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Category: Militarism

  • Will Trump End or Escalate Biden’s Wars?


    A boy sits in rubble in Gaza. Photo Credit: UNICEF

    When Donald Trump takes office on January 20, all his campaign promises to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours and almost as quickly end Israel’s war on its neighbors will be put to the test. The choices he has made for his incoming administration so far, from Marco Rubio as Secretary of State to Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor, Pete Hegseth as Secretary of Defense and Elise Stefanik as UN Ambassador make for a rogues gallery of saber-rattlers.

    The only conflict where peace negotiations seem to be on the agenda is Ukraine. In April, both Vice President-elect JD Vance and Senator Marco Rubio voted against a $95 billion military aid bill that included $61 billion for Ukraine.

    Rubio recently appeared on NBC’s Today Show saying, “I think the Ukrainians have been incredibly brave and strong when standing up to Russia. But at the end of the day, what we’re funding here is a stalemate war, and it needs to be brought to a conclusion… I think there has to be some common sense here.”

    On the campaign trail, Vance made a controversial suggestion that the best way to end the war was for Ukraine to cede the land Russia has seized, for a demilitarized zone to be established, and for Ukraine to become neutral, i.e. not enter NATO. He was roundly criticized by both Republicans and Democrats who argue that backing Ukraine is vitally important to U.S. security since it weakens Russia, which is closely allied with China.

    Any attempt by Trump to stop U.S. military support for Ukraine will undoubtedly face fierce opposition from the pro-war forces in his own party, particularly in Congress, as well as perhaps the entirety of the Democratic party. Two years ago, 30 progressive Democrats in Congress wrote a letter to President Biden asking him to consider promoting negotiations. The party higher ups were so incensed by their lack of party discipline that they came down on the progressives like a ton of bricks. Within 24 hours, the group had cried uncle and rescinded the letter. They have since all voted for money for Ukraine and have not uttered another word about negotiations.

    So a Trump effort to cut funds to Ukraine could run up against a bipartisan congressional effort to keep the war going. And let’s not forget the efforts by European countries, and NATO, to keep the U.S. in the fight. Still, Trump could stand up to all these forces and push for a rational policy that would restart the talking and stop the killing.

    The Middle East, however, is a more difficult situation. In his first term, Trump showed his pro-Israel cards when he brokered the Abraham accords between several Arab countries and Israel; moved the U.S. embassy to a location in Jerusalem that is partly on occupied land outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders; and recognized the occupied Golan Heights in Syria as part of Israel. Such unprecedented signals of unconditional U.S. support for Israel’s illegal occupation and settlements helped set the stage for the current crisis.

    Trump seems as unlikely as Biden to cut U.S. weapons to Israel, despite public opinion polls favoring such a halt and a recent UN human rights report showing that 70% of the people killed by those U.S. weapons are women and children.

    Meanwhile, the wily Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is already busy getting ready for a second Trump presidency. On the very day of the U.S. election, Netanyahu fired his defense minister, Yoav Gallant, who opposed a lasting Israeli military occupation of Gaza and had at times argued for prioritizing the lives of the Israeli hostages over killing more Palestinians.

    Israel Katz, the new defense minister and former foreign minister, is more hawkish than Gallant, and has led a campaign to falsely blame Iran for the smuggling of weapons from Jordan into the West Bank.

    Other powerful voices, national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and finance minister Bezalel Smotrich, who is also a “minister in the Defense Ministry,” represent extreme Zionist parties that are publicly committed to territorial expansion, annexation and ethnic cleansing. They both live in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

    So Netanyahu has deliberately surrounded himself with allies who back his ever-escalating war. They are surely developing a war plan to exploit Trump’s support for Israel, but will first use the unique opportunity of the U.S. transition of power to create facts on the ground that will limit Trump’s options when he takes office.

    The Israelis will doubtless redouble their efforts to drive Palestinians out of as much of Gaza as possible, confronting President Trump with a catastrophic humanitarian crisis in which Gaza’s surviving population is crammed into an impossibly small area, with next to no food, no shelter for many, disease running rampant, and no access to needed medical care for tens of thousands of horribly wounded and dying people.

    The Israelis will count on Trump to accept whatever final solution they propose, most likely to drive Palestinians out of Gaza, into the West Bank, Jordan, Egypt and farther afield.

    Israel threatened all along to do to Lebanon the same as they have done to Gaza. Israeli forces have met fierce resistance, taken heavy casualties, and have not advanced far into Lebanon. But, as in Gaza, they are using bombing and artillery to destroy villages and towns, kill or drive people north and hope to effectively annex the part of Lebanon south of the Litani river as a so-called “buffer zone.” When Trump takes office, they may ask for greater U.S. involvement to help them “finish the job.”

    The big wild card is Iran. Trump’s first term in office was marked by a policy of “maximum pressure” against Tehran. He unilaterally withdrew America from the Iran nuclear deal, imposed severe sanctions that devastated the economy, and ordered the killing of the country’s top general. Trump did not support a war on Iran in his first term, but had to be talked out of attacking Iran in his final days in office by General Mark Milley and the Pentagon.

    Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, recently described to Chris Hedges just how catastrophic a war with Iran would be, based on U.S.military wargames he was involved in.

    Wilkerson predicts that a U.S. war on Iran could last for ten years, cost $10 trillion and still fail to conquer Iran. Airstrikes alone would not destroy all of Iran’s civilian nuclear program and ballistic missile stockpiles. So, once unleashed, the war would very likely escalate into a regime change war involving U.S. ground forces, in a country with three or four times the territory and population of Iraq, more mountainous terrain and a thousand mile long coastline bristling with missiles that can sink U.S. warships.

    But Netanyahu and his extreme Zionist allies believe that they must sooner or later fight an existential war with Iran if they are to realize their vision of a dominant Greater Israel. And they believe that the destruction they have wreaked on the Palestinians in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, including the assassination of their senior leaders, has given them a military advantage and a favorable opportunity for a showdown with Iran.

    By November 10, Trump and Netanyahu had reportedly spoken on the phone three times since the election, and Netanyahu said that they see “eye to eye on the Iranian threat.” Trump has already hired Iran hawk Brian Hook, who helped him sabotage the JCPOA nuclear agreement with Iran in 2018, to coordinate the formation of his foreign policy team.

    So far, the team that Trump and Hook have assembled seems to offer hope for peace in Ukraine, but little to none for peace in the Middle East and a rising danger of a U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.

    Trump’s expected National Security Advisor Mike Waltz is best known as a China hawk. He has voted against military aid to Ukraine in Congress, but he recently tweeted that Israel should bomb Iran’s nuclear and oil facilities, the most certain path to a full-scale war.

    Trump’s new UN ambassador, Elise Stefanik, has led moves in Congress to equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, and she led the aggressive questioning of American university presidents at an anti-semitism hearing in Congress, after which the presidents of Harvard and Penn resigned.

    So, while Trump will have some advisors who support his desire to end the war in Ukraine, there will be few voices in his inner circle urging caution over Netanyahu’s genocidal ambitions in Palestine and his determination to cripple Iran.

    If he wanted to, President Biden could use his final two months in office to de-escalate the conflicts in the Middle East. He could impose an embargo on offensive weapons for Israel, push for serious ceasefire negotiations in both Gaza and Lebanon, and work through U.S. partners in the Gulf to de-escalate tensions with Iran.

    But Biden is unlikely to do any of that. When his own administration sent a letter to Israel last month, threatening a cut in military aid if Israel did not allow a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza in the next 30 days, Israel responded by doing just the opposite–actually cutting the number of trucks allowed in. The State Department claimed Israel was taking “steps in the right direction” and Biden refused to take any action.

    We will soon see if Trump is able to make progress in moving the Ukraine war towards negotiations, potentially saving the lives of many thousands of Ukrainians and Russians. But between the catastrophe that Trump will inherit and the warhawks he is picking for his cabinet, peace in the Middle East seems more distant than ever.

    The post Will Trump End or Escalate Biden’s Wars? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Military-Industrial Complex Is Fueling Climate Catastrophe

    As we write, New York City is an unsettling 70 degrees in November. Meanwhile, a cohort of war profiteers, their pockets lined by the very industries destroying our climate, are flying to COP, the annual U.N. climate summit hosted by a petrostate, no less. They’re gathering to “discuss climate solutions”—but one of the world’s biggest contributors to the climate crisis will be entirely overlooked: the U.S. military-industrial complex.

