Jabril [none/use name]

Looking further at the link you sent, the most recent article on the topic is actually criticizing anti-vax sentiment: https://landdestroyer.blogspot.com/2024/07/reuters-exposes-washingtons-global.html#more

some quotes from the article:

The article titled, “Pentagon ran secret anti-vax campaign to undermine China during pandemic,” admits: At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

The article reveals that the campaign was not conducted only in the Philippines, but across the rest of Southeast Asia and far beyond. The US government campaign, carried out by the US military, was not conducted because it was actually believed that China’s Sinovac vaccine or any of the protective equipment it manufactured was faulty, but purely to undermine China. As revealing and disturbing as Reuters’ article is, it falls far short of fleshing out the full extent of US disinformation, manipulation, and coercion regarding Chinese vaccines and medical equipment.

I went on to watch the video he did on this which is linked on the article page and he points out that the sinovac technology was traditional vaccine technology which he suggests is trustworthy in one article and in this video, his main criticism again being that big pharma was rushing experimental vaccine mrna tech and that it seems dubious, which is true. It was and is dubious, this shouldn’t be controversial, even if it is misused by libertarians to lead people into anti-vax rhetoric, Berletic seems to be passively avoiding that by suggesting that China’s vaccines are actually good because they are using verified tech and not produced by big pharma. I know enough about mrna tech now to trust it but at the time when these articles came out, most people had never heard of it and it was considered experimental and not thoroughly tested enough to be commonly used. I don’t think it was wrong for anyone to doubt these companies, their intentions, and their experimental vaccines being rolled out without oversight, particularly in the first year of the pandemic when these articles came out. People misusing that distrust has been a huge problem, but I really don’t see Berletic doing that when he is saying anti-vax sentiment against Chinese vaccines is a campaign of US imperialism that harms people in Asia.

This to me is another example that while he still is a lib of some kind and not a marxist unfortunately, he is looking at things materially in the same way that liberatarians can sometimes do but he then presents a different and more mature analysis than a libertarian would. It doesn’t really add up to anti-vax to me when he is criticizing the correct problems with the capitalist methodology of healthcare and then using china as an example of how to do it better. Suggesting that people should be trusting Chinese covid vaccines over US and European ones is definitely a new take on anti-vax that breaks away from every anti-vax person I’ve heard.

I’ve met anarchists who somehow got to the point where they pretty much agree with the ML perspectives on every geopolitical issue and even most domestic political issues but still cling to the anarchist label. I personally know at dozens of MLs who went through some form of libertarian before moving on to marxism and eventually to ML, and I’ve seen this reflected by strangers online a lot as well. There are a lot of variation of this process and I just don’t think that the evidence so far is enough for me to think Berletic is currently a far right or crypto fascist creator. I think he very likely could have become that based on his past but surprisingly has been going in a different direction, and enough so that I don’t think we should be suggesting that his free content on geopolitical issues that is well sourced and consistently accurate should be totally disregarded as far right, crypto fascist propaganda. Not that you’ve said that exactly but I think making it a habit to chime in every time you see him mentioned to call him far right implies this.

People like norm finkelstein throw in random transphobic comments, hudson (and pepe escobar) post on unz review, blumenthal is a true anti vaxxer which is one of the reasons ben norton split from him (ben norton still makes content with berletic via danny haiphong though), we can look to so many examples of names we see on this website every month seemingly being more and more openly right in one way or another, and honestly berletic is one of the few that has seeming to be going the opposite direction of this trend.

I’ll just close out by saying: I don’t keep up with Berletic anymore because if you’ve watched anything he’s made in the past few years, he kind of repeats the same info that you’ve already heard and most new info is some extension of what has already been said. I do think his analysis on geopolitics can be very useful and it can worth checking out for free and is well sourced. If anyone shows me anything that ties him to being far right or fascist I would accept it but haven’t seen it yet.

Berletic is not a Marxist or a comrade, and as far as I’m concerned he is just useful for geopolitical and military analysis. I was pushing back against the idea that he is a far right source, because it doesn’t seem accurate and as presented seems like a call to disregard Berletic’s analysis entirely because that means you are essentially reading Nazi propaganda or something.

