November 2021

John Mcevoy November 25, 2021 Yahoo! News (9/26/21) published a bombshell report detailing the US Central Intelligence Agency’s “secret war plans against WikiLeaks,” including clandestine plots to kill or kidnap publisher Julian Assange while he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. Following WikiLeaks‘ publication of the Vault 7 files in 2017—the largest leak in CIA history, which exposed how US and UK intelligence agencies could hack into household devices—the US government designated WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” (The Hill, 4/13/17), providing legal cover to target the organization as if it were an adversarial spy agency. Originally published at FAIR.org Within this context, the Donald Trump administration reportedly requested “sketches” or “options” for how to kill Assange, according to the Yahoo! expose (written by Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff), while the CIA drew up plans to kidnap him. (Assange was expelled from the embassy in 2019 and has since then been in British prison, fighting a demand that he...

Caitlin Johnstone November 26,2021 The New York Times has published a very solid investigative report on a US military coverup of a 2019 massacre in Baghuz, Syria which killed scores of civilians. This would be the second investigative report on civilian-slaughtering US airstrikes by The New York Times in a matter of weeks, and if I were a more conspiracy-minded person I’d say the paper of record appears to have been infiltrated by journalists. The report contains many significant revelations, including that the US military has been grossly undercounting the numbers of civilians killed in its airstrikes and lying about it to Congress, that special ops forces in Syria have been consistently ordering airstrikes which kill noncombatants with no accountability by exploiting loopholes to get around rules meant to protect civilians, that units which call in such airstrikes are allowed to do their own assessments grading whether the strikes were justified, that the US war machine attempted to obstruct scrutiny of the massacre “at...

Photo © Jan Oberg “Boy Looking Back” – 2018 Charles Hampden-Turner, Peter Peverelli and Fons Trompenaars November 23, 2021 This is Chapter 9 of a new book “Has China Devised a Superior Path to Wealth Creation? The Role of Secular Values” by three leading experts on China, cultural dimensions of societies and culture for business. Almost nothing does China more harm in the estimation of the world than the accusation that it is not a democracy and has no announced intention of becoming one. It is accused of totalitarianism. This is profoundly disturbing to the world for several reasons. First China has the largest population on earth at 1.4 billion and it suggests that large populations may not be able to cohere democratically. In a world population that is exploding this is bad news. India has the world’s second-largest population and democracy there shows signs of morphing into Hindu nationalism...

By Leung Wing-Fai November 16, 2021 Review: Fascination mixed with fear is how many in the West culturally construct the East Apocalyptic pollution, “Asian” flu, unfettered economic growth, boot camps for internet addiction, hacker attacks on western businesses and governments:– there is no shortage of fascination mixed with fear directed towards the culturally constructed East. Yellow Peril! An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear distils and presents a collection of accounts, images and essays related to this fear. The phrase yellow peril (sometimes yellow terror or yellow spectre), coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in the 1880s, after a dream in which he saw the Buddha riding a dragon threatening to invade Europe, blends western anxieties about sex, racist fears of the alien other, and the Spenglerian belief that the West will become outnumbered and enslaved by the East. These fears became increasingly reinscribed as ideology through popular cultural products. In the late...

Carlos Martinez November 16, 2021 Since the launch of Obama’s ‘Pivot to Asia’ in 2012, the US has prioritised China containment over all other foreign policy commitments. This includes steadily increasing its presence in the South China Sea and encouraging China’s neighbours in their various territorial claims. Obama also initiated an expansion of US military, diplomatic and economic cooperation with other countries in the region. The overarching strategic goal of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) was to isolate China and to draw East and Southeast Asia back into the US economic – and ideological – orbit. The Trump administration, while dropping the TPP due to its domestic unpopularity, escalated the Pivot in other respects: launching a trade war in January 2018, imposing a ban on Huawei, attempting to ban TikTok and WeChat, spreading conspiracy theories about the origins of Covid-19, and turning ‘decoupling’ into a buzzword. Anti-China propaganda became –...

