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Category: Militarism

  • After Two Years of War in Ukraine, It’s Time for Peace

    The ruins of Avdiivka. Photo Credit: Russian Defense Ministry

    As we mark two full years since Russia invaded Ukraine, Ukrainian government forces have withdrawn from Avdiivka, a town they first captured from the self-declared Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) in July 2014. Situated only 10 miles from Donetsk city, Avdiivka gave Ukrainian government forces a base from which their artillery bombarded Donetsk for nearly ten years. From a pre-war population of about 31,000, the town has been depopulated and left in ruins.

    The mass slaughter on both sides in this long battle was a measure of the strategic value of the city to both sides, but it is also emblematic of the shocking human cost of this war, which has degenerated into a brutal and bloody war of attrition along a nearly static front line. Neither side made significant territorial gains in the entire 2023 year of fighting, with a net gain to Russia of a mere 188 square miles, or 0.1% of Ukraine.

    And while it is the Ukrainians and Russians fighting and dying in this war of attrition with over half a million casualties, it is the United States, with some its Western allies, that has stood in the way of peace talks. This was true of talks between Russia and Ukraine that took place in March 2022, one month after the Russian invasion, and it is true of talks that Russia tried to initiate with the United States as recently as January 2024.

    In March 2022, Russia and Ukraine met in Turkey and negotiated a peace agreement that should have ended the war. Ukraine agreed to become a neutral country between east and west, on the model of Austria or Switzerland, giving up its controversial ambition for NATO membership. Territorial questions over Crimea and the self-declared republics of Donetsk and Luhansk would be resolved peacefully, based on self-determination for the people of those regions.

    But then the U.S. and U.K. intervened to persuade Ukraine’s President Volodomyr Zelenskyy to abandon the neutrality agreement in favor of a long war to militarily drive Russia out of Ukraine and recover Crimea and Donbas by force. U.S. and U.K. leaders have never admitted to their own people what they did, nor tried to explain why they did it.

    So it has been left to everyone else involved to reveal details of the agreement and the U.S. and U.K.’s roles in torpedoing it: President Zelenskyy’s advisers; Ukrainian negotiators; Turkish foreign minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu and Turkish diplomats; Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who was another mediator; and former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder, who mediated with Russian President Vladimir Putin for Ukraine.

    The U.S. sabotage of peace talks should come as no surprise. So much of U.S. foreign policy follows what should by now be an easily recognizable and predictable pattern, in which our leaders systematically lie to us about their decisions and actions in crisis situations, and, by the time the truth is widely known, it is too late to reverse the catastrophic effects of those decisions. Thousands of people have paid with their lives, nobody is held accountable, and the world’s attention has moved on to the next crisis, the next series of lies and the next bloodbath, which in this case is Gaza.

    But the war grinds on in Ukraine, whether we pay attention to it or not. Once the U.S. and U.K. succeeded in killing peace talks and prolonging the war, it fell into an intractable pattern common to many wars, in which Ukraine, the United States and the leading members of the NATO military alliance were encouraged, or we might say deluded, by limited successes at different times into continually prolonging and escalating the war and rejecting diplomacy, in spite of ever-mounting, appalling human costs for the people of Ukraine.

    U.S. and NATO leaders have repeated ad nauseam that they are arming Ukraine to put it in a stronger position at the “negotiating table,” even as they keep rejecting negotiations. After Ukraine gained ground with its much celebrated offensives in the fall of 2022, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley went public with a call to “seize the moment” and get back to the negotiating table from the position of strength that NATO leaders said they were waiting for. French and German military leaders were reportedly even more adamant that that moment would be short-lived if they failed to seize it.

    They were right. President Biden rejected his military advisers’ calls for renewed diplomacy, and Ukraine’s failed 2023 offensive wasted its chance to negotiate from a position of strength, sacrificing many more lives to leave it weaker than before.

    On February 13, 2024, Reuters Moscow bureau broke the story that the United States had recently rejected a new Russian proposal to reopen peace negotiations. Multiple Russian sources involved in the initiative told Reuters that Russia proposed direct talks with the United States to call a ceasefire along the current front lines of the war.

    After Russia’s March 2022 peace agreement with Ukraine was vetoed by the U.S., this time Russia approached the United States directly before involving Ukraine. There was a meeting of intermediaries in Turkey, and a meeting between Secretary of State Blinken, CIA Director Burns and National Security Adviser Sullivan in Washington, but the result was a message from Sullivan that the U.S. was willing to discuss other aspects of U.S.-Russian relations, but not peace in Ukraine.

    And so the war grinds on. Russia is still firing 10,000 artillery shells per day along the front line, while Ukraine can only fire 2,000. In a microcosm of the larger war, some Ukrainian gunners told reporters they were only allowed to fire 3 shells per night. As Sam Cranny-Evans of the U.K.’s RUSI military think-tank told the Guardian, “What that means is that Ukrainians can’t suppress Russian artillery any more, and if the Ukrainians can’t fire back, all they can do is try to survive.”

    A March 2023 European initiative to produce a million shells for Ukraine in a year fell far short, only producing about 600,000. U.S. monthly shell production in October 2023 was 28,000 shells, with a target of 37,000 per month by April 2024. The United States plans to increase production to 100,000 shells per month, but that will take until October 2025.

    Meanwhile, Russia is already producing 4.5 million artillery shells per year. After spending less than one tenth of the Pentagon budget over the past 20 years, how is Russia able to produce 5 times more artillery shells than the United States and its NATO allies combined?

    RUSI’s Richard Connolly explained to the Guardian that, while Western countries privatized their weapons production and dismantled “surplus” productive capacity after the end of the Cold War in the interest of corporate profits, “The Russians have been… subsidizing the defense industry, and many would have said wasting money for the event that one day they need to be able to scale it up. So it was economically inefficient until 2022, and then suddenly it looks like a very shrewd bit of planning.”

    President Biden has been anxious to send more money to Ukraine–a whopping $61 billion—but disagreements in the U.S. Congress between bipartisan Ukraine supporters and a Republican faction opposed to U.S. involvement have held up the funds. But even if Ukraine had endless infusions of Western weapons, it has a more serious problem: Many of the troops it recruited to fight this war in 2022 have been killed, wounded or captured, and its recruitment system has been plagued by corruption and a lack of enthusiasm for the war among most of its people.

    In August 2023, the government fired the heads of military recruitment in all 24 regions of the country after it became widely known that they were systematically soliciting bribes to allow men to avoid recruitment and gain safe passage out of the country. The Open Ukraine Telegram channel reported, “The military registration and enlistment offices have never seen such money before, and the revenues are being evenly distributed vertically to the top.”

    The Ukrainian parliament is debating a new conscription law, with an online registration system that includes people living abroad and with penalties for failure to register or enlist. Parliament already voted down a previous bill that members found too draconian, and many fear that forced conscription will lead to more widespread draft resistance, or even bring down the government.

    Oleksiy Arestovych, President Zelenskyy’s former spokesman, told the Unherd website that the root of Ukraine’s recruitment problem is that only 20% of Ukrainians believe in the anti-Russian Ukrainian nationalism that has controlled Ukrainian governments since the overthrow of the Yanukovych government in 2014. “What about the remaining 80%?” the interviewer asked.

    “I think for most of them, their idea is of a multinational and poly-cultural country,” Arestovych replied. “And when Zelenskyy came into power in 2019, they voted for this idea. He did not articulate it specifically but it was what he meant when he said, ‘I don’t see a difference in the Ukrainian-Russian language conflict, we are all Ukrainians even if we speak different languages.’”

    “And you know,” Arestovych continued, “my great criticism of what has happened in Ukraine over the last years, during the emotional trauma of the war, is this idea of Ukrainian nationalism which has divided Ukraine into different people: the Ukrainian speakers and Russian speakers as a second class of people. It’s the main dangerous idea and a worse danger than Russian military aggression, because nobody from this 80% of people wants to die for a system in which they are people of a second class.”

    If Ukrainians are reluctant to fight, imagine how Americans would resist being shipped off to fight in Ukraine. A 2023 U.S. Army War College study of “Lessons from Ukraine” found that the U.S. ground war with Russia that the United States ispreparing to fight would involve an estimated 3,600 U.S. casualties per day, killing and maiming as many U.S. troops every two weeks as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq did in twenty years. Echoing Ukraine’s military recruitment crisis, the authors concluded, “Large-scale combat operations troop requirements may well require a reconceptualization of the 1970s and 1980s volunteer force and a move toward partial conscription.”

    U.S. war policy in Ukraine is predicated on just such a gradual escalation from proxy war to full-scale war between Russia and the United States, which is unavoidably overshadowed by the risk of nuclear war. This has not changed in two years, and it will not change unless and until our leaders take a radically different approach. That would involve serious diplomacy to end the war on terms on which Russia and Ukraine can agree, as they did on the March 2022 neutrality agreement.

    The post After Two Years of War in Ukraine, It’s Time for Peace first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • War with China

    Don’t want to spoil your weekend, but the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) has picked Foreign Policy (FP) magazine’s article, How Primed for War Is China, as a top commentary. AEI states: “The likelihood of war with China may be the single-most important question in international affairs today.

    FP knows how to start an article and capture attention ─ start with words that startle the audience.

    If China uses military force against Taiwan or another target in the Western Pacific, the result could be war with the United States—a fight between two nuclear-armed giants brawling for hegemony in that region and the wider world. If China attacked amid ongoing wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, the world would be consumed by interlocking conflicts across Eurasia’s key regions, a global conflagration unlike anything since World War II. How worried should we be?

    Not worried about war at all. I am concerned that FP and AEI circulations of fabrications may lead to China deciding it’s had enough of the trashing, cash in its treasury holdings that finance U.S. trade debt (already started), use reserves to purchase huge chunks of United States assets, diminish its hefty agricultural imports from Yankee farms, and enforce its ban of exports of rare earth extraction and separation technologies  (China produces 60 percent of the world’s rare earth materials and processes nearly 90 percent). In short, we should worry that by not cooperating with China, the Red Dragon may decide to no longer bother with Washington’s inanities and use its overwhelming industrial power, with which the U.S. cannot compete, to sink the U.S. economy.

    Another question comes to mind. “What will a war with China resemble?”

    Will the U.S. military load ships in Los Angeles with soldiers and ship them across the Pacific to land on the shores of China? Things have changed since May 1840, when the British fleet proceeded up the Pearl River estuary to Canton and occupied the city. I doubt another D-day landing will be possible.

    Will the U.S. Air Force pound the Chinese mainland into submission? Will a nation, knowing that China will retaliate, permit the U.S. to launch aircraft from its soil? Hardly likely.

    Will it be a nuclear war? Mutual mass destructions are not advisable.
    Could be a cyber war, but who cares if computers get hurt?

    To buttress its rash assumption, FP introduces an assortment of unproven and ambiguous statements, passed off as facts.

    Under Chinese President Xi Jinping, Beijing is amassing ships, planes, and missiles as part of the largest military buildup by any country in decades.
    China is abetting Russia’s brutalization of Ukraine and massing forces on the Sino-Indian border.
    Beijing now outspends every other country in Asia combined.

    By FP’s admission, which appears later in the article, it was about time China started building (not massing) its military forces. FP states that with “a pathetic air force and navy prior to the 2000s, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan would have amounted to a ‘million-man swim.’” China had a weak military and, with Washington rattling the saber, it was wise to strengthen armed might.

    Notice that unlike the U.S., which is aiding and abetting in the genocide of the Palestinian people by assisting Israel, FP only accuses China of abetting Russia in brutalization. Score a big one for China. FP is confused. On December 20, 2022, Times (of London) scare headlined: Indian army (not Chinese) masses on Chinese border after soldiers clash. It is possible that Beijing sent 100 soldiers (mass number) to reinforce those who had fought the small skirmish with Indian troops.

    The dishonorable manner in which “authoritative” commentators present their arguments bothers me They frame all reporting to suit agendas and satisfy their audiences. It shows in the sentence, “Beijing now outspends every other country in Asia combined,” making it seem that China is doing something unusual and must be doing it for nefarious reasons. The “objective” FT commentators omit significant details of their argument.

    • Except for India, China has a population almost equal to all of the Asian nations that need a strong military force.
    • China has a GDP almost equal to the GDP of all the Asian nations that need a strong military force. Besides,
    • Unlike other Asian nations, China has a GDP that can afford a stronger military force.
    • China borders 14 countries and already has had small wars with a few of them — Russia, India, and Vietnam — and friction with others in the area.
    • Unlike other Asian nations, China faces constant U.S. threats.

    The historical graphs on military buildup describe the “military buildup” differently.
    Note: Watch the scales in the left graph, some from the right, others from the left.
    • In proportion to GDP, Chinese military expenditures have remained constant.
    • In proportion to GDP, Chinese military expenditures are the least of the surveyed nations.
    • The U.S. already had a superior fighting force when China started its buildup and the U.S. is still spending three times that of China.

    The sentence, “Personalist dictatorships are more than twice as likely to start wars as democracies or autocracies in which power is held in many hands,” intrigued me. Making a controversial statement without backup data is not credible. Apparently, FP does not have a demanding customer base. Nor is the statement true; the United States, the world’s foremost democracy has fought wars almost every year in its existence, and big ones. Two thriving democracies, Great Britain and France have been involved in great wars. Who and where are the personalist dictators involved in wars?

    What reasons does China have for going to war? FP cites four factors.

    These four factors—insecure borders, a competitive military balance, negative expectations, and dictatorship—help explain China’s historical use of force, and they have ominous implications today.

    Insecure borders? Some frictions, but presently well contained. Who is going to war over a bunch of rocks in the ocean and fishing rights? The parties may hurl invectives, throw stones, or use water cannons, like teenagers at beach parties. No cannons with munitions, that’s for sure,

    FP claims that because the military balance in Asia has shifted to China that could make Beijing perilously optimistic about the outcome of war. FP does not realize what China realizes ─ it will also suffer losses in a war and its military balance is a defensive strategy.

    The negative expectations mean that as “China’s short-term military prospects improve, its long-term strategic and economic outlook is darkening — a combination that has often made revisionist powers more violent in the past.” Nations, revisionist and non-revisionist, and mostly the former, have waged wars during times of severe economic decline — depression, lost markets, depleted resources, and ultra-high unemployment. A “darkening economic outlook” — couched words ─ is far, far from a depression, not unusual for any country and certainly not for China, which has had almost uninterrupted growth for 40 years. Darkening economic growth for China is welcome growth for most nations.

    “China turned into a personalist dictatorship (more dubious and couched words) is of the sort especially prone to disastrous miscalculations and costly wars.” A previous paragraph contested this argument. Add to the refutation the observation that several American presidents have declared small wars without permission of Congress and large wars based on false information. Spanish-American War (sinking of the ship, The Maine), Vietnam War (North Vietnam attacked U.S. warships in Tonkin Bay Resolution), and Iraq War (Iraq had weapons of mass destruction) are a few examples.

    When in doubt, bring in Taiwan, which FP does.

    In short, the United States must wield a credible ability to defend Taiwan and, at the same time, offer a credible pledge that it aims to prevent either side from unilaterally changing the status quo.

    My subjective opinion is that if Chinese troops slipped into Taiwan overnight and recaptured the province, the Taiwanese in the countryside would hardly notice. Urban dwellers may sense something different and wouldn’t be bothered — government officials would be Chinese, police would be Chinese, everyone would be speaking Mandarin, all signs and media would be in Mandarin, all foods would be Chinese, Taiwanese would see no change in their TV preferences, and Chinese would fly back and forth between Taiwan and the mainland. One big difference ─ no American military advisors and no signs of Yankee go home.

    FP concludes with an inspiring message.

    A powerful but troubled China is heading in a bad direction. It will take all the strength and sobriety the United States and its friends can muster to prevent a slide into war.

    The sentence begs word changes.

    A powerful but troubled America is heading in a bad direction. It will take all the strength and sobriety China and its friends can muster to prevent America from pushing China into war.

    The reason the revised sentence has more legs is that capitalist nations have waged wars during times of severe economic decline — depression, lost markets, depleted resources, and ultra-high unemployment — in efforts to regain markets and resources. Unable to overcome the competition, war has previously happened and can happen again.

    I have a suspicion that the authors of the article own a factory that produces nuclear bomb shelters. Can anyone confirm?

    The post War with China first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Another judge sees sense and throws out ridiculous case against Palestine Action

    A judge has thrown out the case against seven Palestine Action activists. It was brought by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) after the group targeted UAV Tactical System’s factory supplying Israel. The case shows cops’ drastically overreaching in their powers to protect the corporate war machine.

    Palestine Action: case dismissed over UAV Tactical Systems

    District judge Grace Leong found seven activists not guilty of breaching a Section 14 notice during Palestine Action’s ‘siege’ on Leicester’s Elbit weapons factory, UAV Tactical Systems.

    The case was thrown out after half time submissions on the basis there was no legal certainty of the Section 14 conditions, no evidence the defendants knew or ought to have known about the notice, and that they weren’t arrested during a public assembly.

    It was over Palestine Action’s “siege” against UAV Tactical Systems. As the group wrote at the time, in May 2023:

    Hundreds have descended on Meridian Business Park in Leicester to force Elbit’s factory to shut down. The crowds began arriving this afternoon, and have been growing in number through the day. With banners, chants, flags, and rousing speeches delivered so far, the mass of people were welcomed later by an empowering performance by rapper and activist Lowkey, along with award winning actor and playwright Tayo Aluko, Palestinian Dabke, poetry, and more.

    The Siege against Leicester’s Elbit-owned UAV Tactical Systems (‘U-TacS’), is a mass action which involves huge numbers willing to remain at the site, using themselves to disrupt the flow of business. Palestine Action refuse to leave until Elbit does.

    There is a heavy police presence on the ground, with riot vans deployed and a metal wall erected around the factory, but actionists, undeterred, continue to arrive on the scene. Police have been conducting raids and arrests at random – smashing their way into parked cars to ‘search’ them.

    Ahead of the action, the company has also reinforced its site with extra fencing, cameras, and shuttered their windows. Despite this, a woodland camp was built by actionists days before the siege began and initially went unnoticed for 12 hours — even with Elbit’s ‘state-of-the-art’ surveillance. Others have now decamped on the road leading to the factory, pledging to stay there for as long as they can.

    Hundreds out against the war machine

    The seven activists were amongst 26 people who were rounded up and arrested on the second day of Palestine Action’s declared siege on the factory. The activists were camping in the woods adjacent to the factory when they were awoken by police and arrested immediately. By the third day of the mass action, 33 were arrested in total. All of those arrested were bailed to not return to the factory.

    The section 14 notice included conditions preventing people from erecting any structure, including tents. This lead to many people sleeping without shelter in sleeping bags and blankets, many of which were supplied by the local community. Despite the police attempt to diminish numbers at the siege, hundreds continued to support the mass action.

    UAV Tactical Systems is owned by Israel’s largest weapons firm, Elbit Systems. The factory regularly sends drones and drone technologies to Israel, where Elbit’s drone products brutally enforce the military occupation of Palestine.

    UAV Tactical Systems’ flagship drone, the Watchkeeper, has been used by the British military in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the English Channel – but is itself modelled on the notorious and deadly Hermes drone, after the latter was ‘battle-tested’ on Palestinians.

    Police “acting to protect” UAV Tactical Systems

    Elbit, Israel’s largest weapons company, supplies 85% of Israel’s drones, and 85% of its land based military equipment. Its products, including the Hermes, have been linked to documented atrocities by the Israeli state.

    Palestine Action has targeted UAV Tactical Systems before – and a judge also acquitted the activists in that case.

    A Palestine Action spokesperson said:

    This victory demonstrates what we knew all along, the police acted to protect the Israeli weapons trade and tried whatever they could to deter us. They failed and the campaign to shut Elbit down continues to go from strength to strength. Whilst a genocide in Gaza is underway, it’s more important than ever to take action against Elbit’s lethal operations on our doorstep.

    Featured image via Martin Pope – Palestine Action

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Stop The War Cymru: a new group in Wales launches with anti-imperialism at its heart

    Stop the War Cymru has been established in response to the continuing crisis in the Middle East and to help coordinate anti-war efforts and messages of peace across Wales.

    Stop The War Cymru

    The organisation represents various peace movements across Wales who wish to see an end to war and Stop the War Cymru will be organising and supporting public meetings, marches, and demonstrations to promote an anti-war and anti-imperialism message.

    Its immediate focus is demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and working towards a just peace in the Middle East.

    Stop the War Cymru will provide speakers for the media to give an alternate voice on a range of subjects, including the escalating crisis in the Middle East, the Russo-Ukrainian War, and recent comments on national service in Britain.

    The group represents: Stop the War groups from across Wales; Palestine Solidarity Campaign; Wales Labour Grassroots; Cymdeithas y Cymod; Cymdeithas yr Iaith; the Young Communist League Wales; the Welsh Communist Party, and has representatives from local Stop the War groups from around Wales and leading Welsh trade unionists and international solidarity campaigns sit on its steering committee.

    Stop the war Cymru convenor Dominic MacAskill said:

    People in Wales have now marched for peace in Gaza and an end to the slaughter every week since the Hamas massacre of Israelis and the taking of hostages on October 7.

    Witnessing the developing genocide in Gaza we believe that Wales has a duty to join the international condemnation of Israel’s atrocities and the calls for a just peace in the region.

    Wales is waking up to that duty. Last year, in opposition to the Welsh government and in response to grassroots pressure, a motion was passed in the Senedd in favour of an immediate ceasefire to the war in Gaza. Each week we are seeing more and more people on marches across Welsh cities calling for peace. It is time that our governments woke up.

    We hope that Stop the War Cymru contributes to the continued pressure on our leaders to support an immediate ceasefire and guarantee the rights of the Palestinian people to statehood, peace, and dignity.

    You can follow Stop The War Cymru on X here.

    Welsh version

    Mae Atal y Rhyfel Cymru wedi’i sefydlu mewn ymateb i’r argyfwng parhaus yn y Dwyrain Canol ac i helpu i gydlynu ymdrechion gwrth-ryfel a negeseuon heddwch ledled Cymru.

    Mae llefarwyr ar gael i’r cyfryngau i roi barn a sylwadau amgen ar y rhyfeloedd ar draws y byd.

    Mae’r mudiad yn cynrychioli mudiadau heddwch amrywiol ar draws Cymru sy’n dymuno gweld diwedd ar ryfel a bydd Atal y Rhyfel Cymru yn trefnu a chefnogi cyfarfodydd cyhoeddus, gorymdeithiau, a gwrthdystiadau i hyrwyddo neges yn erbyn rhyfel ac imperialaeth.

    Ei ffocws yn y dyfodol agos yw mynnu cadoediad ar unwaith yn Gaza a gweithio tuag at heddwch cyfiawn yn y Dwyrain Canol.

    Bydd Stop the War Cymru yn darparu siaradwyr i’r cyfryngau i roi llais arall ar amrywiaeth o bynciau, gan gynnwys yr argyfwng cynyddol yn y Dwyrain Canol, Rhyfel Rwsia-Wcreineg a sylwadau diweddar ar wasanaeth cenedlaethol ym Mhrydain.

    Mae Stop the War Cymru yn cynrychioli: Grwpiau Atal y Rhyfel o bob rhan o Gymru; Ymgyrch Undod Palesteina; Llafur Cymru ar Lawr Gwlad; Cymdeithas y Cymod; Cymdeithas yr Iaith; Cynghrair Comiwnyddol Ifanc Cymru; Y Blaid Gomiwnyddol Gymreig; ac mae ganddi gynrychiolwyr o grwpiau lleol Atal y Rhyfel o bob rhan o Gymru ac mae undebwyr llafur blaenllaw Cymru ac ymgyrchoedd undod rhyngwladol yn eistedd ar ei bwyllgor llywio.

