In terms of content, the Weisses of this world are a dime a dozen. So why “expose” yet another neocon propagandist?
Because he is also very nasty, and very dangerous – as Richard Silverstein’s comprehensive profile of Michael D. Weiss, just published at The Unz Review, convincingly argues.
So far as (functional) psychopathy goes, he really is one of a kind in the world of journalism.
And if pushing kompromat up the Google rankings makes at least a few people think twice before associating with him too closely, then the effort will be worth it.
Weiss in his element.
I. The Making of a Neocon
The first thing one notices about Weiss is that he is a neocon propagandist.
Yes, to be sure, in 90%+ of cases, the two things are tautological. But Weiss really knows how to take it to the n-th level.
Weiss losing control over his conspiracy theories—US is Putin proxy; Putin is ISIS air force—>US is ISIS air force!! pic.twitter.com/M7f9gWiH1x
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) January 27, 2016
America's #1 Russian-illterate Russia expert pic.twitter.com/GHTQ4Td1K2
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) November 4, 2015
Snapshot of recent @michaeldweiss articles. Even for a neocon blowhard the man is going off the rails! pic.twitter.com/HZ9Vf2Q3sz
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) October 10, 2015
Cold War troll Michael Weiss knows who to blame for US bombing MSF hospital http://t.co/PsRUV6Y8sw pic.twitter.com/L2lXvj2irC
— Mark Ames (@MarkAmesExiled) October 6, 2015
Despite knowing neither Russian nor Arabic nor Farsi, he has somehow – by somehow, I mean sponsorship by such doyens of the Pozocracy such as #NeverTrumper PNAC neocon Bill Kristol, exiled Russian crook Khodorkovsky, and Bill Browder – become an authoritative MSM voice on Russia, Syria, Iran, the war in Donbass, and many other geopolitical topics.
Here is a primer on Weiss from Mark Ames’ Pando profile of Peter Pomerantsev, a close associate of his:
During the late Bush years, Weiss worked for the neocon organ of Bill Kristol, the Weekly Standard; afterwards, Weiss headed up a neocon PR project, “Just Journalism,” which policed the English-language press for any journalism critical of Israel in the wake of its brutal war on Gaza in 2008-9. Then, as Syria descended into civil war, Weiss became one of the leading neocon warmongers pushing for America to invade Syria. Perhaps most troubling of all when it comes to Pomerantsev’s credibility — Weiss played a lead role in promoting the career of one of the most notorious academic frauds of our time, Elizabeth O’Bagy, the fake Syria “expert” whom Weiss teamed up with to argue for war in Syria. Apparently after O’Bagy was exposed as a fraud with no Syria credentials, Weiss skulked away, only to reappear with a new co-author—Peter Pomeranstev—and a new beat: Putin’s Russia. [The War Nerd wrote this excellent article on Elizabeth O’Bagy‘s strange & sleazy story.]
When he isn’t appearing on the Clinton News Network as an “expert” to tell everyone about Putin joining ISIS before appearing at academic conferences to wax lyrical about how Russia is a “post-modern dictatorship” where there is “no truth,” Weiss somehow finds the time to serve as editor of both The Daily Beast and The Interpreter.
This is the person (@michaeldweiss) who is so concerned about lack of "truth" in Russia: https://t.co/m1ZVVjkJEJ pic.twitter.com/EiiaQtOcgI
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) November 20, 2015
The Interpreter is a blog dedicated to translating articles from the Russian media (read: Novaya Gazeta, Echo of Moscow, and other almost exclusively anti-Putin outlets), which has recently come under the auspices of the US state-controlled media organization the BBG (Broadcasting Board of Governors), whose main project remains that Cold War era mastadon, RFERL (Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty). The RFERL is an organization so dedicated to Western values of free speech that they fired a strongly anti-Putin journalist, Andrey Babitsky, for having the temerity to report on Ukrainian war crimes.
It is in this context, in his capacity as editor of The Interpreter, that I had my first run-in with Michael Weiss.
II. The Russian Spectrum
At the time, I had set up and was trying to find financing for The Russian Spectrum (TRS), a project that aimed to make translations from the Russian press available to the Anglosphere (in other words, a kind of English-language Inosmi, a RIA project to make “free” Western media available for the delectation of information-deprived and Kremlin-brainwashed Russians (if one that has had rather unintended consequences).
https://twitter.com/strana_mechty/status/667477285881122816
If you look at the TRS archives, you will see translations from a variety of sources both pro- and anti-Putin, with the latter including Latynina, Kashin, Lev Gudkov, Yavlinsky, etc: https://akarlin.com/qualia/translation/
Though my skepticism of the Russian liberal movement is hardly a secret, my aim was to keep TRS broadly ideologically neutral by representing all points of view.
At the time I was interested in exploring avenues of cooperation with other projects that were interested in doing stuff similar to what I was doing, and as yet unaware of the extent to which Michael Weiss was… special, I wrote him the following email:
Dear Michael Weiss/Interpreter Staff,
It is great to see you making translations of the Russian press available for a wider audience. Regardless of one’s political views, that is an unquestionably positive and effective means of fostering more informed views and dialog on Russian politics and society.
As it happens, I have a similar project at The Russian Spectrum (though it is more narrowly focused just on the translation activity)….
Since we share a common interest in presenting “English Inosmi” services, I would like to propose a partnership or cooperation agreement to avoid needlessly duplicating work and expanding the range of translated pieces we both offer. …
Thank you for your consideration. I look forwards to hearing from you on what you think of this.
He refused, as I suspected he would, as was of course his complete right, and I treated the matter as done – until I got involved in a Twitter spat with him several months later.
During this “argument,” Weiss claimed that I was running around “begging favors” from him and threatened to publish my letter, gloating in the prospect of mr being discredited amongst my “Putinist chums.” So I was like, LOL, go ahead. Apparently, the idea that not all people operate by Bolshevik principles – of which neoconservatism is an outgrowth – must have been quite foreign to him.
https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/374036171317186560
The banal reality is that my inroads into “Putinist” circles are in fact rather modest, so the harm he could have done by divulging these private communications was in any case negligible. And that was on the mistaken assumption that Weiss’ projections were correct – which they weren’t. The reality is that many “Putinist” institutions are in fact quite pluralist; RIA during its existence was an outright bednest of liberalism, and even “KGB TV” (aka RT) once took the decidedly unwise step of inviting Weiss to participate in one of their shows:
https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/623882251298832384
Why dafuq is RT getting in touch with Weiss in the first place? Did the Kirchick affair not teach them anything? https://t.co/JF4kvmgcM1
— Anatoly Karlin (@powerfultakes) July 24, 2015
However, as would soon become clear, my experience with Weiss was not an isolated one. Doxxing, blackmail, and character assassination are central tools in his “journalistic” repertoire.
And those tools are not limited to big people like Putin and Trump, and big organizations like RT, that can roll with the punches and strike back.
III. Conservative Friends of Russia
In 2012, there was an effort by elements of the UK Conservative Party to improve relations with Russia under the umbrella of the short-lived Conservative Friends of Russia (CFoR) organization.
According to an acquaintance who was involved with CFoR at the time, Weiss sent an email to CFoR’s office posing as an investigative “journalist” – but essentially demanding that they either come out in support of the Magnitsky Act, or get destroyed in the media.
The guy who was allegedly financing Weiss’ Russia project at the Henry Jackson Society at that time? None other than Bill Browder – the main sponsor of the Magnitsky Act.
Incidentally, since then, it’s become increasingly clear that Browder’s motives were far murkier – and more mercenary – than implied by the simple morality tale of justice for Magnitsky pushed by the Act’s sponsors. And he has expended a lot of effort – mostly successful – to gag a documentary film by (the anti-Putin liberal) Andrey Nekrasov, which made Browder out to be a liar:
Browder has thwarted Nekrasov’s previous attempts to show the film with threats of legal action. The first time, he intervened at the last minute to stop Nekrasov, with Blu-ray disc in hand, from showing it to an audience of European Union parliamentarians at the their headquarters in Brussels… Nekrasov told that his experience dealing with Browder “has been a bit depressing, to be frank.”
“What I discovered is how easy it is — if you have a lot of money — to basically gag somebody,” Nekrasov said.
