Saturday, July 14, 2018


July 14, 2018



MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey





Fox News, Rosenstein, Senators Schumer, Burr, Graham and Warner, et al All Say It: The Russkies are Out to Conquer Lizard Lick, NC, and that Little Community is Only Five Miles from Me!! Oh My! Where Can I Hide?



Friends,

Every few months the Neocon, Russophobic zealots at Fox News trot out the failed billionaire, former Russian oligarch wannabe, Bill Browder (grandson of American Communist Party chief Earl Browder) to recount just how evil that Vladimir Putin really is—you see, Putin, quoth Browder, “had his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky killed.” [For details on this Browder scoundrel, please see: “A Blacklisted Film and the New Cold War,” https://consortiumnews.com/2017/08/02/a-blacklisted-film-and-the-new-cold-war/The Magnitsky Hoax,” http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/the-magnitsky-hoax/; and https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/02/01/meet-corrupt-billionaire-who-has-brought-about-new-cold-war.html]

No doubt ole’ Vlad has gone around the globe and personally assassinated his political enemies even in the farthest corners of the world. Why, he probably had something to do with the killing of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, don’t you know. Vlad was too young—only a 16 year teenager at the time? Never mind…back in 1968 he still was capable of such acts, because, as Fox News along with all the other farther Left Media tell us, he is “evil incarnate,” the second-coming of Adolf Hitler, maybe even Satan himself (oops! I forgot…the Mainstream Media doesn’t belief in Satan…well, that’s okay, if there ever was going to be one, we have him now behind those icy Kremlin walls!  And even as a young teenager we can blame Putin!).

Of course, most of the Neocons at Fox have now jumped on the Trump bandwagon, conveniently, and the reasons as I have explained previously in various columns and articles, have to do with power and attempting to shape the president’s foreign policy. In this they—unlike those consistent Never Trumper Neocons (e.g., Max Boot, Bill Kristol, George Will, etc. ad nauseum)—are essentially dishonest. They don’t really agree with Donald Trump’s stated views on foreign policy; rather they see him, and the ability to ingratiate themselves with him, as an opportunity to influence his policies, turn them, even if ever so slightly, towards their own views and globalist objectives. Thus, they couch their foaming-at-the-mouth Russophobia in terms of—“President Trump is going to really get into it with Putin!”  “The Donald will hand Putin’s head to him on a platter!”  Or, Ms. Lindsey Graham’s plea—“Mr. President, go into that meeting with Vlad and tell him where to go, where to get off, that we KNOW what you’ve been doing!” 

We do?

And then come those addenda about “stopping the invasion of Ukraine,” “get out of Crimea,” “stop propping up Assad in Syria,” etc. That’s the narrative that Graham and the Neocons have impressed on Trump that he simply must present to Putin.

It is all what some less polite friends of mine would term “BS,” but those are words my English professor mother taught me never to use in civil conversation, which I trust this is. In short, for anyone who has read the actual literature—and not just absorbed the manure spread around by such palpable Fox airheads as Brian Kilmeade or Ainsley Earhardt—the continued spectacle is rather nauseating.

The latest little jab came yesterday with the ah-so-not-fortuitous announcement by that paragon of Department of Justice professional probity and apolitical correctness, Rod Rosenstein, that the DOJ had indicted 12 more Russkies on attempts to “interfere” with our 2016 elections….I pause now to collect my breath at this startling announcement, occurring as it did just two days before the Putin-Trump summit in Helsinki. Of course, none of those 12 is in the US, they are all living peacefully in Russia, farming out in Tula or working as cab drivers in Smolensk.  In short, it is kinda like Old Abe Lincoln and his much-touted “Emancipation Proclamation” (you know, the second most important document in US history after the Declaration of Independence) which did not free one slave, as it ONLY applied to areas NOT under Yankee control, while leaving all those areas with slavery UNDER YANKEE control like Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, and Missouri untouched. Rosenstein knows full well that his “determination” (which I submit, again, is based on very dubious “data” collected by our completely impartial [sic!!] “intelligence agencies”) has no practical effect…except that it continues to fuel the rabid Russophobia of the Democrats (who used to love the Russkies when Communism ruled the roost) and their partners in crime, the Neocons, who deeply, in the depths of their dark souls, continue to suspect that Putin and his traditionalist Christian supporters are secret anti-semites who want to put them into concentration camps and reinstitute those bad old Tsarist pogroms.

