Face the facts. Then act on them. It’s the only mantra I know, the only doctrine I have to offer you, and it’s harder than you’d think because I swear humans seem hardwired to do anything but. Face the facts. Don’t pray, don’t wish, don’t buy into centuries-old dogma and dead rhetoric. Don’t give in to your conditioning or your visions or your f***ed-up sense of . . . whatever. Face the facts. Then act. (Quellcrist Falconer). ― Richard K. Morgan, Broken Angels
John Bachar, my climbing mentor, left his earthly pilgrimage in 2009 at the end of his last free solo. If he is watching us, he is saying, “This is a bummer, man, a real buzz-kill.” If he were here, the Master would face our future with the same courage that guided him through his storied life.
SPARTACUS: THE LAST CENTURY
The author is an anonymous commentator. The original episode and its audio are here.
We are not in a new age, but a continuation of the past century.
After reviewing the comments to my last Spartacast, it suddenly occurred to me that I had yet to give voice to the specific reasons for my hatred of the whole concept of military service. The argument had bones, but little meat. It is difficult to grasp the nature of the beast we face without laying down some key historical facts. By the end of this, it is my hope that you will share some measure of my distaste for war.
Let’s go back to the start. The specific point in time I’ve chosen is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, on June 28th, 1914. Now, this isn’t the true beginning. We could go back centuries further and go into the origins of the Bavarian Illuminati and Adam Weishaupt, and so on. I could go even further back, detailing the forebears of these secret societies. However, the instigation of World War I is the event that is perhaps the most relevant to our current state of affairs. On that fateful day, Franz Ferdinand took a trip to the Balkans and never came back. After one assassin threw a grenade at the Archduke’s motorcade, the open-topped car eventually became trapped diverting through a side street and had to turn around. At that point, Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Black Hand secret society, casually walked up to the vehicle and shot both Franz and his wife Sophie at point-blank range with an FN Model 1910.
The year before this, the United States Federal Reserve was created by the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Now, with the financial power of America in the grip of wealthy bankers and industrialists, and Europe a powder keg waiting to explode, the stage was set for the next phase; kicking off an apocalyptic war to massacre an entire generation of young European and American men by compelling them through a draft to kill each other.
World War I was a war of firsts. To be specific, it was one of the first major wars between great powers to showcase the effects of industrialization on war. In response to trench warfare and the difficulties of employing uncooperative cavalry in the muddy, shell-beaten hells of World War I battlefields, the caterpillar-tracked tank was developed and employed, to great success. Belt-fed machine guns, field guns, biplanes, and barrage balloons saw common and widespread use.
Nearly ten million military personnel lost their lives in World War I. At the Battle of the Somme, in 1916, which went on for nearly five months, a million young men were mowed down by machine gun fire and blasted by shells. They disappeared into pits of mud and blood and gore, like something from some Aztec relief of an angry god stamping around and smushing humans like bugs for fun. Imagine being handed a white feather and told you were a coward for the crime of being an ordinary young man in Britain walking around out of uniform, and then enlisting to go walk headfirst into this filth, this human hamburger grinder built by banker and industrialist scum. Doesn’t seem so heroic in that context, does it? Less like a noble sacrifice, and more like needless carnage just for its own sake.
During all of this, the Russian Revolution broke out. Bolshevik revolutionaries rampaged across the countryside, murdered the Romanovs in cold blood, and seized control of Russia. The Russian Revolution was followed, in the decades to come, by the Holodomor, which starved millions of people in Ukraine to death. Also, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg led a failed revolution in Berlin that would have likely had the same genocidal outcome had it succeeded.
As it turns out, the men in the shadows driving us all to war weren’t done. World War I didn’t kill as many people as they wanted. They had to repeat the population cull on a larger, grander scale. All sides in World War II were funded by the same bankers and industrialists who bankrolled all sides in World War I. The true villains of World War II were the ones holding the pocketbooks that fed the slaughter, without whose money and industrial support the conflict would have been impossible to carry on. DuPont, Dow, IBM, Bayer, Chase, Deutsche Bank, IG Farben, Krupp, Rheinmetall, Siemens, and countless others. While supposed war criminals were lined up and executed one after another, these giant corporations got nothing but a slap on the wrist. They were allowed to continue their ambitions of merging state and corporate power and defying the will of the people unimpeded. We can see the consequences of this today: the Davos Man, and his Stakeholder Capitalism. The end of World War II brought with it the ascendancy of nuclear weapons, and with them, the temporary end of wars between great powers, replaced instead with innumerable proxy wars over the resources of poor countries.