    Dywedodd Cydlynydd Atal y Rhyfel Cymru, Dominic MacAskill:

    Mae pobl yng Nghymru bellach wedi gorymdeithio dros heddwch yn Gaza a diwedd i’r lladdfa bob wythnos ers erchyllterau Hamas ar Israeliaid a’u herwgipio o wystlon ar 7 Hydref.

    Wrth dystio’r hil-laddiad sy’n datblygu yn Gaza credwn fod gan Gymru ddyletswydd i ymuno â’r condemniad rhyngwladol o erchyllterau Israel a’r galwadau am heddwch cyfiawn yn y rhanbarth.

    Mae Cymru yn deffro i’r ddyletswydd honno. Y llynedd, mewn gwrthwynebiad i lywodraeth Cymru ac mewn ymateb i bwysau ar lawr gwlad, pasiwyd cynnig yn y Senedd o blaid cadoediad ar unwaith i’r rhyfel yn Gaza. Bob wythnos rydym yn gweld mwy a mwy o bobl ar orymdeithiau ar draws dinasoedd Cymru yn galw am heddwch. Mae’n bryd i’n llywodraethau ddeffro.

    Gobeithiwn y bydd Atal y Rhyfel Cymru yn cyfrannu at y pwysau parhaus ar ein harweinwyr i gefnogi cadoediad uniongyrchol a gwarantu hawliau pobl Palestina i fod yn wladwriaeth, heddwch ac urddas.

    Gallwch ddilyn y grŵp ar X yma.

    Featured image via Stop The War Cymru

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • US Military Projection in Latin America and the Caribbean Intensifies

    Upon assuming the US presidency, Joe Biden asserted in his first major foreign policy address, “America is back!” For Latin America and the Caribbean, this has meant an “aggressive expansion” of the US military in the region.

    In just the last year, US Marines and special forces landed in Peru in May 2023, brought in by the unelected rightwing government to address internal unrest. In October, the US got the UN Security Council to approve the military occupation of Haiti using proxy troops from Kenya. Also in October, the rightwing government of Ecuador resorted to deploying US troops to deal with their domestic insecurities. This month, Mexico and Peru joined the annual US naval exercises in mock war against China. And that just scratches the surface of US military engagement in the region.

    Militarizing diplomacy

    The Pentagon, along with the National Security Council and even the CIA, have taken on an increasingly pronounced role in diplomatic relations formerly the purview of the State Department. Former CIA agent and current US ambassador to Peru Lisa Kenna, for instance, was implicated in the overthrow of the elected leftist president there a year ago.

    This drift in diplomatic function to the military became more pronounced with the appointment of Laura Richardson as head of the US Southern Command in October 2021. When asked about her interest in the region, she unapologetically admitted that the US seeks hegemony over the region and possession of its rich resources.

    In January 2022, General Richardson signed a bilateral agreement with Honduras. She met with Brazilian and Colombian military brass last May. Previously, she had visited Argentina, Chile, Guyana, and Surinam. From August to September 2022, US and Colombian militaries conducted joint NATO exercises, while Richardson made a five-day visit to meet with the newly elected Colombian president. This week, she is meeting with the president of Ecuador, who declared his country is under a state of “internal armed conflict.”

    Status of US military forces in the region

    Washington is by far the largest source of military aid, supplies, and training in the region. The US has twelve military bases each in Panama and Puerto Rico, nine in Colombia, eight in Peru, three in Honduras, and two in Paraguay, along with military installations in Aruba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Cuba (Guantanamo), and Peru.

    In total, the US has 76 bases in the region as of 2018, plus numerous “unconfirmed operational bases.” All function as military centers as well as cyberwarfare posts. Among the problems associated with these bases are displacement of resources that otherwise would be used for social programs. These installations are notorious for their lack of transparency and accountability. In addition, they cause ecological damage with little or no provisions for environmental cleanup.

    The US also has, in addition to bases, major military operations in Argentina, Ecuador, Uruguay, Guatemala, Bolivia, and Mexico. Colombia is a “global NATO partner” and Brazil is an “extra-NATO preferential ally.” The State Partnership Program of the US National Guard joins eighteen states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia in active partnerships with militaries in 24 regional countries.

    Evolving US military mission

    The post World War II mission of the US military has evolved: first, the fight against communism ending around 1991; then the “drug wars” continuing to the present; followed by the “war on terror” and combatting transnational criminal networks of the early 2000s; and now great power competition.

    Thus, US regional military strategy has pivoted from fighting communism, terrorism, and drugs to containing China and, to a lesser extent, Russia and even Iran. China is now the leading trading partner with South America and the second largest with the region as a whole, after the US. Some 21 or 31 regional countries have joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The Southern Command’s budget, which had declined in the 2010s, is now ballooning as the US gears up to confront China.

    The Latin American “theater” is pitched by the Southern Command as a “nearby test bed” and “prime location for experimenting with and testing new technologies” to be used particularly against China. General Richardson warns that China is “a communist country that’s spreading its tentacles across the globe so far away from its homeland.”

    The Southern Command has especially targeted Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua because of their friendly relations with China and Russia. Key to the command’s strategy is disrupting regional unity in the Americas.

    Development of US military tactics

    In the bad old days of 1898-1934, Washington simply and nakedly sent its troops to take over the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Panama. In the post-World War II years, the US still overthrew governments not to its liking the old fashioned way in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989. But for the most part, the US has developed more sophisticated means of asserting its control.

    Proxy armies using mercenaries were deployed against Cuba in 1961 in the Bay of Pigs invasion and in Nicaragua in the 1981-1990 contra war– both unsuccessful.

    Increasingly in the last 75 years or so, covert operations have been employed. The CIA was created in 1947. By 1954, the agency helped engineer the overthrow of Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in what has become known as the first of many CIA coups in the Americas.

    From 1975 to 1980, the US-coordinated Operation Condor installed military dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the US sponsored “dirty wars” in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua. Then in 1991 and again in 2004, Washington backed coups in Haiti, followed by coups in Honduras in 2009 and Boliva in 2019.

    The US also fomented numerous unsuccessful coup attempts against Venezuela, most notably in 2002, but continuing to the present. Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro revealed that four assassination plots were made against him and other high-ranking officials in 2023; the CIA and the DEA were accused. The US has posted a $15M bounty on Maduro’s head. Nicaragua, too, has been targeted, including a major coup attempt in 2018. Cuba, as well, has noted a recent uptick of US terror attacks.

    Expanding scope of military missions

    Combatting forest fires and other climate-driven disasters have recently been incorporated into the expanding US military scope. The militarists are not so much concerned about the environment as they are about perturbances that can upset the existing political order.

    In October 2022, Colombia invited US and NATO military forces into the Amazon on the pretext that they could be repurposed to protect the environment. These new ecological tasks are best understood not as non-military functions but as the militarization of environmentalism. These environmentally “woke” missions operate under such cover as the NATO Science for Peace and Security Program and even the UN Environmental Program, which cooperates with NATO.

    So-called “humanitarian missions” have also been incorporated into the expanding military scope. Former head of the Southern Command, Admiral Craig S. Faller, described such missions as an important component in strengthening military ties with “partners” in the region. He boasted of 25 countries participating in the US military’s regional “warfighting-focused exercises” in 2021. By the next year, his successor General Richardson referenced 28 regional “like-minded democracies.”

    Perhaps the prime non-traditional mission for the US military in the region is “counter-narcotics.” A US military Security Force Assistance Brigade was sent to Panama and Colombia last May to curb drug smuggling as well as migration. The US troops work with other US agencies already in the region, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security.

    Hybrid warfare

    In addition to the explicitly military exercises, described above, the US has increasingly employed “hybrid warfare” to try to maintain its dominance in an emerging multipolar geopolitical context. Unilateral coercive economic measures are now imposed on over a quarter of humanity. Also known as sanctions, these tactics can be just as deadly as bombs.

    Sanctions on Venezuela – started by Obama, intensified by Trump, and seamlessly continued by Biden – have taken their toll: over 100,00 deaths, 22% of children under five stunted, and over 300,000 chronic disease patients without access to treatment. Despite the UN nearly unanimously condemning the US blockade of Cuba for its devastating effects on civilians and as a violation of the UN Charter, ever-tightening economic warfare has left the island in crisis. Washington is also escalating the hybrid war against Nicaragua.

    Return to gunboat diplomacy

    With the new year and with Washington’s blessings, a British warship cruised into waters contested between Venezuela and Britain’s former colony, Guyana. The disputed Essequibo territory between Venezuela and Guyana became an international flashpoint in December.

    The US Southern Command announced joint air operations with Guyana. US boots are already reportedly on the ground in Guyana. What is in essence an oil company landgrab by ExxonMobil is disrupting regional unity and is a Trojan horse for US military interference.

    Waters at the southern end of the continent are also troubled with US-NATO nuclear submarine exercises around the Malvinas and the Southern Ocean. The US Army is working on the Master Plan for the Navigability of the Paraguay River.

    With the new presidency of devotedly pro-Yankee Javier Milei in Argentina a month ago, the US is again pushing to install new military bases in the strategic triple border region of Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil. The Wall Street Journal reports: “Milei has maintained strong support since taking office…as Argentines so far embrace austerity measures.” [emphasis added] The WSJ is referring to the financially secure elites who are not among the 40% below the poverty line in Argentina. The trade unions mounted a general strike on January 24.

    In conclusion, the enduring extra-territorial protection of Yankee military power has always been for the purpose of controlling its southern neighbors, but has become more sophisticated and pervasive. In this two-hundred-first year of the Monroe Doctrine, Simón Bolívar’s words are ever more prescient: “The United States appears to be destined by providence to plague America with misery, in the name of freedom.”

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  • The Global Deep State

    The madmen are in power.

    — Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle

    The debate over U.S. foreign aid is a distraction.

    That’s not to say that the amount of taxpayer money flowing to foreign countries in the form of military and economic assistance is insignificant. Even at less than 1% of the federal budget, the United States still spends more on foreign aid than any other nation.

    The latest foreign aid spending bill includes $95 billion for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

    Since World War II, the U.S. has given more foreign aid to Israel than any other country ($318 billion), with the bulk of those funds designated for Israel’s military efforts.

    Even so, more than 150 countries around the world receive U.S. taxpayer-funded assistance.

    As Forbes reports, “U.S. foreign aid dwarfs the federal funds spent by 48 out of 50 state governments annually. Only the state governments of California and New York spent more federal funds than what the U.S. sent abroad each year to foreign countries.”

    Whether or not that some of that foreign aid is used for legitimate purposes, the global welfare system itself is riddled with corruption and waste. As Adam Andrzejewski rightly asks, “Do taxpayers instinctively know that they are funding choir directors in Turkmenistan, filmmakers in Peru, aid for poultry farmers Tanzania, and sex education workshops for prostitutes in Ethiopia?”

    The problem is not so much that taxpayers are unaware of how their hard-earned dollars are being spent. Rather, “we the people” continue to be told that we have no say in the matter.

    We have no real say in how the government runs, or how our taxpayer funds are used, but that doesn’t prevent the government from fleecing us at every turn and forcing us to pay for endless wars that do more to fund the military industrial complex than protect us, pork barrel projects that produce little to nothing, and a police state that serves only to imprison us within its walls.

    This financial tyranny persists whether it’s a Democrat or Republican at the helm.

    At a time when the government is spending money it doesn’t have on programs it can’t afford, the national debt continues to grow, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached.

    What is going on?

    The “government of the people, by the people, for the people” has been overtaken by a shadow government—a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy—that is fully operational and running the country.

    This powerful international cabal made up of international government agencies and corporations—let’s call it the Global Deep State—is just as real as the corporatized, militarized, industrialized American Deep State, and it poses just as great a threat to our rights as individuals under the U.S. Constitution, if not greater.

    Clearly, we have entered into a new world order: fascism on a global scale.

    It remains unclear whether the American Deep State (“a national-security apparatus that holds sway even over the elected leaders notionally in charge of it”) answers to the Global Deep State, or whether the Global Deep State merely empowers the American Deep State. However, there is no denying the extent to which they are intricately and symbiotically enmeshed and interlocked.

    Consider the extent to which our lives and liberties are impacted by this international convergence of governmental and profit-driven corporate interests in the surveillance state, the military industrial complex, the private prison industry, the intelligence sector, the security sector, the technology sector, the telecommunications sector, the transportation sector, and in recent years, the pharmaceutical-health sector.

    All of these sectors are dominated by mega-corporations operating on a global scale and working through government channels to increase their profit margins. The profit-driven policies of these global corporate giants influence everything from legislative policies to economics to environmental issues to medical care.

    Global Disease

    The COVID-19 pandemic propelled us into a whole new global frontier in which those hoping to navigate this interconnected and highly technological world of contact tracing, vaccine passports and digital passes find themselves grappling with issues that touch on deep-seated moral, political, religious and personal questions for which there may be no clear-cut answers.

    Our ability to access, engage and move about in the world has now become dependent on which camp we fall into: those who have been vaccinated against whatever the powers-that-be deem to be the latest Disease X versus those who have not.

    This is what M.I.T. professor Ramesh Raskar refers to as the new “currency for health,” an apt moniker given the potentially lucrative role that Big Business (Big Pharma and Big Tech, especially) will play in establishing this pay-to-play marketplace. The airline industry has been working on a Travel Pass. IBM is developing a Digital Health Pass. And the U.S. government has been all-too-happy to allow the corporate sector to take the lead.

    “It is the latest status symbol. Flash it at the people, and you can get access to concerts, sports arenas or long-forbidden restaurant tables. Some day, it may even help you cross a border without having to quarantine,” writes Heather Murphy for the New York Times. “The new platinum card of the Covid age is the vaccine certificate.”

    Global Surveillance

     Spearheaded by the National Security Agency, which has shown itself to care little for constitutional limits or privacy, the surveillance state has come to dominate our government and our lives.

    Yet the government does not operate alone. It cannot. It requires an accomplice. Thus, the increasingly complex security needs of our massive federal government, especially in the areas of defense, surveillance and data management, have been met within the corporate sector, which has shown itself to be a powerful ally that both depends on and feeds the growth of governmental bureaucracy.

    Take AT&T, for instance. Through its vast telecommunications network that crisscrosses the globe, AT&T provides the U.S. government with the complex infrastructure it needs for its mass surveillance programs. According to The Intercept:

    “The NSA considers AT&T to be one of its most trusted partners and has lauded the company’s ‘extreme willingness to help.’ It is a collaboration that dates back decades. Little known, however, is that its scope is not restricted to AT&T’s customers. According to the NSA’s documents, it values AT&T not only because it ‘has access to information that transits the nation,’ but also because it maintains unique relationships with other phone and internet providers. The NSA exploits these relationships for surveillance purposes, commandeering AT&T’s massive infrastructure and using it as a platform to covertly tap into communications processed by other companies.”

    Now magnify what the U.S. government is doing through AT&T on a global scale, and you have the “14 Eyes Program,” also referred to as the “SIGINT Seniors.” This global spy agency is made up of members from around the world (United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Denmark, France, Netherlands, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Sweden, Spain, Israel, Singapore, South Korea, Japan, India and all British Overseas Territories).

    Surveillance is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to these global alliances, however.

    Global War Profiteering

    War has become a huge money-making venture, and America, with its vast military empire and its incestuous relationship with a host of international defense contractors, is one of its biggest buyers and sellers.

    The American military-industrial complex has erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope, one dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth. For example, while erecting a security surveillance state in the U.S., the military-industrial complex has perpetuated a worldwide military empire with American troops stationed in 177 countries (over 70% of the countries worldwide).

    Although the federal government obscures so much about its defense spending that accurate figures are difficult to procure, we do know that since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (that’s $8.3 million per hour). That doesn’t include wars and military exercises waged around the globe, which are expected to push the total bill upwards of $12 trillion by 2053.

    The illicit merger of the global armaments industry and the Pentagon that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than 50 years ago has come to represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile infrastructure today. America’s expanding military empire is bleeding the country dry at a rate of more than $15 billion a month (or $20 million an hour)—and that’s just what the government spends on foreign wars. That does not include the cost of maintaining and staffing the 1000-plus U.S. military bases spread around the globe.

    Incredibly, although the U.S. constitutes only 5% of the world’s population, America boasts almost 50% of the world’s total military expenditure,  spending more on the military than the next 19 biggest spending nations combined. In fact, the Pentagon spends more on war than all 50 states combined spend on health, education, welfare, and safety. There’s a good reason why “bloated,” “corrupt” and “inefficient” are among the words most commonly applied to the government, especially the Department of Defense and its contractors. Price gouging has become an accepted form of corruption within the American military empire.

    It’s not just the American economy that is being gouged, unfortunately.

    Driven by a greedy defense sector, the American homeland has been transformed into a battlefield with militarized police and weapons better suited to a war zone. President Biden, marching in lockstep with his predecessors, has continued to expand America’s military empire abroad and domestically in a clear bid to pander to the powerful money interests (military, corporate and security) that run the Deep State and hold the government in its clutches.

    Global Policing

    Glance at pictures of international police forces and you will have a hard time distinguishing between American police and those belonging to other nations. There’s a reason they all look alike, garbed in the militarized, weaponized uniform of a standing army.

    There’s a reason why they act alike, too, and speak a common language of force: they belong to a global police force.

    For example, Israel—one of America’s closest international allies and one of the primary yearly recipients of more than $3 billion in U.S. foreign military aid—has been at the forefront of a little-publicized exchange program aimed at training American police to act as occupying forces in their communities. As The Intercept sums it up, American police are “essentially taking lessons from agencies that enforce military rule rather than civil law.”

    This idea of global policing is reinforced by the Strong Cities Network program, which trains local police agencies across America in how to identify, fight and prevent extremism, as well as address intolerance within their communities, using all of the resources at their disposal. The cities included in the global network include New York City, Atlanta, Denver, Minneapolis, Paris, London, Montreal, Beirut and Oslo.

    The objective is to prevent violent extremism by targeting its source: racism, bigotry, hatred, intolerance, etc. In other words, police—acting as extensions of the United Nations—will identify, monitor and deter individuals who exhibit, express or engage in anything that could be construed as extremist.

    Of course, the concern with the government’s anti-extremism program is that it will, in many cases, be utilized to render otherwise lawful, nonviolent activities as potentially extremist.

    Keep in mind that the government agencies involved in ferreting out American “extremists” will carry out their objectives—to identify and deter potential extremists—in concert with fusion centers (of which there are 78 nationwide, with partners in the private sector and globally), data collection agencies, behavioral scientists, corporations, social media, and community organizers and by relying on cutting-edge technology for surveillance, facial recognition, predictive policing, biometrics, and behavioral epigenetics (in which life experiences alter one’s genetic makeup).

    This is pre-crime on an ideological scale and it’s been a long time coming.

    Are you starting to get the picture now?

    The government and its global partners have struck a deal that puts the American people on the losing end of the bargain.

    On almost every front, whether it’s the war on drugs, or the sale of weapons, or regulating immigration, or establishing prisons, or advancing technology, or fighting a pandemic, if there is a profit to be made and power to be amassed, our freedoms are being eroded while the Global Deep State becomes more entrenched.

    We’ve been losing our freedoms so incrementally for so long—sold to us in the name of national security and global peace, maintained by way of martial law disguised as law and order, and enforced by a standing army of militarized police and a political elite determined to maintain their powers at all costs—that it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when it all started going downhill, but we’re certainly on that downward slope now, and things are moving fast.

    Given the dramatic expansion, globalization and merger of governmental and corporate powers, we’re not going to recognize this country 20 years from now.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the U.S. government will not save us from the chains of the Global Deep State. It’s too busy selling us to the highest bidder.

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  • Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 4)

    The relentless campaign promoting the inevitability of a direct war with Russia is proceeding without challenge. That does not mean that war could erupt at any moment, or it could never happen. First, war is not based on a timetable. Second, war has no deterministic quality of any sort—it can be avoided. Third, but most important, war is contingent upon deliberation and subsequent decision—without decision, there is no war. For the record, neither the United States nor Russia has ever publically declared that they intend to go to war at some point in the future. So far, we only hear dire threats flying around.

    When American think tanks, opinion-makers, and the omnipresent “experts” talk about going to war with Russia, they often disclose the inner workings of the system. Of importance are the ideological processes used to implement agendas and related tactics. World domination themes (our leadership, our national interests, our allies, free world, our values, our democracy, our resolve, state sponsor of terrorism, our sanctions, defending liberty, our this and our that, and all that empty jargon) appear at every turn.

    Processes need avenues to formulate. The climax is reached when those avenues become both overlapped and interconnected. As a result, propaganda, fake diplomacy, false reporting, exaggeration, naked lies, vilification, accusation, crocodile tears for Ukraine, and military “assessments” move in unison with the plans of U.S. ruling circles.

    As stated early on, since the dismantlement of the Soviet Union, the sole remaining superpower (as the United States likes to call itself) has been obsessively pursuing the goal for world control by any means—including war. The countless wars that the United States has been launching against any country that actively dares pursuing its own policie are testimony. War, of course, is easy on paper. Among powerful nuclear states, war is terra incognita. This fact alone, confirms the reasons why the United States, Britain, and other imperialist states treat the project for war with Russia in theatrical ways while depending on rhetorical bravados, sanctions, seizing of assets, and the arming of Ukraine to elicit concessions.

    Now that Russia’s limited military operation in Ukraine has transformed into a wider war involving NATO countries indirectly, what comes next? First, that transformation begs an old-new argument. Do wars have any validity? Posing this argument brings to mind the anti-colonialist wars in the period 1950-1975. Second, although the scope of Russia’s intervention in Ukraine differs from those wars, the basics are the same. Explanation: the struggle for independence, sovereignty, and security can take many forms and transcends time and circumstances. This applies to Russia to a tee. How so?

    Discussion: the charge that the anti-colonialist struggle posed challenge to and imperiled peace (as Petra Goedde opined, retrospectively, in her book, The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History) is bogus. Discussion: what peace are we debating? Is it peace of mind for occupiers, colonizers, and imperialists or is it pacification by sanctions, blockades, and death and destruction to the occupied and the threatened? By analogy, the argument that Russia should not have disturbed the peace with its intervention in Ukraine is bogus too. For instance, considering that Ukraine has become a powerful American tool to destabilize and attack Russia, was it feasible for Russia to assure its survival from U.S. nuclear encirclement without intervening in Ukraine?

    About the principle of armed struggle against all forms of neocolonialism and imperialism: how if not by war could have Algeria, Viet Nam (before U.S. intervention), and Angola, for examples, ended French and Portuguese colonialisms in their respective lands? About Viet Nam: does anyone think that the United States would have left South Viet Nam without being defeated in battle first? Further, because the U.S. and vassals are effectively waging war on Russia while pretending to be defending peace and principles, should Russia smile and wave its arms in jubilation?

    The wider argument: The United States and satellites couch their wars under the rubric, “just and unjust wars”. They deem their wars just and wars by others unjust. U.S. think tanks go further by invoking the concept of legality as if the lawless hyper‑empire is the guardian and depositary of legality. On such think tank is the Brookings Institution, the voice of Zionist academia. The hyper-imperialist Michael O’Hanlon (director of research and senior fellow of the foreign policy program at Brookings) wrote a specious article full with inaccuracies and distorted facts on the American invasion of Iraq, and named it as such: “Why the War Wasn’t Illegal”.

    O’Hanlon starts his article as follows, “United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was wrong in recently terming the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq “illegal”. So, now we know that the warmongering Zionist O’Hanlon thinks that he knows what is right and what is wrong! Aside from that, not only did he distort facts, but also erased the entire body of evidence confirming that Iraq had been abiding by all so-called U.N. resolutions on the matter of disarmament.

