TBR News January 4, 2017

The Voice of the White House  

Washington, D.C. January 4, 2017: “Zero Hedge is a very eccentric Austrian economics-based finance blog run by a pseudonymous founder who posts articles under the name “Tyler Durden,” after the character from Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. It has accurately predicted 200 of the last 2 recessions.

“Tyler” claims to be a “believer in a sweeping conspiracy that casts the alumni of Goldman Sachs as a powerful cabal at the helm of U.S. policy, with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve colluding to preserve the status quo.” While this is not an entirely unreasonable statement of the problem, his solution actually mirrors the anatagonist in Fight Club: Tyler wants, per Austrian school ideas, to lead a catastrophic market crash in order to destroy banking institutions and bring back “real” free market capitalism.

The site posts nearly indecipherable, and generally bizarre, analyses of multiple and seemingly unrelated subjects that are intended  to point towards a consistent theme of economic collapse “any day now.” “ Tyler” seems to repeat The Economic Collapse Blog’s idea of posting blog articles many times a day and encouraging people to post it as far and wide as humanly possible. “Tyler” moves away from the format of long lists to write insanely dense volumes filled with generally contradicting jargon that makes one wonder if the writers even know what the words actually mean. The site first appeared in early 2009, meaning that (given “Tyler’s” psychotic habit of deenying each and every positive data point), anyone listening to him from the beginning missed the entire 2009-2014 rally in the equities market.

The only writer conclusively identified is one Dan Ivandjiiski, a Bulgarian former medical student, who conducts public interviews on behalf of Zero Hedge. This hysterical blog came online several days after he lost his job at Wexford Capital, a Connecticut-based hedge fund (run by a former Goldman trader). And Ivandjiiski chose his pen name from a nihilistic psychotic delusion.

Zero Hedge is not quite the NaturalNews of economics, but not for want of trying.

This entertaining nonsense is in the same category as the pompous, and often rewritten, political blog, the Drudge Report and the “Sorcha Faal” screeching about the fictional “Planet X.” And for even more light-weight entertainment, look at the conspiracy blogs of “Dr.” Paul Fetzer and Tom Hengehan. Since the media has virtually done away with comic strips, these are all that is left to entertain a bored reader. These sort of babblings also entertain a legion of the feeble-minded.”

Assange: Our source is not the Russian government

January 4, 2017

RT

Neither the Russian government nor “a state party” was the source of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee (DNC), WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stated in an exclusive interview with Fox News.

“We can say, we have said, repeatedly that over the last two months that our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party,” Assange said, speaking from the Ecuadorean Embassy in London.

Assange noted that for some reason, “the word WikiLeaks” was missing in recent statements from the FBI and White House, even when US President Barack Obama expelled 35 Russian diplomats in what he said was Washington’s “response to the Russian government’s aggressive harassment of US officials and cyber operations aimed at the US election.”

“It’s very strange,” Assange told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. Asked whether he thought Obama lied to the American people about Russia’s involvement, Assange replied that the outgoing president has been “acting like a lawyer” with his allegations.

“If you look at most of his statements, he doesn’t say that. He doesn’t say that WikiLeaks obtained its information from Russia, worked with Russia,” Assange said.

The 45-year-old Australian said the Obama administration was meanwhile trying to “delegitimize” US President-elect Donald Trump ahead of his inauguration.

“They are trying to say that President-elect Trump is not a legitimate president,” Assange said.

There is “zero evidence” that Russia influenced the US presidential election, incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said on Fox News on Tuesday, adding that it would be “irresponsible to jump to conclusions” before receiving a final intelligence report.

Spicer noted that the preliminary report, published on Thursday, was basically just “a how-to manual for the DNC as to how they can improve their IT security.”

“The way the mainstream media is playing this up is that [Russia] had an influence on the election,”Spicer added.

Earlier, CIA Director John Brennan said the forthcoming intelligence report would set the record straight. “I would suggest to individuals that have not yet seen the report, who have not yet been briefed on it, that they wait and see what it is that the intelligence community is putting forward before they make those judgments,” he told PBS on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump said that a briefing he was due to receive on Russia’s alleged hack attacks and meddling with US elections was strangely delayed until Friday, making the President-elect wonder whether there was enough “intelligence” to “build” the case in the first place.

Trump previously expressed skepticism about the US intelligence community’s assessment of Moscow’s involvement in hack attacks and its alleged attempts to influence presidential elections. “I just want them to be sure because it’s a pretty serious charge,” Trump said on December 31, recalling the US invasion in Iraq was based on flawed and false intelligence. “If you look at the weapons of mass destruction, that was a disaster, and they were wrong,” he added.

Behind fence, Mexico’s notorious Juarez is wary of Trump’s wall

January 4, 2017

by Frank Jack Daniel

Reuters

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico-Mexicans overwhelmingly say they oppose the wall U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has promised to build along their northern border.

But in Mexico’s Ciudad Juarez, where extensive fencing was erected by the United States to secure the border between 2007 and 2010, residents have a more nuanced view of what a wall can mean. They say the Juarez fence has both caused and relieved problems in the city and nearby areas.

Some say the barrier has made life in Juarez better, diverting drug and human traffickers to more remote spots where crossing the border is easier. Others say the high fence bred a new kind of crime in the city, encouraging drug dealers who find it harder to get wares across the border to divert some of their product to expanding and serving a local market.

Juarez’s newly elected mayor, Armando Cabada, sees both sides. He says the fencing, cameras, sensors and stricter controls on border bridges have stopped flagrant crossings of undocumented Mexican migrants into downtown El Paso, Texas, which sits just across the fortified border, in sight of his wood-panelled office.

On balance, however, the negatives have outweighed the positives, he says. He notes that shortly after the wall was built, Juarez was plunged into a hellish war between cartels that made it the murder capital of the world, while El Paso remained the safest U.S. city of its size.

After the border got tighter, Cabada said, “the narco traffickers had to battle much harder to cross their drugs into the United States, and a lot ended up staying here.”

The increased local supply of drugs changed social dynamics in the city and addiction and petty crime soared, he said.

It is hard to isolate causes of the chaos that engulfed Juarez in 2008 when the Sinaloa and Juarez cartels fought over trafficking routes, but the belief that tighter controls contributed to the city’s deadly, downward spiral is widespread among business leaders, security officials and politicians consulted by Reuters.

The city of 1.4 million saw murders rise from 336 in 2007 when work on the fence began, to 3,057 in 2010 when the work was mostly concluded. Only two people were murdered in El Paso in 2010, down from eight in 2006.

Last year murders were back below 2007 levels and normal life has begun to return, but strong demand for methamphetamines in Juarez has triggered a local turf battle and a new spike in violence, Cabada and city security officials said.

Drug use in Juarez is among the highest in Mexico, government health surveys show.

‘LESS CHAOS’

A poll conducted in May by Baselice & Associates Inc for Cronkite News and other media groups spoke to 1,500 people in 14 border cities in Mexico and the United States. It found that 72 percent of respondents on the U.S. side and 86 percent on the Mexican side said they were opposed to building a wall.

Esteban Sabedra, a factory worker living in working class Anapra, on the western fringe of Juarez, is among the minority of Mexicans who would like to see more secure fencing.

Sabedra’s home is a city block away from a rusting, low wire fence in place since the 1980s separating Juarez and El Paso, that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection is now replacing with 1.3 miles (2.0 km) of 15-foot-high steel bollard barricade.

He welcomes the new structure, saying he hopes it will deter human and drug traffickers who currently ply the neighborhood and intimidate residents.

“(This new fence) is not a problem for us, on the contrary, it’s better, less people will move through here,” said Sabedra, who earns 150 pesos ($7.28) per day making brake pads for the U.S. market at a Juarez assembly plant. “There will be less chaos.”

Indeed, experts say fencing around El Paso is one of the factors behind a sharp drop in U.S. border guard apprehensions in the sector, to 14,495 last year from 122,256 in 2006, a drop partially attributed to illegal migrants shifting routes to less protected stretches of border.

Migrant flows are a fraction of what they were in the sector largely because of the greatly increased security presence including the fencing and a near doubling of border agents, the Washington Office on Latin America rights group said in an October report.

