Dakota Beacon

Is there American blood on the hands of Speaker Mike Johnson?  We could say so.  I would say so.  

Maybe some of you remember video posts of independent journalist Gonzalo Lira.  For those of you unacquainted with his work, Lira, an American-born dual citizen of the United States and Chile, was an independent investigative journalist.  He reported on his Youtube blog.  Not content to regurgitate others’ stories, he went to Ukraine himself to learn the truth and report it accurately.  

This, of course, brought him criticism of those who don’t want us to question U.S. foreign policy.  While the U.S. government has been presenting its creation, Volodymyr Zenlenskyy, as a great hero of the stature of a William Wallace or a George Washington, Lira saw something else on closer scrutiny.  He saw a ruthless puppet dictator, a cocaine-consuming false leader who cares nothing at all about his country, his people or his culture, but instead seeks to prolong a war that never should have been.  Lira saw through the corrupt policies and the downright lies of the western powers, citing other investigators such as Seymour Hersch, who outed the Biden Administration’s tragic and devastating blowing up of the Nord Stream pipeline.  No one seriously disputes this now.  He saw the corruption in Zelenskyy’s circle and the shocking decisions and actions of the United States regime in this war.  If we go by the standard definition we must say that the United States is acting as a terrorist state, fomenting war the same way Iran does.  Deny it if you like, but bring your facts.

It’s okay to see these things apparently, but not to tell the rest of us.  Which is a sort of forced participation, isn’t it?  Lira was given the choice to shut up and become a part of the matrix of lies and corruption he saw and recognized, and continue to live “free”  -  or tell the truth as he saw it and challenge authorities.  In some ways we all have this choice.  We can listen to the truth shown to us in factual reporting and act accordingly or we can shut our eyes to it and live “free”.  Lira chose to tell the truth that he saw.  We are all allowed to dispute this truth if we have the facts to contradict it.  We don’t.  Until we do, his truth is the truth, because he went there to find it, to dig it out and show it to us.  

Lira was arrested following his report that Zelenskyy was a “cokehead” - because you can’t criticize Zelenskyy.  Not in the country where he has absolute power.  Or, at least absolute as long as the CIA says so.  He was put on trial - those of us old enough to recall the Kruschev era’s show trials will get the picture - and while on bail he attempted to escape what he knew would be either the rest of his life in a labor camp or death.  He was arrested at the Hungarian border and returned to prison.  Last October he fell ill after months of torture and neglect.  He knew he was intended to die in prison.  Despite pleas from his family to assert some leadership on the part of Biden’s administration, all they got, all Lira got from his government, was silence - a knowing, wink-wink kind of silence as they all waited for the inevitable conclusion of Lira’s life in captivity.  On January 11, 2024, Lira died in a prison “hospital”, of double pneumonia, pneumothorax (a condition where air leaks into the chest cavity and pushes against the lungs - in other words, collapsed lungs) and general edema.  For months, the Russian government  had been asking the United States to investigate this and intervene,  but our leaders’ hatred of anything Russian is so stupid and so intense that Biden’s people just sat and waited for the inevitable instead.  (The same might be said about the silence given American citizens in U.S. prisons for exercising their First Amendment here at home.  Not even Trump dares to defend them.)

These days the truth hurts - especially those who tell it.  Lira died for exposing the corruption and the truth of our country’s rotting CIA and political manipulation and deceit.  American citizens have a right to know what their own government is doing - at least that was Lira’s view.  

You might agree or disagree with Lira’s conclusions and his point of view, but then you are also welcome to investigate for yourself and reach your own conclusions.  That’s all he asked, that’s all we can do.  Too many were content with the canned cheerleading of Zelenskyy, even while he appeared in Congress to demand, demand, demand more, more, more of our money and even the lives of our young people all to be committed to his egotistic show.  

If he were alive and free today, Lira might be looking into the fact that our own weapons, supplied to Zelenskyy’s nightclub act, have been turning up in the hands of Hamas.  Well, some of us were wondering where they all went, since, after all, they weren’t making any perceivable difference in the “war effort”.  

Lira was a champion of the Ukrainian people.  He deplored seeing them dying pointlessly for the one-man Zelenskyy show, watching their homes and economy destroyed, precious lives lost, orphaned children, devastated land.  He knew, as we should, that this was a phony war and that it was destroying the most productive breadbasket in most of Europe.  He knew, as we should, that we made promises to Russia, which they took in good faith, that we would not expand NATO.  We had no need to do anything of the kind.  We could have enjoyed a peaceful and prosperous - even cooperative relationship with Russia.  Instead we saw a stupid, mindless campaign of hate against Russia for taking the action they saw necessary to protect their border.  Maybe we should have left them and Ukraine alone and done the same with our border.  We might all have a safer and better world and less needless death.

But no.  Our faceless bureaucrats continue their pursuit of power as relentlessly today as yesterday.  Only this week our new Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, pledged to Chuck Schumer his commitment to continuing this idiotic war and the consequent continuing destruction of Ukraine and its people.  One could make the case that not only the blood of Ukraine stains his hands, but now the blood of an innocent American citizen, an honest journalist, Gonzalo Lira.  One of their sharpest critics is dead today, of the slow torture and suffocation of double pneumonia, pneumothorax and edema.  Well, we knew they wouldn’t let him live in freedom.

But the Administration sends its condolences.