts numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

Recruiters combed the universities to lay their hands on pretty much any live body that came within reach. Many bodies responded to their blandishments.  Patriotism was a big sell. So was the prospect of a well-paid, secure job. Credentials were secondary – with somef exceptions. Language skills were one, especially Arabic, Farsi and other neglected ‘exotic’ tongues. IT capabilities were in even greater demand. For nerds, it was like Paradise – the promised land of 77 jobs open to the bearded, the tattooed, the loners, the addicted tinkers. Diversity left room for the conventional, too.

Snowden was pretty conventional on most counts. Consumed by IT to the point of neglecting his formal studies, he had an independent cast of mind, unawed by authority, but not a born rebel. After kicking around in a number of schools and jobs interspersed with a stint in the Army, he wound up applying to a position advertised at a consulting firm called COMSO. He was 23. (Snowden never bothered to find out what the acronym stood for; apparently it’s owned by BAEA Systems). A few exchanges of electronic correspondence led to an interview in a non-descript office in a non-descript building in Greenbelt, Maryland with an everyman non-descript recruiter.

A cursory conversation concluded with the man telling Snowden “the job is yours, Edward. What sort of salary are you looking for?” Snowden’s $50k request rose to $62k at the man’s prodding – he was bent on getting the amount as high as reasonably possible. Why? His outfit wasn’t going to pay it; rather, the U.S. government via the CIA would with the recruiting company getting a fixed percentage. ‘Cost-plus” is what they call it. These were (are) the terms on which roughly 80% of the ‘contractors’ who make up the NSA (and technical CIA workforce) got their jobs. Some switch to the more secure status of a straight government employee, some jump back and forth -as did Snowden.

In effect, the famed Intelligence community turned over recruiting responsibilities for staffing the great “War On Terror” to private, for-profit firms. Some were big defense contractors like Lockheed Martin – others small-time operations that acted as little more than a dating service. A strong preference was given to candidates who had advanced skills and some experience. The NSA and CIA didn’t want to be bothered training them. It did, though, take 6 months to indoctrinate and to socialize them.

As Snowden writes, “restructuring your intelligence agencies so that your most sensitive systems were being run by somebody who really didn’t work for you was what passed for innovation.” It did line the pockets of both the dating services and the top administrators who would eventually parachute into lavishly paid positions at those same outfits.

Security clearances? A formality. Given that 835,000 people have wound up with TOP SECRET clearances, it was derisory. A Mickey Mouse polygraph exam: “have you ever been a member or supporter of al-Qaeda?..” A cheap sedative would get you through even if you did have something awkward to hide. Background checks were of the kind done by shop-worn FBI agents in regional offices who show up in a professor’s office with a checklist of banal questions. “Has Jane Doe, to the best of your knowledge, ever belonged to an organization that seeks the overthrow of the United States government? To the best of your knowledge, is Jane Doe addicted to any illegal substance or engaged in alcohol abuse?”

An honest answer would be: “How the hell do I know?” Never having had the pleasure of being invited to a pre-dawn gathering of her and her confederates where they practiced suicide bombings while under the influence of the drug of the month, all I could say was ‘NO.’ The likelihood of having provided cover for a sleeper agent of a terrorist organization was virtually non-existent. The sober truth is that the number of such who have surfaced since 9/11 numbers is in the low single digits. Those few slipped through the fingers of an FBI whose considerable resources were spent entrapping and directing poor sods who, left to their own devices, never would have gotten up from their bar stools or dragged themselves away from their PCs.

Such security measures, existing at the time of Snowden’s recruitment, were ill-suited to identify a dedicated young American whose intelligence, courage and integrity prompted him to take the risk of revealing that the Intelligence agencies he worked for were violating the law and the Constitution on the orders of 3 successive Presidents and their appointees.

In theory, agents of hostile governments (a bestiary now composed of Russia, Iran, China, Hezbollah, Syria and the ever-menacing Mr. Maduro in Caracas) could have taken advantage of the Intelligence agencies slapdash recruiting methods and flawed IT security to penetrate into those ever-expanding data banks. None have managed what Snowden did – at least not from the inside. They could have – if the intent existed. Just respond to a job announcement inserted by the non-descript man in the non-descript office (and take that sedative when they hook you up to the polygraph).

Ironically, one of Snowden’s frustrations before government criminality wracked his conscience was the lackadaisical response of his superiors to his pointing out the seriousness of those flaws – and more serious technical flaws in their systems -and to his recommendations for remedying them.  His initiative produced nothing in the way of remediation.

The system – organization, modes, persons – Snowden describes exhibits some singular features. Most striking is the disproportionate effort and resources devoted to its maintenance. His arrival came at the moment when the CIA and NSA were charging ahead full-bore to build and deploy a vast, high tech apparatus for accumulating, storing and sifting vast amounts of Intelligence data. That involved hardware, software, real estate, dense networks of personnel scattered around the globe and – not least – an intricate, multi-layered organizational complex. Communication was the common denominator.

Communications among unwitting sources picked up by a mind-boggling array of surveillance devices; communications within the Intelligence administration – horizontally, vertically, matrixed into storage sites, out of storage sites; communication among technicians, analysts, directors, and policy-makers. The last, of course, was least developed or standardized. Witness Mr. Tenet, Mr. Rumsfeld, Mr. Cheney.

Maintaining the systems consumed the lion’s share of the resources.  Actual deployment/activation was relatively cheap. Transmission/storage was another ‘gas-guzzler.’ Add in the enormous waste and redundancy involved in relying on a galaxy of predatory contracting firms, and you have the answer as how to spend $80 annually while accomplishing very little of value.

Further evidence of how pervasive is the technology driven operations of the IC is the disparagement of human Intelligence. We do know that this shift began several years before 9/11. Still, when Snowden arrived in Geneva on his first overseas assignment, the CIA still was hunting and signing up real live sources. Even Snowden the nerd was mobilized to try his hand – despite an aversion to gala parties and alcohol. An expatriate Saudi supposedly involved in oil and money had been identified as someone to look into.

Snowden was told to make the first contact before passing him on to a ‘pro.’ This episode quickly turns comedic – not because of Snowden’s naïveté but due to the bumbling of his senior operator. The latter wound up being recalled to Maclean. The humiliated Saudi wound up back in the Kingdom nursing a life-long grudge against the Yanks who had pulled the rug out from under his posh Geneva sedan chair.

This occurred just about the time that the CIA honchos made the fateful decision to drop those old-fashioned methods of seducing/ buying/blackmailing/running agents. The substitute method was simplicity itself. Predictably, it was technology grounded, antiseptic and did away with the need for most human faculties. Step 1: identify somebody who might know something worth having. Step 2: ‘tap’ as many of his/her electronic communications as possible. Collect and store the data for future ‘algorithm-fication.’  Installation, the only sensitive part of the process, became progressively easier as surveillance technology developed ever greater sophistication. Clean & easy.

HUMINT was being marginalized just as old-fashioned SIGNET was being recast as “cyberintelligence.” That foreshadow the morphing of “mass surveillance’ into “bulk collection” and “metadata” – the former connotation suggesting the bi-annual municipal trash service and the latter impressive but unfrightening.