DERELICT HOMES, SPAS

Ciudad Juarez’s public prosecutor, Jorge Arnaldo Nava López, blames the El Paso fencing for contributing to a sharp uptick in crime along a fertile strip through the desert known as Valle de Juarez. The crime spike has been particularly acute where the barrier ends near Guadalupe municipality.

“It has fostered a displacement towards the villages on the outskirts of Ciudad Juarez,” Nava said.

Valle de Juarez used to be a popular weekend escape for the city’s middle class. Now, brutalized by violence and abandoned by outgunned municipal police, many of its spas, holiday homes and cotton farms lie derelict.

Officials and migrants say Mexicans and Central Americans pay gang members hundreds of dollars to wade across a sluggish stretch of the river and try their luck dodging border guards to reach the towns of Tornillo and Fabens on the other side.

Fortification of the border could push the chaos elsewhere. But Nava, who previously headed Chihuahua state’s anti-kidnapping agency, fears it could also spark blowback in the form of increased extortion and kidnapping if local gangs now dedicated to drug trafficking are frustrated by a new wall.

“We are not exempt from the possibility that this kind of crime flares up, and that (more) drugs intended for the United States begin to stay here in Ciudad Juarez,” said Nava.

(Additional reporting by Mica Rosenberg in New York; Editing by Sue Horton and Mary Milliken)

 ‘Mein Kampf’ Murphy translation: Part 2

January 4, 2017

There have been a number of translations of Hitler’s seminal book. Most have been heavily editited so as to promulgate disinformation about Hitler’s views and remove passages that might offend the sensitive. The Murphy translation is considered to be the most accurate and is being reprinted in toto here.

VOLUME I: A RETROSPECT

CHAPTER I

IN THE HOME OF MY PARENTS

It has turned out fortunate for me to-day that destiny appointed Braunau-on-the-Inn to be my birthplace. For that little town is situated just on the frontier between those two States the reunion of which seems, at least to us of the younger generation, a task to which we should devote our lives and in the pursuit of which every possible means should be employed.

German-Austria must be restored to the great German Motherland. And not indeed on any grounds of economic calculation whatsoever. No, no. Even if the union were a matter of economic indifference, and even if it were to be disadvantageous from the economic standpoint, still it ought to take place. People of the same blood should be in the same REICH. The German people will have no right to engage in a colonial policy until they shall have brought all their children together in the one State. When the territory of the REICH embraces all the Germans and finds itself unable to assure them a livelihood, only then can the moral right arise, from the need of the people to acquire foreign territory. The plough is then the sword; and the tears of war will produce the daily bread for the generations to come.

And so this little frontier town appeared to me as the symbol of a great task. But in another regard also it points to a lesson that is applicable to our day. Over a hundred years ago this sequestered spot was the scene of a tragic calamity which affected the whole German nation and will be remembered for ever, at least in the annals of German history. At the time of our Fatherland’s deepest humiliation a bookseller, Johannes Palm, uncompromising nationalist and enemy of the French, was put to death here because he had the misfortune to have loved Germany well. He obstinately refused to disclose the names of his associates, or rather the principals who were chiefly responsible for the affair. Just as it happened with Leo Schlageter. The former, like the latter, was denounced to the French by a Government agent. It was a director of police from Augsburg who won an ignoble renown on that occasion and set the example which was to be copied at a later date by the neo-German officials of the REICH under Herr Severing’s regime (Note 1).

[Note 1. In order to understand the reference here, and similar references in later portions of MEIN KAMPF, the following must be borne in mind:

From 1792 to 1814 the French Revolutionary Armies overran Germany. In 1800 Bavaria shared in the Austrian defeat at Hohenlinden and the French occupied Munich. In 1805 the Bavarian Elector was made King of Bavaria by Napoleon and stipulated to back up Napoleon in all his wars with a force of 30,000 men. Thus Bavaria became the absolute vassal of the French. This was ‘TheTime of Germany’s Deepest Humiliation’, which is referred to again and again by Hitler.

In 1806 a pamphlet entitled ‘Germany’s Deepest Humiliation’ was published in South Germany. Amnng those who helped to circulate the pamphlet was the Nürnberg bookseller, Johannes Philipp Palm. He was denounced to the French by a Bavarian police agent. At his trial he refused to disclose the name of the author. By Napoleon’s orders, he was shot at Braunau-on-the-Inn on August 26th, 1806. A monument erected to him on the site of the executionwas one of the first public objects that made an impression on Hitler asa little boy.

Leo Schlageter’s case was in many respects parallel to that of Johannes Palm. Schlageter was a German theological student who volunteered for service in 1914. He became an artillery officer and won the Iron Cross of both classes. When the French occupied the Ruhr in 1923 Schlageter helped to organize the passive resistance on the German side. He and his companions blew up a railway bridge for the purpose of making the transport of coal to France more difficult.

Those who took part in the affair were denounced to the French by a German informer. Schlageter took the whole responsibility on his own shoulders and was condemned to death, his companions being sentenced to various terms of imprisonment and penal servitude by the French Court. Schlageter refused to disclose the identity of those who issued the order to blow up the railway bridge and he would not plead for mercy before a French Court. He was shot by a French firing-squad on May 26th, 1923. Severing was at that time German Minister of the Interior. It is said that representations were made, to him on Schlageter’s behalf and that he refused to interfere.

Schlageter has become the chief martyr of the German resistance to the French occupation of the Ruhr and also one of the great heroes of the National Socialist Movement. He had joined the Movement at a very early stage, his card of membership bearing the number 61.]

In this little town on the Inn, haloed by the memory of a German martyr, a town that was Bavarian by blood but under the rule of the Austrian

State, my parents were domiciled towards the end of the last century. My

father was a civil servant who fulfilled his duties very conscientiously. My mother looked after the household and lovingly devoted herself to the care of her children. From that period I have not retained very much in my memory; because after a few years my father had to leave that frontier town which I had come to love so much and take up a new post farther down the Inn valley, at Passau, therefore actually in Germany itself.

In those days it was the usual lot of an Austrian civil servant to be transferred periodically from one post to another. Not long after coming to Passau my father was transferred to Linz, and while there he retired finally to live on his pension. But this did not mean that the old gentleman would now rest from his labours.

He was the son of a poor cottager, and while still a boy he grew restless and left home. When he was barely thirteen years old he buckled on his satchel and set forth from his native woodland parish. Despite the dissuasion of villagers who could speak from ‘experience,’ he went to Vienna to learn a trade there. This was in the fiftieth year of the last century. It was a sore trial, that of deciding to leave home and face the unknown, with three gulden in his pocket. By when the boy of thirteen was a lad of seventeen and had passed his apprenticeship examination as a craftsman he was not content. Quite the contrary. The persistent economic depression of that period and the constant want and misery strengthened his resolution to give up working at a trade and strive for ‘something higher.’ As a boy it had seemed to him that the position of the parish priest in his native village was the highest in the scale of human attainment; but now that the big city had enlarged his outlook the young man looked up to the dignity of a State official as the highest of all. With the tenacity of one whom misery and trouble had already made old when only half-way through his youth the young man of seventeen obstinately set out on his new project and stuck to it until he won through. He became a civil servant. He was about twenty-three years old, I think, when he succeeded in making himself what he had resolved to become. Thus he was able to fulfil the promise he had made as a poor boy not to return to his native village until he was ‘somebody.’

He had gained his end. But in the village there was nobody who had remembered him as a little boy, and the village itself had become strange to him.Now at last, when he was fifty-six years old, he gave up his active career; but he could not bear to be idle for a single day. On the outskirts of the small market town of Lambach in Upper Austria he bought a farm and tilled it himself. Thus, at the end of a long and hard-working career, he came back to the life which his father had led.