    Setting the Record Straight on War and Peace

    At present, only one concept can pass the test of rationality thus it is irrefutable. Wars can be either legitimate or illegitimate based on the tenets of the Natural Law, not the laws of the imperialist west and its institutions. The statement leads to an implacable consequence that could never be ignored or dismissed. Opposing legitimate wars (e.g., Russia’s in Ukraine, and the Palestine people resistance’s against the Zionist settler state of Israel, or the improbable but potential war by China for Taiwan) just because we advocate peace is antithetical to the anti-imperialist cause.

    For one, wars fought to defend national independence from imperialist or occupying powers are an exclusive category. Consequently, the implication of selling antiwar agendas to aggressed, squeezed, occupied, or threatened states in the name of western-defined peace and goodwill could not be more obvious. It means that the collective chauvinist west would continue trampling on the natural rights of all nations resisting subjugation. Seeing the magnitude of restrictions, sanctions, and destruction heaped upon them, those nations are left with no choice but to resist and fight back to preserve their very existence.

    In sum, and as far as it concerns Ukraine, the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa, it does not matter if the U.S. and European imperialisms define their ongoing wars in any context. The fact remains, no matter what contexts and laws they invent in support of their aims, the targeted countries would not acknowledge them—effectively they have no validity. The implication resulting from rejecting western rules of domination is unambiguous. Legitimate states (not installed by colonialist powers) threatened by marauding imperialists have every right to resort to any form of resistance to preserve their security, improve social welfare, and defend their freedom from the fascist clique that is ruling the world today.

    Discussion      

    The western intelligentsia obliquely calls it the “Suez Crisis”. It wasn’t. By all attributes, it was a standard colonialist war. Briefly, Britain and France (in collusion with the then 8-year old Zionist settler state (Israel) attacked Egypt in July 1956 because it nationalized the Suez Canal Company—English, French, and other European shareholders owned the operating enterprise; Egypt owned the waterway itself. Remark: during that time, no one suggested that war with Britain, France, and Israel had become inevitable because of their war against Egypt.

    When the United States intervened in Somalia, then invaded and occupied Afghanistan, Iraq, and then attacked Libya, Syria, and Yemen, no one suggested that going to war with the United States is inevitable to stop its Zionist wars. Pay attention: but when Russia intervened in Ukraine, the uproar reached the moon. The United States and major western powers repeatedly spoke of the inevitability of war with Russia. Are we missing something?

    These few facts are enough to corroborate an important assertion. The notion positing the inevitability of war with this or that country is a U.S. stratagem to intimidate all independent nations. Manifest intent: to enforce or induce compliance under the threat of violence. At this stage, do we need to prove that the U.S. obsession for war with Russia goes beyond “Russophobia”, “Russophrenia”, and similar hazy terms? Said obsession is now an ideologically and objectively developed strategic purpose meant as a mechanism to impose the American order on Russia.

    Observation: the old paradigm that governed the relation between capitalist America and communist Russia fell in disuse today. Although vanished in its old form, that paradigm (U.S. ideological enmity toward Russia) morphed into something new: strategic hostility. The core of this new anti-Russian stance is not the intervention in Ukraine, but a set of revamped U.S. geostrategic objectives. Accordingly, something very big has pushed the U.S. into chaotic frenzy. This cannot be but the U.S. certainty that Russia had come out into the open, re-asserted its role on the international arena, and challenged the American plan for world domination.

    Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, stated the fixed purpose of the American empire unequivocally. He declared, “The United States must remain the most powerful nation on Earth if peace is to continue between the U.S., China, and Russia.” In other words, the United States is opposing to maintaining peace—meaning it would go to war—with Russia and China should it conclude that either country or both pose threat to its military domination over the planet. By stating that, Milley has implicitly confirmed that war with Russia and China is inevitable under the condition he outlined.

    The British Sky News of Rupert Murdock is a gigantic factory of lies, tabloid news, and journalistic prostitution. Armed with such “credentials”, Sky News joins the American crowds in discussing the inevitability of war with Russia. Pretending serious journalism, the online tabloid asks, “Are we heading for World War Three?”

    Sky News then provides “verdicts” by its so-called panel of experts. Not surprising was that such experts recycled superficial opinions spread by the American media. Of interest, is the view presented by Sky News’ “military analysist”, Simon Diggins. Using shallow “analysis” and language, Diggins reproduced simplistic clichés taken from Fox News of Murdoch and from worthless stories taken from Microsoft Network (MSN) of Bill Gates.

    I’m not going to comment on Diggins’ quote (below) except for putting the “important” stuff in Italics. Purpose: to stress that the italicized text is nearly identical to the phraseology and lingo employed by American imperialists and Zionists in their daily shows. He writes,

    In one sense, we are always in a ‘pre-war’ world, as wars can start from miscalculation, from hubris, or misunderstandings as well as deliberate design.

    However, the last months have seen some loud rumblings, and the sense that the inevitable tensions of a complex world may only be resolvable by war.

    Nothing is inevitable, but the Ukraine invasion in particular has shown that Russia sees war as an instrument of policy, as a tool to change the world order in its favour, and not simply as a means of defence.”

    China likewise seeks reunification with Taiwan, and Iran, in its region, wants its ‘place in the sun’.

    Josep Borrell, European Union foreign policy chief, never ceases to amaze. His colonialist mindset is closed for reformation, and the bizarre statements he often makes keep getting worse from one to the next. Claiming that Russian influence causing dilemma in Africa’s Sahel, he stated,

    Russia’s “very strong” influence in Ouagadougou, Bamako, and Niamey “creates a new geopolitical configuration” in the Sahel. France has had to leave; we have left our military mission – an incipient military mission – in Niger. We have now been invited to abandon Niger with our civilian mission,” he said, adding that EU member states “will have to decide if they want to stay” and extend Mali’s EUTM [European Union Trade Mark], which is set to expire in May. [Italics added]

    Comment: Can Borrell explain to us why Russia’s influence on Africa’s Sahel is bad, but the European influence on the same is good? Another issue: does he think that war with Russia has become inevitable because Russia is breaking the “sacred” European colonialist legacy in Africa?

    Commenting on article written by the anti-Russian British journalist Gideon Rachman (Financial Times: “How to stop a war between America and China“), American economist Scott B. Sumner made this important remark. He said, “Unfortunately, the article doesn’t tell us how to stop a war between the US and China.  …” In fact, all what Rachman tried to do is upholding the U.S. notion of deterrence against China’s legitimate claims on Taiwan. (Before I forget, Rachman won a few prizes and awards for his superficial analyses.)

    The Zionist-controlled publication of The Atlantic published an article written by Eric Schmidt and Robert O. Work. The title is intriguing: “How to Stop the Next World War.” You would expect a convincing proposal, or at least a generic idea as how to stop the U.S. mad race for war with everyone. After attentively reading the article, I realized that the authors had already “suggested” how to stop the next war in the subtitle: “A strategy to restore America’s military deterrence”. So, now we know the answer to their question: in order to stop the next world war, the United States should not engage in negotiation or something like that, but it must protect and expand its imperialistic spheres of influence through increased military deterrence.

    Comment: U.S. and British imperialist and Zionists are not in the business of stopping wars. On the contrary, they incite for wars and justify them. Their favorite methods are open belligerency and swamping verbosity. In both cases (Rachman’s article and the Atlantic piece), the march toward the inevitable wars with Russia and China was not only hypothesized and marketed, but also rationalized to give the impression of unarguable conclusion.

    To sum it up, western governments (especially the U.S. government) and legions of war promotors have been tirelessly theorizing on the inevitability of war with Russia. Conspicuously absent from their coordinated scripts, however, is the postscript—the aftermath of war. That absence is neither lapsus nor negligence. It is a calculated strategy to advance the abstract notion of war without addressing its concrete consequences on their societies.

    U.S. post-WWII foreign and domestic policies need no introduction. Summary: in building consensus and silence for its wars around the world, the imperialist state relied on indoctrination, concealment, deception, and propaganda. Aside from being the pillars of control, these four categories form a specialized school of thought. Accordingly, those who govern the direction of domestic affairs (finance, Congress, weapons manufacturing, legislation, executive orders, etc.) will also govern the conduct of foreign policy and wars.

    What did the system do to insure that the American people remain passive toward its wars? It relied on a formidable psychological tool: desensitization. Desensitization such as this leads to emotional inebriation. For some (without quantifying), this type of emotions is rewarding whereby the scenes of mass destruction act as psychedelic narcotic. Arguably, the images of victory over a designated enemy are the experience.

    Desensitization has another function. In the hands of warmongers and war planners, it is a contraption to eradicate critical thinking vis-à-vis the plethora of factors and actors pushing for war. The odd thing is that visualizing the destruction of enemy while not contemplating own destruction by retaliatory strikes is not normal and raises myriad questions. For instance, could this behavior equate to sedation? Materially though, it lays the emotional foundation for the acceptance of war by protracted induction.

    Consider the Newsweek article, “Nuclear Bomb Map Shows Impact if Biden’s New Weapon Dropped on Russia,” published on November 3, 2023. The Zionist-imperialist weekly reports on “A nuclear bomb being developed by the Biden administration could wreak havoc in Moscow’. Newsweek broadcasts the bomb’s destructiveness by including a visualization map made by NUKEMAP. Newsweek continues by saying that with its “360 kilotons TNT, the bomb is 24 times the explosive power of the 15-kiloton bomb that the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, during World War II.”.

    Newsweek editors are cynically leaving to the readers the burden of calculating the human cost to Russia. In the case of Hiroshima, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists put the number of dead and injured between (200,000 and 340,000); the average therefore is 270,000. Now, 270,000 x 24 = 6,480,000. Effectively, therefore, the United States is telling Russia that it can and has all means to kill or injure about 6.5 million Russians in one single strike. [Note: those will die— consequent to radiation and other causes related to the blast—in the successive six months to the detonation are not included.] No doubt, the U.S. wants to intimidate Russia as if this is incapable of returning the gift of death to selected U.S. cities.

    Pay attention: Newsweek did not give details on who divulged the news about this new bomb. Skepticism is warranted;  for example, the whole thing could be fiction to scare Russia. But this is unimportant. At this point, we need to learn how the process of indoctrination to war works.

    To start, we know that NUKEMAP was created by Alex Wellerstein. A question: did the Pentagon ask Alex Wellerstein to talk about the 360 kiloton bomb, or did Wellerstein, knowing about it from other sources, decide to open the secret? This hypothesis cannot be true—it is unfathomable that the Pentagon allows its most secret weapons to be known to the enemy. Most likely, the Pentagon ordered the divulgence of information to intimidate Russia. Either way, this whole episode casts light on the multi-pronged interactions between the war apparatuses of the United States and its civilian contributors like Wellerstein.

    Expanded Discussion

    First, NUKEMAP is visualization software designed to help those who covet seeing real nuclear and missile wars. Second, the Pentagon and Wellerstein well know that the program can be used effectively to garner support for war by prospecting a “joyous” outcome, which is visualizing the incineration of Moscow.

    Now, could it be that the Pentagon is offering Wellerstein’s visualization to the public as a form of ideological catharsis to release their “repressed violent emotions”? Can this be true? It implies that the American people at large are addicted to visceral violence. But violence, as philosophy and practice, is acquired. In addition, no nation is uniform in its feelings and reactions to wars initiated by their country. With regard to the U.S. wars on foreign nations in the name of “security” and nominal values, indoctrination targeting the American people has worked on two levels: (a) countless Americans see their foreign wars as patriotic, or (b) they are indifferent to the magnitude of death, destruction, and consequences that their country has been inflicting on foreign nations.

    Pay attention: Wellerstein did not create NUKEMAP to warn against nuclear annihilation or to bring attention to its horrors. His article NUKEMAP is explicit. Not even once does he refer to the consequences of his concept. His focus was on the praise of his software and the awards it obtained.

    Remarks

    • First, Newsweek says that the Pentagon is developing a B61-13 nuclear device to give Biden options to hit large area military target. We understand, therefore, that the Pentagon is actually instigating Biden to consider the option for hitting Russia if he and his associates choose to do so.
    • Second: in turn, Newsweek takes upon itself the responsibility to send a message to Russia by showing what this bomb can do by publishing a simulation by NUKEMAP. Meaning, Newsweek is threating Russia directly on behalf of Biden—as if it is seeking an irrational Russian response to the U.S. visual provocation.
    • Third: of relevance to the process of desensitization is what Alex Wellerstein has done. He gave online users a tool that “Lets you to detonate nuclear weapons over an interactive map of the world”. In a sense, he created an online army of volunteers ready to push the button and wait to see the simulated cataclysmic result. To close, those who love the idea of war and the annihilation of their perceived enemy are now being geared to the idea of vaporizing Russia, China, and any other nation that stands in the U.S. trajectory for world domination.

    To summarize, because the ideological devotion to war with Russia has become a vast cult with unpredictable consequences, how many still remember Russell J. Oakes’ book, The Day After, and how many still recall the eponymous adapted film starring Jason Robards?

    Next: Part 5

    The post Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 4) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hell’s Endless Trails from the USA

    Hell is probably one of the most universal concepts of our species. In this article I describe “Hell at Home” and “Hell Away.”

    Hell at Home

    Gazette Sampler

    Beware of Your Medicine Cabinet

    Several years ago, I collected many descriptions of incidents of wrongdoing in industry and government. Here is a small sample of wrongdoing in “Big Pharma:”

    Big Pharma gouges prices in the absence of Government’s price controls. Uses improper techniques to test drugs. Intimidates and threatens their in-house scientists. Fabricates drug safety data and lies to the FDA. Routinely bribes doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs. Provides drugs to doctors at a discount so they can be sold to patients at a big profit. Markets a drug that is more expensive than alternative drugs and deadly among adults and children. Raises drug prices before new legislation passed seeking to curb drug prices. Aware for at least a decade of animal studies linking breast implants to cancer and other illnesses but waits years before telling women the risks. Dilutes cancer drugs to boost profits. Sells to other countries a drug taken off the U.S. market because of concerns about the drug’s adverse effects.  Blocked state legislation designed to lower drug prices for state residents without insurance coverage.

    Some Selective “Sadtistics”

    In no Particular Order:

    U.S. has highest infant mortality of comparable OECD countries.

    17 million children in poor families don’t get nutritious food regularly.

    Consumer fraud cost Americans 8.8 million dollars in 2022.

    About 3.6 million are jobless.

    37.9 million Americans live in poverty.

    Over one-half million are homeless and living outdoors.

    About 13 million Americans work two jobs to make ends.

    Roughly 5,000 die annually from workplace accidents.

    About 26 million do not have health insurance.

    Over 324,000 home foreclosures in 2022.

    In 2021 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S.

    Enough is Enough

    Some Unmeasurable Harms Done

    Unfulfilled Potential

    Due to denied opportunities, few people have the means to reach their fullest potential.

    Denial of Universal Huan Rights

    Ordinary Americans are denied their universal human rights declared by the United Nations in 1948; rights such as a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of everyone, including food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services, or the right to economic security during crises beyond the person’s control.

    Lost Peace and Democracy

    The two biggest lost opportunities stolen from us are the chance for worldwide peace and to create a true democracy. My guess is that converting our entire national security budget every year into a peacetime budget would be more than enough to rebuild America into a civilized land of fulfilled people and to end our scavenging of the world. A peacetime budget would force weapons makers into making things useful for all of America, a conversion that could be made since the weapons makers know how to make things.

    Had we not lost the opportunity, had our government, as prescribed in the Constitution “provided for the general welfare” and not the welfare of the corpocracy, America would be a very different America today, an America in which its citizenry share power and wealth more equally, an educated America, an employed America, a healthy America, a happy America, and an America at peace with the world. Call this different America the “People’s America.”

    The Loss of Privacy

    Americans have lost their Constitutional right to privacy and live in the land of the watched. The National Security Agency is the government’s master spy agency that probably spies on us daily.

    The Loss of Trust and Faith. How much trust or faith do you really have that the products and services you acquire have no faults given the “Gazette Sampler.”

    The Burden of Fear. Living in a police state and a gun spiked state like America is tantamount to living fearfully for most everybody but the power elite (except the latter’s fear of an uprising may be a repressed or guarded one). Think twice about joining a protest movement, going to a theater, a major outdoor event, or even to the shopping mall?

    USA Hell Away

    Counting sand would be easier than tallying the total number of casualties and property destroyed from US overt and covert military operations since 1776. So, I decided to share with you the tally made by S.B. Wilson of the deaths and destruction from one war alone, the US war waged against the Southeast Asian people in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia – what is known as the Viet Nam War. Mr. Wilson, now a lawyer, lost both legs crushed by an oncoming munitions train he had attempted to halt. Seventy-five percent of South Viet Nam was considered a free-fire zone (i.e., genocidal). Here is his tally:

    –Over 6 million Southeast Asians killed.

    –Over 64,000 US and Allied soldiers killed.

    –Over 1,600 US soldiers, and 300,000

    Vietnamese soldiers remain missing.

    –Thousands of amputees, paraplegics, blind, deaf, and other maiming’s created.

    –13,000 of 21,000 of Vietnamese villages, or 62 percent, severely damaged or destroyed, mostly by bombing.

    –Nearly 950 churches and pagodas destroyed by bombing.

    –350 hospitals and 1,500 maternity wards destroyed by bombing.

    –Nearly 3,000 high schools and universities destroyed by bombing.

    –Over 15,000 bridges destroyed by bombing.

    –10 million cubic meters of dikes destroyed by bombing.

    –Over 3,700 US fixed-wing aircraft lost.

    –36,125,000 US helicopter sorties during the war; over 10,000 helicopters lost or severely damaged.

    –26 million bomb craters created the majority from B-52s (a B-52 bomb crater could be 20 feet deep, and 40 feet across).

    –39 million acres of land in Indochina (or 91 percent of the land area of South Viet Nam) littered with fragments of bombs and shells, equivalent to 244,000 (160 acre) farms, or an area the size of all New England except Connecticut.

    –21 million gallons (80 million liters) of extremely poisonous chemicals (herbicides)  applied in 20,000 chemical spraying missions between 1961 and 1970 in the most intensive use of chemical warfare in human history, with as many as 4.8 million Vietnamese living in nearly 3,200 villages directly sprayed by the chemicals.

    –24 percent, or 16,100 square miles, of South

    Viet Nam sprayed, an area larger than the states of Connecticut, Vermont, and Rhode Island combined, killing tropical forest, food crops, and inland forests.

    –Over 500,000 Vietnamese died from chronic conditions related to chemical spraying with an estimated 650,000 still suffering from such conditions; 500,000 children have been born with Agent Orange-induced birth defects, now including third generation offspring.

    –Nearly 375,000 tons of fire balling napalm

    dropped on villages.

    –Huge Rome Plows (made in Rome, Georgia), 20-ton earthmoving D7E

    Caterpillar tractors, fitted with a nearly 2.5-ton curved 11-foot-wide attached blade protected by 14 additional tons of armor plate, scraped clean between 700,000 and 750,000 acres (1,200 square miles), an area equivalent to Rhode Island, leaving bare earth, rocks, and smashed trees.

    –As many as 36,000,000 total tons of ordnance expended from aerial and naval bombing, artillery, and ground combat firepower. On an average day US artillery expended 10,000 rounds costing $1 million per day; 150,000-300,000 tons of UXO remain scattered around Southeast Asia. 40,000 have been killed in Viet Nam since the end of the war in 1975, and nearly 70,000 injured; 20,000 Laotians have been killed or injured since the end of the war.

    –7 billion gallons of fuel consumed by US forces during the war.1

    In Closing

    “Forever War”

    The murdering and destruction ever since by America’s evil power elite has never stopped and will not stop unless and until. Nick Turse calls this grizzly phenomenon, “Forever War.”2 He is a journalist, winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, book author and currently a fellow at New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War.

    What if the tables were turned and the US became the target of the “Forever War?”

    Endnotes

    The post Hell’s Endless Trails from the USA first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Wilson, S.B.  “Remembering All the Deaths from All of Our Wars.” Counterpunch, May 27, 2016.
    2    Turse, N. “Forever War Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” LA Progressive, January 30, 2024. See also his book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. Metropolitan Books, First Edition (March 3, 2009).

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hell’s Endless Trails from the USA

    Hell is probably one of the most universal concepts of our species. In this article I describe “Hell at Home” and “Hell Away.”

    Hell at Home

    Gazette Sampler

    Beware of Your Medicine Cabinet

    Several years ago, I collected many descriptions of incidents of wrongdoing in industry and government. Here is a small sample of wrongdoing in “Big Pharma:”

    Big Pharma gouges prices in the absence of Government’s price controls. Uses improper techniques to test drugs. Intimidates and threatens their in-house scientists. Fabricates drug safety data and lies to the FDA. Routinely bribes doctors with luxury vacations and paid speaking gigs. Provides drugs to doctors at a discount so they can be sold to patients at a big profit. Markets a drug that is more expensive than alternative drugs and deadly among adults and children. Raises drug prices before new legislation passed seeking to curb drug prices. Aware for at least a decade of animal studies linking breast implants to cancer and other illnesses but waits years before telling women the risks. Dilutes cancer drugs to boost profits. Sells to other countries a drug taken off the U.S. market because of concerns about the drug’s adverse effects.  Blocked state legislation designed to lower drug prices for state residents without insurance coverage.

    Some Selective “Sadtistics”

    In no Particular Order:

    U.S. has highest infant mortality of comparable OECD countries.

    17 million children in poor families don’t get nutritious food regularly.

    Consumer fraud cost Americans 8.8 million dollars in 2022.

    About 3.6 million are jobless.

    37.9 million Americans live in poverty.

    Over one-half million are homeless and living outdoors.

    About 13 million Americans work two jobs to make ends.

    Roughly 5,000 die annually from workplace accidents.

    About 26 million do not have health insurance.

    Over 324,000 home foreclosures in 2022.

    In 2021 48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in the U.S.

    Enough is Enough

    Some Unmeasurable Harms Done

    Unfulfilled Potential

    Due to denied opportunities, few people have the means to reach their fullest potential.

    Denial of Universal Huan Rights

    Ordinary Americans are denied their universal human rights declared by the United Nations in 1948; rights such as a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of everyone, including food, clothing, housing, medical care and necessary social services, or the right to economic security during crises beyond the person’s control.

    Lost Peace and Democracy

    The two biggest lost opportunities stolen from us are the chance for worldwide peace and to create a true democracy. My guess is that converting our entire national security budget every year into a peacetime budget would be more than enough to rebuild America into a civilized land of fulfilled people and to end our scavenging of the world. A peacetime budget would force weapons makers into making things useful for all of America, a conversion that could be made since the weapons makers know how to make things.

    Had we not lost the opportunity, had our government, as prescribed in the Constitution “provided for the general welfare” and not the welfare of the corpocracy, America would be a very different America today, an America in which its citizenry share power and wealth more equally, an educated America, an employed America, a healthy America, a happy America, and an America at peace with the world. Call this different America the “People’s America.”

    The Loss of Privacy

    Americans have lost their Constitutional right to privacy and live in the land of the watched. The National Security Agency is the government’s master spy agency that probably spies on us daily.

    The Loss of Trust and Faith. How much trust or faith do you really have that the products and services you acquire have no faults given the “Gazette Sampler.”

    The Burden of Fear. Living in a police state and a gun spiked state like America is tantamount to living fearfully for most everybody but the power elite (except the latter’s fear of an uprising may be a repressed or guarded one). Think twice about joining a protest movement, going to a theater, a major outdoor event, or even to the shopping mall?

