I don’t believe in God, but the Devil is another matter entirely. Proof of the Malevolent One’s existence is all around us, and he’s been pretty busy lately – filling the military hospitals with the wounded (30,000-plus so far), torturing and otherwise abusing helpless prisoners of war (the Devil never signed the Geneva conventions), and slowly but surely shrinking the parameters of freedom in this country by pretending to expand them abroad.
All the blood spilled on Iraqi soil is not enough to quench his devilish thirst, and old Lucifer is constantly seeking out new venues for his traveling horror show: Islamofascism, after all, is quite a weak reed on which to hang a new world war.
Osama bin Laden and his ragtag crew nowhere hold state power, and the battle against al-Qaeda requires tactics more akin to police work than to conventional military strategy and the business of moving great armies across the globe. As it dawns on Americans that the Iraq war has only empowered bin Laden, the paucity and relative invisibility of the enemy is a problem for the Luciferians, and they’re trying to solve it by restarting the cold war.
The U.S. government–funded organization known as “Freedom House” has recently delivered a Christmas present to Russian President Vladimir Putin: his country has been downgraded, from “partially free” to “not free.” Israel, of course, is deemed completely “free,” in spite of treating its Arab subjects worse than Sparta ever treated its helots. Putin is no Jeffersonian democrat, but neither has he rounded up and imprisoned an entire people and sought to ethnically cleanse them from their homeland. Freedom House standards are elastic, bending to the dictates of American foreign policy.
In Tony Blair’s England, an internal passport in the form of a national ID card has been instituted, you can be arrested for making politically incorrect remarks about officially protected minority groups, and spy cameras are on every corner, yet the Brits get off scot “free.” Bollocks.
The Devil is fond of quoting Scripture, and we are inundated with calls for ending “tyranny” not only in Iraq, but also Russia and Ukraine. Yet any reference to the steady erosion of civil liberties in the sainted West is greeted with cries – Luciferian cries, to be sure – of “moral equivalence!” and accusations of “anti-Americanism.”
The real anti-Americans are to be found in the front ranks of the War Party: it is they who lied us into a war that has served only to further the interests of a foreign country – namely, Israel. It is they who have repeatedly denied what is obvious to our own FBI and other law enforcement agencies: that Israel has been engaged in a long-term and very damaging spy operation in the U.S., one that involves the major pro-Israel lobbying group, and quite probably reaches into the upper echelons of the U.S. government.
Not only that, but Israel has lately been selling sensitive military technology to China. (Technology, one might add, that was either purchased – with our tax dollars – or stolen from the U.S.) Although, for some reason, we haven’t been hearing much about that in the English-language media. The professional super-“patriots” and other “pro-American” neocons, who manage to get themselves worked up over accusations of “treason” – either real or imagined – and the alleged “betrayals” of our allies, have been strangely silent when it comes to Israel’s apparent treachery.
Lying is a major Luciferian trait. Just as members of certain Buddhist sects aspire to pray constantly, so the neocons – uh, er, I mean, Luciferians – lie almost without interruption. Deception comes as naturally to them as breathing, and it has come to the point where they clearly don’t care about the truth: only “truth” that serves their ideology is to be acknowledged.
A good example of this is the news coverage and commentary surrounding Viktor Yushchenko’s performance – which rivals in mendacity anything the Office of Special Plans ever came up with during the run-up to the Iraq war. The Ukrainian election campaign, pitting the former chief central banker and Western favorite against pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovich, has been marked by allegations of fraud engineered by the latter – and is the focus of a looming confrontation between Russia and the West.
Yet the biggest fraud of all may be Yushchenko’s account of his alleged “poisoning,” which he and his supporters attribute to a dinner with Gen. Ihor P. Smeshko, the head of the Ukrainian security services, held at a Ukrainian dacha. The more frenetic members of the new cold-warrior fraternity darkly imply that the Russian KGB was the real culprit.
