Full disclosure. An increasing number of governments want to know who is buttering your bread, and where you got your information from, if they have a sense that you may have left the herd. So, I need to share with you that I’m off the leash. Previously I had a paid subscription to a mainstream Dutch newspaper of my choice, but I could not stomach it any more, so I had to let them go. And I can’t find a suitable replacement, since they are all the same. ‘Granma’ in Cuba is less biased, and more informative these days. And that is not exclusively because of what is going on in Ukraine. It is across the board.
No foreign country is paying my bills, or telling me what to write, and what to omit. Over the years I’ve had offers from private parties, which I declined politely, thanking the individual or organization for taking an interest, and I rejected ‘ghostwriters’, ads, and offers to improve my ‘reach’ through optimizing for a modest fee, since every Euro going into these publications is being paid for by me, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. If my articles do not reach a larger audience ‘organically’, so be it. I do use sources, obviously, which I name, or I add links to relevant articles and videos for your reference.
These days I often publish two articles on a single day, without the help of ‘Chat-GPT’ or something like that. Today I wrote a Dutch article in the morning, which grew around a general idea I had yesterday, and it matured during breakfast and while taking a shower and getting dressed, before starting up the computer to do background research as needed, and completing the ‘ready to print’ article. After lunch I went to the shop to buy teak-oil, before sanding the table which is in need of maintenance, and since that is not rocket science, I had time to think, which gave me this idea to write about ‘full disclosure’ as a subject. With a bit of luck I’ll finish it now, after dinner, and publish it somewhere after midnight, when I wake up for a sanitary relief, after which I publish what I’ve written, reread it, redact it as needed, and it’s gone. Back to bed. So, these personal notes are not the story.
The story is about this rather odd idea that knowing who a person is working for is somehow ‘revealing’. It depends. Within the ‘Intelligence’ community of a country they tend to think like that, because they themselves are ‘bought and paid’ for, and not expected to think for themselves. Which is why I feel strongly that ‘Intelligence’ is not the correct word for organizations like that. In Holland they are labeled in such a way that it is clear they gather ‘Information’. ‘Intelligence’ is confusing. And because many ‘agents’ working for these ‘Intelligence Agencies’ did use their intelligence, we are treated to a wide range of people ‘leaking’ everything, and exposing the ‘Agencies’ since they do ‘Dumb, Fucked Up’ things, because some not altogether bright ‘Elected Official’, who is having lots of trouble formulating any thought in public, or knowing where he is, and who all those people around him are, tells them to hit the pavement running, and stop worrying about the consequences.
I’ve not been an ‘Intelligence Officer’, but I did serve my country as an officer, serving longer than the draft required, but it was clearly not a ‘Match made in Heaven’, for various reasons. More often than not I felt I was in ‘Kindergarten’, with people ‘following orders’, and wasting valuable money provided by the tax-payers. I had the highest ‘clearances’, and the code to the vault containing ‘secret’ publications which were my responsibility during a certain period of my short career, which was not exactly a challenging aspect of my time as an officer. And perhaps a bit of an odd choice, since I was criticizing the military around the clock because it was highly unprofessional. Yet, I would never betray my country. One day a petty officer warned me that our immediate superior was ‘Military Intelligence’, and that he was ‘watching me’. I already suspected as much, since this officer confided that he had been spying on me as we ran a couple of drills, where I was the officer in command. He ‘kind of’ expected me to mess up on purpose, but to his surprise I didn’t, and inspired the crew I was with to beat the record, not shying from offering a helping hand handling stuff, where officers were expected to limit their activity to ‘supervising’. During that talk I explained to him that I was no ‘slacker’, and that if I accepted a ‘contract’, I was committed. But if the outfit was unprofessional, I would not shy from speaking my mind, since lives depended on it, certainly in times of war, and expecting nothing less from the people I was working with if I was the cause of problems in the task at hand. And being an officer gave me no privileges to be shielded from criticism.
What I proposed would be befitting for a modern army focussed on defending the country with highly motivated soldiers. It doesn’t work like that if you want to send underaged boys and grandfathers to the trenches to do their duty, and die, but I didn’t envision myself participating in such a war. In fact, I did not envision myself participating in any kind of war, trusting we would have learned our lesson, relying on diplomacy and ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’ to calm the hotheads. Least of all did I see myself participating in any kind of ‘colonial’ war, far from home, like the ones we are fighting these past twenty-five years or so. Acting as the ‘policeman of the world’ on behalf of, and on orders from people we never elected. Moreover, I fully expected us to respect democratic rule within the countries we were associated with, and leave the rest of the world alone. No way could I have envisioned that my country would be engaged in setting up ‘Regime Change’ in other countries along the lines of what the US did in South- and Middle America, or Vietnam. I was already suspicious of who was running this ‘Gladio’ organization in Europe, and for what purpose. NATO running it was only a rumor back then, although a fellow officer I disliked very much, because he was an extreme right wing rat, already bragged about being elected to be part of such a ‘Hush Hush’ organization. My ‘clearances’ at the security level did not give me the privilege to see any ‘compartmentalized’ information about any of that. No ‘Your Eyes Only’-stuff.
That attitude caused plenty of friction between me and my fellow officers, but men lower in rank, and officers who came from the ranks of petty officers, supported me, and loved to work with me. Even though they shied away from public commitment, which was understandable. When I switched to ‘civil life’, I took that attitude with me, and it served me well. You may recognize this where I stated previously that a ‘friend’ who is letting you have it your way, though he understands that the country you are leading, and the people within it are going to get killed, literally, or figuratively, is no friend at all. Less so if he profits from your failure. So, when my former newspaper yelled that the Russians would lose this war on the soil of Ukraine this morning, reflecting what the ‘Intelligence Chief’ of Ukraine told them in an ‘interview’, I was glad that I was no longer a paid subscriber. If I had been, it would have felt like watching the train leave from the station during the Second World War, waving at the Jews and Roma going ‘on holiday’. Speaking of which, I had this same sinking, powerless feeling when I read that on the fourth of May, as we remember the dead from that terrible war, and the Holocaust, we will now pay attention to victims of other wars as well. I have no idea how that will work out, but if we’re treated to Ukrainian flags, and heroes from that country who are not shy to show their Nazi regalia, I will be left feeling robbed of something extremely valuable.
The proponents of this change argue that fifty-nine percent of the people in Holland want this commemoration to be more ‘inclusive’, but nobody asked me anything. These changes are always supported by some ‘poll’, and the ‘polling bureau’ will tell you that the two hundred people they asked are ‘representative’ of the entire population. So here we are, and there we go. If you feel some sort of ‘loss’, you may apply for therapy, but the die is cast. And I’m not even saying that other victims of wars are not worth our attention, because the bulk of soldiers who fought on the ‘Other Side’ were victims too. Poor lads falling victim to ‘Intelligence Failures’ in the broadest sense, but certainly a prominent lack of intelligence on the side of ‘territory focussed’ advocates of violence, and those who gave us all those wars to ‘liberate’ entire people, destroying entire countries, and plenty of wealth in the process. And € 3000 to listen to Obama speak in a packed stadium yesterday, with a ‘selfie’ to take home with you. The man who kicked off more wars and ‘Regime Change’ operations than any president before, or after him, and who introduced ‘drone killings’, while reneging on his promise to close Guantanamo, and end incarceration without the right to a fair trial. Not to mention his ‘No. 1’ spot in jailing whistleblowers. But he is black………
Full disclosure: I don’t care what the color of your skin is. If you do bad things, I'll tell you so to your face.