    USA Hell Away

    Counting sand would be easier than tallying the total number of casualties and property destroyed from US overt and covert military operations since 1776. So, I decided to share with you the tally made by S.B. Wilson of the deaths and destruction from one war alone, the US war waged against the Southeast Asian people in Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia – what is known as the Viet Nam War. Mr. Wilson, now a lawyer, lost both legs crushed by an oncoming munitions train he had attempted to halt. Seventy-five percent of South Viet Nam was considered a free-fire zone (i.e., genocidal). Here is his tally:

    –Over 6 million Southeast Asians killed.

    –Over 64,000 US and Allied soldiers killed.

    –Over 1,600 US soldiers, and 300,000

    Vietnamese soldiers remain missing.

    –Thousands of amputees, paraplegics, blind, deaf, and other maiming’s created.

    –13,000 of 21,000 of Vietnamese villages, or 62 percent, severely damaged or destroyed, mostly by bombing.

    –Nearly 950 churches and pagodas destroyed by bombing.

    –350 hospitals and 1,500 maternity wards destroyed by bombing.

    –Nearly 3,000 high schools and universities destroyed by bombing.

    –Over 15,000 bridges destroyed by bombing.

    –10 million cubic meters of dikes destroyed by bombing.

    –Over 3,700 US fixed-wing aircraft lost.

    –36,125,000 US helicopter sorties during the war; over 10,000 helicopters lost or severely damaged.

    –26 million bomb craters created the majority from B-52s (a B-52 bomb crater could be 20 feet deep, and 40 feet across).

    –39 million acres of land in Indochina (or 91 percent of the land area of South Viet Nam) littered with fragments of bombs and shells, equivalent to 244,000 (160 acre) farms, or an area the size of all New England except Connecticut.

    –21 million gallons (80 million liters) of extremely poisonous chemicals (herbicides)  applied in 20,000 chemical spraying missions between 1961 and 1970 in the most intensive use of chemical warfare in human history, with as many as 4.8 million Vietnamese living in nearly 3,200 villages directly sprayed by the chemicals.

    –24 percent, or 16,100 square miles, of South

    Viet Nam sprayed, an area larger than the states of Connecticut, Vermont, and Rhode Island combined, killing tropical forest, food crops, and inland forests.

    –Over 500,000 Vietnamese died from chronic conditions related to chemical spraying with an estimated 650,000 still suffering from such conditions; 500,000 children have been born with Agent Orange-induced birth defects, now including third generation offspring.

    –Nearly 375,000 tons of fire balling napalm

    dropped on villages.

    –Huge Rome Plows (made in Rome, Georgia), 20-ton earthmoving D7E

    Caterpillar tractors, fitted with a nearly 2.5-ton curved 11-foot-wide attached blade protected by 14 additional tons of armor plate, scraped clean between 700,000 and 750,000 acres (1,200 square miles), an area equivalent to Rhode Island, leaving bare earth, rocks, and smashed trees.

    –As many as 36,000,000 total tons of ordnance expended from aerial and naval bombing, artillery, and ground combat firepower. On an average day US artillery expended 10,000 rounds costing $1 million per day; 150,000-300,000 tons of UXO remain scattered around Southeast Asia. 40,000 have been killed in Viet Nam since the end of the war in 1975, and nearly 70,000 injured; 20,000 Laotians have been killed or injured since the end of the war.

    –7 billion gallons of fuel consumed by US forces during the war.1

    In Closing

    “Forever War”

    The murdering and destruction ever since by America’s evil power elite has never stopped and will not stop unless and until. Nick Turse calls this grizzly phenomenon, “Forever War.”2 He is a journalist, winner of a 2009 Ridenhour Prize for Reportorial Distinction as well as a James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, book author and currently a fellow at New York University’s Center for the United States and the Cold War.

    What if the tables were turned and the US became the target of the “Forever War?”

    Endnotes

    The post Hell’s Endless Trails from the USA first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Wilson, S.B.  “Remembering All the Deaths from All of Our Wars.” Counterpunch, May 27, 2016.
    2    Turse, N. “Forever War Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” LA Progressive, January 30, 2024. See also his book, The Complex: How the Military Invades Our Everyday Lives. Metropolitan Books, First Edition (March 3, 2009).

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • North Korea Must Be Ready to “Occupy” South – Kim

    North Korea must be ready to ‘occupy’ South – Kim
    North Korean leader Kim Jong-un delivering a speech at the Ministry of National Defense in Pyongyang on the occasion of the 76th founding anniversary of the Korean People’s Army. ©  STR / KCNA VIA KNS / AFP

    Pyongyang must be prepared to seize South Korean territory in the event of an “emergency,” North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has said.

    In a speech marking the 76th anniversary of the founding of the North Korean Army on Friday, Kim praised the military for “firmly protecting the sovereignty and dignity of the country” from “imperialist military threats, blackmail, and the risk of war.”

    Commenting on the increasingly tense relations with Seoul, the North Korean leader said his country has “summarized the history of our people’s division and confrontation and defined [South] Korean puppets as the most harmful and unchangeable enemy” of Pyongyang.

    Against this backdrop, Kim stated that in the event of an “emergency,” North Korean policymakers had “made a national decision to occupy and pacify [South Korean] territory.”

    The warning comes after the North Korean leader ruled out reunification between Pyongyang and Seoul in late December, arguing that the two neighbors adhere to diametrically opposed principles. Last month, Kim also called on the national parliament to label South Korea the “number one hostile country.”

    Pyongyang and Seoul never signed a peace treaty after the end of the 1950-1953 Korean War, which divided the peninsula, and tensions remain high. In recent months, North Korea has conducted numerous missile launches while criticizing its southern neighbor for holding joint military drills with the US, which has some 30,000 troops stationed on the peninsula.

    Citing US officials, the New York Times reported in January that Washington is worried that North Korea could “take some form of lethal military action” against Seoul. The paper’s sources, however, doubted that Pyongyang would risk anything resembling a full-scale attack.

    The post North Korea Must Be Ready to “Occupy” South – Kim first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • When Times Were Better: Victoria’s Ties with Israel’s Defence Industry

    Times were supposedly better in 2022.  That is, if you were a lawmaker in the Australian state of Victoria, a busy Israeli arms manufacturer, or cash counting corporate middleman keen to make a stash along the way between the two.  That view is premised on the notion that what happened on October 7, 2023 in Israel was stunningly remarkable, a historical blot dripped and dribbled from nothingness, leaving the Jewish state vengeful and yearning to avenge 1200 deaths and the taking of 240 hostages.  All things prior were dandy and uncontroversial.

    Last month, word got out that the Victorian government had inked a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Israeli Defence Ministry in December 2022.  “As Australia’s advanced manufacturing capital, we are always exploring economic and trade opportunities for our state – especially those that create local jobs,” a government spokesperson stated in January.  It’s just business.

    No one half observant to this should have been surprised, though no evidence of the MoU, in form or substance, exists on Victorian government websites.  (It is, however, listed on the Australian government’s Foreign Arrangements Scheme register.)  For one thing, Israel’s Ministry of Defense had happily trumpeted it, stating that its International Defense Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) and the Victorian statement government had “signed an industrial defense cooperation statement” that December.  Those present at the signing ceremony were retired General Yair Kulas, who heads SIBAT and Penelope McKay, acting secretary for Victoria’s Department of Jobs, Precincts, and Regions.

    That an MoU should grow from this was a logical outcome, a feature of the State’s distinctly free approach to entering into agreements with foreign entities.  In April 2021, the previous Morrison government terminated four agreements made by the Victorian government with Iran, Syria and China.  The agreements with Iran and Syria, signed in November 2004 and March 1999 respectively, were intended as educational, scientific and training ventures.  The two agreements with China came in the form of an MoU and framework agreement with the National Development and Reform Commission of the PRC, both part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

    The Israeli arms industry has taken something of a shine to Victoria.  One of its most aggressive, enterprising representatives has been Elbit Systems, Israel’s prolific drone manufacturing company.  Through Elbit Systems of Australia (ELSA), it established a Centre of Excellence in Human-Machine Teaming and Artificial Intelligence in Port Melbourne after announcing its plans to do so in February 2021.

    One of its main co-sponsors is the state government’s Invest Victoria branch.  The body is tasked with, in the tortured words of the government, “leading new entrant Foreign Direct Investment and investment opportunities of significance as well as enhancing the business investment environment, developing and providing whole-of-government levers and strengthening the governance of investment attraction activities.”  RMIT University’s Centre for Industrial AI Research and Innovation also did its bit alongside the state government in furnishing support.

    The two-year partnership with ELSA’s Centre of Excellence had rosy, arcadian goals.  The company’s then managing director and retired Major General Paul McLachlan wanted to impress his audience with glossily innocent reasons behind developing drone technology, which entailed counting any “number of people in designated evacuation zones, then to co-ordinate and communicate the most efficient evacuation routes to everyone in the zone, as well as monitoring the area to ensure that everyone has been accounted for.”

    McLachlan, in focusing on “the complex problems that emergency management organisations face during natural disasters” skipped around the nastily obvious fact that the technology’s antecedents have been lethal in nature.  They had been used to account for the killing and monitoring of Palestinians in Gaza, with its star performer being Elbit’s Hermes drone.  A grisly fact from the summer months of July 2014, when the IDF was making much use of Elbit’s murderous products in Gaza, company profits increased by 6.1%.

    This was not a record that worried the director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s defence, strategy and national security program, Michael Shoebridge.  As he told the ABC, the MoU “would have been entirely uncontroversial before the Israel-Hamas war.  But now, of course, there’s a live domestic debate about the war, and … most people are concerned about civilian casualties.”

    It is exactly the slipshod reasoning that gives the think-tankers a bad name.  It means that Israel’s predatory policies towards Palestinians since 1948 can be dismissed as peripheral and inconsequential to the current bloodbath.  The racial-administrative policies of the Jewish state in terms of controlling and dispossessing Palestinians in the West Bank and the trampling, sealing and suffocating of Gaza, can be put down to footnotes of varying, uncontroversial relevance.

    The Victorian Greens disagree.  On February 7, the party released a statement promising to introduce a motion calling on the Victorian government “to end its secretive relationship with the Israeli Ministry of Defence.”  They also demanded the government to “sever any ties with companies arming Israel’s Defence Force, which has killed 27,500 Palestinians in less than four month.”

    Given the federal government’s brusque termination of previous agreements entered into by Victoria with purportedly undesirable entities, the Albanese government has a useful precedent.  With legal proceedings underway in the International Court of Justice in The Hague seeking to determine whether genocide is taking place in Gaza, along with an interim order warning Israel to abide by the UN Genocide Convention, a sound justification has presented itself.  Complicity with genocide – actual, potential or as yet unassessed by a court – can hardly be in Canberra’s interest.  Over to you, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

    The post When Times Were Better: Victoria’s Ties with Israel’s Defence Industry first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Left Must Link With Progressive Forces in Middle East to Stop Regional War

    There has been much talk of the possibility of a regional war in the Middle East ever since Hamas’s brutal assault on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s genocidal invasion of Gaza, in the context of a U.S. administration not willing to call for an immediate ceasefire. As an Iranian American socialist feminist activist with ties to activists in Iran, the U.S., Israel and Palestine…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • US Chooses Genocide Over Diplomacy in the Middle East


    Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in Rafah, the last refuge in southern Gaza. Photo credit: MENAFN

    On February 7, 2024, a U.S. drone strike assassinated an Iraqi militia leader, Abu Baqir al-Saadi, in the heart of Baghdad. This was a further U.S. escalation in a major new front in the U.S.-Israeli war on the Middle East, centered on the Israeli genocide in Gaza, but already also including ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, Israeli attacks on Lebanon and Syria, and the U.S. and U.K.’s bombing of Yemen.

    This latest U.S. attack followed the U.S. bombing of seven targets on February 2, three in Iraq and four in Syria, with 125 bombs and missiles, killing at least 39 people, which Iran called “a strategic mistake” that would bring “disastrous consequences” for the Middle East.

    At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been touring the shrinking number of capitals in the region where leaders will still talk to him, playing the United States’ traditional role as a dishonest broker between Israel and its neighbors, in reality partnering with Israel to offer the Palestinians impossible, virtually suicidal terms for a ceasefire in Gaza.

    What Israel and the United States have proposed, but not made public, appears to be a second temporary ceasefire, during which prisoners or hostages would be exchanged, possibly leading to the release of all the Israeli security prisoners held in Gaza, but in no way leading to the final end of the genocide. If the Palestinians in fact freed all their Israeli hostages as part of a prisoner swap, it would remove the only obstacle to a catastrophic escalation of the genocide.

    When Hamas responded with a serious counter-proposal for a full ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Biden dismissed it out of hand as “over the top,” and Netanyahu called it “bizarre” and “delusional.”

    The position of the United States and Israel today is that ending a massacre that has already killed more than 27,700 people is not a serious option, even after the International Court of Justice has ruled it a plausible case of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide and drafted the Genocide Convention from his adopted home in New York City, must be turning in his grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery.

    The United States’ support for Israel’s genocidal policies now goes way beyond Palestine, with the U.S. expansion of the war to Iraq, Syria and Yemen to punish other countries and forces in the region for intervening to defend or support the Palestinians. U.S. officials claimed the February 2 attacks were intended to stop Iraqi Resistance attacks on U.S. bases. But the leading Iraqi resistance force had already suspended attacks against U.S. targets on January 30th after they killed three U.S. troops, declaring a truce at the urging of the Iranian and Iraqi governments.< A senior Iraqi military officer told BBC Persian that at least one of the Iraqi military units the U.S. bombed on February 2nd had nothing to do with attacks on U.S. bases. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani negotiated an agreement a year ago to clearly differentiate between Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) units that were part of the “Axis of Resistance” fighting a low-grade war with U.S. occupation forces, and other PMF units that were not involved in attacks on U.S. bases.

    Tragically, because the U.S. failed to coordinate its attacks with the Iraqi government, al-Sudani’s agreement failed to prevent the U.S. from attacking the wrong Iraqi forces. It is no wonder that some analysts have dubbed al-Sudani’s valiant efforts to prevent all-out war between U.S. forces and the Islamic Resistance in his country as “mission impossible.”

    Following the elaborately staged but carelessly misdirected U.S. attacks, Resistance forces in Iraq began launching new strikes on U.S. bases, including a drone attack that killed six Kurdish troops at the largest U.S. base in Syria. So the predictable effect of the U.S. bombing was in fact to rebuff Iran and Iraq’s efforts to rein in resistance forces and to escalate a war that U.S. officials keep claiming they want to deter.

    From experienced journalists and analysts to Middle Eastern governments, voices of caution are warning the United States in increasingly stark language of the dangers of its escalating bombing campaigns. “While the war rages in Gaza,” the BBC’s Orla Guerin wrote on February 4, “one false move could set the region alight.”

    Three days later, Orla would be surrounded by protesters chanting “America is the greatest devil,” as she reported from the site of the U.S. drone assassination of Kataib Hezbollah leader Abu Baqir al-Saadi in Baghdad – which could prove to be exactly the false move she feared.

    But what Americans should be asking their government is this: Why are there still 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq? It is 21 years since the United States invaded Iraq and plunged the nation into seemingly endless violence, chaos and corruption; 12 years since Iraq forced U.S. occupation forces to withdraw from Iraq at the end of 2011; and 7 years since the defeat of ISIS, which served as justification for the United States to send forces back into Iraq in 2014, and then to obliterate most of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in 2017.

    Successive Iraqi governments and parliaments have asked the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq, and previously scheduled talks are about to begin. But the Iraqis and Americans have issued contradictory statements about the goal of the negotiations. Prime Minister al-Sudani and most Iraqis hope they will bring about the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, while U.S. officials insist that U.S. troops may remain for another two to five years, kicking this explosive can further down the road despite the obvious dangers it poses to the lives of U.S. troops and to peace in the region.

    Behind these contradictory statements, the real value of Iraqi bases to the U.S. military does not seem to be about ISIS at all but about Iran. Although the United States has more than 40,000 troops stationed in 14 countries across the Middle East, and another 20,000 on warships in the seas surrounding them, the bases it uses in Iraq are its closest bases and airfields to Tehran and much of Iran. If the Pentagon loses these forward operating bases in Iraq, the closest bases from which it can attack Tehran will be Camp Arifjan and five other bases in Kuwait, where 13,500 U.S. troops would be vulnerable to Iranian counter-attacks – unless, of course, the U.S. withdraws them, too.

    Toward the end of the Cold War, historian Gabriel Kolko observed in his book Confronting the Third World that the United States’ “endemic incapacity to avoid entangling, costly commitments in areas of the world that are of intrinsically secondary importance to [its] priorities has caused U.S. foreign policy and resources to whipsaw virtually arbitrarily from one problem and region to the other. The result has been the United States’ increasing loss of control over its political priorities, budget, military strategy and tactics, and, ultimately, its original economic goals.”

    After the end of the Cold War, instead of restoring realistic goals and priorities, the neocons who gained control of U.S. foreign policy fooled themselves into believing that U.S. military and economic power could finally triumph over the frustratingly diverse social and political evolution of hundreds of countries and cultures all over the world. In addition to wreaking pointless mass destruction on country after country, this has turned the United States into the global enemy of the principles of democracy and self-determination that most Americans believe in.

    The horror Americans feel at the plight of people in Gaza and the U.S. role in it is a shocking new low in this disconnect between the humanity of ordinary Americans and the insatiable ambitions of their undemocratic leaders.

    While working for an end to the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, Americans should also be working for the long-overdue withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

    The post US Chooses Genocide Over Diplomacy in the Middle East first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Deplorable: Plans to Expand US Drone Atrocities in West Africa

    The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and the U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) opposes in the strongest terms the U.S. plans, in collusion with West Africa’s comprador class, to further violate Africa’s sovereignty and right to self determination in the form of three new military drone bases in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Benin. Further, we condemn the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) for not publicly renouncing this proposal in particular, and the existence of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in general. Their silence around this development confirms their complicity and betrayal of Pan-Africanism and the interests of the African masses struggling against the ravages of neo-colonialism.

    More U.S. drone bases in Africa spell more violence, vicious anonymity, and “collateral damage” from drone assassinations. It spells enhanced surveillance capabilities for imperialism to use against any threat to the neocolonial order. U.S. maneuvering to expand its already massive military drone operations is consistent with the U.S. incessant drive to wage war globally and its militarization of the planet. U.S. drone and air strikes in Africa have primarily been in Libya and Somalia with the numbers of confirmed civilian deaths from drones as high as 3,200 in these two countries, and studies have shown these conditions “have inadvertently aided the growth of terrorist groups in the region.” This is what the U.S. proposes now for West Africa.

    There are clear and disturbing geostrategic implications regarding the countries they have chosen for these U.S. drone bases. The bases will form a border along the three countries of the Alliance of Sahel States – Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger – countries which have been adopting an anti-imperialist disposition. In fact, Burkina Faso’s entire southern flank would be surrounded by these U.S. drone bases. The last two administrations as well as members of Congress have clearly stated in policy declarations and legislation that the U.S.’ primary objective in Africa is to counteract the presence and influence of China and Russia in order to maintain its full spectrum dominance of all regions of the world. This is also consistent with the Global Fragility Act that states the Biden administration’s first sites of focus would be Haiti, Libya, and “West African coastal states,” where the U.S. seeks to place the drone bases.

    The bases will not be there to end so-called terrorism of extremists in Africa; they will be there for the U.S. to terrorize the region. It is folly to believe that the settler criminals who rule the U.S. state, who can justify the genocidal assault on Gaza, and who systematically murder, sanction, and attack nations globally to maintain white supremacy and global capitalism, are spending hundreds of millions to “fight terrorism” in Africa.

    Rather than “an urgent effort to stop the spread of al Qaeda and Islamic State in the region,” according to American and African officials, the USOAN contends that this is more likely a contingency plan to preserve drone capabilities in the event of losing their $110 million U.S. drone base in Agadez, Niger. Niger has also recently temporarily suspended the granting of new mining licenses and ordered an audit of the sector, a move that would invariably raise the eyebrows of the U.S.-EU-NATO axis of domination, concerned over the future of exploitative access to the mineral resources there, such as uranium. Resource sovereignty runs counter to the true colonialist objectives of U.S. foreign policy.

    BAP and the USOAN call on all who support African sovereignty to denounce the U.S.’ latest imperialist moves in Western Africa as well as the neocolonial African governments and collaborators like the Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo who, face-to-face with U.S. Secretary Antony Blinken, openly begged for the U.S. to violate the sovereignty of the countries in the Alliance of Sahel States.

    BAP and the USOAN will continue to expose the puppets of neocolonialism in Africa and the misleaders masquerading as Black representatives in the legislative branches of the U.S. setter state. We maintain that the U.S. and its Western Europe progenitors are the root cause and primary sustenance for the poverty, displacement, despair, and violence in Africa, born from decades of colonialist plunder.

    #ShutDownAFRICOM!

    #USOutofAfrica!

    The post Deplorable: Plans to Expand US Drone Atrocities in West Africa first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Deplorable: Plans to Expand US Drone Atrocities in West Africa

    The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) and the U.S. Out of Africa Network (USOAN) opposes in the strongest terms the U.S. plans, in collusion with West Africa’s comprador class, to further violate Africa’s sovereignty and right to self determination in the form of three new military drone bases in Ghana, Ivory Coast and Benin. Further, we condemn the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) for not publicly renouncing this proposal in particular, and the existence of the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) in general. Their silence around this development confirms their complicity and betrayal of Pan-Africanism and the interests of the African masses struggling against the ravages of neo-colonialism.

    More U.S. drone bases in Africa spell more violence, vicious anonymity, and “collateral damage” from drone assassinations. It spells enhanced surveillance capabilities for imperialism to use against any threat to the neocolonial order. U.S. maneuvering to expand its already massive military drone operations is consistent with the U.S. incessant drive to wage war globally and its militarization of the planet. U.S. drone and air strikes in Africa have primarily been in Libya and Somalia with the numbers of confirmed civilian deaths from drones as high as 3,200 in these two countries, and studies have shown these conditions “have inadvertently aided the growth of terrorist groups in the region.” This is what the U.S. proposes now for West Africa.

    There are clear and disturbing geostrategic implications regarding the countries they have chosen for these U.S. drone bases. The bases will form a border along the three countries of the Alliance of Sahel States – Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger – countries which have been adopting an anti-imperialist disposition. In fact, Burkina Faso’s entire southern flank would be surrounded by these U.S. drone bases. The last two administrations as well as members of Congress have clearly stated in policy declarations and legislation that the U.S.’ primary objective in Africa is to counteract the presence and influence of China and Russia in order to maintain its full spectrum dominance of all regions of the world. This is also consistent with the Global Fragility Act that states the Biden administration’s first sites of focus would be Haiti, Libya, and “West African coastal states,” where the U.S. seeks to place the drone bases.

    The bases will not be there to end so-called terrorism of extremists in Africa; they will be there for the U.S. to terrorize the region. It is folly to believe that the settler criminals who rule the U.S. state, who can justify the genocidal assault on Gaza, and who systematically murder, sanction, and attack nations globally to maintain white supremacy and global capitalism, are spending hundreds of millions to “fight terrorism” in Africa.

    Rather than “an urgent effort to stop the spread of al Qaeda and Islamic State in the region,” according to American and African officials, the USOAN contends that this is more likely a contingency plan to preserve drone capabilities in the event of losing their $110 million U.S. drone base in Agadez, Niger. Niger has also recently temporarily suspended the granting of new mining licenses and ordered an audit of the sector, a move that would invariably raise the eyebrows of the U.S.-EU-NATO axis of domination, concerned over the future of exploitative access to the mineral resources there, such as uranium. Resource sovereignty runs counter to the true colonialist objectives of U.S. foreign policy.