By 2011, Snowden – now promoted to a bigger job with expanded access – was fully aware that the United States was committed to a massive, global strategy of electronic surveillance. The ultimate aim was to assemble a vast horde of data about everyone who conceivably was worth tracking, and hundreds of millions about whom you knew nothing. BUT about whom you might to know something at some future time – whether on the basis of specific reference or the algorithm printouts. That realization left him deeply disturbed.

Moreover, a harsh truth was emerging. The developing system paid scant attention to legal constraints or privacy rights of any kind. Indeed, a powerful logic was at work that was driving the process toward a total disregard for the 4th amendment. Its strictures could not be accommodated by the technology – hardware & software. The organizational drive within the Intelligence agencies steamrolled all other considerations. Regard for the sensibilities of foreign governments didn’t figure in the equation. Precedent setting and possible retaliation similarly were given no thought (“this is America – isn’t it!”) The emotions that fueled the War On Terror were still eclipsing reason – and they were being inflamed by politicos around the country.

 Finally, there was unanimity among higher-ups – in the Intelligence agencies, in Congress, in the courts, in the Justice Department and in the White House under 3 successive Presidents - in holding to the view that the law had to bend before the exigencies of the threatening times. The Privacy vs Security trade-off as it mistakenly was called by all and sundry – including renowned law professors writing in the New York Review of Books and other esteemed places. In truth it was a conflict between the Law and Lawlessness.

The difference between the two formulations is elementary – but fundamental. The concept of “security vs privacy” has no standing whatsoever in the law – regardless of the standing it might have in the policy realm or philosophical discourse. (‘Mitigating circumstances’ may be acknowledged; however, they come into play only at the sentencing stage. A crime is a crime is a crime). The readiness to obscure that difference, therefore, had nothing to do with intellect. Rather, it demonstrated that we were not ready to go down a road to where Constitution met political expediency.  That attitude has contributed to the persecution of Snowden.

There is a straightforward way to reconcile the two. If one feels that the privacy vs security balance is weighed too heavily in the privacy direction, then there is a method for shifting it, i.e. pass new legislation &/or constitutional amendment. Of course, if you are in panic mode and believe that the exigencies are so acute as to put the Republic at risk, then you are tempted to circumvent the law - especially easy to do when the President is directing you under prodding by the Vice-President.

People like Snowden were not privy to the details. But the implications of the technical tasks they were doing pointed to the conclusion that such a compact was in place. Lawlessness was destined to win.

In particular regard to elite political consensus, let us recall the bipartisan cabal formed by President Bush in 2002 to launch a radical surveillance program that they acknowledged was illegal and nullified the 4th amendment. There was the Deistic push to all that followed. That story was recounted by James Risen in his 2006 book STATE OF WAR – a story that his New York Times editors had in October 2004 but withheld under direct pressure from the Bush White House.

The cabal’s members included all the Congressional leaders from both parties (Pelosi, Daschle, Feinstein on the Democratic side), the Attorney General John Ashcroft, Chief Justice Rehnquist, Robert Mueller – Director of the FBI, as well as the heads of the principal Intelligence agencies and their chief subordinates: General Michael Hayden at the CIA, George Tenet at CIA, and Admirals Thomas Wilson and Lowell Jacoby at DIA. They were sworn to secrecy – an oath they’ve observed to this day. The big IT companies provided helpful services while denying that awkward fact. After all, they were doing something similar for their own deceitful commercial purposes.

Thereby, the equivalent of a “Line of Blood’ was drawn that placed the leaders of America on the side of clandestine criminality. That truth foreclosed any chance of the country’s coming to terms with what constitutes a revision of the Constitution without due process. Overcoming it was certainly not something that an Obama had either the conviction or courage to try doing. Snowden did. The vehemence of his denunciation and persecution by Obama and other self-styled liberal humanists can be explained by the juxtaposition. *

They, and America’s political class generally, cannot understand a man like Snowden. Just what makes him tick is beyond their comprehension. That dread of the unknowable stokes their passionate enmity toward him. Moreover, he might inspire others of similar character. The prospect of an upwelling of such persons exposing the deceit, lawlessness and incompetence - that had become endemic in the most sensitive corners of the American government was nightmarish. Even worse, it undercut their cultivated self-image as public servants of rectitude. Therefore, the instinct of Obama, Holder, Hillary, the NYT editors’ et al was to crucify Snowden.

Snowden rose rapidly into more and more responsible positions – propelled by his talents, his innovative mind and technical curiosity. With promotion came even greater access to the sweep of the IC’s surveillance activities. From Tokyo to Maryland to Hawaii, he encountered PRISM in all its troubling dimensions.

“PRISM is a code name for a program under which the United States National Security Agency (NSA) collects internet communications from various U.S. internet companies. The program is also known by the SIGAD US-984XN. PRISM collects stored internet communications based on demands made to internet companies such as Google LLC under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 to turn over any data that match court-approved search terms. The NSA can use these PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier, and to get data that is easier to handle, among other things.”

It was his involvement with PRISM that convinced Snowden of the imperative to expose it. For he was now an active contributor to a criminal operation – an aggressive multi-dimensional program that was routinely violating Americans’ basis constitutional rights while promising even deeper encroachments. Nobody was inclined to do anything about it.

Under the pressure of being Dell’s chief technologist for the CIA account and recoiling from the programs he was directing, Snowden began to suffer nervous seizures. It was finally diagnosed as a form of epilepsy.

Back in Hawaii, his plans began to crystallize. They were encouraged by a talk given there by the CIA’s chief technology officer ‘Gus’ Hunt. He informed the audience that “At the CIA, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang onto it forever.” There were journalists there from the ‘high tech’ press and journals. Hunt mentioned to them, in a private discussion, that the agency could subject to surveillance every one of their communications – much of it through their smart phones, activated or not. None of them reported on what was said. Mysteriously, a video of the talk appeared on You Tube – site visited by a total of 302 people in 6 years. Some of those journalists might very well be commenting on Snowden’s book in reviews heavy on the Lindsay element.

The date was March 20, 2013. Exactly 7 days earlier, General James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee. In response to a direct question from Senator Wyden as to whether the NSA conducted mass surveillance of Americans, Clapper replied: ‘NO.” His lie represented criminal perjury, a perjury ignored by all parties.

Have we gotten our money’s worth? If not – why? You decide.

• In the Spring of 2008, legislation to extend the broad powers of the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act (FSIA) was before the Congress. Senator Barack Obama made strongly worded comments committing himself to opposing it – indeed, to filibuster against it. When the bill came up in June, he voted in favor. Responding to criticism of his volte-face, he wrote an open letter disparaging his critics as ‘my left-wing friends.’  Three months earlier, he too had been one of those distained left-wingers. That was an augury of things to come.  

