Saturday 30th of March 2024

cheese, snails and clams...

cheesecheese

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Four snails & 90 clams could be killed in upcoming hypersonic missile test, US Air Force warns

The US Air Force has warned that a much-anticipated test of its new air-launched hypersonic missile could kill four snails and 90 clams. No such precise estimates were offered for the weapon's human lethality.  

The Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) test can finally take place next month after a previous failed attempt, General Timothy M. Ray, head of Global Strike Command, said in early June. And those paying the price will not only be the American taxpayers, but also the marine life of the Kwajalein Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands, where the test projectile is going to conclude its flight.

The atoll is home to many rare species, but an environmental assessment that was recently released by the US Air Force Nuclear Weapons Center at Kirtland Air Force Base insisted that the test won't cause irreversible damage to them.

 

"Up to four top shell snails may be killed by the proposed action, and up to 90 clams," the documents said, adding that the impact could occur on both land and in water.

Other species would likely be affected more harshly. The ARRW firing could lead to the "complete mortality" of more than 10,000 coral colonies at the Kwajalein Atoll, the documents said. They also warned that 108 humphead wrasses, which are an endangered fish species, "could be injured or killed."

When it comes to hypersonic weapons, the US is lagging behind Russia, which apparently became the first nation in the world to put such a system in service after the introduction of the Avangard glide vehicle in 2019. So, the cancellation of the first live-fire flight test of the AGM-183A ARRW in April due to unspecified problems on its B-52H bomber carrier aircraft came as a major disappointment for the Pentagon.

 

The environmental assessment mentioned shock waves caused by the direct impact from the test payload, which can travel long distances in the water, as the main reason for concern. However, it pointed out that due to their shells, "shock waves are expected to have insignificant effects to top shell snails and giant clams."

It listed other "stressors" that the sea creatures could experience due to the missile testing, including extreme noise levels, exposure to hazardous materials, disturbance caused by human activity or equipment and the long-term presence of manmade objects in the water.

The report concluded that the ARRW tests and other US military activities under the Ground Based Strategic Deterrent (GBSD) program "would not have a significant impact on the natural or human environment."

The Air Force didn't provide any estimates on the possible loss of human life if a nuclear-capable hypersonic weapon is ever used against another country.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/527066-hypersonic-test-snails-clams/

 

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remembering the future...

 

‘Democracy is dead’: Time-traveling Katy Perry & Orlando Bloom star in ‘cringe’ pro-Democrat political ad to conservative mockery...

Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom have been mocked by conservatives for a hammed-up political ad warning America that democracy will be “dead” in the future unless they support some Democrat-pushed voting bills. 

Released on Thursday, the ad stars Perry and Bloom as a pair of ragtag freedom fighters living under a presumably Republican dictatorship in the year 2055. In a message beamed back to the present day, they warn that “democracy is dead” in the future, and that “the regime watches our every move.”

 

 Katy Perry and Orlando Bloom have been mocked by conservatives for a hammed-up political ad warning America that democracy will be “dead” in the future unless they support some Democrat-pushed voting bills.

Released on Thursday, the ad stars Perry and Bloom as a pair of ragtag freedom fighters living under a presumably Republican dictatorship in the year 2055. In a message beamed back to the present day, they warn that “democracy is dead” in the future, and that “the regime watches our every move.”

 

“It started when voter suppression ran wild all over America,” Perry states, referencing a slew of state-level bills that their Republican sponsors say will tighten up election security, but Democrats argue would make it more difficult to vote. 

Perry and Bloom then move on to the hard sell. “Save democracy while you can!” Bloom shouts, while Perry demands that viewers “call your senator now!” The video ends with jackbooted riot police kicking down the door of the two heroes’ hideout, and closes with a message: “Call your senator and tell them to pass the For the People Act.” 

 

The act is a piece of Democrat-sponsored legislation that would automatically enroll voters, expand mail-in voting nationally, and prohibit election officials from using certain methods to question someone’s eligibility to vote or remove a person from voting rolls. It would also prohibit “onerous voter identification requirements,” which Republicans and multiple governments across the developed world argue are necessary, at least on some level, to prevent fraud.