    BAP and the USOAN call on all who support African sovereignty to denounce the U.S.’ latest imperialist moves in Western Africa as well as the neocolonial African governments and collaborators like the Ghanaian president Nana Akufo-Addo who, face-to-face with U.S. Secretary Antony Blinken, openly begged for the U.S. to violate the sovereignty of the countries in the Alliance of Sahel States.

    BAP and the USOAN will continue to expose the puppets of neocolonialism in Africa and the misleaders masquerading as Black representatives in the legislative branches of the U.S. setter state. We maintain that the U.S. and its Western Europe progenitors are the root cause and primary sustenance for the poverty, displacement, despair, and violence in Africa, born from decades of colonialist plunder.

    #ShutDownAFRICOM!

    #USOutofAfrica!

    The post Deplorable: Plans to Expand US Drone Atrocities in West Africa first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sanders Calls Out US Hypocrisy on Human Rights as Senators Unveil Aid Bill

    Sen. Bernie Sanders said Sunday that the U.S. must stop fueling the Netanyahu government’s assault on the Gaza Strip as senators unveiled legislation that would provide more than $14 billion in aid to Israel, which has waged its monthslong war on the Palestinian territory with massive American-made bombs, artillery shells, and other destructive munitions. “This is not JUST about 27,000…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • An interactive map is helping campaigners target Israel’s war machine

    Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) has released a groundbreaking initiative that means protesters can directly target any company involved in the manufacturing of planes Israel is currently using to bomb Gaza.

    CAAT: now protesters can target every F35 site

    CAAT has released an interactive map of all the locations across the UK where F35 components are made. CAAT estimates the value of the components UK industry supplies for Israeli F35s to be worth at least £336m since 2016.

    Moreover, 15% of every F35 that Israel is using to bombard Gaza is made by British industry.

    The map will enable campaigners across the country to find out where the components are produced, and to protest the companies who are profiting from the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza on their doorsteps.

    Foreign secretary David Cameron recommended continuing arms sales to Israel on 12 December 2023, despite previous Foreign Office assessments stating there were “serious concerns” about breaches of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and Israel’s commitment and ability to comply with IHL. Cameron further accepted that Israel has a different interpretation of its IHL obligations.

    The International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on 26 January, which stated that there is a ‘plausible’ case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, and imposed provisional measures on Israel to prevent genocide, has led to increased calls on the UK government to stop arms exports to Israel.

    The UK has a legal obligation to stop arms exports if there is a clear risk they could be used in violations of IHL, and under the Genocide Convention which places obligations on states to take action to prevent and punish genocide.

    Therefore, the fact that the UK is still allowing exports of arms – including components of F35s – is scandalous.

    A “great resource for campaigners”

    CAAT’s media coordinator Emily Apple said:

    This is a great resource for campaigners across the country. People do not want genocide profiteers on their doorstep, and this map will enable communities to take action against the companies that are complicit in war crimes in their local area.

    However, this isn’t something we should have to do. The legal position is clear. Israel is committing war crimes, including bombing hospitals and refugee camps and deliberately targeting medical workers. This government should immediately suspend arms exports to Israel.

    Instead it is prioritising the profits of arms dealers over Palestinian lives, and it is down to ordinary people to hold these companies to account for their murderous deals.

    Featured image via CAAT

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Palestine Action has just secured another victory against the genocidal Israeli arms trade

    Palestine Action has claimed another victory against Israel‘s weapons trade and supply – this time, forcing a transport company to stop working with arms firm Elbit Systems.

    Palestine Action: another victory against Elbit

    In an email to Palestine Action, transportation giants Kuehne+Nagel (K+N) declared it’s ended all ties with Israel’s largest weapons firm, Elbit Systems, and will not be working with the company again in the future. This victory comes after an extensive direct action campaign.

    This first involved activists from Palestine Action breaking into the K+N’s Leicester offices, smashing windows and spray painting the inside on 12 May 2023. There have been numerous similar actions taken since:

    Following the first action, K+N attempted to disguise the lorries which it used for transporting Elbit’s weaponry from the premises of their Leicester subsidiary, UAV Tactical Systems. This attempt did not go unnoticed by Palestine Action, who listed the company as a target on elbitsites.uk, leading to a double action at the company’s Milton Keynes branch and their cargo insurance firm in London.

    This involved the smashing of their branches’ windows, buildings covered in blood-red paint, and messages left calling for K+N to “cut ties with Elbit”:

    K+N Palestine Action ElbitPalestine Action were initially informed of the logistics and transportation company’s long standing contract with Elbit by a whistleblower from the company. This intel was confirmed by frequent sightings of K+N lorries entering and leaving Elbit’s UAV Tactical Systems factory in Leicester, proving the company’s involvement in the shipping of Israeli drone technologies.

    It is one of only six companies licensed for the secure collection, delivery, and disposal of firearms and weapons in Britain. So, K+N’s decision to cease its relationship with Elbit will significantly hinder the company’s ability to complete its weapons exports to Israel.

    This is what happens when you prop up apartheid

    Along with its former partnership with Elbit – the company supplying 85% of Israel’s drones and land based military equipment – K+N played a historical role in trafficking weapons to Apartheid South Africa, bolstering the regime in the 1980s.

    According to the Anti-Apartheid Movement, these shipments were sent to South Africa via Israel. That this £30bn company, long established in drawing profits from the arms industry, has decided that association with Elbit is too great an operational and PR risk is surely sore news for Israel’s weapons trade.

    K+N’s move to distance itself from Elbit Systems comes after the sole recruiters, iO associates, the property managers of Elbit’s Shenstone factory Fisher German, and the website hosts for Elbit’s Leicester factory also dropped all ties with the Israeli weapons maker:

    This pattern – of companies rushing to end their links with Elbit Systems after a targeted campaign by Palestine Action – further validates the group’s expansive direct action strategy.

    A Palestine Action spokesperson said:

    All companies associated with Israeli weapons makers Elbit Systems must follow suit and end their links with Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Palestine Action will continue to target all those who facilitate the production of Elbit’s weaponry, which is “battle-tested” on the Palestinian people. In solidarity with Palestine, we will not stop until Elbit ceases to exist.

    Featured image and additional images via Palestine Action

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Flashpoint for War: The Drone Killings at Tower 22

    The BBC’s characteristically mild-mannered note said it all: What is Tower 22?  More to the point, what are US forces doing in Jordan?  (To be more precise, a dusty scratching on the Syria-Jordan border.)  These questions were posed in the aftermath of yet another drone attack against a US outpost in the Middle East, its location of dubious strategic relevance to Washington, yet seen as indispensable to its global footprint.  On this occasion, the attack proved successful, killing three troops and wounding dozens.

    The Times of Israel offered a workmanlike description of the site’s role: “Tower 22 is located close enough to US troops at Tanf that it could potentially help support them, while potentially countering Iran-backed militants in the area and allowing troops to keep an eye on remnants of Islamic State in the region.”  The paper does not go on to mention the other role: that US forces are also present in the region to protect Israeli interests, acting as a shield against Iran.

    While Tower 22 is located more towards Jordan, it is a dozen miles or so to the Syria-based al-Tanf garrison, which retains a US troop presence.  Initially, that presence was justified to cope with the formidable threat posed by Islamic State as part of Operation Inherent Resolve.  In due course, it became something of a watch post on Iran’s burgeoning military presence in Syria and Iraq, an inflation as much a consequence of Tehran’s successful efforts against the fundamentalist group as it was a product of Washington’s destabilising invasion of Iraq in 2003.

    A January 28 press release from US Central Command notes that the attack was inflicted by “a one-way attack UAS [Unmanned Aerial System] that impacted on a base in northeast Jordan, near the Syrian border.”  Its description of Tower 22 is suitably vague, described as a “logistics support base” forming the Jordanian Defense Network.  “There are approximately 350 US Army and Air Force personnel deployed to the base, conducting a number of key support functions, including support to the coalition for the lasting defeat of ISIS.”  No mention is made of Iran or Israel.

    Deputy Pentagon Press Secretary Sabrina Singh found it hard to conceal the extent that US bases in the region have come under attack.  Clumsily, she tried to be vague as to reasons why such assaults were taking place to begin with, though her department has, since October 17 last year, tracked 165 attacks, 66 on US troops in Iraq and 98 in Syria.  The singular feature in the assault on Tower 22, she stressed, was that it worked.  “To my knowledge, there was nothing different or new about this attack that we’ve seen in other facilities that house our service members,” she told reporters on January 29.  “Unfortunately, this attack was successful, but we can’t discount the fact that other attacks, whether Iraq or Syria, were not intended to kill our service members.”

    A senior official from the umbrella grouping known as Islamic Resistance in Iraq justified the attack as part of a broader campaign against the US for its unwavering support for Israel and its relentlessly murderous campaign in Gaza.  (Since October 17, the group is said to have staged 140 attacks on US sites in both Iraq and Syria.)  “As we have said before if the US keeps supporting Israel, there will [be] escalations.”  The official in question went on to state that, “All the US interests in the region are legitimate targets, and we don’t care about US threats to respond.”

    A generally accepted view among security boffins is that US troops have achieved what they sought to do: cope with the threat posed by Islamic State.  As with any such groups, dissipation and readjustment eventually follows.  Washington’s military officials delight in using the term “degrade”, but it would be far better to simply assume that the fighters of such outfits eventually take up with others, blend into the locale, or simply go home.

    With roughly 3,000 personnel stationed in Jordan, 2,500 in Iraq, and 900 in Syria, US troops have become ripe targets as Israel’s war in Gaza rages.  In effect, they have become bits of surplus pieces on the Middle Eastern chessboard and, to that end, incentives for a broader conflict.  The Financial Times, noting the view of an unnamed source purporting to be a “senior western diplomat” (aren’t they always?), fretted that the tinderbox was about to go off.  “We’re always worried about US and Iranian forces getting into direct confrontation there, whether by accident or on purpose.”

    President Joe Biden has promised some suitable retaliation but does not wish for “a wider war in the Middle East.  That’s not what I’m looking for.”  A typically mangled response came from National Security Council spokesman John Kirby: “It’s very possible what you’ll see is a tiered approach here, not just a single action, but potentially multiple actions over a period of time.”

    Rather than seeing these attacks as incentives to leave such outposts, the don’t cut and run mentality may prove all too powerful in its muscular stupidity.  Empires do not merely bring with them sorrows but incentives to be stubborn.  The beneficiaries will be the usual coterie of war mongers and peace killers.

    The post Flashpoint for War: The Drone Killings at Tower 22 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Redefining US-Latin American Relations: From Outdated Monroe Doctrine to a 21st Century Good Neighbor Policy

    The Trump administration dusted off the 19th century Monroe Doctrine that subjugates the nations of the region to U.S. interests. The Biden administration, instead of reversing course,  followed suite, with disastrous results for the region and a migration crisis that threatens Biden’s re-election.

    It has left most of Trump’s sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba intact and has tightened those against Nicaragua.

    U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been a fiasco. Try as it might, both Trump and Biden were unable to depose President Maduro and found themselves stuck with a self-proclaimed president, Juan Guaidó. U.S. support for Guaidó backfired as he was held responsibility for massive corruption involving Venezuelan assets abroad that were turned over to him. Now Washington is openly siding with presidential hopeful María Corina Machado, who has a long history of engagement in violent disruptions and has called on the U.S. to invade her country. The Venezuelan people have paid a heavy price for the debacle, which has included crippling economic sanctions and coup attempts. The U.S. has also paid a price in terms of its prestige internationally.

    This is only one example of a string of disastrous policies toward Latin America.

    Instead of continuing down this imperial path of endless confrontation, U.S. policymakers need to stop, recalibrate, and design an entirely new approach to inter-American relations. This is particularly urgent as the continent is in the throes of an economic recession that is compounded by low commodity prices, a belly-up tourist industry and the drying up of remittances from outside.

    A good reference point for a policy makeover is Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor Policy” in the 1930s, which represented an abrupt break with the interventionism of that time. FDR abandoned “gunboat diplomacy” in which Marines were sent throughout the region to impose U.S. will. Though his policies were criticized for not going far enough, he did bring back U.S. Marines from Nicaragua, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, and scrapped the Platt Amendment that allowed the U.S. to intervene unilaterally in Cuban affairs.

    So what would a Good Neighbor Policy for the 21st Century look like? Here are some key planks:

    An end to military intervention. The illegal use of military force has been a hallmark of U.S. policy in the region, as we see from the deployment of Marines in the Dominican Republic in 1965, Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989; involvement in military actions leading to the Guatemalan coup in 1954 and destabilization in Nicaragua in the 1980s; support for coups in Brazil in 1964, Chile in 1973 and elsewhere. A Good Neighbor Policy would not only renounce the use of military force, but even the threat of such force (as in “all options are on the table”), particularly because such threats are illegal under international law.

    U.S. military intimidation also comes in the form of U.S. bases that dot the continent from Cuba to Colombia to further south. These installations are often resisted by local communities, as was the case of the Manta Base in Ecuador that was shut down in 2008 and the ongoing opposition against the Guantanamo Base in Cuba. U.S. bases in Latin America are a violation of local sovereignty and should be closed, with the lands cleaned up and returned to their rightful owners.

    Another form of military intervention is the financing and training of local military and police forces. Most of the U.S. assistance sent to Latin America, particularly Central America, goes towards funding security forces, resulting in the militarization of police and borders, and leading to greater police brutality, extrajudicial killings and repression of migrants. The training school in Ft. Benning, Georgia, formerly called the “School of the Americas,” graduated some of the continent’s worst human rights abusers. Even today, U.S.-trained forces are involved in egregious abuses, including the assassination of activists like Berta Cáceres in Honduras. U.S. programs to confront drugs, from the Merida Initiative in Mexico to Plan Colombia, have not stopped the flow of drugs but have poured massive amounts of weapons into the region and led to more killings, torture and gang violence. Latin American governments need to clean up their own national police forces and link them to communities, a more effective way to combat drug trafficking than the militarization that Washington has promoted.  The greatest contribution the U.S. can make to putting an end to the narcotics scourge in Latin America is to control the U.S. market for those drugs through responsible reforms and to prevent the sale of U.S.-made weapons to drug cartels.

    No more political meddling. While the U.S. public has been shocked by charges of Russian interference in its elections, this kind of meddling is par for the course in Latin America. USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), created in 1983 as a neutral sounding alternative to the CIA, spend millions of tax-payer dollars to undermine progressive movements. Following the election of Hugo Chávez in 1998, for instance, NED ramped up its assistance to conservative groups in Venezuela (which became the foundation’s number one Latin American recipient) as a leadup to regime change attempts.

    An end to the use of economic blackmail. The U.S. government uses economic pressure to impose its will. The Trump administration threatened to halt remittances to Mexico to extract concessions from the government of Andrés Manuel López Obrador on immigration issues. A similar threat persuaded many voters in El Salvador’s 2004 presidential elections to refrain from voting for the candidate of the left-leaning Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

    The U.S. also uses economic coercion. For the past 60 years, U.S. administrations have sanctioned Cuba—a policy that has not successfully led to regime change but has made living conditions harder for the Cuban people. The same is true in Venezuela, where one study says that in just 2017-2018, over 40,000 Venezuelans died as a result of sanctions. With coronavirus, these sanctions have become even more deadly. A Good Neighbor Policy would lift the economic sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua and help them recover economically.

    Support trade policies that lift people out of poverty and protect the environment. U.S. free trade agreements with Latin America have been good for the elites and U.S. corporations, but have increased economic inequality, eroded labor rights, destroyed the livelihoods of small farmers, furthered the privatization of public services, and compromised national sovereignty. When indebted nations seek loans from international financial institutions, the loans have been conditioned on the imposition of neoliberal policies that exacerbate all ofthese trends.

    In terms of the environment, too often the U.S. government has sided with global oil and mining interests when local communities in Latin America and the Caribbean have challenged resource-extracting projects that threaten their environment and endanger public health. We must launch a new era of energy and natural resource cooperation that prioritizes renewable sources of energy, green jobs, and good environmental stewardship.

    Massive protests against neoliberal policies erupted throughout Latin America shortly prior to the pandemic and will return with a vengeance unless countries are free to explore alternatives to neoliberal policies. A New Good Neighbor Policy would cease imposing economic conditions on Latin American governments and would call on the International Monetary Fund to do the same. An example of international cooperation is China’s “Belt and Road Initiative,” which, even with some downsides, has generated goodwill in the Global South by prioritizing investments in much-needed infrastructure projects without conditioning its funding on any aspect of government policy.

    Humane immigration policy. Throughout history, U.S. administrations have refused to take responsibility for the ways the U.S. has spurred mass migration north, including unfair trade agreements, support for dictators, climate change, drug consumption and the export of gangs. Instead, immigrants have been used and abused as a source of cheap labor, and vilified according to the political winds. President Obama was the deporter-in-chief; President Trump has been caging children, building walls, and shutting off avenues for people to seek asylum; President Biden is better than his predecessor when it comes to rhetoric, but not so much action-wise. A Good Neighbor policy would dismantle ICE and the cruel deportation centers; it would provide the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States a path to citizenship; and it would respect the international right of people to seek asylum.

    Recognition of Latin America’s cultural contributions. President Trump’s blatant disrespect towards Latin Americans and immigrants, including his call for building a wall “paid for by Mexico,” intensified racist attitudes among his base which has continued ever since. A new Latin America policy would not only counter racism but would uplift the region’s exceptional cultural richness. The controversy surrounding the extensive commercial promotion of the novel “American Dirt,” written by a U.S. author about the Mexican immigration experience, is an example of the underestimation of talent south of the border. The contributions of the continent’s indigenous population should also be appreciated and justly compensated, such as the centuries-old medicinal cures that are often exploited by U.S.-based pharmaceutical companies.

    An all-encompassing expression of goodwill in the form of a New Good Neighbor Policy will meet resistance from vested economic and military interests, as well as those persuaded by racist arguments. But the vast majority of people in the United States have nothing to lose by it and, in fact, have much to gain. Universal threats, such as coronavirus and the climate crisis, have taught us the limits of borders and should act as incentives to construct a Good Neighbor Policy for the 21st Century based on those principles of non-intervention and mutual respect.

    The post Redefining US-Latin American Relations: From Outdated Monroe Doctrine to a 21st Century Good Neighbor Policy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Offensive Nihilism and Oligarchic Narcissism

    When I was a child my grandfather, whom I knew as a man who had driven cars for the rich and conversed with the famous in his youth, once told me “making money is easy — if that is all you want to do”. As an eight-year-old that sounded very profound although at the time it made little sense to me. Personally I must confess, money has really meant very little to me. I worked as a youth to earn pocket money so I could go to restaurants or buy books. However I never had that sense of thrift that fills the Puritan with such pride or disdain for others. Money was largely absent from my youth so that its presence or absence made no discernible impact on my daily life. Thus my grandfather‘s words remained obscure until my middle age.

    It was then that I had sufficient experience to reflect on the conduct of my fellow humans. One of the questions which arose in my studies did not pertain directly to money. I saw first that the jobs I thought I wanted were all badly paid and yet the applications were very competitive. This too seemed a kernel of wisdom that escaped me. One of my academic sojourns took me through the canon of pre-1990s women’s studies. For those who are too young or amnesiac to recall, this was still the debate about the social-political-economic construction of gender roles in the humanist tradition of which Simone de Beauvoir was a part (see The Second Sex). One of the key observations about these roles was the extent to which the social organisation of labour (not erotic stimulation) placed women in labour-intensive roles within the family and society that freed men of property (what once was called the ruling class) to concentrate almost entirely (aside from bowel movements that could not be delegated) on the exercise of power. Illustrative was the fact that anyone who has to feed and nurture children, cook, clean, launder etc. has very little time to control much beyond the threshold of the home. In other words the labour process and division of labour were critical not only for the control of the family but for those thus freed of menial tasks to spend every waking minute dominating the rest of the world. It was then that I found a model for interpreting what my grandfather told me.

    As I have said, my organizational experience has been varied. I have been able to observe at close quarters the behaviour of people from the shop floor and street pavement to the bridge or boardroom. There even a casual observer can see and hear – with due attention – that there are different types in every organisation but every organisation has the same types.
    There are those who work at the tasks assigned. There are those who organise and supply those who work. Then there are those who do very little other than “be” in the organisation. Finally there are those whose only true interest is the exercise of power in whatever form available. The latter are the same character type as those my grandfather denoted for whom making money is easy.

    What unites theses two is benevolently described as single-mindedness. Within very limited circumstances the sheer determination of these people can be harnessed. However those circumstances may be compared to those of the mythical “peaceful atom”. Atomic power for electricity generation was conceived as a cover for the permanent bomb economy. Praised as a triumph of technology, it is demonstrably the most expensive means of boiling water yet invented. Aside from the toxicity and waste disposal issues, the fact remains that the turbine or other engineering needed to use all the plant’s steam generating capacity has not been developed and never will be. The only net benefits the atomic fission reactors have ever delivered are to those for whom making money or exercising power is thus made easy: unregulated private utilities (one could look back to Bonneville Power bankruptcies in Washington State) and the armed forces (propulsion and annihilation).

    An honest study of power would deal with the material conditions of its accumulation, including the division of labour. This is where rational analysis would show quickly how irrational those who belong to the power or money seeking cults are. However “rational” in the established study of politics and international relations means something quite different. Instead the rationalist – wherever affiliated – ought to be called an apologist, except that he does not apologize. Instead he is proud that he knows no shame.

    The obsession with accumulation of money or power is simplification of the highest degree. Since nothing else counts no other factors are actually relevant. No results can be contemplated beyond accumulation or dissipation. Such personalities are in need of guidance since the world is not naturally a source of profit or power.

    We may have read that in societies preceding those in which we live or imagine based on documents attributed to an inaccessible past, that the leaders sought oracles before or after action. They offered sacrifices – frequently burnt – to obtain the translation of the real world into their unidimensional perspectives. That is what the academic – especially the realist – scholar or consultant does. Within the division of labour the establishment scholar has a sacerdotal role to play. His scholarship is realistic only in the sense that it translates data about the world in which the rulers imagine they live into language of obsessive-compulsive behaviour.

    The astute priest knows the beliefs and dogmas he must profess and teach. He knows that if the king will eat meat on a day it is forbidden then a duck must become a species of fish. If the realist scholar is to serve his faith and his psychopathic patrons then he must translate the potentate’s violence and avarice into virtues. When the War Department in the US was renamed this was partly justified by the consolidation of the cabinet departments. (War was the Army alone.) However the act of Congress was designed to create the bureaucratic conditions for perpetual and covert war. The same legislation created the CIA. The Defense Department became the central instrument of US domestic and foreign policy. As not only George Kennan and Thomas Friedman acknowledged, the US economy and hence the machine for only making money and only exercising power could not run without translating everything into “war” or “profit”. As the DuPonts could easily testify after the Great War there was nothing, absolutely nothing, more profitable than war. (see my review of Behind the Nylon Curtain)

    The realist, unlike Machiavelli whose language was clear, thrives by selling his oracles in the forum or as a hawker in the remotest (now electronic) venues. The development of the atomic bomb to annihilate the Soviet Union, after failure of the West’s intervention to stop the revolution and the failure of their man Adolph to do the job later, was decorated in unrealistic stories. Actually outright lies were constructed. While the realists preached the Soviet threat in public they knew that the West’s Hitler-led devastation would require at least twenty years for the USSR to repair. The realists know that the official US strategy from the end of the Second World War was “first strike” and the renamed War Departments had to arm for two strikes against the Soviet Union. If the Tsar Bomba did nothing else it made some of the less obsessive among the psychopathic elite doubt the advantages of nuclear attack. This was the real meaning of deterrence: the US was deterred from following the nihilistic atomic strategy for which the Manhattan Project – staffed with some of the most reactionary anti-communists available – was founded. When New China developed its own weapons, the deterrent value increased. Mao was supposed to have said that even if the US unleashed an atomic war every fifth survivor would be Chinese. That had at least some deterrent effect at Groton or on Eton’s playing fields.