In any case, CFoR apparently refused to accede to Weiss’ offer that could not be refused, and a defamation campaign by him and others in his circle, such as Sergey Cristo – the guy behind the Guardian plagiarist hack Luke Harding’s attack piece on CFoR – ensued. The specific allegations raised by Weiss were rather comprehensively rebutted by CFoR’s head Richard Royal; most amusingly, the “glowing biographies of Vladimir Putin” that were supposedly distributed at a CFoR event were, according to my source, actually copies of Richard Sakwa’s The Crisis of Russian Democracy – one of the most diligently researched and densely footnoted academic works on the Russian political system in the English language. In no conceivable universe could it be considered a Putin hagiography.
“[Weiss] lies and lies and is very aggressive,” concluded my source.
Unfortunately, as Patrick Armstrong pointed out, there are far more questions than can be answered – or to quote the famous Internet meme, “the amount of energy necessary to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it” – and so the CFoR came under immense political pressure and had to Shut Down (though it later reappeared as the Westminster Russia Forum, and played a key role in the campaign to reward medals to British veterans who participated in the Arctic Convoy missions in World War 2).
IV. Sundry Other Episodes
I never bothered actively following Weiss, even back when I was on Twitter. That said, at least three additional episodes of his misadventures came to my attention (at the very least I found them on my timeline while researching this article).
(1) Doxxing the “pro-Assad” and “pro-Putin” troll @LibertyLynx.
https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/739567296839045120
The irony is that @LibertyLynx is absolutely nothing of the sort; she has, in fact, along with comrade-in-arms Craig Pirrong (aka Streetwise Professor) been consistently and in the past – virulently – anti-Putin. Moreover, she and I have something of a “history” and thus I can’t be said to have any particularly compelling reasons to take her side. That said, in the past 1-2 years she appears to have moderated in this regard, having come to be unnerved by rampant neocon warmongery and hypocrisy (including in Syria).
This appears to have upset Michael Weiss very much, inciting him and his Interpreter associate the mentally deranged Catherine Fitzpatrick (she literally believes using open-source software like WordPress is “technocommunism” and therefore theft) to advance the conspiracy theory that @LibertyLynx was in fact a sockpuppet of Craig Pirrong and/or Rachel Marsden (!). Conveniently, Weiss made sure to delete those allegations of his before posting the doxx of @LibertyLynx.
https://twitter.com/asherahresearch/status/739618682498863104
(2) Insinuating that Maram Susli, aka @Partisangirl – an Assad supporter, as is perfectly her right as an emigre Syrian woman, and by extension one of the foremost proponents of secularism in Syria on social media – was a terrorist suspect under surveillance by Australian intelligence.
This is coming from a guy who regularly pals about with moderate jihadists(TM):
Jihadist with Michael Weiss identified. He didn't live long and was not moderate. pic.twitter.com/yUpr0appcs
— Lynx (@LibertyLynx) October 25, 2015
(3) There is also an extensive account from Irish journalist Bryan MacDonald about his run-ins with Weiss and his Interpreter associate James Miller.
Later in 2014, I wrote a couple of op-eds for RT on and Ben Judah. Both centred on erroneous, factually deviant articles they had written. At no point did I cast aspersions on their private lives, the very thought would have been abhorrent. Around this time, Weiss, a close associate of that pair, began to make obnoxious tweets of a personal nature, directed at me. Miller then emailed me a list of questions, which essentially asked me to “prove you are not a spy” and tagged Weiss on the correspondence. I later sent Weiss a few similar posers so he’d see how ludicrous it was.
Then a “hit piece” appeared on the Interpreter blog, written by James Miller and the same Robert Schultz, making all kinds of wild allegations. The whole thing was so ludicrous that nobody with a brain could possibly have taken it seriously. It essentially alleged that I was a Russian spy who had lied about my background. It also slandered the same ex of mine, calling her a “porn star” and was obsessed with the fact that I changed the spelling of my name for work reasons.
It gets a lot worse:
Right on cue, the Twitter attacks resumed. Then the phone calls started up again. One ‘gentleman’ phoned the local newspaper in the town where I grew up looking for information about me. I last wrote for them in 1998. Someone then called my mother, at home, asking questions. This made me extremely angry because my mother was very sick at the time and it greatly distressed her. She, sadly, died a few months later. I’m not sure what these scumbags were hoping to achieve by harassing my poor mum.
These are the people whom American taxpayers effectively employ following The Interpreter’s partnership with RFERL.
V. We Have Yet to Hit Bottom
Go read Richard Silverstein’s profile of Michael Weiss.
All the above was just the tip of the iceberg.
There are good reasons to believe Weiss is substantially responsible for an American citizen wrongly ending up in an Iranian jail in his zeal to torpedo the US-Iranian nuclear deal.
Here are the most important bits:
Another puzzling, problematic author Weiss brought to the magazine was “Alex Shirazi” (a pseudonym). Until he published his first piece in July 2015 (a month after Weiss took on his new editorial role) under a joint byline with Weiss, there is no online record that “Shirazi” ever existed.
…
In preparation for his second [Daily Beast] article, “Shirazi” first approached Iranian-American oil executive Siamak Namazi, while the latter was visiting Iran in June 2015. At that time, the “journalist” did not reveal his real identity to his subject. He e-mailed a list of questions he wished Namazi to answer about the supposed financial benefits the Iranian regime offered his family.
The nature of the questions alarmed Namazi and members of his family Shirazi also contacted. As a result, they contacted Shirazi’s editor, Weiss, requesting that he review the questions himself, suggesting that they were unfair and even libelous. Weiss declined to intervene, so Namazi escalated his concerns to managing editor, John Avlon. He warned the Daily Beast executive that such an article was likely to harm both him and his family. All this was to no avail.
…
Within a week of receiving Shirazi’s inquiry, Namazi was stopped at the airport by Iranian security officials and refused permission to leave the country. Several months later, in September, DB published Shirazi’s profile, and within a month Namazi was in the notorious Evin Prison. This raises the strong probability that Iranian hardliners were monitoring either Shirazi or Namazi’s e-mail accounts, and that the questions and implicit accusations raised in the messages were exploited by Iranian intelligence officers to implicate Namazi.
Who is Siamak Namazi? His good friend, Reza Marashi, wrote this appreciation of him in Huffington Post:
He helped run a world-renowned consulting firm – staffed predominantly with Iranian-born citizens – that facilitated badly-needed foreign investment from blue-chip multinational corporations.
Neither money nor power was ever a driving force behind Siamak’s work. It was the indigenous development of his motherland that motivated him. Siamak wanted Iran to live up to its vast potential, and he was at the forefront of teaching international best practices and standards in business and management to scores of young Iranians. The pride on his face was always evident when his employees would move on to successful careers across a variety of fields in Iran.
…As U.S. sanctions were causing medical supply shortages in Iran, he independently researched and published what became the authoritative literature on the subject. I was in the audience when he presented his findings in Washington DC. As Siamak began to describe the disastrous impact of sanctions on innocent Iranians, he choked up, paused for a moment, composed himself, and then proceeded to finish his presentation. That’s how much he loves the country that is currently keeping him in prison.
…
To reinforce the ominousness of the charges against Namazi, the graphic art accompanying the DB article consisted of a series of shady-looking Arab militants sporting beards, long hair, a turban and sunglasses. The image is a cross between an Arab playboy and an ISIS fighter. No one in Iran dresses this way…
The main contention implicit in the headline was itself wrong on several counts. Neither Siamak nor his family are “behind” the so-called “Iran Lobby.” Nor is the Iranian-American NGO attacked in the article, the National Iranian-American Council (NIAC) “America’s Iran Lobby.”
A common smear tactic of DC Beltway neoconservatives and the Iranian cult group, Mujahadeen e Khalq (MEK) has been to label NIAC a stooge of the Iranian regime. In reality, NIAC is a completely independent, nonpartisan organization.
Ironically, Aipac, a group heartily supported by those like Eli Lake, Kenneth Timmerman and Weiss who’ve attacked NIAC, is far more of a slavish booster of the Israeli regime than NIAC is of the Iranian regime.
…
Among Iranian-Americans, there has been a great deal of speculation about “Shirazi’s” real identity. A number of them have noted that shortly before his DB article was published a very similar post appeared in a Farsi-language blog written by a former Iranian journalist and activist, Nikahang Kowsar.
…
Iranians I spoke with believe Kowsar hates the Iranian regime so much, he hopes the hardliners will come to power. Then, it will be that much easier to promote a western attack on Iran that would topple the regime. So in a terribly perverse way, his interests coincide with those of the hardliners.
In the course of interviewing Iranian sources for this profile, one told me that the author “Shirazi” approached him with questions about the Namazi family. In the course of the e mails that went back and forth, “Shirazi” slipped up and forgot to use his fake e mail address. Instead, he used his real email address and name: Nikahang Kowsar.
