Prologue

I want to start by saying that the lack of comments on the forum really hit me because I need feedback on what I write. To tell you the truth, writing the post itself was not the most enjoyable part for me. What I enjoyed most was being able to wrestle with ideas and debate my views with other people. Writing a post without comments is like giving a lecture without a Q&A session. I don’t think I know everything, and The Duran community has taught me so much through debating my ideas. I really miss that. Since I don’t know everything, being able to debate with smart, knowledgeable people was one of the most enjoyable things in my life. I love debates and intellectual wrestling — a clash of ideas. I really wish there were a Duran Discord server where people could debate their ideas without being afraid of being banned or silenced. Before comments were removed, this forum felt like such a place to me.

However, I also want to defend The Duran’s decision. It is easy for me to say that they should not have removed the comments, but we need to take into consideration that I didn’t build this platform or community. It is easy for me to say that they should risk everything because I believe it is the right thing to do. Think about how you watch The Duran’s programs, or the programs featuring Alex and Alexander, when certain topics are treated as “thought crimes.” For example, someone on their program recently mentioned an aircraft being shot down—I think it was the one over Ukraine—and Alexander told the guests not to discuss it because they could get into trouble. This is the “mind prison of respectability” I have written about.

Another thing is that I have so much to write and say, and I can connect. I always have to leave things out so that the post does not turn into a book. Having comments allowed me to expand on my thoughts and explain things further.

When I tell people that I write often, they ask whether I get paid for it. The truth is that, as much as I would love to be paid for writing, doing so would mean I wouldn’t have to work a full-time job and would have more time to write. On the other hand, if I were paid to write, I might not be able to express whatever I think if my livelihood depended on the acceptability of what I wrote. That is connected to respectability. I have written many times that I don’t care about respectability, money, or recognition. The only things I care about are finding the truth and understanding the real world. The only way to fix this fucked-up, evil world is to expose its lies and understand how the world really works. If I don’t understand what is really happening, how can I fix it?

Let’s start the post

I really like the channel “Neutrality Studies.” I recently found a very good video from the channel featuring D. Gibbs and Col. L. Wilkerson. D. Gibbs asks Col. L. Wilkerson, whom I greatly respect, some interesting questions. I highly recommend it.

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SIDENOTE

Now I can show you what I mean when I say I have so much to write and say. I was going to write a post about Jeffrey Sachs, whom I have criticized a few times.

In a post such as this one:

My depression, Poland, the war in Ukraine, Radosław Sikorski, and the Yankees vs. Cowboys—i.e., Globalists vs. Neocons. “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland.” – Halford John Mackinder

I have written:

After this, Poland was plundered and destroyed by neoliberal “shock therapy” imposed by Jeffrey Sachs, whom Michael Hudson aptly called the “Butcher of Yugoslavia.”

I wanted to use this video of Mike Benz:

3:31

This is exactly the universities, the CIA, and confessions of an economic hitman. This is the role that Jeffrey Sachs played when he was at the economics department at Harvard in Colombia when Ukraine would bring him over — and meanwhile, the professor has a covert security clearance and is working with the Central Intelligence Agency and working with the State Department.

22:14

Now, Jeffrey Sachs is a much more complicated figure these days because he turned against the blob over the Russia-Ukraine war. He's on his John Perkins arc right now.

For those who don’t know who John Perkins is, here is my post, which includes a video featuring him.

John Perkins “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” Extended Interview 2008

27:06

But let's just keep going.

Jeffrey Sachs: because I'm pretty good at that.

Without a doubt. Look what you did to Russia, bro. Come on, man. And I like Jeffrey Sachs, I think he's a complicated figure. I think he's gone through — I think in his latest arc, I'm kind of cool, but you know what you did, bro? We sent over the "Harvard Boys" to Russia. You crashed the Russian economy.

In a way, Jeffrey Sachs caused this war with Russia that we're currently in because when Russia had the ability - when Russia had the willingness and ability to ally itself with the West and it trusted Jeffrey Sachs to handle its economy—the Harvard Boys looted it. They set the Russian economy on fire and stole everything.