Although it was shared and reposted by liberal activists and Perry and Bloom’s Hollywood pals, the ad was mocked into the ground by the right. “Cringe suppression now,” conservative pundit Mike Cernovich jibed, while reporter Mairead McArdle described it as “the most cringe thing I've ever seen.”

 

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/usa/527069-perry-bloom-democracy-ad-ftpa/

 

MEANWHILE:

 

Five batches in a row of absentee ballots from Georgia's most-populous Fulton County suspiciously showed the same tally of 392 votes for Biden, 96 Trump, and 3 for Libertarian candidate Jo Jorgensen — which state officials have admitted is a statistical impossibility.

The US state of Georgia's top electoral official has acknowledged voting irregularities in the state capital — seven months after the presidential election.

Revelations this week have prompted Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to order a new audit of tens of thousands of ballots collected from drop-boxes in Fulton County — which covers 90 percent of the state capital Atlanta and whose one million inhabitants represent a tenth of the state's population. 

Joe Biden was declared the winner of the state's 16 Electoral College votes by a wafer-thin margin of some 12,000. Donald Trump claimed that systematic ballot-rigging in six states under the cover of massively-expanded postal voting had robbed him of rightful victory.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/us/202106191083189689-georgia-secretary-of-state-finally-admits-2020-election-foul-play-in-atlanta/

 

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forgetting the past...

 

 

From Ross Douthat...

 

Last August, I predicted that Donald Trump’s electoral defeat would encourage a lot of Republican politicians to embrace Don Draper’s mantra from “Mad Men,” his explanation of how easy it is to bury an inconvenient piece of your own past: “This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”

 

You can definitely see the Draper method at work in the let’s-just-not-talk-about-Trump wing of the G.O.P. these days. But what’s equally striking are the ways that liberals are practitioners as well. This week, for instance, Joe Biden held a summit with Vladimir Putin — a banal event in the context of past Democratic administrations, but a remarkable one in the context of the world as the liberal Resistance interpreted it from 2016 through 2020.

In that world, Putin was a figure of extraordinary menace, the leader of an authoritarian renaissance whose tentacles extended everywhere, from Brexit to the N.R.A. He had hacked American democracy, placed a Manchurian candidate in the White House, sowed the internet with misinformation, placed bounties on our soldiers in Afghanistan, extended Russian power across the Middle East and threatened Eastern Europe with invasion or subversion. In this atmosphere every rumor about Russian perfidy was pre-emptively believed, and the defense of liberal democracy required recognizing that we had been thrust into Cold War 2.0.

Now comes Biden, making moves in Russia policy that are essentially conciliatory — freezing a military aid package to Ukraine, ending U.S. sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking Germany to Russia, a return of ambassadors — and setting up a summit that can reasonably be regarded as a modest propaganda coup for Putin. And suddenly almost everyone wants to act as though the Trump years never happened: Not just the Republicans accusing Biden of being soft on Moscow, but the Democrats who have apparently decided that it’s fine to hand concessions and photo ops and promises of “stability” to the regime that just yesterday was the Great Reactionary Enemy, the liberal order’s greatest threat.

But this isn’t actually a column about liberal amnesia or hypocrisy. It’s a column about the wisdom of the Biden administration, in recognizing that certain Trump-era hysterias within its party can be safely put to sleep.

Some of those hysterias belong to the progressive left, and plenty has been written about Biden’s refusal to let woke Twitter set all his political priorities. But the Russia hysteria was a paranoia of the center, an establishment overreaction, so it’s notable to see Biden and his team steer away from it as well.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/19/opinion/sunday/biden-putin-trump.html

 

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putin...