…
The most profound irony of the entire episode is that a group of neocon polemicists, in an attempt to defame NIAC, have used the Namazi family as a sacrificial goat. The parallel force on the Iranian side, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard and other hardliners, have exploited this struggle for their own purposes. …
It’s also ironic that both Kowsar and the Iranian hardliners detest NIAC, and for similar reasons. They each detest the nuclear agreement as they detest any rapprochement in relations between Iran and the west. Inside Iran, the extremists even call NIAC and figures like Siamak “infiltrators.”
…
Perhaps the ultimate irony of this affair is that Michael Weiss and his neocon comrades, in their desperation to sabotage U.S.-Iran relations have made common cause with the most hardline and vicious of Iran’s clerical regime. They make for very strange bedfellows.
VI.
Or maybe not so strange after all. Birds of a feather flock together, and the totalitarian sees another totalitarian from afar.
We are not merely dealing with an eloquent and well-connected ideologue. This is a psychopath who views the world through a Manichean prism, in which you are either with him or you are subhuman scum, to be smeared into oblivion even if your disagreements with him are ultimately quite modest, as with @LibertyLynx, or tricked and utilized for the Great Cause should the opportunity present itself (as with the hapless idealist Namazi).
As James Carden pointed out in an investigative essay in The Nation, his attitude towards the media is profoundly McCarthyite:
The authors call for the creation of an “internationally recognized ratings system for disinformation” that would furnish news organizations and bloggers with the “analytical tools with which to define forms of communication.” While they throw in an obligatory caveat that “top-down censorship should be avoided” (exactly how is left unexplained), they nonetheless endorse what amounts to a media blacklist. “Vigorous debate and disagreement is of course to be encouraged,” the authors write, “but media organizations that practice conscious deception should be excluded from the community.”
What qualifies as “conscious deception” is also left undefined, but it isn’t difficult to surmise. Organizations that do not share the authors’ enthusiasm for regime change in Syria or war with Russia over Ukraine would almost certainly be “excluded from the community.” Weiss, for instance, has asserted repeatedly that Russia is to blame for the July 2014 downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. But would a news organization like, say, The Atlantic or Der Spiegel be “excluded from the community” for writing about a German intelligence report that indicated the missile in question did not come from Russia? Would journalists like Robert Parry be blacklisted for questioning the mainstream account of the tragedy? Would scholars like the University of Ottawa’s Paul Robinson be banned from appearing on op-ed pages and cable-news programs for challenging the notion that there is, in the words of Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, “no civil war in Ukraine,” but rather a war “started and waged by Russia”?
Weiss and Pomerantsev accuse the Kremlin of “making deception equivalent to argumentation and the deliberate misuse of facts as legitimate as rational persuasion.” Maybe so. But these tactics are hardly unique to the Kremlin. In December, a group of Kiev parliamentarians presented photographs to the Senate Armed Services Committee purporting to show Russian troops and tanks invading eastern Ukraine. Subsequent reports revealed that the images had been taken during the Russian-Georgian war in 2008. Did the Interpreter denounce the Ukrainian delegation for trying to pass off doctored photos? No. Its warnings about disinformation cut only one way.
Incidentally, Pomeranstev, a close associate of Weiss and the rest of the yuppie neocon circle (Ben Judah, Ioffe, Applebaum, etc), in a recent report co-authored with Edward Lucas, argues for equating pro-Russian views with those of radical Islam:
A third proposal in this report is perhaps even more bizarre. Citing efforts to deradicalize Islamic militants, Lucas and Pomerantsev write that, ‘Similar initiatives should be undertaken with radicalized, pro-Kremlin supporters, those on the far left and the far right, and Russian speakers.’ Are they suggesting anti-brainwashing programs for people who watch RT or read Russia Insider? I really don’t know what to make of this.
You’ve made it this far down this article? Report to your nearest soma dispensation station immediately, citizen!
What are the ideological roots of Weiss’ totalitarian instincts?
Weiss lists as his special heroes Karl Marx, Irving Howe (a bit of a clash there between the founder of Communism and an ardent anti-Communist), and George Orwell. Among the surprising things this future neocon endorses is “socialized healthcare.”
How… Orwellian.
The Soviet dissident Sergey Dovlatov’s aphorism is rarely more appropriate: “After communists, most of all I hate anti-communists.”
So these are the kinds of tactics people who want power use and have been using since forever.
As Tolstoy said, the rulers, the elite, in any society are simply the most vulgar and wicked men of that society, the bottom of the barrel of that society.
However, as an elite seizes power and wealth through lies, aggression, and other immoral means, it finds wealth and power fail to satisfy, are a mirage, and it loses its “edge” in a few generations – at which point, the new dregs of society, who are more immoral, seize the reins.
And so it goes. The neoconservatives are merely the new power hungry dregs of society – the WASP elite of the past became powerful using the same tactics, and the neocons, after a while, will be overthrown by some new, more ruthless, more immoral element – perhaps Chinese immigrants.
The real question is – since elites are always the same – the most power hungry, i.e the most evil, men of their society (power selects for immorality) – what difference does any of this make? If it wasn’t the neocons, it’d be someone else doing similarly nefarious and sinister things, perhaps in other parts of the world.
And the other question must be – how do we respond to this? By using their tactics for “good” – i.e becoming evil just like them? Or refusing to play their game, not responding to their sillinness, and ignoring them?
Why does the other side have an endless supply of people like this, and by that I mean effective?
Butch Cassidy: I couldn’t do that. Could you do that? Why can they do it? Who are those guys?
The other side just wants more power more than your side. That’s all it is.
Maybe you want to live, enjoy life, have intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual interests – they dont. They want only power and pursue it with an obsessive single mindedness that you would find appalling – everything that makes life worth living they would sacrifice for power.
If you want your side to be more “effective”, all you have to do is become empty and dead inside and give up everything that makes life gracious and joyous and worth living. Then you can be just like them.
They are joyless and deluded.
They are miserable now – all they feel is envy, hate, rage, resentment – and they are miserable when powerful. They pursue power because they have lost the ability to feel joy, but power is also what takes the edge off their misery. They are trapped.
That’s why there is constant turnover of elites – power does not satisfy, so elites lose their “hunger”, only to be replaced by the new power hungry.
I don’t think your explanation explains anything. If I pursue power just to exercise power, the “side” is immaterial. If power seeking is the only motivation we could have a good supply of these types on “our side.”
I am not sure how you are defining “our side” – I define it as those people who value truth, reality, honesty, capacity for hapinness, and similar things.
I should not have assumed we meant the same thing, sorry.
I see you mean merely factions representing self-intetest, with neither standing for any higher values – in that case, you are quite right, there is no inherent reason why one faction should produce more evil and ruthless men than the other. Probably accident and luck of the draw, I suppose.
Maybe you’ll get lucky and your faction will find a way to produce men as ruthless and evil as Weiss, as you seem so much to desire.
I am not sure how you are defining “our side”
For purposes here; the not neo-con side.
I define it as those people who value truth, reality, honesty, capacity for hapinness, and similar things.
truth – relative
reality – check
honesty – relative
happiness – highly overrated
I look forward to your perspective on who funded Trump’s real estate deals after his 6 bankruptcies made him persona non grata in the United States banking community. We cannot prove anything…..yet. But a series of inferences make it seem overwhelmingly likely that trump’s campaign manager was HANDSOMELY rewarded for being a money launderer for Ukrainian dirty money.
Now you can say I am connecting the dots without proof and you would be right BUT I ain’t no fool, Billions and Billions of Ukrainian and Russian dollars were laundered and ended up in the american economy. If there is absolutely no connection between Trump’s real estate deals and Russian dirty money getting laundered in this country I would be very very surprised.
Now I know you really like Trump but I trust you are smart enough Mr Karlin to admit it looks really really grim for your political hero 🙂
So basically you’re a nihilist who’s unhappy, who admires power. Pretty classic. I’d say you and Weiss would understand each other.
If everything’s relative, why not be a neocon? Your side would be winning.
Shibboleth of the necon species there; at least the English, or English-influenced ones; Hitchens, Nick Cohen, David Aaronovich et al. He’s their pastiche of Paul the Apostle; started out commie, ended up, in their minds, as one of them.
I’m assuming you’ve read Dolan’s take on him: http://exiledonline.com/big-brothers-george-orwell-and-christopher-hitchens-exposed/
George Orwell wasn’t really a commie ever, rather a socialist…and it’s rather painful to see his name mentioned in connection with such loathsome anti-English scum as David Aaronovich.
