State power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. The state can train subjects, but it can never develop free people who take their affairs into their own hands, for independent thought is the greatest danger that it has to fear.
--Rudolf Rocker
I have a new site called "Exit the Cuckoo's Nest," so I will be posting articles there and not here. Hopefully SteelPirate can find someone to do that at Censor Free Zone. If not, he says he's going to keep the site open as a sort of archive. We agree that it's about time I got my own site, and no hard feelings.
The new site still has some glitches - like the obnoxious orange color of the comment text - and things I'd like to add, but it appears it's operational enough to post OPs and comments.
I sent out invitations but may have forgotten a few posters, and the site is not limited to those on that list. If you'd like your name added to or subtracted from the list, let me know. Commenting rules are included in "About 'Exit the Cuckoo's Nest'."
An artificially-imposed union in unnatural borders is known as ‘a construct’. Constructs are artificial, as they are populated by different peoples, who speak different languages and have different cultures, and who would prefer to live in their own common nation-state because of those differences. For these reasons constructs are always imposed top-down for ‘reasons of State’ and rejected by those who are oppressed by them at the grassroots. Constructs are only ever popular among the elites which invent them and make money from them. They rarely achieve more than 50% popularity, usually far less. They are always rejected by the people at the bottom of the pile. This is why constructs never last.
1. The USA as a Construct
For instance, the USA, founded on exploitation, gun-law, slavery and the genocide of its native peoples, is a construct. Its straight-line borders are artificial, the result of wars and treaties, forced on others by historical circumstances or illegal occupations, for example as in Alaska and Hawaii. Much of its southern territory is Spanish-named and was stolen from Mexico and is now – such is the justice of history and the reward of patience – being reoccupied by Spanish speakers.
As for the northern border, that was fixed because basically the lands northwards were cold and uninviting. The vast majority of them, except for a very narrow strip close to the US border, spread up to the Arctic and were uninhabitable. Thus, the US elite left them to the unwanted whom they called ‘Canadians’, who presented no threat to them.
As regards its ‘United’ States, they are the result of an incredibly bloody Civil War, leaving as many as one million dead, the equivalent of ten million today. It was directed by an industrial elite in the North-East and the result, enforced by genocide, was by many never accepted. That elite was Zionist (not Jewish, though many of its financiers were Jews) in its proclamation that it was exceptional and that its ‘manifest destiny’ (i.e. manifest only to themselves) was to spread ‘from sea to shining sea’.
2. Europe and its Constructs
Europe (meaning by etymology ‘the west’) is also a construct, its identity going back to an ancient Greek myth. For the Romans 2,000 years ago, it did not exist separately from Asia and Africa. Indeed, it is artificially separated from Asia (meaning by etymology ‘the east’), from where its peoples emigrated. There is no natural border between the European peninsula and Asia: its eastern border is purely political and for the moment fixed in the Ural Mountains and the Caucasus.
Moreover, nearly all of its languages are ‘Indo-European’ and have their origins in a language spoken in today’s Turkey (Asia Minor) or even further east, well over 5,000 years ago. The historically recent contempt of ‘Europe’ for anything ‘Asian’, contemptuously termed ‘Asiatic’ or ‘barbarian’, is simply a rejection of its own origins and a self-justification for its artificial state of separation.
In the early 90s the then French President, Chirac, called on all: ‘Creeons l’Europe, Faisons l’Europe, il faut construire l’Europe’ (Let us create Europe, Let us make Europe, We must build Europe’). This was simply an open admission that Europe did not exist. It does not.
Within contemporary Europe the EU, the UK and the Ukraine are obviously constructs. The EU goes back only to 1993, the Ukraine to 1992, and the UK to 1922. In other words, they are all temporary inventions of the twentieth century. Now we are in the twenty-first century, we can see that they will not last much longer.
a. The EU
Taking the most recent construct first, we can see that many of the now 27 countries of the EU, which the UK left after 47 turbulent years, experiencing it and its predecessors as a straitjacket, are constructs. We would make exceptions only for some small countries: Portugal, the Czech Lands, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Malta and the five sparsely-populated Nordics: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland, the latter both Non-EU. (The total population of the five Nordics is just 27 million, 40% of the population of France or the UK).
Spain is a construct, Catalans and Basques reject it. France is a construct, Basques, Bretons, Occitans, Corsicans and Alsaciens reject it. Belgium, Italy and Germany are constructs that go back no further than the nineteenth century and Germany has been reinvented radically over that time, as the Second Reich of 1871 disappeared in 1918 and the Third Reich of 1933 lasted only twelve years, after which the borders of Germany changed radically.
Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were constructs. Czechoslovakia split into its two natural entities, but the fate of the far more complex Yugoslavia is far from resolved. Yugoslavia disintegrated into a number of states, most of which have unnatural borders, not unlike several other European countries, for example, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania. And here we do not even mention the unresolved problem of occupied Cyprus. Obviously, those who claim to be in favour of self-determination are not.
The EU elite comes from the borderlands of Latin-Germanic/Protestant-Catholic Europe. These run through Belgium, Luxembourg and eastern France (the Brussels-Luxembourg-Strasbourg axis). This elite was US-formed, like Jean Monnet, Robert Schuman and Konrad Adenauer. As the former President of France, Giscard d’Estaing, stated, the Common Market (predecessor of the EU) was until the 1970s little more than a ‘Neo-Carolingian Empire’. In other words, it was a recreation of the ‘Empire’ of Charlemagne, who was not a French leader or founder of the French educational system, as French State schoolbooks claim. He was a vicious and illiterate German barbarian who spoke no French and was tall, so called Karl the Tall, disguised by the French name ‘Charlemagne’.