And that made Russia very angry. They elected Putin. And Putin went about trying to get Russian sovereignty back after feeling like they had been betrayed by Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard Boys, USAID, and the US State Department.

And I wonder if that's part of Jeffrey Sachs's turn against the blob when the war broke out where he's like, "Okay, I've just done so much of these operations over the years. I cannot be responsible for World War III. Here's what really happened." That's basically what he's been saying.

I don’t fully agree with Mike here. Mike says that Jeffrey Sachs is explaining “what really happened,” but I don’t think that is true. Sachs is not telling the whole story, and I believe he is trying to whitewash his own role. That is why I call Jeffrey Sachs the “Butcher of Yugoslavia,” as Michael Hudson aptly called him. I believe I understand what Sachs did in Yugoslavia and Russia, and, most importantly to me, in Poland, my own country. I included this section to highlight the difference between people like John Perkins and Col. L. Wilkerson, whom I respect, and Jeffrey Sachs, whom I do not.

Both John Perkins and Col. L. Wilkerson admit to their wrongdoing. In his work, Perkins says that he did bad things, and Col. L. Wilkerson has done the same.

Here you got example:

0:41

Host: Colonel Larry, a pleasure, my dear friend. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for accommodating my schedule. Was Dick Cheney a war criminal?

Larry Wilkerson: Yes, no question about it. So was George W. Bush. Matter of fact, as I said to one interviewer this morning, so was I. But I'm so low down the chain — we don't ever do accountability in the empire — they'd probably never get to me.

In my opinion, this difference is important. As I have written before, I could begin to respect Jeffrey Sachs if he admitted that he played a harmful role in Yugoslavia, Poland, Russia, and elsewhere, and acknowledged that he had done bad things. So far, I believe he presents himself as telling the truth while engaging in a limited hangout.

A limited hangout is a public relations and espionage strategy where an organization or government admits to a portion of a damaging truth only after a cover-up fails, while hiding the most crucial and incriminating details.

I believe Jeffrey Sachs is telling half-truths through a limited hangout to conceal the most crucial and incriminating details of his wrongdoing. John Perkins and Col. L. Wilkerson, by contrast, tell the truth even when it incriminates himself. I will never respect someone who, in my view, uses a limited hangout on me the way Jeffrey Sachs does.

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This sidenote, which is almost a little post in itself, is just an example of how much I have to leave out of my posts to keep them from becoming too long. Comments allowed me to develop my thoughts and expand on things like this that I would normally have to leave out. I have so much to say, and I could connect so many things but writing them all would turn every post into a book. Being able to extend my thought process and explain what I wanted to say by responding to comments was a wonderful thing.

Now back to the topic of this post

I would like to discuss recent events and interpret them through my mental model, although most of my posts are more abstract. In those posts, I focus on the bigger picture rather than interpreting individual events because I want people to understand the underlying mechanisms that shape what happens. I want people to understand those mechanisms instead of simply being told what is happening and having to accept it. People are capable of understanding events for themselves if they understand how these mechanisms work.

The main video in this post features Prof. D. Gibbs, whom I like. I thought the question he asked Col. L. Wilkerson was close to the kind of question I would ask and to the ideas on which my mental model is based. However, I would take the argument further, which I won’t explain here because this post would become too long.

Now what I would like to highlight from this program with Prof. D. Gibbs' part about Pearl Harbor and 9/11.

34:39

So, you think that it would have — you think the war in Iraq would have happened if 9/11 didn't happen?

I think they needed a pretext. I don't think they could have done it without a pretext. They would have had to have some justification. Maybe they would have found some other justification. I think the best case against 9/11 being a false flag is probably that it would require the Bush administration to have been extremely competent at something.