In the wake of the Snowden revelations, President Obama assured the country that “no one is listening to your phone calls.” It was a bald-faced lie. Right then it should have been obvious what manner of man was on the threshold of the White House. Such is our capacity for self-delusion that even today, 11 years later, I know of no public figure of the Democratic persuasion who is prepared to hold Obama to account. Yet they are free and easy with their denunciation of Edward Snowden – the villain, the traitor.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/10106919/Obama-on-NSA-surveillance-scandal-nobody-is-listening-to-your-phone-calls.html

Michael Brenner mbren@pitt.edu
You may also like to see Glen Grweenwald’s twit to me about the book
Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

 • Sep 12
Just got our copy of Edward @Snowden's book/memoir, Permanent Record! So much has been said about this great & courageous hero; now he finally tells his own story in his own words. It's out on Constitution Day - Sept 17 - but you can pre-order now https://amazon.com/Permanent-Record-Edward-Snowden/dp/1250237238

And my response to Greenwald
w george krasnow@vlad62slav

Edward Snowden is a hero for the global peace, and Glenn Greenwald be praised for his loyal support to Snowden and other peace champions. Snowden's book is a must for the citizens of the world.
 
P.S. For self-disclosure I must admit I have not read Snowden’s book but I wrote an article about him shortly after his defection. It was published by RAGA 

To Defect or to Integrate? The USA vs Edward Snowden 4/29/2014 

http://www.raga.org/news/to-defect-or-to-integrate-the-usa-vs-edward-snowden
​
I am also a former Soviet defector and the author of Soviet Defectors: The KGB Wanted List.
https://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Defectors-Wanted-Institution-Publication-ebook/dp/B07CQPFH5S
​
All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

​It is important we do not confuse Gandhi's Non-Violent philosophy with cowardice. As Gandhi himself put it: "Let no one say when I am gone that I taught the people to be cowards. I would far rather that you died bravely dealing a blow and receiving a blow than died in abject terror. Fleeing from battle is cowardice and unworthy of a warrior. Cowardice is worse than violence because cowards can never be non-violent." See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha  

When an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead, some 53 times more powerful that the one dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, is detonated over Manhattan in the apocalyptic nuclear exchange with Russia, the center of the blast will reach four to five times the temperature of the sun and the resulting fire storm will cover 90 to 150 square miles and will rage for several hours, based on an assessment by the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.  People and animals in the direct light of the fireball will be mutilated with third degree burns as far away as Corona, Queens, and Crown Heights, Brooklyn.  There will be no survivors within five to seven miles of Midtown Manhattan.

When command centers in and around the Russian capital are attacked with Trident nuclear warheads from a single submarine, “The total number of people who would die within 12 weeks in Moscow and the surrounding areas would be around 3 million, including around 750,000 children,” according to a study by John Ainslie. “Several million people would be injured.”  With all major hospitals in the area destroyed or rendered inoperable by radiation and fire, there will be no burn beds to alleviate the horrific wounds sustained by millions of people who are not completely incinerated.

Elaine Scarry, a Professor at Harvard University, in her recent interview in Boston Review invokes these and many other horrors that miraculously have not yet happened and warns: “I’m almost at the point of believing that there is a wanton refusal to see the imminent peril, a refusal to understand not just that we have a responsibility to reverse it, to dismantle it, but that we have the ability to do so, and that if we don’t, it is going to happen. I don’t know if it’s going to happen this year, or whether it’s going to happen this century, but it’s almost inconceivable that nuclear war isn’t going to happen.”

With hundreds of nuclear-tipped ICBMs in Russia and America on hair-trigger alert and a complete break-down in nuclear arms control agreements and communication between the world’s two largest nuclear superpowers, no words ring truer or more urgent today. 

Ernest Moniz and Sam Nunn, bemoaning this erosion of “strategic stability” in the U.S.-Russia relations, write in the Foreign Affairs magazine on this year’s somber 74th anniversary of Hiroshima Day: “Not since the 1962 Cuban missile crisis has the risk of a U.S.-Russian confrontation involving the use of nuclear weapons been as high as it is today. Yet unlike during the Cold War, both sides seem willfully blind to the peril.”

As the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START), the last remaining vestige of nuclear arms control architecture between the U.S. and Russia, is set to expire in 2021, and “all nine nuclear powers are…modernizing their nuclear weapons production facilities and adding new, improved types of nuclear weapons to their arsenals,” it is really hard to miss the gravity of what we are witnessing in the world today.  We have to start working on easing that omnicidal tension now, before it is too late.  In order to do this, we have to finish what we weren’t able to resolve in the 1990’s.

After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world had a real chance of pursuing the path of peaceful co-existence.  The horrible nightmare that we all lived in during the second half of the twentieth century, in constant fear of mutually assured nuclear destruction, seemed to be over.  There were bright, peaceful years ahead.  But something went awfully wrong…

What we are experiencing today causes even more fear, and you can’t really call it a “nightmare” any longer.  It’s been a long time since everybody awoke, but most are still pretending to be asleep.  Good luck trying to wake them up, as Gandhi was well aware.  In the meantime, the Doomsday Clock is ticking, and the nuclear odds are not in our favor.

To stop the clock, before the minute hand irreversibly hits the eternal midnight, we are going to have to give up our misplaced faith in our own exceptional uniqueness and insularity.  It is that faith that allows us to see ourselves as superior to the rest of the world and, simultaneously, allows others to manipulate us.  What politician would be able to convince his constituents that the continuation of endless war is good for them, if they didn’t already believe that it would be necessary to preserve and impose forcefully on the rest of the world the freedom-loving fire of their benevolent exceptionalism?

That was precisely how, in the aftermath of the 9/11 tragedy, which, in the words of the late Lynn Margulis, was “the most successful and most perverse publicity stunt in the history of public relations,” the neoconservatives were able to con America into adopting the concepts of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action.  After all, we know better what’s best for the rest of the planet, truth and justice be damned; we are the victims, we are different, and we’ll to dictate to others by our God-given privilege the rules and conditions of their dependent, inferior, and completely isolated existence.

Once we’ve let this faith in our uniquely-blessed exceptionalism and our vengeful self-righteousness, whether American, or Jewish, or Evangelical Christian, nurtured carefully by the state and mass media, blind us into such an illusion, we lost our chances for peaceful development in the world.  Russia, which was infected by the Bolsheviks with a similar belief system in the twentieth century, paid for it dearly after the collapse of the Soviet Union.  The United States is about to experience the same tragedy that it was forewarned about by the Russian ordeal.

The only thing that can help us now is the realization that we are all brothers and sisters.  We are all in this together; we are all the same and all so different.  We all share the same fundamental interests.  The other person’s happiness is no less valuable and important than ours.  And her pain no less terrible and unbearable than our own.  All those who say otherwise are our only enemies.  We have no others.  We have to overcome them with our self-enquiry and ensuing action.  There are many organizations and international efforts trying to bring peace and security to us all, but they need our collective and individual help.

First of all, there is the Appeal of the Hibakusha, the A-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.  The Appeal, signed by over 9 million people around the world, states:

We, the Hibakusha, call on all State Governments to conclude a treaty to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons. The average age of the Hibakusha now exceeds 80. It is our strong desire to achieve a nuclear-weapon-free world in our lifetime so that succeeding generations of people will not see hell on earth ever again.

You, your families and relatives, or any other people should not be made Hibakusha again. We believe that your signatures appended to this appeal will add up to the voices of hundreds of millions of people around the world and move international politics. They will finally save the future of our blue planet and all life on it. We earnestly appeal to you to append your signature to this petition.