 

Vladimir Putin is a philosopher… When he says: "There's no happiness in life, only a mirage of it on the horizon.” he means well. This is not glib. Some of the world leaders are gruffs/grubs like Trump, spoiled brats like Macron or professional deceitful politicians like Biden. Not Putin. I repeat. He is a philosopher. He knows the value of reality. And despite what we think of Russia, Russia is a country with more philosophers by square kilometre despite its extensive empty spaces than any other country on this planet. Some of these philosophers find refuge in potato wine and vodka, but they are not the majority. Philosophy is ingrained in the language… As Noam Chomsky tells us:

 

NOAM CHOMSKY: One of the striking things about language which greatly impressed the founders of the Scientific Revolution Galileo and his contemporaries is what is sometimes called the creative aspect of human thought. We are somehow capable of constructing in our minds an unbounded array of meaningful expressions. Mostly, it happens beyond consciousness. Sometimes, it emerges to consciousness. We can use these in a way which is appropriate to situations and constantly in new ways, often which of are new in the history of the language in our own history. Well, this creative character through the centuries has been connected speculatively, but not absurdly, to a fundamental instinct for freedom, which is part of our essential nature, resistance to domination and control by illegitimate authorities, fundamental element of human nature, maybe part of the same creative capacity, which shows up very strikingly in our normal use of language.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/23/podcasts/ezra-klein-podcast-noam-chomsky-transcript.html

 

And Vladimir Putin’s command of the German language is another sign of his philosophical depth. German is the language of solid stable philosophy itself. Friedrich Nietzsche, Freud and many others offer solid analysis of the human psyche, while the French lingo in more bent on freedom of the arty-farty soul and while English/American is the language of grocers. 

 

Stan Grant tells us:

 

Analysts have spent days since puzzling over what he meant.

 

Putin did add that we should cherish that glimpse of happiness. He was referring as much to trust as happiness, adding that while there was no "family trust" between the US and Russia, in the meeting with Biden "the silent lightnings of it actually flashed by".

 

Make of that what you will. Putin has been here before. He has seen off Presidents Bush, Obama and Trump — all of whom wanted a "reset" with Russia.

 

Putin is still here and, if anything, is more powerful at home and abroad. He has revived Russian influence in the world — not always entirely legitimately and by force.

 

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-20/vladimir-putin-joe-biden-meeting-last-word/100226200

 

 

Not entirely legitimately? What does this mean? Ah yes, the elimination of his major opposition… We, in the West are very much in favour of opposition to Russia’s ruling mob. We don’t like philosophers. We prefer the rich refugee oligarchs, former robber barons of Russia, now financing football clubs… 

 

Let’s say that the Ruskies would not mind having the trapping of life like those of the RICH Americans with private swimming pool (there are about 45 million people living below the poverty line in the USA and about 2.5 million in US prisons) instead of the communal waterworks where one can catch up with the neighbours and a few bacteria. Note: this last infection is also possible in private pools and this is why we have the pool guys to drop massive amounts of chlorine in them. But the Ruskies also know that the US is hell-bent on destroying Russia. Who knows why? Possibly because the Rooskies remind the US that the Red Army won WW2 and an alliance of Russian and German philosophers would have destroyed the US/UK empires of grocers...

 

The major “opposition” the West sees in Russia is a small time crook, with a tiny following, called Navalny with no other policy than to get rid of the main Russian philosopher, Putin… We fail to see that the major opposition in Russia is the Communists, well, because we don’t like the commies, do we? They are the descendants of Karl Marx, that grand German philosopher who spent time in England to study the way the grocers were shafting the workers… Now, not all the Russians are descendants of Catherine the Great, a German lady, ten times the size of Angela Merkel herself, but many Russians have inherited the spirit.  While the Germans and the Russians venerate their philosophers, including Tolstoy, we, in the West take the semi-naked Kardashian family as gurus… Ain’t cutting it, is it?

 

And we love the Nazis in Ukraine… Work this one out. Why? Because supporting these nasty guys is our way to get at Russia. It does not take a philosopher to work this one out, but it helps. Putin is not dumb, despite being a philosopher. He knows all the tricks in the book of life.

 

Reviving Russian influence by force? Hell it does not take a philosopher that one has to defends one’s own patch if one wants to survive. But a philosophising attitude will help against the deceit of the psychopathic Christians of the West. These guys fight under the banner of redemption and absolution, but with very little contrition. They will lie through their teeth as they ransack some place like Iraq or destroy someone’s fiefdom like Libya, under fake pretexts, with real bombs. 

