The events that led to this critical impasse were reported by me here on Friday night, and that report thus continues here, in order to provide context to these events.
The spokesperson for the Islamist party of Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan has called upon all of NATO to go to war against Syria for Syria’s having killed dozens of Turkey’s troops in order for Syria to defeat Turkey’s invasion and military occupation of Syria’s Idlib Province, which borders on Turkey. Going to war against Syria would mean going to war also against Russia, which is in Syria to protect Syria’s sovereignty over its own territory. If the United States accepts that Turkish proposal, then World War III will consequently result.
Turkey is calling for NATO’s protection after 33 of its soldiers were killed in an apparent Syrian airstrike in Idlib, allegedly while fighting in terrorist ranks. In the regional chaos that ensues, only one player stands to gain.
Speculation over what’s to come next has seen #article 5 trending on Twitter in the hours following the attacks, after Omer Celik, spokesman for Turkey’s ruling AKP party, indicated to reporters in Ankara that he was looking at requesting formal NATO protection against Damascus and, by proxy, the Russian air force.
“We call on NATO to [start] consultations. This is not [an attack] on Turkey only, it is an attack on the international community. A common reaction is needed. The attack was also against NATO,” Celik told Turkish media.
Article 5 of the NATO treaty says an attack on one member is an attack on them all.
The US State Department also condemned the attack, stating that it stands by its “NATO ally Turkey.” It further stated that it continues to “call for an immediate end to this despicable offensive by the Assad regime, Russia and Iranian-backed forces.” Never one to let us down, the US envoy to NATO Kay Bailey Hutchinson also told journalists that “everything is on the table.”
Internally, within Islamist-ruled Turkey, the official Anadolu Press Agency sub-headlined one English-language news report, “Crisis in Idlib has crossed all limits, says presidential spokesman after regime attack martyrs 33 Turkish troops” and opened, “Turkey’s presidential spokesman on Friday called on the international community to take measures to de-escalate tensions in Syria after dozens of Turkish soldiers were martyred in a late night attack by the regime forces.” No mention was made about those ‘martyrs’, that this had occurred in Syrian territory, where Turkish forces were invaders and military occupiers, and that the ‘regime’ they referred to is Syria’s committedly and ideologically secular, non-sectarian, Government, which is the only internationally recognized Government that Syria has (but from which Islamist Turkey is now trying to seize Syria’s Idlib Province and to include it within Turkey’s own territory).
Turkey is pressed by developments in Syria’s Idlib and has no choice but to “loosen” its policy of preventing refugees from travelling on to Europe, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s communications director Fahrettin Altun told reporters in Ankara.
“If Idlib falls, then millions of Syrian refugees will try to escape to Turkey and Europe. Turkey no longer has the possibility to provide resources for and help these people,” Altun said.
This is applying pressure upon the European member-nations in NATO to either join Turkey’s now very hot war against both Syria and Russia, or else to become faced with Turkey’s release of the tens of thousands of ‘rebels’ (mainly jihadists) whom Turkish forces in Syria’s Idlib Province have been protecting against military fire from Syria’s Army and from Russia’s Air Force.
"We're All Going To Get It": Life In Italy's Coronavirus 'Red Zone' Getting 'A Little Crazy'
With Italian cases of coronavirus surpassing 800 on Friday and 21 dead, life inside northern Italy's so-called 'red zone' has 'taken on a surreal air,' according to the Washington Post.
With 50,000 people under a quarantine 40 miles southeast of Milan - stretching across 11 villages and towns - a network of dozens of roadblocks are operated by the police and army in order to keep residents from traveling, and prohibit visitors from entering. The situation has caused residents obvious distress.
Outside a small bar on the edge of northern Italy’s coronavirus “red zone,” patrons watch as paramedics head-to-toe in protective suits, gloves and face masks attend a house call across the street.
One of the figures in white describes the patient’s cough to a colleague over the phone. The bar flies with rumors.
“We’re all going to get it,” said 22-year-old Claudi Ghidoni, sitting at a plastic table with two friends, the first time she said she’s been out of the house since Italian cases of covid-19 dramatically jumped last week. -WaPo
Disturbingly, however, the Post notes that the checkpoints "have become handover points with the outside world. Some come to give their relatives or friends gifts of cheese, other hand over documents caught up on the other side. A woman comes to collect specialist cat food dropped off by a friend."