Shortly after the end of World War II, the CIA began a program called Operation Gladio, which was a stay-behind operation in Europe, where they supported the formation of militias and death squads, with the aid of the Italian Mob. This is covered extensively in Paul L. Williams’ book, Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance Between the Vatican, the CIA, and the Mafia.
This period of time, from the interwar period up through the Atomic Age, saw a significant expansion in brutal and unethical human experimentation, from the horrors that Josef Mengele and Shirō Ishii inflicted on their victims, to the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, to the radiation experiments of the Manhattan Project where they injected unwitting people with plutonium, to the LSD experiments at Edgewood Arsenal, to the CIA, the mad poisoner Sidney Gottlieb and all his Operation Paperclip buddies, and their MKULTRA and MKNAOMI programs which experimented with things like mind control via induced hypnotic states, and the destruction or tainting of agricultural crops with chemical weapons.
We know for a fact, through declassified documents, that the CIA also experimented on American citizens with MKULTRA. In Operation Midnight Climax—yes, that’s what they called it—back in the fifties and sixties, prostitutes on the CIA’s payroll dosed unwitting johns with LSD, to see if it made them pliable and open to suggestion or interrogation.
In the fifties, the US went to war with Korea, which resulted in a country that remains divided between a capitalist, wealthy South and a communist, impoverished North to this very day. Around this same time, in China, Mao’s Great Leap Forward was in the process of starving tens of millions of Chinese to death and turning pots and pans into thousands of tons of pig iron.
In the early sixties, the DOD proposed something called Operation Northwoods, which would have been a false flag attack on American citizens, on American soil, to drum up public support for a war with Cuba. Around that same time, the CIA also murdered then-President John F. Kennedy. Why did the CIA murder JFK? Numerous reasons. For one thing, JFK was furious about the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis and wanted to dissolve the CIA, or at least put it on a much, much tighter leash. This pissed off the CIA-connected Bush family because they had huge investments in Cuba and just off its shores, like the CIA intelligence-gathering front Zapata Oil.
Also, JFK was asking some questions about Israel’s Dimona plant that made David Ben-Gurion very nervous. Why did it make him very nervous? Because he knew that Israel’s secret nuclear capabilities were based upon highly enriched uranium that was, at that time, being stolen from NUMEC, and possibly other US enrichment facilities. Israel did not enrich their own uranium. They didn’t want to bother with the huge outlay cost to come up with their own enrichment facilities at the time, so instead, they stole American nuclear material with the full support of our compromised intelligence services. So, because of this and various other geopolitical and intelligence inconveniences related to leaving JFK alive and well, the Bush-CIA cabal made JFK’s head go boom, and that took care of that little problem.
The year after, with the psychopath Lyndon B. Johnson in power, and the fake, false flag Gulf of Tonkin incident fresh in people’s minds, the stage was set for America to enter Vietnam. During the Vietnam War, which killed tens of thousands of American servicemen and over a million Vietnamese, the CIA ran something they called the Phoenix Program, where they kidnapped innocent civilians suspected of Vietcong sympathies and raped and brutally tortured them. This is covered extensively in Douglas Valentine’s book, The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the Weather Underground, another CIA front, conducted terrorist bombing campaigns against government buildings throughout the US, to cast anti-war protesters in a negative light and drum up support for COINTELPRO operations and an FBI-led surveillance state. All the leaders of the Weather Underground got a slap on the wrist and can be seen hobnobbing with other CIA assets today.
Towards the end of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon decided to end the US Dollar’s convertibility to gold, which kept other countries from pulling out of the dollar and depleting US gold reserves and eventually established the petrodollar as a global reserve currency. Around this exact time, wages in America became decoupled from productivity. A larger share of all new growth went to speculators than to wage laborers, and the dreams of middle-class prosperity and upward mobility brought about by the post-WWII reconstruction were crushed underfoot by Big Finance.