UNZ is really doing favor to Michael Weiss by portraying him a smart Zioconservative AZZ.
Weiss may have excelled in Israeli hasbara, but he is still far behind Kristol and Robert Booker (Bob) Baer.
During a June 2006 interview, Robert Baer told Thom Hartmann that Iran and Saudi Arabia helped Osama bin Laden to commit 9/11 terrorist attacks. In other word, Baer is calling his Israeli Jewish brother, Barry Chamish, a liar for claiming in August 2012 – Israel did 9/11.
In a interview published by at NPR on January 10, 2015, Robert Baer told Peter Sagal that he once dated a Russian KGB General’s daughter and was part of CIA team sent to assassinate Saddam Hussein ……
https://rehmat1.com/2015/12/18/confession-of-an-ex-cia-jewish-agent/
“After communists, most of all I hate anti-communists.”
To me that’s not a contradiction or an absurdity. There were two kinds of comminism. They were diametrically opposed to each other. The transition between the two mostly happened in the 1935 – 1938 peirod. When neocons say they’re anti-communist, what they mean is that they hated the second, peaceful communism, the one that conquered space and eliminated homelessness, prostitution, gambling, unemployment, etc. They don’t hate early, Leninist-Trotskyist communism. Well, they say they do, but that’s a lie. In fact they always strive to recreate it.
The worst communists call themselves anti-communists. It’s not just funny phrase. It’s a real thing.
I don’t think you can really say they were two separate Communisms. Countries can make great achievements at the same time they do horrible things. The Ukrainian famine was done while Stalin was industrializing Russia. Stalin killed millions of his own people, but he did stop Hitler, at a horrible cost in Russian lives (20-30 million) not appreciated by Westerners today.
I don’t know…I suppose the Soviet Union after 1953 wasn’t that bad, but 1935-1938 as the transition period to “good” communism? That includes the years of the Great Terror, and the Soviet Union did some really evil, non-peaceful things at least during the opening years of the 2nd world war (like Katyn)…don’t really understand your reasoning there.
I met Ben Judah a few times at university and shared a couple of mutual friends. It’s simply not true to describe him as a neocon; he was certainly pro Obama over McCain. I at the time was a neocon transitioning into being a paleolibertarian (I’m embarrassed about both to be honest). I know who the neocons around at Oxford were; there weren’t many.
I simply don’t see the point in labelling liberal interventionist-internationalists of any and all varieties as neocons. It doesn’t seem to have any validity either in historical terms, or as a descriptive classification. It also has the unfortunate function of discouraging people from reading Leo Strauss who wrote some of the most penetrating critiques of missionary liberalism around.
To be honest, the neocon word seems to be basically clickbait.
the neocon word seems to be basically clickbait.
Accurate labeling is the key to the kingdom. “Big thinkers” are crazy for prefixes.
I’m pretty sure the guy who got Ben Judah into his Putin bashing was a chap called Max Seddon.
https://twitter.com/maxseddon?lang=en
When I had tutorials with him, he was pretty conventionally anti-Bush in an elite American way. I think he may even have been a “Stopper” of sorts, I think if you called him a neocon he’d have a fit.
Ben Judah is a bit more politic, since, I suppose, he wants to use neocon thinktanks like the Henry Jackson Society, which are literally desperate to find someone young and intelligent to associate themselves with them, as a legup. It’s hard to find him say much about the Iraq war. Seddon, on the other hand, was one of the richest people I’ve ever met. I think his parents basically pay for him to stay in fancy hotels in Eastern Europe tweeting.
Meanwhile, when it comes to Sec’y of State Hellary facilitating the sale of uranium to Russia in exchange for a kick-back, we don’t even need to speculate:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/24/us/cash-flowed-to-clinton-foundation-as-russians-pressed-for-control-of-uranium-company.html
Looks like Hellary’s ‘Russian conspiracy’ is just another cynical Clinton tactic.
I think if you called him a neocon he’d have a fit.
Does anyone claim this label anymore?
Yes, though not many young people because it means social death, everywhere outside a few, shrinking American circles. The reason why the neoconservative movement seems so big from one angle when it is, in fact, small and shrinking, is because in reality neoconservative is mostly just FDR liberalism shore of its least defensible aspects (like slaughtering millions of farm animals at a time of food shortage etc.) plus a bit of Burke and a pinch of Strauss. The term gained an undeserved prominence because after 9/11 it really looked like the Republicans might be able to rewrite the electoral map in a serious way and the Democrats unleashed every weapon they could, including the New Left true believers who had an unresolved obsession about neocons over their betrayal in the 1960s. In reality, though, the difference between the neocons and the Dems over foreign policy was essentially one about personnel and tactics i.e. who got to run the universalist empire of democracy that FDR had bequeathed them. The neocons had chance to really run things and they fouled up so bad they will never run anything much ever again. They fouled up so badly, in fact, that the Democrat “anti-war” campaign was basically superfluous and they ended up overshooting; the term neocon has such a bad brand that it taints anyone associated with the American empire. So now Hillary is a neocon, Obama is a neocon, Kerry is a neocon, the EU are neocons, Swedish anti-Putin liberals are neocons, Jo Cox is a neocon, all of them, more than half the western world, part of this tiny conspiracy. The way things are going, someone will say LBJ was a neocon soon.
OK.
So what is the correct label for the war mongers who use welfare state liberalism to maintain political power and control of the American military?
@iffen
Humanitarian interventionists! As Gabriel M has already indicated, there is little difference with the neocons in their goals and tactics, mostly it’s just a question of nuance in marketing to the American public. Indeed, for all intents and purposes they are one and the same and are essentially merging this election.
Anatoly, whatever LibertyLynx was a couple of years ago, she is a full-blown anti-neocon now. Her disagreements with Weiss are not trivial, there is an unbridgeable gap between them.
Viktor Pinchuk is one of the top donors to the Clinton Foundation. Abramovich and Usmanov have invested millions into the top 2 football clubs in London. George Osbourne went on holiday sharing the same Yacht with Oleg Deripaska. This is like an “all-stars” of dirty money.
Manafort and Trump’s supposed dealing are irrelevent by comparison. Considering the business Trump was in….nothing at all wrong with him accepting dirty East European money…..it’s not his job to decide the good from the bad
It was not “done” – it happened.
Only “Russia”? Not also other parts of the USSR?
Billions! Personally! And then he ate them, so there is no proof. [nods]
Newsflash! People die in war!
a) Only Russian lives?
b) Who killed them – Nazis or Stalin?
c) How much were civilians and how much military personell?
You are aware that there were no communism in the USSR? BTW – do you even know what is communism?
Which affected only a tiny percent of the USSR citizens.
What a bunch whiney moralistic hogwash! Besides – its hardly as clear cut as the Polacks screech Re: Katyn.
At the risk of being facetious, I would say “centrists”.
Weiss, Judah, Ioffe, Appelbaum…
Why, oh why Americans made these people into their elite? In Russia, Weiss would have been a “dissident” blogger, or something.
At the risk of being facetious, I would say “centrists”.
Well, I think that I agree with that.
If we go all the way back to Senator Jackson, the pundits called him a hawk and the ones opposed doves. It was also framed as guns and butter. Senator McGovern was a dove and favored butter over guns, and we know what happen to him. McGovern’s position has not been taken by any major candidate since. Sanders seemed like he was trying to make a go of it in that direction. Since McGovern the “center” has always favored guns and butter. Sometimes the perception will be that a candidate favors one over the other, for example, and before McGovern, Johnson was the peace candidate while Goldwater was the war candidate. Obama was the peace candidate over the warmonger, McCain. Usually the “centrist” candidate who balances guns and butter will prevail. In the current cycle, Trump seems to imply that he will emphasize butter over guns, although he is very careful to deny that he will not maintain a strong military, while Clinton is going with more guns over butter. So you are correct, there is only the center that prefers guns and butter, with the populace squinting to see if they can make one candidate fit their preference as to the guns vs. butter mixture.
The only one I can think of in the UK who self-identifies as one is Douglas Murray, who incidentally, hasn’t ever written an anti-Russian or anti-Assad piece, or even an “Assad/Putin is very very very bad ……BUT” piece. I think there was a bit of a splintering of the Neocons sometime around the Syrian war, with a minority of, mainly right wing ones taking his position (along with Liberty Lynx; David P Goldman/Spengler or even Trump). The vast majority of the rest seem to have merged with the “liberal interventionists”.