The Post interviewed 20 residents inside the quarantine zone by phone or across roadside checkpoints, some of whom said that the initial panic had morphed into ongoing concern and confusion.
In San Fiorano village, the mayor announced three elderly deaths from coronavirus but that he's unable to find out how many people in the village have tested positive. He added that with funerals and burials suspended, the dead are still awaiting proper burials.
Only the most necessary stores, like pharmacies and supermarkets, remain open and have limits on the number of customers that can enter at a time. Residents are asked to avoid gatherings and crowds.
With post offices closed, the elderly are unable to pick up their pensions.
“Everyone struggles,” said Mario Ghidelli, the San Fiorano mayor, saying other mayors are frustrated with the level of information they were receiving. “We need to give answers to our citizens.”
He said that last blessings were given for the three residents who died, all over the age of 69, in the presence of a few family members, but the coffins had to be placed in a municipal crypt until undertakers are available. -WaPo
"People are getting a little crazy," said 49-year-old Guiseppe Malusardi as he rode his bicycle past a police checkpoint in the village of Casalpusterlengo. "Everything's closed."
Still, some Italians are making the best of the situation.
"It’s fantastic," said 54-yeawr-old Ambrogio Pezzi as he walked along with his golden retriever - adding that he's enjoyed the two-week break from his dentistry work and more time with his family. "We are like hamsters in a wheel, running around and around and not realizing we are always running in the same spot. Maybe this is a lesson to slow down and enjoy things."
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has vowed to protect his people as Turkey once again opened the floodgates of refugees heading to Europe.
Amid an escalation in Syria following an airstrike which killed 33 Turkish troops, Ankara announced that it would no longer hold back the wave of people attempting to reach Europe.
Almost immediately, videos showed migrants heading towards the borders of Greece and Bulgaria as well as Turkey’s Aegean coast.
[VIDEO] Drone footage shows migrants flock to #Turkey-#Greece border
Irregular migrants are walking towards northwestern Turkey to cross into Europe after airstrike by Assad regime in Syria’s Idlib pic.twitter.com/BmoEzAQDn0
Ankara is once again using migrants as a weapon in a bid to accomplish its geopolitical goals, illustrating how so-called “refugees” can only have a massively negative impact on the countries they enter.
Orbán responded by vowing to stand strong against the threat.
“Despite all the attention the coronavirus is attracting, migration remains a historical challenge,” he said. “The upward flow [of migrants] from the south is a historical trend, and we stand in the way.”
“Where will the flow from the south be stopped?” asked Orbán. ” I have always maintained that the invasion of migratory masses is wave-like.”
“We must expect another migratory wave and mass attack on the Hungarian border fence, [and] the Hungarian border must be protected,” he added.
With the migrants also representing another possible vector for the spread of coronavirus, Europe is facing a massive twin threat.
“Hungary’s border and the Hungarian people must be protected,” a spokesman for the Hungarian government told Breitbart.
Meanwhile, as Coronavirus continues to spread around Europe, Hungary is testing arrivals from Italy for symptoms of the illness.
That differs from the UK, where arrivals from Italy just walk straight into the country with no tests whatsoever.
So far, there have been zero cases of coronavirus in Hungary, unlike the rest of Europe where numerous countries recorded their first cases of the virus as a result of carriers entering from Italy.
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Silver Linings Playbook: 119 People Quarantined In A Brothel In Spain
Of all the places to be quarantined, a brothel in Valencia, Spain, might not be the worst. You've got booze, you've likely got a small buffet of fried foods and you've got entertainment.
But in all seriousness, that was exactly the case a day ago when authorities found that a woman working at the "La Selva Negra" brothel had tested positive for coronavirus. The findings forced authorities to quarantine the premises and the 86 customers that were inside.
The employee, who is now in the hospital, had "slept with several clients that same night," according to a translated blog post on the story.
In addition to the customers, the club's owners, waitresses, security and cleaning crew were also quarantined. When added to the total of 86 customers, it makes 119 people under quarantine. They have been asked to "keep calm" and to just "live a normal life" inside the premises.
