Near Miss Between Russia and USN in China Sea

It is obvious that the spin doctors that put out the "news" watch social media to see how it is playing in Peoria (as the ad men used to say).

My husband heard on NPR yesterday morning that the US ship was anchored in the Philippine Sea and those nasty Russians came up out of nowhere to almost attack them.

By the time I heard the story, both ships were moving and the Russian ship was coming up too fast, so the US captain had to put his ship in reverse. They showed a picture and there was wake behind the Russian ship. Wake, I tell you, WAKE! And yes, you could see wake. The ship appeared to have been on a straight course, and then swerved to miss the US ship.
But they just kept repeating that the wake proved that the Russians were Evil.

Eventually, US Navy veterans got onto social media to explain the rules of the sea, and the proper procedures when two ships pass in the day, etc.

And now I see that the propaganda has been dropped, at least from the most obvious outlets. Maybe Peoria, as well as the rest of the US, has too many veterans for obvious provocations to go unremarked upon?

And maybe too many people know how the US swaggers around the world to believe the Official Story.


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Arriving Home After Leaving Vietnam

From another Vietnam vet- Michael Cruitt

Written on Memorial Day...

"This is what I remember:

In mid-March 1968, I and a planeload of fellow soldiers returned to the US after 13 months in Vietnam. We left behind a country still embattled in the Tet Offensive (when we took off from Tan Son Nhut airbase the pilot pulled the plane up into a steep ascent to avoid ground fire). When we finally landed at Oakland Army Base we clapped and cheered and cried, extremely grateful to make it back home in one piece.

We were met on the tarmac by a squad of MPs who escorted us to a waiting bus. The bus took us to a barracks on the far edge of the base, where we were issued new “dress” uniforms. Most of us still wore nasty jungle fatigues, not appropriate for public display.

I sneaked out the back of the barracks, walked to the perimeter fence and looked out over the city. I saw hundreds of cars moving along highways and streets, people shopping and consuming – a perfectly ordinary scene. Yet, at that very second, just across the ocean, millions of people suffered and died in an unspeakable hell.

I’ll never forget that; Americans going about their business completely indifferent to the ravages of their own military.
“Memorial Day” is for picnics and barbecues . . "

Leaving Vietnam

A memory of a soldier medic:

Mike Hastie
When I left Viet Nam as a soldier, I processed out
at Cam Ranh Bay, like so many thousands of others
returning to the United States.

My group was assigned to a large transit barracks.
We were there for a couple of days dealing with
all of the paper work, and we all had to be tested
for traces of heroin in our urine.

We were called out the next day, and those who
tested positive had to stay in Viet Nam for a
couple of extra weeks to be treated in a shake and
bake addiction treatment program.

What I remember the most about the 2-3 days
we were in Cam Ranh Bay was the graffiti that
was written on the walls of that transit barracks.

It was written on every square inch of those walls.
American soldiers were expressing everything they
had stuffed during the year they were in Viet Nam.
The anger and rage they had suppressed toward their
government and President Richard Nixon came pouring out
of their souls. Their truth was extraordinarily articulate as
any profound piece of writing I have ever read.

They all felt used by their government for absolutely no reason,
except for war profiteering. They all had hate for the
politicians who sent them there. This is a microcosm of
history that has long been forgotten. It is all down the
memory hole of the tragedy of the Viet Nam War.

The last day I was in that transit barracks, a soldier in
the bottom bunk next to me, got up from a drinking
blackout and pissed on the wall against that graffiti.
For me, that was a powerful moment of encapsulating
the entire atrocity of the Viet Nam War.

Far more Viet Nam veterans have committed suicide
than were killed during the war.

Many of my friends did not die in Viet Nam, but as a result of being there.
During the year I was in An Khe, Viet Nam, I not only
saw dead and wounded American soldiers being
brought in by helicopters, but I saw the end result
of U.S. soldiers committing suicide and homicides,
along with rampant heroin addiction.

This is the legacy of that god awful war against
Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos. For every U.S.
soldier killed, there were 100 indigenous people
killed by the United States Government.
When I left Cam Ranh Bay, the graffiti and the
piss on the wall didn't lie...

