Fourth Reich Archaeology - #088 - Propaganda Madness 2: “The Daily” Deception

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

This week we are trying a new format of straight media criticism. As the criminal, insane war in Iran continues ramping up with no signs of slowing down, we figured some of you–like us–might be wondering how on earth anyone in their right mind can just go about their daily life without passing a thought to the global conflagration spreading across the Middle East. Well, listener, you’re in luck, because we’ve identified at least one place where the professional class and the rest of the American mainstream may be getting brainwashed into passive but moderately concerned acquiescence. Namely, the New York Times, and its hit podcast, “The Daily.”Don digs into “The Daily” episode on the so-described “errors” that led to the United States murdering over 175 innocent civilians–mostly young girls–in the bombing of an elementary school. The propaganda is even more obscene than you might imagine, as it takes the developing set of facts on the ground and molds them to fit the pre-fabricated narrative frameworks that have been deployed in defense of the American Empire. We spare no critique of The Daily and its contributors, calling out their lies, mischaracterizations, and omissions, once again in the footsteps of the likes of Guy Debord who so effectively taught us how to deconstruct the Spectacle. You won’t want to miss it.Outro Song: Brian Jonestown Massacre, “We Never Had A Chance”Patreon: patreon.com/fourthreicharchaeology

Flying over Tehran, flying over Iran, flying over their capital, flying over the IRGC, Iranian leaders looking up and seeing only U.S. and Israeli airpower every minute of every day until we decide it's over. And Iran will be able to do nothing about it. B-2s, B-52s, B-1s, Predator drones, fighters. controlling the skies, picking targets, death and destruction from the sky all day long. We're playing for keeps. Our warfighters have maximum authorities granted personally by the president and yours truly. Our roles of engagement are bold, precise, and designed to unleash American power, not shathing.

This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it is not a fair fight. We are punching them while they're down, which is exactly how it should be. Or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that's just confined to England or France or the United States. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. So it's one huge complex or combine. Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. And this international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources.

We found no evidence of conspiracy, foreign or domestic, the Warren Commission of science. I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever. I don't care what the facts are. We began to require information which showed that there were two wars going to. His job, he said, was to protect the Western way of life. The primitive simplicity of their minds renders the more easy victims of a big lie than a small one. For example, we're the CIA. No, he has a mile. He has a mile.

Freedom can never be secure. It usually takes a national crisis. Freedom can never be secure. Pearl Harbor. A lot of killers. We've got a lot of killers. Why, you think our country's so innocent? This is Fourth Reich Archaeology. I'm Don. Dick is off this week for Noruz, the Persian New Year. And we certainly wish a safe and a ultimately peaceful and in the future, a future, a Just New Year where the illegal criminal imperialist aggression against the people of Iran is brought to a timely

and a swift end and its perpetrators are brought to justice. As usual, we'd like to start things off with a note of gratitude. Thank you so much for joining us, for tuning in, for supporting the pod, listening to the pod, for subscribing to the pod on your podcast apps, for giving it that like, and for leaving us a little comment here and there. Any digital interaction that you perform with this podcast will expand its algorithmic reach and help us to reach new listeners and to grow this project. What will also help us do that is if you, sign up for our Patreon at patreon.com slash forthrightearchology. You'll find us there and if you are willing

and able to do so, drop us a little bit of change. If you can spare it and help us get to a point where we can start to think about spending more of our time on this project, putting out more content and doing even more work in this media landscape that we all inhabit. And there's, of course, the social media landscape that we inhabit as well. We're on Twitter. We're on Instagram. The handle is at Fourth Reich Pod in both of those locations. And we love to hear from you there as well.

Now, I don't want to belabor the introductory remarks here because this week, we are going to put out a bit of a different kind of an episode than what we've done previously. It's a little change of pace, a little change of format. We hope that you'll like it, that it will resonate with you, and that perhaps it could be of some use to you. as you interact with people who may not be as communoid as the listenership of Fourth Reich archaeology is. And perhaps this would be a good episode to circulate among some of those friends, loved ones, and acquaintances who find themselves stuck in the imperial mindset that has so forcefully been imposed. upon the minds of Americans for generations back, with the deep, deep implantation of a series of myths and of nationalistic understandings and connections with the super ego that drives the desires of the people.

and one of the objects of American desire is, of course, the desire for war, for conquest, for blood. Remember, this nation was founded on the genocide of the native peoples who inhabited North America before the arrival of European colonists, and their elimination, their extermination, was the foundation upon which the nation of the United States of America was built. And much of that building was, of course, done by enslaved Africans and their descendants, many of whom were viciously, forcefully bred for the purpose of perpetuating the chattel slavery system of absolute and utter. exploitation. Well, the levels of exploitation have largely remained unchanged, notwithstanding

the abolishment, the abolition of chattel slavery in the United States and in most, if not all countries, because slavery by other names persists, of course, in the so-called global south, where the wealth that inflates the spectacle here in the so-called developed world in the West, in Europe, in America, and in the metropolises across the world, it's all built on the back of the deepest, the most cruel, the most sadistic forms of exploitation that the human brain can imagine in its darkest fantasies and nightmares. And to revisit friend of the pod, Guy de Beau, of course, his concept of the society of the spectacle traces the process whereby that exploitation, that nightmarish reality

