Anders Breivik

Aaron Mate: As Arab states seek peace, US insists that Syrians suffer

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Aaron Mate is a perceptive foreign policy journalist, often appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show discussing Ukraine and other issues. Here he discusses U.S. policy toward Syria, mentioning Israel as a “U.S. proxy” rather than the U.S. as Israel’s proxy in its ongoing war with the Arab world and Iran, as pressured by Israel Lobby, compliant politicians, and the neoconservative infrastructure that dominates U.S. foreign policy—the diplomats, the journalists writing for pro-Israel media, and the staff of prominent foreign policy think tanks.

For example, he mentions Josh Rogin, the presumably Jewish Washington Post columnist, who, “like the neoconservative diplomats he parrots, simply presupposes the US right to dominate their region. Indeed, as Rogin makes clear, for Washington’s Dirty Warriors, ‘stability’ means continuing to suffocate Syria, in a Middle East where Arab states only do what Washington ‘allows.'” He mentions the neocons but doesn’t get into their allegiance to Israel, nor does he discuss the role of the Israel Lobby, pro-Israel policy groups like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy [WINEP], Jews in the media, etc.—although he names a couple figures without identifying them as Jews  or mentioning their history of pro-Israel activism.

It’s also interesting that missing from the rhetoric of the Biden administration and the pro-Israel activist groups is any serious discussion of what U.S. interests are at stake in Syria. Syria’s accepting aid from Russia and Iran is completely understandable given they have been and are faced with a very well funded, U.S.-supported insurrection — any port in a storm. And as usual, we hear moral outrage at unfounded claims that Assad has gassed Syrians.

But times are changing. The China-brokered deal between Iran and the Saudis is a signal that U.S. hegemony is on the wane as the Ukraine war is making new alliances and making countries around the world question whether U.S. military and economic (e.g., the U.S. dollar as reserve currency and its consequent enabling of sanctions] hegemony is still a reality

Excerpts:

As Arab states seek peace, US insists that Syrians suffer

Having spent billions of dollars on a dirty war to overthrow Syria’s government, and then imposed crippling sanctions to prevent the country’s reconstruction, Washington is not pleased with the Arab League’s new expression of independence toward Damascus.

A bipartisan group of lawmakers has responded with a measure that would intensify US sanctions and punish states who engage with Syria any further. “The readmission of Syria to the Arab League really infuriated members and made clear the need to quickly act to send a signal,” a senior Congressional staffer told Reuters. Accordingly, “The legislation is a warning to Turkey and Arab countries that if they engage with Assad’s government, they could face severe consequences.”

Those severe consequences include US sanctions on any country that lets a Syrian airliner land at its airports. Given that Syrian civilians travel on these flights, the bill’s authors effectively seeking a global “Syrian Ban” in the image of Trump’s original “Muslim Ban.” The Congressional measure also calls for a review of “any grants of $50,000 or more to Syria,” — a warning shot to anyone helping Syrians in need. …

Secretary of State Anthony Blinken explained the core sanctions principle in October 2021: “Our position is oppose the reconstruction of Syria.”

US officials apparently see no contradiction in expressing concern for the Syrian people while imposing policies that inflict mass suffering on them. According to the United Nations, Syria’s “economic and humanitarian situation is at its worst since the start of the conflict” in 2011. This includes an “800 per cent rise in food prices since 2020.” As US officials openly brag, US sanctions — particularly under the bipartisan 2019 “Caesar Syria Civilian Protection Act” — have played an instrumental role.

James Jeffrey, the former US envoy to Syria [and with a history of involvement with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the above-mentioned pro-Israel foreign policy forum], writes that the United States has “crushed the country’s economy through sanctions.” The EU and Israel, he boasts, have also pitched in to help “choke the regime’s economy through sanctions, holds on reconstruction assistance, and maritime interdiction” – i.e. seizing and even bombing ships that defy the US-led blockade. These sanctions give the US “considerable influence” in Syria’s future, Jeffrey explains, along with military occupations that have left “30 percent of Syrian territory… controlled by the U.S. and Turkish armies and their Syrian allies.”

Andrew Tabler, another former senior US official for Syria policy [presumably Jewish and, like Jeffrey, associated with WINEP]  likewise boasts that US sanctions have destroyed Syria’s currency, leading to “corresponding cuts in regime subsidies that have exacerbated fuel and food shortages for everyday Syrians.” In welcoming “fuel and food shortages for everyday Syrians,” Tabler is not only making plain the sadism of US policy, but cutting through the propaganda used to justify it. Whereas US officials claim to only target the Syrian “regime,” Tabler is admitting that, in the real world, this means targeting the “regime subsidies” that provide for ordinary civilians’ basic needs.