But there have been numerous problems with the evil-commies-poisoned-Yushchenko narrative from the very beginning, which I have endeavored to point out – here and here – and after the diagnosis of dioxin poisoning was announced, I received a number of “now will you retract your pro-Russian, pro-Yanukovich position” letters, all of them smugly assuming that was the end of the story. But, as it turns out, it isn’t the end. Indeed, it may be just the beginning. Because Yushchenko’s story is falling apart, as the New York Times reports:
“The most popular theory – that Mr. Yushchenko was poisoned at the dacha – contains flaws, strong enough that even his own supporters raise questions about it. And as investigators seek deeper insight into the case, they say a chief obstacle has been Mr. Yushchenko himself, who has used the poisoning almost as a theme in his campaign, but has not fully cooperated with the authorities, even as the trail of his would-be assassin grows cold.”
We learn from the Times that, in spite of numerous “news” stories detailing how an enormous dose of dioxin was put in Yushchenko’s soup, soup wasn’t on the menu at the dacha dinner that night. We also discover how uninterested Yushchenko seems to be in finding the real cause of his illness: “Yushchenko,” writes the Times‘ C. J. Chivers, “busy with his campaign, has not been of much help.” He has also been too “busy” to submit an official statement to the parliamentary commission investigating the charges; no medical evidence has been forthcoming from the Rudolfinerhaus clinic, either. In a meeting with the prosecutor in the case, Yushchenko pledged his cooperation – but not until after the election. In the meantime, the Yushchenko mythos – based on the image of the poisoned martyr to the cause of Ukrainian freedom and self-determination – acquires the aura of truth, if not the substance. Very clever, as Chivers implicitly notes, but perhaps too clever by half:
“Without his cooperation, the case has taken the form of theories, and for the news media the most popular has been the dinner at the dacha. But as details and a greater understanding emerge, that version remains open to question.”
To Yushchenko’s Western fan club, however, the official mythos is not open to question: to believe that Yushchenko was not poisoned by the KGB is to betray one’s membership in “our own domestic axis of evil,” as Tom G. Palmer, a senior scholar at the Cato Institute, put it. But Palmer, who also argues that the U.S. government could save money in conquering the world by “peacefully” effecting regime-change in places like Ukraine – thus rendering cruder methods, like outright invasion, unnecessary – lets his newfound neoconservative zeal blur his perception of the facts. As it turns out, Yushchenko became sick before the supposedly fateful dinner date with General Smeshko, and, to complicate matters further:
“A second, more intriguing, complication is that toxicologists say that after a person is contaminated with dioxins, it typically takes three days to two weeks before symptoms appear. Mr. Yushchenko was racked with pain hours after the dacha dinner, which understandably cast initial suspicion on the meal. But the theory was weakened this month when doctors in Vienna announced that the poison was dioxin; his would be the only known case of a dioxin acting that fast.
“Dr. Arnold Schecter, a specialist in dioxin contamination at the University of Texas, and co-editor of ‘Dioxins and Health,’ a medical reference, said it was possible but highly unlikely that Mr. Yushchenko was poisoned on Sept. 5. ‘It doesn’t make sense, medically,’ he said. ‘I would go back 14 days before that.'”
It doesn’t make medical or political sense: why would the Yanukovich camp conspire to make the poisoning seem so obviously their work? Except it isn’t so obvious, after all, as the facts begin to contradict the propaganda.
Not that facts ever stopped ranting neocon ideologues from reinterpreting reality to fit their agenda. That’s why it had to be the KGB – a theory “which is plausible because it was an old KGB tactic,” as Palmer vapidly avers – in spite of the lack of any real evidence. To heck with evidence: that’s so September 10th! Neocons require only a mere pretext, and the barest one at that.
Yushchenko’s own campaign manager, David Zhvaniya, dismissed allegations that Yushchenko was poisoned at the dacha as “a stupid theory,” according to the Times:
“The poisoning could have happened at any moment. He was always touring. He met hundreds of people in hundreds of places. To link it to that evening can be called only paranoia.”
Yet this paranoia has been reported in the West as fact, and contrary views of the Ukrainian events – such as Rudolfinerhaus medical director Lothar Wicke’s testimony – are ignored. In any event, according to former Communist and now ardent Blairite David Aaronovitch, all dissent from the “approved” view is a “right-wing isolationist” plot engineered by Antiwar.com and John Laughland, in league with “anti-American” leftists and the British Helsinki Human Rights Group. In other words: ignore the facts – just look at who’s reporting them. But to those of us in the “reality-based community,” this just won’t do….