Let’s get these signatures to 100,000,000 and make the Hibakusha and our voices heard!

Second, there is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) itself, which was adopted at the UN on July 7, 2017.  On Hiroshima Day 2019, Bolivia became the 25th country to deposit its ratification instrument of the TPNW.  The Treaty will enter into force once it’s been ratified by 50 States, so we are now halfway to making nuclear weapons illegal under international law.  Organizations, such as ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons) and Nihon Hidankyo (Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organizations), need all the help we can provide them to make full ratification of the TPNW a reality.

Third, we need to follow the lead of the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) and bring the nuclear disarmament issue into the 2020 U.S. Presidential Campaign.  On July 1, 2019, the USCM, a nonpartisan association of 1,408 American cities with populations over 30,000, unanimously adopted a Mayors for Peace resolution “Calling on All Presidential Candidates to Make Known Their Positions on Nuclear Weapons and to Pledge U.S. Global Leadership in Preventing Nuclear War, Returning to Diplomacy, and Negotiating the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons”.  The USCM “calls on all Presidential candidates to pledge, if elected, to reverse U.S. opposition to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and to embrace its humanitarian values and goals”.  We have to bring this resolution to the attention of our mayors, public officials, and Presidential candidates.  And we need to help United for Peace & Justice, CodePink, World BEYOND War, and other peace organizations make this resolution, along with others adopted by the USCM in the past, front and center in a number of critical campaigns, including Back from the Brink and Divest from the War Machine.

Fourth, there was the Basel Appeal on Disarmament and Sustainable Security addressed in January  2019 to Presidents Trump and Putin, Secretary-General of NATO, and to the chairs of U.S. congressional and Russian parliamentary committees on defense and foreign relations, by mayors, parliamentarians and representatives of civil society organizations from some 40 countries, including the mayors of 18 U.S. cities.  Their joint appeal calls on the U.S., Russian and European leaders to preserve the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty (from which the United States formally withdrew on August 2), extend the New START Treaty until 2026, adopt ‘no-first-use’ and rescind ‘launch-on-warning’ policies, and work towards a nuclear-weapon-free world through “enhanced dialogue and engagement with other nuclear-armed States.” 

The endorsing mayors and parliamentarians also call on the Russian Duma and U.S. Congress to refuse to authorize or allocate funding for the nuclear weapons banned by the INF Treaty, reaffirm their commitment “to acting resolutely for a nuclear-weapons-free and less militarized world,” and “call on cities, parliaments, governments and civil society around the world to join us in this endeavor.”  You can already see these calls at work in several Congressional resolutions in the U.S., such as the No First-Use Act introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Congressman Adam Smith.

As  Christine Muttonen, Jacqueline Cabasso, and Alyn Ware write on IPS, “it may not be all up to Trump and Putin.”  They quote U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower, who observed: “People want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.”

This power-from-below approach – taking concerted action on nuclear risk-reduction and disarmament in federal, state and city legislatures – is just beginning…There are powerful levers parliaments, cities and civil society can use to stop the unraveling of the arms control regime and prevent an arms race…

It is our responsibility as an informed public in what is supposed to be a participatory democracy to help them engage these levers.

Finally and perhaps most importantly, there are the indispensable nonviolent acts of civil disobedience that must become our reality for the foreseeable future.  We have plenty of examples of this in our past, from Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in the U.S., to Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha and the Indian independence movement, which was influenced heavily by Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy of “non-resistance to evil by force.”  Tolstoy was, in turn, moved by the Doukhobors (Духоборы, “Spirit Wrestlers”), whose pacifism and anti-war preaching led to government persecution in 19th-century Russia and whose immigration to Canada, following their 1895 mass burning of guns in Transcaucasia, Tolstoy helped finance, along with the British Quakers.  The Doukhobors tradition is alive in Canada to this day.

The Plowshares movement is a courageous example of anti-nuclear protests and nonviolent resistance to war in the present-day world.  The movement was started by the Reverend Daniel Berrigan, his brother Phillip and six other activists, known as the “Plowshares Eight”, when they trespassed onto the General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, PA, on September 9, 1980.  They hammered on nuclear warhead nose cones, poured blood on documents, and prayed for peace, before being arrested. A prolonged court battle followed, with over 10 felony and misdemeanor charges piled on by the federal government.  The eight were convicted and served from five days to over 14 months in prison for their protest.

There have been 100 similar actions throughout the world since then, with the latest event organized on April 4, 2018.  On that day, marking the 50th anniversary of the Martin Luther King Jr. assassination, seven Catholic plowshares activists entered Kings Bay Naval base in St. Mary’s, GA, the largest nuclear submarine base in the world.

The Kings Bay Plowshares 7 (KBP7) said in their pre-action statement, “Weapons of mass destruction, especially nuclear weapons, create nothing but a false sense of security.  They cannot constitute the basis for peaceful co-existence between members of the human family, which must rather be inspired by an ethics of solidarity.  Nuclear weapons eviscerate the rule of law and force white supremacy, perpetuate endless war and environmental destruction, and ensure immunity for all manner of crimes against humanity…A just and peaceful world is possible when we join prayers with action, [beat] swords into plowshares.”

The KBP7 proceeded to symbolically and nonviolently convert the nuclear weapons of mass destruction stored at the base by hammering on a statue of a Trident II D5 missile and pouring their own blood on it.  They were arrested, and several of them, including the 79-year-old Liz McAlister, have spent the next 17 months (as of this writing) in jail, awaiting trial (now set for October 21) and facing 25 years in prison, if convicted of the multiple charges brought by the federal government.  Compare this with the 13 months served by the multimillionaire pedophile, sex trafficker, and alleged Mossad agent Jeffrey Epstein out of an 18-month sentence in 2008 for molesting 36 underage girls, some as young as 14 years old, and you’ll get the idea of whose interests the government and the justice system truly represent and why our nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience are so important.

It takes exceptional courage and dedication to do what the Plowshares Eight, KBP7, and the rest of the Plowshares movement have done, and very few of us will ever be able to rise to their level.  But we all have to stand in solidarity with these heroes, when they need our help the most.  Please join Noam Chomsky, Daniel Ellsberg, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and other Nobel Peace Laureates and distinguished supporters from around the world and sign a global petition to U.S. Attorney General William Barr to dismiss all charges against the Kings Bay Plowshares 7.

We can also look to the British-based group Extinction Rebellion (XR, for short) for inspiration in using “acts of peaceful civil disobedience to disrupt the business-as-usual which is sending our species on a one-way track to extinction.”  The movement was founded in May of 2018 (one month after the KBP7 action) by 94 academics who co-signed a letter declaring that “When a government willfully abrogates its responsibility to protect its citizens from harm and to secure the future for generations to come, it has failed in its most essential duty of stewardship. The “social contract” has been broken, and it is therefore not only our right, but our moral duty to bypass the government’s inaction and flagrant dereliction of duty, and to rebel to defend life itself.”