His EU ‘Empire’ with its violent warrior class of Franks was recreated a millennium later by other Fascistic tyrants, Napoleon and Hitler; hardly a recommendation for the EU, though EU membership and territory are almost identical to their blood-soaked Empires. Moreover, both those Empires failed because they too tried to invade Russian territory. Although it is not necessary or inevitable, history does in fact repeat itself, simply because of the greatest human stupidity – not to learn the lessons of history. And so it goes on and today the earth of the Ukraine is soaked in blood again.
b. The Ukraine
Although the word ‘Ukraine’, meaning borderland, is ancient, the concept of a country called ‘the Ukraine’, like its Austrian flag, goes back only to the Austro-Hungarian Imperialism of the late nineteenth-century. The Ukraine as a nation-state is an even more recent construct.
The Ukraine was invented largely by Non-Russian Communist dictators for political reasons, in 1922, 1939 and 1954, and has existed as a separate state only for thirty years. It has never been an independent state, having been completely dependent on a Jewish oligarchic elite over its thirty years of existence. And since 2014 it has been a US conquest-state and so vassal.
Constructs are dangerous things (1). Just as the construct of ‘Belgium’ (the southern Netherlands and part of northern France) was used as a pretext for World War I in 1914, the construct of ‘Poland’ (then consisting of Poland and large and oppressed parts of Belarus and Galicia) was used as a pretext for World War II in 1939, so the Ukraine was used as a pretext for what we call World War III (2014 – present).
From 2014 on, for eight years, a huge Ukrainian force, over 500,000 strong, was gathered, trained, dug in and armed by NATO in order to invade Russia from the eastern Ukraine. This is the origin of the present Third World War, which is now in its ninth year and slaughtered nearly seven million in its biological warfare (covid) phase alone. The blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians is now on the hands of the USA, its vassals and their foreign financiers.
c. The UK
The UK in its present form, England, Scotland, Wales and an occupied piece of north-eastern Ireland, was founded in the same year as the Soviet Ukraine – 1922. However, its origins go way back to the violence of a Viking-Norman elite, financed by Jewish merchants from Rouen. (Until 1066 there were no Jews in any of the Four Nations, England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland).
Those Normans are nothing to do with contemporary Normandy and Norman people. Those ‘Normans’ (= Northmen) were a cosmopolitan, French-speaking Viking elite, temporarily based in north-western France. They marauded all over Europe, notably in Sicily, Southern Italy and England, wherever, in fact, as conquistadors they could see opportunities for power and gold. The ships they used to invade were in fact Viking drakkar, dragon-ships, as can be seen from pictures of them in the eleventh-century English-made Tapestry, at present in Bayeux in Normandy.
In 1066 and after, the Normans, led by William the Bastard/Conquistador, conquered England by genocide, though most of his mercenary force consisted of Flemings and Bretons, the bandit scum of north-western Europe. In other words, only the leadership elite were ‘Normans’. Their alliance of pillaging bandits went on to conquer Wales, Scotland and, in the twelfth century, Ireland, where they were known as ‘Anglo-Normans’.
Then they created a ‘Hundred Years War’ with France and intervened in other interminable wars on mainland Europe. However, their much later racial and ideological descendants and adepts, of all nationalities, went on to conquer worldwide territories in what became known as ‘The British Empire’. In fact, this was ‘The Norman Empire’. Noted for its ‘raiding and trading’, that is, pillaging and looting, it was the ultimate Viking enterprise, violent warriors replaced by ruthless traders, battle-axes by trade monopolies, excommunications by trade sanctions.
The Constructing Elites
The elites who have imposed these constructs all have something in common – their intolerance. We would call them ‘Exceptionalists’ to describe that unique intolerance, because that is how they consider themselves and they actually use their imagined ‘exceptionalism’ to justify the darkest of deeds. According to them, all who are different have to be destroyed – ‘cancelled’. ‘We are best, and therefore…’. This is only the racism of Hitler: ‘We are Aryans, and therefore…’. They call themselves ‘Judeo-Christians’. The Saker very aptly calls them Anglo-Zionists. Again we repeat that here we must distinguish between Jews and Zionists. Many Jews are anti-Zionist and many Zionists are not at all Jews (2). Let us give two examples.
I remember talking many years ago to an Englishman, then aged 102, a true Victorian, who told me that he was convinced that God was English. And he was serious. I told him that after the US provocation of Pearl Harbour in December 1941 (when American infamy entered a new phase), surely his god had changed nationalities and become American. He replied to me that English and Americans were the same anyway. He was a Zionist, but he was not a Jew. Then about twenty years ago an 80 year-old Dutchman from Alkmaar told me that: ‘After the War (= 1945) the world’s policeman was no longer English, but American’. (He never explained to me why the world needed a policeman and who had chosen him). He too was a Zionist, but not a Jew.
All of this of course is known as ‘cultural prejudice’ or, more simply, ignorance and bigotry. Thus: ‘We want to steal Iraq’s oil and gas. Because we are Americans, we are exceptional and we have the right to do this. This is the international rules-based order which we have established’. These people are Zionists, but they are not necessarily Jews.
Conclusion: Reconstruction
It is a spiritual law (also known as ‘common sense’) that you do not destroy anything, until you have something better to replace it with. In other words, you do not deconstruct, if you are not first ready to reconstruct. What exactly the future of the USA is I could not say, though I would say that it will fall back into its natural components, for that is the destiny of all constructs – they de-compose, as artifice is always taken over by nature – like a corpse in the grave. All constructs become corpses, some quite rapidly, as in today’s deeply tragic Ukraine.