experienced by so many hundreds of millions of people, billions of people, billions of people at the bottom of the global socioeconomic pyramid, the process by which that is concealed is the subject of De Beaux's whole theory. And I think this episode kind of working within the framework of De Beaux and the process of deconstructing the spectacle into its component parts and analyzing how it functions to manipulate reality to sustain and inflate official narratives of historical events in real time as they're occurring, and of course to lay down the groundwork whereby posterity will understand what had happened in the past

and make decisions accordingly based on the same twisted, manipulated, and false picture of what the old mighty Wurlitzer, as Frank Wisner dubbed the media establishment, is cranking out as it plays its little keys upon the world, except the musical notes here are not lovely, vibrational noises know they are the sounds of falling bombs, of screaming children of death and destruction on mass. And so in this episode, what we're going to do is to take under our Fourth Reich Archaeology microscope the propagandists at the New York war crimes, the New York Times, that paper of record as it styles itself, that imperialist rag, as we might call it, from where we're sitting. And I was just listening to these episodes of this New York Times podcast,

The Daily. And I was thinking to myself that, you know, this is the conventional wisdom that that informs the entirety of the liberal bourgeoisie of the United States, the main component of the population that is perhaps generically against the criminal war in Iran, but isn't going to stand up to do anything about it, isn't going to risk any blowback that could come to them personally from, speaking out against the war. And, you know, if asked, would express an opinion that it's bad, that Trump is crazy, and that it doesn't look good. The prospects for the future sure don't look like this thing is going to wrap up real quick and nice. As perhaps some of the more fanatical

followers of Donald Trump and his MAGA movement, which is really just, his cult of personality believes. So in this episode, what we're going to do is play some clips from the daily recent coverage of the war in Iran, and I'm just going to butt in and take down what these absolute, real disgusting propagandists are putting out. I mean, as I'm setting this up, I've already heard all this stuff. I know that it's coming. I have not yet recorded the commentary that I'm going to do on this.

But just remembering what they say is making me feel like I want to fucking puke. And listener, please understand just the level of depravity, of removal from the plane. of reality that these media ghouls have thrown us into. It's truly astounding the effectiveness of this propaganda machine that's been operating ever since the days of Frank Wisner and is today, I would submit, even more powerful, not just more powerful, but more powerful by orders of magnitude, more powerful by orders of magnitude and more depraved by orders of magnitude in the type of imperialist justification that they're putting out on offer because at least when you had the Soviet Union in existence during the Cold War, at least there was a nuclear-armed superpower that was

theoretically in a face-off against the United States, a nuclear face-off that at any minute could result realistically in the devastation of the entire planet, of the destruction of the entire territorial United States, of the end of life on Earth as we know it, that those were the stakes, and so if indeed this enemy stood ready to wipe us. the Americans off the map, well, you're going to forgive a little bit of dirty fighting. You're going to give the benefit of the doubt to your government because, indeed, you believe that this great, great power enemy really exists and wants to do you harm. However, with the series of post-Cold War military invasions, occupations, episodes of aggression that the United States has carried out, especially in the Middle East, but of course elsewhere as well, Latin America, let's not take our eyes off Cuba, for example, as well, and our solidarity to the people of Cuba and to the,

flotillas that are headed down there this week. We send you our love and our support and hope that the people of Cuba are able to benefit from that endeavor. But to get back to the story here, there's no plausible case to be made that a country like Iran poses an existential threat to the United States. With Iraq, they stretched that idea of a nuclear enemy as far as they possibly could past the breaking point, because of course there were no WMDs. But they at least sold the Iraq war as if there were WMDs. And now with this invasion of Iran, which I think every rational observer has noted will not be able to advance beyond the current stalemate of throwing a shit ton of bombs back and forth without some kind of a ground invasion.

And Trump has acknowledged that possibility. I mean, without belaboring the point, because this is not a dedicated episode about the state of the war or anything like that. This is a propaganda-focused episode, a media. criticism episode, a deconstruction episode to actually see not what's going on on the ground, but to see how the events going on on the ground are being so twisted, so forced into the old mythical framework of American exceptionalism, even while The administration is not so much as attempting to offer a reasonable justification for its actions,

let alone concrete objectives that it's pursuing beyond vagaries which change from day to day and none of which actually hold any water as soon as you scratch the surface on them. it's truly alarming and it should be a clarion call to anybody and i'm not just talking about the masses of people i'm not just talking about the working class who's going to very soon be unable to afford the gasoline required to take the one-hour commute to the wealthier districts where they can't afford to live, to service the ruling class who live and work in those districts. I'm not just talking about those masses of humanity who will be so deeply harmed by this insanity. I'm also talking about the bourgeoisie. I'm talking about the professional managerial class.

I'm talking about the legal profession. to which Dick and myself belong. It is a clarion call to us all that our rulers have lost their goddamn minds, and that they are walking us all into an infernal abyss of unknown proportions compared to what we've been through in the past. It's truly beyond the pale that people are not vocally up in arms about what's going on. There's very few scenarios other than, well, I've never paid attention to geopolitics in the past, and I've always been okay.