Extinction Rebellion has since brought together thousands of people around the world in nonviolent direct actions against the governments’ criminal inability to address the “direct existential threat” to humanity of climate change and ecological collapse.  Major roads and bridges were blocked and hundreds of demonstrators arrested.  XR organizers have called for a general strike around the world this October.  As Chris Hedges writes in Fear vs. Fear,

The 10-day protest in April in London led by Extinction Rebellion—which saw 1,130 people arrested as crowds repeatedly shut down major parts of the city in demonstrating against the failure of the ruling elites to confront the climate catastrophe—is what we must emulate…

Switch off the electronic images. Ignore the media burlesque. The endless political shows, which turn presidential campaigns into mind-numbing, two-year-long marathons, are entertainment. Do not trust anyone in power. We will save ourselves by building mass movements to overthrow corporate power. I am not certain we will succeed. But I am certain that if we fail, we are doomed.

Elaine Scarry observes in her interview for Boston Review that “It might be embarrassing to have to stand on a street corner with a sign or attend a public meeting.  Imagine, though, if we forgave the complicity with past acts of enslavement or genocide by saying, ‘People saw that it was wrong, but they considered it too intellectually obvious, too compromising of their dignity, to have to stand up and protest.’”

Discussing the meaning of the Second Amendment as the repudiation of a “standing army” that serves at the discretion of a single individual, without the consent of the citizens who are instead to be armed for their mutual self-defense, she notes that “A nuclear weapon is everything that was detested (and regarded as illegal) in the ‘standing army…’”  We have surrendered our right to self-defense, which underlies every other human right, to a “thermonuclear monarch,” who is “so thrilling, so important, so vulnerable that he alone deserves a fallout shelter.”

As for America’s political landscape,
Right now it seems there are only two options: keep the right to bear arms and continue to witness shootings in schools, streets, and workplaces, or repeal the right to bear arms altogether. But there is a third alternative: the left has to listen to the right, and the right has to listen to the left…Ours is a citizenry that needs to relearn what courage is; it’s not shooting schoolchildren, and it’s not firing nuclear missiles at the innocent citizenry of a foreign nation.

The Chinese writer and poet Lu Xun wrote, “Hope is like a path in the countryside. Originally, there is nothing–but as people walk this way again and again, a path appears.”  May we all walk this path to peace.
 
Author: Anna Tolstoyevskaya grew up in the Soviet Union and came to the U.S. as a student of Philology and Foreign Service in the mid-1990s. She is an analyst by trade and an Austinite at heart, having spent a third of her life in that beautiful city. She can be reached at atx3017@gmail.com.

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

2019 "Information Clearing House"

We have come such a long way since time immemorial, since we were hunters and gatherers living in caves and bundled in hides, trying to invent fire.

Now we have TV and iPhone, we drive cars and fly planes. We can talk to and see each other from the opposite sides of the world.

Our civilization has reached amazing heights of scientific and technical development, but we still have not learnt to see a human being in each other. And a friend. We are still throwing sticks and stones at one another, except they have become so much bigger and heavier. Too heavy even for our planet.

And now we are facing the question of whether anyone will be around tomorrow to greet the sunrise.

Yet, we still have a chance to save our mother planet from and for ourselves, and continue meeting sunsets and sunrises with her. And with our friend, in humanity and in spirit.

Who is he, or her, this friend? Why do we like or hate him? How can we understand and forgive him? Learn to see yourself in her. And your own reflection. After all, we all learn from each other.

How can we learn to love truth and peace, and do no harm to each other, and respect others in ourselves?

Our time in this Universe is not unlimited, and we still have so much to discover.

To help our planet heal from the wounds caused by us and time. To protect and save our disappearing siblings, sharing with us this magnificent ecosphere. To slow down, or at least not exacerbate with emissions and pollution, the ominous warming of our shared environment. It is truly, in the prophetic words of Chris Hedges[i], “The Last Battle.”[ii]

As for the modern sticks and stones, they will be of no use to us. About the only thing we can do to save ourselves from them now is remove all the fast fingers from the proverbial button.

All nuclear sticks with short fuses on hair trigger alert have long outlived their senselessness. Launch on warning will save no one, but destroy us all.

We’ve had a number of close calls already. Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov was one such “man who saved the world”[iii] on the night of September 26, 1983. There were others. Next time, we may not be so lucky.

We are playing the Russian roulette as a race, and in the barrel of cosmic odds all it takes is one evil nuclear bullet. We must at least take the finger off the trigger, so we don’t do the irreparable by accident.

We must heed the call of the courageous Daniel Ellsberg,[iv] the author of terrifying but largely overlooked The Doomsday Machine[v] and a nuclear war planner in the early part of his career. And Global Zero,[vi] ICAN[vii] (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, the winner of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize), and the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists with its Doomsday Clock,[viii] moving ever closer to midnight, who have all been working for years to bring this about, to give us all our mind and survival back.

Our common most-pressing universal task is to help them bring it about. Every action in this direction counts. As Nikola Tesla,[ix] whose genius brought us so many of the comforts of our civilization, put it, “The action of even the tiniest creature leads to changes in the entire Universe.”

We don’t have much time left to make it happen in our lifetime, and not pass this problem to our children, if they should have a future at all.

It’s high time to end all wars. We certainly have no business in Iran or Venezuela after Iraq and Libya.

Israel, first and foremost, needs to understand that you can’t build your own happiness on other people’s grief and graves. Even if you have suffered much in your own life. The law of karma doesn’t change because of it. There will still be heavy consequences, and you still have to pay what you owe, and reap what you sow, even if you conceal it really well. Sooner or later, it will be apparent, if not for us, then for our children, as it was recently well explained in Laurent Guyénot’s book “From Yahweh to Zion”.[x] That was to a large extent the meaning of the Shoah last tragic century.

Truth is one and the same for everyone. To love and trust is always better than to fear and hate.
Let us all love one another. You never know if you are saying goodbye for the last time. Nobody wants to be ill remembered.

Let’s stop giving our attention to all the gossips, scandals and squabbles that are broadcast at us from every screen. They might be profitable for someone for some time, but definitely not for us.

We need to work and take care of each other, our young and our old, and not get plunged as a whole society into massive karmic debt that no one will be able to repay.

We need to learn to listen and understand what we are being told and why. No need to hypnotize us. It won’t work anyway when we are all awake and withdraw our consent.

There are many spiritual and conscious streams flowing through us. As Rudolph Steiner[xi] used to say, we can and should learn to recognize and tell them apart. The success and happiness of our own life depend on it.

And we need to pay attention to these streams and not to the venal voices of the mass media. Let them show their true selves for what it’s worth, but don’t be swayed by them. “The traits we see most clearly in others exist most strongly in ourselves,”[xii] according to the ancient wisdom of Vedanta expressed in the words of Deepak Chopra.[xiii]

We have no use for the representatives and leaders who think only of themselves. Lots of money and power doesn’t make you either good or happy. They can spew their silliness, court intrigues and lies to themselves for now.

When big money is removed from politics through the grassroots efforts of organizations such as RepresentUs,[xiv] others, like Ilhan Omar and Bernie Sanders, whom we can trust and respect, will come to replace them.

And no one will be able to manipulate and scare us any longer.