It was at this period that I first began to have ideals of my own. Ispent a good deal of time scampering about in the open, on the long roadfrom school, and mixing up with some of the roughest of the boys, which caused my mother many anxious moments. All this tended to make me something quite the reverse of a stay-at-home. I gave scarcely any serious thought to the question of choosing a vocation in life; but I was certainly quite out of sympathy with the kind of career which my father had followed. I think that an inborn talent for speaking nowbegan to develop and take shape during the more or less strenuous arguments which I used to have with my comrades. I had become a juvenile ringleader who learned well and easily at school but was rather difficult to manage. In my freetime I practised singing in the choir of the monastery church at Lambach, and thus it happened that I was placed in a very favourable position to be emotionally impressed again and again by the magnificent splendour of ecclesiastical ceremonial. What could be more natural for me than to look upon the Abbot as representing the highest human ideal worth striving for, just as the position of the humble village priest had appeared to my father in his own boyhood days?

At least, that was my idea for a while. But the juvenile disputes I had with my father did not lead him to appreciate his son’s oratorical gifts in such a way as to see in them a favourable promise for such a career, and so he naturally could not understand the boyish ideas I had in myhead at that time. This contradiction in my character made him feel somewhat anxious.

As a matter of fact, that transitory yearning after such a vocation soon gave way to hopes that were better suited to my temperament. Browsing through my father’s books, I chanced to come across some publications that dealt with military subjects. One of these publications was a popular history of the Franco-German War of 1870-71. It consisted of two volumes of an illustrated periodical dating from those years. These became my favourite reading. In a little while that great and heroic conflict began to take first place in my mind. And from that time onwards I became more and more enthusiastic about everything that was in any way connected with war or military affairs.

But this story of the Franco-German War had a special significance for me on other grounds also. For the first time, and as yet only in quite a vague way, the question began to present itself: Is there a difference–and if there be, what is it–between the Germans who fought that war and the other Germans? Why did not Austria also take part in it? Why did not my father and all the others fight in that struggle? Are we not the same as the other Germans? Do we not all belong together?

That was the first time that this problem began to agitate my small brain. And from the replies that were given to the questions which I asked very tentatively, I was forced to accept the fact, though with a secret envy, that not all Germans had the good luck to belong to Bismarck’s Empire. This was something that I could not understand.

It was decided that I should study. Considering my character as a whole, and especially my temperament, my father decided that the classical subjects studied at the Lyceum were not suited to my natural talents. He thought that the REALSCHULE (Note 2) would suit me better. My obvious talent for drawing confirmed him in that view; for in his opinion drawing was a subject too much neglected in the Austrian GYMNASIUM. Probably also the memory of the hard road which he himself had travelled contributed to make him look upon classical studies as unpractical and accordingly to set little value on them. At the back of his mind he had the idea that his son also should become an official of the Government. Indeed he had decided on that career for me. The difficulties through which he had to struggle in making his own career led him to overestimate what he had achieved, because this was exclusively the result of his own indefatigable industry and energy. The characteristic pride of the self-made man urged him towards the idea that his son should follow thesame calling and if possible rise to a higher position in it. Moreover, this idea was strengthened by the consideration that the results of his own life’s industry had placed him in a position to facilitate his son’s advancement in the same career.

[Note 2. Non-classical secondary school. The Lyceum and GYMNASIUM were classical or semi-classical secondary schools.]

He was simply incapable of imagining that I might reject what had meant everything in life to him. My father’s decision was simple, definite, clear and, in his eyes, it was something to be taken for granted. A man of such a nature who had become an autocrat by reason of his own hard struggle for existence, could not think of allowing ‘inexperienced’ and irresponsible young fellows to choose their own careers. To act in such a way, where the future of his own son was concerned, would have been a grave and reprehensible weakness in the exercise of parental authority and responsibility, something utterly incompatible with his characteristic sense of duty.

And yet it had to be otherwise. For the first time in my life–I was then eleven years old–I felt myself forced into open opposition. No matter how hard and determined my father might be about putting his own plans and opinions into action, his son was no less obstinate in refusing to accept ideas on which he set little or no value.

I would not become a civil servant.

No amount of persuasion and no amount of ‘grave’ warnings could break down that opposition. I would not become a State official, not on any account. All the attempts which my father made to arouse in me a love of liking for that profession, by picturing his own career for me, had only the opposite effect. It nauseated me to think that one day I might be fettered to an office stoo,, that I could not dispose of my own time but would be forced to spend the whole of my life filling out forms.

One can imagine what kind of thoughts such a prospect awakened in the mind of a young fellow who was by no means what is called a ‘good boy’in the current sense of that term. The ridiculously easy school tasks which we were given made it possible for me to spend far more time in the open air than at home. To-day, when my political opponents pry into my life with diligent scrutiny, as far back as the days of my boyhood, so as finally to be able to prove what disreputable tricks this Hitler was accustomed to in his young days, I thank heaven that I can look back to those happy days and find the memory of them helpful. The fields and the woods were then the terrain on which all disputes were fought out.

Even attendance at the REALSCHULE could not alter my way of spending my time. But I had now another battle to fight.

So long as the paternal plan to make a State functionary contradicted my own inclinations only in the abstract, the conflict was easy to bear. I could be discreet about expressing my personal views and thus avoid constantly recurrent disputes. My own resolution not to become a Government official was sufficient for the time being to put my mind completely at rest. I held on to that resolution inexorably. But the situation became more difficult once I had a positive plan of my own which I might present to my father as a counter-suggestion. This happened when I was twelve years old. How it came about I cannot exactly say now; but one day it became clear to me that I would be a painter–I mean an artist. That I had an aptitude for drawing was an admitted fact. It was even one of the reasons why my father had sent me to the REALSCHULE; but he had never thought of having that talent developed in such a way that I could take up painting as a professional career. Quite the contrary. When, as a result of my renewed refusal to adopt his favourite plan, my father asked me for the first time what I myself really wished to be, the resolution that I had already formed expressed itself almost automatically. For a while my father was speechless. “A painter? An artist-painter?” he exclaimed.

He wondered whether I was in a sound state of mind. He thought that he might not have caught my words rightly, or that he had misunderstood what I meant. But when I had explained my ideas to him and he saw how seriously I took them, he opposed them with that full determination which was characteristic of him. His decision was exceedingly simple and could not be deflected from its course by any consideration of what my own natural qualifications really were.

“Artist! Not as long as I live, never.” As the son had inherited some of the father’s obstinacy, besides having other qualities of his own, my reply was equally energetic. But it stated something quite the contrary.

At that our struggle became stalemate. The father would not abandon his ‘Never’, and I became all the more consolidated in my ‘Nevertheless’.

Naturally the resulting situation was not pleasant. The old gentleman was bitterly annoyed; and indeed so was I, although I really loved him.

My father forbade me to entertain any hopes of taking up the art of painting as a profession. I went a step further and declared that I would not study anything else. With such declarations the situation became still more strained, so that the old gentleman irrevocably decided to assert his parental authority at all costs. That led me to adopt an attitude of circumspect silence, but I put my threat into execution. I thought that, once it became clear to my father that I was making no progress at the REALSCHULE, for weal or for woe, he would be forced to allow me to follow the happy career I had dreamed of.

I do not know whether I calculated rightly or not. Certainly my failure to make progress became quite visible in the school. I studied just the subjects that appealed to me, especially those which I thought might be of advantage to me later on as a painter. What did not appear to have any importance from this point of view, or what did not otherwise appeal to me favourably, I completely sabotaged. My school reports of that time were always in the extremes of good or bad, according to the subject and the interest it had for me. In one column my qualification read ‘very good’ or ‘excellent’. In another it read ‘average’ or even ‘below average’. By far my best subjects were geography and, even more so, general history. These were my two favourite subjects, and I led the class in them.

When I look back over so many years and try to judge the results of that experience I find two very significant facts standing out clearly before my mind.

First, I became a nationalist.

Second, I learned to understand and grasp the true meaning of history.

The old Austria was a multi-national State. In those days at least the citizens of the German Empire, taken through and through, could not understand what that fact meant in the everyday life of the individuals within such a State. After the magnificent triumphant march of the victorious armies in the Franco-German War the Germans in the REICH became steadily more and more estranged from the Germans beyond their frontiers, partly because they did not deign to appreciate those other

Germans at their true value or simply because they were incapable of doing so.