That may be easier for some of the patrons than they'd like to admit.
And for all those guys who told their wives they were going to a wine tasting with their buddies and instead went to the brothel, the news may be worse than coronavirus - you're officially busted.
It’s quite fitting that the – imperially pre-determined – judicial fate of Julian Assange is being played out in Britain, the home of George Orwell.
As chronicled by the painful, searing reports of Ambassador Craig Murray, what’s taking place in Woolwich Crown Court is a sub-Orwellian farce with Conradian overtones: the horror…the horror…, remixed for the Raging Twenties. The heart of our moral darkness is not in the Congo: it’s in a dingy courtroom attached to a prison, presided by a lowly imperial lackey.
In one of Michel Onfray’s books published last year, “Theorie de la Dictature” (Robert Laffont) – the top dissident, politically incorrect French philosopher starts exactly from Orwell to examine the key features of a new-look dictatorship. He tracks seven paths of destruction: to destroy freedom, impoverish language, abolish truth, suppress history, deny nature, propagate hate, and aspire to empire.
Michel Onfray in 2009. (Alexandre López, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)
To destroy freedom, Onfray stresses, power needs to assure perpetual surveillance; ruin personal life; suppress solitude; make opinion uniform and denounce thought crimes. That sounds like the road map for the United States government’s persecution of Assange.
Other paths, as in impoverishing language, include practicing newspeak; using double language; destroying words; oralizing language; speaking a single language; and suppressing the classics. That sounds like the modus operandi of the ruling classes in the Hegemon.
To abolish truth, power must teach ideology; instrumentalize the press; propagate fake news; and produce reality. To propagate hate, power, among other instruments, must create an enemy; foment wars; and psychiatrize critical thinking.
There’s no question we are already mired deep inside this neo-Orwellian dystopia.
John “Paradise Lost” Milton, in 1642, could not have been more prophetic, when he wrote “Those that hurt the eyes of the people blame them for being blind.” How not to identify a direct parallel with Le Petit Roi Emmanuel Macron’s army, month after month, willfully blinding protesting Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests in the streets of France.
Orwell was more straightforward than Milton, saying that to talk about freedom is meaningless unless it refers to the freedom to tell people what they don’t want to hear. And he put it in context by quoting a line from Milton: “By the known rules of ancient liberty.”
No “known rules of ancient liberty” are allowed to penetrate the heart of darkness of Woolwich Crown Court.
A Spy at the Service of the People
Juan Branco is arguably the most brilliant young French intellectual – heir to a fine Sartre/Foucault/Deleuze tradition. The French establishment detests him, especially because of his best-seller “Crepuscule,” where he dissected Macronism – branded as a thuggish regime – from the inside, and the French president as a creature and instrument of a tiny oligarchy.
Julian Assange. (YouTube still)
He has just published “Assange: L’Antisouverain” (Les Editions du Cerf), an absorbing, erudite study that he defines as “a philosophy book about the figure of the Anti-Sovereign.” The Sovereign is of course the state apparatus.
Here (in French) is an excellent interview with Branco about the book. There’s nothing even remotely comparable to it in the Anglosphere, which has treated Assange essentially as an unpleasant freak, oozing pedestrian slander and piling up sub-ideology tirades disguised as facts.
The book is essentially structured as a seminary for the hyper-selective Ecole Normale Superieure, the august school in the Latin Quarter here that shapes French elites, a privileged nest of power institutions and reproduction of privileges. Branco takes the reader to the heart of this universe just to make him or her discover Assange from the point of view of one of those students.
Branco was privileged to profit from the interaction between the Ecole Normale Superieure and Yale. He met Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in January 2014, “in a state of radical confinement,” and then followed him as a juridical consultant, then lawyer, “day after day,” until meeting him again in September 2016, “getting ready to no less than change the course of the American presidential election and engineer the fall of the one who had sworn to crush him, one Hillary Rodham Clinton.”
Branco is fascinated by Assange’s “scientific journalism,” and his capacity to “intervene in the political space without occupying a determined place.” Assange is painted as a contemporary oracle, a maniac for free access to information, someone who “never looked for a reward, or insertion, or juridical protection,” which is a totally different modus operandi from any media.