“When human beings today speak of ‘God’ they mean only their angel, the angel who guides them through life,” taught Rudolf Steiner in The Karma of Untruthfulness, a series of lectures on the origins of WWI. “But they persuade themselves that they are speaking of a being higher…”

At long last, we’ll recognize in Yahweh but one of our jealous tribal angelic reflections from the time of sticks and swords, as explained masterfully in Laurent Guyénot’s[xv] From Yahweh to Zion.[xvi]

And we’ll finally find Christ in each and every one of us. A true son and daughter of our true god, infinitely beautiful universal consciousness in all its manifestations on earth and in heaven.
Let there always be the Sun!
 
Author: Anna Tolstoyevskaya grew up in the Soviet Union and came to the U.S. as a student of Philology and then Foreign Service in the mid-1990s. She is an analyst by trade and an Austinite at heart, having spent a third of her life in that beautiful city. She can be reached at atx3017@gmail.com.

​
SOURCES AND REFERENCES:
___________________________

[i] Christopher Hedges (born 1956) is an American journalist, Presbyterian minister, and visiting Princeton University lecturer. His books include War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle (2009); Death of the Liberal Class (2010); Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt (2012), written with cartoonist Joe Sacco, which was a New York Times best-seller; Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt (2015); and his most recent America: The Farewell Tour (2018).   Hedges  is a columnist for the progressive news and commentary website Truthdig. He has reported from more than fifty countries, and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times.  Нe  contributed to The New York Times entry that received the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting for the paper's coverage of global terrorism. He also received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism in 2002.He has taught at Columbia University, New York University, the University of Toronto and Princeton University. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Hedges

[ii] Chris Hedges, “The Last Battle”. APR 29, 2019
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-last-battle/
THE BEAVER LAKE CREE NATION, Treaty No. 6 Area, Canada. I am driving down a rutted dirt road with Eric Lameman, a member of the Cree nation.
“Over there,” he says, pointing out where he was born in a tent 61 years ago.
We stop the car and look toward a wooded grove.
“That’s the mass grave,” he says softly, indicating a clearing where dozens of Cree who died in a smallpox epidemic over a century ago are buried…”
 
[iii] Stanislav Petrov (Russian: Станислав Евграфович Петров; 7 September 1939 – 19 May 2017) was a lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who became known as "the man who single-handedly saved the world from nuclear war" for his role in the 1983 Soviet nuclear false alarm incident.
On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm, and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in large-scale nuclear war. Investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
 
[iv] Daniel Ellsberg (born April 7, 1931) is an American economist, activist and former United States military analyst who, while employed by the RAND Corporation, precipitated a national political controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers, a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York Times and other newspapers. On January 3, 1973, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 along with other charges of theft and conspiracy, carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years. Due to governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering, and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School professor Charles Nesson, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr. dismissed all charges against Ellsberg on May 11, 1973. He is also known for having formulated an important example in decision theory, the Ellsberg paradox, his extensive studies on nuclear weapons and nuclear policy, and for having voiced support for WikiLeaks, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden. Ellsberg was awarded the Right Livelihood Award in 2006 and the 2018 Olof Palme Prize for his "profound humanism and exceptional moral courage."
 
[v] In December 2017, Ellsberg published The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. He said that his primary job from 1958 until releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971 was as a nuclear war planner for US Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. He concluded that US nuclear war policy was completely crazy and he could no longer live with himself without doing what he could to expose it, even if it meant he would spend the rest of his life in prison. However, he also felt that as long as the US was still involved in the Vietnam War, the US electorate would not likely listen to a discussion of nuclear war policy. He therefore copied two sets of documents, planning to release first the Pentagon Papers and later documentation of nuclear war plans. However, the nuclear planning materials were hidden in a landfill and then lost during an unexpected tropical storm.[62] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
 
[vi] https://www.globalzero.org/ We are at a turning point: The world has never faced so many nuclear flashpoints simultaneously and the risk that nuclear weapons will be used — intentionally, mistakenly or accidentally — is the highest it’s been since the height of the Cold War. Since its launch in Paris in 2008, Global Zero has grown to include hundreds of eminent political, military and civic leaders and hundreds of thousands of engaged citizens globally. By combining cutting-edge policy analysis, backchannel diplomacy, media outreach and public engagement, we’re blazing a trail for governments to follow — one that leads to the lasting peace and security of a world without nuclear weapons.

Trump Administration Barreling Toward New Nuclear Arms Race With Russia
1 August 2019, US News: “The death of the INF Treaty, without any plan in evidence to compensate for the deterioration of arms control, will only accelerate our downward spiral into nuclear chaos and potential catastrophe.” – Jon Wolfsthal, director of the Nuclear Crisis Group, on US withdrawal from the INF Treaty. https://www.globalzero.org
 
[vii] https://www.icanw.org The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is a coalition of non-governmental organizations in one hundred countries promoting adherence to and implementation of the United Nations nuclear weapon ban treaty. This landmark global agreement was adopted in New York on 7 July 2017.
 
[viii] https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/ A new abnormal: It is still 2 minutes to midnight
2019 Doomsday Clock Announcement. Washington, D.C. • January 24, 2019
Humanity now faces two simultaneous existential threats, either of which would be cause for extreme concern and immediate attention. These major threats—nuclear weapons and climate change—were exacerbated this past year by the increased use of information warfare to undermine democracy around the world, amplifying risk from these and other threats and putting the future of civilization in extraordinary danger. There is nothing normal about the complex and frightening reality just described. Read more
 
[ix] Nikola Tesla (/ˈtɛslə/;[2] Serbo-Croatian: [nǐkola têsla]; Serbian Cyrillic: Никола Тесла; 10 July 1856 – 7 January 1943) was a Serbian-American[3][4][5] inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla
 
[x] From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land...Clash of Civilizations –2018 by Laurent Guyénot (Author), Kevin J Barrett (Translator)
https://www.amazon.com/Yahweh-Zion-Jealous-Promised-Civilizations/dp/0996143041 See there also “How I Discovered 'the Jewish Question'": Laurent Guyenot, author of From Yahweh to Zion. A video interview with Kevin Barrett, Published on Mar 16, 2018.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVV_LfdUcpk
Laurent Guyenot's "From Yahweh to Zion" may be the best book ever written on what used to be called "the Jewish question." In this interview Dr. Guyenot explains how his study of the Deep State, specifically its role in 9/11 and the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, led him to a historical re-examination of Judaism and Jewish identity politics. "From Yahweh to Zion" raises many "Jewish questions" including: Is Judaism/Jewishness a religion or an ethnicity? What is the Jews’ relationship to God, and to Jesus and the prophets? What accounts for the Jews’ ability to maintain tribal cohesion over more than 2500 years? Why have Jewish communities so often been at odds with their non-Jewish neighbors? Why have Jews been over-represented—in many non-Jewish societies throughout history—in positions of wealth and power? Why does this over-representation seem to be increasing today? Why is this issue off-limits for discussion in polite company (including the mainstream media and the academy)? Is Jewish tribal cohesion an important factor in the Deep State? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVV_LfdUcpk
 