But to the point that I would like to raise: you mentioned a lot about how there is this multi-decade obsession with a "Pearl Harbor moment," and this is kind of, you know, the way to get people on board with a project that they otherwise wouldn't be. Because there is this scare term used in American foreign policy constantly, which is called "isolationism" — this thing that arguably historically never actually existed, and is mostly just an interpretation of a lot of public commentary in the interwar era.

And to me, what's really interesting is that the American public was very, very bellicose in the Spanish-American War and World War I in many ways. But the so-called isolationist moment really was a reaction to World War I, and how they had been lied to, and how the worst crackdown on civil liberties that had ever happened—possibly even to this day — under the Wilson administration going after Fighting Bob La Follette, the incarceration of Eugene Debs, and these things, you know, actually really soured people on the global crusade.

When World War II happened and it came to the United States via Pearl Harbor, our mythology, at least it seems to me, has been that everyone united, everyone was on board — you know, "This is our grand crusade for democracy." But when you actually look at the historical sources — and you know, you're a history professor, so what I want to hear from you is the documents you've come across about this — I've come across many sources that say the public was far less bellicose and far more grim about World War II than they were about World War I, having been kind of soured on this. There was a lot of draft dodging — more than in the First World War. There was a lot of suspicion. The big theory at the time was that the British had engineered everything to get the US involved in the war.

So, what are the things you've come across to show you kind of the—it's not that it's wrong per se, but the exaggerations of the kind of "noble World War II" narrative in American foreign policy history?

Well, I think that I will say I do hold to the conventional view that World War II was the "last good war" in a certain sense of the term. On the other hand, there's no doubt the public was very reluctant to get involved, and Roosevelt was clearly very eager to get involved. In my view, he got lucky at Pearl Harbor, and he got the pretext he needed to get involved in war. But there's no doubt Roosevelt... wait, Roosevelt wanted to get involved in war.

It does definitely demonstrate the US public is not eager to get involved in war. I think they often have to be dragged into war — dragging and, you know, yelling and screaming, shall we say. And they need a pretext, and the pretext of Pearl Harbor was an excellent pretext. I think it really was authentically not something that was orchestrated by the United States. I don't find that credible — losing one specific fleet just seems to be an unlikely deliberate act in my view.

This is where I became disappointed. After hearing him say that, I would like him to respond to this video, which I have used many times. I know it is only one video, and, ironically, the quality is not very good. But, just like the video of Condoleezza Rice speaking frankly about the war against Russia — which is also, curiously, in poor quality — this seems to be one of those moments when people say something they should not have said aloud.

I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough, and it’s very hard for me to see how the United States president can get us to war with Iran. This leads me to conclude that if, in fact, compromise isn’t happening, then the traditional way America gets to war is what would be best for U.S. interests.

Some people might think Mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us into World War II; as mentioned, you may recall we had to wait for Pearl Harbor. Some people might think Mr. Wilson wanted to get us into World War I; you may recall he had to wait for the Lusitania episode. Some people might think that Mr. Johnson wanted to send troops to Vietnam; you may recall they had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin episode. We didn’t go to war with Spain until the USS Maine exploded. And may I point out that Mr. Lincoln did not feel he could call out the federal army until Fort Sumter was attacked, which is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which the South Carolinians had said would cause an attack.

So if, in fact, the Iranians aren’t going to compromise, it would be best if somebody else started the war. -Patrick Clawson

According to Wikipedia, Patrick Clawson is an American economist and Middle East scholar. He is currently the director of research at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and a senior editor of Middle East Quarterly.

So he is not just an unknown person like me saying something I have been saying for a long time — something that contradicts what Prof. D. Gibbs said. This video of Patrick Clawson comes from The Washington Institute Policy Forum luncheon, “How to Build U.S.-Israeli Coordination on Preventing an Iranian Nuclear Breakout,” held on September 21, 2012. This was not a skit in a bar, nor was the audience made up of random people. I would like you to listen to the audience’s reaction to Clawson’s remarks. You can see their smirks and hear their laughter. In my interpretation, they are not laughing because he said something stupid, but because he said something that should not be said aloud—a truth they already know and understand, but that people like Prof. D. Gibbs do not understand.