School History November 13, 2021 Originally posted on School History Key Facts & Summary Operation Mockingbird indicates the CIA’s involvement in the manipulation of the news published in the United States and across the world. Today, one can identify such manipulation with fake news Operation Mockingbird commonly refers to the CIA’s involvement in journalism during the 1970s The CIA bribed students as well as established journalists and reporters to write a CIA version of the events Senator Frank Church established the Church Committee in order to investigate ‘government operations and potential abuses’ The CIA admitted their manipulation of mainstream media in order to change the American people’s mind and published the Family Jewels. Overview The idea of a large organisation controlling the minds and thoughts of individuals, pushing them towards a specific ideology and certain life choices, may seem as science fiction, or as an absurd conspiracy that can be...

Peter McKillop November 8, 2021 The Chinese president did not attend COP26, but China already has a master plan for climate action. Do you, President Biden? It may be one of the great ironies of COP26 that the leader of the nation that emits more carbon than the United States, India and the European Union combined is skipping the climate conference in Glasgow. For China and President Xi Jinping, it’s politics as usual. Perhaps it’s about maintaining COVID protocols, or he is still smarting from the new nuclear submarine deal between the U.S. and Australia. For whatever reason, President Xi will limit his COP presence to a video link. But Xi’s physical absence at the summit should not be mistaken for inaction on climate change. Besides a commitment to check the increase in greenhouse gas emissions in 2030 and reach net zero by 2060, China has quietly put together an...

Ash Center research team unveils findings from long-term public opinion survey By Dan Harsha – Ash Center Communications November 6, 2021 Understanding what Chinese citizens think about their own government has proven elusive to scholars, policymakers, and business people alike outside of the country. Opinion polling in China is heavily scrutinized by the government, with foreign polling firms prohibited from directly conducting surveys. Given China’s global rise in the economic, military, and diplomatic spheres, understanding public opinion there has arguably never been more important. Originally published at The Harvard Gazette A new study from the Ash Center fills in this gap for the first time, providing a long-term view of how Chinese citizens view their government at the national, as well as the regional and local levels. What started as an exercise in building a set of teaching tools for an executive education class eventually transformed into the longest academic survey of...

Daniel Ellsberg November 8, 2021 Given the intellectual and ethical status of many leaders in today’s world, this is not – as it may seem – a far-fetched question. It must be raised and discussed since the shocking revelation made by Daniel Ellsberg (1) earlier this year. In 1958, the US had a president – Dwight D. Eisenhower – who was himself a military man. Military people are often more cautious about war because they know much better than politicians what it would mean to start and fight a real war. What would Western leaders do today if a hard dilemma came up? The 12-min documentary below should – together with other articles we have published on this issue – serve as a wake-up call for those who believe that nuclear war is something that belongs only to the past. Young people who engage wonderfully in climate issues seem not...

November 8, 2021 Cyrus Janssen is an American expat who has lived in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Vancouver over the past 14 years. He is passionate about showing a true insight into China and loves sharing his travels around the world. He is a very knowledgeable and competent communicator of complex issues and Janssen’s Youtube Channel has no less than 171 000 subscribers at the moment – i.e. it’s much bigger than many local newspapers around the world. It’s one of many examples of why you are wasting your time if you spend all of it on mainstream, public service or prime time news – because there is so much more interesting and truly independent information and knowledge available in places such as Janssen’s. I recommend his Channel very warmly because you will really learn something important about China – and the US – when you spend a little time...

Photo from the original article Hussein Askary November 1, 2021 According to well-documented statistics provided by American research institutions and universities the human, economic, and financial costs of all wars the United States launched since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, are in the millions of killed, maimed, and traumatized (mostly civilians); destruction of infrastructure in the hundreds of billions; and financial cost for the war effort itself in the trillions of U.S. Dollars. Added to that is a lost economic opportunity in dozens of countries and several regions. These wars and regime-change operations started with Afghanistan (and Pakistan) in October 2001, and continued to Iraq in 2003, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, in addition to so-called anti-terror operations in Africa that are continuing to date. Originally posted on Brix Sweden’s homepage on September 6, 2021 In the meantime, China, which has been more criticized in Western media than the...