    Today, when some wonder (and others appear to praise) about the treatyless “rules based” order their uncertainty or discontent is generally directed at all those who do not comply with that order. Others moan that the United Nations is so ineffective. Altogether the wailing avoids the historical reality of the imperial regime initiated in 1913. That reality was the “great class war” aka the Great War or WWI after its continuation had ended in 1945. Eric Blair (George Orwell) was not prophetic. He was a true realist. He described the really existing empire that was established and unfolding. He knew nothing about the Soviet Union. The religion was Engsoc – British fascism or Anglo-national socialism. Orwell’s Party was the distillation of Anglo-Puritan moralism and its crusading fanaticism, to be intensified in all the white dominions. Behind those crusaders or in their hearts was the nihilistic obsession with power and submission for their own sake. He could not name them because the very fusion of state and corporate power which the Anglo-American Empire perfected became an exoskeleton sustaining power as if without the personality of the potentate. In order to distract from this reality a body of scholars was actively recruited and promoted whose descriptions of so-called totalitarianism or authoritarianism erased the essence of the new form which thirty years of war had perfected. In doing so, these often cited writers and speakers squeezed political theory out of toothpaste tubes and polished the smiles of those who triggered, waged and prolonged the slaughter, plunder and pillage into anonymity. Were these merely academic debates in modern monasteries we could regard them as arcane. However those critical years began a continuing deception about the true sources of the power that ended humanism and turned the short 20th century into the start of a millennium of perpetual war.

    How would the realist scholar explain this? What rational basis could such a society have? This is no speculative question. Such a society already prevails but not for the priests of academy. They cannot find the society in which the vast majority of us live. Their brethren have no idea about the economy they pretend to study either. The economist sees monopoly and piracy as “imperfect competition” just as Samuelson told us all. The political scientist sees only imperfect democracy where voting and public assets are entirely owned and controlled by cartels immune even from modest citizen scrutiny. The biologist revels in the destruction of humanity through genetic engineering just like his brothers who created the atomic bomb at the same time. These realists all at the cutting edge of their fields stand ready and willing to push humanity into the precipice their nihilism has created.

    It is all so easy to destroy human life, if that’s all you want to do.

    The post Offensive Nihilism and Oligarchic Narcissism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Protesters to target swanky and “delightful” London arms trade dinner over complicity in Gaza genocide

    Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) will be targeting an arms industry dinner at a top London Marriot hotel – despite the location supposedly being a secret. It comes as multiple companies which will attend the event are complicit in Israel‘s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

    The “prestigious” dinner for those complicit in genocide

    Arms dealers will be have to walk through a gauntlet of protesters when they meet for their ADS Annual swanky dinner at the Marriot Grosvenor House Park Lane hotel on Tuesday 30 January. The full address is JW Marriott Grosvenor House London 86-90 Park Lane, Mayfair, London, W1K 7TN

    Ticket prices range from £250 – £510 per head for a “prestigious event” that “brings together companies from across the UK’s aerospace, defence, security, and space industries for a delightful evening of entertainment, dinner and networking.”

    Event sponsors include companies such as BAE Systems, Babcock, and Moog that are complicit in the genocide the Israeli government is perpetrating against Palestinian people in Gaza. BAE Systems is the lead partner in providing components for the F35 combat aircraft that are currently bombarding Gaza.

    Previous dinners have been attended by some of the world’s biggest and worst arms companies. Although ADS have not revealed its speaker or guest list, in previous years over 40 MPs, including senior government ministers, have attended to schmooze with arms dealers.

    Marriot: blah, blah, blah

    The Canary asked Marriot for comment. It said:

    We are a hospitality company that provides public accommodations and function space.

    Acceptance of business does not indicate support, or endorsement of any group or individual.

    In line with our guest privacy policies, we do not discuss details of our guests or the groups with whom we do business.

    Clearly, Marriot hasn’t heard of BDS. Nor is it concerned with the UK arms industry’s appalling track record Gaza and the Occupied Territories.

    The UK government: also complicit in Israel’s genocide

    Since 2015, the UK has licenced over £487m worth of arms to Israel in single issue licenses. However, this does not include open licenses where companies can export unlimited amounts of specified equipment without further reporting requirements. One of these open licenses is for components for the F35 stealth combat aircraft that Israel is currently using to bombard Gaza.

    UK industry makes 15% of each F35, and Campaign Against Arms Trade estimates the value of the F35 contract is at least £336m since 2016. These figures do not include licenses issued since October 7th due to a lag in reporting arms export data.

    Foreign Secretary David Cameron recommended continuing arms sales to Israel on 12th December 2023 despite previous Foreign Office assessments stating there were “serious concerns” about breaches of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) and Israel’s commitment and ability to comply with IHL.

    Cameron further accepted that Israel had a different interpretation of IHL.

    On 26th January, the ICJ ruled there is plausible evidence Israel is committing genocide against Palestinian people in Gaza. The UK has a legal obligation to stop arms exports if there is a clear risk they could be used in violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL), and under the Genocide Convention which places obligations on states to take action to prevent and punish genocide.

    The protest, organised by London CAAT, will take place at 6pm outside the hotel.

    Marriot: “outrageous”

    CAAT media coordinator Emily Apple said of the Marriot-hosted dinner:

    This is a vile event aimed at enabling arms dealers to sell more weapons and fuel conflict across the world.

    Marketing this event as ‘delightful ‘is outrageous. There is nothing delightful about enabling genocide, and killing Palestinian children. The very people attending this dinner are complicit in war crimes. They are dining on the profits of genocide.

    However, the protest will ensure the evening is far from delightful for these merchants of death, and will remind them of the consequences of their murderous deals.

    Featured image via Hotels Catalogue – YouTube

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Conventional Detergent: Political Science as an Ideological Laundromat

    An old friend with years in the purchasing department of a leading consumer products conglomerate once told me that the active ingredient in washing powder is actually a minuscule component in those huge boxes of famous brand soap powders from which US daytime television dramas derived their sobriquet. The rest, he said mockingly, is just to make suds (foam). His point was that the consumer pays for the suds.

    I retorted that although the deception did not surprise me, he underestimated the importance of foam. Although I am no chemist, unlike my friend I have been washing my own clothes for years. I explained that one had to understand some basic physics, too. Suds, I added, are needed for dispersion, i.e., to carry the chemical solution to the bundle of clothes in the machine. This was done by hand in the days of washboards.

    My first attempt at scholarly writing was at the age of 16. The US withdrawal of uniformed services from Vietnam was still fresh and the professionals in the field I thought I would study on the way to a career at the bar were already telling the ostensibly defeated men of the Ivy League why they had lost the war. Years later I would write a series of articles criticising that body of scholarship. At 16 I only had the fragments of the public record in the county library and my readings of Liddell-Hart, Clausewitz and Mao at my disposal. Then my conclusion was that the stated objectives of US war against the Vietnamese people were incompatible with the actions taken to wage the war. That seemed to me to be a simple and logical conclusion. The US did not distinguish between a hammer and a screwdriver.

    When I began to study that subject called political science I thought I was going to learn more about how such decisions or distinctions were made. I was soon disappointed. This led me to retain the major — because the required course load was so small — and spend the remaining two years studying every other subject (mainly arts and literatures) to grasp what it might mean to be educated in our society.

    Although I had abandoned the academic discipline — and was not called to the bar — I did not cease asking the questions I believed were the subject of study for that field. I can say, to cut the biographical at a decent interval, that I have been an active participant in a representative cross-section of organized activities that has permitted me to see how people in organizations of very different types articulate themselves and behave, both internally and externally. Very few of the theories or concepts to which I had been introduced in academia were in any way adequate to explain or predict (two functions of classical science) what I experienced and observed. In fact the only useful theories I found came from my study of arts and literatures. Furthermore it was these theories which offered some insight into what political scientists actually do in those places they are employed.

    In 2014, I submitted the argument that the West was preparing for some kind of world war. I based this on specific observations and the bald assertion that the Anglo-American Establishment (to use Quigley’s term) was a captive of the public school/preparatory school indoctrination of more than two hundred years of empire. In other words, world war a century later was an expression of what the Americans call “school spirit.” “Let’s celebrate Sarajevo with another bout of mass slaughter and destruction.”

    I am reasonably sure that the majority of readers dismissed this “unscientific” proposal. Surely no one in office would want to repeat the Great War or World War 2, much less for the sentimental reasons I mentioned. And yet the near universal praise for the deceased realist Heinz K offers an excellent support for my case as do the assessments of another “offensive” realist still with us and rather lionized by all masters and mistresses of insight into today‘s global bellicosity. Heinz K. consistently justified his intrigues based on his reading of Metternich, the continental cutout for British policy after the French Revolution and Napoleon were defeated. Balance of power (terror against the population) and deterrence are quintessential British concepts. With the merger of the British and American Empires through the Great War these doctrines became the central dogma of the piratical cult that Rhodes and Rothschild conceived in the Round Table. It is important to know that while for most people the Round Table is a cult of nobility and order (or something from Camelot or The Holy Grail films), Thomas Malory made quite clear that it was a system of vicious treachery dominated by a sinister and jealous monarch and his deceitful and ruthless champion Lancelot. It is the real Round Table that should concern investigators, not the fantasy.

    Far from being a paragon of virtue and loyalty, Lancelot is an adulterer and a cheat who stoops to any trick needed to win the tournaments Arthur has instituted to maintain control over the chivalry and, needless to say, the deplorables (the rest of the population). Anglo-American imperial policy is not similar to the Round Table as Rhodes, Rothschild, Milner et al. envisioned. It is identical with it. One need only look at how NATO and the COVID regime perform. It is a matter of record that the most draconian policies were applied throughout the Anglo-American Empire: the US, Britain and the white dominions. A realist, if that term means anything in the vernacular, would have to ask how such uniform tyranny could have been exercised in all those nominally independent countries? The answer is not hard to find.

    Political science as practiced in the academy and those tank manufacturer-funded institutions who collude in the articulation of public policy cannot call attention to the obvious. This is especially true of the so-called “realists.” What makes them so offensive is their obfuscation combined with moralizing verbosity. Yet the “realist” scholar or school is admired by all young and old (we have not yet heard of “trans-aged”).

    Consider the pre-mortem and in vivo critiques of the Ukraine and Palestine theaters. The steadfast refusal to analyse these as elements of one world war is generally tolerated because of the episodic objections raised to Anglo-American imperial warfare (my words, since for the realist the AAE and the one war world do not exist). Furthermore, the belligerence or in the case of Heinz K, duplicitous action toward China is never seriously criticised. It defies imagination to consider that the academic, “punditric” and weblog/podcasting spheres have never studied Manifest Destiny (a laudable exception is Bruce Cumings — no political scientist).

    “Political science” and its sister “international relations” literally concern the study of politics/policy and trans-border engagements. However what they do not concern is the exercise of real power. Neither the sources of power nor its composition are seriously observed or described. While classic geopolitical writing — often cited as boilerplate — like Mackinder or Mahon at least admits power for its own sake and attempts to describe its exercise, these books, even like the maligned Liddell-Hart are treated as superficially as dinner conversation at the club (whichever type one may imagine). That is no accident. Conversation is not supposed to offer offense to anyone, especially those whom it is dangerous to offend). In the jousting that goes by the name scholarship the best cheat wins.

    Like in the automatic washing machine, the power lies in the minuscule cult that rules the empire. Political science and her siblings produce the suds, the foam.

    The post Conventional Detergent: Political Science as an Ideological Laundromat first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Conventional Detergent: Political Science as an Ideological Laundromat

    An old friend with years in the purchasing department of a leading consumer products conglomerate once told me that the active ingredient in washing powder is actually a minuscule component in those huge boxes of famous brand soap powders from which US daytime television dramas derived their sobriquet. The rest, he said mockingly, is just to make suds (foam). His point was that the consumer pays for the suds.

    I retorted that although the deception did not surprise me, he underestimated the importance of foam. Although I am no chemist, unlike my friend I have been washing my own clothes for years. I explained that one had to understand some basic physics, too. Suds, I added, are needed for dispersion, i.e., to carry the chemical solution to the bundle of clothes in the machine. This was done by hand in the days of washboards.

    My first attempt at scholarly writing was at the age of 16. The US withdrawal of uniformed services from Vietnam was still fresh and the professionals in the field I thought I would study on the way to a career at the bar were already telling the ostensibly defeated men of the Ivy League why they had lost the war. Years later I would write a series of articles criticising that body of scholarship. At 16 I only had the fragments of the public record in the county library and my readings of Liddell-Hart, Clausewitz and Mao at my disposal. Then my conclusion was that the stated objectives of US war against the Vietnamese people were incompatible with the actions taken to wage the war. That seemed to me to be a simple and logical conclusion. The US did not distinguish between a hammer and a screwdriver.

    When I began to study that subject called political science I thought I was going to learn more about how such decisions or distinctions were made. I was soon disappointed. This led me to retain the major — because the required course load was so small — and spend the remaining two years studying every other subject (mainly arts and literatures) to grasp what it might mean to be educated in our society.

    Although I had abandoned the academic discipline — and was not called to the bar — I did not cease asking the questions I believed were the subject of study for that field. I can say, to cut the biographical at a decent interval, that I have been an active participant in a representative cross-section of organized activities that has permitted me to see how people in organizations of very different types articulate themselves and behave, both internally and externally. Very few of the theories or concepts to which I had been introduced in academia were in any way adequate to explain or predict (two functions of classical science) what I experienced and observed. In fact the only useful theories I found came from my study of arts and literatures. Furthermore it was these theories which offered some insight into what political scientists actually do in those places they are employed.

    In 2014, I submitted the argument that the West was preparing for some kind of world war. I based this on specific observations and the bald assertion that the Anglo-American Establishment (to use Quigley’s term) was a captive of the public school/preparatory school indoctrination of more than two hundred years of empire. In other words, world war a century later was an expression of what the Americans call “school spirit.” “Let’s celebrate Sarajevo with another bout of mass slaughter and destruction.”

    I am reasonably sure that the majority of readers dismissed this “unscientific” proposal. Surely no one in office would want to repeat the Great War or World War 2, much less for the sentimental reasons I mentioned. And yet the near universal praise for the deceased realist Heinz K offers an excellent support for my case as do the assessments of another “offensive” realist still with us and rather lionized by all masters and mistresses of insight into today‘s global bellicosity. Heinz K. consistently justified his intrigues based on his reading of Metternich, the continental cutout for British policy after the French Revolution and Napoleon were defeated. Balance of power (terror against the population) and deterrence are quintessential British concepts. With the merger of the British and American Empires through the Great War these doctrines became the central dogma of the piratical cult that Rhodes and Rothschild conceived in the Round Table. It is important to know that while for most people the Round Table is a cult of nobility and order (or something from Camelot or The Holy Grail films), Thomas Malory made quite clear that it was a system of vicious treachery dominated by a sinister and jealous monarch and his deceitful and ruthless champion Lancelot. It is the real Round Table that should concern investigators, not the fantasy.

    Far from being a paragon of virtue and loyalty, Lancelot is an adulterer and a cheat who stoops to any trick needed to win the tournaments Arthur has instituted to maintain control over the chivalry and, needless to say, the deplorables (the rest of the population). Anglo-American imperial policy is not similar to the Round Table as Rhodes, Rothschild, Milner et al. envisioned. It is identical with it. One need only look at how NATO and the COVID regime perform. It is a matter of record that the most draconian policies were applied throughout the Anglo-American Empire: the US, Britain and the white dominions. A realist, if that term means anything in the vernacular, would have to ask how such uniform tyranny could have been exercised in all those nominally independent countries? The answer is not hard to find.

    Political science as practiced in the academy and those tank manufacturer-funded institutions who collude in the articulation of public policy cannot call attention to the obvious. This is especially true of the so-called “realists.” What makes them so offensive is their obfuscation combined with moralizing verbosity. Yet the “realist” scholar or school is admired by all young and old (we have not yet heard of “trans-aged”).

    Consider the pre-mortem and in vivo critiques of the Ukraine and Palestine theaters. The steadfast refusal to analyse these as elements of one world war is generally tolerated because of the episodic objections raised to Anglo-American imperial warfare (my words, since for the realist the AAE and the one war world do not exist). Furthermore, the belligerence or in the case of Heinz K, duplicitous action toward China is never seriously criticised. It defies imagination to consider that the academic, “punditric” and weblog/podcasting spheres have never studied Manifest Destiny (a laudable exception is Bruce Cumings — no political scientist).

    “Political science” and its sister “international relations” literally concern the study of politics/policy and trans-border engagements. However what they do not concern is the exercise of real power. Neither the sources of power nor its composition are seriously observed or described. While classic geopolitical writing — often cited as boilerplate — like Mackinder or Mahon at least admits power for its own sake and attempts to describe its exercise, these books, even like the maligned Liddell-Hart are treated as superficially as dinner conversation at the club (whichever type one may imagine). That is no accident. Conversation is not supposed to offer offense to anyone, especially those whom it is dangerous to offend). In the jousting that goes by the name scholarship the best cheat wins.

    Like in the automatic washing machine, the power lies in the minuscule cult that rules the empire. Political science and her siblings produce the suds, the foam.

    The post Conventional Detergent: Political Science as an Ideological Laundromat first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Cognitive Warfare, Targeting your Subconscious

    Cognitive warfare is no longer science fiction. Cognitive warfare is a fact of the modern age and everyone, whether civilian or military, is a potential target. Cognitive attacks are aimed at exploiting emotions rooted in our subconscious, bypassing our rational conscious mind. This is achieved by exploiting biases, fallacies, emotions and automatisms, but also through nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology.

    — Commander Cornelis van der Klaauw, Royal Netherlands Navy and Strategic Communications

    The five domains of warfare are land, sea, air, space and cyberspace. The core technical components of Fifth Dimension Operations (cyberspace) are cyberwarfare and cyber-attacks. The military concept now is to treat cyber as a place, not a mission. Cyberwarfare relates to fifth generation warfare, but transcends and expands that model.

    The primary objective is freedom of action in, through, and from cyberspace as needed to support mission objectives. The corollary is to deny freedom of action to adversaries at times and places of our choosing. The ability to do both provides for cyber military superiority.

    — Gen. Larry D. Welch USAF (Ret.)

    As many of our readers and subscribers know, Jill and I have been writing about PsyWar and Fifth Generation Warfare for quite a while now. Most of the strategies and tactics we have covered target conscious thought, conscious cognition, with the possible exception of neurolinguistic programming. But Cognitive warfare involves a different approach than more classical Fifth Generation Warfare strategies and tactics. Cognitive warfare is specifically focused on targeting your subconscious mind.

    Cognitive warfare is a critical component of modern cyberwarfare. NATO’s strategic document “Warfare Development Imperative of cognitive superiority” details planning to develop a 10 to 20 year operational framework that defines defensive and proactive measures within the cognitive warfare space for NATO. In this document, NATO Allied Command defines cognitive warfare as including “activities conducted in synchronization with other instruments of power to affect attitudes and behavior by influencing, protecting, or disrupting individual and group cognition to gain advantage over an adversary.” The nature of the adversary is open ended, and can include both foreign and domestic interventions.

    NATO’s definition of cognitive warfare includes a cognitive attack that directly targets the minds of civilians (and citizens), meaning non-combatants. To their credit, NATO apparently believes (as do I) that this is a violation of the Law of Armed Conflict, but we also both agree that it is already happening. Therefore, it is proposed that countering cognitive attacks is a military task in which NATO must play a role. Of course, this logic can provide a convenient excuse for developing the capacity and capabilities to engage in and deploy these same practices if deemed necessary against domestic citizens. Another opportunity to advance “dual function” research logic.

    Please keep in mind that one way that the “five eyes” intelligence alliance operates is that intelligence groups from one of the alliance members can target members of an allied nation-state in the event that the intelligence community of that nation-state is prohibited from taking action against its own citizens. For more information on the five eyes alliance, please see the excerpt from a recent “The Hindu” article quoted below.

    NATO recently published an article in their journal, “Three Swords” titled “Cognitive Warfare” – written by by Commander Cornelis van der Klaauw, Royal Netherlands Navy and Strategic Communications and subject matter expert for the NATO Joint Warfare Centre. This essay lays out some critical ideas behind NATO’s concept of cognitive warfare.

    From the article:

    “Unlike psychological operations, cognitive activities are not directed at our conscious mind, but at our subconscious mind, the main drivers of our behavior: emotions. This takes place through hyper-personalized targeting integrating and exploiting neuroscience, bio-technology, information and cognitive techniques (NBIC), mainly using social media and digital networks for neuro-profiling and targeting individuals. We need to realize that individuals are at the centre of all military operations and strategic-political decision-making. Although they often sound like ideas from a science-fiction film, cognitive attacks are not science fiction anymore. They are taking place already now, and these attacks will continue to become more sophisticated.

    Several countries are developing NBIC capabilities and collecting data for use in targeting the cognitive dimension. These activities are supported by aspects such as data mining and data analytics, and are further combined with artificial intelligence. Although most of the cognitive attacks remain below the threshold of armed conflict, the effects can be lethal and multi-domain, affecting all five domains of warfare. Further- more, these attacks are people-centric, meaning they have human cognition as their centre of gravity, and in principle that is a continuous, never-ending battle. Although not proven to be a cognitive attack, the so-called Havana syndrome, a cluster of adverse symptoms reported by U.S. intelligence and military personnel stationed abroad in recent years, could well be an instance of the use of cognitive capabilities.

    China is globally one of the leading nations in the scientific development of NBIC capabilities. China conducts human research and experiments that are deemed unethical according to Western standards, but these experiments nevertheless attract scientists from all over the world. Within the context of the Chinese “three warfares” strategy, an integrated people-centric, psychological and legal approach, the Chinese have developed a data- base with the profiles of more than two million prominent individuals worldwide that may be used to influence decision-making processes.

    LOOKING AT COGNITIVE activities in more detail, we can identify long-term campaigns taking place over several years, but also one- off activities. What both have in common is a structured approach to achieve a specific aim without the target becoming aware of an attack. Generally the damage is already done before the target realizes that it has been targeted. The reason why cognitive attacks go unnoticed by their targets is that cognitive activities bypass the conscious mind and directly target the subconscious of a person. In fact, within the subconscious mind, the primary target is the amygdala. From an evolutionary point of view, the amygdala is the oldest part of the brain. Before we go more into detail on the ways and means used for cognitive activities, we will briefly look at the functions of our conscious and subconscious mind as well as the relationship between the two. As the term suggests, our subconscious mind exists “beneath” our conscious mind. Contrary to the conscious mind, the subconscious mind is always active; it never sleeps. It regulates our basic organic functions, our emotions and, surprisingly enough, most of our decision-making. The reason why most of our decisions are made by our subconscious is that our conscious mind uses a lot of energy, which causes it to reach the limits of its capacity quickly. Actually only five to ten percent of the decisions we make are rational decisions; for the rest, we rely on our subconscious decision-making, which is strongly influenced by repetition, automatisms, biases and fallacies. We tend to then use our conscious mind to justify, rationalize and explain our emotionally driven decision-making and behavior.

    What cognitive attacks then do is exploit these emotions, automatisms, biases and fallacies in a way that affects our processes of making meaning of our surroundings, affecting not what we think but how we think. Adversaries do this in different ways, integrating and exploiting NBIC techniques. In this context we need to consider that both biases (non-rational shortcuts acceptable in normal situations) and fallacies (conclusions without evidence, based on assumptions) are commonly uniform across cultures and therefore easier to exploit.