That seems very wrong to me, especially since he doesn’t monetize his youtube videos or sell ads on his website, so you aren’t actually supporting him any any material way by considering what he is saying, and everything I’ve seen as him make in regards to geopolitics and military analysis is both really useful and seems totally free from brainworms. The extra dozen or two clicks he might be getting from hexbear isn’t boosting him in the algo enough to be considered co signing fascist rhetoric.

I haven’t noticed dogwhistles or bigotry or hinting at anything suspicious, just talking straight facts and in every case being on the side of anti-imperialist nations entirely. He sources well and does it with western sources that people can’t claim are owned by Russia or the see see pee, so he is a very helpful creator to pull from when talking to people about geopolitics. None of his guests or collaborators since I have heard about him a couple years ago have really raised any red flags but I haven’t looked into them at all and am prepared to be wrong about any of them.

His regular co-host Angelo Giulano lives in Hong Kong and his twitter is literally all posts calling out the genocide in Palestine, I don’t know anything about him outside of looking into his twitter for this post and the things he has done with Berletic, but maybe looking into him and the others would provide more clarity about Berletic himself?

You may not have been a super chud at your worst, but I don’t see why that is relevant. This guy is an ex marine alt journalist, the fact that he isn’t a rabid MAGA guy or pushing transphobic or racist rhetoric or selling carnivore diet meal prep kits seems to me that he has come a long way from how he likely was fresh out of the marines. A regular, probably younger person going from a default lib to communist is less of a political progression than an over 40 ex-marine going from super chud to whatever he is now, and more often than not people from his background go the opposite direction.

He seems like he was probably some sort of earnest “libertarian” when he got out of the marines and started his journalism career, which is an ideology that does well to at least acknowledge real material phenomena like pharmaceutical companies being evil and fossil fuel companies pretending to care about climate change, and war being bad- point being that it is a great trap for newly radicalizing people in the US who are encoded from birth to be anti-communists. Many US marxists with no military background had some libertarian phase during their political transition. He isn’t a marxist, but no one here is suggesting his work to be informed about how to be a leftist. He is useful at staying informed on geopolitics and has a solid track record of reporting better than most I’ve seen on Ukraine, Taiwan, Iran, etc and less annoying to me than his contemporaries.

him self critting or deleting old stuff doesn’t really make sense because he isn’t a marxist and hasn’t become so politically developed to think doing such a thing matters. You are comparing him to yourself, a Marxist, and that seems like an unhelpful standard to view him through. Most people don’t do things like that or think they need to, even if they have changed their perspectives on things, unless called out and confronted about it. Most people just keep moving forward and their older work stays up as a testament to their career which they have continued to build on and evolve. If he comes out as a communist and then doesn’t acknowledge his past or delete that stuff it would be different, but otherwise I think every person can mature from who they were ten years ago even if it is slow and doesn’t get them to a level of enlightenment that gets them to become a marxist and feel the need to go back and delete the first five years of their work because it is cringe. I don’t think anyone who posts this content here use him to base their understanding as a marxist off of, and I don’t hold him to marxist standards or expect him to be following a self criticism regiment; he is strictly a useful free resource for a very particular topic

In the day in age when people feel like they don’t need to pretend to care about “woke” and “dei” and everyone is happy they can say the r-slur again and be openly fascistic as an easy way to boost their careers and make more money, him choosing NOT to do that and instead openly calling out MAGA, Trump, NATO and all NATO related attacks against other nations, feels like a sign that he has grown from where he was ten years ago and has probably improved some of his perspectives from that time. Unlike MAGA communists or other grifters, I don’t see him pandering to the white working class or really anyone at all.