[xi]  Rudolf Steiner  was an Austrian philosopher, social reformer, architect, economist and esotericist. Steiner gained initial recognition at the end of the nineteenth century as a literary critic and published philosophical works including The Philosophy of Freedom. Wikipedia
Born: February 1861, Donji Kraljevec, Croatia
Died: March 30, 1925, Dornach, Switzerland
Rudolf Steiner. The Karma of Untruthfulness: v. 1: Secret Societies, the Media, and Preparations for the Great War. https://www.amazon.com/Karma-Untruthfulness-Secret-Societies-Prepa
rations-ebook/dp/B07NB3YRCX/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
 
[xii]  Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire Glimpses of the field of infinite possibilities by Deepak Chopra
 
[xiii] Deepak Chopra (/ˈdiːpɑːk ˈtʃoʊprə/; Hindi: [d̪iːpək tʃoːpraː]; born October 22, 1946) is an Indian-born American author, public speaker, alternative medicine advocate, and a prominent figure in the New Age movement. Through his books and videos, he has become one of the best-known and wealthiest figures in alternative medicine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepak_Chopra
 
[xiv] https://represent.us/anticorruption-act/ We bring together conservatives, progressives, and everyone in between to pass powerful anti-corruption laws that stop political bribery, end secret money, and fix our broken elections. The American Anti-Corruption Act sets a standard for local, state, and federal laws that fix our broken elections, stop political bribery, and end secret money.
Sign here to Co-sponsor the Anti-Corruption Act
 
[xv] Laurent Guyénot. Author. After earning an engineering degree (ENSTA, 1982), Laurent Guyénot pursued his interests in the history and anthropology of religions, earning his doctorate in Medieval Studies (Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2008). His current research focuses on the religious and civilizational backgrounds of Zionist geostrategy. ... Google Books  Born: April 27, 1960. See also his  https://www.voltairenet.org/auteur125605.html?lang=en
 
[xvi] From Yahweh to Zion Kindle Edition by Laurent Guyénot (Author), Kevin Barrett  (Translator)
Who is Yahweh? Where did he come from? How did this jealous, vengeful, exclusivist god shape the destiny of his chosen people? Can we trace a direct connection, through twenty-five centuries, linking the cult of Yahweh to contemporary Zionism? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0798DF7K1/

I found myself so much in agreement with the Manifesto, that I immediately translated it to Russian    - W George Krasnow

​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

RAGA News
www.RAGA.org​

​Resume: Russophobia, as psycho-social-political pathology, is diagnosed as a disorder in The West since before the 1000-year-old Roman-Orthodox religious schism and most recently manifested with a vengeance in the course of the 2013-14 with Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass surveillance by the US and its covert activities leading to the Ukraine coup with Russophobia used thereafter as a weapon of mass deception to inflame this latent pathology in the public.

After more than a year since we first heard the BBC “breaking news” about the “Russians Poisoning the Skipals”, all we have are allegations, but there is still no real evidence to present before a judge and jury for a just trial, only media propaganda which has provoked even more fear and hysteria meant to distract people from the government’s bungling and high level of anxiety over Brexit by once again blaming Russia. Never-the-less, it prompted politicians to administer instant sanctions against Russia as punishment. That first day, the “evidence”, presented in the usual clipped, “authoritative” British accents, included interviews with a conservative British MP, then the former US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow (2001-05), now with the notoriously hawkish US-based think tank, the Atlantic Council. Thus, the three of them: the BBC “journalist” and the two “experts”, colluded to transform false allegations into “facts”… fueled, as always, by their perpetual prejudice, RUSSOPHOBIA, in the course of their propaganda war to force Russia to surrender to American-led Western Domination or else: have their economy destroyed & their people suffer. Indeed, it is a threat to the whole world played to the discord of rattling nuclear swords with a chorus of vindictive Russian oligarchs, whom Putin expelled for robbing the Russian people. So, now living in London as expats, they would seem to be the more likely culprits. All the while elsewhere in London, thanks to our “special US-UK relationship”, Julian Assange has been excommunicated and imprisoned in a tiny “cell” at the Ecuador embassy for revealing embarrassing American secrets via Wikileaks.

There we have it: the poisoning of our minds by the media and politicians which are owned and controlled by the US-UK-EU 1%, who benefit from Western Hegemony. So, these deluded few are now desperately defending it from the rising powers led by Russia and China with India not far behind demanding a multi-polar, democratic world order.

My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, “Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy” by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). And there, the detoxification of my mind began as I studied his deft, well-documented deconstruction of the political propaganda disseminated “by various think tanks, congressional testimonials, activities of NGOs and the media” (preface p. XIII)

Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, “Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria” (2017). There, Mettan informs us that this psycho-social pathology in Western Civilization” goes back more than 1000 years: to the division of Christendom between the Orthodox and Roman churches. Indeed, his research into the depths of history confirms the diagnosis by our renowned American psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, in his 2003 book, “Superpower Syndrome: America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World”. Therein, Lifton states: “More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims.” (p.3) And Mettan’s analysis of Russophobia also underscores the work of University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, our leading international relations “realist” in his three Henry L. Stimson lectures at Yale University November 2017: “The Roots of Liberal Hegemony”, “The False Promises of Liberal Hegemony” and “The Case for Restraint”: https://macmillan.yale.edu/news/john-j-mearsheimer-liberal-ideals-and-interntional-realities with his book, “The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams, International Realities” published in 2018.

​But what about “Russian Aggression” in Ukraine & Crimea?

In the first place, it was the astute Mearsheimer, who, in the Sept-Oct 2014 Foreign Affairs, informed us “Why the Ukraine Crisis is the West’s Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin” (pp 77-89), but the American foreign policy establishment, together with ambitious politicians and the me-too media, paid no heed and continues to repeat its fabricated “facts”.
Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa’s book, “Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order”, 2017, we turn to the section on “Reality Wars and American Power” on p. 217 to read: “It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes.” And he continues on p. 218: “Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks.” Adding that these “are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today.”

Karl Rove: “We’re an empire now; we create our own reality.”
​
[In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W. Bush—identified later as Karl Rove, Bush’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff—told him, “We’re an empire now, we create our own reality.”]
Thus, we’ve become trapped in a contrived “reality” promulgated by neo-conservative warriors under cover of neo-liberal “democracy-spreading-humanitarian-interventionists” to justify an American Empire promoting itself as the indispensable “Liberal World Order”. However, under that global order, as Sakwa points out on p. 219: “If a foreign power is considered to have violated ‘international order’, then it can be overthrown” as a rationale for American “regime change” anywhere around the world: whether to control the supply of copper in Chile or oil in Iran. And, with its eye on Russia’s vast oil, gas and other natural resources, America claims the right to threaten Russia by ringing it with weapons which we would not abide were the Russians to place missiles in Mexico…as the Soviets did in Cuba to defend it after our “Bay of Pigs” invasion that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. Thus, Russia was defending itself in Ukraine against further NATO expansion while Crimean citizens, by majority vote in a democratic referendum, chose to rejoin Russia as they had been one country ever since Catherine the Great…except for an interval in the ’50s when Crimea was” gifted” to Ukraine while they were all members of the Soviet Union.