In the last, supposedly falsified election round, 90-something percentage point turnouts in pro-Yanukovich districts were underscored as definitive evidence of massive fraud by the blues, yet the orange districts that showed similar turnouts in favor of Yushchenko were never questioned by Western-funded election “watchdog” groups. But to point this out – or question the circumstances surrounding Yushchenko’s alleged poisoning – is to incur the wrath of self-appointed commissars of political correctness like comrade Aaronovitch, who, with typical neoconnish arrogance, disdained the BBC for giving Laughland a few minutes to rebut Yushchenko’s fairy tales.
Polls sponsored by Western–allied (and U.S.-funded) “pro-democracy” groups have already announced that Yushchenko is going to be the winner, no question about it. In addition, the leader of the “orange revolution” has recently predicted that there would be a “disruption” of the voting – whether coming from his own camp, or the camp of the pro-Yanukovich “blues,” is not clear from his comments. Regardless of the real outcome of the Dec. 26 poll, Yushchenko and his folks look like they aren’t going to take no for an answer.
In any case, the Luciferian lies that are being hurled at us, one after the other, are eventually debunked, but it’s all a matter of timing. Sure, the myth of Iraqi WMD, Saddam’s nonexistent links to al-Qaeda, and all the rest were uncovered as “errors” or outright deceptions, but not in time to prevent us from going to war – and plunging headfirst into the Iraqi quagmire. Yes, it looks like the truth about Yushchenko’s dioxin intake is coming out, slowly but surely, but it is highly unlikely that it will be fully known before the election – thanks to the complete refusal of Yushchenko to cooperate with the investigation.
We at Antiwar.com definitely do have an ideology, and we don’t pretend to be neutral when it comes to the conduct of American foreign policy. But we recognize the difference between news and propaganda, which is why we never reported the poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko as fact until his diagnosis of a dioxin overdose.
To this day, we have given no credence to the various conspiracy theories pointing either to the Ukrainian security services or the Russian KGB – for the very good reason that there is not a single iota of evidence to back any of these theories up: just a lot of wishful thinking, hysteria, and groupthink. (All typical traits not only of neocons, but of ideologues in general, including some pro-war types who claim to be “libertarians.”)
The Yushchenko story is a textbook example of news management, neocon-style: of how the conventional wisdom is created out of very few real facts, and contrary views are kept out of the debate. Instead of questioning the logic of Yushchenko’s insistence that he was poisoned by supporters of Yanukovich, and raising alternate explanations, we were supposed to simply echo the politically correct version of the story. Instead of wondering why anyone would use dioxin – a substance that has never been known to kill a single person – in an assassination attempt, we were supposed to just keep quiet, accept the conventional wisdom, and come up with catchy headlines like: Pro-Western Bearer of “Democracy” Martyred by Commie Rats.
Except we didn’t – and we won’t. The truth about how, when, and why Yushchenko came to ingest a debilitating dose of dioxin has barely begun to unfold, and we will cover it, in these pages, no matter where it goes. What seems clear at this point, however, is that what everyone “knew” to be true – the “poisoned soup” story pushed by Yushchenko and his Western supporters – is definitely not true, and I’m proud to say that we at Antiwar.com were not taken in for a single moment.
The “Father of Lies” – another name for His Satanic Majesty – has been coming up with some real whoppers lately. Oh, he’s been busy, and not only in the Middle East: the Luciferian lust for war demands a constant supply of enemies, as well as fresh lies, and they are good at creating both seemingly out of thin air.
It’s the Devil’s Christmas, this year, as the wolves of war bay at the moon, and Lucifer’s legions move on every front. Iraq, Iran, Russia, and the Caucasus – they’re everywhere, looking for an opening. Christmas, the season of hope, is this year transmuted to the season of fear and ominous foreboding. Even as we celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Peace, the pagan acolytes of the war god plot in the shadows.
And that’s where Antiwar.com comes in. We work around the clock, debunking and exposing this constant stream of lies, helping you – the reader – discern innuendo from established fact, winnowing through the thoroughly propagandized news media to pick out precious nuggets of truth. It’s our continuing Christmas gift to you: just the facts, and some pertinent analysis, delivered to your computer each day.