Europe’s destiny is to rejoin Asia, which is its origin in every sense, including the origin of Christianity. For Christianity is not by origin European. The defection of Western Europe from Christian Tradition almost exactly 1,000 years ago (3) and its construct of ‘Catholicism’ (4), which 500 years later split into a myriad of State-moulded sects (5), which have lasted another 500 years and are now rapidly dying out, signified its schism from Asia. It was only from the eleventh century on that the word ‘Europe’ began to be used to define a geographical entity, being firmly established only by 1300 (6).
Western Europe even began to call the old Christian Capital of New Rome/Constantinople on the frontiers of Europe and Asia, symbolised therefore by a double-headed eagle, ‘Byzantium’. It even invented the word ‘Byzantine’ to describe its own labyrinthine bureaucracy and convoluted hypocrisy. (There is nothing so ‘Byzantine’ as perfidious Albion). Then, in 1204, the new Judeo-Christian ‘Catholics’ sacked the Christian Capital, weakening it and so enabling it to be conquered by the Muslim Ottomans in 1453.
Now comes the, as yet faint, possibility of Europe’s return to its roots after its thousand-years of captivity. In order to do this, Europe has to free itself from the dictatorship of the atheist elite, now based in the USA, but with important offshoots in Western Europe, especially in post-Protestant north-western Europe.
Europe has to recognise the Four Asian Civilisations, founded on religion and rooted in history, which have given Asia and the world its history. Chronologically, these are: the Hindu world of the Subcontinent (Hindustan), the Confucian-Buddhist-Taoist Chinese world, the Orthodox Christian world (today based in Russia, but which spreads southwards to its origin in Jerusalem and beyond) and the Muslim world of Asia and North Africa. They represent three-quarters of the world. You will never get away from them. Stop fighting among yourselves and fighting against them and learn to live with them.
9 November 2022
Notes:
1. We also have the example of the construct of Kuwait, artificially divided from artificial Iraq, designed with its straight lines by British cunning and greed. It was the pretext for the First Genocide in Iraq in 1990-1991.
3. The Pope of Rome whose name was permanently removed from the lists (‘diptychs’) of Orthodox Christian leaders in Rome by the Orthodox Christian Patriarch of Constantinople was the Germanising Benedict VIII (1012-1024). Since him no further Popes of Rome have been recognised and commemorated as Orthodox Christians in the Orthodox world.
4. Today’s ailing Roman Catholic leader, Pope Francis, is said to be the last Pope. This is according to the Prophecies of St Malachy, though that document is much disputed and considered by many to be pure fiction.
5. As one English writer, writing of his own country, put it nearly a century ago: ‘Religion (in the late sixteenth century) was not about conversing with the Eternal, but keeping people quiet in the Eternal’s name’. And: ‘Religion then was not building churches, it was preparing to smash churches and put up conventicles where one could hate one’s neighbour as oneself’.
6. See ‘The Europeanization of Europe’, Pp. 269-291 in The Making of Europe by Robert Bartlett (1993).
A precursor to the polygraph was first used in 1921 by psychologist, lawyer and inventor William Marston, who later created the comic superhero Wonder Woman. A man named James Frye had been accused of murdering a prominent physician in Washington, D.C. He had confessed to the crime and then recanted his confession. Marston used a blood pressure cuff on Frye while asking him questions and measuring his physiological reactions. He claimed his test showed Frye to be innocent, but a judge in the case refused to admit the results as evidence, citing a lack of general acceptance by the scientific community. The ruling established what came to be known as the Frye standard, which governs expert witness testimony in many states, including Minnesota, to this day.
Before we move forward, let's be clear: there is no one type of lie detector test, but when we talk about lie detector tests, we generally refer to the traditional polygraph test.
How Polygraph Tests Work
Technically, there's more than one answer. I'll explain…
A polygraph machine is not unlike what kids have to strap themselves into to play video games these days. Try not to think about it.
Most polygraph machines measure
Breath rate.
Pulse.
Blood pressure.
Perspiration.
Willingness to participate (binary).
What it doesn't do is determine whether or not the subject is lying. Only Big Tech and Politifact are endowed with such superpowers. (Just kidding.)
A polygraph operator uses some simple questions to calibrate feedback. Different people have different physiological responses to being asked questions. Some get stressed more than others, and some begin rhetorically asking about the definition of "is".
Some others hold a press conference.
(Just kidding.)
After the test is calibrated, the polygraph operator judges as best as possible whether the data from the measured metrics fits with the calibrated controls.
Polygraph Tests: Admissible in Court?
In an interview or two over the past year, I mentioned that polygraph tests are not admissible in court. Mea culpa. When I "learned" that "fact", I must have been in a state where they were not admissible. But I've since learned that they are admissible in some states, but not in others. From lawinfo.com:
Those who think polygraph evidence should be used in court say that the tests are reliable most of the time and, therefore, useful information. However, many experts disagree with the assumption that lie detector tests are reliable in most situations. Accordingly, in leaving the decision up to individual jurisdictions, the Supreme Court commented that there is no reliable scientific evidence about the accuracy of lie detector tests. Still, the Supreme Court has not forbidden it outright.
Estimates differ, but the accuracy of a polygraph test (per operator) at detecting lies seems to be around 87%. But such a number is not set in stone! It may vary greatly among different people.
There is also a major problem leaping for percentage accuracy to meaningful results, however. An educated and skilled individual can push the accuracy very close to a fair coin flip (50/50). This is because studious individuals learned how to hack that game, and eventually experts like Doug Williams broke down and just gave the game away, completely.
Perhaps in some courtrooms, the jury is given the opportunity to decide, based on additional evidence about the person taking the test, whether the test is likely to be reliable.