And so I'm not going to start now because I assume, it's just the same as it's ever been. And I think that this is a big mistake, to put it mildly. A big mistake because things are going to get quite disrupted in the day-to-day life of people throughout the world as a result of the truly, truly psychological. decision to invade Iran. And none of this would be possible, this stranglehold on the mind of professional America, on the mind of the liberal bourgeoisie by the likes of the propagandists at the New York Times,

well, perhaps, maybe just maybe, if that stranglehold can be broken by exposing the false assumptions, the faulty logic and the outright falsehoods that are spouted within this otherwise reasonable-sounding propaganda, well, our hope is that perhaps we can pop that bubble a little bit, just a little bit, because goddamn is it doing harm to the world that people cannot see reality for what it is? that let's get digging We have no idea to target, civilians. They're not...

We think it was just by Iraq, because we could be able to be inaction with their community. They have no accurately whatsoever, but they're done by a row. Not much as we be sacred, sacred, sacred, sacred, and we can definitely say about us because we want everyone to try and we want to Surprise. Who knows better about surprises you can? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Howard?

Okay? You believe in surprise? I think much more so than that. And we had a surprise and we did. And because of that surprise, we knocked out, the first two days is probably knocked out 50% of what we, and much more than we were disappointed. So if I go and tell everybody about it,

there's no longer a surprise. The first piece that we're going to look at is from the Daily Podcast dated, I believe, March 12th, 2026. The host of this episode is Michael Barbaro, and indeed the name fits, a barbarian sensibility, as you will see. The journalists contributing here, one goes by the name of Maliki Brown, that's the one speaking with an Irish accent, and the other is Julian E. Barnes, who covers U.S. intelligence agencies and national security matters for the New York Times. Folks might take a guess what that signifies. and the title of the episode, and there's always much in a name, as we know, is the U.S. errors that led to the airstrike on an elementary school. So already in the title, we see that inclusion of the word errors, which builds in the assumption, of course, that never could the United States ever deliberately attack an elementary school, never could it commit a crime of mass murder of 175 mostly children.

No, it had to be U.S. errors that were at fault because we're the good guys after all and because we wouldn't do that on purpose. And speaking of the word we, the plural first person pronoun, that is what these so-called journalists use repeatedly throughout their reporting, throughout this podcast episode. And that in itself is also astounding because they are aligning themselves in a deep way, on the level of identity, on the level of group. If you've been listening to our exegesis on Carl Schmidt,

and if you're familiar at all with Schmidt's work, of course we know that the concept of the political, his critical contribution to legal scholarship in the Nazi era, is built around the friend-enemy distinction, right, whereby this line is drawn between us and the people that we are willing to kill in order to protect the interests of our pursuers, in group. And indeed, that paradigm is uncritically presented in the discourse, in the discursive framework of the New York Times Daily podcast. Well, hey there, censors. I just wanted to read in a little bit of the U.S. Code before I start dropping clips from the venerable New York

Times. Hate for him to come after me for copyright infringement because a tell you what, it's not copyright infringement if it's protected fair use. So, according to 17 U.S. Code Section 107, notwithstanding the provisions of the copyright laws, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or photo records or by any other means specified by that section for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research is not an infringement of copyright. Ergo, the following is not an infringement of copyright. Well, thanks for stopping by.

So let's have a listen now to how this Maliki Brown fellow describes the obviousness of the fact that this building that was struck, this school, this elementary school that was obliterated, all inhabitants murdered by not one, but by multiple airstrikes, including a double tap after rescuers showed up on the scene. Here's how he describes it's evident.

identity as a school. We were also able to determine that it was located beside a naval base of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is Iran's most powerful military. And it was once a part of it. We could see in historic satellite imagery that back in 2013, the building that the school was in was once encompassed within that broader rectangular military base. Already he is creating the identity between the school and the adjacent military base that he's reporting is next to and used to encompass the building that the school is located in. And that leading with that fact, leading with the fact that there is nearby this legitimate, presumably legitimate, military target is already setting up in the mind of the listener the preparedness that a mistake

was made here because indeed what they were really after was this so-called legitimate military target. He continues. Yeah, and then by 2016 it was walled off. The area was cleared, watch towers were removed, public entrances were opened into it, and the ground was cleared for playing areas, it was painted all these bright colors, so it had become, you know, it looked like a school and definitely was used for civilian purposes. But it was sitting right beside a military site, and they were being targeted in these early hours of the war on Iran. It really starts to piss me off, at least, once he continues here, because not Not only is he describing how blatant this building's identity has been as a school since 2016,

with a wall separating it from the military compound, with playgrounds, with brightly colored paint on the outside of the building that is visible through publicly available satellite images, i.e. Google Earth. I mean, he describes all that. but then still pivots back to the New York Times very favorite framing of any genocidal conflict where they blame, of course, the victims, the recipients of slaughter for using children as human shields. And here he's not using the word human shields, but he does pivot back to discussing how close it was to these legitimate. targets. It's extremely subtle in one respect because it's sharing critical information about the nature of what happened, but it is forcing that information into a pre-existing framework,

