EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF Replant the American Dream. “Your USA Today is The World’s Most Hated Nation”. Why?

Replant the American Dream. “Your USA Today is The World’s Most Hated Nation”. Why?

By Larry Romanoff

July 29, 2020

Posted for the first time on January 22, 2020

 ENGLISH   ESPAÑOL

Some years ago, David Ignatius wrote an article in the Washington Post titled, ‘Replant the American Dream’ (1), in which he told of travelling the world as a foreign correspondent some 35 years ago, and how he believed that as an American he carried a kind of white flag, presumably of purity and moral superiority, signifying that he – being an American – was ‘different’, and that “the world knew it”.

He then noted dejectedly that the US was slowly “shredding the fabric that defines what it means to be an American”, that Americans are now seen as “hypocrites who boast of our democratic values but who behave lawlessly and with contempt for others”. His basic premise was that the US, and Americans generally, had “used up all their seed corn” and needed now to reach out to the world and ‘share America’s values’ once again.

He then ended with a statement of hope about the celebration of American Thanksgiving Day. Reading from his mythological American history book, he recounted the Pilgrims’ desolate fears as they departed the Old World for America, and “the measureless bounty they found in the new land”, which they shared with the local natives. You have already read an accurate account of the first Thanksgiving, which was a bit short on sharing measureless bounty. Ignatius ended with the words: “We need to put America’s riches back on the table and share them with the world, humbly and gratefully.” I wrote a reply to Mr. Ignatius that said in part:

EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF -- CIA Project MK-ULTRA -- July 2, 2020

CIA Project MK-ULTRA

LARRY ROMANOFF • JULY 2, 2020

 • 22,100 WORDS • 39 COMMENTS • 1 NEW • REPLY

Retiring director of the CIA Allen Dulles (centre) with US President John F Kennedy and Dulles’ CIA replacement John A. McCone in Washington, DC. in early 1960s. Picture: AP

Note to readers:

This essay is an edited and abridged version, with content reformatted, of that originally posted here. It is updated with some new material and full references. A list of the most important references is at the end of the essay, before the notes. I deleted the small portion on P. W. Botha because I was unable to locate my primary reference which was text extracted from the Truth and Reconciliation hearings held in South Africa. The content was testimony by one of Botha’s underlings at a hearing that Botha refused to attend. Rather than leave questions about the validity of statements, I deleted that section.

CIA Project MK-ULTRA

The United States government funded and performed countless psychological experiments on unwitting humans, especially during the Cold War era, perhaps partially to help develop more effective torture and interrogation techniques for the US military and the CIA, but the almost unbelievable extent, range and duration of these activities far surpassed possible interrogation applications and appear to have been performed from a fundamental monstrous inhumanity. To simply read summaries of these, even without the details, is almost traumatising in itself.

In studies that began in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the US Military began identifying and testing truth serums like mescaline and scopolamine on human subjects, which they claimed might be useful during interrogations of Soviet spies. These programs eventually expanded to a project of vast scope and enormous ambition, centralised under the CIA in what would come to be called Project MK-ULTRA, a major collection of interrogation and mind-control projects. Inspired initially by delusions of a brainwashing program, the CIA began thousands of experiments using both American and foreign subjects often without their knowledge or against their will, destroying countless tens of thousands of lives and causing many deaths and suicides. Funded in part by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and jointly operated by the CIA, the FBI and the intelligence divisions of all military groups, this decades-long CIA research constituted an immense collection of some of the most cold-blooded and callous atrocities conceivable, in a determined effort to develop reliable techniques of controlling the human mind.