As another former Syria envoy, Joel Rayburn, explained, US sanctions are able to so freely immiserate Syrians because the Caesar Act managed to “lower the bar” for imposing them. …

In short, US policy is to destroy ever major “sector” of the Syrian economy, regardless of whether or not there is any “evidence to prove” a “link” to its nominal “regime” target. In the name of helping the Syrian people, the US ensures that their economy is besieged, and the rubble of their destroyed buildings and factories left in place.

Ahead of Christmas last year, Rayburn celebrated his success: Syria’s “economy and state are collapsing”, he declared, with “no fuel/electricity”, “basic needs unaffordable,” schools shuttered, and “people desperate.”

As to why US diplomats would hail a country’s torment, they, along with their media allies, are equally candid that Syria’s independent existence is an affront to US hegemony.

According to Jeffrey, allowing an “Iranian and Russian strategic success in Syria, coming on the heels of the Afghan pullout, would endanger the decades-old American regional security system and the general security which it has provided.” The notion that US has provided “general security” to the Middle East happens to be at odds with public opinion there. In annual polls, Arab populations routinely list the US and its proxy Israel [!] as the top threats to their security. But Jeffrey is not concerned with the actual security of the Middle East region; instead, he recognizes that allowing Syria to evade US control would endanger a “decades-old American regional security system” based on US hegemony.

Accordingly, when Arab states increased outreach to Assad in late 2021, Jeffrey complained that “None of them have been told not to” by the US — the region’s real master.

Echoing Jeffrey, Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin declared that the Biden administration “is sorely mistaken if it thinks that allowing regional players to reestablish diplomatic and economic ties with Bashar al-Assad will lead to greater stability.” Rogin does not explain who has granted Washington the authority to “allow” Arab states to have ties with their neighbor. This is presumably because Rogin, like the neoconservative diplomats he parrots, simply presupposes the US right to dominate their region. Indeed, as Rogin makes clear, for Washington’s Dirty Warriors, “stability” means continuing to suffocate Syria, in a Middle East where Arab states only do what Washington “allows.”

Rogin has particular disdain for Jordan’s King Abdullah II. In “leading a rapid regional normalization” of Assad’s government, Rogin fumed, the Jordanian monarch is running “counter to U.S.-Syria policy and counter to U.S. law.” Following Rogin’s logic, Jordan is not allowed to “counter” US policy in its relations with its own neighbors, and “U.S. law” does not just govern U.S. territory, but the Middle East as well.

…

The prevailing US colonialism toward Syria has been abetted by an establishment US media that has gone to extraordinary lengths to normalize it, as the Paper of Record has recently made clear.

In the aftermath of February’s devastating earthquake, the New York Times made the mistake of briefly acknowledging that “Syria is not able to receive direct aid from many countries because of sanctions.” This narrative error was quickly corrected: within one day, the Times erased that wording and replaced it to read that “the Syrian government tightly controls what aid it lets into opposition-held areas.”

Days later, the Times’ Declan Walsh followed up by noting that “the Syrian economy has nose-dived, strained by chronic food and fuel shortages” – not strained, of course, by US sanctions that – as more candid US officials like Jeffrey and Tabler openly admit — have caused those shortages.

The February earthquake posed a particular dilemma for supporters of US sanctions, which hinders Syria’s ability to rebuild. The Times’ Raja Abdulrahim captured this quandary in reporting of concerns from the Syrian opposition that the government may “now funnel money into the country under the guise of earthquake relief and instead use it for reconstruction of buildings damaged in the civil war.” Indeed, for the forces that tried to destroy Syria in one of the most expensive dirty wars in history, it would be unfathomable to allow the government to engage in the “reconstruction of buildings” destroyed in the process. The fact that the Biden administration subsequently allowed a six-month exemption for some humanitarian aid to Syria was a tacit admission that US sanctions explicitly hindered it.

From the US point of view, it is all the more unfathomable to let Syria rebuild given that its resistance to the dirty war was backed by two other Western foes, Iran and Russia. “Syria was one example of the effort by both to find ways to sap American strength and prestige wherever they could in the world,” the Times’ Neil MacFarquhar noted last year. Because these US rivals were able to help “sap American strength and prestige” in Syria, the country’s civilian population must accordingly pay the price.