Lying is the most powerful weapon in war"
Mike Hastie
Army Medic Viet Nam
May 29, 2019


As a sidenote, the heroin addictions of soldiers in Vietnam were a side effect of the heroin dealing of the CIA and other US agencies. The addicted soldiers were collateral damage. Imagine being ready to ship home, and having to stay longer to detox.
I wonder if the same thing happens now with the soldiers in Afghanistan.

Censorship Ramps Up

YouTube announces a new purge of dissident views.
Julian Assange arrested and becomes very ill in prison. Chelsea Manning in jail indefinitely, until caving, anyway.
Facebook hires the NATO-supported Atlantic Council to help them purge and censor members.
Twitter bans people who refuse to support the dominant narrative.
Google makes searching for dissident views more and more difficult.

Why is the Empire stomping down so hard on truth tellers? Because the horizontal communication made possible by the internet and social media makes it more difficult to keep the dominant narrative dominant. Too many people scoff at the lies and tell other people, who tell others. Fewer and fewer people are swallowing the nonsense, because when people are allowed to communicate with each other, lies will be exposed and truth will out.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Goebbels

Tiananmen Square Events Revisted With Color Revolution Lens

As our imperial media brings up the Tiananmen Square massacre again, as part of the ongoing propaganda push against China, people from China are explaining the events as an early Color Revolution, with a smack-down response. The angry students, the burned soldiers, the crack down from the government....are all very familiar to us now, but not so much back then.


Via Robert K Tan
As opposed to myths or lies, the few simple truths about the Tiananmen tragedy are buried, suppressed and/or brushed aside by corporate media, NGOs and western governments.

1. No one was killed in Tiananmen Sq on June 4, 1989.
There were a dozen first-hand accounts by those present at TAM Sq at the material time, including a protest leader Hou Dejian, a couple of foreign diplomats and some foreign journalists. Even the cables sent by the American embassy in Beijing to the State Department stated so. At least three foreign journalists, James Miles from BBC, James Kynge of Financial Times, and Richard Roth from CBS have confessed to false reporting of TAM Sq massacre. Years after the event, they confirmed the fact that no one was killed at TAM Sq.

2. Hundreds died in the street leading to TAM Sq, particularly Wuxidi, as a result of violence started by the mobs and agents provocateur, many supported and supplied with petrol bombs by the American CIA and Taiwan forces. Subsequent clashes between the mobs and PLA soldiers ensued.
The death toll was vastly exaggerated and inflated by western press and NGOs. A few put it as high as 10,000, with one at a ridiculously high 200,000.
Official death toll was 300 plus, including soldiers and workers.
Several surveys of hospitals in Beijing put it at between 400 and 1,000. The Tiananmen Mothers group has so far registered only 212 .
Who do you believe? The western sources which have lied for decades to destabilize and regime-change independent sovereign states. Or local civil groups such as the Tiananmen Mothers and surveys of hospitals.
Remember Iraq's WMD, human rights abuses by Gaddafi and chemical attacks by Assad? And recently, up to 3 million Uighurs interned in concentration camps in Xinjiang.

3. Protests demanding democracy?
That's a lie. As Geodfry Roberts put it, the students wanted no more than BIG CHARACTERS democracy, something they learnt from Mao during the Cultural Revolution.
The students were mad at the government for withdrawing tuition subsidies. They were angry with inflation running at more than 20%, and they were pissed off at corruption.
The narrative that the protesters demanded democracy was fabricated by the Americans to justify the student protests and to overthrow the CCP government.

More on the false narrative of student protesters demanding democracy :

"But “democracy” was far from the minds of the students when the protests first kicked off – the primary three demands were related to: price , official corruption (particularly Zhao Ziyang’s son), and labor market competition.

Deng’s rural reforms had massively improved the lot of Chinese farmers and led to spiking crop yields – but the flip side is that the boost to farmer incomes led to price increases in urban areas for staple foods. This was compounded by inflation shocks throughout the 80s which had also shaken urban residents.

“in the late 1980s, with food prices and wages both climbing and the system flush with cash, overall inflation skyrocketed, averaging nearly 19 percent in both 1988 and 1989”

Ironically the driver of these inflation shocks were reforms proposed by Zhao Ziyang, who originally was the target of the protestors’ ire, though this abruptly stopped at some point during the protests. Stories of official corruption had also united various factions of protestors, with handbills pointedly asking, “How much does Zhao Ziyang pay to play golf?”