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the CIA armed the Mujahideen through Operation Cyclone, which lasted for a whole decade and funneled arms right into the hands of jihadi lunatics. This would give rise to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda years later. During the Iran-Contra affair, our government tried selling weapons to Iran to fund and arm death squads in Nicaragua to fight the Sandinistas. That same decade, Robert Maxwell, the longtime Mossad asset, father of Ghislaine Maxwell, and mentor of Jeffrey Epstein, sold out Mordechai Vanunu for revealing Israel’s nuclear secrets. Mossad then kidnapped Vanunu and had him imprisoned in Israel for treason.
Iraq went to war with Kuwait because the Kuwaitis were stealing Iraqi oil by slant-drilling into Iraqi territory. The US, in turn, went to war with Iraq because they didn’t want Saddam Hussein to get any funny ideas about monopolizing oil and price-gouging. The story that was fed to us in the media was that this was a humanitarian and just war and we had to save the poor Kuwaitis from big bad Saddam. Remember the Nayirah testimony? Remember when we found out that she was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States and her false testimony was arranged as part of a PR campaign, and that her story corroborated by Amnesty International about Iraqi soldiers stealing babies out of incubators in hospitals was a lie?
A few months afterward, the Battle of 73 Easting occurred, where Abrams tanks equipped with state-of-the-art GPS navigated miles of trackless desert before attacking an Iraqi Republican Guard formation and obliterating them so utterly that the survivors fell to their knees waving white flags and begging for their lives. The battlefield literally smelled like a barbecue, like cooked human flesh, from all the Iraqi vehicle crews who’d burned to death in their tanks. Even our guys were horrified at what they’d done. It wasn’t a fight. It was an execution.
Around the same time, Danny Casolaro was investigating the Inslaw PROMIS affair, the October Surprise theory that Ronald Reagan’s campaign made a secret deal with the Iranians to delay the release of American hostages until after the election, the collapse of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International which was engaged in complex and fraudulent schemes, and Iran-Contra. Casolaro believed that all of these things were linked together into a single conspiracy that he called The Octopus. Shortly thereafter, Danny Casolaro was found dead with his wrists slit in a bathtub, supposedly of suicide.
Was he onto something? Of course he was. Earl Brian sold Inslaw’s PROMIS database software to Israel and Singapore, and Robert Maxwell took the modified, compromised PROMIS software given to him by his Mossad handlers and went around hawking it to American military and Department of Energy-connected national laboratories like Los Alamos and Sandia, most likely to give Mossad an electronic backdoor into these facilities and help them steal cutting-edge research into nuclear weapons, energetic materials, and so on.
Towards the end of the decade, Bill Clinton’s extraordinarily corrupt administration decided to bomb Kosovo. The claimed goal here was the prevention of the genocide of Albanian Muslims by Serbs. The truth was, Milosevic did not start expelling Albanians en masse until NATO’s intervention convinced him to order reprisals. Could things have looked entirely different with proper diplomacy, without Bill Clinton and Tony Blair going in guns blazing like a bunch of morons? Yes, they could have. Meanwhile, UN peacekeeping forces and a US State Department-aligned PMC were involved in sex trafficking young girls in Bosnia. When Kathryn Bolkovac tried blowing the whistle on them, she was fired from her job. Let me add, I don’t grave-dance very often, but it must be said; Madeleine Albright was a piece of human garbage and should be remembered as a piece of human garbage.
Then, a couple years later, 9/11 happens. A few things immediately come to mind. First of all, it has recently come to light that a couple of the supposed hijackers were CIA assets, but even without that little detail, let’s be serious here. There is footage of bright orange molten iron pouring out the sides of the Twin Towers. Investigators found molybdenum spherules in the rubble. Molybdenum is a refractory metal that melts at 4753 °F. What this tells us is that the debate about whether or not jet fuel can melt or weaken steel is completely moot. Whatever was burning in those towers, it was burning much, much hotter than jet fuel, and, in fact, hotter than normal thermite.