The Germans of the REICH did not realize that if the Germans in Austria had not been of the best racial stock they could never have given the stamp of their own character to an Empire of 52 millions, so definitely that in Germany itself the idea arose–though quite an erroneous one–that Austria was a German State. That was an error which led to dire consequences; but all the same it was a magnificent testimony to the character of the ten million Germans in that East Mark. (Note 3)

Only very few of the Germans in the REICH itself had an idea of the bitter struggle which those Eastern Germans had to carry on daily for the preservation of their German language, their German schools and their German character. Only to-day, when a tragic fate has torn several millions of our kinsfolk away from the REICH and has forced them to live under the rule of the stranger, dreaming of that common fatherland towards which all their yearnings are directed and struggling to uphold at least the sacred right of using their mother tongue–only now have the wider circles of the German population come to realize what it means to have to fight for the traditions of one’s race. And so at last perhaps there are people here and there who can assess the greatness of that German spirit which animated the old East Mark and enabled those people, left entirely dependent on their own resources, to defend the Empire against the Orient for several centuries and subsequently to hold fast the frontiers of the German language through a guerilla warfare of attrition, at a time when the German Empire was sedulously cultivating an interest for colonies but not for its own flesh and blood before the threshold of its own door.

[Note 3. See Translator’s Introduction.]

What has happened always and everywhere, in every kind of struggle, happened also in the language fight which was carried on in the old Austria. There were three groups–the fighters, the hedgers and the traitors. Even in the schools this sifting already began to take place. And it is worth noting that the struggle for the language was waged perhaps in its bitterest form around the school; because this was the nursery where the seeds had to be watered which were to spring up and form the future generation. The tactical objective of the fight was the winning over of the child, and it was to the child that the first rallying cry was addressed:

“German youth, do not forget that you are a German,” and “Remember, little girl, that one day you must be a German mother.”

Those who know something of the juvenile spirit can understand how youth will always lend a glad ear to such a rallying cry. Under many forms the young people led the struggle, fighting in their own way and with their own weapons. They refused to sing non-German songs. The greater the efforts made to win them away from their German allegiance, the more they exalted the glory of their German heroes. They stinted themselves in buying things to eat, so that they might spare their pennies to help the war chest of their elders. They were incredibly alert in the significance of what the non-German teachers said and they contradictedin unison. They wore the forbidden emblems of their own kinsfolk and were happy when penalised for doing so, or even physically punished. In miniature they were mirrors of loyalty from which the older people might learn a lesson.

And thus it was that at a comparatively early age I took part in the struggle which the nationalities were waging against one another in the old Austria. When meetings were held for the South Mark German League and the School League we wore cornflowers and black-red-gold colours to express our loyalty. We greeted one another with HEIL! and instead of the Austrian anthem we sang our own DEUTSCHLAND ÜBER ALLES, despite warnings and penalties. Thus the youth were educated politically at a time when the citizens of a so-called national State for the most part knew little of their own nationality except the language. Of course, I did not belong to the hedgers. Within a little while I had become an ardent ‘German National’, which has a different meaning from the party significance attached to that phrase to-day.

I developed very rapidly in the nationalist direction, and by the time I was 15 years old I had come to understand the distinction between dynastic patriotism and nationalism based on the concept of folk, or people, my inclination being entirely in favour of the latter.

Such a preference may not perhaps be clearly intelligible to those who have never taken the trouble to study the internal conditions that prevailed under the Habsburg Monarchy.

Among historical studies universal history was the subject almost exclusively taught in the Austrian schools, for of specific Austrian history there was only very little. The fate of this State was closely bound up with the existence and development of Germany as a whole; so a division of history into German history and Austrian history would be practically inconceivable. And indeed it was only when the German people came to be divided between two States that this division of German history began to take place.

The insignia (Note 4) of a former imperial sovereignty which were still preserved in Vienna appeared to act as magical relics rather than as the visible guarantee of an everlasting bond of union.

[Note 4. When Francis II had laid down his title as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empireof the German Nation, which he did at the command of Napoleon, the Crown and Mace, as the Imperial Insignia, were kept in Vienna. After the German Empire was refounded, in 1871, under William I, there were many demands to have the Insignia transferred to Berlin. But these went unheeded. Hitler had them brought to Germany after the Austrian Anschluss and displayed at Nuremberg during the Party Congress in September 1938.]

When the Habsburg State crumbled to pieces in 1918 the Austrian Germans instinctively raised an outcry for union with their German fatherland. That was the voice of a unanimous yearning in the hearts of the whole people for a return to the unforgotten home of their fathers. But such a general yearning could not be explained except by attributing the cause of it to the historical training through which the individual Austrian Germans had passed. Therein lay a spring that never dried up. Especially in times of distraction and forgetfulness its quiet voice was a reminder of the past, bidding the people to look out beyond the mere welfare of the moment to a new future.

The teaching of universal history in what are called the middle schools is still very unsatisfactory. Few teachers realize that the purpose of teaching history is not the memorizing of some dates and facts, that the student is not interested in knowing the exact date of a battle or the birthday of some marshal or other, and not at all–or at least only very insignificantly–interested in knowing when the crown of his fathers was placed on the brow of some monarch. These are certainly not looked upon as important matters.

To study history means to search for and discover the forces that are the causes of those results which appear before our eyes as historical events. The art of reading and studying consists in remembering the essentials and forgetting what is not essential.

Probably my whole future life was determined by the fact that I had a professor of history who understood, as few others understand, how to make this viewpoint prevail in teaching and in examining. This teacher was Dr. Leopold Poetsch, of the REALSCHULE at Linz. He was the ideal personification of the qualities necessary to a teacher of history in the sense I have mentioned above. An elderly gentleman with a decisive manner but a kindly heart, he was a very attractive speaker and was able to inspire us with his own enthusiasm. Even to-day I cannot recall without emotion that venerable personality whose enthusiastic exposition of history so often made us entirely forget the present and allow ourselves to be transported as if by magic into the past. He penetrated through the dim mist of thousands of years and transformed the historical memory of the dead past into a living reality. When we listened to him we became afire with enthusiasm and we were sometimes moved even to tears.

It was still more fortunate that this professor was able not only to illustrate the past by examples from the present but from the past he was also able to draw a lesson for the present. He understood better than any other the everyday problems that were then agitating our minds.

The national fervour which we felt in our own small way was utilized by him as an instrument of our education, inasmuch as he often appealed to our national sense of honour; for in that way he maintained order and held our attention much more easily than he could have done by any other means. It was because I had such a professor that history became my favourite subject. As a natural consequence, but without the conscious connivance of my professor, I then and there became a young rebel. But who could have studied German history under such a teacher and not become an enemy of that State whose rulers exercised such a disastrous influence on the destinies of the German nation? Finally, how could one remain the faithful subject of the House of Habsburg, whose past history and present conduct proved it to be ready ever and always to betray the interests of the German people for the sake of paltry personal interests? Did not we as youngsters fully realize that the House of

Habsburg did not, and could not, have any love for us Germans?

What history taught us about the policy followed by the House of Habsburg was corroborated by our own everyday experiences. In the north and in the south the poison of foreign races was eating into the body of our people, and even Vienna was steadily becoming more and more a non-German city. The ‘Imperial House’ favoured the Czechs on every possible occasion. Indeed it was the hand of the goddess of eternal justice and inexorable retribution that caused the most deadly enemy of

Germanism in Austria, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, to fall by the very bullets which he himself had helped to cast. Working from above downwards, he was the chief patron of the movement to make Austria a Slav State.

The burdens laid on the shoulders of the German people were enormous and the sacrifices of money and blood which they had to make were incredibly heavy.

Yet anybody who was not quite blind must have seen that it was all in vain. What affected us most bitterly was the consciousness of the fact that this whole system was morally shielded by the alliance with Germany, whereby the slow extirpation of Germanism in the old Austrian Monarchy seemed in some way to be more or less sanctioned by Germany herself. Habsburg hypocrisy, which endeavoured outwardly to make the people believe that Austria still remained a German State, increased the feeling of hatred against the Imperial House and at the same time aroused a spirit of rebellion and contempt.

But in the German Empire itself those who were then its rulers saw nothing of what all this meant. As if struck blind, they stood beside a corpse and in the very symptoms of decomposition they believed that they recognized the signs of a renewed vitality. In that unhappy alliance between the young German Empire and the illusory Austrian State lay the germ of the World War and also of the final collapse.