And what is even more curious about this: it’s basically the same list that was actually made available back earlier this year, in February—it really isn’t new at all! Except that back then the media and the Russophobes did not have the same reason to use it like now, just before the Helsinki Summit! Funny how these things just aren't “news” until the media decides to make them “news” [see: http://russiafeed.com/breaking-robert-mueller-indicts-13-russians-russian-entities-conspiracy-charges/]

Of course, the totality of the Democratic Party immediately pounced: “Mr. Trump [they don’t want to call him “president” because they still hope that Mueller can find something, anything, to rid them of him] cancel that meeting,” say Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and Mark Warner.

Oh, and that Warner is another pol who obviously had a complete, “invasion-of-the-body-snatchers” lobotomy at an early age…but I forgot, he and North Carolina’s senior US senator, Republican Deep Stater Richard Burr are buddy-buddy, and both have canonized and “authenticated” similar “results” about those evil Russkies (information provided by our sterling white, non-political Intelligence services—yeah, right, and let me sell you a plot of land, an oil well, in my back yard—for just a few mil). You know, back in 1861 Virginia and North and South Carolina were models of true patriotism and constitutional probity. That they are now represented in the US Senate by such—be careful, Boyd, what you are about to call these politicos—“individuals” as Senators Graham, Tim Scott, Burr, and Warner assuredly has our ancestors rolling over at breakneck speed in their graves. And doesn’t say much about the rapidly descending spiral of intelligence and rationality among our citizens….

I invite you to go back and read some of the previous items on this topic now on my blog; I don’t feel like continuing to re-invent the wheel when the media and the political Deep State are engaged in endless bouts of lunatic hysteria, slinging those dried cow pies right and left to somehow solidify the narrative of those evil Russkies and that new Satan, ur, Hitler, residing in the Kremlin.  [see, www.boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com]

In this vein, I pass on another piece of sharp irony (and scathing parody) by our friend noted author C. J. Hopkins. Hopkins has a tongue and pen even more wicked than I have…My mother might have corrected some of his language, too.



Hardcore Hitler on Hitler in Helsinki


C.J. HOPKINS • JULY 10, 2018

Here it comes, the moment we’ve been waiting for, when Trump and Putin meet in Helsinki to officially launch the “Destruction of Democracy” and very possibly the Apocalypse itself. That’s right, folks, once again, it appears we’re looking at the end of everything, because according to the corporate media, on July 16, 2018, Trump is probably going to disband NATO so that Putin can invade the Baltic states, then Germany, then the rest of Europe, and then presumably order an all-out thermonuclear strike on the United States, which will pretty much end civilization as we know it. Or perhaps the plan is to do away with NATO, withdraw all American troops from Poland, let Putin rape and pillage Western Europe, and then have North Korea nuke both coasts of the US mainland (and Canada, of course) so that a Putin-Nazified Middle Amerika will have carte blanche to exterminate the Mexicans and make women wear those “Handmaid” costumes, or some other ridiculously paranoid scenario, possibly involving Susan Sarandon as some kind of Putin-Nazi triple agent.



Tragically, the global neoliberal establishment is completely powerless to stop Trump and Putin from carrying out this evil scheme (whatever it turns out to be in the end), because even the US Intelligence Community [AKA, the FBI and Deep State operative Rod Rosenstein] has to obey the law, after all, and not do anything sneaky, or unethical, not even with the fate of democracy at stake. No, unlike the Russians, who go around blatantly poisoning people with novichok oatmeal more or less whenever they like, the global capitalist ruling classes’ hands are tied by their own integrity [sic!!]. All they can do is watch in horror as these two Hitlerian megalomaniacs destroy their entire global empire and establish a thousand-year Putin-Nazi Reich.