 

This is where Putin, the philosopher (he’s also a judo black belt), saw that the US were trying to destroy Syria under false pretences… Syria was a example of happiness and ethnic harmony apart from a small group of extremist arabs who wanted everyone to lift their arse for Allah… Not only that, the US were encouraging these extremists to destroy the place, by supplying them with weapons and training… What does one do? A christian would have presented the other cheek like Jesus and bombed something in a devilish manner… Putin is actually a little guy, but a great philosopher. Despite knowing that happiness is an illusion, he knows that hardship and pain can be a nasty reality. People were going to suffer because of the empire building grocers. How gauche. Same with South Ossetia and Crimea… The way Putin swiftly stopped the recent war between Armenia and Azerbaijan was the only thing one could do to avoid further bloodshed — even if there was a loser and a winner...

 

The force that Putin used to salvage the Syrian furniture was surgical and minimalist. Meanwhile the USA got the shits and are now stealing the Syrian oil… The Turks are protecting the Sunni extremists in Idlib. You don’t punch a bigger adversary on the nose, or anyone for that matter. Putin is a patient philosopher. Patience does far more than rage and force. He also knows how to use the force of the opponent against the opponent himself (or herself to be PC). 

 

Putin is not unhappy despite his great knowledge of history. A guy like Biden barely remembers the last five minutes and needs advisors to show him the way to the toilet block. It has been said that Putin can speak 9 Indian languages (Telugu, Hindi, Oriya, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Sanskrit, Tamil and Urdu) and 8 foreign languages ( English, French, Arabic, not mentioning German..). Meanwhile a guy like Biden speaks gaffy political garbage as well as some English and a bit of kitchen Latin on Sundays…

 

So there, to understanding philosophy though linguistics. Putin has been more important to the planet than we realise. Had a less philosophising character taken the rein of Russia, we’d be eating radiated turnips under the skies of World War 3….

 

 

Gus Leonisky

 

Part-time philosopher.

 

 

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the end of endless wars...

 

In accordance with the Geneva summit agreements (known as Yalta II), on 17 June 2021, the House of Representatives voted to repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001.

This text had granted all United States presidents the authority to launch a war against the authors of the attacks of September 11, 2001. According to the Congressional Research Service, this text was invoked on 39 occasions with regard to 14 countries [1].

It had been adopted on September 18, 2001, approving the Rumsfeld / Cebrowski doctrine which had not yet been made public [2]. Its abrogation is expected to be confirmed by the Senate by the end of June.

 

Read more:

 

https://www.voltairenet.org/article213438.html

 

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the end of WW3...

A NEW WORLD ORDER TAKES SHAPE - PART II

Biden-Putin, a Yalta II rather than a new Berlin

 

by Thierry Meyssan

 

 

The United States, defeated in Syria, went to Geneva to accept the conditions of the winner, Russia. The summit of June 16, 2021 should put an end to hostilities on the condition that the Biden Administration holds its troops. Western Europeans will have to pay the bill. China is confirmed in its position as Russia’s partner.

 

The Third World War, which pitted 119 states against each other in Syria, ended with the victory of Syria, Iran and Russia and the military defeat of the 116 Western states and allies. The time has come for the losers to acknowledge their crimes and pay back the damage and costs they have caused (at least 400,000 dead and $400 billion in damage in Syria, $100 billion in Russian armaments).

However, the West has not experienced this war on its own territory and has not suffered from the fighting, which they have mostly carried out through mercenaries (the "jihadists"). They have retained some of their power. The United States, along with the United Kingdom and France, remain at the head of a formidable atomic deterrent force.

 

From then on, the new world order must not only integrate the world’s leading economic power, China -which remained neutral during the war-, but must also spare the losers, not drive them to despair. This is all the more difficult as Western public opinion is not aware of their military defeat and persists in believing themselves to be the victors.

