In 58 posts with close to 100k words, we shared a lot in 2024! Explore 2024’s biggest geopolitical shifts, cultural battles, and bold insights with Drishtikone’s year in review. See you in 2025! Happy New Year! Be safe!
When you see Russia get into existential war over Ukraine, or Israel bomb Syria or India battle with Pakistan or Bangladesh, it is not because of some whim. It has a historical and geographical context. That is critical to understand for analyzing geopolitics.
Dive into the shadowy world of the Deep State—its hidden structures, powerful networks, and the far-reaching impact on global events and control.
The Incubator Babies that never were became the key for US to attack Saddam in 1992. Today, a sitting US Head of State is persona-non-grata within hours. Web of power and lies can do anything!
Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20 from Pixabay
“You cannot reconcile creativeness with technical achievement. You may be perfect in playing the piano, and not be creative. You may be able to handle color, to put paint on canvas most cleverly, and not be a creative painter...having lost the song, we pursue the singer. We learn from the singer the technique of song, but there is no song, and I say the song is essential, the joy of singing is essential. When the joy is there, the technique can be built up from nothing; you will invent your own technique, you won't have to study elocution or style. When you have, you see, and the very seeing of beauty is an art.” ― Jiddu Krishnamurti
If all your essential supplies - like food or oil - come from another country, then in a time of war, your enemy does not have to kill you. They just need to deprive you of those things by cutting off your access.
In today’s world, with technology and social media as the new opium of the masses as well as the rails on which commerce and currency moves, one who wants to strangle you does not need to go out of his bedroom. He can switch off the access to everything from his bed.
There are no rules. There are no UN debates. As if they mattered. An upstart kid sitting in an office can decide whose digital life to end and poof - he is gone!
Monsters can be created. Wayward idiots can be fashioned as demons extraordinaire. Unleashing scorn from the entire society.
Once such a scenario has been accomplished, then all you need is an outraged crowd with the right phrases fed to them and a way to take the message to every person.
Stories can be created - full of sympathy and pity for the manufactured victims of the targeted person, organization, or even a nation.
And, now we know that when it comes to such machinations, even the world’s most powerful head of state can become a persona non grata within a matter of hours!
This, folks, is the scene of the Tech Armageddon.
A group of politicians led by California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter (remember these names we will come back to them in the end) came together on October 10, 1990, to hold a hearing on Capitol Hill. They called the group Congressional Human Rights Caucus. Lantos and Porter were also part of another group called the Congressional Human Rights Foundation. In fact, they were the co-chairs.
This group had a free office space in the Washington DC office of a PR firm called Gill and Knowlton.
That day, an alarming testimony was given by a 15-year old Kuwaiti girl - Nayirah. No one knew her full name. Saddam Hussein, the monster had attacked Kuwait and no one wanted her family to be impacted.
She described in detail, while sobbing, the damage and the monstrosity of Saddam and his troops!
"I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," Nayirah said. "While I was there, I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns, and go into the room where ... babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die."(Source)
As she was speaking, her written testimony was being passed out by Citizens for a Free Kuwait to the media.
That “Congressional hearing” was held by the Human Rights Caucus which was not really a committee of Congress.
Why is that important?
That meant you unlike the legal consequences of lying under oath in front of a congressional committee, doing the same against such a Caucus was merely termed as “Public Relations” - PR.
And, that becomes important because Nayirah was no poor Arab girl who witnessed the horrific crimes perpetrated by Saddam’s goons. She was a member of the Kuwaiti Royal Family! Her Dad, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, was Kuwait's Ambassador to the US.
About the Citizens for a Free Kuwait, the group which had shared Nayirah’s written testimony with the media on October 10th. They were a PR group which got millions from the Kuwaiti Royal family to nail Saddam. Oh, and the PR company whose DC office the two Congressmen were using for their own little organization? That was hired by the Kuwaiti royal family as well.