MK-ULTRA was an umbrella for a large number of clandestine activities that formed part of the CIA’s psychological warfare research and development, consisting of about 150 projects and sub-projects, many of them very large in their own right, with research and human experimentation occurring at more than 80 institutions that included about 50 of America’s best-known colleges and universities, 15 or 20 major research Foundations including Rockefeller, dozens of major hospitals, a great many prisons and mental institutions, and many chemical and pharmaceutical companies. At least 200 well-known private scientific researchers were part of this program, as were many thousands of physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists and other similar. Many of these institutions and individuals received their funding through so-called “grants” from what were clearly CIA front companies. In 1994 a Congressional subcommittee revealed that up to 500,000 unwitting Americans were endangered, damaged or destroyed by secret CIA and military tests between 1940 and 1974. Given the deliberate destruction of all the records, the full truth of the MK-ULTRA victims will never be known, and certainly not the death toll. As the inspector general of the US Army later stated in a report to a Senate committee: “In universities, hospitals and research institutions, an unknown number of chemical tests and experiments … were carried out with healthy adults, with mentally ill and with prison inmates.” According to one government report, “In 149 separate mind-control experiments on thousands of people, CIA researchers used hypnosis, electroshock treatments, LSD, marijuana, morphine, Benzedrine, mescaline, seconal, atropine and other drugs.” Test subjects were usually people who could not easily object – prisoners, mental patients and members of minority groups – but the agency also performed many experiments on normal, healthy civilians without their knowledge or consent.

There were 149 subprojects listed under the umbrella of MKULTRA. Project MONARCH has not been officially identified by any government documentation as one of the corresponding subprojects, but is used rather, as a descriptive “catch phrase” by survivors, therapists, and possible “insiders”. MONARCH may in fact, have culminated from MKSEARCH subprojects such as operation SPELLBINDER, which was set up to create “sleeper” assassins (i.e. “Manchurian candidates”) who could be activated upon receiving a key word or phrase while in a post-hypnotic trance. Operation OFTEN, a study which attempted to harness the power of occult forces was possibly one of several cover programs to hide the insidious reality of Project MONARCH. There were also operations BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MKNAOMI, and MKDELTA.

EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF -- Honk if You Love Jesus -- July 19, 2020

Honk if  You Love Jesus

LARRY ROMANOFF • JULY 19, 2020

We already know that Americans have, and treasure, a great many freedoms, but it is not widely known that the freedom of (white) Americans to kill blacks with impunity is actually just a subset of a greater freedom – the freedom of religion. It is this essential connection between God and killing that permits an American policeman to shoot dead a pregnant young mother then escape punishment by a claim to be “lifting the husband and children up in prayer”. If you aren’t American, you won’t understand this.

Right-Wing violence draws much of its nourishment from religion, from a conviction of being “a divine race” (Japanese), of being “God’s Chosen People” (Jews), of having been created in God’s image and thus having God “on my side” (Christian countries). Religion and belligerence are fundamental to a Right-Wing society, and widespread government support for the world’s most dysfunctional religions has always been a major part of American politics, the far-right evangelical Christian church being prominent throughout the US. While the Western God is praised as a God of love and tolerance, more tragic wars and human-rights atrocities have been committed in the name of God and religion than from any other source.

EN -- LARRY ROMANOFF -- Giving Things Names -- July 19,2020

Giving Things Names

LARRY ROMANOFF • JULY 19, 2020

 

A name is a term used for identification. They can identify a class or category of things,

or a single thing, either uniquely, or within a given context. 

In most parts of Northern nations like Canada or Russia, we have one word for snow: “snow”. If we want to be really precise, we will distinguish between dry snow and wet snow because wet snow is heavy and shoveling it from your driveway is one of the more popular methods of inviting a heart attack. But in the world’s far North the native Inuit people have more than 30 words for snow because they live with it for most of the year and minor differences in snow characteristics can greatly affect hunting and survival. We have names for things that are important to us.

For example, one of the most important categories of things in North America is alcoholic drinks. The basic categories are beer, wine, and spirits (which are distilled), and many products not fitting easily into these categories. We have beer, bitter, ale, stout and lager; cider, mead, kumis and sake. We have Chianti, Bordeaux, Beaujolais and Burgundy. We have red wine, white wine, rosé wine, fruit wine, table wine, sparkling wine, ice wine and champagne. We have sweet wines, dry wines, fruit wines and potato wines. We have fortified wines like Port, Madeira, Sherry and Vermouth. We have absinthe and Aquavit; we have brandy, cognac and Armagnac. We have schnapps and fruit brandies. We have gin, vodka, rum, scotch, bourbon, rye and sake. We have tequila and Ouzo. We have dinner wines, table wines, aperitifs, cocktails, mixed drinks, straight drinks, neat drinks. And we have special places for getting drunk. We have bars, wine bars and music bars. We have dance bars, topless bars and gay bars. We have cocktail lounges. We have pubs, beer halls, taverns and beer gardens. And I haven’t even begun.

