Bleeding Edge

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.”
~ Noam Chomsky

This was evidenced recently on a recent 60 Minutes interview with Norah O’Donnell which focused on the Biden administration’s China policy, US Secretary of State Tony Blinken talked about the United States as a defender of the rules-based international order and the importance of bringing Beijing into compliance with it, by stating that: “Our purpose is not to contain China, to hold it back, to keep it down, but rather is to uphold this rules-based order that China is posing a challenge to.”

Blinken said. “Anyone who poses a challenge to that order, we’re going to stand up and defend it.”

Blinken was not speaking about specific ways of defending “the rules-based order” while trying to contain China when he was talking to Norah O’Donnell: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/6in8fx1Tc38?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Some of O’Donnell’s interview questions with Secretary Blinken are following herewith:

“I know you say the goal is not to contain China, but have you ever seen China be so assertive or aggressive militarily?”

“Do you think we’re heading toward some sort of military confrontation with China?”

“Let’s talk about human rights.  Describe what you see is happening in Xinjiang that maybe the rest of the world doesn’t.”

“If Xinjiang isn’t a red line with China, then what is?”

“The Chinese have stolen hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars of trade secrets and intellectual property from the United States.  That sounds like the actions of an enemy.”

“And so did President Biden tell President Xi to cut it out?”

“China thinks long term, strategically, decades in advance.  Is America just caught up on the latest fires here and there, and we’re not thinking long term, strategically, and as a result, China will surpass us?”

“What is the administration going to do about Hong Kong?”

“Then why not boycott the 2022 Olympics in Beijing?”

Here it is: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/ib2AdrfrxZQ?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

Blinken confronted the Chinese government’s Xinjiang “genocide” campaign and the fact that China acting “so aggressive militarily” — and then Secretary Blinken was asked by O’Donnell about what measures can be taken to move away from this dangerous trajectory in pursuit of detente…

In fact, as the US during the last cold war engaged with the old Soviet Union, the promise of a mutually assured destruction [M.A.D.] became a mainstream point of view and that is why the idea of DETENTE was embraced by both Democrats & Republicans alike … simply because they wanted to avoid going M.A.D.

Yet, in this dangerous new multifrontal cold war, this idea of going M.A.D. has gone completely missing, and consequently the word DETENTE has also gone missing.

Well, you might see occasionally the word DETENTE appear — but almost never in regards to the two powerful nuclear-armed nations where it matters the most today…

As a matter of fact, a recent Guardian article talks of potential detente between Syria and Saudi Arabia…

And a Reuters piece three weeks ago, referred to detente between the US and Iran.

Subsequently, a Wall Street Journal article spoke of detente between the US and North Korea.

Yet any more recent usage of the word DETENTE is entirely missing from the widely circulated news & mass media. 

Seems to me that the concept of DETENTE doesn’t even exist amongst the officialdom of Washington DC today because the Senior people who had worked in the SALT treaties of the bygone era of Sanity and Reason are all gone for good…

And even amongst the current Politicos of our State Department, who tread water without the benefit of institutional memory, and even those high up amidst the cognoscenti of the current administration, all seem to have forgotten the word DETENTE and therefore today this is not considered as an option.

Indeed people in power, policymakers, lawmakers, legislators, Pentagon hawks and doves, as well as everyday working journalists are purposeful in their ignorance of DETENTE as an option, and that makes one suspicious of the old conspiracy of the game of blindness, deafness & silence of the three monkeys.

And I see this scenario play out also in the high level conversations and national security conference debates we all engage in from day to day, when people who defend the reckless cold war escalations by the United States against Moscow and generally speak as though they haven’t ever heard of, and certainly have not even considered the possibility that detente could occur — spout massively erudite yet foolish statements about containment and triangulation like a new dominoes theory by the NeoCons led to the river by one pied piper known alternatively as Nixon’s alter ego — AKA Mr kiss-in-ger.

Many highly acclaimed journalists don’t even know the word DETENTE exists, or what it might even mean, and they might find themselves utterly surprised, should they ever run onto it headlong in an intellectual tumble outside of their holding pen for errant children…

Obviously all the merchants of “sham” and NeoCon bollocks — simply assume that the only option on the table is increasingly confrontational cold war escalations, and don’t even have a conceptual framework in place for considering any alternative, not that they are allowed to know that such an alternative exists.

That’s how extensively the possibility of peace with Russia and China has been hidden from your attention chamber by the merchants of sham reality: https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/jj1pTdgCPhY?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

And one gets the sense that this is entirely by design, same as earlier manipulations by the mass media and the attention getters of our propaganda machine as seen in the earlier Red Scare of Russiagate and beyond.

Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in seriously synergistic ways, throughout the country.

Their Russiagate media malpractice, as Stephen Cohen termed it — may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. No mainstream media did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents, the Steele Dossier and the January 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment — but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives.

Little more need be said here about this institutional self-degradation. Glenn Greenwald and a few others followed and exposed it throughout, and now Matt Taibbi has given us a meticulously documented account of that systematic malpractice, concluding that Mueller’s failure to confirm the media’s Russiagate allegations “is a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media.”

“I think this is the most dangerous moment in American-Russian relations, at least since the Cuban missile crisis,” Stephen Cohen told Democracy Now in 2017.

“And arguably, it’s more dangerous, because it’s more complex. Therefore, we — and then, meanwhile, we have in Washington these — and, in my judgment, factless accusations that Trump has somehow been compromised by the Kremlin. So, at this worst moment in American-Russian relations, we have an American president who’s being politically crippled by the worst imaginable — it’s unprecedented. Let’s stop and think. No American president has ever been accused, essentially, of treason. This is what we’re talking about here, or that his associates have committed treason.”

“Imagine, for example, John Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis….”