Hill & Knowlton, then the world's largest PR firm, served as mastermind for the Kuwaiti campaign. Its activities alone would have constituted the largest foreign-funded campaign ever aimed at manipulating American public opinion. By law, the Foreign Agents Registration Act should have exposed this propaganda campaign to the American people, but the Justice Department chose not to enforce it. Nine days after Saddam's army marched into Kuwait, the Emir's government agreed to fund a contract under which Hill & Knowlton would represent "Citizens for a Free Kuwait," a classic PR front group designed to hide the real role of the Kuwaiti government and its collusion with the Bush administration. Over the next six months, the Kuwaiti government channeled $11.9 million dollars to Citizens for a Free Kuwait, whose only other funding totalled $17,861 from 78 individuals. Virtually all of CFK's budget -- $10.8 million -- went to Hill & Knowlton in the form of fees. (Source)
With this elaborate set-up and public opinion creation exercise, the monsterization of Saddam was complete.
The “babies out of incubators” story from the Kuwaiti plant became the main phrase in every media outlet and used to describe Saddam’s monstrosity.
And, all this paved the way for the attack on Iraq.
On November 29, 1990, the UN authorized use of "all means necessary" to eject Iraq from Kuwait. On January 12, 1991, Congress authorized the use of force. (Source)
No one in the media had checked any of those lies. No one in the public even questioned if what the PR companies and their lackeys - the US Congressmen - were even telling the truth?
The stage was set for lies to show as the facts and those lies-as-facts were repeated ad nauseum to make them the Truth.
And, Iraq was attacked almost in the fashion of a video game war by Bush Sr.
A strategy that was repeated yet again by Bush Jr to completely finish Iraq and Saddam Hussein after 9-11.
Still, no one gave a rat’s arse about the facts.
To finish a country, any country, even an erstwhile close ally - as Saddam was of Bush administration before he decided to attack Kuwait - is that easy.
Lies can be fabricated. Tomes on monstrosities can be created and an entire nation can be razed to dust with everyone applauding at the generosity of the perpetrator.
This week, the Russian spokeswoman equated the blocking of Donald Trump by Social media tech giants to a nuclear explosion. (Source)
Let’s just leave out the jibes about Russia backing Trump out for a moment and focus on this comment.
How important is it?
Well, it has started a chain reaction where Trump is the greatest political and racist monster in the country and so needs to be purged from everywhere. These companies have either suspended Trump or anyone who remotely supported him in the last one week. (Source and Source)
Whether he is a monstrous and racist villain or not is not what we want to discuss here. We want to look at the extent of damage that can be done if it is “proved” in the media, and loudly enough, that someone is a monster.
Just look at the situation for what it is:
The US establishment has put sanctions on their own sitting President! And the corporations have followed suit.
From social media companies to web hosting companies to email services to banks and the credit card payment rails like Visa, Mastercard and Paypal have basically taken Trump out of the system.
The last ones are the most important.
In our earlier newsletter edition, we had discussed how the UPI system that was laid out by the Indian government had basically beaten the Visa and Mastercard payment rails so spectacularly in India. (Issue #215 - The UPI/RuPay Juggernaut)
In the new world of digital currency being the dominant force - Cash is not what runs the economies. Payment rails - like Visa, Mastercard, Paypal, etc - do!
So now for some simple truth. (Source)
What can they do for outsiders?
If these companies can put sanctions on their own sitting Head of State, imagine what they can do with another state whose Head of State is hit by the “Incubator Babies" scheme?
Here is an example.
Crimeans lost the ability to use Visa and MasterCard cards after the annexation. They were not accepted in shops and did not work in the ATMs. Visa and MasterCard announced they were terminating services in Crimea in December 2015. The money transfer service PayPal also terminated operations in the occupied peninsula. After Visa and MasterCard ceased operations on the peninsula, and any kind of card payments became impossible, Crimeans started to think up various schemes to facilitate cash transfers. (Source)
Not that what Russia did to Crimea was a good thing. But since when was an invasion of another nation such a big issue for the US and its corporations?
The payment rails were taken out of the whole region.
Now factor in the Crypto Wars.
The Crypto Wars is an unofficial name for the U.S. and allied governments' attempts to limit the public's and foreign nations' access to cryptography strong enough to resist decryption by national intelligence agencies (especially USA's NSA). (Source)
Do you see how scary, comprehensive, and easy it is for the US “establishment” to bring an entire nation along with its leadership down to its knees?
Now imagine this scenario against India or Israel.
Read the above again.
Digest it.
Now, think back to the anti-CAA protests and the resolutions in US cities against India. Add the anti-Article 370 protests, articles and the PR campaigns. And these hearings where Aarti Tikoo Singh (Source) and Sunanda Vashisht (Source) were hounded. The latter one was incidentally the Lantos Human Rights Committee - which was founded as the Human Right Caucus by Lantos and Porter. (Source) The infamous “Incubator Babies” PR duo!