Concerns over prices weren’t simply “economic anxiety” though, this was also heavily tinged with elitism. Students and urbanites were not happy to see “peasants and farmers” do so well relative to them.

This “economic anxiety” also manifested itself a year earlier in Nanjing, where students affected by cuts to tuition subsidies took out their anger on African exchange students in a massive demonstration, even setting fire to the African students’ dormitory at Hohai University.
“Like most foreign students, the Africans enjoyed greater standards of living in China and some dated local women. Among the signs in the crowd at Hehai on Christmas Eve,1988, were placards demanding greater democracy alongside ones proclaiming, ‘death to the black devils’.”
Many of the organizers of the Nanjing anti-African protests later came to Beijing to participate in the Tiananmen protests as well: “The anti-African demonstrations spread to Beijing where, late on the night of April 19, student militants carrying banners saying, ‘No Offend Chinese Women,’ yelling ‘Kill the foreigners!’ and screaming insults at Deng marched on Party leaders’ living quarters at Zhongnanhai.”

The student protestors were also contemptuous of the worker protestors as well: “A member of the Workers’ Autonomous Federation found the students were ‘especially unwilling’ to meet members of the Construction Workers’ Union, whom they drove from the Square, considering them as lowly ‘convict laborers. They ‘were always rejecting us workers. They thought we were uncultured. We demanded participation in the dialogue with the government, but the students wouldn’t let us. They considered us workers to be crude, stupid, reckless, and incapable of negotiating’.”
Wang Dan, another student leader at Tiananmen, stated “the movement is not ready for worker participation because democracy must first be absorbed by the students and intellectuals before they can spread it to others.”

“They (the students) exhibited a wariness about the articulation of economic demands by other groups, and wanted to keep the movement exclusively under their control”

In the early days of the protests, the students even went as far as to cordon off their own protests so that the hoi polloi couldn’t protest with them – from an eyewitness: “The marchers on the periphery of the parade held pink colored packaging twine that circumscribed the marchers. It was meant to exclude anyone else. If you weren’t a student from that particular school, you couldn’t just join in their march. They didn’t even want anyone marching beside them: I walked a block maybe, asking questions about what their demands were and what they hoped to achieve, and was basically told to bugger off.”

As the protests went on and the students unexpectedly (to them) received a good deal of sympathy, both from the general public and even the government (evidenced by the sympathetic editorials in the papers), the nature of the demands began to shift. Hardliners in the student protestors wanted to go beyond addressing corruption and price controls, and some advocated for the overthrow of the government.

“Chai Ling, who was recognized as the top leader of the students, gave an interview to Western reporters on the eve of June 4 in which she acknowledged that the goal of the leadership was to lead the population in a struggle to topple the Communist Party of China, which she explained would only be possible if they could successfully provoke the government into violently attacking the demonstrations.”

Working with Chai Ling and other protestor leaders was the CIA’s man in China, Gene Sharp, who wrote the book on “color revolutions” for the US and whose playbook continues to be used today by the USA. Sharp even had the audacity to smear the worker and union activists at Tiananmen as CPC agent provocateurs in later interviews.

None of this was met with broad consensus from the protestors. As Chai Ling and Feng Congde said themselves, they faced multiple “coups” from various factions of protestors.

“At the May 27th coalition meeting, Chai Ling and Feng Congde reported on the situation in the Square. The impression we got was that things were really chaotic. There was endless factional in-fighting, and sanitary conditions were terrible. We began to doubt whether anything positive could come out of this on-going stalemate. “

Feng Congde: “Often we had to suppress 3 or 4 coups a day. At the time I even joked, "Now I finally understand why Li Peng wanted to suppress the students."

By May 30th a significant portion of the students had left the square. This caused the student leaders to shift their policy and start to allow worker protestors (previously banned from the square) in to boost numbers.

With martial law declared and the central premise of the protests becoming more and more muddled – was it still about official corruption? Inflation? Or now about democracy and free press? – the leaders of the students turned to wilder plans.

“Moderate student leaders argued that, having made their point, the students should withdraw and live to fight another day but Chai Ling commanded them to stay because, “The students keep asking, "What should we do next? What can we accomplish?" I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?”

Of course, this was all very brave talk by someone who already had acquired a US visa in secret."

For more information.