    The world’s largest institutional emitter, the U.S. military, sits beyond the reach of the metrics meant to hold countries accountable for climate pollution. Exempt from transparency requirements at the COP or within U.N. climate agreements, the military sector is, in fact, the leading institutional driver of the climate crisis. It burns through fossil fuels on a scale that surpasses entire nations while waging wars that destroy lives, communities, and the land itself. It’s a deliberate omission, one meant to hide the environmental and social costs of militarism from view.

    Leading the U.S. delegation to COP is John Podesta — a career defender of militarism, a lobbyist who has worked to fortify the very military establishment poisoning our air, water, and land. Now, he arrives in the conference halls of COP wrapped in a cloak of environmentalism. Yet, as long as he skirts around the elephant in the room, no amount of recycled paper or energy-efficient lighting at COP will address the core driver of the climate crisis. If Podesta ignores the environmental impact of U.S. militarism, he’ll be dooming us.

    For those of us directly feeling the crisis, there’s no question that the U.S. Empire’s military machine is central to our climate emergency. Appalachians living through floods and those of us in New York watching temperatures soar out of season are witnesses to the toll. And yet we watch as our leaders, claiming to care about climate, push forward with policies and budgets that only deepen our climate emergency.

    In the past year alone, the war on Gaza has been a horrifying example of militarism’s environmental toll. Entire communities were leveled under the firepower of U.S.-funded bombs. In just two months, emissions from these military activities equaled the yearly carbon output of 26 countries. This violence bleeds beyond borders. U.S. police forces train with the Israeli military, and they’ll soon bring their war tactics to Atlanta’s Cop City, where a training center is planned on sacred Indigenous land. Militarism is woven into every facet of our society — taking lives, razing homes, and desecrating land — all while stoking climate disaster.

    This crisis can’t be solved by those who are its architects. It can’t be fixed by Podesta’s well-crafted speeches or the administration’s empty pledges. The Biden administration just passed one of the largest military budgets in history, pumping more dollars — and more carbon emissions — into the climate catastrophe. Each weapon shipped, each tank deployed, is an environmental crime in the making, one funded by American tax dollars. We can’t ignore this fact as COP progresses and climate talks fall short yet again.

    It’s easy to despair in the face of such unaccountable power. But in times of crisis, clarity can become a weapon. We must expose the truth that militarism is antithetical to climate justice. True climate solutions don’t come from polite panel discussions led by those who wield the tools of destruction. They come from radical honesty and demands for accountability. They come from a commitment to ending the empire choking our planet and communities. And they come from a shared goal of mutual liberation that doesn’t ignore the plight of the many to serve the few.

    The cost of militarism is clear, and its environmental toll demands our fiercest opposition. This COP, let’s not let the elephant in the room fade into the background. It’s time for those responsible for our climate crisis—the war machines, the lobbyists, and the industries that back them—to be held accountable. For our survival and for each other, we must demand climate justice that tells the truth.

    The post The Military-Industrial Complex Is Fueling Climate Catastrophe first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Visions of an Asian NATO

    Japan’s new prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, is stirring the pot – notably on regional security matters.  He has proposed something that has done more than raise a few eyebrows in the foreign and defence ministries of several countries.  An Asian version of NATO, he has suggested, was an idea worth considering, notably given China’s ambitions in the region.  “The creation of an Asian version of NATO is essential to deter China by its Western allies,” he revealed to the Washington-based Hudson Institute in September.

    During his campaign for office, Ishiba had mooted changes to the deployment arrangements of the Japan Self-Defence Forces and the need to move beyond the purely bilateral approach to regional security anchored by US agreements with various countries, be it with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and others.

    Ishiba’s suggested changes to Japan’s self-defence posture builds on a cabinet decision made during the Abe administration to reinterpret the country’s constitution to permit exercising the right of collective self-defence.  It was a problematic move, given the pacifist nature of a text that renounces the use of force in the resolution of international disputes.

    In September 2015, then Prime Minister Shinzo Abe convinced the Diet to pass a package of security bills known as the Legislation for Peace and Security, thereby allowing Japan to participate in limited forms of collective self-defence.  Opponents warned, understandably, that the legislation paved the way for Japan to attack a country in concert with another on the premise of collective self-defence, despite not itself being directly attacked.  They have every reason to be even more worried given Ishiba’s recent meditations.

    The intention to broaden the remit of how Japan’s armed forces are deployed is also a reminder to the United States that Tokyo is no longer interested in playing a subordinate role in its alliance with Washington. “The current Japan-US security treaty,” complains Ishiba, “is structured so that the US is obligated to ‘defend’ Japan, and Japan is obligated to ‘provide bases’ to the US.”  He suggests “expanding the scope of joint management of US bases in Japan”, a move that would reduce Washington’s burden, and revising the Japan-US Security Treaty and Status of Forces Agreement to permit the stationing of Japanese forces on Guam.

    What makes his suggestions disconcerting is not merely the establishment of a power bloc bound by the glue of collective self-defence – an arrangement that has much to do with defence as a growling provocation.  Ishiba is intent on being even more provocative in suggesting that any such “Asian version of NATO must also specifically consider America’s sharing of nuclear weapons or the introduction of nuclear weapons into the region.”

    Were such a move taken, it would, at least from a Japanese perspective, fly in the face of a doctrine in place since December 1967, when Prime Minister Eisaku Sato articulated the three non-nuclear principles of “not possessing, not producing and not permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons, in line with Japan’s Peace Constitution.”

    As with so many in the business of preaching about international security, false paradigms and analysis are offered from the pulpit.  The Japanese PM, much like neoconservative hawks in Washington and Canberra, prove incapable of seeing conflict in generic, transferrable terms. “Ukraine today is Asia tomorrow,” he falsely reasons. “Replacing Russia with China and Ukraine and Taiwan, the absence of a collective self-defense system like NATO in Asia means that wars are likely to break out because there is no obligation for mutual defense.” Ergo, he reasons, the need for an Asian version of NATO.

    Ishiba’s suggestions have yet to gather momentum. Daniel Kritenbrink, US assistant secretary of state for East Asia and the Pacific, told a forum on Indo-Pacific security at the Stimson Center in September that he preferred the current “latticework” approach to US regional alliances featuring, for instance, the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue involving Japan, India and Australia, and AUKUS, featuring Australia and the UK. “It’s too early to talk about collective security in that context, and [the creation of] more formal institutions.” It was far better to focus on “investing in the region’s existing formal architecture and continuing to build this network of formal and information relationships.”

    Kritenbrink’s analysis hardly gets away from the suspicion that the “latticework” theory of US security in the Indo-Pacific is but a form of NATO in embryo. As Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said with tartness in 2022, “The real goal for the [US] Indo-Pacific strategy is to establish an Indo-Pacific version of NATO. These perverse actions run counter to common aspirations of the region and are doomed to fail.”

    From New Delhi, the view towards such an alliance is not a glowing one.  On October 1, at an event held by Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar proved dismissive of any NATO replication in Asia. “We don’t have that kind of strategic architecture in mind.” India had “a different history and different way of approaching” its security considerations.

    With the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the collective defence hawks so keen on adding kindling to conflict will have their teeth chattering.  Ishiba’s ideas may well have to be put back into cold storage – at least in the interim.  And as luck would have it, his own prime ministerial tenure already looks threatened.

    The post Visions of an Asian NATO first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Remembrance Day must be decolonised to truly serve its purpose

    White poppy wearers are calling for the victims of colonial conflicts to be remembered alongside other victims of war on Remembrance Day – with their voices being amplified by the Peace Pledge Union.

    Remembrance Day: focusing on British military victims of war

    Mainstream remembrance events traditionally focus on British and allied military victims of war, primarily from the First and Second World Wars, rarely acknowledging colonial conflicts waged during the British Empire.

    Peace campaigners are now calling for this to change, pushing for a long-overdue reckoning with Britain’s colonial past.