Whether or not polygraph tests fairly work as lie detector tests, some investigators may find them helpful for determining who is and is not nervous about some important topics. This might help detectives track down better information aside from the test results.
Now, let's wade into the deep end of the pool…military intelligence.
The People Who Fool the Machines
While we have talked about people trained to game polygraph tests, most people don't go so far as to train themselves into the appropriate meditative state. Even so, there are still problems. One of the issues with polygraph tests is that there is a small subset of people whose polygraph results are not observably dependent on whether they're lying or telling the truth. From Psychology Today,
In February of 1994, the FBI arrested Aldrich Ames, who had been a CIA employee for 31 years. Ames was arrested and charged with espionage. He was a Russian spy. For nine years, he had been passing secrets to the Russians in exchange for over $1.3 million. His spying activities had compromised dozens of CIA and FBI operations. Worse yet, his treacherous crimes had led to the deaths of several CIA spies and the imprisonment of many more.
During the time that Aldrich Ames was operating as a Russian spy, the CIA had twice given him a lie detector test. Despite having no special training in how to defeat a lie detector test, Aldrich passed both times.
A few weeks ago I shared a several hour car ride with a Signals Intelligence (SigInt) officer in the U.S. military. She explained that everyone serving in SigInt submits to polygraph testing annually. It was the second time we'd had a conversation about it over the past several years. The first time she complained that she was weirdly growled out by the polygraph operator over the results, which surprised her. She laughed it off, but it was enough to make her ask about the test the next time around. During her more recent test, she asked the operator about the purpose of the test and was told that people who showed no response were removed from military intelligence.
Tell Me Another Fairy Tale
Upon hearing this story about people Ames-ing the polygraph, I declared shenanigans, and my passenger laughed and said something like, "Yeah, that's kind of what I thought, too." What I'd said specifically is that those "removed" over such a test were likely identified as cool psychopaths, and simply reassigned and retrained for work that requires their rare attributes.
Thinking from the point-of-view of the top of the opaque hierarchy that is military intelligence (which might as well be all of U.S. intelligence now that the DNI runs the whole show), can you imagine just tossing aside an asset like that?
I certainly can't.
Now, exercise your imagination and ask yourself how you would repurpose such an asset. The only limit is your creativity.
This is a rite of passage that needs to go the way of the Dodo.
Mercenaries, and now, we have a blue blood son, grandson to Robert Kennedy, heading out to Ukraine with some sad sack ideas about what he in the name of Hell is going to do in that country?
Yep, RFK Jr., let out the news recently, on Megyn Kelly. The newspapers picked it up:
“He felt that he shouldn’t be arguing about it unless he was willing to have skin in the game and take his own risk,” Kennedy said on “The Megyn Kelly Show” of his son’s decision to go to the war-torn country.
Kennedy said his son signed up for the Foreign Legion at the Ukrainian Embassy and was a drone pilot before he was promoted to a “machine gunner.”
“He didn’t have any military experience and kind of talked his way into the unit,” he added. “He’s been in firefights, mainly nighttime, and a lot of artillery fights with the Russians.”
“He had a job for a law firm, a really good law firm in Los Angeles, and I was looking forward to him living with me for the summer,” he said of his son’s initial plans.
When probing him further about Conor Kennedy’s plans, his son said, “I’m not going. I want to talk to you. I don’t want you to ask me what I’m doing.”
“I was like, ‘Um…,’” he explained. “And he said, ‘I will explain it to you at some point, but I do not want you to ask me now, and if you could just respect that it would mean a lot to me.’ So I did.”
We can discuss what the role of parenting has to do with bringing up children who might find it necessary to shoot at people to get skin in the game. Now, Conor is 28, that is, 28 years old, not months, yet as a teacher of many souls over four decades, I can say he is most certainly arrested developed (so many American men are), and this whole idea of having skin in the game is beyond insane. Kind reader, what were you doing at age 28? Wanting skin in the game? Which game? Hmm, I went to Central America before age 28, and I was working with refugees in Arizona in my 19 to 21 years of age time frame. I was involved in journalism, too, young, at 17, and then reporting on some things like El Salvadorans perishing in the desert near where I was headquartered, and some on the drug tunnels down also near Bisbee. Also, reporting on the military putting up aerostat balloons along the border to try and capture undocumented workers. I even did a story on some of those Posse Comitatus folk, the border patriots (sic) who went out there armed and lock ‘n’ loaded.
Nope, no blue blood in my line. Yep, plenty of military around me with an old man in cryptology in the Air Force and then Army. Germany, France, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, etc.
Yes, and I am named after a grandfather who was a WWI pilot in the Germany navy-air force, flying triple-wing planes. He was in post-WWI Germany, seeing the wheelbarrows of Deutsche Marks for a loaf of bread. He also — before the German loss — in the Battle of Jutland, on a ship, the Rostock, that was hit and distressed with hundreds dead. He floated on the flotsam of war and watched the battle ensue and then the two sides with white flags came into the war theater to pick up the wounded and dead.
And, of course, I had Irish and Scottish and English and Canadian family in that war, but also in WWII. Uncle Ian was on a submarine for the British, and German family members on the Russian front, and alas, relatives who survived the bombing of Dresden.
Yeah, I heard stories about Paul Haeder’s exploits on a tall sail ship learning how to be a soldier, and listened intently his war experiences, and learned about his post-WWI life, and his life in Iowa and South Dakota (my grandfather ended up in Iowa and South Dakota as the last of seven brothers who hit Ellis Island before WWI). Paul found work as a former lieutenant impossible — coal mining and “working” the food trains with orders to shoot fellow Germans, per the Pinkerton outfit, if they rushed the trains for food, bread, foodstuffs. That wasn’t Paul Haeder’s ethos, so he never did the dirty deeds of shooting Germans hungrier than rabid dogs.
