Libertarianism wasn’t a dominant ideology or political current for most of my political life. It was so marginal that most people still don’t know what it is. But in 2011, with the Arab uprisings, it came into its own & began to dominate & influence all sorts of people, including many socialists. It was like the invasion of the body snatchers.

When libertarian-think began to emerge in political discussions during the Arab Spring, I did a thorough study of what it’s all about because I was disturbed by the irrational denial, especially in Global Research, that the Arab uprisings were genuine mass popular movements & were instead political street theater orchestrated by the CIA & Mossad.

Well I’ve just made a discovery about its influence that is blowing my mind. The open collaboration between libertarians & Assadists Beeley & Bartlett has always been disturbing since a pivotal aspect of libertarianism is anti-Semitism & increasingly Islamophobia. Beeley is a regular interviewee on the Ron Paul show & both are regular contributors to Global Research, the very fountainhead of libertarian-think, & they both write for many other libertarian blogs. Their political base & support is libertarians.

In my study, I came across David Icke, an English libertarian, probably the best known in the world, who makes Ron Paul & Alex Jones look almost sane. These celebrity libertarians share a disturbed ideology that includes anti-Semitism, hating on Muslims who they see as extremists, xenophobia, racism, & anti-immigration views.

Icke sees himself as a demigod or some kind of savior. He believes that shapeshifting reptilian humanoids called the Illuminati run the world & are leading society toward a global fascist state. All this would provide great material for stand up comedians except that the heart of his imaginary universe is a vile & dangerous depiction of Jews & an anti-Semitism of the Nazi sort. In his theoretics, the lizard-like Illuminati are dominated by the Rothschild banking family who control everything in the world: banks, governments, media, corporations. How is that different from Adolph Hitler & fascist ideology? Not much.

I didn’t know Icke was a committed propagandist for Assad & for Russian intervention in Syria until I followed clues in some articles I read & went to Icke’s website. It’s like entering an obscurantist house of horrors & is politically indistinguishable from Global Research or RT. Lo & behold, Eva Bartlett is up to her eyeballs in direct association with Icke & his ideology. Both Beeley & Bartlett have been interviewed more than once about Syria on the Richie Allen show associated with Icke but Bartlett also has a longstanding collaboration with him as a writer & editor on one of his journals called SOTT.

Now the role that Beeley & Bartlett & their many disciples play in the Syria debate begins to make sense: the currents of thought control & paranoia about MSM; the cultish aspects; the hating on Muslims & Jews; the aggressive almost storm trooper debating methods; the enemy lists; the unmerited prominence both of them have in Russian & Syrian media, not to mention libertarian media.

None of these people are of any interest to me. I’ve seen too much infantilizing cultism in left politics to find it anything but pathetic. People have a right to hold whacky ideas & to worship crackpots. That’s not an issue & it’s none of my business. What concerns me & what I make my business is their destructive influence on the antiwar, Palestinian solidarity, & socialist movements. I don’t expect writing this will dissuade a single supporter of Assad or even give them pause to reconsider their political perspectives. But what they destroy must be rebuilt & understanding the process & the political forces involved in that destruction is essential to the regeneration.

It is not exaggerating to say libertarianism has profound affinities with fascism–maybe not yet fully realized but moving in that direction over Syria–which explains why fascist, not just right-wing but fascist, organizations around the world are among Assad’s most ardent supporters.

This is a report from Mohammed Imran who is an elected representative at a Rohingya refugee camp in Bangladesh:

Kutupalong, Ukhiya,01, January 2017.
Rohingya Refugee Survives Under Hardship

By Mohammed Imran

The UNHCR says that approximately 45,000 Rohingya people have taken shelter in Bangladesh since October alone. They fled from Myanmar to escape state-sponsored persecution. The government of Myanmar has designed a systematic plan to eliminate Rohingya Muslims from the country.