    The UK’s leading pacifist organisation, the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), has launched a new initiative, ‘Decolonising Remembrance’, which aims to ensure that the victims of colonial wars receive proper recognition on Remembrance Day.

    The project also aims to challenge the legacies of colonialism today, which continue to influence who is publicly remembered and whose histories and experiences are erased.

    The PPU is encouraging those organising events for Remembrance Sunday and Remembrance Day to draw on the experiences of those affected by colonial wars, both past and present, and to listen to the voices of those who keep their memory alive.

    Wearing the white poppy

    Many white poppy wearers have already embraced this initiative, recognising the need to actively acknowledge victims of war that are systematically ignored or dehumanised. The white poppy, which has been worn for over ninety years, stands for remembrance of all victims of war, both civilian and military, of all nationalities.

    White poppy wearer and Peace Pledge Union (PPU) member Nadja Lovadinov said:

    Decolonising Remembrance is about asking ourselves, who do we remember on the eleventh of November, and who have we forgotten? Decolonisation is an active practice that unsettles and refuses to accept the nationalist, military narrative of mainstream remembrance, by platforming the victims of colonial wars.

    The call to decolonise remembrance comes in the wake of renewed controversy over the legacies of Empire, after the UK government’s decision to hand over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, in partial recognition of the UK’s expulsion of the indigenous population in the 1960s and 1970s. The decision was immediately slammed by Conservative politicians, in spite of the fact that the US-UK military base on the island of Diego Garcia is due to remain.

    Since then, Keir Starmer has rejected the possibility of British reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, prompting further homages to the British Empire from Tory politicians, with Robert Jenrick saying former colonies owe the UK a “debt of gratitude”.

    The PPU points out that such ongoing attempts to whitewash or glorify colonialism make it all the more urgent that we challenge its legacies and remember the victims of colonial conflicts.

    Stop whitewashing colonialism

    Geoff Tibbs, the Peace Pledge Union (PPU’s) remembrance project manager, said:

    When we still see politicians openly celebrating the British Empire, it is vital that we remember the impacts that colonial wars and violence have had – and continue to have – around the globe.

    He added:

    We need to make space for the victims of colonial wars on Remembrance Day. This involves listening to the voices of those affected by that history and the ongoing impacts of colonialism, both in the UK and elsewhere. It involves actively challenging the racist legacies of colonialism that continue to influence whose lives are valued and whose are not.

    The war in the Middle East has been another factor prompting fresh examination of Britain’s colonial past, as some campaigners pushing for a ceasefire have highlighted Britain’s historical responsibility for the dispossession and oppression of the Palestinians.

    The Balfour Declaration of 1917 established British support for the Zionist movement in Palestine, laying the ground for conflict over the territory, whilst British military tactics used against the Palestinian population during the British Mandate were later adopted by the Israeli government.

    The PPU, which supports calls for an immediate ceasefire in the Middle East, argues that Remembrance Day should be a time for honest and open reflection on the human cost of wars, both past and present, including colonial conflicts.

    They point out that even the First and Second World Wars are severely distorted by ignoring their colonial context, as both conflicts had profound impacts throughout the Empires of the imperial powers, with often disastrous human consequences, such as the imposition of racist regimes across North Africa or the Bengal Famine in India.

    Decolonising Remembrance Day

    In recent years there have been some official attempts to address the inequalities in the way the victims of war are commemorated on Remembrance Day. A landmark inquiry by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission blamed ‘pervasive racism’ for the unequal commemoration of black and Asian war dead.

    The Royal British Legion has also made increasing efforts to acknowledge the role of Commonwealth troops. The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) has welcomed these efforts, but urged them to go further by remembering all those affected by colonial conflicts.

    Decolonising remembrance is an open-ended project which, the organisers hope, will benefit from the input of groups and individuals with expertise in the history and ongoing impacts of colonialism.

    The new webpage on decolonising remembrance includes an open-ended list of resources to help white poppy wearers and others engage with this issue during and after Remembrance Day.

    We can give a human face to the hidden victims of war

    Hamit Dardagan from Iraq Body Count, which is among the resources included, said:

    Colonialism is best characterised as the armed robbery of resources, land and liberty on such a grand scale that it requires the machinery of war and military occupation. Thus its cost is not only economic but includes every imaginable injury and insult to the human body and spirit, every variety of suffering and loss: physical and mental, individual and social, immediate and prolonged.

    He added:

    While accepting that we cannot erase the harm already done to the dead, their families and friends, we must do all we can to give a human face to the many nameless, hidden, often distant victims of these wars. We must not allow their names and stories to become lost or forgotten, and need to remember that their lives were as valuable as our own. The PPU’s efforts in this cause have our gratitude and full support.

    Featured image via the Peace Pledge Union

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • How & Why the Washington Post‘s Former Owner Now Pushes Biden to Go Nuclear Against Russia

    Ever since the November 5 defeat of the so-called ‘Democratic’ Party and of its unanimous neoconservative obsession to defeat Russia with the help of Ukrainians (claiming all the time that doing this is necessary in order to protect Americans and America’s ‘democracy’), the Bilderburg member Donald Graham, who at the 2013 Bilderburg meeting met privately with Jeff Bezos and agreed to sell him the Washington Post, has been instead using his Foreign Policy magazine in order to increase the pressure upon President Joe Biden to escalate the U.S. Government’s proxy-war in Ukraine against Russia up to and including World War Three (WW3).

    On November 5, the magazine headlined “The Biden Administration Now Has an Expiration Date — and a To-Do List,” and reported:

    As of late October, the Biden administration still had $5.5 billion it could throw into Ukraine’s war chest. In the past, that has come in the form of air-defense batteries, battle tanks, and long-rage U.S. firepower that can help Ukraine balance the playing field against a larger neighbor with seemingly inexhaustible manpower and ample assistance from allies in Asia. …

    With no reason to worry about spiking oil and gasoline prices, the United States may be more amenable not only to Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil infrastructure, but also to the unsheathing of additional sanctions on miscreant oil producers such as Iran and Venezuela, which skated clear of sanctions all year thanks to U.S. worries about the domestic impact of an energy war.

    On November 7, it headlined “Ukraine Now Faces a Nuclear Decision: Under a new Trump administration, Ukraine’s government can’t avoid considering a nuclear weapon,” and reported:

    Last month, with little fanfare, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky made the stakes of the ongoing war in Ukraine as clear as possible…. “Either Ukraine will have nuclear weapons and that will be our protection or we should have some sort of alliance,” he said. “Apart from NATO, today we do not know any effective alliances.”

    It was the first time the Ukrainian president had revealed an outcome that has become, for the war’s observers, increasingly inescapable. In this war for Ukraine’s survival, with Kyiv facing both declining men and materiel, the only surefire way of preventing Ukraine’s ongoing destruction is NATO membership—a reality that has gained more supporters since the war’s beginning but still remains years away. Barring such an outcome, as Zelensky outlined, only one option remains: developing Ukraine’s own nuclear arsenal and returning it to the role of a nuclear power that it gave up some three decades ago. …

    Putin, after all, has only grown increasingly messianic and monomaniacal in his efforts to shatter Ukraine. Previous designs on simply toppling Kyiv have given way to outright efforts to “destroy Ukrainian statehood,” especially following Ukraine’s successful occupation in Russia’s Kursk region [“Kyiv has secured a substantial political victory in Kursk whether it stays or decides to withdraw from this territory in the coming months. It has called Putin’s bluff and made a mockery of his stated “red lines” and nuclear bluster.”], as the Moscow Times recently reported. With Ukrainian statehood — and even Ukrainian identity, given Russia’s genocidal efforts — at stake, any nation would understandably pursue any option available for survival. …

    This reality has been made blindingly clear by recent archival work from a number of scholars, poring through overlooked U.S. and Ukrainian documents. For instance, Columbia University’s George Bogden has recently published extensively on the internal debates in both the United States and Ukraine surrounding Kyiv’s post-Soviet arsenal…

    In both the George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton administrations, U.S. officials placed continued emphasis on reassuring Russia that Moscow could have regional primacy — and that the United States was not trying to take advantage of the power vacuum emerging in the Soviet rubble…

    The reason why the GHW Bush Administration agreed to this demand by Gorbachev was that during WW2, many Ukrainians in western Ukraine sided with Germany against Russia and participated eagerly not only in wiping out Jews but in assisting the Germans and Nazi-supporters such as the anti-Russian FInns to kill Russian troops. If Bush would have gone along with what Graham’s propaganda-magazine says he should have done, then Gorbachev would never have allowed the break-up of the Soviet Union, because it would quickly have meant war against Ukraine.