In the subsequent pages of this book I shall go to the root of the problem. Suffice it to say here that in the very early years of my youth I came to certain conclusions which I have never abandoned. Indeed I became more profoundly convinced of them as the years passed. They were: That the dissolution of the Austrian Empire is a preliminary condition for the defence of Germany; further, that national feeling is by no means identical with dynastic patriotism; finally, and above all, that the House of Habsburg was destined to bring misfortune to the German nation.

As a logical consequence of these convictions, there arose in me afeeling of intense love for my German-Austrian home and a profound hatred for the Austrian State.

That kind of historical thinking which was developed in me through my study of history at school never left me afterwards. World history became more and more an inexhaustible source for the understanding of contemporary historical events, which means politics. Therefore I will not “learn” politics but let politics teach me.

A precocious revolutionary in politics I was no less a precocious revolutionary in art. At that time the provincial capital of Upper Austria had a theatre which, relatively speaking, was not bad. Almost everything was played there. When I was twelve years old I saw William Tell performed. That was my first experience of the theatre. Some months later I attended a performance of LOHENGRIN, the first opera I had ever heard. I was fascinated at once. My youthful enthusiasm for the Bayreuth

Master knew no limits. Again and again I was drawn to hear his operas; and to-day I consider it a great piece of luck that these modest productions in the little provincial city prepared the way and made it possible for me to appreciate the better productions later on.

But all this helped to intensify my profound aversion for the career  that my father had chosen for me; and this dislike became especially strong as the rough corners of youthful boorishness became worn off, a process which in my case caused a good deal of pain. I became more and more convinced that I should never be happy as a State official. And now that the REALSCHULE had recognized and acknowledged my aptitude for drawing, my own resolution became all the stronger. Imprecations and threats had no longer any chance of changing it. I wanted to become a painter and no power in the world could force me to become a civil servant. The only peculiar feature of the situation now was that as I grew bigger I became more and more interested in architecture. I considered this fact as a natural development of my flair for painting and I rejoiced inwardly that the sphere of my artistic interests was thus enlarged. I had no notion that one day it would have to be otherwise.

The question of my career was decided much sooner than I could have expected.

When I was in my thirteenth year my father was suddenly taken from us. He was still in robust health when a stroke of apoplexy painlessly ended his earthly wanderings and left us all deeply bereaved. His most ardent longing was to be able to help his son to advance in a career and thus save me from the harsh ordeal that he himself had to go through. But it appeared to him then as if that longing were all in vain. And yet, though he himself was not conscious of it, he had sown the seeds of a future which neither of us foresaw at that time.

At first nothing changed outwardly.

My mother felt it her duty to continue my education in accordance with my father’s wishes, which meant that she would have me study for the civil service. For my own part I was even more firmly determined than ever before that under no circumstances would I become an official of the State. The curriculum and teaching methods followed in the middle school were so far removed from my ideals that I became profoundly indifferent. Illness suddenly came to my assistance. Within a few weeks

it decided my future and put an end to the long-standing family conflict. My lungs became so seriously affected that the doctor advised my mother very strongly not under any circumstances to allow me to take up a career which would necessitate working in an office. He ordered that I should give up attendance at the REALSCHULE for a year at least. What I had secretly desired for such a long time, and had persistently fought for, now became a reality almost at one stroke.

Influenced by my illness, my mother agreed that I should leave the REALSCHULE and attend the Academy.

Those were happy days, which appeared to me almost as a dream; but they were bound to remain only a dream. Two years later my mother’s death put a brutal end to all my fine projects. She succumbed to a long and painful illness which from the very beginning permitted little hope of recovery. Though expected, her death came as a terrible blow to me. I respected my father, but I loved my mother. Poverty and stern reality forced me to decide promptly. The meagre resources of the family had been almost entirely used up through my mother’s severe illness. The allowance which came to me as an orphan was not enough for the bare necessities of life. Somehow or otherI would have to earn my own bread.

With my clothes and linen packed in a valise and with an indomitable resolution in my heart, I left for Vienna. I hoped to forestall fate, as my father had done fifty years before. I was determined to become ‘something’–but certainly not a civil servant.

The Abolition of Foreign Policy

It’s all about domestic politics

January 4, 2017

by Justin Raimondo,

AntiWar

What explains the behavior of nations on the world stage? There is no science to guide us, no psychology of nation-states to elucidate the secrets of the national Ego, Super-Ego, and Id. Oh, there are theories galore: the realists, the structuralists, the Marxists, and more. Yet these are thin gruel these days, when all claims of predictability are open to challenge, and one cannot tell the exceptions from the rule. In today’s world, it often seems that there are no rules.

Or are there?

Let us look at the current madness, and its antecedents, and see if we can discern a pattern.

For all the years of the cold war – roughly, from Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech to the fall of the Berlin Wall – American liberals (and the far left) told us that the Soviet threat was largely a figment of the right’s imagination.

Oh, yes, there were cold war liberals, of the sort who gathered around Encounter magazine and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, that CIA front that sought to recruit the “soft” left to the cold war cause. Yet these were swimmers against an ideological tide that finally culminated in the tumult of the 1960s, the antiwar movement, and the rise of a form of “left”-isolationism that abjured US intervention abroad and urged America – in George McGovern’s phrase – to “come home.”

On the right, conservatives railed against the alleged threat posed by “international Communism,” which they characterized as a worldwide conspiracy headquartered in the Kremlin and implacably dedicated to the destruction of the West. The threat, they averred, had to be confronted, and not with mere containment: no, the only way forward was to roll back the Communists with direct military confrontation, in Vietnam and around the world.

This was a complete reversal of their earlier “isolationist” stance in regard to the alleged threat posed by the Axis powers – just as the left-isolationism of the McGovernites stood the interventionist “arsenal of democracy” rhetoric of Franklin Delano Roosevelt on its head. In the run up to Pearl Harbor, it was the conservatives who were the Peace Party; it was they who invoked Washington’s Farewell Address and warned against the dangers of entangling alliances. It was they who insisted on neutrality, and organized the America First Committee – the biggest and most effective antiwar organization in the country’s history – and countered every move by FDR to get us into the war with the cry of “It isn’t our fight!”

When war finally came, FDR was vengeful, and American liberals and their far left allies were positively savage: they unleashed a barrage of political and legal assaults that characterized conservatives as traitors: wartime censorship was imposed, and enforced. A sedition trial was organized, targeting the anti-interventionist right, and although it was ultimately thrown out of court, the effect was to intimidate anyone who opposed the war to shut up and hunker down for the duration. FDR’s enemies paid a high political price for their opposition to the war: the “isolationists” were driven from office, and, in the media and academia, were driven out of public life.

The cold war gave conservatives a means to get back at their persecutors. The wartime alliance with “Uncle” Joe Stalin had not only handed the Soviets half of Europe and a foothold in Eastasia, it had also led to the penetration of the government by Soviet moles – yes, right up into FDR’s inner circle. With the coming of the cold war, the conservatives took full advantage of the sudden shift in the political winds by dishing out the same bitter medicine they had been subjected to: the liberals, they averred, were but “fellow travelers” of the Communists, who had infiltrated not only the government but also the Democratic party, academia, and the woof and warp of American political life. McCarthyism made its debut, and this movement – which at first focused on the alleged internal threat – soon morphed into the “New Right’ of William F. Buckley, Jr., and National Review, which transformed the foreign policy of the old “isolationist” right into its complete opposite: a policy of global intervention.

This inversion was something different, however, and in order to understand how and why it was we have to step back and look at what motivated these swings from “isolationism” to interventionism in the past.

The conservatives who opposed FDR’s march to war were convinced that the fight against fascism abroad would deliver us into the waiting arms of fascism on the home front. On the other side of the barricades, the New Deal liberals, who dreamed of a planned economy and the end of laissez-faire, saw war as the perfect instrument of a social transformation. The same fervor had imbued the liberal intellectuals who supported the progressivism of the Woodrow Wilson administration, and who saw World War I as the augur of a new society in which government would uplift humanity both at home and abroad.