And what does China have? Almost nothing. One word – jiu – for anything with alcohol in it. And if we want to be precise, we have beer (pi jiu), grape wine (pu tao jiu) and the white stuff that should kill you but somehow doesn’t – bai jiu. And China has no places where people go to drink,  awine and spirits in any supermarket or convenience store, but you drink thoset home (or in the park, or sitting on the curb). You can of course order them in most restaurants. But that’s all. Almost nothing to drink, and almost no place to drink it.

In the category of family, in the West the “family” is the mother, the father, and the kid. That’s it. We have uncles, aunts and cousins, and we have grandparents,

meaning we don’t like them but were born with them and had no choice. But in China, “family” means the entire extended family plus, occasionally, favored outsiders or even foreigners, in total comprising perhaps 50 people sharing not only emotional but often financial bonds as well.

In the West, we have only a handful of names for family members, generally ending with second cousins. But in China we have potentially hundreds of names for family members, far beyond mother, father, son and daughter. We have names for younger and older brothers, names for the father’s older and younger brothers and those of the mother’s and father’s parents, their younger and older brothers and sisters. We have names for the grandmother’s third cousin on her father’s uncle’s side of the family. It doesn’t end. You can see that in China, we waste all our words on trivial things like family members while in the West with our democracies and American values we save our words for really important stuff like things you can get drunk with. Clearly, China needs to change its attitude.

An American acquaintance once asked me if all Chinese people had “American” names. I tried to deflect that by saying they were ‘Western’ names rather than ‘American’ but she countered by saying, “Well, that’s the same thing”. But it isn’t the same thing. Her name, Theresa, is French. Her husband’s name is Russian; her son’s name is English. There is no such thing as an American name. Actually, that’s not quite true. There are three categories of American names. Pocahontas is an American name, as are girls’ names that end in i like Whoopi and Bambi. The third category is the sometimes-cute names that black mothers give to their football-player sons, like Jemahl and Freezone. That’s the list. But to Americans, who copied all their names from people of other nations, the names are now as American as Coca-Cola. Except that Coca-Cola is Spanish.

ERIC ZUESSE -- Debate: Is ‘Russiagate’ a CIA Hoax?

Debate: Is ‘Russiagate’ a CIA Hoax?

Eric Zuesse

July 31, 2020

There now is a public debate regarding whether or not ‘Russiagate’ was/is a CIA-generated hoax, instead of (as it has been reported) a Russian Government hacking operation. Whatever it was, did spark massive U.S. economic and other sanctions against Russia, and is therefore important in today’s U.S. international relations. Had the CIA actually created the “evidence”? Were those sanctions based upon a U.S. Government fraud? That is the question here.

On July 30th, the former Technical Director of the NSA — America’s top position on cyber intelligence including computer-hacking — Bill Binney, summarized, by a ten-minute presentation, the latest up-to-date information that exists regarding, and discussing, the actual sources of the various unauthorized releases, to the public, of emails and other documents from the computers of the Democratic National Committee and of John Podesta who headed the Presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton. Binney alleged there that the raw data prove conclusively — not just speculatively — that the CIA tampered with the evidence, in order to become enabled to accuse Russia as having been involved in those unauthorized information-releases. He further alleged that Robert Mueller’s report on the Democratic Party’s charges that Russia and Trump were involved in these matters was false when it unquestioningly accepted the CIA’s assertions against Russia and on that basis accused the Internet Research Agency, in Russia, as having “hacked” the data. Consequently: if Binney’s case is correct, then recent U.S. history is based upon fraud by the U.S. Government itself. This would be a case like America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, but perhaps even worse.