Habiba Khatun is a 50-year-old unregistered refugee who lives in the Kutupalong makeshift camp in Bangladesh. She lost her husband in October during a military crackdown in Myanmar. She has three children but none of them go to school. She is the only provider for her family. Every morning, she must go to the forest to collect firewood. She walks there in the morning and returns in the evening to sell the firewood in the market in order to provide food for herself and her three children. They must go to the forest with her to collect firewood. “We are living a miserable and vulnerable life without any humanitarian support,” she told. She left Myanmar when her land was confiscated and her house was burnt down by the government authorities.

My little birds are whistling along to Loreena McKennitt. Adorable but very off key.

Last week activists posted many photos & videos of large anti-Assad protests throughout free areas of Syria during the ceasefire period under the slogan “The revolution brings us together.”

This is a compilation of those protests in cities where Syria & Russia have now resumed bombing. Many confused Assad supporters claim the popular movement has long since been defeated or is only manifest in armed militias. To those willing to examine evidence, these expressions of the Syrian revolution are a direct rebuttal to Assad’s propagandists.

https://syriafreedomforever.wordpress.com/2016/12/30/demonstrations-friday-the-revolution-brings-us-together-30-12-206-

When it comes to investigative journalism on Syria no one is as probative as the blogger Moon of Alabama (MoA) who sits on the back porch in the Alabama outback culling news from other libertarian bloggers of the crazy-pants kind & howling at the moon.

The irrational bellows resonated all the way to Canada with the editors of Global Research so they made MoA a regular contributor throughout 2016–which is odd because MoA has never traveled from the pig farm to Syria so how would s/he know anything?

The MoA repertoire of exposés includes all the false flag operations run in Syria by the Salafists, US, Al-Qaeda, ISIS; the Pentagon coup d’état against Obama; excoriations of the “wannabe sultan Erdogan;” & proof the Zika virus is another false flag operation. But surely MoA’s most noteworthy exposé is that the US paints its fighter jets in Syria to match the color schemes of Russian bombers so that pro-US eye-witnesses can take mobile photos & claim Russia is committing war crimes.

Now our intrepid blogger has topped even that revelation with an article titled “U.S./UK Paid “White Helmets” Help Al Qaeda Blocking Water To 5 Million Thirsty Syrians” where MoA shows s/he is no backwoods bumpkin but can in fact read the White Helmet insignia in Arabic. It might have been better if MoA hadn’t quoted MoA to prove Al-Qaeda poisoned the water supply to Damascus. But his/her career as a propagandist is in the early stages & soon s/he’ll catch on just like Bartlett & Beeley, the Beavis & Butthead in Assad’s stable of propagandists.

These are the damning photos from MoA’s exposé about the baby blue bombers. At first it seemed Global Research had the good sense not to publish this MoA story but in fact they did by another of their halfwitted bloggers. We would refer them to Snopes which pointed out the entirely different shapes of US & Russian bombers but after Snopes took out most of Eva Bartlett’s lies in one fell swoop that site is now considered fake news.

PS to Assadists: If you don’t want to be ridiculed, don’t leave a trail of social media droppings.

It’s often said that those who won’t engage in pissing contests with Assad supporters are dodging the arguments advanced because we’re unable to answer them. There’s nothing compelling or cogent that’s worth dodging. It’s propaganda & adheres to that model of persuasion: name calling (“head-chopping jihadists”); fear mongering (tapping into Muslim-hating & paranoia about MSM); & bandwagon politics (all the really trendy anti-imperialists support bombing civilians to defend Syrian national sovereignty.)

The top stories harped on by Assad propagandists & their fellow travelers include: vilifying the White Helmet rescue workers to take attention away from Syrian & Russian bombing; discrediting baby Omran as staged to deny children are suffering under that bombing; portraying all opposition to Assad as US-NATO & jihadist head-choppers to deny the existence of a popular, on-going revolution. How does one politically answer that crap? How do you chase a chimera? To address such scurrilous claims, one has to probe the psychological depths of Islamophobic angst along with the venal motivations of propagandists when not everyone has the stomach for dredging such malignancies.