Looks like LibertyLynx has just been joined by KevinRothrock, lol
https://twitter.com/michaeldweiss/status/766120300652134400
communism was the greatest evil ever on earth and you are one of them. Hitler was the ONLY anti communist that ever lived. communism is the jews religion and communists started Israel which is trying to do what the Bolsheviks started to do which is to cause as much misery suffering death and looting as their master satan wants. Gen Patton figured out after the war while in Berlin we fought the wrong people and he finally knew the real evil was the jewish Bolsheviks who have transferred operations to israel
AK: Was going to give a warning but on looking through your profile you appear to be a Jew obsessed SIF (Single Issue Fanatic). So will go straight to a ban.
This article is published on Rense.com today – 8/18
https://twitter.com/KevinRothrock/status/766069123071770624
Apparently Weiss is a compiling a list of people who are RTing Silverstein’s article for purposes of democratic lustrations.
Avowedly? Where exactly did this dickhead go to school?
a dissertation length article about twitter spats. snooooooooooze……..
“The neoconservatives are merely the new power hungry dregs of society – the WASP elite of the past became powerful using the same tactics, and the neocons, after a while, will be overthrown by some new, more ruthless, more immoral element – perhaps Chinese immigrants.” – I am willing to try Chinese. I did not like WASPs and found Jews to be even worse.
No they didn’t.
You’re merely trying to deflect from what everyone already knows, the “neocons” are a Jews first, Zionist front.
Of course they buy a few non-Jews in an attempt to distract.
Who demands mass immigration into white gentile countries, but stops non-Jew immigration into “that shitty little country”?
Who runs the Federal Reserve?
Who runs Wall Street?
Who owns the US Congress?
Who owns the White House?
Who forces acceptance of the fictitious & impossible ’6M & gas chambers’?
Who runs the media / entertainment?
Who runs the music business?
Who dominates ‘academia’?
Why is AIPAC the most powerful, dominant lobby, which regularly writes the text of Congressional bills and resolutions?
Who is it that wants to censor free speech via the “hate speech” canard?
Who is it that demands we shed the blood of US troops for their interests?
Who are the real & biggest racists on the planet?
Japan is getting cucked just like the West.
Look at Japanese athletes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asuka_Cambridge
http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/sport/Julian-Walsh–Jamaican-born-Japanese-athlete-making-a-name-in-400m_17543296
Japanese women going to Jamaica and having babies with black men who are raised as ‘Japanese’ and represent Japan.
Numbers and proportions are important.
Woah that John Dolan writes a lot but what does he actually say?
He’s definitely pretty good at performing the rituals of the written anti-imperialist sermon and detecting racism in someone’s writings.
Such bloggers are more tiresome than know-all high-schoolers who want to save the world from evil.
Yep, Neocons run the music industry, and as for academia, hell you can hardly move at Harvard for all the neocons successfully indoctrinating their students to love GW Bush.
Mr Karlin, your comments threads are pretty bad, even by Unz standards. Conversely, Steve Sailer’s threads have got a lot better and he seems to have found a way to unload his whackjobs on Saker and Paul Craig Roberts. As the only other writer on Unz who is consistently worth reading, perhaps you could work on some similar strategy.
Dolan might be a shitlib at heart but more than makes up for it with his spittle-flecked literary brilliance.
See this takedown of Victor Hanson. Or his trolling of the academic beigeocracy.
Thanks Anatoly.
I always liked this explanation of what 1984 is about (at the New American by David A. Goodman):
http://www.thenewamerican.com/culture/history/item/4668-the-60th-anniversary-of-orwells-1984
<
blockquote>The masterpiece 1984, therefore, stems from decisions made in Fabian circles beginning in 1884 and continuing for a hundred years. The book may be called a dystopia about totalitarian Britain and America, but there is a great deal more to Orwell’s purpose than that. It is a book warning about how socialism cast free of its moral anchors could eventually lead to an all-powerful state exercising totalitarian rule. Clearly 1984 is Orwell’s projection of the Beveridge Report and Winston Churchill’s fears during the 1945 elections of power-hungry younger Fabians getting their hands on the whip.</blockquote
It is quite interesting to speculate on the origins of the Neocon movement and how it gave rise to oh so many “fire-breathing” acolytes, like Mr. Weiss ?
From what “well” did it spring ?
Perhaps, like the comments in the Matrix by the character the Merovingian, understanding the “Why” of a thing, is understanding the true source of its power.
It may be worth it (to us all) to speculate on the “Why” of the Neocon movement, what grounds its pathological addiction to war fraud, terror fraud, and unrestrained belligerent militarism ?
After analyzing it for quite some time, I am convinced that what “grounds” the Neocons is not some vain desire for ruthless power, no, not at all, its a mistake to think so.
What grounds the neocon movement is,in fact, “the ground” itself.
or rather not the ground, per say, but THE LAND.
It is “land of Israel” or the land which Israel seeks to claim for itself, which is the very root of the movement and the source of the conflicts in which we are engaged.
The KEY decision to KEEP and to TAKE, forever, the Golan Heights from Syria as well as much, if not all, of the Palestinian territories is the very WELLSPRING, the very HINGE of the Neocon movement, the Neocon wars, and the Neocon lies in which we find ourselves thoroughly immersed.
Everything may indeed grow out of this “precise” desire.
Consider the moment in time, when the resolution to do this, fermented into the “prime directive”.
Ask yourself, what is it, (if you were they), that they MUST DO, to achieve this ?
Why, you would have to BEND the entire world to achieve this.
And 9-11 was the crystallization of the beginning of the BENDING.
Do any among you, TRULY believe the Neocons give a hoot about “spreading democracy” anywhere?
You are a fool if you do.
Do any among you,TRULY believe the Neocons give a hoot about ASSAD or how he rules his people ?
You are a fool if you do.
Do any among you, TRULY believe the Neocons give a a hoot about how evil PUTIN might be ?
You are a fool if you do.
No, No, the entire Syrian conflict is designed quite specifically around Israels “prime directive” of achieving the GOLAN…. permanently….everything else is war fraud, “pretexts” and bogus fodder.
They don’t CARE about the “removal” of Assad ,or how “villainous” he may be, and never did.
Its all “window dressing” …… a big bunch of bogus claptrap….and always was.
The unrelenting “vilification” of PUTIN and ASSAD exists only for one simple reason… they both are standing in the way of the “prime directive”, and that’s it.
What the neocons CARE about, what drives the conflict, at its core, is the “dissolution of the territorial integrity of the state”.
This is why the dismemberment of Syria will continue into the foreseeable future.
We live in the age of Neocon belligerence whose essential goal is the consolidation of the Greater State of Israel.
This is the one true WHY of our wars, today.
No other rationale even comes close.
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/dec/03/hilary-benn-airstrikes-vote-speech-full-must-confront-isis-evil-video
Yup, Hillary Benn, all he thinks about is greater Israel.
http://www.hilarybennmp.com/statement_on_gaza
Or not.
the neoconservative movement seems so big from one angle when it is, in fact, small and shrinking
Yep, Neocons run the music industry, and as for academia, hell you can hardly move at Harvard for all the neocons successfully indoctrinating their students to love GW Bush.
So which is it? Choose one and only one.
Mr Karlin, your comments threads are pretty bad, even by Unz standards.
I presume that you absolve yourself of any guilt.
Americans are sick and tired of these endless ‘Wars for Wall Street and Israel’ the only two outfits that really benefit from all this carnage.
We want our troops to come home and the money used to rebuild our shattered infrastructure, that is falling apart right in front of our eyes, since most of our taxes is going to support the destruction of ME and African nations and to support corrupt Wall Street banks.
Enough is enough, maybe if we stop the madness now, those people whose lives we’ve turned into a living Hell will forgive us.
The truth is that there is so many propagandist lies from all sides that there is no way to know the truth without visiting these places and discovering for yourself what is true. I am pretty sure that will never happen. Who knew that in the information age, the information would mostly be crap?
they are psychopaths. No conscience.
My favorite from the article: “The RFERL is an organization so dedicated to Western values of free speech that they fired a strongly anti-Putin journalist, Andrey Babitsky, for having the temerity to report on Ukrainian war crimes.”
The RFERL is an organization that is curated by the CIA. What else should we expect from the RFERL “operatives?”