    The preferred way to do this is via social media and digital networks, as these are our primary environment for sharing all sorts of information, and they have increasingly become our main source for news. However, there are more aspects that make social media an ideal vector for cognitive activities. Social media weaken our cognitive abilities as the content can easily stir up emotions and forces us to react quickly. Social media platforms are designed to foster addictive behavior.

    On average, we are exposed to digital information systems between five and seven hours a day. Internet use disorder is now a recognized mental disorder. Furthermore, social media are ideal for collecting personal information and or carrying out data analysis and data mining. Drawing up a person’s digital profile is a quick and relatively simple process that can be carried out with limited means.

    The effects of the digital age are far-reaching: A paper copy of the newspaper does not know what we read; our tablets, however, do. The advertisement in the paper does not know what we bought and where; our smartphones do. The newspaper editor does not know what article we found interesting and shared with friends; our social network does. Closely related to and often fully integrated with social media are our smart devices. Smart devices collect all manner of personal physiological information such as blood pressure, heart and breathing rate, skin temperature and so on. All this information is relevant to target people in the right moment, for example when they are tired, hungry, stressed or angry.

    Looking to digital networks, gaming platforms, with their more than three billion gamers worldwide, are ideal venues for cognitive activities. The platforms contain all kinds of sub-cultures that are in turn linked to non-gaming groups who can create their own games or modify existing games to infiltrate the gamers’ lives without any control or regulations of the content of the games. An aspect that, in this context, should not be overlooked is that the lines between physical, digital and mental personas are becoming blurrier and with that, the difference between reality and fiction is also becoming unclear. Virtual reality environments in particular drive this trend.

    Three billion gamers worldwide, who are subject to cognitive warfare. That is a mind blowing concept.

    Digital spaces have also been known to breed echo chambers. Within them, people concentrate on a narrative that supports their beliefs and desires while ignoring information that is not aligned with their narratives.

     The Emerging Technologies:

    Those embryonic technologies or scientific discoveries that are expected to reach maturity in 2023–2043; and are not widely used currently or whose effects on Alliance defence, security and enterprise functions are not entirely clear. NATO Science and Technology Organization result is closed micro-societies vulnerable to group thinking, polarization and generation of distrust. This becomes more likely when the time to think about the information is limited; the less time is available, the more people tend to unquestioningly follow a narrative aligned with their beliefs. In addition, it should be noted that echo chambers are an excellent venue to collect personal information that can be used for micro targeting of individuals.

    Furthermore, emerging technologies such as synthetic media, deepfakes, artificial intelligence and data mining create opportunities to collect and process information that can be used for cognitive activities. One of these emerging technologies is the Metaverse. The Metaverse is able to replicate the physical world and provide a highly immersive social experience through the use of headsets, body suits and haptic equipment. At the same time, it can provide a significant amount of physical and mental information that can be used for psychological and emotional manipulation or, in the hands of adversaries, micro targeting of individuals.

    In the following section, the essay starts discussing how to counter cognitive warfare- by developing cognitive resilience. The advice is relevant to individuals, groups, military units and government leaders.

    Knowing one’s vulnerabilities is important, but knowing when a cognitive attack is taking place is just as vital. This requires a high level of awareness and a basic understanding of the different methods used. For example, it is essential to maintain awareness about the information we unknowingly share that can be used against us. At the same time, technological solutions can help to identify cognitive attacks through algorithms and artificial intelligence, but also with real-time pattern and signature recognition. General awareness and technological solutions may alert us to cognitive attacks in good time and help us in determining the best way to respond. This brings us to the subject of creating cognitive resilience.

    Within the Cognitive Warfare Concept, cognitive resilience is defined as “the capacity to withstand and recover quickly from an adversarial cognitive attack through the effective preparation of groups and individuals.” In order to create cognitive resilience, we must look at the current ways in which cognitive activities are conducted, and by which means. In order to keep the initiative, we need to anticipate possible future developments. Currently such future developments include ways to read thoughts and emotions, which can enable measurements of the effect of cognitive activities. Based on the result, models can be developed to improve decision-making, but also to identify weaknesses to exploit.

    This section of the essay develops the functional strategic and tactical adjacencies that are important to understand the cognitive warfare battlespace and related technologies.

    THERE ARE OTHER RAPID developments in the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology. In nanotechnology we see the development of nanorobotics, nanosensors and nanoenergy sources making in-body processes possible. Bioartefacts linked to nanorobotics can stimulate perception, cognition and behaviour. In the field of biotechnology, there are encouraging developments in bioengineering, biogenomics and neuropharmacology. One of the most promising projects is the development of embedded synthetic DNA or sDNA. This can be a useful alternative to silicon semiconductors. Currently it is possible to store 2.14 × 106 bytes of data on sDNA. This organic material could enable human-machine interfaces and is often seen as the 47th human chromosome.

    In the field of neurocomputing, implants can be used to improve hearing and vision. Furthermore, neural nanotechnology can be used to bring nano-sized robots close to a neuron via the bloodstream and make it possible to link the human brain directly (i.e. not intercepted by our senses) to a computer, making use of artificial intelligence in the process. But we must keep in mind that this is a two-way street: such an artificial intelligence will, in turn, be linked to a human brain.

    In April 2013, U.S. President Obama announced the launch of the White House initiative Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN). Its goal was to support innovation that would further our understanding of the brain; Russian commentators perceived it as a project to “hack the human brain.”

    In 2016 Elon Musk started the neuro- technology company Neuralink, which aims to develop a brain-computer interface to extend the abilities of people with paralysis. Of course, such an interface may also be used to extend the abilities of people without disabilities, for instance to improve their performance on the battlefield. Future developments include innovation in artificial intelligence, machine intelligence and means to enhance human brainpower, either through alteration of genes or directly, by linking the brain through physical peripherals or anatomically internalized products.
    In Conclusion

    It is important to reiterate that cognitive warfare is no longer science fiction. Cognitive warfare is a fact of the modern age and everyone, whether civilian or military, is a potential target. Cognitive attacks are aimed at exploiting emotions rooted in our subconscious, bypassing our rational conscious mind. This is achieved by exploiting biases, fallacies, emotions and automatisms, but also through nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology.

    In cognitive warfare, the ultimate aim is to alter our perception of reality and deceive our brain in order to affect our decision-making. We are commonly unaware of such attacks before it is too late and they have already affected their targets. Therefore, we must protect ourselves by raising awareness and developing a system of indicators and warnings that can provide realtime information. The use of artificial intelligence can show us the preferred way to react to a possible cognitive attack. The human mind is becoming the battlefield of tomorrow, and this means that every person is a potential target. Warfare is no longer a purely military concept; it has become much broader and more complex. In the future, there will only be one rule in warfare: There are no rules. While other domains can provide tactical and operational victories, the human domain is the only domain in which we can secure a full victory.

    The post Cognitive Warfare, Targeting your Subconscious first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Cognitive Warfare, Targeting your Subconscious

    Cognitive warfare is no longer science fiction. Cognitive warfare is a fact of the modern age and everyone, whether civilian or military, is a potential target. Cognitive attacks are aimed at exploiting emotions rooted in our subconscious, bypassing our rational conscious mind. This is achieved by exploiting biases, fallacies, emotions and automatisms, but also through nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology.

    — Commander Cornelis van der Klaauw, Royal Netherlands Navy and Strategic Communications

    The five domains of warfare are land, sea, air, space and cyberspace. The core technical components of Fifth Dimension Operations (cyberspace) are cyberwarfare and cyber-attacks. The military concept now is to treat cyber as a place, not a mission. Cyberwarfare relates to fifth generation warfare, but transcends and expands that model.

    The primary objective is freedom of action in, through, and from cyberspace as needed to support mission objectives. The corollary is to deny freedom of action to adversaries at times and places of our choosing. The ability to do both provides for cyber military superiority.

    — Gen. Larry D. Welch USAF (Ret.)

    As many of our readers and subscribers know, Jill and I have been writing about PsyWar and Fifth Generation Warfare for quite a while now. Most of the strategies and tactics we have covered target conscious thought, conscious cognition, with the possible exception of neurolinguistic programming. But Cognitive warfare involves a different approach than more classical Fifth Generation Warfare strategies and tactics. Cognitive warfare is specifically focused on targeting your subconscious mind.

    Cognitive warfare is a critical component of modern cyberwarfare. NATO’s strategic document “Warfare Development Imperative of cognitive superiority” details planning to develop a 10 to 20 year operational framework that defines defensive and proactive measures within the cognitive warfare space for NATO. In this document, NATO Allied Command defines cognitive warfare as including “activities conducted in synchronization with other instruments of power to affect attitudes and behavior by influencing, protecting, or disrupting individual and group cognition to gain advantage over an adversary.” The nature of the adversary is open ended, and can include both foreign and domestic interventions.

    NATO’s definition of cognitive warfare includes a cognitive attack that directly targets the minds of civilians (and citizens), meaning non-combatants. To their credit, NATO apparently believes (as do I) that this is a violation of the Law of Armed Conflict, but we also both agree that it is already happening. Therefore, it is proposed that countering cognitive attacks is a military task in which NATO must play a role. Of course, this logic can provide a convenient excuse for developing the capacity and capabilities to engage in and deploy these same practices if deemed necessary against domestic citizens. Another opportunity to advance “dual function” research logic.

    Please keep in mind that one way that the “five eyes” intelligence alliance operates is that intelligence groups from one of the alliance members can target members of an allied nation-state in the event that the intelligence community of that nation-state is prohibited from taking action against its own citizens. For more information on the five eyes alliance, please see the excerpt from a recent “The Hindu” article quoted below.

    NATO recently published an article in their journal, “Three Swords” titled “Cognitive Warfare” – written by by Commander Cornelis van der Klaauw, Royal Netherlands Navy and Strategic Communications and subject matter expert for the NATO Joint Warfare Centre. This essay lays out some critical ideas behind NATO’s concept of cognitive warfare.

    From the article:

    “Unlike psychological operations, cognitive activities are not directed at our conscious mind, but at our subconscious mind, the main drivers of our behavior: emotions. This takes place through hyper-personalized targeting integrating and exploiting neuroscience, bio-technology, information and cognitive techniques (NBIC), mainly using social media and digital networks for neuro-profiling and targeting individuals. We need to realize that individuals are at the centre of all military operations and strategic-political decision-making. Although they often sound like ideas from a science-fiction film, cognitive attacks are not science fiction anymore. They are taking place already now, and these attacks will continue to become more sophisticated.

    Several countries are developing NBIC capabilities and collecting data for use in targeting the cognitive dimension. These activities are supported by aspects such as data mining and data analytics, and are further combined with artificial intelligence. Although most of the cognitive attacks remain below the threshold of armed conflict, the effects can be lethal and multi-domain, affecting all five domains of warfare. Further- more, these attacks are people-centric, meaning they have human cognition as their centre of gravity, and in principle that is a continuous, never-ending battle. Although not proven to be a cognitive attack, the so-called Havana syndrome, a cluster of adverse symptoms reported by U.S. intelligence and military personnel stationed abroad in recent years, could well be an instance of the use of cognitive capabilities.

    China is globally one of the leading nations in the scientific development of NBIC capabilities. China conducts human research and experiments that are deemed unethical according to Western standards, but these experiments nevertheless attract scientists from all over the world. Within the context of the Chinese “three warfares” strategy, an integrated people-centric, psychological and legal approach, the Chinese have developed a data- base with the profiles of more than two million prominent individuals worldwide that may be used to influence decision-making processes.

    LOOKING AT COGNITIVE activities in more detail, we can identify long-term campaigns taking place over several years, but also one- off activities. What both have in common is a structured approach to achieve a specific aim without the target becoming aware of an attack. Generally the damage is already done before the target realizes that it has been targeted. The reason why cognitive attacks go unnoticed by their targets is that cognitive activities bypass the conscious mind and directly target the subconscious of a person. In fact, within the subconscious mind, the primary target is the amygdala. From an evolutionary point of view, the amygdala is the oldest part of the brain. Before we go more into detail on the ways and means used for cognitive activities, we will briefly look at the functions of our conscious and subconscious mind as well as the relationship between the two. As the term suggests, our subconscious mind exists “beneath” our conscious mind. Contrary to the conscious mind, the subconscious mind is always active; it never sleeps. It regulates our basic organic functions, our emotions and, surprisingly enough, most of our decision-making. The reason why most of our decisions are made by our subconscious is that our conscious mind uses a lot of energy, which causes it to reach the limits of its capacity quickly. Actually only five to ten percent of the decisions we make are rational decisions; for the rest, we rely on our subconscious decision-making, which is strongly influenced by repetition, automatisms, biases and fallacies. We tend to then use our conscious mind to justify, rationalize and explain our emotionally driven decision-making and behavior.

    What cognitive attacks then do is exploit these emotions, automatisms, biases and fallacies in a way that affects our processes of making meaning of our surroundings, affecting not what we think but how we think. Adversaries do this in different ways, integrating and exploiting NBIC techniques. In this context we need to consider that both biases (non-rational shortcuts acceptable in normal situations) and fallacies (conclusions without evidence, based on assumptions) are commonly uniform across cultures and therefore easier to exploit.

    The preferred way to do this is via social media and digital networks, as these are our primary environment for sharing all sorts of information, and they have increasingly become our main source for news. However, there are more aspects that make social media an ideal vector for cognitive activities. Social media weaken our cognitive abilities as the content can easily stir up emotions and forces us to react quickly. Social media platforms are designed to foster addictive behavior.

    On average, we are exposed to digital information systems between five and seven hours a day. Internet use disorder is now a recognized mental disorder. Furthermore, social media are ideal for collecting personal information and or carrying out data analysis and data mining. Drawing up a person’s digital profile is a quick and relatively simple process that can be carried out with limited means.

    The effects of the digital age are far-reaching: A paper copy of the newspaper does not know what we read; our tablets, however, do. The advertisement in the paper does not know what we bought and where; our smartphones do. The newspaper editor does not know what article we found interesting and shared with friends; our social network does. Closely related to and often fully integrated with social media are our smart devices. Smart devices collect all manner of personal physiological information such as blood pressure, heart and breathing rate, skin temperature and so on. All this information is relevant to target people in the right moment, for example when they are tired, hungry, stressed or angry.

    Looking to digital networks, gaming platforms, with their more than three billion gamers worldwide, are ideal venues for cognitive activities. The platforms contain all kinds of sub-cultures that are in turn linked to non-gaming groups who can create their own games or modify existing games to infiltrate the gamers’ lives without any control or regulations of the content of the games. An aspect that, in this context, should not be overlooked is that the lines between physical, digital and mental personas are becoming blurrier and with that, the difference between reality and fiction is also becoming unclear. Virtual reality environments in particular drive this trend.

    Three billion gamers worldwide, who are subject to cognitive warfare. That is a mind blowing concept.

    Digital spaces have also been known to breed echo chambers. Within them, people concentrate on a narrative that supports their beliefs and desires while ignoring information that is not aligned with their narratives.

     The Emerging Technologies:

    Those embryonic technologies or scientific discoveries that are expected to reach maturity in 2023–2043; and are not widely used currently or whose effects on Alliance defence, security and enterprise functions are not entirely clear. NATO Science and Technology Organization result is closed micro-societies vulnerable to group thinking, polarization and generation of distrust. This becomes more likely when the time to think about the information is limited; the less time is available, the more people tend to unquestioningly follow a narrative aligned with their beliefs. In addition, it should be noted that echo chambers are an excellent venue to collect personal information that can be used for micro targeting of individuals.

    Furthermore, emerging technologies such as synthetic media, deepfakes, artificial intelligence and data mining create opportunities to collect and process information that can be used for cognitive activities. One of these emerging technologies is the Metaverse. The Metaverse is able to replicate the physical world and provide a highly immersive social experience through the use of headsets, body suits and haptic equipment. At the same time, it can provide a significant amount of physical and mental information that can be used for psychological and emotional manipulation or, in the hands of adversaries, micro targeting of individuals.

    In the following section, the essay starts discussing how to counter cognitive warfare- by developing cognitive resilience. The advice is relevant to individuals, groups, military units and government leaders.

    Knowing one’s vulnerabilities is important, but knowing when a cognitive attack is taking place is just as vital. This requires a high level of awareness and a basic understanding of the different methods used. For example, it is essential to maintain awareness about the information we unknowingly share that can be used against us. At the same time, technological solutions can help to identify cognitive attacks through algorithms and artificial intelligence, but also with real-time pattern and signature recognition. General awareness and technological solutions may alert us to cognitive attacks in good time and help us in determining the best way to respond. This brings us to the subject of creating cognitive resilience.

    Within the Cognitive Warfare Concept, cognitive resilience is defined as “the capacity to withstand and recover quickly from an adversarial cognitive attack through the effective preparation of groups and individuals.” In order to create cognitive resilience, we must look at the current ways in which cognitive activities are conducted, and by which means. In order to keep the initiative, we need to anticipate possible future developments. Currently such future developments include ways to read thoughts and emotions, which can enable measurements of the effect of cognitive activities. Based on the result, models can be developed to improve decision-making, but also to identify weaknesses to exploit.

    This section of the essay develops the functional strategic and tactical adjacencies that are important to understand the cognitive warfare battlespace and related technologies.

    THERE ARE OTHER RAPID developments in the fields of nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology. In nanotechnology we see the development of nanorobotics, nanosensors and nanoenergy sources making in-body processes possible. Bioartefacts linked to nanorobotics can stimulate perception, cognition and behaviour. In the field of biotechnology, there are encouraging developments in bioengineering, biogenomics and neuropharmacology. One of the most promising projects is the development of embedded synthetic DNA or sDNA. This can be a useful alternative to silicon semiconductors. Currently it is possible to store 2.14 × 106 bytes of data on sDNA. This organic material could enable human-machine interfaces and is often seen as the 47th human chromosome.

    In the field of neurocomputing, implants can be used to improve hearing and vision. Furthermore, neural nanotechnology can be used to bring nano-sized robots close to a neuron via the bloodstream and make it possible to link the human brain directly (i.e. not intercepted by our senses) to a computer, making use of artificial intelligence in the process. But we must keep in mind that this is a two-way street: such an artificial intelligence will, in turn, be linked to a human brain.

    In April 2013, U.S. President Obama announced the launch of the White House initiative Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN). Its goal was to support innovation that would further our understanding of the brain; Russian commentators perceived it as a project to “hack the human brain.”

    In 2016 Elon Musk started the neuro- technology company Neuralink, which aims to develop a brain-computer interface to extend the abilities of people with paralysis. Of course, such an interface may also be used to extend the abilities of people without disabilities, for instance to improve their performance on the battlefield. Future developments include innovation in artificial intelligence, machine intelligence and means to enhance human brainpower, either through alteration of genes or directly, by linking the brain through physical peripherals or anatomically internalized products.
    In Conclusion

    It is important to reiterate that cognitive warfare is no longer science fiction. Cognitive warfare is a fact of the modern age and everyone, whether civilian or military, is a potential target. Cognitive attacks are aimed at exploiting emotions rooted in our subconscious, bypassing our rational conscious mind. This is achieved by exploiting biases, fallacies, emotions and automatisms, but also through nanotechnology, biotechnology and information technology.

    In cognitive warfare, the ultimate aim is to alter our perception of reality and deceive our brain in order to affect our decision-making. We are commonly unaware of such attacks before it is too late and they have already affected their targets. Therefore, we must protect ourselves by raising awareness and developing a system of indicators and warnings that can provide realtime information. The use of artificial intelligence can show us the preferred way to react to a possible cognitive attack. The human mind is becoming the battlefield of tomorrow, and this means that every person is a potential target. Warfare is no longer a purely military concept; it has become much broader and more complex. In the future, there will only be one rule in warfare: There are no rules. While other domains can provide tactical and operational victories, the human domain is the only domain in which we can secure a full victory.

    The post Cognitive Warfare, Targeting your Subconscious first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Media goons predicting WWIII are all ignoring the same thing – and it’s ‘mad’

    Anyone reading the news this week will have been confronted by the most ridiculous story since ‘nationalised sausages‘: conscription for WWIII:

    That’s right, we’re heading towards WWIII with Russia. While that may be true, there’s one thing everyone used to understand – namely that such a conflict would be incredibly short and spectacularly radioactive.

    The well-practiced stupidity of the British media means 99% of journalists have forgotten this fact. this in turn means there are now talks of a land war with Mr Putin:

    Who do they think they are kidding?

    What now? WWIII apparently…

    A British general named Patrick Sanders has been going around suggesting we need to bring back the draft in preparation for WWIII. As reported by the Guardian:

    Speaking at a military conference, Sanders starkly described the British people as part of a “prewar generation” who may have to prepare themselves to fight in a war against an increasingly aggressive Russia. The chief of general staff highlighted the example of Sweden, which has just reintroduced a form of national service as it closes in on joining Nato.

    During the speech in London, the army chief said the UK needed to broadly follow Stockholm’s example and take “preparatory steps to enable placing our societies on a war footing”. Such action was “not merely desirable, but essential”, he added.

    The foundations for “national mobilisation” could not be confined to countries neighbouring or close to Russia, and as a result ordinary people in the UK would be forced to join the UK’s 74,110 full-time regular army to see off an active threat to mainland Europe.

    He said: “We will not be immune and as the prewar generation we must similarly prepare – and that is a whole-of-nation undertaking. Ukraine brutally illustrates that regular armies start wars; citizen armies win them.”

    The problem isn’t that he’s saying these things; the problem is that the media is reporting on them without the most obvious context in the world.

    Unclear nuclear

    One of the key arguments for maintaining our nuclear arsenal is the concept of ‘mutually assured destruction’ (MAD). As Atomic Archive noted:

    By the mid-1960s, unilateral deterrence gave way to “mutual deterrence,” a situation of strategic stalemate. The superpowers would refrain from attacking each other because of the certainty of mutual assured destruction, better known as MAD. This theory is still a major part of the defense policies of the United States and Russia.

    While MAD may sound like – well – an absolutely mad state of affairs, it is possible to argue it prevented WWIII.

    Powers like the US and Russia have been at war with select portions of the world pretty much constantly, of course. However, citizens within the bosom of imperialism have been spared from the violence themselves (barring the odd act of retaliation, or ‘terrorism’ as we’re supposed to call it).

    Now, it seems, mutually assured destruction is no longer a thing. But how, exactly? Did every nuclear power around the world forget to update their arsenal, and now we’re all unexpectedly unprotected? Maybe nuclear bombs never existed in the first place, and the strikes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were staged by the people who filmed Godzilla?

    Regardless of what happened, you’d expect journalists covering the story to be asking ‘so what the fuck happened to our nuclear deterrent’? By and large, this isn’t happening. The Guardian article we quoted above doesn’t mention nukes. This article from the Telegraph doesn’t either, and neither do these from the Independent, LBC, Metro, Sky News,  BBC News, or the Sun.

    Special mention to this article from GB News, though, which does at least half-address the issue:

    Professor Glees stated that although the UK’s Trident nuclear submarine fleet deters Russia, China, Iran and North Korea from using their nukes against us, the idea of a conventional war should not be ruled out.

    Ah, okay, so why can’t we rule it out exactly?

    Would you be surprised to learn that the good professor doesn’t explain this, and that GB News doesn’t ask any follow up questions?

    Another special mention to this article from the Daily Mail. It doesn’t itself mention our nuclear capacity, but it does link to another article about Putin being “unafraid to use nuclear weapons in war with NATO”.

    Unafraid, is he? Don’t worry – that will soon change when he sees our army of confused teenagers and beer-bellied, red-faced 40-somethings. Putin will be shitting it so hard he wouldn’t dare press a button in the safety of his well-guarded palace some several thousand miles away from the front line.

