war industry

Holiday From History Over For Australia?

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See if you can make sense of this empire-speak:

Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs, but an aberration. 

Australia’s holiday from history is over.

Holiday from history. That is quite a concept. Who the f ever gets a holiday from history? In this instance, I believe the phrase is supposed to mean war is on the horizon and soon. Because history is only a series of wars, and wars are normal, and your complacency is slack.

Pax Australia as enjoyed under the soft authority of Pax Americana is about to come to an end if these authors get their way. 

Here’s context for the quote from Caitlin Johnstone: 

The report by the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age — which former Prime Minister Paul Keating just called “the most egregious and provocative news presentation of any newspaper I have witnessed in over 50 years of active public life” —  actually comes close to actually admitting that there’s a concerted propaganda campaign designed to increase hysteria about China and manufacture consent for war. The “expert” panel asserts that there needs to be a “psychological shift” in the public toward this direction which they must be actively persuaded to accept.

“Most important of all is a psychological shift,” the report says. “Urgency must replace complacency. The recent decades of tranquillity were not the norm in human affairs, but an aberration. Australia’s holiday from history is over.”

Plenty of fearful reasons for Australian taxpayers to enrich those guys behind Uncle Sam in the cartoon above.

Some have suggested that Australia, not Taiwan, is slated to be the next Ukraine. Others have suggested it could be Japan. 

I haven’t seen any polls but I’m going out on a limb and say that the vast majority of people living in these places which are likely candidates to be selected for a proxy war on China do not want that to happen.

But it’s clear that the empire thinks it can act with impunity at this point in history. 

Impunity supported by the profound lack of curiosity about whodunit on Nord Stream evident throughout western media. Imperial control 0f that sector is working well with independent media covertly choked by lawfare, financial attacks, shadow banning, and cancellation. I’ve come to feel that getting authentic information is akin to getting nutritious food — it’s possible, but you have to work at it.

Who else is curious about NATO nuclear weapons and related systems being moved around? I know I am.

Imperial plotters fancy themselves eagles (dark eagles in the service of Dark Brandon, apparently) but the whole world knows they’re really more like pigeons.

(The rest of this insightful post may be found at GlobalSouth.Co.)

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9/11 Is But One Piece Of The Puzzle

/ went2thebridge / 2 Comments

A visual comparison of deaths at the World Trade Center and deaths from the pandemic caused by the COVID-19 virus and its variants.

Unlike today’s students being preyed upon by military recruiters counting on manufactured patriotism — patriotism on steroids since the unfortunate events of 9/11 — I was there. No, not in NYC, or Washington DC, or even in Maine where one of the alleged masterminds of the alleged takedown of the twin towers in lower Manhattan boarded his first plane.

I was in California, on my way to work, with a preteen child in the car — one whose sense of security was demolished on Sep. 11, 2001.

A few years later I was back in Maine trying to count the flags that had sprung up everywhere (too many to count in a car traveling 45 mph).

Some things are best understood in retrospect.

That nearly 3,000 “Americans” (27 were actually foreign nationals) died in the World Trade Center was a fact repeated as often as the videos of both towers collapsing. Oh, and WTC Building 7 which collapsed 8 hours later. This magnitude of death was the pretext for going to war on Afghanistan which allegedly harbored the Saudi masterminds of the terrorist attack. Except it was Pakistan doing the harboring. But they have nuclear weapons, don’t they?

The main things that 9/11 provided were an enormous spectacle to justify the endlessly profitable wars of imperial expansion for the U.S., sometimes doing business as NATO.  (If you wonder what NATO is doing in Australia since that’s about as far from North Atlantic as you can get, maybe read blogger Caitlin Johnstone.)

The other signficant thing that 9/11 provided cover for was the 300 page so-called Patriot Act which gutted constitutional rights of citizens and terrorists alike. Swiftly gutted them, and created the Department of Homeland Security and created ICE — both of which we had gotten along without prior to 9/11.

A lot of torture happened after 9/11. No, not the torture of being an Afghan or Pakistani child trying to sleep while surveillance robots droned overhead 24/7 waiting to unleash their Hellfire missiles on your home. Torture in secret prisons and in the gulag known as Guantánamo which is on Cuba’s territory without their consent.

Torture that resulted in persecution of torture whistleblowers. 

Torture of Chelsea Manning for refusing to reveal how she shared evidence of U.S. war crimes. 

Torture of Julian Assange for sharing evidence of U.S. and allied forces’ war crimes and dirty financial dealings. 

Almost torture of Edward Snowden for revealing the spying that digital technology and security state overreach have made ubiquitous. He lives in exile in Moscow now, with his young family, still trying to warn us about how to protect ourselves from the “security” state.

9/11 was used to justify war on Iraq via lies that Saddam Hussein had something to do with it. 

Source: Brown University, Watson Institute, Costs of War Project

9/11 was used to drive fossil fuel consumption and thus climate crisis.

9/11 was used to justify war on people in Syria. And Yemen. And Somalia. 

9/11 was used to consolidate U.S. government support of Israel’s human rights violations and war crimes against Palestinians.

Source: The Daily Times “Eagleton fifth-graders study 9/11” Sep. 10, 2016 

9/11 was used to produce a lot of canned curriculum that teachers are told they must use to inform kids that are not upset about 9/11. 

Becuase they were not even born when it happened.

And really, how much should they care about 9/11? Their young lives have been upended by a public health disaster of far greater proportions, still rampaging out of control. This time the heroes they’re encouraged to worship aren’t in firefighter or military uniforms, they’re in scrubs and PPE.

What will this much larger disaster be used for?