ERIC ZUESSE --How Modern Jihadism Became Co-Invented by the U.S. and Saudi Governments

How Modern Jihadism Became Co-Invented by the U.S. and Saudi Governments

Eric Zuesse, originally posted at Strategic Culture

Modern jihadism was co-invented in 1979 by Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al Saud, and U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, working together, and here is the background for it, and the way — and the reasons — that it was done:

Back in the later Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church and its aristocracies had used religious fervor in order to motivate very conservative and devout people to invade foreign countries so as to spread their empire and to not need to rely only on taxes in order to fund these invasions, but also to highly motivate them by their faith in a heavenly reward. It was far cheaper this way, because these invading forces wouldn't need to be paid so much; the reason why they’d be far cheaper is that their pay would chiefly come to them in their afterlife (if at all). That’s why people of strong faith were used. (Aristocracies always rule by deceiving the public, and faith is the way.) Those invaders were Roman Catholic Crusaders, and they went out on Crusades to spread their faith and so ‘converted’ and slaughtered millions of Muslims and Jews, so as to expand actually the aristocracies’ and preachers’ empire, which is the reason why they had been sent out on those missions (to win ‘converts’). This was charity, after all. (Today’s large tax-exempt non-profits are no different — consistently promoting their aristocracy’s invasions, out of ‘humanitarian’ concern for the ‘welfare’, or else ‘souls’, of the people they are invading — and, if need be, to kill ‘bad people’. This has been the reality. And it still is. It’s the way to sell imperialism to individuals who won’t benefit from imperialism — make mental slaves of them.)

ERIC ZUESSE -- 43% of America’s Renters Now Face Eviction

43% of America’s Renters Now Face Eviction

Eric Zuesse

Nationwide in the U.S. on July 28th, the “Estimation of households experiencing rental shortfall and potentially facing eviction” is 43.12%, according to Stout Risius Ross, LLC, “Based on Household Pulse Survey data” (from the U.S. Census Bureau).

An infographic by Niall McCarthy of Forbes shows the state-by-state percentages, as of July 15th, and they were:

WV=59%

TN=58%

MS=55%

MN=55%

FL=51%

LA=50%

KY=48%

MO=48%

IA=48%

TX=48%

NY=46%

GA=46%

NH=45%

NJ=44%

WY=44%

IN=44%

AR=43%

NC=43%

SC=43%

MD=42%

NM=42%

SD=42%

OK=42%

AL=42%

IL=42%

OH=41%

CT=41%

MI=40%

PA=40%

AZ=38%

AK=37%

ID=37%

CA=37%

MT=36%

NV=35%

NE=35%

RI=35%

ME=35%

KS=34%

HI=34%

ND=34%

WI=34%

VA=34%

OR=33%

CO=33%

DE=31%

DC=31%

UT=29%

WA=28%

MA=27%

VT=22%

Dilyana Gaytandzhieva -- Pentagon Unit A1266 studies bioterrorism agents in Kazakhstan

Pentagon Unit A1266 studies bioterrorism agents in Kazakhstan

By

 Dilyana Gaytandzhieva

July 21, 2020

American military scientists from the US Navy Medical Research Center, Silver Spring, Maryland have studied bioterrorism agents in Pentagon biolaboratories in Kazakhstan, scientific papers reveal.

The Pentagon Unit A1266 along with local scientists have collected 40,000 ticks from 13 regions in Kazakhstan and isolated four bio-agents that pose a serious bioterrorism threat: Tick-Borne Encephalitis Virus (TBEV), Crimean-Congo Hemorrhagic Fever Virus (CCHFV), Rickettsia and Coxiella burnetii (the causative agent of Q fever). These bio-agents have the potential to be engineered for mass aerosol dissemination and used as bioweapons.

ERIC ZUESSE -- The U.S. Empire Is Ending

The U.S. Empire Is Ending

Eric Zuesse

On July 26th, Germany’s Die Welt (The World) Sunday newspaper headlined “USA threatens German Nord Stream 2 contractors” and reported that, “The construction of the Russian Nord Stream 2 pipeline has long been a thorn in the US’s side. Now they are increasing the pressure on German and European companies involved in the project — and announce sanctions. German politicians are outraged.”