Now, of course, forgotten history of that putrid, Patton and MacArthur, and their dirty deeds killing their own veterans:
In 1932, 17,000 former soldiers marched on Washington, D.C. to demand wartime pay owed to them. The Great Depression ravaged the country, and a president took desperate measures to disperse the angry veterans.
Tanks rolled down the streets. Soldiers held people at bayonet-point. Veterans and their families took lungs full of tear gas. People died.
Gen. Douglas MacArthur — then the U.S. Army’s Chief of Staff — led the 12th Infantry Regiment and the 3rd Cavalry Regiment into the fray.
The cavalry regiment contained six Renault FT tanks commanded by Maj. George Patton. The Army troops, with bayonets affixed to their rifles, charged into the shanty town and launched tear gas into the crowds. (source)
Skin in the game? Hmm. So, growing up on air force bases, army posts and outside Paris, on SHAPE and NATO compounds, I was truly interested in the stories of men and women, and the accounts of dudes who were in Vietnam, or hanging onto my old man’s Korea stories and his recalling about what happened in Vietnam, though he was pretty much a zipped up mouth on those wars. He worked in NATO caves in France and Germany, as a signal corps warrant officer, and we all in the family had to have FBI-level background checks.
I wonder what a 13-year-old is doing learning about Black Panthers, Cesar Chavez, Che Guevara, and much much more? That was me. I learned about Ho Chi Minh from some of my older sister’s friends who had come back from Vietnam, mentally wounded, hooked on smack, some wounded physically, and most anti-American, anti-War.
No blue blood in my family.
Look, yes, I am trauma informed, and this image, or these two, are full of context and whatever this Conor believes in, in terms of killing humans, Russians, and some of them, if he was a drone operator, civilians, that would be an interesting discussion and debate.
So, listening to RFK, Junior, Conor’s dad, I stuck with him throughout the wide-ranging two-hour Megyn Kelly interview, which in my mind is less of a journalistic interview and more of the same old celebrity cultish thing a multimillionaire Kelly was doing (interviewing) with another multimillionaire, RFK, Jr.
I wrote this to a fellow writer I respect, and who publishes many amazing pieces. He’s a bit older than I am, I believe. Here:
Yeah, ECC, we have this fascination with blue blood, the Kennedys, Bush, those coming out of Ivy League schools, who are millionaires who hang with billionaires.
His son, well, has to be judged on what he was doing, and alas, Ukraine is the most corrupt nation in the world, in some sense. So, there are many issues tied to what the quality of his character is.
He’s a mercenary, and this is war porn. He wasn’t even in any military. He talked his way into the Mercenary Legions. Lied. Oh, he is an athlete, which is a big Kennedy thing.
The entire thing will give this kid a cleared pipeline to multi-millions, and his book will be coming out soon, Oprah-approved, soon.
The kid (man, age 28) wouldn’t even tell his parents where he was going, what he was up to. That is something deeply troubling to me because I have friends and a spouse who have been estranged by their children. There are Facebook groups with the title “Mothers of Estranged Children.” Many of these women were just hard working single mothers, and something snapped in the children. There are 70 year old women who have never met children’s children, and even great grandkids. This is pretty deeply ingrained in my own background in trauma informed case management with homeless civilians and veterans and those hooked on drugs and those just released from prison.
I’m 65, been to Central America as a journalist, covered the US-Mexico border, been with US military as a college instructor at the Sergeant Major Academy at Fort Bliss. My old man was in 32 years. Air Force and then Army. Clandestine stuff, crypto stuff. We ended up in the Azores and then Germany and France and UK. I got to see and hear a lot of stuff. I am, was early, anti-military on so many levels
Very young (13) I was already seeing the destruction of the world through the military state, through corporate malfeasance, through the professional managerial class, and the lawyer class. This kid (man) at this age, 28, is really going to be part of the problem for socialists and social-environmental-cultural warriors like myself, and anyone who might come up as decent, smart and thoughtful adults in our current generation. We have a lot of work to do, and putting one’s effort into machismo, into this trip into a corrupt place, thinking Putin is a Gangster, well, what sort of upbringing did he have?
FYI: In the Megyn interview RFK admits he got the mRNA, and so did his children, 7.
Whew. Amazing, no, ECC.
Trauma, man. So much trauma in the Kennedy family. Epigenetic, and who the hell knows what kind of trauma is in Conor’s immediate family. I am trauma informed, so I can’t judge too much on that level.
Then, Aaron and Gabor Mate, an older interview, on the trauma, the mental illnesses and pain that propelled people to believe in Russia Gate.
Thanks, ECC. A real interview with you one of these days?
Here’s the show’s low down blurb:
Megyn Kelly is joined by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., author of “A Letter to Liberals,” to discuss COVID pandemic orthodoxy, the need for discussion and debate, the elimination of freedoms due to the COVID pandemic, Dr. Fauci demanding blind faith in authority, the important issue of whether the COVID vaccines prevent transmission, myocarditis risk from COVID and from vaccines, rise in “unexplained” deaths in a post-COVID vaccine world, the truth about how many lives COVID vaccines saved and lost, the lack of important data needed to understand the rise in deaths post-COVID, what Fauci said about vaccines that could have an adverse effect before the COVID vaccines were available, the absurdity of the new booster which was only tested on eight mice and no humans, Pfizer’s involvement in the Trump administration, Alex Berenson and tech censorship, RFK’s disbanded “vaccine safety” commission, Scott Gottlieb and our supposed medical elite, American Academy of Pediatrics’ recommendations, problems with the VAERS system, personal backlash from family and friends, his views of Donald Trump then and now, Herschel Walker and our politics today, the war in Ukraine, American imperialism, RFK’s personal connection to the war as his son Conor was fighting in the country, and more.