The US Ignores Victory Day to Focus on D Day

On May 9th, US media was completely silent about marking the end of the war in Europe and the surrender of Germany, 74 years ago. That seemed odd.

But now I see great and grand commemorations of the day coming up that marks the day the US opened a second front in Europe, on June 6th, 1944, after the Germans had been defeated in Russia and were being driven back to Germany, 75 years ago. That is when the US invaded France and headed to Germany.

Um....really? Are we really going to dance around in celebration, patting ourselves on the back and bragging about our Great and Glorious Victory, only one month after totally ignoring the actual end of the war?

Embarrassing. But it must be embarrassing to be French, as well. Imagine inviting Merkel to the D-Day celebrations, but not inviting Putin. And France only fought Germany for 6 weeks, before setting up their collaborationist government.

Who else did they invite? And how long did their countries resist? Belgium? - 18 days Netherlands? 14 days. Luxembourg? -1 day
Denmark? - 6 hours Poland? -5 weeks Norway? - 9 weeks.

No wonder they didn't invite Russia, who didn't just resist for 4 years, but actually defeated the Nazis and drove them back.

Maybe they are too embarrassed to stand next to non-collaborators. A motley collection of descedants of Nazi supporters, Nazi funders and Nazi collaborators don't want anything to do with the people who defeated their heroes.

The US put Nazi descendants into power in Ukraine, after the US-backed coup overthrew the elected government. Then, the US and its Nazi-loving vassals (referred to collectively as the International Community) told the world that it was Russia who interfered in Ukraine.

Goebbels would be proud.

Meanwhile, former members of the Soviet Union are tearing down statues of the Soviet generals and war heroes who liberated them, and putting up statues of those who collaborated with the Nazis, now in charge of those countries.

It looks very much like Europe will unite this time in the coming attack on Russia, unlike the last two world wars.

How many actual citizens of those countries agree with the attack? I, for one, strongly oppose the upcoming war. The owners of this country (I live in USA) are stripping and looting our resources, while our citizens fall ever deeper into poverty, and the homeless hordes grow, bringing back diseases of the past, like typhoid and typhus. Why should I support my owners' attack on any other country?

I don't.

Pronoun Usage

While the US is bombing 7 countries and destabilizing many more, Americans are distracted and entertained by arguing over next year's election or proper pronoun usage for each other.

We are now being told that we must ask everyone what pronouns they prefer. What? Why should people be allowed to regulate our language, even when they are not physically present?

Obviously, the pronouns "I" and "you" are gender neutral, so the demand that we must self-police our language while there is no chance of "literally" hurting someone with "violent" language, when they are not there to hear it, is bizarre.

If a tree falls in a forest....? and so on. (The answer is "No". If you use the "wrong" pronoun when speaking of someone who is not there to hear it, it is not "literal violence".)

And we are now being told that we are to introduce ourselves including the phrase..."Hi. My name is _____. I use the pronouns she/her"
Who uses third person pronouns to refer to themselves? I have never heard anyone do that, although I have heard people refer to themselves by their own name, which is uniformly weird. This is taking it a step further, forcing weird and disturbing language use upon everyone, under threat of legal action, or social media banning. Yes, people have been fired, removed from Twitter and had the police visit them, for using the "incorrect" pronoun.


What difference does it make? This blog post explains it well...Update: the blog post has been censored. Logic is not allowed these days, and Medium censors posts frequently.

"Forcing our brains to ignore the evidence of our eyes, to ignore a conflict between what we see and know to be true, and what we are expected to say, affects us.
USING preferred pronouns does the same. It alters your attention, your speed of processing, your automaticity. You may find it makes you anxious. You pay less heed to what you want to say, and more to what is expected of you. It slows you down, confuses you, makes you less reactive. That’s not a good thing."

George Orwell, in the book 1984, had Winston Smith break down under torture and say what Big Brother told him to say, denying what he saw with his eyes, and conforming to the "proper" use of words.
"
'Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?'

'Yes.'

O'Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.

'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'

'Yes.'

Language is important to humans. Our brains develop with language and our language helps shape our world view. If our owners can force us to say that we see a woman, when we know that we are seeing a man, they have forced us to submit in a new and more powerful way. They already have most people convinced that War is Peace, and Ignorance is Power, but Man Is Woman? That is a power grab unprecedented in our history.