Thank God at least the corporate media are raising their collective voices in protest. In a recent piece in The Washington Post, Max Bergmann of the Center for American Progress [AKA, Hilary’s “think tank”] warns that “this is a summit about appeasement, and we should be terrified that Trump is going to sell out America and its allies.” According to Bergmann, Trump might “accidentally” share state secrets with Putin, or promise to reduce support for our freedom-loving Ukrainian Nazis, or stop trying to overthrow the Syrian government so that Syria, with the help of Russia and Iran, can launch a sneak attack on Israel and drive “the Jews” into the sea. Worse still, Bergmann speculates, he might make “secret agreements” with Putin without telling the editors of The Washington Post, which … God help us all if that ever happened.



Not to be out-apocalypsed by The PostRoger Cohen of The New York Times published a full-blown dystopian fantasy vision wherein Trump, Putin, Marine Le Pen, the AfD, and a variety of other globalist-hating Hitler-alikes form “the Alliance of Authoritarian and Reactionary States” (the “AARS”), disband the European Union and NATO, impose international martial law, and start ethnically cleansing the West of immigrants. Matteo Salvini and Horst Seehofer, decked out in full Putin-Nazi regalia, personally supervise the genocidal purges, which frightened Europeans come to support after Putin’s irresistible “fake news” bots brainwash them into believing that a little Russian girl named “Tatiana” has been abducted by Moroccan migrants off a beach along the Costa del Sol.

And as if that wasn’t horrifying enough to whip folks up into a mindless frenzy, The New York Times (which, let’s remember, is an extremely distinguished and respected newspaper [sic!!!], and not at all a cheap propaganda rag) produced this charming little animated film depicting Putin and Trump as … well, a couple of tongue-sucking, titty-pinching homos. I found this kind of weird at first, as I had thought such ugly anti-gay sentiment had disappeared from liberal society, but apparently it’s fine in Resistance circles to stigmatize your enemies as butt-humping queers in order to render them more repulsive in the eyes of your sophisticated, liberal audience. I did a little research, and it appears this “Hitler on Hitler” porno The Times produced is just the latest in a rather long line of Trump on Putin “homo” jokes, which are perfectly harmless when told by liberals and the Left, but when told by conservatives are homophobic hate crimes.



Look, I’m not a fan of poofter humor, or the corporate media, or the so-called “Resistance,” but neither am I a big fan of Trump, nor am I an employee of Putin. What I am is a student of propaganda, media manipulation, and mass hysteria, and though I experienced the roll-out of the War on Terror, and assorted other propaganda campaigns (like Obama’s “Hope and Change” routine, Reagan’s “Morning in America” schtick, George H.W. Bush’s “New World Order,” and Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” happy horsecrap), I have never witnessed anything like this. Most of those other propaganda campaigns at least bore some vague resemblance to reality. What we’re experiencing now is more akin to the kind of behavior that goes on in cults … where people are conditioned to surrender their reason (and, ultimately, to conform their perception) to whatever paranoid official narrative the leader of the cult has invented, and eventually to direct their fear and hatred, not only at the cult’s official enemy, but at anyone who questions the cult’s “reality.”



If you believe cults work because people are gullible, or stupid, you need to do some research. Cults work because their members are gradually conditioned to detach from “society” (i.e., the social body that conditioned them as children) and conform to the social body of the cult. This conditioning happens systematically, often over the course of years. Scientology cult members are not introduced to the “body thetans” story the day they walk in. Nor were the Manson girls ready to butcher a house full of people for Charlie at first … it took months of orgies, acid trips, and other de- and re-programming techniques to get them to buy into his paranoid prophecy of Imminent Racist Hippie Apocalypse.



Which is what I find so disturbing, presently. The ease with which the neoliberal ruling classes have programmed millions of Western consumers to believe a narrative no less ridiculous than Scientology’s “body thetans,” Manson’s “Helter Skelter” … or take your pick of any number of other cult narratives. The speed at which they switched from the War on Terror narrative to the Putin-Nazi narrative attests to the power of the corporate media and the neoliberal propaganda machine, generally. It really is an amazing achievement. In less than two years, they managed to condition a significant portion of the Western masses to forget about “the Islamic terrorists” that they had been conditioned to live in fear of, and to transfer their fear and hatred to Trump, and Putin, and anyone who appears to support them, or doesn’t sufficiently hate and fear them.