Look, these issues need to be discussed. In the interview, there is discussion about Trump, about politicians’ public lives versus private lives, and how we weigh the bad people perpetrate in their families, in their own house and jobs, their personal personas, against the good their policy and governance might come off as part of their public life. My writer friend was upset that RFK, Jr. calls Putin a thug and gangster, while at the same time, RFK JR does speak out against the cancel left, against the war drumming and against the endless pit of money and arms for nothing to ZioLensky. Kennedy laments that there is $7 a gallon of gasoline in California, equating that to the war/Putin (?), but really, the USA is (has been for decades) in a major free-fall, and, people are struggling with double-triple-quadruple cost of living; i.e., food, coffee, drugs, and now Pfizer, who got the jab approved by CDC for children’s yearly vaccination, well, they also announced the company will be upping the price of the dirty jab, to $110 a shot, which is four times the current price.
I wonder what these lawyers working for these outfits have in terms of skin in the game? Will they head to Yemen to see what it’s like to have USA-UK supplied bombs to Saudi Arabia. Skin in the game in Haiti stealing that country’s resources and stealing the coffers? Which skin in the game will the American put forth who wants to know what it is to take on a stand on any issue psychologically and intellectually without having to put one’s ass in the game?
It is a blue in the face routine now attempting to talk about Nuland and Maidan, about the Donbass and the ethnic cleansing? All of the history of Putin wanting diplomacy, wanting to be part of the Eurozone, to be on good terms with Germany, and to advance nuclear weapon decommissioning.
The thuggery and gansterism RFK Jr. and Conor Kennedy espouse about Putin, that’s way off, sort of brainwashed opinion. Putin is a million times more informed and sensible than Biden or Blinken. They have skin in the game, a la Raytheon et al.
Here, trauma, and what exactly is-was-continues to go on in the minds of Russia Gate freaks:
GABOR MATÉ: What does it say about American society that so many people are actually enrolled in believing that this man could be any kind of a savior? What does that say about the divisions and the conflicts and the contradictions and the genuine problems in this culture? And how do we address those issues?
You can look at that. Or you can say there must be a devil somewhere behind all this, and that devil is a foreign power, and his name is Putin, and his country is Russia. Now you’ve got a simple explanation that doesn’t invite you or necessitate that you explore your own pain and your own fear and your own trauma.
So I really believe that really this Russia gate narrative was, on the part of a lot of people, a sign of genuine upset at something genuinely upsetting. But rather than dealing with the upset, it was an easier way to in a sense draw off the energy of it in to some kind of a believable and comforting narrative. It’s much more comforting to believe that some enemy is doing this to us than to look at what does it say about us as a society.
I mean there was a massive denial of the actual dynamics in American society that led to the election of this traumatized and traumatizing individual as President, number one.
AARON MATÉ: Because you think Donald Trump himself is traumatized?
GABOR MATÉ: Oh, Donald Trump is a clearest example of a traumatized politician one could ever see. He’s in denial of reality all the time. He is self aggrandizing. His fundamental self concept is that of a nobody. So he has to make himself huge and big all the time and keep proving to the world how powerful and smart, what kind of degrees he’s got and how smart he is. It’s a compensation for terrible self image. He can’t pay attention to anything, which means that his brain is too scattered because it was too painful for him to pay attention.
What does this all come down to? The childhood that we know that he had in the home of a dictatorial child disparaging father, and a very weak
AARON MATÉ: Fred Trump, his father.
GABOR MATÉ: Who demeaned his children mercilessly. One of Trump’s brothers drank himself to death. And Trump compensates for all that by trying to make himself as big and powerful and successful as possible. And, of course, he makes up for his anger towards his mother for not protecting him by attacking women and exploiting women and boasting about it publicly. I mean, it’s a clear trauma example. I’m not saying this to invite sympathy for Trump’s politics. I’m just describing that that’s who the man is. And the fact that such a traumatized individual can be elected to the position of what they call the most powerful person in the world speaks to a traumatized society.
And like individuals can be in denial, a society can be in denial. So this society is deeply in denial about its own trauma, and particularly in this case about the trauma of that election. So one way to deal with trauma is denial of it. The other way is to project onto other people things that you don’t like about yourself.
Now, it’s only a matter of historical fact. And no serious person, no serious student of history can possibly deny how the United States has interfered in the internal politics of just about every nation on earth.
There is lots of skin in the game for all of us surviving in various stages and steps trauma. How many countries has the USA bombed, sanctioned, proxied, and stolen from? That is another fun thing, right, visiting those countries and donating some mutual aid support — skin in the game — by planting trees, feeding children, digging water systems. But putting on combat gear and playing tin soldier with live rounds and drones, hmm, that is an interesting skin in the game.
Here, Jim Chambers, from the rich and famous Cox news-cable family, he too went to Ukraine, Donbass, as a reporter:
When I asked him about his perspectives on the conflict now, versus when he made the decision to come over, his repeated emphasis was that he had been “extremely uninformed” when he was still in Alabama and relying on the narrative being spun by Western media. “I can tell you that I was very surprised to see most women and children still at home and living normally in all the major Ukrainian cities I went to. And when I was detained here in Donetsk, it was the first time I had been able to speak to any Russians or Russian-speakers from Donbass. There’s a side of the story that we’re not getting in America.” He noted that even from his cell in Donetsk, he had been hearing constant explosions, every day, coming from Ukrainian shelling of the city, something he had never anticipated. “Nothing in the Western media shows you that this is a civil war, and one that’s been going on a long time.” He didn’t go as far as disavowing the Ukrainian state, or endorsing the Russian “special military operation,” but he repeatedly said to me, “If I had known the truth about what was going on over here, I would never have made the decision to come. I regret it.”