In these cases, the foreign policy of the right – anti-interventionism – and that of the left – making the world “safe for democracy” – served some domestic ideological end. For conservatives, it meant preserving their decentralist vision of a government constrained by the Constitution and the natural limits imposed by both tradition and common sense. For the liberals and their far left allies, it meant advancing their agenda of centralized authority and wealth redistribution on the home front by imposing the sort of controls Americans would only tolerate in wartime. These very different foreign policy visions were motivated, then, by rival ideological projects: small government- anti-interventionism-“America First” versus big government-interventionism-globalism.

Yet the transformation of the American conservative movement from its earlier “isolationist” incarnation into the militant anti-Communist crusade it was to become marked a break in this pattern. Prior to founding National Review, Buckley penned a piece for Commonweal in which he described the credo that was to energize his “New Right.”

While claiming to acknowledge the libertarian analysis of the state as “begotten of aggression and by aggression,” this principle was relegated by Buckley to the realm of pure theory. In practice, the Soviet “threat” necessitated “the extensive and productive tax laws that are needed to support a vigorous anti-communist foreign policy.” The “thus far invincible aggressiveness of the Soviet Union” meant that “we have to accept Big Government for the duration—for neither an offensive nor a defensive war can be waged . . . except through the instrument of a totalitarian bureaucracy within our shores.” Forget the domestic program conservatives had fought for during the dark days of the New Deal, that was all old hat anyway: conservatives, Buckley opined, must give fulsome support to “large armies and air forces, atomic energy, central intelligence, war production boards and the attendant centralization of power in Washington.” And, digging the knife in deeper, he added: “Even with Truman at the reins of it all”!

So here we have the conservatives’ ideological project abandoned, wrecked on the rocky shores of the cold war. What had been a body of ideas with a purely domestic focus had now been internationalized – globalized, if you will – and subordinated to the overriding “necessity” of fighting the Communist Menace in the rice paddies of Vietnam. “America First” had become “Everybody Else First.”

The practical effect of this was to decouple conservatism from its past, and its traditional constituency of Midwestern farmers, small and medium businessmen, and defenders of traditional mores. In their place arose a new coalition based largely on the Eastern seaboard: urban Catholics, neoconservative dropouts from the left, multinational businesses with global interests, and of course what Eisenhower decried as the “military-industrial complex.”

In short, “movement” conservatism, having abandoned its longstanding ideology, became an instrument of pure politics: the libertarian critique of the New Deal became the demagoguery of demanding “Who lost China?” Decoupled from its original governing principle of individual liberty, “conservatism” became simply a tribal signifier that identified a group of people out to seize and hold power.

On the left, this process was less marked, at least at this point, but essentially similar: the foreign policy of the liberals was simply a reaction to the ascendant cold war mentality that dominated the right. Conservatives were for massive military spending, confronting the Communists on every continent, and using the FBI to root out “subversives” on the home front, and so liberals called for less military spending, touted the virtues of diplomacy over confrontation, and took up the cudgels on behalf of civil liberties. All of this, by the way, was a complete turnaround from their heyday during the New Deal era: the right and the left had switched polarities, each becoming that which they had opposed.

The transformation of American liberalism represented a decoupling of ideology from the historic foreign policy stance of the New Deal. FDR and his supporters – and, before them, Wilson and his supporters – had recognized that wartime is springtime for governmental gigantism. As long as federal bureaucrats could mobilize the nation’s resources in the name of “national security,” then the centralizing egalitarian project that is the heart of the liberal program could be snuck in through the back door – or, once the conservative opposition was sufficiently chastened, pushed through the front door. Yes, liberals could mask their ideological apostasy by claiming that money spent on overseas adventurism was better spent on welfare programs for the poor at home, but this dualistic myth was busted by the “Great Society” of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who pushed through his program of “guns and butter” at the height of the Vietnam war.

One result of this decoupling was an ideological convergence. While there was still a fair amount of rhetorical devotion to “conservatism” and “liberalism,” in practice this was merely a debate that took place around the margins of the Welfare-Warfare State. The victory of one party over another really made little difference as far as domestic and foreign policy were concerned: elections became a struggle for power over a system frozen in near-perfect stasis.

In the foreign policy realm, the differences between “right’ and “left” were determined, not by any broad principles, but by purely political considerations. To take a recent example: the “debate” leading up to the invasion and occupation of Iraq didn’t involve any real contention over the goals or rationale for the war, and the subsequent partisan divide didn’t reveal any principled divisions between the two parties, or between the “left” and the “right.” Both sides endorsed the essential premise of the war, which was that it is America’s duty to police the world – the debate was merely over the means, not the ends. The liberal Democrats insisted on a “multi-lateral” approach, while the neoconservative-dominated GOP averred that unilateral aggression was the way to go. Barack Obama campaigned against “stupid wars,” i.e. the Iraq war, while insisting the real battle was to be fought in Afghanistan.

And so the dance of the rival tribes continued. Mitt Romney insisted that the number one threat to world peace is Russia, while President Obama – and his journalistic fan club – mocked him by jeering that “The 1980s are calling and they want their foreign policy back.” And yet as soon as it became politically convenient to demonize Russia, this was all forgotten.

Today we are looking at the spectacle of a new cold war unfolding before our eyes: “liberals” are screaming that President-elect Donald Trump is a “Russian puppet,” as President Obama makes his last act as chief executive the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the US on the grounds that Vladimir Putin plotted to put Trump in the White House.

This underscores the fact that foreign policy is, today, simply political posturing. Whatever foreign policy serves the interests of those in power – that is, whatever serves to maintain and extend their hold on power and delegitimize their enemies – is the policy they choose to pursue. This, and this alone, explains the actions of states on the world stage. If a given action grants the ruling elite an advantage – political, financial, psychological, or some combination of these – then it gets the green light. Ideology has little if anything to do with it. Neither do events overseas: the US is safely ensconced between two very large oceans, and faces no real threats to its territorial integrity. We can therefore safely ignore, say, Putin’s annexation of Crimea – unless, that is, our rulers decide that there’s some political advantage in drawing attention to it.

If we define foreign policy as the relations between states, then we can see that, for all intents and purposes, it has simply ceased to exist. The formulation and execution of American foreign policy is purely an internal, self-referential affair. Ironically, our foreign policy has become truly “isolationist” in the sense that it has no real relation to anything that occurs outside our borders: it revolves entirely around the axis of domestic politics.  Nor does it have anything to do with pursuing American interests, which are not always – or even usually — congruent with the interests of those who hold office.

What sets the course of our nation in the world is nothing less than the pure caprice of our rulers. There are no rules, no principles, no overriding visions of America’s proper role – when you’re a global empire, with no credible rivals, and no constitutional restraints on the exercise of military power, it’s deuces wild. Anything can happen.

Is it even necessary to point out how dangerous this is?

As far as the incoming administration is concerned, this parlous condition presents us with a few alarming portents, and also a glimmer of hope.

We should be alarmed that a desire to appear “strong” in comparison to the supposedly “weak” Obama administration may drive Trump into a series of impulsive moves that could end quite badly. This is all too possible.

And yet there is also the hope that this President, despite the apparent lack any ideological lodestar, will reconnect American foreign policy with a domestic agenda that precludes large scale interventions overseas. This is precisely the promise of his “America First” program: he may be so preoccupied with reindustrializing America that any thought of revitalizing a US-enforced “world order” we can no longer afford and that the voters don’t want is lost in the shuffle.

I tend to be optimistic, but that may just be a character flaw. Trump’s public pronouncements have been encouraging, but then again when policy is unmoored from principle and you have the entire national security apparatus against you – well, let’s just say the next few months are going to be quite interesting. One can only hope, however, that they aren’t too interesting…..

WashPost Is Richly Rewarded for False News About Russia Threat While Public Is Deceived

January 4 2017

by Glenn Greenwald

The Intercept

In the past six weeks, the Washington Post published two blockbuster stories about the Russian threat that went viral: one on how Russia is behind a massive explosion of “fake news,” the other on how it invaded the U.S. electric grid. Both articles were fundamentally false. Each now bears a humiliating editor’s note grudgingly acknowledging that the core claims of the story were fiction: The first note was posted a full two weeks later to the top of the original article; the other was buried the following day at the bottom.

