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When criminals show their true face, believe them. Here’s George Bush at a black tie dinner 20 years ago for Radio and TV journalists, joking to sycophantic applause about the elusive WMD in Iraq. Those WMD being the casus belli, recall, for what Nuremberg 1945-6 had declared “the supreme crime” of waging aggressive war: in this case on a country thousands of miles from US borders and shores; one that killed at least a million Iraqis, plunged the country into a sectarian hell from which it has yet to emerge, and transferred its wealth from state to privatised control to the further enrichment of US oligarchs.
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And here’s former CIA head, Sunday School superintendent and then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo bragging, to laughter no less obsequious at a conference in Texas A&M University in April 2019, that “we lied, we cheated, we stole. It’s like we had entire training courses … “
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So when the Trump Administration speaks of seizing Greenland by force, we should not view so ugly a threat as the hyperbole of a rogue presidency. This is the true face of the American ruling class – or at least, of significant wings of the same in response to crisis. Having abandoned law and morality long ago, the criminal empire now abandons – at first through unipolar hubris and now in panic at unipolar decline – hypocrisy itself. 1
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When criminals, and those in high office who do their bidding, show their true face, believe them.
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- Abandoning hypocrisy itself? Writing a few hours after I posted this – Four observations on the US kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro – Jonathan Cook comments:
It is a sign of quite how much of a rogue state the US has become that Washington isn’t even trying to come up with a plausible reason for kidnapping the Venezuelan president.
In invading Afghanistan, the US said it had to “smoke out” al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from his mountain lair after the 9/11 attacks. In invading Iraq, the US said it was going to destroy Saddam Hussein’s “weapons of mass destruction” that threatened Europe. In bombing Libya, the US claimed it was preventing Muammar Gaddafi’s troops from going on a Viagra-fuelled campaign of rape.
Each of these justifications was a transparent falsehood. The Taliban had offered to hand over bin Laden for trial. There were no WMD in Iraq. And the Viagra story was a work of unadulterated fiction.
But earlier US administrations at least had to pretend their actions were driven by humanitarian considerations and the need to maintain international order.
The charges against Maduro are so patently ridiculous you need to be a Trump fanboy, an old-school imperialist or deeply misinformed to buy any of them. No serious monitoring organisation thinks Venezuela is a major trafficker of drugs into the US, or that Maduro is personally responsible for drug-trafficking. Meanwhile, the firearm charges are so preposterous it’s difficult to understand what they even mean.
Looking at that last photograph, the though occurs as to where’s Marshal Jed Cooper when he’s needed?
While we are waiting
https://karlof1.substack.com/p/cold-war-20-or-world-war-three-whats
“For fair development and peace to occur on our planet, the two Outlaw Nations must be defeated, disarmed and made to obey the law. Yes, a special operation by and for Humanity. As for the democracy illusion within the Empire, Trump again today spoke to Republicans about cancelling the mid-term elections, which he could try to do—he’s broken the law daily and throughout his life, so what’s one more crime? It’s time for Humanity to Stand Its Ground against Empire, Imperialism, Zionism and Nazism. ”
Where do we sign up?
News just broke that the more senior of the two Outlaw Nations has seized another oil tanker on the Caribbean, this one flying the Russia flag.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/cwynjdqgellt
How do global logistical supply chains function in a practical sense when cargoes can be seized in transit – whether on land or sea – by Mafia State pirates, making the law up to suit themselves and their convenience? Or energy delivery routes and generating capacity are bombed by Mafia State actors.
Good luck with the empty supermarket shelves, dry fuel pumps, and affordable energy when that scenario develops to its logical conclusion. Assuming of course that you are allowed to have a bank account, spend money to feed yourself or travel because you have been cancelled by whichever Mafia Western State you live in. Or, in some cases, been deported from into some prison camp in Central/South America or Rwanda for expressing the wrong opinion at variance with The Official Narrative (TON).
A society, a civilisation, cannot function or operate with no common rules or laws. What happens when the blockade is not limited to the Caribbean but expands to the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, the Straits of Maracas, The South China Sea, The Arctic, The Baltic, The Black Sea or the South Caucuses?
The Rubicon has been crossed. Which means that for everyone outside the Collective West, this is now a matter of existential survival. Having been designated as [checks notes] “shitty little Third World countries” whose people are expendable because they are sitting on resources that the Western Oligarchy wants to plunder or in a peer rival for the same reasons.
Either the rule of law at international and national levels is reintroduced by force and the perps either properly tried and punished as an example/physically removed from existence, or everyone else is next. Because this will not stop at Cuba, Columbia, Mexico or Greenland but will most certainly expand outside the Western Hemisphere to Iran, Africa, South East Asia and anyone else doing business with the Official peer enemies, Russia and China.
And regardless of the need to re-establish a proper rule of law, there will most certainly be some – and not merely at State level – who will be prepared to fight fire with fire by applying the same principles to Western leaders and their Comprador’s who will be considered equally fair game for kidnap, citizen arrest or being inhumed. Particularly by former citizens, now feudal subjects, who are increasingly aware that they are considered surplus to requirements and have little left to lose.
It’s hard to see how Moscow and Beijing can not respond. They’ve been put in a situation where appeasement is the more dangerous option. Gilbert Doctorow was making much the same point to Judge Napolitano earlier today – i.e. before the tanker seizure, and talk of the Russian crew being extradited to the US and prosecuted for busting US imposed ‘sanctions’.
https://youtu.be/EDvw4pkcL5Q