Feelings of sympathy for a man in a life-and-death predicament, who at face value seems to have been duped into his decision, above all else, are completely understandable. But some on the Donetsk side of the conflict aren’t shedding many tears for him, or for similar detainees. Russell “Texas” Bentley is a U.S.-born veteran of the DPR armed forces, having served from 2014 to 2017, and he is a resident of Donetsk. Bentley shared with me his thoughts on Drueke and those like him.
“Yeah, a lot of these punks were just too big for their britches, and that’s almost forgivable. But what they wanted to do was come here to kill, and if the shoe had been on the other foot, they wouldn’t have hesitated. I was behind Ukrop [Ukrainian] lines twice, and didn’t fire a shot either time. Every single battle I was ever in was defensive. We held a position, and the Ukrops came to attack us, and they’d have killed us all if they could have. So, it will be an educational experience for them, hopefully give them a bit of a head start in their next life.” (source — ‘I Regret’ Being a Mercenary in Ukraine: Conversation with U.S. POW Detained in Donbass)
“Here is Texas Russell Bentley: From Texas to Donbass: Meet the American fighting Ukrainian fascists”
I used to show lots of movie clips to my students in Texas, New Mexico, Washington and Oregon. Lots of controversial (sic) books, and tons of articles and professional journal studies. Controversial, in their face, and much of it was during Reagan’s illegal wars, Panama, Bush One and Kuwait and Iraq, Bush Two, Iraq, Clinton, even Obama. Many many complaints about exposing youth and older students to things that went boom in their heads. Everything was on-limits, no holds barred. We talked, debated and then I got students to research and think critically and with the right tools of rhetoric, a la centuries of clear thinking, proposing, comparing and contrasting, looking at causes and effects, all of the ways we classify, argue, persuade, define and connotate and how we engage in those techniques of propaganda, and how to get through with objectivity and then what powerful tools narrative writing can give us. Pat Tillman — Conor, ever see him?
Look, RFK Jr. did say that we are imperfect, that is, the human race. He was stating how Hershel Walker can be candidate X, antiabortion vis-à-vis policy, but in his own life, having been a part of abortions with his spouses and partners, that is just the contradictory way of politics. It all makes sense as a Catholic who believes in redemption. I am not going to knock that. Conor, becoming a high priced lawyer one day, well, maybe he will do great things for humankind.
Maybe doing the mercenary thing in Ukraine will give Conor better perspectives. Now, Russell Bentley, I have had email exchanges with him. Yes, he has hit some of the same places I have hit — El Paso, Tucson, etc. He went to Donbass, and he married a Ukrainian-Russian, and he lives in the Donbass and reports from the Donbass. Yes, he sent me his memoir:
Robert Kennedy said he is not doctrinaire or hard-headed, and that he learns and changes over time. He repeats how he was working as an environmental lawyer, and that he was part of Riverkeeper, for which there are over 350 rivers around the world with a keeper testing water, supporting the river life and acting as a pied piper for a healthy river. He was suing over poisons in the rivers, mercury. He stated that he was dogged by some women at one of his talks. One woman gave him a stack of briefs and reports on mercury preservatives in Vaccines and other issues tied to vaccine injuries. The vaccine fight he was not a part of for years, until persistent citizens and a medical doctor brought it to his attention. I understand that old saw, “No one is perfect . . . Homo Sapiens is a messy, troubled species.”
That’s a given And we all have skin in the game when it comes to peace, life, truth, and reconciling our own trauma with healing and loving thy neighbor. The whole Putin is a Gangster thing is interesting, for sure, and alas, Capitalists Are Gangsters, sure, I get to deploy that one all the time. Murder Incorporated, the Value of Nothing, the Sociopathic Rich, and so much more I can also utilize as descriptors of the USA, then and now. Did Conor take in that book, War is a Racket? Did he weigh Butler’s words with the reality of Russia wanting Minsk II to be abided by before signing up for weaponizing his idea of skin in the game? What was Nuland doing in Kiev? Biden and Hunter? Are we all going to default on redemption for any sin? That we are all imperfect souls? Did Conor have real deep talks with people outside the frame of Putin is a Gangster?
I recommend reading, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929). The book, and now, a 2022 German movie of the book:
“But now, for the first time, I see you are a man like me. I thought of your hand-grenades, of your bayonet, of your rifle; now I see your wife and your face and our fellowship. Forgive me, comrade. We always see it too late. Why do they never tell us that you are poor devils like us, that your mothers are just as anxious as ours, and that we have the same fear of death, and the same dying and the same agony — Forgive me, comrade; how could you be my enemy?”
Remarque’s novel saw censorship outside of Germany as well. In the United States, the English translation was banned in Boston on grounds of obscenity; and in Chicago, U.S. customs had seized any volumes which had not been expurgated. Austrian soldiers were forbidden to read the novel, Czech military libraries removed copies from their shelves, while Italy banned the novel entirely due to its anti-war, pacifist agenda. Despite its success, or perhaps because of it, Remarque had his German citizenship revoked and was forced into exile. Just before the onset of World War II in Europe, Remarque and his wife left Switzerland for the United States. They became official U.S. citizens in 1947. (source)
Now? The sides, that is, the many sides, to Ukraine and Nazis and Bandera and Zelensky and Coups and USA and CIA, and then, Putin and Russian demands for stopping the existential threat of NATO moving east with all their bombs bursting in air. John Pilger stated it correctly recently:
Much of this propaganda originates in the US, and is transmitted through proxies and ‘think-tanks’, such as the notorious Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the voice of the arms industry, and by zealous journalists such as Peter Hartcher of the Sydney Morning Herald, who labeled those spreading Chinese influence as ‘rats, flies, mosquitoes and sparrows’ and called for these ‘pests’ to be ‘eradicated’.