the narrative mold of the human shield paradigm that has so frequently been deployed by the New York Times in, for example, justifying genocidal violence against Palestinians throughout both the recent genocide in Gaza and for a long time before that as well. So after this Maliki Brown character gives an overview of the what of the attack on the elementary school, this fellow Julian E. Barnes,

the intelligence reporter and listener, yes, I did look and no, I could not find any familial connection between this Julian E. Barnes and CIA veteran of Bay of Pigs fame, Tracy Barnes. So, unfortunately, we don't have a eureka family history moment here for Julian E. Barnes, but he performs just as effectively. as if he were a chip off the old block of the old spooks, because he goes into how targets are selected and how indeed this error has happened and casts it as just one in a long string

of these unfortunate errors that just seem to keep happening to the poor, bumbling American Empire as it puts its giant footprint, all over the world, smashing everything in its path. Making a target is a complicated process. And that's the next stage of the military investigation to figure out, did the verification not take place? Did it fail to reveal the truth?

Where did that process break down? Because there's old data that's entered all the time, and there are safety nets that are meant to catch it. But they didn't catch it in this place. So again, he's implying that the normal way of doing things, the status quo, the ideal, is that the U.S. military employs all these checks, all of these careful analytical stopgap measures between targeting and execution that will ensure that civilians will not be caught in the crossfire and certainly that we would never attack an elementary school on purpose,

that it must have been some failure of process along the way, and what is the solution to a failure of process? Why, of course, the solution to a failure of process is more procedures, additional modes of engagement, rules of engagement, maybe draw back on some of that Pete Hegseth, excesses in lowering the restrictions on military action, in lowering the oversight mechanisms, and the what he calls, you know, the woke rules shackling the hands of our warfighters and all that macho bullshit. Just scale that back and you're going to be fine because, as Julian E. Barnes

lets us know in this next segment, really all of the previous managers of Empire have managed to conduct their wars of aggression in ways that are much more just, equitable, safe, fair, and kind, indeed humane, because they undertake to protect civilian life. Indeed, what are we even doing this for in the first place? if not to improve the lives of the Iranian people. It is certainly not to make their lives worse. It's not to destroy and ruin their lives, their country, their economy, their prospects for a peaceful and a happy life. No, we are intervening on their behalf against this government that is hurting them.

So really, you know, it's simply inconceivable that in a... this mission to save Iran that we would deliberately murder children. Let's hear a little bit more from Mr. Barnes. I'm curious, Julian, what you think, based on your many years covering these kinds of incidents, what accountability might look like in a case like this? Do you think that it's likely anyone will be fired for this? Will there be any effort to hold individuals or an entire chain of command responsible? Will there be any effort to compensate the families of those killed?

I mean, compensation is a very inadequate word given that we're talking about small children who were killed. But what do you think happens as a result of this? You'll hear Julian's response to the question in a moment, but I wanted to pause there because I think that that question by Michael Barbaro is phenomenally telling as well. Well, the goalposts for what might constitute accountability range somewhere from somebody getting fired to giving some money to the families of the little girls who were crushed to a pulp and blown apart into pieces by a tomahawk missile and then by another tomahawk missile. Nowhere, nowhere in the discussion does prosecution for what is obviously a war crime, a crime against humanity, and a mass, mass murder, a sadistic mass murder.

If nothing else, the scopes on these fighter jets have viewfinders. there are people looking at what they're shooting at and can see what they're shooting at. And yet these fucking people can't even conceive that what those pilots, what their superior officers, what the entire chain of command, not a chain of command, the chain of command to the very top, to the commander in chief, is responsible for the deluxe. deliberate murder of over 175 people, most of whom are little girls. It is, it's astounding. It's like, how on earth are we having this conversation on these terms?

And now you're going to hear exactly how we're having this conversation by glimpsing into the deranged psychotic fantasy world of Julian E. Barnes, New York Times. In a different administration, this would have been handled in the complete opposite way. We would be having a president not blaming the opponent. We would not have a president rushing to judgment. This isn't even the full response. I'll give a little bit more of it, but I got to to pause there because what the fuck is he talking about? What the fuck is this guy fucking talking about? In another administration, you wouldn't blame the opponent for something going wrong. Are you fucking kidding me? This is the Biden State Department spokesman.

Guy I like to call Captain Smirk because he would not wipe that fucking shit-eating grin off of his face through 18 months of genocide that he stood at the podium every single fucking day, Matthew Miller, talking about the Israeli bombing of Al-Ahali Hospital in the early days of the genocide in Gaza. We are still gathering information, but based on our initial assessment, it is the assessment of the intelligence agencies of the United States government that the explosion at the hospital was a failed rocket launch by militants in Gaza. And that's just the last administration.

