"An atmosphere was created in which it was only natural for the American, with his reverence for the underdog, to accept Zionist propaganda as gospel."
-----Alfred Lilienthal, The Other Side of the Coin, p. 93
"About this little Mediterranean country (Israel) more fables have been written than are contained in Scheherazade and Mother Goose together."
-----Alfred Lilienthal, ibid.
The Second Coming of Trump has arrived with full force and never a dull moment is the word. Jewish supremacy has re-opened the floodgates of Hell massacring Palestinians and pushing for war with Teheran; the triumphant U.S. president has finally expressed some empathy - for Elon Musk! - ("He's being treated unfairly"); and rising waves of popular revulsion at the billionaire duo's contempt for everybody and everything that doesn't directly enrich them have seized the moment and surged into the political foreground.
Meanwhile, DOGE's "efficiency experts" are using nutcase Javier Milei's "chainsaw for bureaucracy" to remove the fraud, waste, and abuse from the federal budget - like pediatric cancer research, aviation safety, and medical care for Veterans - all three perverse funding priorities posing obvious obstacles to "Making America Great Again."
Sadly for Trump, his hoped-for record breaking mass deportations have fallen woefully short, not even equaling Joe Biden's pace, a shameful outcome for MAGA given the president's campaign promises, or at least it would be if he were capable of feeling shame. Unwilling or unable to spend the money required for the mass round-ups he promised, Trump has taken to grabbing the low-hanging fruit - unwary legal immigrants passing through airports - including in one case a woman married to a U.S. citizen who once overstayed a legal visa because flights were canceled and the border shut down due to Covid, making it impossible for her to leave on time. Fortunately, this glaring national security threat has been seized and dispatched to immigration jail, an immense relief to dictatorship-loving Americans everywhere.
Speaking of national security threats, legal immigrant Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian raised in a refugee camp in Syria, has been smeared as a terrorist and thrown into jail for condemning wholesale U.S.-Israeli extermination in Gaza, the culmination of "never again" pontificating about the Holocaust and its attendant kosher killing campaigns.
Nevertheless, we have every right to be indignant about Khalil: the bloody nerve of people driven off their land and tortured and murdered for nearly a century raising a voice against the perpetrators! Have they no shame?
There is no relief coming for any of this from the collaborationist Democratic Party, which has spent years claiming that government can't be used to deliver universal health care or a federal jobs guarantee, and certainly not to negotiate our differences with those who object to having their leaders assassinated and their governments overthrown by Washington, standard methods for dealing with popular movements that take majority rule too literally. Democracy does not mean majority rule; it means minority rule with popular ratification, hence the Trump "mandate" to attack and destroy the interests of the majority.*
Democratic Party leaders' denial of any constructive role for government in meeting the needs of the majority has left them with nothing to say to the DOGE brigade's meat-axing of government on the grounds that it's all useless bureaucracy. If everything legitimate (apart from the Pentagon) is delivered by the glorious "free market" why shouldn't we gut government programs?
Interestingly, though the Trump administration is in firm control of all three branches of government, it has chosen not to advance its agenda through the at least formally democratic institutions it controls, but rather, by extra-constitutional gambits like DOGE, which is accountable only to Trump, if even him.
There couldn't be clearer evidence that the MAGA masterminds do not trust the people they say have given them a mandate to construct a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. With Tesla dealerships being torched and Luigi Mangione raised to the status of a folk hero, there is little chance their agenda could be passed in open Congressional session.
Their distrust of the people is very well deserved. Stay tuned.
*Trump got 49.8% of the vote in an election with 63% turnout, so his "mandate" consists of slightly more than 31% support of the full electorate. In other words, it's fantasy.
A tsunami of Trump Derangement Syndrome is washing over us once again in the wake of the White House meeting between Volodmyr Zelensky, President Trump, and Vice-President Vance. Trump and Vance took Zelensky to task for opposing a cease fire, forcing Ukrainian conscripts into an already lost war, throwing good money after bad, and demonizing Vladimir Putin to the point of making peace negotiations impossible. The remarkable confrontation played out like a reality TV episode, one in which Trump did everything but shout in Zelensky's face: "You're fired!", a fate the seriously unfunny comedian more than deserves.