    Basically, Graham is propagandizing for Biden to cross all of Russia’s (or ‘Putin’s’ — as-if Putin doesn’t really represent the Russian people) national-security red lines. Graham’s basic argument is that though the U.S. and its colonies (‘allies’) have their national security to protect, Russia (China, and other countries that America’s billionaires demand to control) don’t. This gives the U.S. regime carte blanche to subterfuge, coup, sanction, and/or outright invade, wherever and whenever they want to; or like Elon Musk famously said, “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”  (Britain’s Guardian featured an article on 25 November 2023, “‘We will coup whoever we want!’: the unbearable hubris of Musk and the billionaire tech bros. Challenging each other to cage fights, building apocalypse bunkers – the behaviour of today’s mega-moguls is becoming increasingly outlandish and imperial”. However, it’s not ONLY “the billionaire tech bros.” but ALL of U.S.-and-allied billionaires who control the U.S. Government and tolerate, if not outright demand, further expansion of the U.S. empire, regardless of the national-security needs of other countries.)

    On 4 June 2024, the internationally well-known geostategic analyst Pepe Escobar headlined at youtube “Putin and China Issue a GRAVE Warning: Tensions Near Breaking Point”, and he reported that WW3 is wanted by Bilderberg=NATO because the billionaires who control Western Governments want to nullify Governments’ debts (such as America’s $36 trillion); they’re now desperate, and EU/NATO breakup will likely come soon. So: these post-Kamala-Harris articles from Donald Graham’s propaganda-mill Foreign Policy are clearly in line with that scenario by Escobar on June 4th, not because they are truthful or even realistic, but because they clearly display this desperation by the billionaires, to retain control over international institutions, and even their willingness to risk destroying the world in order to achieve it.

    I don’t know whether Escobar is correct that cancellation of debts is an objective — much less a main objective — in this, but the reality of the rest of his analysis is hard to refute; and, on 18 October 2024, I headlined an article documenting this, “The Collapsing U.S. Empire.” It opened:

    The neoconservative dream, ever since neoconservatism started on 25 July 1945, has been for the U.S. Government to take over the entire world, but this 79-year-old dream for them (nightmare for everyone else) has now practically ended, because after having played nuclear chicken against Russia ever since that date, the U.S. Government has finally — as-of 9 October 2024 (Biden’s cancellation then of his planned October 12th Ukraine-war victory summit at America’s Rammstein Air Force Base in Germany) — come to the painful realization that their plan (ever since at least 2006) to win a nuclear war against Russia, is unrealistic, and would only leave this planet virtually uninhabitable, a lose-lose war for both sides, instead of to produce the neocons’ ardently hoped-for win-lose war (in which, of course — as the neocons have imagined — the U.S. regime emerges victorious) against Russia.

    The neoconservative chorus (singing to the music of America’s billionaires) are trying to persuade the U.S. public to support what is, effectively, all-out U.S.-and-‘allied’ aggression against Russia. All of this is based upon the lie that Russia started Ukraine’s war on 24 February 2022, America didn’t start it on 20 February 2014.

    On October 10, I headlined “Biden’s plan calls for WW3 to start after Election Day.” People such as Donald Graham evidently want it to turn out to be true — notwithstanding that America’s Government — NOT Russia’s, had started this war. I still have some hope that it won’t. But if it won’t, then Biden will lose his most ardent supporters, neocons (which include virtually all U.S. billionaires — even the ones who prefer Trump). They will feel that he betrayed them. And, in that case, it will have been so — he did.

    However, in either case, a deluge will come soon. Because the collapse of the American empire will not be able to go smoothly. I agree with Escobar on that.

    The post How & Why the Washington Post‘s Former Owner Now Pushes Biden to Go Nuclear Against Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We Don’t Want Our Islands to Be Used to Kill People

    Ōriwa Tahupōtiki Haddon (Ngāti Ruanui), Reconstruction of the Signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, c. 1940.

    For the past few weeks I have been on the road in Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Australia at the invitation of groups such as Te Kuaka, Red Ant, and the Communist Party of Australia. Both countries were shaped by British colonialism, marked by the violent displacement of native communities and theft of their lands. Today, as they become part of the US-led militarisation of the Pacific, their native populations have fought to defend their lands and way of life.

    On 6 February 1840, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) was signed by representatives of the British Crown and the Māori groups of Aotearoa. The treaty (which has no point of comparison in Australia) claimed that it would ‘actively protect Māori in the use of their lands, fisheries, forests, and other treasured possessions’ and ‘ensure that both parties to [the treaty] would live together peacefully and develop New Zealand together in partnership’. While I was in Aotearoa, I learned that the new coalition government seeks to ‘reinterpret’ the Treaty of Waitangi in order to roll back protections for Māori families. This includes shrinking initiatives such as the Māori Health Authority (Te Aka Whai Ora) and programmes that promote the use of the Māori language (Te Reo Maori) in public institutions. The fight against these cutbacks has galvanised not only the Māori communities, but large sections of the population who do not want to live in a society that violates its treaties. When Aboriginal Australian Senator Lidia Thorpe disrupted the British monarch Charles’s visit to the country’s parliament last month, she echoed a sentiment that spreads across the Pacific, yelling, as she was dragged out by security: ‘You committed genocide against our people. Give us our land back! Give us what you stole from us – our bones, our skulls, our babies, our people. … We want a treaty in this country. … You are not my king. You are not our king’.

    Walangkura Napanangka (Pintupi), Johnny Yungut’s Wife, Tjintjintjin, 2007.

    With or without a treaty, both Aotearoa and Australia have seen a groundswell of sentiment for increased sovereignty across the islands of the Pacific, building on a centuries-long legacy. This wave of sovereignty has now begun to turn towards the shores of the massive US military build-up in the Pacific Ocean, which has its sights set on an illusionary threat from China. US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall, speaking at a September 2024 Air & Space Forces Association convention on China and the Indo-Pacific, represented this position well when he said ‘China is not a future threat. China is a threat today’. The evidence for this, Kendall said, is that China is building up its operational capacities to prevent the United States from projecting its power into the western Pacific Ocean region. For Kendall, the problem is not that China was a threat to other countries in East Asia and the South Pacific, but that it is preventing the US from playing a leading role in the region and surrounding waters – including those just outside of China’s territorial limits, where the US has conducted joint ‘freedom of navigation’ exercises with its allies. ‘I am not saying war in the Pacific is imminent or inevitable’, Kendall continued. ‘It is not. But I am saying that the likelihood is increasing and will continue to do so’.

    George Parata Kiwara (Ngāti Porou and Te Aitanga-a-Māhaki), Jacinda’s Plan, 2021.

    In 1951, in the midst of the Chinese Revolution (1949) and the US war on Korea (1950–1953), senior US foreign policy advisor and later Secretary of State John Foster Dulles helped formulate several key treaties, such as the 1951 Australia, New Zealand, and United States Security (ANZUS) Treaty, which brought Australia and New Zealand firmly out of British influence and into the US’s war plans, and the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty, which ended the formal US occupation of Japan. These deals – part of the US’s aggressive strategy in the region – came alongside the US occupation of several island nations in the Pacific where the US had already established military facilities, including ports and airfields: Hawaii (since 1898), Guam (since 1898), and Samoa (since 1900). Out of this reality, which swept from Japan to Aotearoa, Dulles developed the ‘island chain strategy’, a so-called containment strategy that would establish a military presence on three ‘island chains’ extending outward from China to act as an aggressive perimeter and prevent any power other than the US from commanding the Pacific Ocean.