The current policy of preventing Syria from rebuilding from a war that the US itself fueled reveals a fundamental contradiction that US officials and their media stenographers never acknowledge. Whereas the US claims to be punishing Syria for human rights violations during the war, it is an uncontested fact that the Syrian government was defending its own territory from an insurgency backed by the world’s wealthiest countries and dominated by sectarian death squads, namely Al Qaeda. (Additionally, when the US claims to be holding Syria “accountable” for using chemical weapons, it is never acknowledged that in all major cases, these allegations have been undermined by extensive Western leaks, including from the world’s top chemical watchdog, the OPCW). …

Indeed, the US proxy war in Syria was “one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the C.I.A.,” the New York Times reported in 2017. Documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a budget of nearly $1 billion per year [which should have been counted in U.S. aid for Israel], or around $1 of every $15 in CIA spending. The CIA armed and trained nearly 10,000 insurgents, spending “roughly $100,000 per year for every anti-Assad rebel who has gone through the program,” U.S. officials told the Washington Post in 2015. Two years later, one U.S. official estimated that CIA-funded militias “may have killed or wounded 100,000 Syrian soldiers and their allies over the past four years.” …

Although the CIA’s program has long been shuttered, the guiding sadism prevails. For defending their country from US-backed sectarian mass murderers — and renewing ties in a region that the US has long dominated — the message from Washington is that while Syria’s devastating war has ended, its suffering will not.

Not One of Us: Asne Seierstad’s book on Anders Breivik

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one-us-story-anders-breivik-and-massacre-norwayA Brief Review of: Asne Seierstad, One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway, Translated by Sahar Death (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015).

I recently finished reading One of Us, a book on Anders Breivik by the well-known Norwegian journalist and author Asne Seierstad. The book was published in Norway in 2013. The English language edition was released this spring. July 22nd marks the fourth anniversary of Breivik’s attacks, and the subject is topical due, in part, to the June rampage by Dylann Roof. There are significant similarities and differences between Breivik and Roof.

Everyone recalls the news reports of the 2011 attacks, but this book details Breivik’s life, the events of July 22nd, and his trial the following year. Assuming that Seierstad’s account is accurate — and despite some left-wing bias, it appears to be, this can be said about Breivik:

He was not a National Socialist, nor even a racialist. He supported Israel. He was a cultural Christian. Although he did not have a strong religious faith and rarely went to church, Christianity was important to his identity. He was anti-Islam. He considered himself a revolutionary conservative and an intellectual, not a warrior.

Read more

White Ethnocentrism as Psychopathology: Anders Breivik and Emma West

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A major theme of The Culture of Critique is that several Jewish-dominated intellectual movements developed theories in which ethnocentrism by Whites (and only Whites) was an indication of psychiatric disorder. This was true not only of the Frankfurt School, perhaps the main offender, but also Richard Hofstadter’s diagnosis of “status anxiety” for Whites concerned about their displacement and Erich Fromm’s analysis in terms of “sado-masochistic reaction formations” (see here, p. 195ff). All of these movements were facilitated by psychoanalysis, an infinitely plastic bit of anti-science that was able to get any desired result.

We are now seeing a trend for psychiatric diagnoses to be given to Whites who are angry about the massive invasion of non-Whites that are destroying the traditional cultures and threatening the status of the traditional populations of White countries. Anders Breivik was recently diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic for his rampage, mainly against young activists and the children of the leftist Norwegian elite he viewed as responsible for the immigration assault on Norway. This despite the fact that his operation was well-planned and despite the fact that his manifesto shows that he is quite intelligent and has read widely on the ongoing disaster of the Muslim invasion of Europe. I described him as “a serious political thinker with a great many insights and some good practical ideas on strategy (e.g., developing culturally conservative media, gaining control of NGOs. and developing youth organizations that will confront the Marxist street thugs).”

His writings are definitely not the ravings of a psychotic completely out of touch with reality. Indeed, there will be an investigation by the Norwegian parliament because at least some members are voicing concerns that the diagnosis is not consistent with the level of planning involved. Dr. Tarjei Rygnestad, the head of a panel that must approve the ruling before it becomes official, stated in July that “it was unlikely that a true schizophrenic would have been able to plan an attack as carefully and calmly as Mr Breivik had.” Read more

Stephen Walt on Anders Brevick, Immigration, and Western Culture

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If there’s one characteristic that defines the European nationalist parties, it is that they have eschewed racialist rhetoric in favor of cultural arguments. Geert Wilders, Marine LePen, et al. have claimed that Islam is incompatible with Western culture—that Muslims refuse to assimilate and have values that are incompatible with Western modernity, particularly on women and sexuality.

Without doubt this tactic has made nationalist parties more acceptable to mainstream voters and more difficult to attack by the left. It is not possible to tar these parties with the ultimate post-WWII pejorative—”Nazi—which is sure to come up if one breathes a word about ethnic interests of Whites.

Now Stephen Walt, of Israel Lobby fame, attempts to undercut cultural conservative arguments that he associates with Breivik—“the idea that he is defending some fixed and sacred notion of the ‘Christian West,’ which is supposedly under siege by an aggressive alien culture” (“Breivik’s Warped Worldview“). (He’d doubtless disapprove even more of Breivik’s Nordicist proclivities.)