Prof. D. Gibbs believes in what he calls the “conventional view” of World War II, which I see as a naive narrative shaped by the need to maintain respectability. Yet the reaction to Clawson’s remarks suggests to me that Clawson and people at The Washington Institute Policy Forum do not share that same conventional view. I interpret their laughter as being directed at people like Prof. D. Gibbs, who hold on to that view because they care about their respectability.

So if you share Prof. D. Gibbs’s “conventional view” of World War II, I want you to know that, in my interpretation, people at The Washington Institute Policy Forum — including people like Patrick Clawson — are laughing at your naivety. This is why I call this the “world of the naive.” People like Prof. D. Gibbs are not stupid; I believe they are trapped in a mental prison created by their need for respectability. That need creates a kind of thought crime: certain ideas cannot be expressed because doing so might cost someone their respectability.

It is not that I am smarter than other people. I simply don’t care about respectability, and so I do not feel as constrained by these unspoken rules. I am nobody, and that gives me a kind of freedom. That is why I often call myself a nobody and a loser; I do not mean it as an insult. If I already call myself a loser and think of myself that way, why should it matter if other people think I am one because I say something they disagree with?

Here again, I have strayed into psychology, and I could write an entire post about it. There is a great philosophical video that contains a passage I find especially meaningful.

 

Dostoevsky distinguishes between two types of men: the man of action and the man of acute consciousness. The Underground Man is extremely envious of the man of action, he who lives life without ruminating too much on his thoughts. He has a lower intellectual capacity that frees him from the questions and torments of one’s consciousness, while the Underground Man is paralysed by his thoughts.

Dostoevsky gives us an analogy with the Stone Wall, which represents scientific determinism. One has to accept these laws as the truth without questioning them. Two times two makes four and anyone who says otherwise is foolish. This represents a barrier to one’s free will.

When faced with revenge, the man of action dashes straight for his object like an infuriated bull with its horns down, for he seeks justice. But when he stumbles upon the stone wall, he is genuinely surprised and unable to speak – the wall is not an evasion, it is simply what renders his activity impossible.

The Underground Man, on the other hand, tries to come up with all sorts of tricks, and instead of admitting defeat and turning around, he smashes his head against the wall, while knowing the futility of his actions.

“Of course I cannot break through the wall by battering my head against it if I really have not the strength to knock it down, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is a stone wall and I have not the strength. As though such a wall really were a consolation…”

Every course of action seems insufficient and so he is paralysed, or as Dostoevsky puts it, he finds himself stuck in a state of inertia, only able to think but unable to act. He suffers the greatest ailment of all, consciousness. To think too much is a disease. This best describes the Underground Man’s state of mind, he is stuck in his own reflective hyperconsciousness, thus creating a greater accumulation of spite than in the man of action. The result is that the intellectual is unable to do anything and is thus characterless. He writes:

“I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.”

He is aware of his flaws, while the man of action is content in his foolishness and believes that he is great. The Underground Man finds solace as he is smarter than all of the people he meets but socially they are all well above him. His vanity convinces him of his own intellectual superiority and he despises everybody; but when he realises that he cannot rest without their recognition of his superiority, he hates others for their indifference and falls into self-loathing at his own humiliating dependence.

The Underground Man considers the man of action as the real normal man, while he sees himself as a product born out of a test tube. He calls himself a mouse, though nobody tells him he is one, it is as if he has constructed a hell out of his own internal ruminations.

I once wrote:

For me it’s 

Of course I cannot find the truth by contemplation if I really do not have the intellect to know it, but I am not going to be reconciled to it simply because it is an unreachable truth and I do not have enough intellect to know it. As though such an unknowable truth was really a consolation…

At the time, I was still focused on understanding the human mind, philosophy, psychology, and behaviorism. But this passage:

I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.

This passage describes me very well, and I agree with it. If becoming somebody means that I have to accept bullshit, then f**k it. I used to be spiteful and angry, but as I came to understand the human mind more fully, I began to see that it is not necessarily people’s fault.