2016 portrait of Juan Branco. (Yale University, Wikimedia Commons)
Branco shows how WikiLeaks “allowed whistleblowers to act,” by growing an archive parallel to the “production of data related to the mechanism of contemporary power apparatuses.” Under this framework “every citizen is able to become a researcher.”
So, Assange’s work has been about redistributing power. It’s as if Assange had become a “spy at the service of the people.” And that leads Branco to draw the connection with the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests. WikiLeaks releasing the “Macron Leaks” in 2017 legitimized the Yellow Vest struggle for direct democracy.
Branco describes Assange as “a strange figure, a bridge between the pre-history of digital civilization and its definitive penetration as a primordial, structural element of political and social space.”
But arguably his best appraisal is of Assange as “a dissident of his own internal space, mostly interested by the sphere of cultural, economic and social domination in which he was born, that of the American imperium, of which his native Australia is one of the most dedicated allies, and that dominates this cyber-space where he constituted himself as a political actor.”
In what could be construed as the top reason for the United States government’s unbounded thirst for vengeance against Assange, he challenged the fact that “American acts have a natural regulatory function for the rest of the world, a result of their over-dominance of the contemporary geopolitical space.”
It’s All in the Algorithm
And that brings us to the heart of the matter: algorithms. As Branco synthesizes it, the “revelation of raw documents aims at reinvesting in the political space those that have been discarded because of their submission to a word of authority whose algorithms have been masked.”
A view from the Member’s Gallery inside the New York Stock Exchange, August 2008. (Ryan Lawler, Wikimedia Commons)
Onfray had already warned about “destroying words,” “impoverishing language” and clinging to newspeak – but Branco takes it to a new level. Because “the word of power is a word assimilated to the algorithm, in the sense that it benefits from a presumption of truth, it does not reveal, to remain effective, any of its assets, settling to enounce a reality impossible to contest.”
Branco is careful to explain that, “Algorithm would not have become a social power without the support of an ethical presupposition (the consecration of Homo Economicus), a postulation towards scientificism (thus to universality) and a technological rupture (big data).”
Branco breaks it down to the formula “Algorithmization is the foundation of sovereignty.” And that’s exactly what Assange challenged. And that’s why he’s such a divisive, eternally controversial figure, unlike Edward Snowden, who’s basically an average guy – with a sterling IQ – who simply wants to reform a system.
A Chance for Liberty, Equality and Fraternity?
When he worked on behalf of Assange, Branco essentially coordinated a team of lawyers responding to star judge Baltasar Garzon, who was present at Woolwich Crown Court earlier this week. Last week, Assange’s legal team said they would apply for asylum in France. Branco can’t possibly be part of the team because of “Crepuscule” – which eviscerates Macron.
President Emmanuel Macron celebrating France’s victory over Croatia in the 2018 World Cup final in Moscow. (Kremlin)
Le Petit Roi, for his part, may now be presented with the ultimate global reach P.R. opportunity. Ending a ghastly neo-Orwellian charade, offering asylum to Assange, and ridiculing Trump and Boris Johnson at the same time would enhance his status in myriad European latitudes and all across the Global South.
Yet there should be no illusions. On July 3, 2015, advised by his legal team, Assange wrote an op-ed for Le Monde asking about the possibility of asylum. Only one hour after publication the Elysee Palace – under Francois Hollande – issued a firm denial. There were no leaks on what kind of pressure was applied by the U.S. Deep State.
Assange lawyer Geoffrey Robertson is under no illusions: “He won’t be pardoned by President Trump, although [a future] President Sanders might do so. I think that’s the objective of the Pentagon — to put him in prison for the rest of his life.”
A measure of the cowardice of all those established newspapers who profited handsomely from the work of Assange and WikiLeaks is this despicable Le Monde editorial that half-heartedly pretends to defend him as a journalist and publisher.
It’s idle to expect from Anglo-American corporate media even a modicum of decency to admit that journalists must not be treated as spies and dangerous criminals. Criminalization of critical thinking – capable of provoking, unmasking and denouncing raw power — is a key plank of the new dictatorship examined by Onfray, and already in effect. Now it comes down to Onfray and Branco not to be lost in translation – and forcefully demonstrate to the Anglosphere that the heart of darkness must not be allowed to prevail.