What about the fucking invasion of Afghanistan? Wasn't that a bit of a rush to judgment where we invaded just less than two months after 9-11 without any sort of an investigation into the origins of the attack? What about the war in Iraq when the Bush administration, lied us into the war making up stories about yellow cake uranium, about aluminum tubes, about all of this bullshit. The idea that another administration would, West Wing style, take all the facts into consideration and make a reasoned determination that war is the only last resort available to

us and by gum, we are forced here to make a tough decision to commit military might and to put human lives at risk. Are you fucking kidding me, dude? Give me a fucking break. What the hell kind of an idiot do you think is listening to you who's going to believe that shit? Somebody that woke up fucking yesterday under a rock? No. No. In the society of the spectacle, the person who's going to believe that shit is the person who's part of the we that you keep on fucking talking about. The imaginary group of friends on this side of the Schmittian friend enemy distinction who are over here trying to preserve our way of life. That's who's going to believe you. Because if they don't believe you, then they're not part of the group anymore. And God forbid

that to be the case. And then you'd have the U.S. looking to potentially make an apology? Here is the great, reasonable, indeed by some estimations, even anti-Zionist President George H.W. Poppy, Bush. I'll never apologize for the United States. United States of America. Ever, I don't care what the facts are. I will lead her.

I will do my level best to stand up for freedom and democracy around the world by keeping the United States of America strong and by keeping our eyes wide open. You recognize it from our intro song. You know it. You love it. This speech was of course delivered in July 1988, following the U.S. navies shooting down of Iran Air flight number 655, which was an internationally scheduled passenger flight, civilian passenger flight, an Airbus A300 aircraft, the standard

commercial airline that you see in airports everywhere, while it was flying over Iran's territorial waters where a U.S. Navy destroyer happened to be without authorization during the Iran-Iraq war. And so, once again, in that case, even though it was a clearly, visibly identifiable commercial passenger airliner, even though it was broadcasting and transmitting civilian signals to all receiving radio frequencies, even though the people who were responsible for shooting that plane down knew perfectly well what they were doing and nevertheless proceeded to murder

290 civilian passengers on board the plane when they blew it into smithereens. George H.W. Bush doubled down, refused to apologize and once again restated that American solipsism, that we are the good guys, therefore what we do is good. And apparently his admonition did not fall upon deaf ears, because here in the year of our Lord, 26, some 38 years after the fact, once again we are seeing Julian E. Barnes of the New York Times saying that in any other administration, if the U.S. had mistakenly killed some civilians, we would expect to see an apology. I wonder, Julian, what you have in mind, because

at least in my recollection in my adult life, just about the only apology that I can recollect was, I believe Obama apologized for the 1954 coup. in Guatemala and the successive genocidal military dictatorships who devastated that country destroyed ways of life of multiple indigenous groups of people and kept a trap, a capitalist trap for the exploitation of the Guatemalan workforce as wage labor. other than that, I don't recall any president apologizing for anything, and indeed, I think that Poppy's statement stands as the general U.S. policy on issuing apologies. I don't know where Julian E. Barnes got this notion from, but certainly the implication that the Trump

administration is erratic as compared to historical U.S. administrations, or marks some kind of a substantive turn in imperial foreign policy from other administrations must be laughed out of the fucking room, not even taken with a grain of salt. It's simply empirically bogus as fuck. And we can't just let these assholes keep on shaping public opinion around their fucking lies. But his answer continues, insisting that in addition to an apology, the U.S. in any other administration would also... Potentially to do compensation to the families in Afghanistan, there was regular compensation when civilians were wrongly targeted, or when there was a civilian casualty in an otherwise correct military operation. Let's unpack this claim.

Where to begin. It is true that the U.S. has paid out what are called condolence payments to Afghan individuals who submit claims to the United States government, which, remember, just taking that step to submit a claim to the United States government when the Taliban has been throughout the entire war that lasted for 20 odd years, was controlling vast swaths of territory. If I were a civilian who'd been harmed by the United States, I don't know that I would want to walk past my local Taliban armed guard to the local U.S. consulate to submit my claim for a condolence payment. But certainly, many people did. And they...

received, on average, a payout between $2,500 and $5,000. And this is based on reporting from Al Jazeera, from lawfare, from documents that were obtained and made public by the ACLU during the Afghan War. And in total, just to give a sense of the total number of claims that were getting paid out, between 2015 and 2020, which is the data set that Lawfare website reported on, the payouts totaled $4.9 million, excuse me, a little under $4.9 million with an M dollars. Okay? The estimated cost of one Tomahawk missile is between 2.5 and 3.6.

million dollars per missile. So by that arithmetic, the, just the missiles that were used to murder those 175 innocent children in Iran, the missiles cost more than what was paid out to Afghanistan individual civilians in damages over a five-year period combined. Just think about that for scale. Okay? Now, what we also know is that the scale of the destruction and devastation in Afghanistan is immeasurable. Not only the tens of thousands of civilian lives that were ended,

not only the people who were deformed, who were mortally wounded, whose homes and livelihoods were destroyed, wiping out generations of history, of memory, of family. The United States additionally seized $3.5 billion from Afghanistan, from the people of Afghanistan, as payback for 9-11 when they left the country in 2022. this is reported by Al Jazeera, and many, many, many other places have reported on this. So not only are the so-called condolence payments that Julian E. Barnes finds to be so soothing to his conscience