    Over time, these three island chains became hardened strongholds for the projection of US power, with about four hundred bases in the region established to maintain US military assets from Alaska to southern Australia. Despite signing various treaties to demilitarise the region (such as the South Pacific Nuclear Free Treaty, also known as the Treaty of Rarotonga in 1986), the US has moved lethal military assets, including nuclear weapons, through the region for threat projection against China, North Korea, Russia, and Vietnam (at different times and with different intensity). This ‘island chain strategy’ includes military installations in French colonial outposts such as Wallis and Futuna, New Caledonia, and French Polynesia. The US also has military arrangements with the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau.


    Christine Napanangka Michaels (Nyirripi), Lappi Lappi Jukurrpa (Lappi Lappi Dreaming), 2019.

    While some of these Pacific Island nations are used as bases for US and French power projection against China, others have been used as nuclear test sites. Between 1946 and 1958, the US conducted sixty-seven nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. One of them, conducted in Bikini Atoll, detonated a thermonuclear weapon a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Darlene Keju Johnson, who was only three years old at the time of the Bikini Atoll detonation and was one of the first Marshallese women to speak publicly about the nuclear testing in the islands, encapsulated the sentiment of the islanders in one of her speeches: ‘We don’t want our islands to be used to kill people. The bottom line is we want to live in peace’.

    Jef Cablog (Cordillera), Stern II, 2021.

    Yet, despite the resistance of people like Keju Johnson (who went on to become a director in the Marshall Islands Ministry of Health), the US has been ramping up its military activity in the Pacific over the past fifteen years, such as by refusing to close bases, opening new ones, and expanding others to increase their military capacity. In Australia – without any real public debate – the government decided to supplement US funding to expand the runway on Tindal Air Base in Darwin so that it could house US B-52 and B-1 bombers with nuclear capacity. It also decided to expand submarine facilities from Garden Island to Rockingham and build a new high-tech radar facility for deep-space communications in Exmouth. These expansions came on the heels of the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) partnership in 2021, which has allowed the US and the UK to fully coordinate their strategies. The partnership also sidelined the French manufacturers that until then had supplied Australia with diesel-powered submarines and ensured that it would instead buy nuclear-powered submarines from the UK and US. Eventually, Australia will provide its own submarines for the missions the US and UK are conducting in the waters around China.

    Over the past few years, the US has also sought to draw Canada, France, and Germany into the US Pacific project through the US Pacific Partnership Strategy for the Pacific Islands (2022) and the Partnership for the Blue Pacific (2022). In 2021, at the France-Oceania Summit, there was a commitment to reengage with the Pacific, with France bringing new military assets into New Caledonia and French Polynesia. The US and France have also opened a dialogue about coordinating their military activities against China in the Pacific.

    Yvette Bouquet (Kanak), Profil art, 1996.

    Yet these partnerships are only part of the US ambitions in the region. The US is also opening new bases in the northern islands of the Philippines – the first such expansion in the country since the early 1990s – while intensifying its arm sales with Taiwan, to whom it is providing lethal military technology (including missile defence and tank systems intended to deter a Chinese military assault). Meanwhile the US has improved its coordination with Japan’s military by deciding to establish joint force headquarters, which means that the command structure for US troops in Japan and South Korea will be autonomously controlled by the US command structure in these two Asian countries (not by orders from Washington).

    However, the US-European war project is not going as smoothly as anticipated. Protest movements in the Solomon Islands (2021) and New Caledonia (2024), led by communities who are no longer willing to be subjected to neocolonialism, have come as a shock to the US and its allies. It will not be easy for them to build their island chain in the Pacific.

    The post We Don’t Want Our Islands to Be Used to Kill People first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What the Air Force Doesn’t Want Us to Notice on Election Night

    Much significance will happen at the end of Election Day, and a countdown will begin at 11:00 p.m. PDT on November 5th. While everyone’s attention will be on who our next president will be, the U.S. The Air Force will test-launch an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile with a dummy hydrogen bomb on the tip from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The missile will cross the Pacific Ocean and 22 minutes later crash into the Marshall Islands. The U.S. Air Force does this several times a year. The launches are always at night while Americans are sleeping.

    This is what nightmares are made of – between 1946 and 1958 the U.S. detonated 67 nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands, and the result is that the Marshallese people have lost their pristine environment and face health problems. Our environment is threatened here as well. Not only did the indigenous Chumash people lose their sacred land to Vandenberg Air Force Base, but also America’s Heartland presently has around 400 ICBMs stored in underground silos equipped with nuclear warheads that are ready to launch at a hair trigger’s notice. Named “MinuteMen III,” after Revolutionary War soldiers who could reload and shoot a gun in less than a minute, ICBMs not only put Americans at risk of accident, but they put all life on earth in danger.

    ICBMs are not viable for national defense. They are a relic of a bygone era having been invented by Nazi Germany, and their presence only escalates the risk of nuclear accidents or conflicts.A single launch could lead to a nuclear exchange that would annihilate cities, contaminate the environment, and cause irreversible harm to our planet’s ecosystem. Once an ICBM is launched, it cannot be recalled. I don’t want a nuclear strike or accident to happen. We can change course now, and our first step is to decommission the ICBM program also because it is a staggering financial burden to maintain.

    The U.S. plans to spend over $1.2 trillion on nuclear modernization over the next 30 years, which means new, larger nuclear bombs and new, larger ICBMs called Sentinels that will need to be tested. This massive investment in outdated technology diverts critical funds away from humanitarian needs like healthcare, education, and healing climate change— issues that directly impact our quality of life, and our children’s future.

    I teach 4th and 5th graders Creative Writing. I adore children’s imaginations, but when my students were given the assignment to write about something important to them, they wrote lines that broke my heart.  This is a wake-up call for us adults to face the reality we have made for our children.

    “Such a shame, a perfectly good planet, trashed.” Claire, age 9.

    “What would you think about no nature in the world? No trees, no butterflies, no birds or bunnies at all! Most important of all, no people. There would be no technology, no schools, no history, no entertainment; everything we have worked for would be wasted. What would you think about a beautiful world that basically had nothing? I think I would absolutely hate it.,” Brynn, age 9.

    Other than destruction caused by industrial global warming and by war, which the children are all-too aware of, this child does not know what actually could turn nature and civilization to nothing in a matter of minutes; she doesn’t know about “nuclear winter” or how vulnerable we are to a nuclear accident. Most people don’t.

    The claim is that nuclear weapons are deterrents, but it is diplomacy that creates alliances and peace. Nuclear weapons only provide the terrifying threat of annihilation, either by command or by accident. Nuclear weapons and ICBMs only make the world less safe and strip us of security.

    As the warring ruling class seems to be pushing for nuclear brinkmanship, on this election night let us not be distracted.  By decommissioning ICBMs, the U.S. could lead the world in reducing the nuclear threat and encourage other nations to do the same. For the sake of our health, environment, and the safety of future generations, it’s time to scrap the ICBM program. We owe it to our children to invest in a future that prioritizes peace and sustainability over destruction.

    As it is we the people who possess the right of self-determination, we must confront the material reality of our homeland and face what it will take to protect it.  Do we have the courage to change our country for the better and ensure our futures?  Yes we do, and now is the time to take action.

    “Only we, the public, can force our representatives to reverse their abdication of the war powers that the Constitution gives exclusively to the Congress,” said Daniel Ellsberg, U.S. military analyst, economist, and author of “The Doomsday Machine.”

    May we cancel this nightmare weapons program for once and for all and give our children the security that they deserve.

    Tell Congress: Cancel Sentinel Missile Program—More Than 700 Scientists Agree.

    Learn more about the dangers of ICBMS and get involved.

    The post What the Air Force Doesn’t Want Us to Notice on Election Night first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • White poppy orders surge in schools and universities ahead of Remembrance Day

    More white poppies are being ordered for schools, universities, and other education settings in the run up to Remembrance Day this year, following increased interest from students and teachers. The news comes as the Peace Pledge Union marks its 90th anniversary. 

    White poppies: sales up this year again

    Israel’s genocide in Gaza has been cited by teachers as one reason for this trend, as more of their students recognise the importance of remembering all victims of war, including civilians and those affected by conflict today.

    The Peace Pledge Union (PPU), which distributes white poppies, has reported a year on year increase in orders of White Poppy Education Packs, with double the number already distributed this year compared to 2021. There has been a nearly 30% increase compared to this point last year.