    Jokes aside, we do have a secret weapon that may just swing the war in our favour:

    Divorced Dad’s Army

    Britain’s commentariat may be the dumbest people in the world, but action heroes from the 80s and 90s weren’t particularly bright either, and they got things done.

    Using this logic, we think we can all agree that boisterous opinion writers like former PM Boris Johnson have got this one covered:

    There’s an inclination to think this story is particularly stupid in 2024, given that we’ve spent the past three years watching Putin fail to win what was supposed to be a very brief invasion. Obviously the combined forces of NATO could give Mr Putin a black eye? Possibly, but let’s not forget that the US has spent much of this century losing wars against dudes on horseback.

    It’s actually incredibly difficult to conclusively end a war without decimating the civilian population, which is just one of many reasons why it should always be avoided – especially as we and Russia literally have the capacity to mutually assure one another’s destruction.

    Mo’ nukes, mo’ problems

    Ironically, this is all happening at the same time that the US is sending more nukes to Britain:

    Presumably this means we still plan on nuking Russia in the event of WWIII?

    So to summarise, what some people would like to see is the following chain of events:

    1. We conscript a bunch of teenagers, gammon, and opinion columnists.
    2. We mould them into an elite killing machine.
    3. We send them to Russia.
    4. As soon as the conflict starts, we immediately nuke the country we just sent them to.

    We feel like there’s something we’re not following here. Thankfully there are still some outlets out there who are questioning the MADness:

    Featured image via Number 10 – Flickr

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Biden Must Choose between a Ceasefire in Gaza and a Regional War

    Houthi-affiliated Yemeni coastguard patrols the Red Sea, flying Palestinian and Yemeni flags. [Credit: AFP]

    In the topsy-turvy world of corporate media reporting on U.S. foreign policy, we have been led to believe that U.S. air strikes on Yemen, Iraq and Syria are legitimate and responsible efforts to contain the expanding war over Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while the actions of the Houthi government in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran and its allies in Iraq and Syria are all dangerous escalations.

    In fact, it is U.S. and Israeli actions that are driving the expansion of the war, while Iran and others are genuinely trying to find effective ways to counter and end Israel’s genocide in Gaza while avoiding a full-scale regional war.

    We are encouraged by Egypt and Qatar’s efforts to mediate a ceasefire and the release of hostages and prisoners-of-war by both sides. But it is important to recognize who are the aggressors, who are the victims, and how regional actors are taking incremental but increasingly forceful action to respond to genocide.

    A near-total Israeli communications blackout in Gaza has reduced the flow of images of the ongoing massacre on our TVs and computer screens, but the slaughter has not abated. Israel is bombing and attacking Khan Younis, the largest city in the southern Gaza Strip, as ruthlessly as it did Gaza City in the north. Israeli forces and U.S. weapons have killed an average of 240 Gazans per day for more than three months, and 70% of the dead are still women and children.

    Israel has repeatedly claimed it is taking new steps to protect civilians, but that is only a public relations exercise. The Israeli government is still using 2,000 pound and even 5,000 pound “bunker-buster” bombs to dehouse the people of Gaza and herd them toward the Egyptian border, while it debates how to push the survivors over the border into exile, which it euphemistically refers to as “voluntary emigration.”

    People throughout the Middle East are horrified by Israel’s slaughter and plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but most of their governments will only condemn Israel verbally. The Houthi government in Yemen is different. Unable to directly send forces to fight for Gaza, they began enforcing a blockade of the Red Sea against Israeli-owned ships and other ships carrying goods to or from Israel. Since mid-November 2023, the Houthis have conducted about 30 attacks on international vessels transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden but none of the attacks have caused casualties or sunk any ships.

    In response,  the Biden administration, without Congressional approval, has launched at least six rounds of bombing, including airstrikes on Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The United Kingdom has contributed a few warplanes, while Australia, Canada, Holland and Bahrain also act as cheerleaders to provide the U.S. with the cover of leading an “international coalition.”

    President Biden has admitted that U.S. bombing will not force Yemen to lift its blockade, but he insists that the U.S. will keep attacking it anyway. Saudi Arabia dropped 70,000 mostly American (and some British) bombs on Yemen in a 7-year war, but utterly failed to defeat the Houthi government and armed forces.

    Yemenis naturally identify with the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, and a million Yemenis took to the street to support their country’s position challenging Israel and the United States. Yemen is no Iranian puppet, but as with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Iraqi and Syrian allies, Iran has trained the Yemenis to build and deploy increasingly powerful anti-ship, cruise and ballistic missiles.

    The Houthis have made it clear that they will stop the attacks once Israel stops its slaughter in Gaza. It beggars belief that instead of pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza, Biden and his clueless advisers are instead choosing to deepen U.S. military involvement in a regional Middle East conflict.

    The United States and Israel have now conducted airstrikes on the capitals of four neighboring countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran also suspects U.S. and Israeli spy agencies of a role in two bomb explosions in Kerman in Iran, which killed about 90 people and wounded hundreds more at a commemoration of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.

    On January 20, an Israeli bombing killed 10 people in Damascus, including 5 Iranian officials. After repeated Israeli airstrikes on Syria, Russia has now deployed warplanes to patrol the border to deter Israeli attacks, and has reoccupied two previously vacated outposts built to monitor violations of the demilitarized zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

    Iran has responded to the terrorist bombings in Kerman and Israeli assassinations of Iranian officials with missile strikes on targets in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan. Iranian Foreign Minister Amir-Abdohallian has strongly defended Iran’s claim that the strikes on Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan targeted agents of Israel’s Mossad spy agency.

    Eleven Iranian ballistic missiles destroyed an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence facility and the home of a senior intelligence officer, and also killed a wealthy real estate developer and businessman, Peshraw Dizayee, who had been accused of working for the Mossad, as well as of smuggling Iraqi oil from Kurdistan to Israel via Turkey.

    The targets of Iran’s missile strikes in northwest Syria were the headquarters of two separate ISIS-linked groups in Idlib province. The strikes precisely hit both buildings and demolished them, at a range of 800 miles, using Iran’s newest ballistic missiles called Kheybar Shakan or Castle Blasters, a name that equates today’s U.S. bases in the Middle East with the 12th and 13th century European crusader castles whose ruins still dot the landscape.

    Iran launched its missiles, not from north-west Iran, which would have been closer to Idlib, but from Khuzestan province in south-west Iran, which is closer to Tel Aviv than to Idlib. So these missile strikes were clearly intended as a warning to Israel and the United States that Iran can conduct precise attacks on Israel and U.S. “crusader castles” in the Middle East if they continue their aggression against Palestine, Iran and their allies.

    At the same time, the U.S. has escalated its tit-for-tat airstrikes against Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. The Iraqi government has consistently protested U.S. airstrikes against the militias as violations of Iraqi sovereignty. Prime Minister Sudani’s military spokesman called the latest U.S. airstrikes “acts of aggression,” and said, “This unacceptable act undermines years of cooperation… at a time when the region is already grappling with the danger of expanding conflict, the repercussions of the aggression on Gaza.”

    After its fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq killed thousands of U.S. troops, the United States has avoided large numbers of U.S. military casualties for ten years. The last time the U.S. lost more than a hundred troops killed in action in a year was in 2013, when 128 Americans were killed in Afghanistan.

    Since then, the United States has relied on bombing and proxy forces to fight its wars. The only lesson U.S. leaders seem to have learned from their lost wars is to avoid putting U.S. “boots on the ground.” The U.S. dropped over 120,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in its war on ISIS, while Iraqis, Syrians and Kurds did all the hard fighting on the ground.

    In Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies found a willing proxy to fight Russia. But after two years of war, Ukrainian casualties have become unsustainable and new recruits are hard to find. The Ukrainian parliament has rejected a bill to authorize forced conscription, and no amount of U.S. weapons can persuade more Ukrainians to sacrifice their lives for a Ukrainian nationalism that treats large numbers of them, especially Russian speakers, as second class citizens.

     Now, in Gaza, Yemen and Iraq, the United States has waded into what it hoped would be another “US-casualty-free” war. Instead, the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza is unleashing a crisis that is spinning out of control across the region and may soon directly involve U.S. troops in combat. This will shatter the illusion of peace Americans have lived in for the last ten years of U.S. bombing and proxy wars, and bring the reality of U.S. militarism and warmaking home with a vengeance.

    Biden can continue to give Israel carte-blanche to wipe out the people of Gaza, and watch as the region becomes further engulfed in flames, or he can listen to his own campaign staff, who warn that it’s a “moral and electoral imperative” to insist on a ceasefire. The choice could not be more stark.

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  • We Know a Different World Will Be Born Out of This Mess

    Luis Felipe Noé (Argentina), La naturaleza y los mitos II (‘Nature and Myths II’), 1975.
    Luis Felipe Noé (Argentina), La naturaleza y los mitos II (‘Nature and Myths II’), 1975.

    ‘The West is in danger’, warned Argentina’s new president, Javier Milei at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland. In his dangerously appealing style, Milei blamed ‘collectivism’ – that is, social welfare, taxes, and the state – as the ‘root cause’ of the world’s problems, leading to widespread impoverishment. The only way forward, Milei declared, is through ‘free enterprise, capitalism, and economic freedom’. Milei’s speech marked a return to the orthodoxy of Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys, who pushed forward an ideology of social cannibalism as the basis for their neoliberal agenda. Since the 1970s, this scorched earth policy has devasted much of the Global South through the structural adjustment programmes of the International Monetary Fund, but also created factory deserts in the West (what Donald Trump, in his inauguration address in 2017, called the ‘American carnage’). Therein lies the confounding logic of the far right: on the one side, calling for the billionaire class to dominate society in their interest (which produces the social carnage) and then, on the other side, inflaming the victims of said carnage to fight against policies that would benefit them.

    Milei is right in his overall judgment: the West is in danger, but not because of social democratic policies; it is in danger because of its inability to come to terms with its slow demise as the dominating bloc in the world.

    From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Global South Insights (GSI) come two important texts on the changing global landscape: a landmark study, Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous, Decadent New Stage, and our seventy-second dossier, The Churning of the World Order (the dossier is an ‘executive summary’ of the study, so I will be referring to them as if they were one text). We believe that this is the most significant theoretical statement that our institute has made in its eight-year history.

    In both Hyper-Imperialism and The Churning of the World Order we make four important points:

    First, through a deep analysis of the concepts of the Global North and the Global South, we show that the former acts as a bloc, while the latter is merely a loose grouping. The Global North is led by the United States, which has created several instruments to extend its authority over the other countries in the bloc (many of which are historic colonial powers and settler-colonial societies). These platforms include the Five Eyes intelligence alliance (initially set up in 1941 between the US and UK, the network has now expanded to Fourteen Eyes), the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO, set up in 1949), and the Group of Seven (G7, set up in 1974). Through these and other formations, the United States and its political allies within the Global North are able to exercise authority over their own countries and the countries of the Global South.

    In contrast, the countries of the Global South have historically been much more disorganised, with some, looser alliances and linkages around regional and political affiliations. The Global South has neither a political centre nor an ideologically driven project.

    The analysis in the texts is detailed, relying upon public databases and databases built by GSI. The bottom line is that there is one world system that is managed dangerously by an imperialist bloc. There are no multiple imperialisms, no inter-imperialist conflict.


    Mahmud al-Obaidi (Iraq), Untitled, 2008.

    Second, the platforms of the Global North exercise power over the world system through a number of vectors (military, financial, economic, social, cultural) and through a range of instruments (NATO, the International Monetary Fund, information systems). With the gradual decline of the Global North’s control over the international financial system, raw materials, technology, and science, this bloc mainly exercises its power through military force and through the management of information. In these texts, we do not go over the question of information, although we have previously written about it and will take it up again in a study on digital sovereignty. The focus of these texts is largely on military spending, where we show that the US-led bloc accounts for 74.3% of world military spending and that the US spends 12.6 times more than the world average on a per capita basis (Israel, second to the US, spends 7.2 times above the per capita world average). To put this into perspective, China accounts for 10% of world military spending and its per capita military spending is 22 times less than that of the United States.

    Such enormous spending on the military is not innocent. Not only does it come at the cost of social spending, the Global North’s military power is used to threaten and intimidate countries, and – if they are disobedient – to punish them with hellfire and brimstone. In 2022 alone, these imperialist nations made 317 deployments of their military forces to countries in the Global South. The highest number of these deployments (31) were made to Mali, a nation strongly seeking sovereignty, and which was the first of the Sahel states to stage popular-backed coups (2020 and 2021) and eject the French military from its territory (2022).

    Between 1776 and 2019, the United States carried out at least 392 interventions worldwide, half of them between 1950 and 2019. This includes the terrible, illegal war against Iraq in 2003 (at this year’s WEF meeting, Iraq’s Prime Minister Mohammed Shia’ al-Sudani asked for Global North troops to leave Iraq). This vast military spending by the Global North, led by the United States, reflects the militarisation of its foreign policy. One of the little remarked aspects of this militarisation is the development of a theory in both the United States and United Kingdom of ‘defence diplomacy’ (as it was noted in the UK Ministry of Defence’s Strategic Defence Review of 1998). In the United States, strategic thinkers use the acronym DIME to reflect on the sources of national power (diplomacy, informational, military, and economic).

    Last year, the European Union and NATO – the institutions at the heart of the Global North – jointly pledged to ‘mobilise the combined set of instruments at our disposal, be they political, economic, or military, to pursue our common objectives to the benefit of our one billion citizens’. In case you did not catch it, that power – mostly military power and military diplomacy – is not to serve humanity, but to serve only their ‘citizens’.

    António Ole (Angola), The Maculusso Mural, 2014.
    António Ole (Angola), The Maculusso Mural, 2014.

    Third, Part IV of our Hyper-Imperialism study is called ‘The West in Decline’, and looks at the evidence for this trend from a perspective that rejects Milei’s ‘the West is in danger’ fearmongering. The facts show that since the start of the Third Great Depression, the Global North has struggled to maintain its control over the world economy; its instruments – monopolies over technology and raw materials, as well as dominion over foreign direct investment – have fundamentally eroded. When China surpassed the United States’ share of global industrial output in 2004, the United States lost hegemony in production (by 2022, the former held a 25.7% share versus the 9.7% held by the latter). Given that the United States is now dependent on large scale net capital imports, which reached $1 trillion in 2022, the US has little internal capability to provide economic advantages to its Global North or Global South allies. Owners of capital in the United States have siphoned off their profits from the country’s exchequer creating the economic conditions for the social carnage that afflicts the country. The old political coalitions rooted around the two parties in the United States are in flux, with no space within US political system to develop a political project to exercise hegemony over the world economy through legitimacy and consent. That is why the US-led Global North resorts to force and intimidation, building its massive military apparatus by increasing its own public debt (since there is little domestic consensus to use that borrowing to build the infrastructure and productive base of the country).

    The root of the New Cold War imposed by the United States on China is that China has outpaced the United States in net fixed capital formation, whilst the US has seen a gradual decline. Every year since 1992, China has been a net exporter of capital, this surplus of capital creation has made it possible to finance international projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, now ten years old.


    El Meya (Algeria), Les Moudjahidates, 2021.

    Fourth, we analyse the emergence of new organisations rooted in the Global South, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (2001), the BRICS10 (2009), and the Group of Friends in Defence of the UN Charter (2021). These interregional platforms are in an embryonic stage, but they provide evidence for the growth of a new regionalism and multilateralism. Although these formations do not seek to operate as a bloc to counter the Global North’s bloc, they reflect what we have previously called a ‘new mood’ in the Global South. The new mood is neither anti-imperialist nor anti-capitalist, but is shaped by four main vectors:

    • Multilateralism and regionalism centred on the creation of Global South-anchored platforms for cooperation.
    • New modernisation centred on constructing regional and continental economies that use local currencies in place of the dollar for trade and reserves.
    • Sovereignty, which would create barriers to Western intervention. This includes military entanglements and digital colonialism, both of which facilitate US intelligence interventions.
    • Reparations, which would entail collective bargaining to compensate for the West’s century-old debt traps and abuse of the excess carbon budget as well as its much longer-reaching legacy of colonialism.

    The analysis in these texts goes deep beneath the surface, providing a historical materialist assessment of our present crises. Documents produced by the institutions of the Global North, such as the WEF’s Global Risks report for 2024, provide a list of the dangers that we face (climate catastrophe, social polarisation, economic downturns) but cannot explain them. Our approach, we believe, provides a theory to understand these perils as the outcome of the world system managed by the hyper-imperialist bloc.

    In thinking about these texts, my mind wandered to the work of the Iraqi poet Buland al-Haydari (1926–1996). When all seemed futile, al-Haydari wrote that ‘the sun will not rise’ and that ‘at the bottom of the house, already dead, are the steps of my children, reduced to silence’. But even then, when we ‘were without power’, there remains hope. His civilisation drowns, but then ‘you arrived with the paddle’, he sings. ‘Such is the history of our yesterday, and its taste is bitterness’, he concludes, ‘such is our slow walk, the procession of our dignity: our only good until the hour when will rise, finally, a free paddle’.

    That anticipation defines a classic by the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), ‘Someone Who Is Not Like Anyone’ (1966):

    I’ve had a dream that someone is coming.
    I’ve dreamt of a red star,
    and my eyes lids keep twitching
    and my shoes keep snapping to attention
    and may I go blind
    if I’m lying.
    I’ve dreamt of that red star
    when I wasn’t asleep.
    Someone is coming,
    someone is coming
    someone better.

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  • The Willful Destruction of a People

    The US corporate media has maintained a near unanimous support for the Israeli destruction of Gaza – the home of 2.2 million Palestinians. While pundits engage in parlor games over what degree of violence is “justified” by the Hamas attack upon Israel, while public intellectuals fall in line with the gutless unconditional support of Israeli punitive actions, tens of thousands of Palestinian people – largely men, women, and children going about their day-to-day lives– have been killed, maimed, wounded, or terrorized.

    Corruption, racism, and cowardice come together to produce a rare near-total US ruling-class consensus behind the brutal action of the ultra-right, ultra-nationalist, and racist Israeli government.

    The enforcement of this consensus is unprecedented and a truly appalling sight to behold.

    The highly publicized clash over even an embarrassingly tepid pushback by elite administrators at elite universities over free speech– a normally sacrosanct intellectual fallback– underscores the complete, unconditional freedom-of-action that Israel enjoys with the rich and powerful in the US.

    While the machinations of donors and administrators at Harvard, Penn, and MIT should be of little more than entertainment value for most of us, the raw, public exercise of the power of wealth in shaping academic institutions should cause many to recoil. Those who naively believed in the independence and integrity of academia should be chastened accordingly.

    Black Harvard President Gay would learn that neither her own elite background nor the thin armor of the faddish liberal DEI mutation of anti-racism would protect her from the vulgar bullying of wild-eyed Zionist billionaires and rightwing witch hunters.

    Christopher Rufo, puffed up with his own role in bringing down Harvard’s Gay, concedes that he couldn’t have done it without the collaboration of the center-left that accepted any excuse to enforce support for Israel.

    Despite the crude editorial endorsement of and overwhelming official enthusiasm for the Israeli slaughter of Palestinians, a different message has gotten through to the US populace. Whether it is the heart-rending pictures of death and destruction, the cracks in the carefully hedged and vetted news stories, or the alternative media, a bold, determined movement against Israel’s vicious assault on Gaza has emerged to challenge the ruling-class monolith. Risking economic reprisals, future status, and public shaming, hundreds of thousands– overwhelmingly youth– have stood and marched for life and a future for Gaza and Palestine.

    It is truly a remarkable moment of crass opportunism, slavish conformity, and viciousness confronted by high principle, self-sacrifice, and courage. It is this kind of moment that forces people to examine how their words and self-styled image cohere with reality.

    The facts are effective in awakening people to the brutal fate of Palestinians as a people. Because the Israeli government is so blatantly indifferent to international outrage, The Wall Street Journal is embarrassed to report the truth-on-the-ground in Gaza. Whether reluctantly or not, a recent front-page news story– Gaza’s Destruction Stands Out In Modern History (softened in the online edition to: The Ruined Landscape of Gaza After Nearly Three Months of Bombing) — describes an almost unimaginable living hell. Its lead is worth quoting in full:

    The war in the Gaza Strip is generating destruction comparable in scale to the most devastating urban warfare in the modern record.

    By mid-December, Israel had dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells on the strip. Nearly 70% of Gaza’s 439,000 homes and about half of its buildings have been damaged or destroyed. The bombing has damaged Byzantine churches and ancient mosques, factories and apartment buildings, shopping malls and luxury hotels, theaters and schools. Much of the water, electrical, communications and healthcare infrastructure that made Gaza function is beyond repair.

    Most of the strip’s 36 hospitals are shut down, and only eight are accepting patients. Citrus trees, olive groves and greenhouses have been obliterated. More than two-thirds of its schools are damaged.

    While most media mention the 22,000 or more deaths or the over 80,000 total Palestinian casualties, they dutifully treat the facts as allegations and with vastly more than warranted skepticism. Nonetheless, the numbers have shocked millions around the world.

    But the WSJ article goes further, offering comfortable, secure readers a taste of what life is like for those not physically harmed by Israeli bombs:

    In the south, where more than a million displaced residents have fled, Gazans sleep in the street and burn garbage to cook. Some 85% of the strip’s 2.2 million people have fled their homes and are confined by Israeli evacuation orders to less than one-third of the strip, according to the United Nations…

    According to analysis of satellite data by remote-sensing experts at the City University of New York and Oregon State University, as many as 80% of the buildings in northern Gaza, where the bombing has been most severe, are damaged or destroyed, a higher percentage than in Dresden [the site of murderous firebombing in WWII].

    The WSJ presents a set of facts and expert observations that are nothing if not damning of the Israeli tactics:

    • Robert Pape, political scientist at the University of Chicago: “What you are seeing in Gaza is in the top 25% of the most intense punishment campaigns in history.”

    • “Some 85% of the strip’s 2.2 million people have fled their homes and are confined by Israeli evacuation orders to less than one-third of the strip, according to the United Nations.”

    • “He Yin, an assistant professor of geography at Kent State University in Ohio, estimated that 20% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been damaged or destroyed. Winter wheat that should be sprouting around now isn’t visible, he said, suggesting it wasn’t planted.”

    • “A World Bank analysis concluded that by Dec. 12, the war had damaged or destroyed 77% of health facilities, 72% of municipal services such as parks, courts and libraries, 68% of telecommunications infrastructure, and 76% of commercial sites, including the almost complete destruction of the industrial zone in the north. More than half of all roads, the World Bank found, have been damaged or destroyed. Some 342 schools have been damaged, according to the U.N., including 70 of its own schools.”

    • Where the US dropped 3,678 munitions on the entire nation of Iraq in seven years, Israel has dropped 29,000 on tiny Gaza in a little over two months.

    • On Gaza city: “‘It’s not a livable city anymore,’ said Eyal Weizman, an Israeli-British architect who studies Israel’s approach to the built environment in the Palestinian territories. Any reconstruction, he said, will require ‘a whole system of underground infrastructure, because when you attack the subsoil, everything that runs through the ground—the water, the gas, the sewage—is torn.’”

    • “The level of damage in Gaza is almost double what it was during a 2014 conflict, which lasted 50 days, with five times as many completely destroyed buildings, according to the Shelter Cluster. In the current conflict, as of mid-December, more than 800,000 people had no home left to return to, the World Bank found.”

    To those seduced by a gutless media and a bought-and-sold political establishment, this picture constructed by one of the US’s most conservative papers should bring Israel’s crimes against Gaza into sharper relief; it should be painful to even imagine living under such conditions; it should remove the Gaza question from the realm of political debate to the basic issue of human dignity and survival.

    Is there any humane answer beyond: Cease Fire Now!?

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