The U.S. regime is demanding that Germany cut pipelined gas from Russia and replace it with far costlier gas from U.S. fracking companies, which are facing hard economic times and are desperate to increase their exports. The news-report said:

The United States had previously legally enforced the implementing provisions of the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act ( CAATSA ) [which started] on July 15. The companies and their banks are threatened if they continue to participate in the pipeline’s construction. The sanctions include complete exclusion from the US market and entry bans for employees. At a press conference in Washington, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo summarized the aim of the measure for the companies concerned as follows: "Get out now or bear the consequences.” …

When asked by WELT AM SONNTAG, the German energy company Uniper "regretted that with the announced revision of the CAATSA guidelines, the US is still trying to undermine an important infrastructure project that we believe is important for Europe's energy security.” “A clear encroachment on European sovereignty”. …

For the parliamentary director of the CDU/CSU group in the European Parliament, Markus Pieper (CDU), the American threat of sanctions is “a clear violation of everything we understand by commercial law”. Pieper criticized the recent expansion of the CAATSA sanctions law of 2017 “German companies are now on par with Iran”. “The fun is slowly coming to an end.” Germany and Europe “urgently need to develop a counter-strategy”.

For the very first time, the U.S. regime is so desperate to crush Russia, as to endanger America’s continued alliance with Europe and especially with Germany. This is unprecedented, and must be marked as a turning-point in post-World-War-II history, because if the U.S. empire ends up losing Germany, then it will cause the end of America’s anti-Russia military alliance, NATO, and maybe even the end of America’s anti-Russia diplomatic and economic alliance, the EU. (The Cold War was against Russia, not actually against communism.)

ERIC ZUESSE -- What Caused Americans to Become Nazis

What Caused Americans to Become Nazis

Eric Zuesse 

The U.S. does vastly more foreign invasions, and political subversions, and coups, around the world, than any other nation does, and none of the countries we’ve invaded and overthrown had ever invaded the U.S. — these are all brutal international aggressions, and they have destroyed each of the countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and numerous others. The coups that the U.S. perpetrated have likewise destroyed many countries, starting in Thailand in 1948, then Syria in 1949, then Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and extending right up to the U.S. coup in Ukraine in February 2014, after which Ukraine’s GDP plunged by 50% and stayed down for years and still hasn’t recovered from the civil war and other destruction that the U.S. Government caused in that country. (Furthermore, repeatedly, in 2013, and in 2017, and even going back as far as 2003, global polling around the world has shown that the U.S. comes out way on top for being the “biggest threat to peace” of any nation on the planet — and it’s cited for that vastly more frequently than is any of the countries that America has invaded or threatens to invade, or calls an ‘enemy’, is. If Americans don’t know this fact that every American needs to know, then it’s because our ‘news’-media hide it from us.) 

And, yet, ever since 2001, when we invaded and destroyed Afghanistan, and even more in 2003 when we invaded and destroyed Iraq, the most respected of all institutions by the American people is its military, which is the chief agency of America’s curse upon the rest of the world; so, why are Americans so supportive of this blatantly evil Government — especially of its military?  Are Americans insane, or instead deceived?

ERIC ZUESSE -- THE LANCET Praises Chinese Model for Coronavirus Policies

THE LANCET Praises Chinese Model for Coronavirus Policies

Eric Zuesse

The Lancet, which is perhaps the world’s most influential medical journal and is the one that concentrated immediately on, and has concentrated the longest on, the coronavirus-19 pandemic, headlined an editorial on July 25th, “COVID-19 and China: lessons and the way forward”, and they opened:

China has largely controlled COVID-19. A country of 1.4 billion people and a size similar to Europe or the USA now reports only clusters of cases rather than widespread community transmission. China has been widely criticised for its role and responsibilities during the pandemic because of censorship, transparency, and human rights concerns. But the rest of the world can still learn from China's successes in bringing its outbreak under control.

They said that the first lesson to be learned from China’s remarkably successful response to the Covid-19 challenge is “China’s response shows the importance of domestic research and public health capacity.” The Chinese Government has devoted “huge investments” to public health, which left the nation “much better prepared."

A second lesson is that a robust foundation of research cannot guarantee effective control without strong top-level political commitment to use science to tackle the outbreak decisively. Governments and their leaders must respect science, understand its value, and act on it in a way that is best for society. China’s National Health Commission sent three groups of national infectious disease experts to Wuhan at the beginning of the outbreak to investigate the risks and transmission of COVID-19, and their recommendations informed the decision to lockdown Wuhan on Jan 23. When Chen Wang, president of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and colleagues saw the need for Fangcang shelter hospitals, the government was quick to respond.