This is why Russia has chosen to collect war damages without presenting them as such; not to strangle NATO militarily; and not to publicize its decisions. In terms of form, the Russia-US summit is therefore more like a Yalta II (division of the world between allies) than a new Berlin (capitulation of the Third Reich).

It is worth noting that the United States was not held accountable for the destruction of Libya because, at the time, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev had supported it.

An opaque summit

Russia did not want to give the impression that it was crushing the West. Even before the meeting, the media had been warned that the heads of state would not hold a joint press conference, as no narrative would be acceptable to both publics at the same time. Not since at least 2014 (when Russia entered the war) has an intergovernmental summit been so poorly covered. When the presidents spoke separately, the security services had to intervene to control the crowd. In the end, things went according to plan: the journalists did not understand much and only had unimportant details to report. The US public believes that Russia tried to manipulate the last two presidential elections in favor of Donald Trump; that it attacked official US websites; that it poisoned some of its opponents; and that it is threatening Ukraine militarily.

Russia has denied all these childish illusions, and then praised the great US president, Joe Biden, for his experience, the quality of his exchanges, and even - without laughing - for the lucidity of this visibly senile man.

Decisions made by Moscow beforehand

 On the military level, the important thing was to ensure that the United States would no longer modernize its atomic arsenal and would not be able to design hypersonic launchers.

President Biden announced at the opening of the summit that the United States would reopen arms reduction negotiations, which it had unilaterally halted during World War III. We do not know what steps have been taken to prevent the construction of Western hypersonic missiles, but given Russia’s lead in launchers, Moscow and Washington can drastically reduce their nuclear missile inventories without altering Russian dominance. US disarmament would be in the interests of peace.

 

President Biden has acknowledged that his country should repeal the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 2001, the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine of endless war.

 Economically, Russia has demanded to secure its revenues. The United States therefore agreed, on May 19, that the European Union’s industry would no longer run on Western oil, but on Russian gas. Washington announced that it was lifting the sanctions it had imposed on the companies involved in the construction of the North Stream 2 pipeline. It goes without saying that the price of this gas will not correspond to the market value of this product, but to the payment of the war debt. Nevertheless, it will always be possible for Western Europeans to escape this overpricing.

Eventually, Germany and France could be exempted from paying these damages, as former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and former Prime Minister François Fillon have always been opposed to this war. Specifically, the socialist Gerhard Schröder is a director of the Russian state-owned gas company Rosneft, while the Gaullist François Fillon should be appointed director of the Russian state-owned oil company Zarubezhneft. Germany and France would still have to cease hostilities, while the former still has soldiers in Idleb and the latter in Jalabiyeh, and the main actors of this carnage would have to be struck down with indignity, such as Volker Perthes or François Hollande.

 On the diplomatic front, Moscow and Washington announced the restoration of their relations and the return of their ambassadors. It remained to define the zones of influence.

First and foremost, President Putin set out lines for the United States not to cross: (1) a ban on Ukraine joining Nato or stationing nuclear launchers there (2) a ban on meddling in Belarus (3) a ban on intervening in Russian domestic politics.

It was agreed that the Middle East would be under joint Russian-US influence, with the exception of Syria, which is directly under Moscow’s wing; that the Sunnis would be divided into two groups in order to prevent the resurgence of the Ottoman Empire; that Syria (and not Iran) would take the leadership of an area including Lebanon, Iraq, Iran and Azerbaijan (again to prevent an Ottoman resurgence); and finally, that Israel would abandon Vladimir Jabotinsky’s expansionist project. In any case, Washington had already informed all the states in the broader Middle East on June 2 that it would withdraw its anti-missile systems (Patriot and Thaad).

Moscow anticipates that these agreements will encounter obstacles put in place by some US officials, not directly, but through the use of third-party actors.

China’s place

As regards the Far East, Russia has firmly rejected proposals for an alliance with the West against China. It considers, in the light of history, that China will not lay claim to Eastern Siberia as long as it keeps the West out of harm’s way. That is why President Putin reaffirmed just before the summit that he did not consider Beijing a threat.