News about China in the West is almost entirely about the threat from Beijing. Airbrushed are the 400 American military bases that surround most of China, an armed necklace that reaches from Australia to the Pacific and south east Asia, Japan and Korea. The Japanese island of Okinawa and the Korean island of Jeju are loaded guns aimed point blank at the industrial heart of China. A Pentagon official described this as a ‘noose’.
Palestine has been misreported for as long as I can remember. To the BBC, there is the ‘conflict’ of ‘two narratives’. The longest, most brutal, lawless military occupation in modern times is unmentionable.
The stricken people of Yemen barely exist. They are media unpeople. While the Saudis rain down their American cluster bombs with British advisors working alongside the Saudi targeting officers, more than half a million children face starvation.
This brainwashing by omission has a long history. The slaughter of the First World War was suppressed by reporters who were knighted for their compliance and confessed in their memoirs. In 1917, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, C.P. Scott, confided to prime minister Lloyd George: ‘If people really knew [the truth], the war would be stopped tomorrow, but they don’t know and can’t know.’ (‘Silencing the Lambs — How Propaganda Works‘)
Then, on a sad and inspiring (for some) note tied to other types of humans who might be coming to Donbass to fight what they believe is the good fight.
That’s Alex Castillo, who was a fighter in Donbass since 2014. From Spain, but born in Columbia. It’s a tough comparison, right, Kennedy and Castillo. This man had skin in the game, family in the game, was there to defend the people of Donbass being murdered by Ukraine, vis-a-vis USA material and training and NATO beefing up.
He was a communist, too, which is contrary to the bleeding heart liberals who are wrapped in blue and yellow and demand more more more for Zelensky, who has rounded up communists. Russia, by the way, isn’t communist, since so many Americans I will send this article to might need some reminding.
Russell Bentley is in Donbass and was in the fighting groups with Castillo. Bentley is a communist, colorful, sometimes bombastic, but not afraid to call a spade a spade, and he has that robust energy still in his older age days (63) of someone critical of USA, of Ukraine and of Russia’s decision makers who Russell believes have really messed up the fight against the AFU and Azov folk in Donbass region.
But he has tributes for Castillo, just recently killed in fighting:
Alexis was a true Communist, and a real Internationalist. He often spoke of going to Syria or Venezuela or Cuba after our victory here in Donbass, to defend the people and the socialism there. He did not love war, not by any means, he hated it, as we all do here, as all decent people do, but he was good at the job, and the job needed to be done. As all combat veterans know, we are all born with only so much luck, and the more time you spend in the places where the bullets fly, the closer you get to the day your luck runs out. Alexis spent 8 years as a front line soldier, a sniper in a Spetsnaz unit, and he never, ever hesitated when it was his turn to go. And when his time came to meet death, two weeks after our good friend Elia was killed, Alexis met it like a hero, advancing on the enemy with a weapon in his hand. Alexis was truly a Che Guevara of the 21st century, and Alexis had said, as did Che, “I do not care if I fall, as long as another ear hears my battle cry, and another hand picks up my gun.” (“Adios, Alex Castillo: A Donbas hero falls on Oct. 28″).
Any sort of tribute to a fighter like Castillo in the circles I intersect with is verboten, literally. Cancelled, called a traitor, called a Putin lover, called a Trumpster, called any number of names that are completely antithetical to who and what I am. Or, you might end up in a Michigan Democratic rally, with Obama stumping, and god forbid you confront Obama about his administration’s work in Ukraine in 2014, and not only will you get the swarmy and bs Obama folksy retort — “We are all friends here . . . you’ll have time to speak” — but you will get those blue democrats, men, women, children, old and young, hating on Russia and just not ready for any pushback against their multimillionaire-soon-to-be-a-pro-basketball-team-owner Obama. Yelling, “Down with Russia . . . Putin is our enemy.” You know, no antiwar chants, or chants of peace talks, or chants against escalation, of nuclear saber rattling by Biden. Obama is truly a stump. These are his rallies in Michigan, and he was in Oregon, stumping for the democratic candidate for governor. What’s that got to do with ex-President’s multimillionaire package?
I know it’s “only” Jimmy Dore below covering that Michigan event, but heck, no pushback from mainstream media, so here, watch Democratic Party rally with Obama pushed through the Dore seive: “Peace Activists Heckle Obama Over Nuclear War”
All those dead Ukrainians, and Russians, and fighters like Castillo, and this is the end result for so many of them — what they leave behind:
We are in some very sick and strange times —
Deep Critical Analysis Needed EVERY Veterans’ Day, USA’s National Holiday, November 11!
Paul Haeder's been a teacher, social worker, newspaperman, environmental activist, and marginalized muckraker, union organizer. Paul's book, Reimagining Sanity: Voices Beyond the Echo Chamber (2016), looks at 10 years (now going on 17 years) of his writing at Dissident Voice. Read his musings at LA Progressive. Read (purchase) his short story collection, Wide Open Eyes: Surfacing from Vietnam now out, published by Cirque Journal. Here's his Amazon page with more published work Amazon. Read other articles by Paul, or visit Paul's website.