In my review of The Israel Lobby, I made the following point about Western elites:

Confronted with the moral critique of America emanating from elite universities and the media, the old Protestant intellectual establishment quickly yielded the high ground. Many of them became avid cheerleaders of the new multicultural zeitgeist that rejected the America and even the Americanism of their ancestors, to the point that the new zeitgeist has become a consensus among elites of all stripes. They accepted their own demographic decline, and they gave up their pretensions as cultural leaders and trend setters. And they implicitly paved the way for their eventual  loss of political power to other groups, some of which have historically conditioned grudges against them—a dangerous situation to say the least. In doing so, they became the pallbearers for their own people.

Sadly, this applies to Stephen Walt. In the current main TOO article, Charles Dodgson does an excellent job of refuting Walt’s moral indictments of the West. Right now I am reviewing Ricardo Duchesne’s The Uniqueness of Western Civilization—a book that I strongly recommend for intellectuals like Walt. Duchesne, a sociologist at the University of New Brunswik, is fond of showing how the critics of the West typically presuppose ideas whose origins are uniquely Western. Read more

Does the Norway Atrocity Make Nationalism Illegitimate? A Reply to Stephen Walt

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My first thoughts on learning about the mass murder committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway on 23rd July 2011 were mixed with emotions. That such atrocity could be committed in the name of something I also believe in–the defence of the West from Third World colonization–was sickening. Should I feel shame? Perhaps. I certainly felt fear. As a parent I could imagine how those youngsters’ parent felt and my own children being targeted for my beliefs.

Then shame or a sense of impending shame began to take over. Viewing Breivik’s video and skimming his book forced the realization that this was not an aimless rampage but an act carefully thought out to achieve a goal. Breivik may be a psychopath, but he is a psychopath with a purpose. And his purpose is also mine. I had a moral dilemma.

The dilemma was this: If defending Western identity inevitably leads to atrocity, to the killing of innocent people, how can I justify participating in identity politics? How can I be a White loyalist and live with myself? It is easy to make excuses and brush the issue under the proverbial carpet. Most nationalists are not killers. We have a just cause. The other side does bad things. Some immigrant communities are prone to violence. Etc. etc. Still, if our side descends to atrocity, that is something for which we must take responsibility. Read more

Political Violence, Part 2: Violence by the Right: The Media’s Timothy McVeigh Paradigm

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Breivik, Goldstein, Amir, and McVeigh

In a sense, Anders Breivik’s killings were a form of vigilantism, as are almost all killings conducted outside the apparatus of the State. To illustrate my point, we go back to Weather Underground member, David Gilbert, talking about his decision to turn to violence:

Our movement had come about thinking we could shake the moral conscience of America….But painful experience had taught us that there was an entrenched power structure which profited from and systematically enforced oppression. We could not make a dent in the overwhelming social violence of the status quo without coming up against that power structure. (In Dan Berger, Outlaws of America, p. 44)

One could easily envision Breivik making the same exact justification for his decision to turn to killing. Both Breivik and Gilbert killed outside the mechanism of the State, but one is looked at as a sort of hero of the left and intellectual circles, while those same members would view Breivik as a monster beyond compare. This is helped by the media’s attempt to brand Breivik negatively while branding those Good Terrorists with positive qualities. Read more

Political Violence, Part 1: Anti-White Violence by the Left as Precursor to Today’s Mainstream Anti-White Establishment

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Political violence has been used throughout history to send messages and influence public opinion and policy. Throughout the 1960’s up until the 1990’s, leftists groups consistently used bombings, shootings, and scare tactics to promote their goals. In the United States, the Weather Underground is probably the most notable terrorist group in the history of the United States. Yet, the group is held esteem by many intellectuals, academics and media figures, who feel the violence committed by the group was justified given the context of the times. Leftist groups such as the Weather Underground were promoting viewpoints that would eventually become accepted into the mainstream, such as opposition to the Vietnam War and the dissolution of white homogeneity in the United States. As a result, groups such as the Weather Underground can give us a unique perspective on the prism through which the media and the Left in the Western World perceive violence.

In 1970, Weather Underground members Terry Robbins, Theodore Gold and Diana Oughton, were all killed when a bomb they were making in a Greenwich brownstone detonated, leveling the brownstone. The goal was to attack an army ROTC dance for non-commissioned officers in Fort Dix, New Jersey, in retaliation for the U.S.’s war in Vietnam. The fact that it was a dance likely would have resulted in the death of many female civilians. In 1981, a number of Weather Underground members and the Black Liberation Army shot and killed two police officers and a guard while trying to rob a Brinks armored truck. Many more incident could be listed, but the point is that these leftist groups were very violent. Read more