Furthermore, Osama bin Laden was a longtime CIA asset who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. They didn’t arm and fund him directly. They carefully channeled their support through middlemen in the Pakistani ISI and Saudi Intelligence. That’s why no one could ever figure out if the CIA aided bin Laden or not.
Regardless, shortly thereafter, George W. Bush, another corrupt piece of crap president from a whole dynasty of ‘em, dragged us back into the sandbox, invading Afghanistan and Iraq. The former, because the Taliban supposedly provided support to bin Laden and concealed his forces in Afghanistan, and the latter, because Saddam supposedly had WMDs. Both of these things were false. As it turns out, bin Laden was apparently hiding in Pakistan, in Abbottabad, almost the entire time, or so we’re told. Yes, Pakistan, our so-called ally. Also, Saddam did not have WMDs; after the first Gulf War, he’d cooperated with UN investigators and basically destroyed all of his chemical weapon stockpiles. But it was too late. The damage was already done. The War on Terror had claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and thrown trillions of dollars straight down the toilet.
Did you know that when Jeffrey Epstein got a plea deal back in 2008 that kept him out of prison, Alexander Acosta* had been told to back off, and that Jeffrey Epstein belonged to intelligence, and he should just leave the whole matter alone? Well, that sure sounds encouraging. The protégé of a longtime Mossad asset, who drowned back in ’91 after allegedly falling off his yacht, was running a child sex ring with a clientele exclusively made up of high-net-worth people, and he belonged to intelligence. Wow. Pretty much says it all, doesn’t it?
Yoho: He was the federal prosecutor on the case and could only have been called off by the President or Attorney General.
Remember the buried CIA torture reports? Remember the detainees who were victims of rectal feeding as a result of hunger strikes? Yeah, turns out, the human body can’t exactly absorb nutrients shoved up the rectum, like South Park. This was basically a means of humiliating, torturing, and controlling detainees. By raping them. And the worst part? Most of these detainees in Gitmo were sold to the US by warlords. The United States was offering bounties, and gun-toting maniacs in MENA were just plucking random people off the street, and then our guys were brutally interrogating them until they would basically confess that they were all bin Laden’s half-brothers and personally supplied Al-Qaeda with box cutters.
But our leaders weren’t done killing innocent people and wasting our money. Oh, no, no. Not even close. During the Arab Spring, a bunch of agents-provocateurs trained by pro-democracy Washington DC think tanks like the National Endowment for Democracy and Freedom House and Stratfor-associated rabble-rousers like CANVAS took advantage of a hike in food prices and instigated mass protests and riots in one Middle-Eastern and North African country after another, using information warfare over social media as the conduit.
Shortly thereafter, NATO decided to establish a no-fly zone over Libya, allegedly to protect protesters from being slaughtered by Muammar Gaddafi’s soldiers, but mostly because Sarkozy wanted to protect the CFA franc and the economic power it afforded France over their former North African colonies. The destruction of Libya was actually part of an ongoing pattern to that effect. Anyone who ever questioned the necessity of the CFA franc has ended up dead. When NATO warplanes bombed Gaddafi’s convoy and the rebels caught up to him, they shot him pretty much on the spot, but not before brutally sodomizing him with a knife. I have seen the uncensored footage of his summary execution myself. Not a pretty sight. I’m starting to see a pattern here. Defy the United States and be raped. Nice. Hillary Clinton cheered over his murder, by the way.
NATO warplanes also bombed the Great Man-Made River project, which was Gaddafi’s plan to draw water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System under the desert and use it for agriculture. They then blew up the factory used to construct new concrete pipes for this massive irrigation system. What’s the matter? Is feeding Libyans too much? Do the Overclass want them to just leave that water under the ground, until Wall Street could start trading Water Futures and they had the chance to corner the market on water? Imagine that. Imagine a world with drained aquifers and nonexistent desalination infrastructure, where a few elites control the flow of potable water from strategic locations by moving it in pipelines and tanker ships like it was oil. Or don’t, because frankly, I don’t think any of us want to live in a psychotic, Mad Max-inspired world like that.