“Ditching Solzhenitsyn, Defender of Russia”

And not to forget that in 1974, after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his family fled first to Zurich then to Vermont in 1976 and lived on a farm near Cavendish, where he continued to write and publish his work. Meanwhile, Mettan, as a journalist covering events related to Russia, became quite distressed over “the widespread prejudices, cartloads of clichés and systematic anti-Russian biases of most western media.” And he went on to say that “the more I traveled, discussed and read, the wider I perceived, the more the gap of incomprehension and ignorance between Western Europe and Russia became evident.

“That was why, during the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn. For decades, we had published, celebrated, and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence. We had praised Solzhenitsyn to the skies as long as he criticized his native country, communist Russia. But as soon as he emigrated, realizing that he preferred to isolate himself in his Vermont retreat to work rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves from the great writer.

“The idol no longer matched the image they had built and was becoming a hindrance to their academic and journalistic career plans. And once Solzhenitsyn had left the United States to go back to Russia and defend his humiliated, demoralized motherland that was being sold at auction, raising his voice against the Russian ‘Westernizers’ and pluralist liberals who denied the interests of Russia to better revel in the troughs of capitalism, he became a marked man, an outdated, senile writer, even though he himself had not changed in the least, denouncing with the same vigor the defects of market totalitarianism as those of communist totalitarianism.
“He was booed, despised, his name was dragged through the mud for his choices, often by the very people who had praised his first fights. Despite that, against all odds, against the most powerful powers that were trying to dissuade him, Solzhenitsyn defended his one and only cause, that of Russia. He was not forgiven for having turned his pen against that West that had welcomed him and felt it was owed eternal gratitude. A dissident today, a dissident wherever truth compelled, such was his motto. This deserves to be remembered.” Mettan, pp. 15-16 in “Creating Russophobia”.

Russophobia: akin to Racism

From another perspective: Mettan’s chapter on “German Russophobia” set me thinking that this “Western Supremacy” political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma. Until in high school, I became so perplexed and appalled by the curtain of hate and “justifications” in which we were smothered: the Negro schools on the other side of town? and why were there separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains & restrooms in bus and train stations?…that I began poking holes in the curtain to see what was outside…and found a book in the library: “South of Freedom” by Carl Rowan, an African-American Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, describing his journey from South to North. So, thanks to what I learned from Rowan, I began to tear the whole damned curtain down…at least in my mind.

Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad?

So, here’s a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy… and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe’s neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis. These are not poor “niggers” from the Eurasian ghetto we’ve been trying to club into submission as second-class citizens of “The Liberal World Order” dominated by US; they’re nuclear-armed and no longer willing to sit at a separate, inferior table with no vote and no voice over who makes the rules…nor are China, India and Brazil. And last year, while the wave of Russophobic hysteria over alleged “Russian poisoning” was rolling out of the UK and engulfing the Western world in the latest siege of mass madness…with only Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labor party, having the courage to stand up in Parliament on the Ides of March and demand Evidence! only to be pilloried by the mindless politicians and media…led by the once esteemed BBC. And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.

Meanwhile, not to forget that it was Hearst newspaper propaganda that whipped the American public into a war frenzy to support our first step in empire-building: our 1898 intervention in Cuba’s war for independence from the Spanish Empire which had dominated all of Latin America for 500 years. As the former NYTimes journalist/bureau chief in Istanbul, Berlin & Central America, Stephen Kinzer reminds us in his latest book “The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire”, Twain, Booker T. Washington and even Andrew Carnegie leading a handful of other anti-imperialists…were not able to prevail against Roosevelt with his Rough Riders and the Hearst newspapers’ war propaganda.

Regime Change Comes Home

Never-the-less, after a very long run of American “regime change” abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil…on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile…to name a few of our interventions…we were back for a second round with “coalitions of the willing” or not? in the Middle East where our regime-change machine managed to plow its way through Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya…before breaking down in Syria. Until now it’s been brought home again, renovated and renamed “RussiaGate” for another attempt at removing a President for trying to mend US relations with Russia. Though even after more than a year of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller’s investigations accompanied by such cinematic support as the movie, “Felt”, another “Watergate” re-run. Did anyone else notice the resemblance between “Felt” and Mueller? And despite the media’s commemoration of its 44-year-old “moment of courage” with the movie “The Post” to promote Trump’s ouster, our democratically-elected President, as of this writing, remains in power. However, in this rush to “regime change”, didn’t the our “ruling elite” read Jane Mayer’s “The Danger of President Pence” in the 10/23/17 New Yorker? At least the 70s’ “ruling class” was smart enough to remove an unqualified Vice President Spiro (who?) Agnew…before “regime changing” Nixon and replacing him with the more or less benign Gerald Ford.

A Florentine Epiphany

But back to last January in Florence, Italy, when I was hiking in the hills beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its spectacular view of that Renaissance city and its centerpiece, the Duomo, I came across the Villa Galileo, which had been his last home after his trial as a “heretic”, during which to save himself from torture and execution, he was forced to deny his helio-centric vision and henceforth lived under “villa arrest”, from 1631 until his natural death in 1642. While pondering his fate, I continued walking along the gently rising, ever-narrowing road between ancient stone walls overlooking villas and olive groves until I reached the peak, where I felt as if I were standing on top of the world as I contemplated both the Arno and Ema river valleys far below and where I swear I heard Galileo declare: “The world does not turn on an American axis!”

The 21st Century Inquisition

So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers…such as Edward Snowden, our electronic age “Solzhenitsyn?” in Russian exile; Chelsea Manning, imprisoned some 7 years for revealing US brutality in Iraq; Julian Assange confined to his Ecuadorian Embassy exile in London since August 2012; Katharine Gun, a whistleblower attempting to stop the Iraq invasion, who faced 2 years of British imprisonment before her case was dropped; James Risen, former New York Times journalist who was persecuted by our “justice” system for revealing our government’s surveillance of US! 

Any Good Sense Left?

So, do we the people have enough good sense & independent thinking left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau?

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality.” - “Walden” 1854

If not, the Doctor prescribes Shock Therapy:

For a week, a month, or however long it takes to cleanse and open the mind, one must adhere to strict abstinence from Mainstream Media propaganda, junk news, pseudo analysis, fake photos, TV & videos including absolutely NO phony “for, by & of the people” NPR, PBS, BBC or other Government-funded Neo or LibCon Imperial tranquilizer.

© Jean Ranc | 2019

Originally published: 
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/13/russophobia-wmd-weapon-mass-deception/

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Retired Navy SEAL commander Jocko Willink and psychology professor Jordan Peterson discuss the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag and the nature of evil. Please share your thoughts in the comments below. 

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​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

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​All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

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Vladimir Putin's full Year-End Press conference.
December 20,2018

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President Trump's warm words for Vladimir Putin and his failure to endorse U.S. intelligence community claims about alleged Russian meddling have been called "treasonous" and the cause of a "national security crisis." There is a crisis, says Prof. Stephen F. Cohen, but one of our own making. Visit https://therealnews.com 

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All statements in this report are an opinion of the author. Act at your own risk. Russia & America Goodwill Association (RAGA) is not responsible for the content of the article. Any views or opinions presented in this report are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RAGA. Any liability in respect to this communication remain with the author.

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