“Imagine if Kennedy had been accused of being a secret Soviet Kremlin agent. He would have been crippled.

And the only way he could have proved he wasn’t was to have launched a war against the Soviet Union. And at that time, the option was nuclear war.”

Indeed a step into the precipice without the benefit of a parachute…

A crime against Humanity perpetuated by our own journalists and the propaganda merchants. Of course this was this entirely inadvertent nor was it accidental.

On August 8, 2016, the trend-setting New York Times published on its front page an astonishing editorial manifesto by its media critic. Asking whether “normal standards” should apply to candidate Trump, he explained that they should not: “You have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century.”

Let others decide whether this Times proclamation unleashed the highly selective, unbalanced, questionably factual “journalism” that has so degraded Russiagate media or instead the publication sought to justify what was already underway. In either case, this remarkable—and ramifying—Times rejection of its own professed standards should not be forgotten.

Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller’s finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, “have no regrets.”

 Because contrary to a number of major media outlets, from Bloomberg News to The Wall Street Journal, nor does Mueller’s exculpatory finding actually mean that “Russiagate…is dead” and indeed that “it expired in an instant.” Such conclusions reveal a lack of historical and political understanding. Nearly three years of Russia-gate’s toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and again in one form or another.

This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy—damage done not by an alleged “Trump-Putin axis” but by Russsigate’s perpetrators themselves. Having read and carefully examined this collateral damage through the late Stephen Cohen’s books “War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate“– I will only note them here in a summary fashion…

Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin “attacked our elections” and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere — national, state, and local.

If true, or even suspected massive electoral fraud — how can voters have confidence in the electoral foundations of American democracy?

Persistent demands to “secure our elections from hostile powers” — a politically and financially profitable mania — can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process.

Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people?

Defamatory Russsia-gate allegations that Trump was a “Kremlin puppet” and thus “illegitimate” were aimed at the president but hit the presidency itself, degrading the institution, bringing it under suspicion, casting doubt on its legitimacy.

And if an “agent of a hostile foreign power” could occupy the White House once, a “Manchurian candidate,” why not again? Will Republicans be able to resist making such allegations against a future Democratic president? In any event, Hillary Clinton’s failed campaign manager, Robby Mook, has already told us that there will be a “next time.”…

The late Stephen Cohen, renowned scholar and expert on US-Russia relations, who debunked the Russia-gate Neo-McCarthyism and Democrat infused RED SCARE, also reintroduced the word “detente” into the vernacular and as a matter of fact, used it constantly up until his death last year.

Yet as expected — based on the limited allowable discourse theory as expressed by Noam Chomsky: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate” — during the preceding years as things began heating up with Russia, Stephen Cohen had been finding his analysis, articles and opinions; all less and less welcome on the mainstream channels of the mass media empire outlets.

For the same reason Norah O’Donnell only asked Blinken how he was going to escalate aggressions against China, and never asked him how he was going to de-escalate them, because the mainstream media are always keen in keeping the general public ignorant of the existence or even the possibility of, and certainly would never speak of the dire necessity for a new era of DETENTE…

And what that means is simply this: We are meant to take it as God given gospel, that the only option available to all of us, is to continue the increasing aggressions between these two nuclear powers.

And of course, much like Russia-gate, this is an outright naked lie, and the repercussions form it are the same level of insanity that we saw in Dr Strangelove — the pivotal film by Stanley Kubrick that expressed in cinematic form the pure evil of General Curtis LeMay, the Air Force chief of staff, and one of the Pentagon chiefs who wanted to end the whole enchilada during the Cuban missile crisis.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/almost-everything-in-dr-strangelove-was-true

In my mind as well as in the minds of all reasonable people — DETENTE is a viable option, as well as it should because it must absolutely be an option; that is if we want to stop risking all life on earth with this psychotic game of nuclear roulette each and every day, just because a few powerful sociopaths have decided the empire must retain supremacy at all and any costs and now that. they are in power want to use their NeoCon street-cred to launch another World War that will cause the remaining few survivors, to revert back to the Stone Age after the long Nuclear winter.

now, methinks that in light of the present day circumstances and after reviewing all of the available dismal options — there is no valid reason why we cannot engage in a Game of Detente hoping that we can all get along and walk away from Mutually Assured Destruction, [M.A.D.] and then perhaps spend our remaining time in Peace, and our extra frothing energy in collaborating toward mutual human thriving, instead of mutual death.

And of course, as we discussed earlier today — the mainstream mass discourse manufacturers are not even permitting this as a topic of discussion, and that fact alone tells you that they are deliberately hiding it from our awareness in the interests of the powerful elites and the Democratic Neo-Cons who are itching as they aggravate and prepare for a new war because their interests lie with the war profiteers, and not with the average American people, the troops and the innocent Civilians who might die-off by the tens and hundreds of millions and perhaps by the billions…

In fact this word DETENTE is being hidden because the only alternative to attacking and undermining the interests of China and Russia is for the US empire, to relinquish its unipolar domination of the planet and allow other nations to thrive beyond its control.

Yours,

Dr Churchill

PS:

I am often accused of having sinister loyalties to the deep US establishment, or to the Secret Services, or to our Intelligence apparatus, or even to the Kremlin or to the forbidden palace of Beijing and the Communist Party of China — depending on the day and what I happen to be writing about at the time, yet the reality is that I simply do not consent to having my life, the life of everyone I love, and the life of everyone I share this planet with — gambled and thrown away by some idiotic supremacist that serve nobody but themselves.

And because methinks that there is no good reason we can’t lay down our arms, turn them into plowshares, and collaborate with all other nations in friendship, kindness and goodwill.

Ask anyone and they will tell you that all people care for Human Life, for Dignity and the Pursuit of Happiness.

Maybe, because the alternative is pure madness… and even the children know it.