The second story on the electric grid turned out to be far worse than I realized when I wrote about it on Saturday, when it became clear that there was no “penetration of the U.S. electricity grid” as the Post had claimed. In addition to the editor’s note, the Russia-hacked-our-electric-grid story now has a full-scale retraction in the form of a separate article admitting that “the incident is not linked to any Russian government effort to target or hack the utility” and there may not even have been malware at all on this laptop.

But while these debacles are embarrassing for the paper, they are also richly rewarding. That’s because journalists — including those at the Post — aggressively hype and promote the original, sensationalistic false stories, ensuring that they go viral, generating massive traffic for the Post (the paper’s executive editor, Marty Baron, recently boasted about how profitable the paper has become).

After spreading the falsehoods far and wide, raising fear levels and manipulating U.S. political discourse in the process (both Russia stories were widely hyped on cable news), journalists who spread the false claims subsequently note the retraction or corrections only in the most muted way possible, and often not at all. As a result, only a tiny fraction of people who were exposed to the original false story end up learning of the retractions.

Baron himself, editorial leader of the Post, is a perfect case study in this irresponsible tactic. It was Baron who went to Twitter on the evening of November 24 to announce the Post’s exposé of the enormous reach of Russia’s fake news operation, based on what he heralded as the findings of “independent researchers.” Baron’s tweet went all over the place; to date, it has been re-tweeted more than 3,000 times, including by many journalists with their own large followings.

But after that story faced a barrage of intense criticism — from Adrian Chen in the New Yorker (“propaganda about Russia propaganda”), Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone (“shameful, disgusting”), my own article, and many others — including legal threats from the sites smeared as Russian propaganda outlets by the Post’s “independent researchers” — the Post finally added its lengthy editor’s note distancing itself from the anonymous group that provided the key claims of its story (“The Post … does not itself vouch for the validity of PropOrNot’s findings” and “since publication of the Post’s story, PropOrNot has removed some sites from its list”).

What did Baron tell his followers about this editor’s note that gutted the key claims of the story he hyped? Nothing. Not a word. To date, he has been publicly silent about these revisions. Having spread the original claims to tens of thousands of people, if not more, he took no steps to ensure that any of them heard about the major walk back on the article’s most significant, inflammatory claims. He did, however, ironically find the time to promote a different Post story about how terrible and damaging Fake News is.

Whether the Post’s false stories here can be distinguished from what is commonly called “Fake News” is, at this point, a semantic dispute, particularly since “Fake News” has no cogent definition. Defenders of Fake News as a distinct category typically emphasize intent in order to differentiate it from bad journalism. That’s really just a way of defining Fake News so as to make it definitionally impossible for mainstream media outlets like the Post ever to be guilty of it (much the way terrorism is defined to ensure that the U.S. government and its allies cannot, by definition, ever commit it).

But what was the Post’s motive in publishing two false stories about Russia that, very predictably, generated massive attention, traffic, and political impact? Was it ideological and political — namely, devotion to the D.C. agenda of elevating Russia into a grave threat to U.S. security? Was it to please its audience — knowing that its readers, in the wake of Trump’s victory, want to be fed stories about Russian treachery? Was it access and source servitude — proving it will serve as a loyal and uncritical repository for any propaganda intelligence officials want disseminated? Was it profit — to generate revenue through sensationalistic click-bait headlines with a reckless disregard to whether its stories are true? In an institution as large as the Post, with numerous reporters and editors participating in these stories, it’s impossible to identify any one motive as definitive.

Whatever the motives, the effects of these false stories are exactly the same as those of whatever one regards as Fake News. The false claims travel all over the internet, deceiving huge numbers into believing them. The propagators of the falsehoods receive ample profit from their false, viral “news.” And there is no accountability of the kind that would disincentivize a repeat of the behavior. (That the Post ultimately corrects its false story does not distinguish it from classic Fake News sites, which also sometimes do the same.)

And while it’s true that all media outlets make mistakes, and that even the most careful journalism sometimes errs, those facts do not remotely mitigate the Post’s behavior here. In these cases, they did not make good faith mistakes after engaging in careful journalism. With both stories, they were reckless (at best) from the start, and the glaring deficiencies in the reporting were immediately self-evident (which is why both stories were widely attacked upon publication).

As this excellent timeline by Kalev Leetaru documents, the Post did not even bother to contact the utility companies in question — the most elementary step of journalistic responsibility — until after the story was published. Intelligence officials insisting on anonymity — so as to ensure no accountability — whispered to them that this happened, and despite how significant the consequences would be, they rushed to print it with no verification at all. This is not a case of good journalism producing inaccurate reporting; it is the case of a media outlet publishing a story that it knew would produce massive benefits and consequences without the slightest due diligence or care.

The most ironic aspect of all this is that it is mainstream journalists — the very people who have become obsessed with the crusade against Fake News — who play the key role in enabling and fueling this dissemination of false stories. They do so not only by uncritically spreading them, but also by taking little or no steps to notify the public of their falsity.

The Post’s epic debacle this weekend regarding its electric grid fiction vividly illustrates this dynamic. As I noted on Saturday, many journalists reacted to this story the same way they do every story about Russia: They instantly click and re-tweet and share the story without the slightest critical scrutiny. That these claims are constantly based on the whispers of anonymous officials and accompanied by no evidence whatsoever gives those journalists no pause at all; any official claim that Russia and Putin are behind some global evil is instantly treated as Truth. That’s a significant reason papers like the Post are incentivized to recklessly publish stories of this kind. They know they will be praised and rewarded no matter the accuracy or reliability because their Cause — the agenda — is the right one.

On Friday night, immediately after the Post’s story was published, one of the most dramatic pronouncements came from the New York Times’s editorial writer Brent Staples.

Now that this story has collapsed and been fully retracted, what has Staples done to note that this tweet was false? Just like Baron, absolutely nothing. Actually, that’s not quite accurate, as he did do something: At some point after Friday night, he quietly deleted his tweet without comment. He has not uttered a word about the fact that the story he promoted has collapsed, and that what he told his 16,000-plus followers — along with the countless number of people who re-tweeted the dramatic claim of this prominent journalist — turned out to be totally false in every respect.

Even more instructive is the case of MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin, a prolific and skilled social media user who has seen his following explode this year with a constant stream of anti-Trump content. On Friday night, when the Post story was published, Griffin hyped it with a series of tweets designed to make the story seem as menacing and consequential as possible. That included hysterical statements from Vermont officials — who believed the Post’s false claim — that in retrospect are unbelievably embarrassing.

That tweet from Griffin — convincing people that Putin was endangering the health and safety of Vermonters — was re-tweeted more than 1,000 times. His other similar tweets — such as this one featuring Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy’s warning that Putin was trying to “shut down [the grid] in the middle of winter” — were also widely spread.

But the next day, the crux of the story collapsed — the Post’s editor’s note acknowledged that “there is no indication” that “Russian hackers had penetrated the electricity grid” — and Griffin said nothing. Indeed, he said nothing further on any of this until yesterday — four days after his series of widely shared tweets — in which he simply re-tweeted a Post reporter noting an “update” that the story was false without providing any comment himself.

In contrast to Griffin’s original inflammatory tweets about the Russian menace, which were widely and enthusiastically spread, this after-the-fact correction has a paltry 289 re-tweets. Thus, a small fraction of those who were exposed to Griffin’s sensationalistic hyping of this story ended up learning that all of it was false.

I genuinely do not mean to single out these individual journalists for scorn. They are just illustrative of a very common dynamic: Any story that bolsters the prevailing D.C. orthodoxy on the Russia Threat, no matter how dubious, is spread far and wide. And then, as has happened so often, when the story turns out to be false or misleading, little or nothing is done to correct the deceitful effects. And, most amazingly of all, these are the same people constantly decrying the threat posed by Fake News.

A very common dynamic is driving all of this: media groupthink, greatly exacerbated (as I described on Saturday) by the incentive scheme of Twitter. As the grand media failure of 2002 demonstrated, American journalists are highly susceptible to fueling and leading the parade in demonizing a new Foreign Enemy rather than exerting restraint and skepticism in evaluating the true nature of that threat.