Now come to the so-called Farm Protests and the swagger of Pakistan even when things are going kaput for them. Do you see that actions have already started in the last few years?
Building the entire IndiaStack was the first step.
The payment rails are out of the way as is the mechanism to unleash a nation-wide measure at a moment’s notice via Aadhar.
The next step - do a China. There is absolutely no need to create any new pathbreaking featured applications. Clone them and link them to Aadhar.
Final step - shut down the access to other apps. Completely.
Bhupinder Singh Mann, one of the four experts who was nominated by the Supreme Court for negotiations with farmers, is allegedly receiving threats from Canada after recusing himself from the SC-appointed panel. Mann, who is the president of the Bhartiya Kisan Union (BKU), said on Thursday that he is recusing himself from the panel. (Source)
During COVID-19. many users are facing a cash crunch. Taking advantage of people's compulsion to make fast money, Chinese apps have siphoned off money to the tune of Rs 21 thousand crores. Meanwhile, Google has removed some lending apps aimed at consumers in India from Play Store in an attempt to safeguard users, it said in a blog post on Thursday. Alphabet Inc`s Google has removed some lending apps aimed at consumers in India from Play Store in an attempt to safeguard users, it said in a blog post on Thursday. (Source)
SpiceHealth, CSIR-IGIB launch genome sequencing lab at Delhi airport to ensure early action against new variants of coronavirus that have emerged in countries like the UK. Samples of all international passengers, who undergo RT-PCR test on arrival at the Delhi airport and are found positive, will be sent to this genome sequencing lab. (Source)
India’s first indigenous 9 mm Machine Pistol “ASMI” has been developed by a young officer from Infantry School, Mhow with assistance from Defence Research and Development’s (DRDO) Armament Research & Development Establishment (ARDE), Pune. Developed in a record time of four months by Lt Col Prasad Bansod, the weapon has the capability of firing the in-service 9 mm ammunition. (Source)
Asserting that the made-in-India light combat aircraft Tejas is far better and advanced than the Chinese-Pakistani JF-17 fighter jets, Air Force chief RKS Bhadauria on Thursday said the latest Indian jet would be better equipped to carry out Balakot-type airstrikes. (Source)
Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal on January 14 said he has allowed reopening of poultry markets and withdrawn orders that restricted trade and import of chicken stock. This came after samples taken from poultry markets in New Delhi tested negative for Bird Flu. (Source)
“To Sell A War - Gulf War Propaganda” was a documentary that aired in December 1992. It was part of the CBC program the fifth estate. The program was directed by Martyn Gregory and produced by Neil Docherty.
Watch it!
Today’s ONLINE PAPER: Check out today’s “The Drishtikone Daily” edition. - THE DRISHTIKONE DAILY
TOOLS WE USE (our secret recipe): Here are some tools we use to streamline our work and do things in a lean and agile manner.
Evernote: One-stop shop for all note-taking and content clipping - this tool has notes, articles (~10,000) saved since 2005 which go into our research (have used their premium plan - very powerful!) // Fiverr: Get everything done by professionals for much less money. The most important marketplace for great talent! // Grammarly: your personal grammar checking tool (indispensable for writers)// Ferns n Petals: Send cakes, flowers, gifts, rakhis in India (tried and tested for 5 years!) // Sling TV: throw out the expensive cable and dish TV and get the same channels for less // Bluehost (US): Cheap and powerful website hosting (start a site for just $3.95/month - for India use this link -> Bluehost-India to start a site for $199/month) // Headliner App: Create amazing videos from the podcast/audio files with FB/Twitter integration (get 2 weeks free) - we use it for our podcasts
[These are referral links - which may provide us with some consideration at no cost to the user]
SUPPORT DRISHTIKONE: If you consider our work important and enriching and would like to contribute to our expenses, please click on the button below to go to the page to send in your contribution. You can select the currency (for example, INR or USD, etc) and the amount you would like to contribute. Contribute to Drishtikone
If you like this post - please share it with someone who will appreciate the information shared in this edition
If you like our newsletter, please share it with your friends and family
Every Sunday AM (US Time)/ PM (India time), we send out a weekly detailed newsletter. We also share other insightful notes during the week. Its free. Do sign up and share with friends!