as part of this American we who is here making mistakes and murdering hundreds of kids. a pittance, as it's an utter pathetic pittance, to think that $5 million or less is going to cover five whole years for an entire country that is subject to devastation for no reason whatsoever. No reason. Taliban was in charge when the United States invaded. Taliban is in charge here today in March of 26. there is no justification, and there was no justification for the so-called smart war against Afghanistan, the so-called legal war against Afghanistan. And on top of all of that, on top of tossing the equivalent of pennies at the people who have just suffered under the lash of the full force,

of American imperialism, the U.S. grabs the dollars. Toss down some pennies, grab down some dollars. Of course, 3.5 billion is many, many, many orders of magnitude larger than whatever was paid out to the hard-suffering people of Afghanistan, all for the crime of 9-11, which, evidently those people had nothing whatsoever to do with. But they have to, to suffer for it. Why? Because people like Julian E. Barnes at the New York Times tell the liberal, educated American public that, you know, when we made mistakes in Afghanistan and accidentally, you know, even while we were pursuing otherwise correct military actions, we always, we always made whole the people who we harmed. And no, we don't mean made whole.

whole is in put the pieces of their dismembered corpses back together, that would be impossible because they were evaporated underneath the bombs or they were torn into ribbons by the machine gunfire of automatic weaponry. Not make hole in that sense. Make hole in the sense that the average income in Afghanistan is like nothing. So to these people, $2,500 is like a lifetime supply of money. So they should just be happy that they get anything at all. And, you know, next time, maybe don't be from the country that happens to be critical for mineral supplies, for supplying the global heroin trade with opium poppy. I mean, there's a list of crimes that these people have committed just by existing,

and so they're lucky that they get anything at all. Indeed, they basically just crawled out of the sludge yesterday, and if it wasn't for the British Empire and the good work that they did out there in Central Asia, these people, they wouldn't even have written language, most probably. So goes. The mentality of the daily podcast, listener, thanks to the indoctrination and inculcation of this imperialist mind frame within the

society of the spectacle. And the nausea that I had when we started is getting worse and worse and worse. I'm going to try to keep on trudging on through a couple more of these clips that I've selected. I don't know if I'll get to every single one that I had isolated for discussion, but let's continue with it. Because, It's not only, I don't want to give the impression that it's only Mr. Barnes, who's giving this absolutely psychotic paradigm of reality to the listeners of the New York Times podcast. The host as well is equally guilty in the way that he frames things. So here once again is Michael Barbaro. What happened here?

the idea that the U.S. would make a mistake and that it would kill civilians, it's not a new phenomenon. We talk about it a lot on the show. War right now, as the United States largely conducts it, is from the air, and it's through drones or warships firing missiles from very far away, which is what we think happened in the case of this school. And the idea is that it insulates American soldiers from harm that would come from being on the ground. Okay, now we're cooking with a little bit of ramp it up, start the discussion with a limited concession, right? This isn't something new. This isn't something that's happening now for the first time.

And not only that, but we cover it on this show. You know that it's not something new because we are giving you hard facts, hard information about the crimes of empire. Even if we're not calling them crimes per se, we're at least exposing the truth about what's really happening because we are the paper of record and we've got to put it on the record and tell you our readers, our listeners, our stewards of civilization. the readership of the New York Times. And from there, proceed to give the rationale for why we now engage in a warfighting strategy that involves largely, as Pete Hegseth put it, reining down death and destruction from the skies. Well, we have to do that, of course, because it takes our trust.

groups out of harm's way. If they're in an Air Force base somewhere remote controlling a drone, they're not liable to be killed by enemy fire. If they're 30,000 feet up in the air, traveling at 600 miles an hour, they're not liable to be shot down by enemy surface-to-air missiles or by enemy aircraft. They are immune from the consequences of the possible. of aggression that is being directed from on high. And that ultimately is a good thing because we don't want to put our troops in harm's way. You probably know a troop. And if you don't know a troop, your neighbor does, or, you know, the grocery store clerk does, or the gas station attendant does, somebody in your community is a troop, knows a troop, or loves a troop. And because of that,

you, just like we, we remember, don't want to risk their lives to achieve these policy objectives. But the risks are now very plain, and we somewhat regularly, as a military, kill civilians because we aren't close enough to the targets to understand who's there. That was especially true a few years back, and we did an episode about it, when the U.S. military killed a The man in Afghanistan, who we believed was a suspect of an attack when, in fact, he was an aid worker and we killed nine members of his family, including his seven children. Is this form of modern American warfare just going to be far more error-prone? Of course, the question begs the answer, and the answer has got to be the affirmative. Yes, it's more error-prone, and that is the trade-off that policymakers have

made. Now, the New York Times is not inviting the democratic populace here to weigh in on the policy decision that creates this paradigm in the first place. Rather, the New York Times is asserting to its readership, to its listenership, that this is the trade-off, this is why the trade-off was made, and the consequences include such tragedies as Afghan man and his seven children wrongfully murdered whether by accident or not