“Michael Weiss is a senior editor at The Daily Beast, a CNN contributor and the editor-in-chief of The Interpreter…”
And this: Michael Weiss is a Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security, Atlantic Council: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/about/experts/list/michael-weiss
Atlantic Council is exceptionally selective in his choice of scoundrels. Among their recent acquisitions is Eliot Higgins, a college dropout and expert in selling women’s underwear. He became the darling of neocons after concocting disinformation on Syria and Ukraine. Michael Weiss did indeed found his brethren. http://redpilltimes.com/15-minutes-of-fame-over-elliot-higgins-aka-bellingcat-is-being-debunked-all-over-internet-by-real-experts-and-scientists/
And while Higgins looks slightly imbecilish (there is something pitiful about this fellow), Weiss is a committed opportunist: he is not a principled ideologue, in a sense he knows where his butter is coming from. Weiss is one of those noisy brats that like serving the powerful with pomposity.
Just out of curiosity (and since Weiss was very intrusive to other peoples personal lives) – who are Weiss’ parents? Does psychopathy run in the family?
Western values, when you really think of it, are foreign to Jews. So I would not be surprised.
This is something…
“One thing you need to keep in mind here: Michael Weiss is an idiot. No, I mean even by the standards of American punditry. Weiss has been writing Russia-baiting crap for years, stories with comic headlines like “Ireland Bows to Russia’s Intimidation.” When he’s not bashing Russia, Weiss’ job is gulping up some stinking, fishy gobs of CIA/Pentagon/Likud disinformation, then vomiting it back onto the pages of the Beast like a dutiful penguin dad. Weiss never sees anything, or even tries to; he hears things, always whispered in his ear by some quasi-spook shill whose motives he never questions. And what he hears about Syria is that the Russians are paving the way for Islamic State…” Ouch!
https://pando.com/2015/10/19/bombed-stupid/1edbbfc93db42f1f2c30886a55b043ca44309e64/
Yeah so? The other pattern is for people to find another ally in the elite or even benefit from a foreign leader who is always interested in the rights and liberation of another people. Putin is probably the most prominent civil rights advocate the US has seen for a long time. Democracy is just another slave revolt. Ever notice on Russia Today we see one more giant of freedom and democracy after another? Our own government slaps on the patriot act all while conducting the Arab Spring. The US is very interested in freedom and democracy for its enemies while it build its own police state.
These are the resources and wise people should use them. It seems the smart money is on Trump precisely for this reason alone.
Orwell was mostly an anarchist. As I recall he was part of the Anarchist forces in the Spanish Civil War.
Are the neocons finished? Trump seems to have repudiated them. What Trump is up to in foreign policy in the ME is not clear.
He may or may not put the Judenstaat on a shorter leash.
Even the Dems have their anti-zio contingent.
My foreign policy advise for Trump: Demand Israel pay for its stolen land…make a deal with the Palestinians, pay reparations for the Jewish Wars of the last 20 years and link it to Isis, & Co. backing off on terror. Get agreements on Migration.
If this does not cool out the muzzies, resume the bombing of Isis, etc., no ground troops, and satisfy the American people that something is being done. It won’t work probably, but will have some immediate popular appeal.
If it is going to be War with Islam, then start shipping boatloads of European muzzies home to further inflame muzzie countries. Faced with 50 million returning muzzies, the local dictators will have a lot on their plates.
No nukes for Iran or any other muzzie country. This would be a catastrophe….
If it is war, then so be it. But make the obvious gesture of Peace Offering on the only terms that make sense.
Israel then notified that any more aggression will not be tolerated by the US…the offer they cannot refuse kind of thing.
If it is going to be war with Islam, it would not be such a terrible thing if we keep ground troops out of the equation. Sooner or later, the stupids will begin to see that their God has failed.
More terror here/Europe meets with hostage killing. Kill the families and friends of terrorists.
And so on. This logic will soon meet its equivalent when the niggers Go Too Far at home.
Joe Webb
“Is you is, or is you ain’t, my constichency?”
an avowedly anti-Semitic website
Unless R. Unz has avowed that this is an anti-Semitic website, this statement is demonstrably incorrect.
Well, that’s one way to raise black IQs.
Weiss is a typical millennial leftist scum. Only proving once again that there is nothing conservative in “neoconservatives” – Trotskyists of various hues is all they are.
Typical Zionist lies from a HRC supporter who has more foreign criminal money flowing to her than any candidate in American history.
The NYTs tells US she’ll eschew it all on gaining POTUS.
The fix is in,and its up to US to unfix it in November.
There is an old French saying
Society is like stew. The dregs fall to the bottom the scum rises to the top and in between are the meat and vegetables.
And in America there is an alliance between the scum at the top and the dregs at the bottom against the productive tax paying middle.
But what with affirmative action and non White immigration there are fewer and fewer productive tax payers every year.
Any conservatives who think that those wonderful skilled entrepreneural non White immigrants pay their share of taxes are deluded fools
Zionist mole traitors?
“…there is so many propagandist lies from all sides…”
This sounds so charmingly naive. Do you know, by chance, who owns the main outlets for information, globally?
“Globally, large media conglomerates include Viacom, CBS Corporation, Time Warner, 21st Century Fox and News Corp (the former News Corporation, split in 2013), Bertelsmann, Sony, Comcast, Vivendi, Televisa, The Walt Disney Company, Hearst Corporation, Organizações Globo and Lagardère Group.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentration_of_media_ownership
You do understand whose interests the above conglomerates represent and defend by any means, don’t you?
Here is a story of Michael Hastings? http://nymag.com/news/features/michael-hastings-2013-11/
Michael was not like Michail Weiss et al. Hastings was an honest man.
Here how the sausages are made by Weiss and such:
“… Legatum Institute is the brainchild of billionaire venture capitalist Christopher Chandler. Like Browder and Khodorkovsky, Chandler made his billions in post-Soviet Russia. … He and his brother “reportedly were the single biggest foreign beneficiaries of one of the greatest privatization scams in history: Russia’s voucher program in the early 1990s.” To mark the publication of the “Menace of Unreality” report, Legatum hosted a panel discussion that featured such luminaries as Anne Applebaum, US Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, former US ambassador John Herbst, and Ukrainian Ambassador at Large Olexander Scherba. All expressed grave concern over the threat that Putin’s propaganda machine poses to the West.” https://www.thenation.com/article/neo-mccarthyism-and-us-media/
The scoundrels (Chandler brothers) committed rape (of Russia) and then put dirt on the victim. All in the name of “the threat that Putin’s propaganda machine poses to the West.” The shameless Pyatt (another psychopath?) was, of course one of the leading makers of Kiev putsch: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-26079957
https://consortiumnews.com/2015/07/13/the-mess-that-nuland-made/
The essence of the Narrative and GloboLogic.
Zionist-Globalist: “It is wrong, even evil, for white people to think in terms of white identity, territory, history, heredity, unity, and interests.”
White Skeptic: “If it is wrong for a people to think and feel that way, why do Jews believe in Jewish identity, unity, territory, and interests? Why do they have AIPAC and promote Israel.”
Zionist-Globalist: “Anti-Semite!”
“My foreign policy advise for Trump: Demand Israel pay for its stolen land…make a deal with the Palestinians, pay reparations for the Jewish Wars of the last 20 years and link it to Isis, & Co. backing off on terror. Get agreements on Migration. If this does not cool out the muzzies, resume the bombing of Isis, etc., no ground troops, and satisfy the American people that something is being done. It won’t work probably, but will have some immediate popular appeal.”
But ISIS is not at war with Israel. ISIS has been supported by US allies like Saudis. They are at war with Arab Christians and Shiites. ISIS has never attacked Israeli targets. They are like the UkroNazis. They are defacto allied with Zio-Globalism.
Politics makes for strange bedfellows.
I was going to offer “Democrats and Republicans”. Centrists is better. Thank you.
Had we lived in a different world, Gabriel.
Were that to have occurred,in good faith, only to precipitate an unwarranted ATTACK on the state of Israel, from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran then one could argue, with integrity, the “existential” threat posed to Israel as real, and also as grounds for “war”.
Imagine, for a moment, you are the state of Israel.
Can you , as a nation state, be BOTH “terrified” of the impending existential threat from the “enemies” around you, AND continue to gobble up Palestinian land on a daily basis ?
Can you ?
It seems either one or the other is the true reality…..but can it really be both ?
One understands that relinquishing the land it took in 1967, to those Israel took it from, as was the expectation of the entire world community, would have taken Israel as far as it could go, towards peace.
Had those commitments been honored…and THEN 9-11 occurred …or Israel came under assault..perhaps one could believe MORE in the Neocon argument made for the wars we have fought since that time.
Without this having happened , it seems all quite rightfully, suspect. Doesn’t it ?
I suppose Israels belief, whether warranted or not, that many of the countries surrounding it would not accept its very existence, no matter where it located itself(beyond the green line or not) does lend legitimacy to the Neocon enterprise and its posture of preemption.