    The greater interest from schools and universities follows the spike in demand for white poppies since Israel’s assault on Gaza began last October and drew fresh attention to the plight of civilians in conflict. The PPU has heard that an increasing number of Muslim school students, among others, have shown interest in white poppies due to Israel’s ongoing atrocities in the Middle East.

    One teacher who contacted the PPU said:

    As a school which values peace as one of its core values it is important that we live that value in our daily lives. The wearing of a white poppy symbolises a commitment to peace and acts as a reminder for all of us to do our duty in averting not only war, but to challenge the instruments of war which are so prevalent in our world today. The Peace Pledge Union is perhaps even more relevant in our modern world which is so racked by conflict and division.

    Peace Pledge Union: representing all victims of war

    A number of student unions in universities have chosen to offer white poppies for the first time this year. One university student from London said: “I really like the concept of the white poppies. Although the red poppies stand for something remarkable, the white help to be inclusive to all victims of war, from the soldiers to people who had to witness it. Especially with what’s going on in the Middle East, it’s nice to know that the victims are being represented.”

    Schools that distribute white poppies often do so alongside offering red poppies. The PPU argues that teachers should offer range of views and perspectives on Remembrance Day, war and peace, due to the political nature of these topics, allowing young people to form their own views as they grow up.

    Another teacher, who has offered white poppies in their school for several years, described this as:

    an excellent way to encourage students to participate in remembrance activities because it encourages students to think more deeply about what it means to remember and to honour those who have died.

    This is especially important as familial ties to the great 20th Century wars become more distant, because we are at risk of losing our connection to these events unless we remind ourselves of the lessons they teach, and our consequent responsibility to build a better world with those lessons.

    One sixth-form student said:

    The idea of a white poppy is really appealing as an alternative way of showing support. Previously, I’ve always bought a red poppy to show support for the millions of people who died during hugely destructive wars.

    I admire charities that help other people get their lives back together after trauma, especially people injured in the service of others. However, the red poppy’s attachment to the military has put me off.

    The alternative Remembrance

    In a further sign of interest among young people and teachers, the educational movement Woodcraft Folk has recently collaborated with the PPU on a set of new educational activities on white poppies, which have been distributed to groups of young people around the UK.

    White poppies have been worn since 1933. They stand for remembrance for all victims of war, both civilian and military, of all nationalities, as well as challenging militarism and a commitment to peace. They differ from red ones, which commemorate only British and allied armed forces personnel and show “support for the armed forces,” according to the Royal British Legion which promotes them.

    Geoff Tibbs, Remembrance project manager from the Peace Pledge Union, said:

    Around the world at the moment, we are witnessing the greatest intensity of war and violence so far this century. On Remembrance Day, we must remember all those affected by this, as well as those who have died in the past, and make an active commitment to peace.

    It is heartening that a growing number of young people are turning to the white poppy, for the light it sheds on today’s conflicts. Many are alienated by the mainstream tradition of Remembrance Day, as it fails to acknowledge civilians and people of other nationalities affected by wars today.

    On Remembrance Sunday, ceremonies featuring white poppies will take place around the UK. The National Alternative Remembrance Ceremony in London will focus on remembering all victims of war, including those being killed in wars today in Gaza, Lebanon, Ukraine, Sudan, and elsewhere, and will feature a speech by a Palestinian activist involved in nonviolent campaigning for peace.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

  • Who Should be the Next Emperor of the Violent Global Imperium?

    As US voters go to the polls on November 5, they need to remind themselves that when the US elects its next domestic president, it is also selecting the emperor of a violent, global imperium.  Choices made over sundry domestic issues have far reaching effects, far beyond local pocketbook or civil rights issues.  They determine who lives and dies across the planet, and how much pain, harm and suffering the rest of the world will have to bear.

    In this context, it’s fair to ask, who is the lesser evil?  Trump or Harris?

    The answer, of course, is “neither”.  Like infinity, when it comes to evil, there’s not much use in finger-counting which is greater or lesser.  They are cardinal equivalents. Third party is the moral choice.

    However, between two terrible choices, President Kamala Harris–to the extent that she has institutional continuity with the Biden/CNAS administration and retains key advisors–is likely to wage more wars: in Ukraine and most certainly with China.

    This is not because Trump is less hawkish or more prudent, but because he is likely to be less effective.  These have to do with the following:

    Distraction, Obstruction, and Opprobrium

    Trump is likely to be focused on attacking/settling scores with domestic enemies, who have harassed, belittled, betrayed, tattled, audited, impeached, sued, indicted, prosecuted him, and possibly attempted his assassination.  He is also more likely to be thwarted or obstructed by institutional forces as he implements his agenda, even if it is similar to Joe Biden’s, and more likely to attract opprobrium and opposition, including if he wages war.

    Bean-counting vs Seoul force

    Trump has contempt for South Korea’s Yoon administration and wants to multiply the cost of stationing US troops in Korea nine-fold to $10 Billion/year.  That could be a deal breaker. He openly refers to South Korea as a “money machine“. This mercantile transactionalism is likely to put sand into the gears of the US war machine that is preparing Korea as the easiest and first place to start an omnicidal war with China.

    South Koreans are already furious with President Yoon Sok Yeol for subordinating South Korea’s political and economic interests to US foreign policy, and they are likely to impeach Yoon if he submits to such flagrant extortion.  On the other hand, If he doesn’t pay up, and the US administration weakens its support of Yoon, the Korean people will rise up and overthrow him as they have other US-quisling presidents like Syngman Rhee, Chun Doo Hwan, Park Geun Hye.  This will strategically diminish the prospects of the Empire. The canard of North Korean troops fighting in Ukraine is an attempt to stave off this bad end by heightening the stakes, promoting South Korea (and Yoon’s) status as a global “pivot state”, and enmeshing Korea into the Ukraine-NATO-Empire trainwreck.

    Compassionate rape indulgences

    Trump was openly contemptuous of “Shinzo” (Abe), but he has even less relationship with Japanese Prime Minister Ishida (or any future potential Japanese PM).  However, as with South Korea, his uncouth transactionalism around the omoiyari yosan (Japan’s “empathy contribution budget”) for US troops in Japan, is likely to disorient and vex the Japanese leadership, and outrage the populace who are already livid to be paying reverse indulgences for occupation and rape.  JAKUS, the Japan-Korea-US alliance is already brittle, due to the current political weakness of Japan’s ruling LDP and South Korea’s hatred for Yoon’s pro-collaborationist position. Prime Minister Ishida has lost the lower house and the LDP, which has governed Japan as a virtual one-party state, is at its weakest in decades.  Simultaneously, Yoon’s military collaboration with Japan, Korea’s former colonizer, is sending Yoon into crisis territory, as his approval rating plummets down to 17%.

    Deadly Insurance policy

    Trump has said that the Taiwan authorities need to pay the US for protection because the US is “no different from an insurance company”.  But Trump’s insurance company is a corporation that has no intention of paying out if Taiwan becomes the next Ukraine. He has also stated that Taiwan should spend 10% of its shrinking GDP on the military, a coded demand to buy more marked up US weapons systems.  Again, the ruling DPP will be bewildered and rattled by Trump’s demand—an offer they can’t refuse: being asked to pony up for an extortionary “insurance” policy that guarantees almost certain denial of services while bankrupting the country: Trump has refused to state if he will commit troops to Taiwan to support US-prompted secessionism.

    Currently Vice President Louise Hsiao, a former US citizen and deep state denizen, serves as President’s William Lai’s US minder.  A prissy preacher’s daughter from New Jersey, it’s a pretty good bet that neither Trump nor Vance will get along with the self-proclaimed “cat warrior” princess. Hsiao, for her part, has bet all her chips on Ukraine–stating that “the Ukraine war sends a powerful message to China”–the de-knickered message of a person squatting in an outhouse hit by a tornado. Trump’s potential Ukraine pullout could heighten the mortification.

    Disdain for the McCain Stain

    Certainly, Trump is hawkish and belligerent on Iran and could greenlight war. He will also support Israel in continuing to wage its horrific genocide and ethnic cleansing, just as the Biden administration ministers to, indulges, and excuses every genocidal whim and action of Israel.

    But Trump is likely to force some kind of settlement on Ukraine, because he hates losing and losers, and Ukraine is a losing war, which he can blame on Biden.