Each individual…has a share in numerous group minds – those of his race, of his class, of his creed, of his nationality, etc. – and he can also raise himself above them to the extent of having a scrap of independence and originality.

– Group Psychology and The Analysis of the Ego, Sigmund Freud

The first step toward becoming free is understanding that your thoughts are not entirely your own. We are human, and we can raise ourselves above group minds only to the extent that we manage to develop a small measure of independence and originality.

Experts in ancient Greek culture say that people back then didn’t see their thoughts as belonging to them. When ancient Greeks had a thought, it occurred to them as a god or goddess giving an order. Apollo was telling them to be brave. Athena was telling them to fall in love.

Now people hear a commercial for sour cream potato chips and rush out to buy, but now they call this free will.

At least the ancient Greeks were being honest.

― Chuck Palahniuk,

I see people in the West who are fully convinced that propaganda and advertising do not affect them and that their thoughts are entirely their own. I believe this, too, is a form of mental prison. I have strayed a little into psychology, but it is all connected. Now I will return to geopolitics.

ZEITGEIST

My friend described ZEITGEIST as a form of mental sickness that makes people sick, and said that the film is not truthful. I know that its first section, about religion, contains errors, and I am sure other sections do as well. However, it also contains some interesting claims that I believe are true. I would like to focus on Part 3 of ZEITGEIST.

1:33:06

World War II: On December 7th, 1941, Japan attacked the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, triggering U.S. entry into that war. President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared the attack was "a day that will live in infamy" — a day of infamy indeed, but not because of the alleged surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

After 60 years of surfacing information, it is now clear that not only was the attack known well in advance, it was outright wanted and provoked. In a journal entry by Roosevelt's Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, dated November 25th, 1941, he documented a conversation he had with Roosevelt: "The question was how we should maneuver them into firing the first shot." In congressional testimony later, he added it was desirable to make sure the Japanese be the ones to do this, so that there should remain no doubt as to who were the aggressors.

In the months leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt had done almost everything in his power to anger the Japanese, showing a posture of aggression:

• He halted all of Japan's imports of American petroleum.
• He froze all Japanese assets in the United States.
• He made public loans to Nationalist China and supplied military aid to the British (both enemies of Japan in the war), which, by the way, was in complete violation of international war rules.

With numerous Japanese codes broken in advance revealing the plan to attack on December 7th, 1941, Japan was allowed to attack Pearl Harbor, killing 2,400 soldiers.

Before Pearl Harbor, 83% of the American public wanted nothing to do with the war. After Pearl Harbor, one million men volunteered.

Now, that’s a conspiracy theory, right? Thanks to members of The Duran community, I discovered the channel “Tales of the American Empire,” which is shared on The Duran forum and which I highly recommend. That led me to the BBC documentary Sacrifice at Pearl Harbor, made in 1989.

6:48

Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. It will be recorded that the distance of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago."

On December 8th, 1941, the United States of America declared war on Japan. Three days later, Germany and Italy in turn declared war on the United States. Winston Churchill, when he heard of America's decision, later admitted: "Satiated with emotion, I went to bed and slept the sleep of the thankful and the saved."

For nearly 50 years, one question has been repeatedly asked: Did Roosevelt allow Pearl Harbor to happen so that the surprise attack would give him the excuse to take America into the Second World War?

The new evidence that has come to light strongly suggests that he did. It is now clear that Roosevelt and his advisers knew far more than was openly admitted at any of the nine separate inquiries into the attack.

William Casey, a former director of the CIA, was in a position to testify where some of that information came from. In his book, Casey says quite openly that the British told the Americans that a Japanese fleet was heading east across the Pacific towards Hawaii. It is now known that Churchill used this intelligence to give British commanders in the Far East early warning of the imminence of a Japanese attack. But no similar warnings were ever sent from Roosevelt to the American commanders in the Pacific.

This fact alone suggests a degree of culpability on the part of the president that cannot have been so strongly argued before now.