How could one argue that it doesn’t ?
Your thoughts ?
The years of mass murder were the transition to good communism. You have disgusting politics.
The years of mass murder
Would Trotsky have starved the Ukrainians and murdered the kulaks?
To Karlin “neocon” is just another memeword like “the feels” or “OMGWTFBBQ.” He doesn’t know a single thing about social science research of accidental Tylenol overdose or James Q. Wilson textbook chapters on the municipal politician’s exploitation of urban crime toward bureaucratic ends. Trying to read through this article makes for a painful tour of the Internet pop-culture IKEA furniture of Karlin’s head; I gather there was some pissing-contest dispute between this Weiss fellow and other new old Russia hands. He done got slanged real bad on the Twitter by MARK AMES! Whooo, can’t ever get enough of that social media conflict… Side B says Side A was unfair to X lobbyist group’s profile in suburban North Virginia, OH NO THEY DI’IN’T
But it’s important to keep all this crap in your head, apparently, unlike the intellectual history of political thought which can be patched in on the fly…. Incidentally “neoconservative” was a term of insult by Michael Harrington against certain of the more doomsaying ex-Stalinists from the God That Failed school. It doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on the all-American Wilsonian/JFK/Scoop Jackson military spending posture, at least not until the late 1980s.
Lyttenburgh 7:54am said:
Hmm, doesn’t quite rise to the level of “argument.” You are engaging in some parodically trite flaming, yes?
There was a pretentious idiot called Stebbing on one of the other threads. Do you see him when you look in a mirror?
“Why does the other side have an endless supply of people like this, and by that I mean effective?”
Sheeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiit, boy!!! You can’t be that naive.
MONEY. They got lots of money. And gift of gab to be sure.
Ideally, the media should be a way of honest journalists to report on what is really happening and for honest critics to speak truth to power(and to the mob).
But the media are not owned by the people. It is owned by the oligarchs. In other words, media is weaponized and serves a certain agenda of those who do the funding and hiring. Also, journalism schools are not taught by honest academics but committed partisans.
They may have academic credentials but they lack integrity. Consider Victor Navasky who teaches or taught journalism at Columbia. I’m sure he has academic credentials but he’s been a player willing to use any amount of lies to push an agenda.
https://newrepublic.com/article/61271/red-dusk
“I wonder what the folks around The Nation were feeling when their underlying sense of postwar America essentially collapsed last week. And what Victor Navasky, its pater familias, is feeling, too. He has been the cheerleader of the ‘everybody was innocent’ school in American sentimental thought about communism and its fellow-travelers. Hiss was innocent. The Rosenbergs were innocent. It was all a search for witches, as Arthur Miller tried to tell us in The Crucible. Except that there were no witches in seventeenth-century New England, not even in Salem. But there were communists who were disloyal to their country and communist spies who acted against their country.”
Media are weaponized instruments. They are not critics of the power but instruments of the power. This is nothing new, but the problem may be bigger than ever because there is such an ethno-monopoly of the media. It is mostly Zio-Homo-Globalist.
So, people like Weiss is a hitman. Now, Russian media are the same way, but I would side with them(for now) because they are on the defensive from the massive Western Propaganda barrage of epic proportions of mendacity. Also, most of the war-mongering since the end of Cold War has been pushed by the West.
The Serbian War was a key conflict. While US war on Serbia had some moral legitimacy, it was essentially a ruse to prep and justify FUTURE American military ventures, especially in the Middle East. By preventing the ‘genocide of Muslims’ in Bosnia, the US military would (1) gain moral credit as friend of Muslims and (2) promote of human rights around the world.
This would make future wars on Iraq and other Muslim nations more palatable since US has demonstrated that it (1) saved Muslims in Bosnia and (2) is deeply committed to ‘human rights’.
Now, US war in Serbia did have some positive outcomes, but the Neocons who pushed weren’t merely using it as prelude to future ventures in the Middle East.
The fact is, due to Clash of Civilizations scenario, US needed a positive image to the Muslim world. Since US ‘saved’ Muslims in Bosnia, it could portray its wars in the Middle East and North Africa the same way: To Save People from Tyranny.
The golden age of media and free speech in this country was in the 60s and 70s. The Old power of wasps and social conservatism were slipping, and new powers(especially Jewish, black, and homo) were coming into being. But the Old power was still around, and the New had yet to take total power. So, there was a tumultuous compromise that allowed all sides to say their fill(even if some sides were favored). This was a time when ACLU even defended far right types in name of free speech. This was a time when Pat Buchanan hit hard in his mass-syndicated columns and when Liberal pundits fired back.
But as Old Power and Old Values slipped, and the media and narrative totally fell into hands of Zio(and then Homo) globalists and PC totally eradicated Old Values, there was only one narrative. Even elements of ACLU came around to pushing ‘hate speech’ policies. Consider how colleges used to be for ‘free speech’ but are now about ‘trigger warnings’.
The media are now so weaponized. Putin saw this in Russia. There was so much talk of how the fall of commie state media would lead to freedom of speech in Russia. But all the media were bought up by globo-oligarchs and only one narrative was pushed in Russia while gangsters allied with oligarchs shut down, bullied, and even killed dissenting voices.
So, Putin took over the media and weaponized it for his purposes. Not ideal but, for the time, necessary cuz loss of state control will mean Russia media will just be the weapons of people like Soros.
The following experiment would be nice:
Suppose some super-rich guy decided to fund something called the People’s Media Network. It would represent Americans proportionally. So, if blacks are 13% of the population, 13% of shows and journalists would be black. And if Asians would be 5% of the voices on the network. And if Hispanics are 16%, they would hold that proportion. Since Jews are 2% of the population, they would make up 2% of the journalists and staff. And since white gentiles are 65% of the population, they would make up that percentage. And so on. And these people would decide on the topics and content of their issues and etc.
And if Libs are 30% of the population, 30% of staff would be libs. And if cons are 30%, they would make up 30%. And if indies are 10%, etc, etc.
Now, I’m not saying this is the ideal way to set up a network, but it would serve as a useful counter to the current media that offers the mirage of Diversity of Views but where the content-makers are almost all part of the Zio-Homo Glob. Puppets are diverse but the puppet-masters are not. Just like Hollywood.
But the People’s Media Network would be proportional at every level.
It would be interesting to see how such a Network can serve as a counter against the current MSM.
When so much of the media are really controlled by Jews are 2% and homos who are 2%, it’d be nice to have a counter-media where all groups of Americans are represented proportionally as content-makers.
Somebody this douchey must have been somebody’s butt-boy.
you sure took him down a notch or two with that blistering quip !!!!!
I don’t know your presidential preferences and I have no interest in reading your comment history, but are you actually implying that you are supporting the old criminal hag who literally took foreign bribes via the Clinton foundation? No rational person , especially on this web site would support her unless they are one of the millions of parasitic voters on which HRC thrives. The old crone’s health is failing anyway.
But you’ve missed the point – the only way the Chinese could become the new elite is if they were worse than the Jews.
By definition, the elite are the worst – most immoral and ruthless – part of any society. Not, as they would like you to think, the most competent.
In America, at IQ 130, whites outnumber Jews 3-1. Jews were simply willing to do things that the old Anglo elite had lost the will to do, and to sacrifice all good things in life to their lust for power, something Anglo elites had once been willing to do but had since lost the desire for. The history of America’s early years, with its awful Robber Barons, shows the Jews are hardly unique.
That’s the thing about wealth and power – it fails to satisfy. Jews today ate beginning to lose their will to power, as they too learn the lesson the old Anglo elite eventually learned.
Who will replace Jews? Those who don’t yet know that power is an empty mirage and, and who are willing to do anything to get it.
By defnition, they will act just like the Jews do today, and like the old Anglo elite did before them, until they too calm down and learn there are better things in life than power.
So it hardly matters who is the elite – Anglos, Jews, Chinese – because every elite is made up of the worst people who just want to exploit everyone else.
Yawn. It gets tiresome.
1) No one was “starving” the Ukrainians.
2) No one was “murdering” the kulaks. They, OTOH, often did that – and got what deserved.
‘We live in the age of Neocon belligerence whose essential goal is the consolidation of the Greater State of Israel.”
Correct. The inevitable next phase will be unraveling of Ziocons’ Oomph! — along with melting of “anti-semitism” nonsense. Considering that the special moral fiber of the state of Israel produced such doctrine as Samson Option, we can be sure that the chosen care not about humanity at large.