    Trump’s language is extremely belligerent and hawkish, and he is rash and impulsive, but his narcissism traps him into trying to make himself look like a winner at all times.  Like the over-validated child, who will avoid any challenge that might reveal the limits of his competence, Trump is less likely to test the outer limits of US power with peer competitors.   That means he could be less likely to start conventional wars he cannot win, and be more likely to try to get out of losing wars.  This could even be true for the genocidal war on Gaza, which despite its stream of atrocities, is Israel’s John McCain moment: a strategic and political loss for a colonizer that has been taken hostage by its own insanity.

    Catastrophic Reboot Risk

    The catastrophic geopolitical risk with Trump is he may not understand the real risks of nuclear war—he has asked “Why have nukes if they can’t be used?”—and could be recklessly tempted or prompted to use them.  This is in contradistinction to the CNAS neocons who will control Harris’ foreign policy and her nuclear threat posture: they understand the risks  and costs, and they still seek to use them deliberately.  They believe in integrating nuclear war seamlessly into conventional doctrine, exercises, signaling, and operations.

    This is true also for climate change.  Trump denies global warming and has stated that it is a Chinese conspiracy to undermine the US economy.  The Harris-Biden administration understands global warming but sees sustainable transition as unacceptable because it would boost China’s development and global status. They see doubling down on burning fossil fuels as in the core strategic interests of the US in maintaining hegemony.  They would rather burn up the planet than let China shine.

    In fact, they would rather destroy the planet than give up an ounce of privilege to the burgeoning multipolar world.  Wonk-speaking necropolitical ideologues from their first cakewalk to the final funeral march of mankind, they would rather be dead rather than be led into a better world of sovereign independence, equality, non-interference, and peace.

    If Trump is elected, the global south will pray that he never abandons his neo-mercantilist transactionalism and his petty narcissistic fraudulence. Until the dismantling of Empire and Capital, and until the West stops using wars to reboot the economy, this may be about the only thing that saves the world.

    The post Who Should be the Next Emperor of the Violent Global Imperium? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Peace Pledge Union marks its 90th year in a world that needs it more than ever

    As it marks its 90th year, the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) has reiterated its commitment to strive for a world without war.

    The Peace Pledge Union: war is a crime

    Back in 1934, the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) arose out of a campaign initiated by the pacifist Dick Sheppard who issued an open letter encouraging people to pledge they would never again support another war.

    This was set against the backdrop of deteriorating relationships between European nations, bringing with it fears of another bloody and tragic conflict. Sheppard’s call elicited tens of thousands of replies within a few weeks from people whose pledge remains the basis of PPU membership to this day:

    War is a crime against humanity. I renounce war, and am therefore determined not to support any kind of war. I am also determined to work for the removal of all causes of war.

    By 1936, this movement had formally evolved into the Peace Pledge Union, open to “men and women of… divergent philosophic, religious and political opinions.” Its prominent members have included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, Vera Brittain, Benjamin Britten, Michael Tippett, Sybil Morrison, and Bertrand Russell.

    Today the PPU is not only Britain’s oldest secular pacifist organisation, but also a leading voice in promoting pacifism and nonviolence, and resisting militarism and the causes of war.

    The PPU is best known for distributing white poppies, which stand for remembrance of all victims of war, both civilian and military, and challenge the militarisation of Remembrance Day.

    Actively engaging

    From the time of its founding, the Peace Pledge Union (PPU) has actively engaged with issues of domestic and international importance. During the Second World War the PPU supported conscientious objectors, helped found the Famine Relief Committee, which was the precursor to Oxfam, and campaigned against the firebombing of German cities.

    Later the PPU was part of the earliest opposition to the UK’s nuclear arsenal, organising demonstrations and civil disobedience which led to the arrest of PPU members.

    Amongst many other instances of public opposition to militarism, the PPU opposed British atrocities in Kenya in the 1950s, spoke out against British involvement in the Nigerian Civil War in the 1960s, campaigned for nonviolent approaches to the conflict in Northern Ireland and led the resistance to the Falklands War in the 1980s.

    Throughout its history the PPU has supported conscientious objectors, both in the UK and internationally as part of War Resisters’ International. Following a fundraising campaign, the PPU created the Conscientious Objectors’ Commemorative Stone in Tavistock Square, London, unveiled in 1994.

    In recent years, the PPU has added its voice and pacifist perspective to calls for a ceasefire in the Middle East, condemned the British government’s complicity in the Saudi bombing of Yemen, and expanded its peace education programme.

    Building on the Peace Pledge Union legacy

    The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) is determined to build on its rich 90-year legacy while looking toward the future. To ensure the PPU’s continued relevance in today’s multifaceted unstable world, the PPU is working to highlight connections between pacifist, anti-militarist struggles and other key movements for justice, and to do so in ways that broaden its reach and deepen its impact.

    Amy Corcoran, the PPU’s operations manager, said:

    As we mark this important milestone in our history, it is important that we remain as relevant and forward-facing as ever. That’s why our new five-year strategy not only reaffirms our commitment to putting pacifism into practice, resisting war and the causes of war today, but will also see us do so in the current context of global conflict and a creeping domestic tide of militarism.

    PPU council member Sarri Bater said:

    Nonviolent approaches to conflict are becoming increasingly marginalised, which is why it is so vital that we put forward pacifism as an urgent message that addresses the need for deep-rooted, systemic change.

    You can read the PPU’s new strategy here, and find out how to support the PPU’s work here.

    Featured image via Wikimedia

    By The Canary

  • Labour just railroaded a secretive US-UK nuclear treaty renewal deal

    The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) said it condemns the government’s outrageous railroading through parliament of the renewal of the US-UK Mutual Defence Agreement (MDA), the secretive treaty that underpins the nuclear ‘special relationship’ between London and Washington.

    The MDA: under a cloak of secrecy

    In force since 1958, the MDA allows for the transfer of key technologies, information, and nuclear materials to and from the US. Since its inception, the treaty has been amendable every ten years, also requiring parliamentary agreement on its extension.

    But the government intends to make this treaty permanent by removing the clause that requires the treaty to be extended, and enables debate and amendment, including rejection. CND said:

    In an open and democratic society, a major change like this should be given due consideration and debate in parliament. However, the government has disgracefully obstructed this by announcing its planned changes to the MDA just before parliament’s summer recess – guaranteeing six weeks of inaction.

    Upon their return, MPs spent much of September and October engaged with party conferences. This shamefully left little time for parliament to debate the proposed changes before the deadline of 23 October.

    Labour’s railroading of US nuclear co-operation: CND reacts

    CND general secretary Kate Hudson said:

    Thousands of CND supporters have contacted their MPs to raise the MDA as an issue for debate in Parliament before the 23 October deadline. Despite this outpouring of public concern, the limited time MPs have spent in Parliament since the election has left very little space for the open discussion this significant but little-known treaty deserves.

    The railroading of the MDA by the government is typical of the policy that successive governments have been pursuing when it comes to Britain’s military policies and its possession of nuclear weapons.

    This ‘special relationship’ tethers British military and foreign policy to Washington – and makes redundant the claim that Britain has an independent nuclear weapons system. Without US support, Britain would be unable to sustain its nuclear arsenal. Efforts to scrutinise this relationship are regularly deflected by the government under the guise of national security.

    SO, CND will protest not only the MDA, but also the return of US nuclear weapons to Britain – ahead of the US presidential election.

    CND protesting at Lakenheath on 2 November

    The group and its supporters will mobilise at RAF Lakenheath on Saturday 2 November, to oppose plans to station US nuclear weapons in Britain for the first time since 2008.

    This will be CND’s fourth national mobilisation at RAF Lakenheath since 2022, after US government budget documents revealed plans for upgrade works at the US-run air base for the storage of the new B61-12 guided nuclear bomb.

    With the US presidential election to take place just days later, the protest aims to highlight the significant impact of US foreign and military policy on the British public, and the increased nuclear dangers brought by deploying its nuclear weapons in Britain – by whoever wins the White House.