I think it's highly dubious to assume it was accidental because it's never accidental to pull the trigger it's never accidental to be there in the first place so it's never accidental that these deaths happen. There are deliberate decisions made at every step of the chain

between policy-making and execution. And I don't mean execution of the policy. I mean execution of innocent people in far-flung reaches of the world that is inevitable as a consequence of imperialism. But of course, the anecdote of... about this one individual and his family who were killed, which was, as Barbaro tells us, covered on this podcast,

that is but a drop in the ocean of the horrors wrought in Afghanistan over a period of more than 20 years, remember, more than 20 years. And the vast bulk of that time, the military strategy focused on, of course, air war and night raids. which referenced the book in the past, the Fort Bragg Cartel by Seth Harp, talking about how these special forces guys who were doing these night raids

were basically an assassination squad that like the Phoenix program of the CIA in Vietnam in the 1960s did, would take very dubiously sourced lists of names and basically go from house to, a house and either kill people or turn them into informants at great risk to their life from whoever the opposing force was. And so this notion that, you know, at the very worst end of things, you know, you get things like this anecdote where accidentally a handful of people in this one

family were killed, it obscures in a tree. truly deceitful way, the breadth and the scope of the carnage that was wrought by the United States military operation in Afghanistan. It's utterly dishonest. It's totally obfuscatory. And for somebody in this position of public trust, this self-serious role of informing the masses with a daily podcast that delivers not only the news, but behind the head. headlines analysis, it is just astounding to see the reduction of really 20 years of brutalization, of a sadistic campaign of domination for no reason. Remember, for no actual salvageable identifiable policy objective other than fueling the military industrial complex,

fueling the global heroin trade, getting every little hand that's got a pocket in either one of those some gold coin upon it, and ultimately, again, fastening this suicide vest of militarism onto the American body politic, that our only notion of solving world problems is sending advanced weaponry to make big explosions. And the New York Times is as guilty for perpetrating a lot of these crimes as some of the actual officers themselves because of the abuse of its position of trust. I mean, it's hard to imagine that these people don't know any better. And even if they don't, you know, if they're that fucking stupid that they can seriously say this shit without having even a tinge of a thought

that perhaps they're full of shit, well, then they deserve whatever's coming to them anyways, because they know perfectly well that they're making bank while spouting nonsense. And to close it out, the last section that I want to play from this episode is a section that's about hammering home the point that this was an error, that it was a mistake, and that it was a tragedy. You know, the almost hypnotic repetition of those three words, error, mistake, tragedy. Throughout the entirety of the episode performs a subliminal programming. It's very like parallax view style podcasting.

And it again begs the question of all of these very educated people. I come across people in real life all the time that take great pride in listening to The Daily every day on their morning commute and thereby considering themselves to be informed members of the electorate, to be aware of current and global events and affairs, and to understand what is happening and why it's happening. And, you know, they're just fucking baby. and they're getting a spoonful of mashed yams fed into their mouth and being told here comes the airplane and opening up with a chortle. Except unlike a baby eating mashed yams, there's really nothing cute about the spectacle. It is instead pathetic. Pathetic. How do you think that this mistake, this tragedy, this killing of all of these children at this elementary school in the early hours of this war is going to be remembered. Cue the music there, a subliminal hint to the

listener to open up that amygdala and let in the information that's about to come because it's both emotionally impactful and important. When you think about this war, you know, you know, that no matter what policy goals are achieved in this war, the death of the supreme leader, the weakening of the Iranian regime, or the elimination potentially of its nuclear program, whatever is to come. And because it's we who are pursuing these objectives, they must inherently be good objectives. So what you're hearing from Barnes is that it's a good thing to assassinate the supreme leader. It's a good thing to weaken the regime. There is, evidently, a nuclear program that exists, even though that assumes a fact, which was explicitly

disclaimed by the UN and the Omani foreign minister who is conducting negotiations with Iran. There was was no nuclear program. Indeed, even the United States claimed that it had completely destroyed the Iranian nuclear program with the earlier attacks on the nuclear sites in Operation Midnight Hammer, right? So we are making a false assumption, and then we are building on top of that, that we're assuming for the sake of argument that these are the actual goals of the operation and that those are actually good goals with an asterisk, right? And the asterisk is what comes next. This war is still going to be remembered, defined by this mistake as well. It's too big an error. It's too big a tragedy. Mistake, error.

tragedy. I told you was a fucking mantra. And if we think back on other American wars, we do think of the things that go wrong, right? If we go back to Vietnam,

we think of the Milai massacre. We think of the use of napalm that killed children. Once again, the exact same pattern, name one atrocity, set that up as the placeholder for the entirety of the atrocities committed

and thereby obscure the breadth and scope of those atrocities. So, for example, maybe omits the important fact that the U.S. war in Vietnam, once again, a war that was lost by the United States, quote unquote, lost, It enriched a hell of a lot of military-industrial complex goons, but it achieved nothing in the geopolitical stated objectives of the day of that war. It resulted in the reunification of Vietnam under a communist government, of course. What does he leave out? He leaves out the fact that it killed something like a million people. It's a genocidal war, and it was indeed a genocide involving the attempted evisceration of the ways of life of the Vietnamese people.