“We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force. …We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.” They really do not care.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samson_Option
https://archive.org/details/Sampson_Option
Here is a great example of a ziocon jumping loops and bending over to make a case against Putin and for “continuation” of Russian revolution: http://www.aei.org/publication/even-vladimir-putin-cannot-kill-the-russian-revolution/?
First Mr. Leon Aron informs the readers of the many great things that have happened in Russia AFTER the demise of Yeltsin, but he studiously avoids to mention the person who was in charge of Russia after Yeltsin as if Mr. Aron suffers an age-related amnesia. Then Mr. Aron recalls, suddenly, a bad great wolf that has been destroying the legacy of Yeltsin – the bad, bad Putin. Mr. Aron’ memory gets even better and he produces the names of three bestest Russian revolutionaries, which, for some reason, do not enjoy wide popularity in Russian Federation.
At the conclusion of his article, Mr. Leon Aron turns to the favorite neocons pastime – cheerleading for regime change.
Among Mr. Aron colleagues at American Enterprise Institute are Mrs. Cheney and Mr. Bolton. Perhaps, before blowiating about democracy and the rule of law and such, Mr. Aron should contemplate a bit on how he found himself among cheerleaders for criminal wars of aggression and bloody regime changes.
My understanding is that the peasants crops, especially grain, were expropriated for sale or for the cities and they eere left with insufficient food to keep them alive. Isn’t that starvation)?
Your “understanding” needs, first of all, a grounding in history. But I doubt this happening any time soon, cause that would crash your pet theory
Well tell us all about it Lyle, no famine in the Ukraine?
Now, you are pointing to things in true proportion.
The Left used to complain of the Fat Cats (wealthy), they took over the colleges in violent outbursts over a war none of them went to fight (Vietnam). They hated authority at the colleges. The wanted their unrestricted sexual rights and of course, Feminism plundered the economy and society. All early baby boomers. The Pigs of Woodstock.
Fast forward 40 years, they own the colleges and turned them into profit centers by conning their kids. They have plundered your 401k and Wall Street and the banks several times the past 40 years. They complained of wars and yet no generation ever stirred more wars. They consumed all and then moved the engines of our wealth overseas without a care for what’s left for their children. They dare to lambast the Millennial Generation, yet, they plundered all and left nothing for them. And now? The Left is the new Establishment and a far more sinister Establishment than the one they used to protest. They have corrupted both parties to the point that it matters not who gets elected, the system is far more powerful and unchallenged than any President they direct.
The difference between then and now? Their children, who ought to be marching in the streets for what the Left-Baby Boomers have wrought on the country and world, are distracted by the toys the boomers built. The children are fat and weak and unaware and stupid, they don’t know that none of this is Constitutional or legal because well, the Boomers took that part out of their education from 1-12 and college. Boomers brought them endless war, created enormous divides between the races and invited in 100 million Hispanics and empowered the Blacks to an evil level, even as they build gated communities and wisely stay away from the Blacks themselves. They call all who protest “racist”. And so the kids are stupid and don’t even understand, and they’re damned unlikely to investigate because:Hillary, First Vagina, Obama, First Black in the White House. Both of them complete tools, raining unfettered destruction down on the 95%. And the kids are taught that all speech in protest is hateful and racist. As Eastwood said, the kids that ought to be protesting the theft of their heritage are now The Pussy Generation. With no opposition, the Left plunders all. The Me Generation means to ruin every square inch and every venue and dialog and to consume the last morsel, again, unopposed.
And that, folks is what became of the Left.
Disgusting politics: that’s you looking in the mirror, my non-friend.
A few quotes from various publications on that subject.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu
The proponents of the genocide will of course produce an equal or greater volume of quotes in support of their claim. At this point one has to use his reasoning abilities and decide what are hard facts and what is fiction.
Long lists of rhetorical questions are not really the best way to get your point across.
In the real world, Obama has been in power for 8 years. America’s Syria policy, its Russia policy, its Libya policy don’t have much to do with neocons. Samantha Powers is not a neocon, George Soros is not a neocon. In fact, George Soros was both the main financial backer of the anti Iraq War movement and of anti-Likud NGOs in Israel.
Get out more.
@Gabriel M
Victoria Nuland, the Deputy Secretary of State in charge of the US’ Eurasia (Russia!) policy for the entire span of the Obama regime, is a die hard, Dick Cheney appointed neocon. Samantha Powers may just as well be, as the humanitarian interventionists’ policies align with those of the neocons’ now pretty much across the board. Strange, I thought you were one of the smarter and more well informed commentators here, but this post was rather breathtaking in its ignorance.
Isn’t it interesting the parallels with Weimar Republic, showing the mostly circular nature of history — the real advantage in studying history, perhaps, is to learn from mistakes previously made.
Charles Lindbergh had it right — America First!
“America’s Syria policy, its Russia policy, its Libya policy don’t have much to do with neocons.”
Would you prefer the name “ziocons” over “neocons?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2oFkmcZt4OQ
Yep, Powers, Ziocon extraordinaire.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-08-20/leaked-memo-proves-soros-ruled-ukraine-2014-minutes-%E2%80%9Cbreakfast-us-ambassador-pyatt%E2%80%9D
Soros, diehard neocon always thinking about a Greater Israel.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/105814/soros-plot-topple-netanyahu-daniel-greenfield
Yeesh.
Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the United Nations “accused the world body of harboring a bias against Israel, while speaking in Tel Aviv….”
http://www.timesofisrael.com/in-tel-aviv-us-envoy-skewers-un-for-anti-israel-bias/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
And here is something to contemplate on the obscenity of foreign influence on the US policies: extracting money from the US taxpayers for the benefit of Israel, in contravention of the US law.
https://www.rt.com/usa/356079-us-government-sued-aid-israel/
The US State Department [Clinton] “unlawfully conspired to codify ‘nuclear ambiguity’ through a secret gag law targeting any US federal government employee or contractor from publicly communicating about Israel’s nuclear weapons program under threat of immediate employment loss, fines and imprisonment.”
Yes, the US government is infested with ziocons-on-payroll. Otherwise, why do Obama & Clinton punish the US citizens for following the US law when that law is inconvenient for Israel?
that’s not because of Netanyahu’s security or foreign -policy you cretin. Soros is the biggest neo-con vermin thug around.
Anyway, 80% of these pro-Nato, neocons were CND member,Marxists 20,30 or 40 years ago. Your posts literally dont make sense
What literally doesn’t make sense is to claim that George Soros is a neocon. There’s really no further proof required for my original contention that the word is being thrown about here in a way that has no coherent meaning whatsoever.
George Soros
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/12/the-bubble-of-american-supremacy/302851/
You may as well say the people pictured here, almost certainly funded by Soros, are neocons.
http://www.zombietime.com/sf_rally_september_24_2005/bds/
Gabriel,
That nonsense that this POS Soros wrote ( or his publicist did) confirms what I was thinking. All he is doing is promoting the Democratic Party, to which he donates billions, by attacking Bush the Republican, using projection. The actual topic of the welllbeing of Iraqi’s is immaterial to him. Show me where he says a similar thing about the Yugoslavia intervention? It is just straightforward politicking. He doesn’t repudiate doing anything by Proxy as the US have done for years and will continue to do…or the stealth operations in Ukraine that this tramp is a part of . Whether he does it for reasons of American hedgemony, the pigs own megalomania ….or simple bitter and twisted Russophobia…doesn’t matter so much…..it is still neo-conservatism.
I don’t blame you for writing what you did….but this looks naive.
The word neoconservatism as used by you has no intelligible meaning whatsoever. Since you apparently want to indicate the support of a global empire of democracies with the U.S. as the lead power, I have already suggested a better word for you “centrist”. Neoconservatives are a particular faction of centrists whose signature policy, namely the Iraq war, is generally recognized to have been a failure. By labelling all centrists as “neocons”, you not only commit the fallacy of equating the part with the whole, whilst making yourself look silly, you blind yourself to the scale of the problem.
You talk about Iraq being their signature policy but don’t include the multitude of proxy wars over the decades that are a staple diet of American Foreign Policy……neo-con policy.
Americans bleat about Vietnam but their protesting and their media work was basically non-existant for all the proxy wars America was involved in at the same time…..that were just as violent
What is the scumbag Soros’s view on the US made Soviet-Afghan War and the US support for jihadists?
You don’t seem to understand my point, which, to be frank, I have made perfectly clear now more than once. The word “neocon” as you are using it has no more meaning here than “papist” in seventeenth century England. By comparison, Karlin is a paragon of precision.