As Syria & Russia resume carpet bombing in Syria, Assad propagandists & their fellow travelers are out in force justifying the bombing attacks on civilians in Wadi Barada by claiming Al-Qaeda forces from the area poisoned the water supply to Damascus & need to be taken out. Every such accusation has to be vetted which Assad supporters won’t do because fear-mongering, boogie-man politics is part of Assadist appeal. But serious-minded people not driven by infantile angst will investigate because it’s more necessary to investigate the reality of military operations than to plumb the psychological cesspool of hating on Muslims.

Bellingcat is a useful resource of citizen journalists who investigate stories using satellite imagery & other such tools available on the internet. Today, they posted their investigation titled “Wadi Barada: What Happened to Damascus’s Water?” One can question & refute that carefully sourced investigation but it cannot be rebutted with vituperations against “jihadists” without some documentation. Enough of that baloney.

https://www.bellingcat.com/…/wadi-barada-happened-damascus…/

This photo is from east Aleppo after Syrian & Russian airstrikes in September 2016 because many of the bombing videos from Wadi Barada are not verified. Is this image the principled antiwar activist’s vision of a freedom struggle?

(Photo from Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Any personal reviews of the movie “Heart of a Lion” with Dev Patel?

It’s based on an extraordinary true story: a little boy begging at a train station in India gets caught on a train & lost thousands of miles away in another city. He eventually ends up in an orphanage & is adopted by Australians but remains deeply haunted by memories of his mom & older brother & wants to find them. As a young man, using satellite imagery on the internet, he somehow finds his way back to them.

A TV interview with the real fellow, who now lives in Tasmania, showed footage of his return home to his mom & learning that his older brother who got separated from him at the train station was killed that very day by a train.

Is that an extraordinary story, or what? Is the movie worthy of the story or is it rendered maudlin?

We almost never hear the term “sheeple” on Facebook anymore. Have the users smartened up or are they among the 10,000 people on my block list?

Elderly homeless man in Yemen:

When the history of this epoch is written it can only be titled the barbaric phase of capitalism: millions of homeless children & elderly; millions of children workers; millions of refugees; billions dispossessed & forced to live in slums; endless wars & occupations. It will be known as an era when human life had no value at all.

Perhaps the worst things this era has done is undermine the belief that working people have the capacity to change the world & put us at odds with each other. Overcoming those problems involves conflict because the problems are domination & subordination through class inequality, racism, misogyny, & other social antagonisms.

Differences in politics are unavoidable & stressful. Sometimes they’re decisive so they have to be battled out because reality is complex & the stakes are high. Competing ideas express competing social interests. Not everyone has the stomach for political dispute; some avoid it like the plague. But everyone can learn from them. They also serve who do not throw the punches.

It should be said that intolerance for trolls on social media is not an attempt to short circuit the necessary debates. It’s pest control.
We’re going to be slugging Syria out for awhile. It’s a harsh dispute & the most important for a long time. It’s not a thing where you can wing it; you have to sift the arguments. But it’s also not inscrutable & any attempts to make it so derive from the guilty parties involved attempting to deceive.

Stick with principles & we’ll be safe even if don’t understand all of a complex war: no foreign military intervention of any kind by any country. Stop the bombing.

There’s a fine line between Assad supporters trolling your posts & the Zombie Apocalypse. It might be good to reiterate the rules of engagement for the latter so you can use them for the former.

–Never engage with one if you can avoid it. Deflect every overture, even if they pretend to like one of your posts. If they try to trap you into a conversation, run for it or “block ’em Danno.”

–Never underestimate one; don’t be fooled by their robotic recitations from RT or Global Research. They can burst out of hiding behind a timid persona & suck your brain out in the blink of an eye.

–If necessary, seek medical attention after any encounter. The zombie virus can enter your body through the smallest opening in your skin–very much like the virus they get from reading MSM.

If you end up marrying one, you’re on your own. May you RIP.