The ruling classes have achieved this feat by generating an ongoing series of episodes of mass hysteria. Most of them last a week or two, but their cumulative effect is powerful and enduring. Fake news, bots, travel bans, Confederate statues, neo-Nazi rallies, “novichok” attacks, kids in cages … anything the corporate media can use to channel more hatred toward Trump and Putin….

The upcoming summit is next on the list. It won’t be as juicy as the baby concentration camps, but it will do as far as reminding people that Trump is a secret Russian operative, or traitor (or quisling, as Paul Krugman would have it), conspiring with Putin to “destroy democracy” … that is, when they’re not fellating each other. Once the summit has come and gone, and democracy has miraculously survived, they will generate another round of Hitler hysteria, and Resistance cultists will spring into action like salivating Pavlov’s dogs, denouncing whatever unspeakable horror they had completely ignored for the previous eight years, jabbering about concentration camps, and ripping MAGA hats off teenagers. Purely for the sake of entertainment, I’m hoping it will be the secret Nazi code the Department of Homeland Security is embedding in its press materials, presumably to alert the Underground Network of Putin-Nazi Militias to stand by for imminent government takeover, the “securing of the future for white people and their children,” and the weeks of homosexual Odinist orgies that are sure to follow.



Seriously, though, the absolute genius of the ruling classes’ Putin-Nazi narrative (which rational people are underestimating) is that it is virtually impossible to criticize it without being labeled a Trump supporter, a Putin apologist, or a crypto-Nazi. Like Scientology’s Suppressive Persons (i.e., those who criticize Scientology), Putin-Nazi narrative deniers “seek to upset, continuously undermine, spread bad news about and denigrate” the cult. These are typically ex-cult members who no longer subscribe to official cult teachings, and are thus an existential ideological threat. Such persons are to be stigmatized and shunned, “so that others will know not to associate with them.” (Those quotes are from the Scientology website, but the same rules apply in every cult.)



Glenn Greenwald is probably the best example of a prominent “Putin-Nazi narrative denier” (and he is harassed for it on an daily basis), but an hour or two of research on Twitter will reveal the same dynamic at work against much less famous “pillow biting traitors.” Nor is it just fanatical cultists on Twitter. If you happened to google your humble narrator at any point during the last nine months, and were concerned that the people “People Also Search For” in my “Knowledge Panel” are mostly anti-Semites and “alt-right” types … well, I wrote about that in November of last year. (I have since repeatedly written to Google and advised them to occasionally alternate the anti-Semites they are associating me with, as using the exactly the same ones for months is lazy, and makes it rather difficult to blame their “search results” on some innocent algorithm.)



But what do I know? Maybe I’m just paranoid, and Google isn’t out to get me. Or maybe they know me better than myself, and I really am a crypto-Nazi, or some other kind of Suppressive Person, and democracy really is on the brink of disaster. After all, Glenn Greenwald just flew over to Moscow, and was selfied in the company of Edward Snowden, and Putin is poisoning random people in Amesbury for no apparent reason, and Susan Sarandon hacked the election, or dropped a Sarin bomb on Douma, or else Putin did, or maybe it was Xenu, or the Russians are about to take down the entire American fiberoptic network, and I almost forgot those four hundred white supremacist idiots who are planning to gather and bellow Nazi slogans at each other in Lafayette Square on August 12, and who are already receiving international coverage, because we can’t afford to ignore a few hundred racist morons in polo shirts … if we did, well, who knows what that might lead to? People might actually have a moment to pause and think about what’s going on, and why it’s going on, and who it serves, and try to put it all into some kind of perspective, before they react to the next Pavlovian stimulus the media waves in their faces. Ready? Good. Because here it comes …

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at cjhopkins.com orconsentfactory.org.


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