Don’t even get me started on Syria. James Le Mesurier and the White Helmets? Propaganda. Psyop. They went around staging atrocities and blaming them on the Syrian government while also posing with the people they supposedly rescued for PR purposes. If you look around, you can find video footage of a supposed Syrian gas attack where there were multiple takes of the same footage, and the casualties and rescuers switched places. You can also find photographs with White Helmets members, out of their White Helmets uniforms and in their rebel uniforms, posing with decapitated bodies. A leaked OPCW report showed that the supposed gas attack in Douma was staged. The chlorine that investigators found was in the range of parts per billion, low enough that it could have plausibly come from the regular use of household bleach. The supposed gas cylinders that they found appeared to be hand-placed rather than air-dropped. Meanwhile, the CIA funneled arms to jihadi nutcases, again, through Operation Timber Sycamore. The Free Syrian Army had hardly any morale and nothing to fight for. A lot of them dropped their flags and went to fight for ISIS because the pay was better. Some of them took American-supplied arms and ammunition and sold them on the black market, where they were snatched up by Salafist radicals. We just armed another Taliban. What will the consequences be in ten years?
When the US pulled out of Afghanistan and let the Taliban take the whole country back in a callback to the Fall of Saigon, wasting the lives of US servicemen who spent all that time protecting the Deep State’s opium poppy fields, people were so desperate to get on the last few American transport aircraft taking off from Kabul, they actually became entrapped in the landing gear, their bodies flapping in the wind as the planes hit cruising speed.
Why don’t I support military service? Because, quite simply, we don’t have a democracy. We have a spookocracy. Our government is run by spooks. Spooks choose our political candidates, and spooks decide our military targets and the goal is not to protect average citizens or enhance our national security, never to protect but to consolidate more power in the hands of supranational institutions led by unelected, spook-picked puppets. When you enlist for military service, you are agreeing to kill people on behalf of—and potentially die in the service of—this viscerally disgusting and illegitimate form of government, which has, as its goal, the abolition of the nation-state and its replacement with a globe-spanning human cattle farm.
Michael J. Glennon put it best in his book, National Security and Double Government. There are two bodies of government in the US; the Madisonian institutions, consisting of the office of the President, Congress, and the other legitimate, surface-level aspects of government, where people’s vote still seems to have some sort of influence, at least at a glance, and then, there’s the Trumanite network, which consists of all the unelected national security goons in military, intelligence, diplomatic, and law enforcement agencies, as well as their Deep State contractor, NGO, and supranational buddies, whose appointment is not in any way subject to a vote or any democratic or legal processes whatsoever, and who actually call the shots and write the foreign policies that presidents and congressmen absent-mindedly rubber-stamp.
This is very much like how organized crime works. Organized crime rings always have fronts that appear to be legitimate businesses on the surface. Restaurants, bars, nightclubs, betting shops, payday lenders, and so on. When you go into the basements of these establishments, it’s a bunch of people in Tyvek suits cooking methamphetamine. The US Government is exactly the same way.
Why did I take the name, Spartacus, in spite of the obvious associations one might draw to Weishaupt and the Spartacists and other phony revolutionaries? Because over the past century, things have changed. We are the oppressed ones, now. We are the ones who need to stand up against tyranny, not the Overclass and their pawns. These men have lived comfortable lives surrounded by unimaginable wealth, taken slaves, shuttled contraband from one end of the planet to the other, and driven countless innocents to their ignoble deaths from war and starvation and disease, and yet, they still have the gall to think of themselves as mankind’s liberators.
Let the COVID-19 overreach be their final folly.
-Spartacus
Reference:
If you can stand more darkness, here is the Club of Rome.
Parting Shot
John Bachar was a fast climber. A few decades ago, he and his partner passed me in the middle of an 1800-foot-high Yosemite climb called Astroman. I should have asked the sage about the meaning of our lives, but all I could think of was to apologize for writing a satirical article about him that was published in Climbing Magazine. He reassured me, “Bob, any publicity is good publicity.”
Surviving Healthcare offers no healthcare advice and is written for entertainment purposes. I am retired.
I do have advice, but take it at your own risk. If you are a climber, do your Yosemite apprenticeship and then climb Astroman. I did it twice and led every pitch free. It was one of the peak experiences of my life.
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