Moreover, from a Russian point of view, China’s economic development could not be more normal. It violates the rules of Western globalization, but is based on a legitimate nationalist doctrine. The final communiqué of the G7, which condemns China and claims to set the standards for world trade, is a delusion of old glories. In any case, Beijing, having preferred to develop economically rather than pay blood money during the war, cannot demand privileges. Moscow is in favour of a "handover" of Taiwan to China, but without resorting to military confrontation.

 

Moscow intends to join Russia’s political and China’s economic efforts through the Greater Eurasian Partnership, especially for the joint development of Eastern Russian Siberia. That is why it is building the Trans-Siberian Railway and the Magistrale connecting Lake Baikal to the Amur River, the Primorye-1 and Primorye-2 transport corridors, the Northern Silk Road, the Europe-Eastern China Expressway, the North-South Highway and the Russia-Mongolia economic corridor. To this connection of the Russian space to the Chinese Silk Roads should be added more than $700 billion of joint projects in both countries.

US expectations

Regarding the U.S. proposals on cybersecurity, the issue cannot be dealt with bilaterally. Moscow knows better than anyone else that it did not sponsor attacks on the US presidential elections or on the websites of US public agencies.

Computer attacks are carried out by private hackers, sometimes acting as privateers on behalf of states. The NKTsKI - Russian National Center on Computer Incidents (a department of the FSB created three years ago) - estimates that, contrary to what the Western media claim, a quarter of the computer attacks come from the United States.

Russia has obtained the creation by the UN General Assembly, on December 31, 2020 (A/RES/75/240), of an "open-ended working group (OWEG) on digital security and its use (2021-2025)". This group, and only this group, will be responsible. For Moscow, this is a way to give back to the United Nations the role of a democratic world forum, which it had been deprived of during the Third World War, which had turned it into a transmission channel for Washington’s hawks.

 

Thierry Meyssan

 

Translation

Roger Lagassé

 

Read all:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article213446.html

 

 

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NED warmongers...

 

The US government’s regime change funding organization – the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – headed since its inception in 1983 by Carl Gershman – now has a new president and CEO – Damon Wilson.

 The NED’s own announcement regarding the handover provides some background for Wilson, claiming:

 

Mr. Wilson currently serves as Executive Vice President of the Atlantic Council, a role he has held since 2011, overseeing Council strategy and managing its 14 centers and programs. Earlier, Wilson served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European Affairs at the National Security Council (2007-2009).  He was Executive Secretary and Chief of Staff at the US Embassy in Baghdad (2006-2007), where he helped manage one of the largest US embassies during a time of conflict. Prior to this posting, he worked at the National Security Council as the Director for Central,

 

Wilson’s previous employment – unlike Gershman who at least on paper came from a “humanitarian” background – reveals an unapologetic pro-war, pro-American hegemony administrator and policymaker.

These suspicions are immediately grounded in Wilson’s own activities over the past decade at the Atlantic Council – an arms industry, oil company, and bank-funded “think tank” promoting US socio-economic, political, and military domination over the planet and all the wars, interventions, and meddling used to achieve it.

Understanding Wilson’s career of promoting American belligerence abroad will help one better understand which direction the US NED will take in its continued role in funding US-backed opposition groups and the regime change operations they are tasked with carrying out by Washington around the globe.

Removing the Velvet Glove

The NED’s inception in 1983 – according to the Western media itself – was to rehabilitate the image of what was at the time CIA-sponsored regime change operations.

The Washington Post in a 1991 article titled, “Innocence Abroad: The New World of Spyless Coups,” would admit:

 

The great democratic revolution that has swept the globe over the past few years has been a triumph of overt action. The CIA old boys spent a generation fantasizing about this sort of global anti-communist putsch. But when it finally happened, it was in the open. There were no secret paramilitary armies, and there was almost no bloodshed. The key operatives in the conspiracy turned out to be telephones, televisions and fax machines. 

 

Working in broad daylight, the United States and its allies were able to do things that would have been unthinkably dangerous had they been done in the shadows.

Regarding the NED specifically, the Washington Post would note:

 

The sugar daddy of overt operations has been the National Endowment for Democracy, a quasi-private group headed by Carl Gershman that is funded by the US Congress. Through the late 1980s, it did openly what had once been unspeakably covert — dispensing money to anti-communist forces behind the Iron Curtain.