Again, this is not the supposedly conspiratorial film ZEITGEIST; it is an official BBC documentary made in 1989.

By the way, doesn’t the account of the British informing Roosevelt about the Pearl Harbor attack sound similar to the warning Benjamin Milikowsky Netanyahu reportedly received about the October 7 attacks?

People do not know the real history, and that is why they allow history to repeat itself. In a recent post, I wrote that this history can be traced back to the USS Maine, which I described as the first false flag. Patrick Clawson traced the pattern back to Fort Sumter and the American Civil War. I do not know enough about that period to comment on it. I am more focused on the First and Second World Wars, especially the Second World War and what happened after it, because I believe that was when our current “world of the naive” — the narrative we live in — was created.

I would really wish Prof. D. Gibbs could respond to this. I would like to see his response to the fact that his “conventional view that World War II” is contradicted not only by conspiratorial movies like ZEITGEIST but also by official BBC documentaries as well as The Washington Institute Policy Forum and people like Patrick Clawson. While if you ask them official they will tell you “conventional view that World War II” is true but as we see from video with Patrick Clawson and reaction of crowd they are not laughing at him like he is some conspiracy theories they are all laughing at naive people believing “conventional view that World War II” which they know is not true in other word they all laugh at people like Prof. D. Gibbs.

Thank you to everyone who stuck with me until the end of this post. And, as always…

 

“Knowledge will make you free.”

— Socrates

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“Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.”

— Richard P. Feynman

=

“Freedom is not free; you need to pay attention.”

— Grzegorz Ochman

 

Please pay attention, or we will all be screwed. God bless you all.

 

“In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching — these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren…Twenty-seven years later, in this third quarter of the twentieth century A.D., and long before the end of the first century A.F., I feel a good deal less optimistic than I did when I was writing Brave New World. The prophecies made in 1931 are coming true much sooner than I thought they would… The nightmare of total organization…has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.”

— Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited

 

“Now that we know how positive reinforcement works, and why negative doesn’t, we can be more deliberate and hence more successful, in our cultural design. We can achieve a sort of control under which the controlled, though they are following a code much more scrupulously than was ever the case under the old system, nevertheless feel free. They are doing what they want to do, not what they are forced to do. That’s the source of the tremendous power of positive reinforcement—there’s no restraint and no revolt. By a careful design, we control not the final behavior, but the inclination to behave—the motives, the desires, the wishes. The curious thing is that in that case the question of freedom never arises.”

— B.F. Skinner, Walden Two

 

“Behavioral science is clearly moving forward; the increasing power for control which it gives will be held by some one or some group; such an individual or group will surely choose the purposes or goals to be achieved; and most of us will then be increasingly controlled by means so subtle we will not even be aware of them as controls. Thus whether a council of wise psychologists (if this is not a contradiction in terms) or a Stalin or a Big Brother has the power, and whether the goal is happiness, or productivity, or resolution of the Oedipus complex, or submission, or love of Big Brother, we will inevitably find ourselves moving toward the chosen goal, and probably thinking that we ourselves desire it. Thus if this line of reasoning is correct, it appears that some form of completely controlled society—a Walden Two or a 1984—is coming. The fact that it would surely arrive piecemeal rather than all at once, does not greatly change the fundamental issues. Man and his behavior would become a planned product of a scientific society.”

—Carl Rogers, On Becoming a Person

 

“When I was young, I forgot how to laugh in the cave of Trophonius; when I was older, I opened my eyes and beheld reality, at which I began to laugh, and since then, I have not stopped laughing. I saw that the meaning of life was to secure a livelihood, and that its goal was to attain a high position; that love’s rich dream was marriage with an heiress; that friendship’s blessing was help in financial difficulties; that wisdom was what the majority assumed it to be; that enthusiasm consisted in making a speech; that it was courage to risk the loss of ten dollars; that kindness consisted in saying, “You are welcome,” at the dinner table; that piety consisted in going to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed.”

― Søren Kierkegaard