It is no coincidence that many of the most embarrassing journalistic debacles of this year involve the Russia Threat, and they all involve this same dynamic. Perhaps the worst one was the facially ridiculous, pre-election Slate story — which multiple outlets (including The Intercept) had been offered but passed on — alleging that Trump had created a secret server to communicate with a Russian bank; that story was so widely shared that even the Clinton campaign ended up hyping it — a tweet that, by itself, was re-tweeted almost 12,000 times.

But only a small percentage of those who heard of it ended up hearing of the major walk back and debunking from other outlets. The same is true of The Guardian story from last week on WikiLeaks and Putin that ended up going viral, only to have its retraction barely noticed because most of the journalists who spread the story did not bother to note it.

Beyond the journalistic tendency to echo anonymous officials on whatever Scary Foreign Threat they are hyping at the moment, there is an independent incentive scheme sustaining all of this. That Russia is a Grave Menace attacking the U.S. has — for obvious reasons — become a critical narrative for Democrats and other Trump opponents who dominate elite media circles on social media and elsewhere. They reward and herald anyone who bolsters that narrative, while viciously attacking anyone who questions it.

Indeed, in my 10-plus years of writing about politics on an endless number of polarizing issues — including the Snowden reporting — nothing remotely compares to the smear campaign that has been launched as a result of the work I’ve done questioning and challenging claims about Russian hacking and the threat posed by that country generally. This is being engineered not by random, fringe accounts, but by the most prominent Democratic pundits with the largest media followings.

I’ve been transformed, overnight, into an early adherent of alt-right ideology, an avid fan of Breitbart, an enthusiastic Trump supporter, and — needless to say  — a Kremlin operative. That’s literally the explicit script they’re now using, often with outright fabrications of what I say (see here for one particularly glaring example).

They, of course, know all of this is false. A primary focus of the last 10 years of my journalism has been a defense of the civil liberties of Muslims. I wrote an entire book on the racism and inequality inherent in the U.S. justice system. My legal career involved numerous representations of victims of racial discrimination. I was one of the first journalists to condemn the misleadingly “neutral” approach to reporting on Trump and to call for more explicit condemnations of his extremism and lies. I was one of the few to defend Jorge Ramos from widespread media attacks when he challenged Trump’s immigration extremism. Along with many others, I tried to warn Democrats that nominating a candidate as unpopular as Hillary Clinton risked a Trump victory. And as someone who is very publicly in a same-sex, inter-racial marriage — with someone just elected to public office as a socialist — I make for a very unlikely alt-right leader, to put that mildly.

The malice of this campaign is exceeded only by its blatant stupidity. Even having to dignify it with a defense is depressing, though once it becomes this widespread, one has little choice.

But this is the climate Democrats have successfully cultivated — where anyone dissenting or even expressing skepticism about their deeply self-serving Russia narrative is the target of coordinated and potent smears; where, as The Nation’s James Carden documented yesterday, skepticism is literally equated with treason. And the converse is equally true: Those who disseminate claims and stories that bolster this narrative — no matter how divorced from reason and evidence they are — receive an array of benefits and rewards.

That the story ends up being completely discredited matters little. The damage is done, and the benefits received. Fake News in the narrow sense of that term is certainly something worth worrying about. But whatever one wants to call this type of behavior from the Post, it is a much greater menace given how far the reach is of the institutions that engage in it.

Israeli soldier convicted of manslaughter over death of Palestinian

Elor Azaria has been found guilty over the death of an immobile Palestinian suspect that was caught on video. Protesters and right-wing politicians had expressed strong support for the soldier over military condemnation.

January 4, 2017

DW

Elor Azaria, the 20-year-old Israeli Defense Force soldier whose case has polarized Israel, was convicted of manslaughter in a landmark case on Wednesday for shooting dead a Palestinian assailant who was lying on the ground. His conduct caused an outcry across the country when video footage of the incident was leaked online.

Hundreds of protestors stood outside the courthouse in Tel Aviv in a show of support for Azaria. “The nation is with you” and “People of Israel do not abandon a soldier in the battlefield,” read some of the signs.

Scuffles broke out between the demonstrators and police officers after the protest began blocking a major intersection in the city. Two protesters were then arrested for disturbing the peace.

The Palestinian foreign ministry called the whole process a “mock trial” in a statement slamming the proceedings. What is needed, said the statement, is not a trial against one soldier but “a trial of the entire occupation authority, which rushes to incite against Palestinians and commit dozens of crimes against them.The case had deeply divided officials in Israel, with army leaders condemning the killing and right-wing politicians coming to Azaria’s defense. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even called the young soldier’s father to offer his sympathies.

Military chief: Azaria is not a child

In the video, Abdul Fatah al-Sharif, 21, is lying prostrate next to another man, having stabbed and mortally wounded a soldier shortly before. Azaria, who was 19 at the time, can then be seen shooting al-Sharif in the head even though he was already lying on the ground. Azaria’s lawyers had argued that their client may have thought al-Sharif was wearing a suicide belt, although he had already been checked for explosives and no one in the video appeared to be approaching him with caution.

Military chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot slammed how the case was politicized, saying it could “harm our institutions and our requirements of soldiers.”

“An 18-year-old man who serves in the army is not our child, he is not a baby,” said Eisenkot, criticizing a support campaign for Azaria that called the soldier a “child” of all Israelis.

In a rare case of an Israeli soldier being held accountable for the death of a Palestinian, Azaria faces up to 20 years in prison. His sentencing will come at a later date.

FBI: Accused spy has ‘vital’ intelligence on China

January 3, 2017

by Jamie Satterfield

USA Today

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — In the nation’s first legal challenge of Chinese procurement of American nuclear know-how, the government has scored a victory in procuring the cooperation of the engineer prosecutors say was an operative for China, federal court records show.

According to a docket entry, Szuhsiung “Allen” Ho is scheduled to plead guilty Friday in U.S. District Court in the nation’s first case of nuclear espionage involving China. The plea deal itself has not yet been filed.

But a stack of documents already filed in the case suggest Ho’s plea is considered key to gathering intelligence on the inner workings of China’s nuclear program — both the one used to power homes and the one to make war — in a case in which the Chinese government refuses to even acknowledge the indictment of its own nuclear power company.

Ho is charged in U.S. District Court in Knoxville, Tenn., with plotting to develop special nuclear material illegally outside the United States.

Ho, his firm, Energy Technology International, and Chinese nuclear power plant China General Nuclear Power, were indicted in April in an alleged plot to lure nuclear experts in the U.S. into providing information to allow China to develop and produce nuclear material based on American technology and below the radar of the U.S. government.

It is the first such case in the nation brought under a provision of law that regulates the sharing of U.S. nuclear technology with certain countries deemed too untrustworthy to see it. Those countries include China. Although the technology is used for nuclear-power generation, the by-product of that process can be used to produce nuclear weapons.

The investigation began at the behest of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which contacted the FBI with concerns about one of its senior executives, engineer Ching Huey, who later admitted he was paid by Ho and, by extension, the Chinese government, to supply information about nuclear power production and even traveled to China on the Chinese government’s dime. Huey agreed to cooperate in the probe. He has since struck a plea deal.

Ho, a Taiwan native who became a naturalized U.S. citizen, brought to the defense table a stable of high-priced attorneys, including Washington attorney Peter Zeidenberg and Knoxville attorney Wade Davies. Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Atchley Jr. has repeatedly insisted in court the Chinese government had paid Ho millions for his alleged spy work. Ho worked for the Chinese government, Atchley alleged, and lived in China most of the time.

Testimony from FBI Agent William Leckrone also emphasized Ho’s key position in the eyes of those tasked with national security for the U.S. In a recent hearing, Leckrone said the FBI “believed Dr. Ho had information of value to the intelligence community.” The FBI pushed him to cooperate the day of his arrest in April, but he refused, court records show.

A lawyer with the Justice Department’s National Security Division is now attached to the local prosecution team of Atchley and Assistant U.S. Attorney Bart Slabbekorn Jr.

Under a standard plea deal, a suspect is required to debrief with the government. The extent of Ho’s cooperation agreement is not yet known.