 

In other words, the NED was a rebranding effort meant to dress up dirty and destructive US regime change campaigns as “promoting freedom around the world” – just as the NED’s slogan says on its official website. It always was – from 1983 when it was first announced to today – a velvet glove placed over the iron fist of covert US interventionism.

And under Gershman for the last almost 40 years – that is what the NED served as. A “presentable” facade constructed over otherwise invasive, dirty, and destructive regime change campaigns – as invasive, dirty, and destructive as anything the CIA had carried out beforehand – but sold to the public as “democracy promotion.”

Over the years, as the NED and parallel organizations, institutions, and agencies have attracted more scrutiny, the once “transparent” nature of their work has been increasingly covered up, with key opposition groups receiving NED money removed from public disclosures on the NED’s website, and the NED becoming increasingly covert – defeating the entire purpose of its creation and existing simply as a redundant extension of the CIA itself.

With Wilson’s appointment as president and CEO of the NED – the velvet glove is coming off altogether.

In a 2018 Atlantic Council talk titled, “Frontlines of Freedom,” Wilson would admit:

 

…the strategy [of consolidating control over Eastern Europe] is not meant to create new dividing lines in Europe. The aim is to anchor a vulnerable, insecure zone in the certainty of a stable and prosperous and free Europe, and over the long time [sic] this vision includes a democratic Russia. But the pathway to reform in Moscow might just begin with choices that are made in Kiev, Chișinău, Yerevan, and Tbilisi.

 

Wilson reveals the goal of US policymakers and their involvement in both the EU and NATO is not only to move both organizations up to Russia’s borders, but to absorb Russia itself – a policy that couldn’t be more obvious to geopolitical observers and the clear driving force behind Western-Russian tensions today.

Throughout his time at the Atlantic Council he has helped promote US State Department narratives regarding not only the EU and NATO’s antagonism toward Russia, but the West’s wars abroad in general including those in North Africa and the Middle East.

In 2016 at the US Embassy in Berlin, he would advocate continued sanctions on Syria as well as continued support for armed militants the US is sponsoring to fight Syria’s government by proxy.

Wilson also participated directly in war propaganda projects with other notorious appendages of the Atlantic Council. This includes a co-authored paper he wrote with US government-funded “Bellingcat” founder Eliot Higgins titled, “Hiding in plain sight: Putin’s war in Ukraine.”

Together with Wilson as president of the NED –  sitting on the NED’s board of directors – are people like convicted criminal Elliott Abrams who oversaw death squads in Central and South America, Scott Carpenter who directly participated in the US occupation of Iraq as “director of governance for the Coalition Provisional Authority,” and Victoria Nuland whose conversations regarding the US hand-picking Ukraine’s new government in the wake of the US-sponsored 2014 coup was leaked to the media.

The NED’s role in promoting US-backed regime change under the paper-thin veneer of “promoting freedom around the world” will likely transform into a much more direct tool of aggression wielded by the US alongside sanctions and the ever-looming threat of military aggression.

And while the US may believe Wilson’s appointment as president and CEO of the NED signals “strength,” in reality it is a sign of America’s growing weakness in combination with an increasingly aware global public – a global public that understands what the NED is, what it does, and the danger it poses – no matter what it claims to represent or to be doing worldwide.

Wilson’s appointment as president and CEO of the NED may help governments around the globe better explain to their respective populations the danger the NED poses and the necessity of legislation to inhibit or entirely ban the organization and those taking money from them from within their borders.

Gershman – for nearly 40 years – oversaw an NED attempting and ultimately failing to put a velvet glove over CIA-sponsored regime change. Wilson will be overseeing an NED unable to hide behind such facades any longer – with his own pro-war, pro-intervention, and pro-special interests background undermining the organization’s self-proclaimed but obviously misleading mission statement even further.

 

 

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2021/06/24/the-neds-new-ceo-atlantic-council-warmonger-damon-wilson/

 

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