it does seem like most evidence points to him genuinely improving over time and moving away from the right. Your perspective is that he is going crypto and just hiding his power level but it seems like for that to be true, he would need the dogwhistles, or be a part of a pipeline to other creators who take the viewer to the next level of being a fascist but I don’t see any evidence of that. The only evidence of connections that would suggest that seem to have really ended years ago, which tracks with the idea that he got politicized as a white ex marine in america and has gotten better to some degree instead of doubling down. I haven’t seen enough evidence to assume your theory is correct and the little I have to go off of suggests to me that he’s genuinely drifted towards the left enough that considering his analysis for free isn’t a betrayal of marxist values. More evidence could sway me, like if it turned out the other people he collaborates with in the past few years are a part of some fascist pipeline with him, but nothing I’ve seen yet suggests that enough for me to jump on board with your position. Looking at Michael Hudson who still puts his still on Unz Review where commentators on his articles are saying heinous anti-semetic and bigoted shit on every post, I could see how michael hudson is actively leading people right now into fascism via his otherwise innocuous economic work. I haven’t seen that connection for Berletic yet.

To the climate change articles: All the ones you linked most recently are a decade old. The most recent one related to climate change was the first one you linked which I responded to, where it seems like he clearly accepts climate change as real, even while still be skeptical of the big corporations and institutions claiming to care about climate change while actively harming the climate. It seems like he has changed his perspective on this, and nothing recent I’ve seen would suggest otherwise. Showing more of his work from ten years ago is evidence of how he thought then, but more recent work on the subject shows that he has potentially grown from that perspective to something closer to what you and I believe.

To the vaccine ones: he didn’t write most of these. I don’t know what kind of agreements he has had with publishers like NEO or Infowars to boost other writers from those sites in exchange for them boosting his work. Again, if he was purporting to be a communist and was boosting these people I’d say he is a bad communist, but as a non-communist trying to build a career as an alt journalist who would never be published in typical outlets, using these avenues to build your career isn’t surprising, and him starting at infowars in 2010 and seemingly being totally unassociated within a few years seems like a positive sign that his de-chuddening journey has been underway. I assume it was something like this because the infowars people who’s work he has on his website, like paul joseph watson, are also articles from 2010 and 2011. It looks like when he started his career he was there and he was crossposting their stuff, and then he has since distanced himself from infowars and no longer posts that stuff or boost those people. He seemed to have a similar deal with NEO after infowars, a publication I don’t know anything about and don’t read, but the articles on his site you linked to from NEO writers are from 2020 before vaccines were even out, and in the ones he wrote himself he says traditional vaccines technology is sound but he is distrustful of these mega corporations rushing out experimental vaccines because these companies have done terrible things to people in the name of science and the mrna technology wasn’t in widespread use yet. it’s a far cry from being anti-vax in the same way that the true scions of that movement are, because Berletic does seem to think vaccines are good in general but just thinks that the companies who make them are sketchy and there is no way to verify if what they are doing is safe or not. He mentions the mercury thing in an article from 2014 and after searching his website, hasn’t mentioned it since. Not great but not surprising given the context and most importantly, not present in his work for over a decade. Another potential sign of improvement.

Human civilization - without doubt - is negatively impacting the environment.

Big-agriculture poisons our land and water with chemicals and genetic contamination. Big-oil chokes our air. Big-defense litters battlefields with depleted uranium constituting a modern-day equivalent of plowing the earth with salt. Plastic packaging necessary for “globalized” consumerism fills our land and seas. Even if one does not believe in mainstream notions of “climate change,” petroleum-based transportation has a direct and undeniable impact on human health that must be reduced if not entirely eliminated. The wealth and power consolidated by big-energy is also a major social problem that needs to be confronted.

If Greta Thunberg and her Fridays for Future activists wanted to “save the Earth,” they would be gathering outside the headquarters of the corporations responsible for these offenses - not protesting outside the offices of the politicians they own.

When “Fridays for Future” begins advocating boycotts of big-box stores and their oil-dependent, global-spanning supply chains in favor of local industry and business - when they protest genetically modified organisms and big-ag food in favor of locally produced organic produce, and when they begin advocating and investing in alternative energy rather than demanding the government do it for them - they will finally be on the road with a growing number of very real activists already working to truly save the environment.

They will also realize that these real activists - toiling for years - have never been known to them because the cameras and studios eagerly promoting “Fridays for Future” and their anemic, co-opted “activism” have already long ago worked hard to marginalize, censor, smear, and attack these genuine activists.