The Strategic Hamleting program not only used Napalm to kill children, it used Napalm to devastate the entire agricultural, landscape of the country. And not only Vietnam, also Cambodia, also Laos, the operations, of course, spanned outside of the borders of Vietnam on the map. Besides killing a million-plus Vietnamese, the war also used, besides Napalm, many other chemical and biological warfare agents, namely the rainbow. agent, so-called Agent Orange. Many people don't know, but there's also Agent White, Agent Pink, a whole panoply of different chemical weapons that were deployed ostensibly as defoliants,

but which had generational impacts on the health care of Vietnamese people. There are still today being born babies with absolutely unbearable deformities. and birth defects as a result of poisoning inflicted by United States chemical warfare 50 years ago and more. The level of devastation not only on the ecological level, on the agricultural level, on the economic level, on the social level, besides the death toll is so great that to diminish it to the Milai Massacre, which bears the designation of simply being the only massacre that made the headlines.

But it was, again, like the anecdote told earlier, about the man in Afghanistan, killed with his seven children, just one, just one example among hundreds, among thousands of like cases of massacres upon massacres, of tortures upon tortures, of mutilations upon mutilations. And that is lost when you make such a reductive statement as the one that Mr. Barnes made right there. If we go to the Iraq War, we think of Abu Ghraib and the abuse of prisoners there. we think of that terrible military mistake and the consequences it had. He really wants you to believe that Abu Ghraib was a military mistake. That's how he characterizes several people getting caught running a torture chamber

that lasted for an extended period of time affected dozens. if not hundreds of prisoners who were systematically tortured. And again, that's just the case that we know about. But there are countless, countless other instances of torture in Iraq, in the Global War on Terror more broadly, through the Extraordinary Rendition Program, not to mention, again, the Fallujah Massacre, the killing of over a million Iraqis during the Second Iraq War,

the deliberate spurring and exacerbation of a sectarian civil war that lasted for more than a decade. He's really saying that what it's going to be remembered for is Abu Ghraib, and that that was a military mistake, crimes against. Humanity, violations of the International Covenant Against Torture, a military mistake, it's just beyond insulting to the intelligence of a listener, one, to reduce, again, the criminality of the Iraq War, which all of these little anecdotal synecateches that are being offered up to stand in for the collective crimes of any one of these illegal wars of aggression launched by the United States in furtherance of the wealth and greed and exploitative power

of the global ruling class, just the mischaracterization of a mass torture campaign, a sadistic, evil, inhuman, not inhumane, inhuman, subhuman, scenes of horror that are just the surface that we were able to scratch, thanks to selective information becoming publicly available. to call that a military mistake, just like the military mistake of shooting down Iran Air Flight 655. You see it, you know that it's a passenger civilian airliner, and nevertheless you shoot it down because you can, because it shows your enemy that you will do anything, that you have no limits, no scruples, no morals, no values, and no care and no regard for what you get caught doing.

And every single day, people like Julian E. Barnes prove you right by serving as imperial, stenographer and covering up your crimes and telling lies and making mischaracterizations in furtherance of the criminal enterprise known as the American Empire. And no matter what is to come in this war in Iran, the killing of the schoolchildren, the mistaken targeting of a school by the U.S. military, is going to color how, we look at it. What more is there really to say? I mean, the entire purpose, the entire goal of this podcast from the New York Times obviously is to do exactly what its title does, which is to

memeify the murder of 175 innocent, mostly young girls and their teachers and their parents who were bombed with the second tomahawk when they rushed to the scene to try and save their children. That's when the second missile hit, okay? When the parents came to the scene to try and save their children, the parents too were blown to smithereens by some troop flying in a plane overhead with targets provided by other troops and other brass all the way up the chain of command. And the New York Times wants the recollection in the official narrative of this event to be filed away in that mental category behind the label of tragedy. of error, of mistake, not of culpability, not of crime, not of horror, not of atrocity, and not of the type of event.

Talking about the murder of 175 children that grabs the conscience of the entire world and rattles out a clear call to stop whatever the fuck led to this horror. At no point in time are the objectives of the war, as mendaciously stated by the administration perpetrating it, questioned or even doubt it in the slightest. that those are in fact the true objectives and that they are not only true but good for we, the we, for whom these journalists, quote unquote, all speak when they identify themselves in the first person plural along with the troops carrying out the mass murder of children

with munitions that cost more than the pittances that were paid out to the similarly situated victims of U.S. military imperialism and aggression, unwarranted, unfruitful, as though that's even a consideration, and absolutely unjustified. The only sane reaction to the only sane reaction to the this utter psychosis at the highest levels of power is to put something into the machinery, to grind it to a halt, because this has started off horrifically bad, and it can only get worse from here as not only the death toll rises in Iran, in the Gulf, countries in Lebanon, which is under Israeli continuous bombardment and threat of an occupation invasion. There are Israeli generals talking about wanting to do to southern Lebanon what they did

to Gaza, to turn Beirut into Kanunis, and the atrocities that these sociopathic murderers, these criminals of an epic proportion, these moral Hitler's are going to bring to our world. For now, on behalf of Dick, I am Don saying farewell and keep on digging.