As usual, simplistic characterizations rather than insight dominates the headlines. Zelensky is a "democratic leader" and Putin is a "dictator," although Trump has - gasp! - called Zelensky himself a dictator. This judgment, our mind managers tell us, is just more evidence of how stupid Trump and his MAGA supporters are. How could Zelensky, champion of the Free World, possibly be a dictator? Just because he jails his political opponents, bans independent media, and shuts down religious organizations doesn't mean he isn't a democracy-loving freedom-fighter. How could it?
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell is incensed that Trump is "not educable," thus incapable of understanding that U.S. media hacks are infallible in their "value-free" judgments about political reality. Trump "knowingly lies" about key statistics like how much aid the U.S. has sent to Ukraine. Horrors! This he takes to be far more significant than the fact that Trump correctly states that (1) Ukraine cannot defeat Russia on the battlefield (2) that it is therefore pointlessly sacrificing huge numbers of its own people, and (3) that it is "risking WWIII," (especially when it shoots U.S. ATACM missiles deep into Russian territory as it did in the final months of the Biden administration). O'Donnell and his fellow media hacks don't enlighten their audience about any of this, which is the heart of the story vis-a-vis the Ukraine war. Lies of omission, as the late Aldous Huxley noted, are the most effective element of propaganda.*
Putin has long objected to NATO expansion, as any Russian head of state necessarily would, and questioned why it still exists after the parallel Warsaw Pact disbanded at the conclusion of the Cold War. The West continually stated that it didn't want any more Berlin Walls, even as it kept expanding the Russia-hating military alliance to the East. NATO liked to claim that it was transforming itself into more of a political organization than a military one, to which Putin sensibly replied, "but if it's a political organization, why did it bomb Yugoslavia?" (in 1999).
For Moscow, following through on the Minsk Accords, adopted by Russia, France, Germany, and Ukraine in 2015 and endorsed unanimously by the UN Security Council, was the only path to progress in Ukraine, which had essentially become an extension of NATO. The agreement implicitly assumed no formal membership in NATO for Ukraine, an outcome that any Russian leader would have had to insist on. It called explicitly for disarmament of the Donbass and withdrawal of Russian forces while basing the overall settlement on three elements: (1) demilitarization (2) restoration of Ukrainian sovereignty (3) full autonomy for the Donbass.
The Minsk Accords were never implemented because Ukraine didn't want them to be and Washington didn't insist on them.
Putin has long objected to the U.S.-dominated, "democratic" world order, which is built around Washington using force in international affairs without a thought to the consequences, as in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Putin especially disliked the U.S. overthrow of Qaddafi in Libya. The UN resolution authorizing a no-fly zone over that country was "defective and flawed," he said, because, "It allow[ed] them to do what they like, to undertake any manner of actions against a sovereign state." It reminded him, he said of "a medieval crusade."
In a speech to the United Nations General Assembly at the end of September in 2015, Putin blamed the refugee crisis (roughly five million people displaced) stemming from the Syrian civil war squarely on the West, which had induced hundreds of thousands of desperate families to rely on rickety boats to flee to Greece, the nearest European Union state. The U.S., which supported ISIS, was behaving as though there were "good terrorists and bad terrorists," Putin thought, without noticing that there was no easy way to distinguish the two groups. "Is it," asked Putin, "that the so-called moderates behead people more delicately or in more limited numbers?" Touche.
For Washington's neo-con crusaders, the "good" terrorists are whichever ones they're cynically using at the moment, which is why no one should be surprised that the head-choppers displaced Bashar al-Assad in Syria with U.S. air support last fall. Eight months from now they will commemorate 911 for the twenty-fourth time, piously renewing their imaginary permanent opposition to jihadi-style terrorism.
By comparison, Putin is a saint.
*Overt lies are also important, of course. For example, Zelensky's claim that Putin did not comply with a 2019 cease-fire and prisoner exchange is not correct. There are photos of the prisoner exchange, which was carried out according to the negotiated agreement. See Aaron Mate and Katie Helper on the Useful Idiots podcast, March 3, 2025.
Sources:
Lawrence O'Donnell, "Trump Humiliated again on world stage by British PM," The Last Word, MSNBC, February 28, 2025
"Putin" by Philip Short (Henry Holt, 2022) p. 369, 522, 588-9, 652
Noam Chomsky with C. J. Polychroniou, ed. "Illegitimate Authority - Facing The Challenges of Our Time," (Haymarket, 2023), p. 160