    Attendees will also witness an unofficial declaration of Lakenheath as a nuclear-free zone, and calls for both the UK and other nuclear weapons states to engage with the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

    CND will be joined by Melissa Parke ,executive director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), the organisation that won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize. Melissa will speak about nuclear dangers in Europe.

    No US nuclear weapons on UK soil

    Details of the protest are as follows:

    • Saturday 2 November.
    • 12 noon to 3pm.
    • RAF Lakenheath Main Gate, Brandon Road, Lakenheath, Suffolk. More details on parking can be found on the CND website here.

    Hudson said:

    As we gather at RAF Lakenheath to protest the return of US nuclear weapons to Britain, we stand united in our commitment to a nuclear-free future. This demonstration is not just about local concerns; it resonates on a global scale, especially with the upcoming US presidential election.

    The decisions made in Washington have profound implications for peace and security – be they here in Britain, or elsewhere like Ukraine, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific. We urge everyone to join us in sending a clear message that nuclear weapons have no place in our society nor in building genuine security for all.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The Escalator Grinds to a Halt

    It is apparently not much of an exaggeration to say that Israel’s attack on Iran fizzled. Some targets were hit and at least two Iranian soldiers were killed, but the ineffectiveness of the operation was probably due to several factors:

    1. Israel just doesn’t have the weaponry. Most of its missiles don’t have the distance, and those that do, just barely so. That’s true for a lot of its drones, too, and they are too easily detected and don’t have the carrying power.
    2. The US didn’t aid, in particular with refueling manned aircraft. It’s just as well. It would have been a good way to lose both pilots and aircraft.
    3. Most of the nations geographically in between Israel and Iran would not permit overflights from either Israel or the US. Iran told these nations that they prefer to remain on good terms with them, and that they would consider it an act of war to lend their airspace to Israeli operations.
    4. Iranian antiaircraft systems were apparently quite effective.

    Other factors may have been involved. It is possible that cooler heads prevailed in the Israeli and US militaries, for example, but we may never know, or at least not soon. Nevertheless, the main reason that Israel did not cause more damage appears not to be a question of intention, but of capability. There’s no question that Israel was hoping for an escalation that would widen the war and force the US to enter on Israel’s side. That appears to have been avoided. Iran will have to respond, but unlike Israel, neither Iran nor the US wants escalation. Iran’s response will therefore be measured, and they will declare the matter settled.

    The Netanyahu government now finds itself squarely in check, though not yet checkmated. Nevertheless, the best it can do now is probably a stalemate. This is not good in the short run for Gaza and the Palestinians, nor for Lebanon, but it’s also not good for Israel, whose population is emigrating, whose economy is tanking, and which is generally a pariah throughout the world. Its decades of building its image as glamorous, progressive and a technological powerhouse is gone. It is now the redoubt of religious fanatics and criminals that even much of the international Jewish community is loathe to support. Its current mainstay is the international network of influence peddlers such as AIPAC, whose power has not dwindled in the US and other western governments, due to its ability to enrich the military industrial complex and to control the elective processes in these governments. With the loss of a wider base in the Jewish community, however, that power is likely to decline.

    The post The Escalator Grinds to a Halt first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pro-Palestine Activists Target Invisible Genocide Profiteer in Arms Supply Chain

    As Israel’s campaign of mass killing in Palestine enters its second year and extends to Lebanon, the collective sense of urgency felt by people around the globe has inspired a shift in organizing strategy. Activists in the U.S. have been organizing to quell the Israeli war machine by turning their attention to logistics companies that physically deliver munitions to Israel.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • As Ukraine War Reaches Violent New Heights, US Boosts Weapons Production

    The death toll in Russia’s war on Ukraine is reaching alarming new heights. Roughly 1 million soldiers and civilians on both sides have been killed or wounded, a recent in-depth review of available data published by the Wall Street Journal found. As Russia attempts to secure key towns and cities in the Donbas region, the war of attrition along the front line has become extremely violent as the…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Failures of U.S. Middle East Policies

    United States foreign policies are marked by intermittent failures, often accomplishing the opposite of what is intended — Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq are examples. A difference between U.S. policies in the Middle East and State Department walkthroughs in other regions is that the Middle East policies have been consistent failures, worse than adversaries relish.

    Immediately after World War II, Cold War competition with the Soviet Union drove U.S. policies, mildly favored Israel, and tended toward achieving a balance of power between the Zionist state and Arab world. Israel’s victory in the 1967 six-day war changed the status quo. Warsaw Pact nations had supplied arms to Egypt, ostensibly for defensive purposes, and Israel’s rapid offensive angered them. The Soviet bloc severing of relations with Israel led Washington to believe the Arab world had allied with the Soviet Union and motivated Uncle Sam to elevate relations with the victorious nation. Each year, the commitment to advance Israel’s supremacy and slaughter of the Palestinian people grew. Each year, the democratic appearance and humanistic values of the American system deteriorated. Each year, the American system, established in 1789, tended toward destruction of its political and social fabrics.

    President Jimmy Carter added a Middle East foreign policy directive by claiming the Soviet Union posed a grave threat to the free movement of Middle Eastern oil through the Persian Gulf. Safeguarding the oil flow was of vital interest to the United States of America. Framed in other words, the U.S. had another mission ─ prevent Iran from threatening Arab kingdoms and disturbing the flow of oil.

    One approach to examining policies is to compare results with intentions. Dr. Michael S. Bell, professor at the National Defense University Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, has given a sensible definition of the policies: 1) protection of the American homeland from terrorist attacks; 2) peace between countries in the region; 3) nonproliferation of nuclear weapons; and 4) the free flow of energy and commerce to the global economy.

    Protection of the American homeland from terrorist attacks

    Protection from terrorist attacks did not occur, not in the homeland, at American military bases, and in American embassies. The American people remain unformed why Sept 11, 2001 and other terrorist attacks occurred.

    The errors started with President Ronald Reagan allowing the CIA to shuffle funds to Pakistan intelligence, who used the funds to finance Saudi construction engineer, Osama bin Laden, to construct roads and bases in Afghanistan that eventually became training grounds for al-Qaeda militants. The road led through several nations. Along its path, al-Qaeda recruited others to form new terrorist organizations and attack American facilities in several countries. In Afghanistan, the CIA paved the road to the 9/11 terrorist attack on American soil.

    Hidden from public knowledge is that America’s support for Israel contributed to Obama bin Laden‘s arguments with the United States. The al-Qaeda leader revealed his attitude in the opening sentences of a “Letter to America.” Bin Laden’s words are unpleasant and offensive but taking notice and reading them was a prerequisite for devising a strategy that defeated terrorism and protected Americans. The letter’s opening statements.

     Why are we fighting and opposing you? The answer is very simple:

    (1) Because you attacked us and continue to attack us.

    a) You attacked us in Palestine:

    (i) Palestine, which has sunk under military occupation for more than 80 years. The British handed over Palestine, with your help and your support, to the Jews, who have occupied it for more than 50 years; years overflowing with oppression, tyranny, crimes, killing, expulsion, destruction and devastation. The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals. And of course there is no need to explain and prove the degree of American support for Israel. The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily.

    (b) You attacked us in Somalia; you supported the Russian atrocities against us in Chechnya, the Indian oppression against us in Kashmir, and the Jewish aggression against us in Lebanon.

    The letter appeared in 1998, but before that date bin Laden had signaled his displeasure with America. Ignoring the reasons for his threats was a grave policy mistake and proved fatal. Policy errors manufactured additional policy errors.

    By stationing U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the 1991 Persian Gulf war, President George H. W. Bush aroused Radical Islamists in the Desert Kingdom to join forces with Osama bin Laden. On December 29, 1992, a bomb exploded  at the Gold Mohur hotel in Aden, Yemen, where U.S. troops had been staying while on route to Somalia.

    Intelligence and strategy failures by President Bill Clinton elevated al-Qaeda to an international enterprise. President Clinton’s aggressive policy in Somalia created a mistrust of American power among East Africans and an anarchy that eventually led to emergence of The Islamic Courts Union ( ICU), who preached Shariah as law and ruled parts of Somalia at various times. After being defeated, the ICU evolved into Al-Shabaab, an al-Qaeda look alike in East Africa.

    • On Friday, February 26, 1993, Kuwaiti Ramzi Yousef and Jordanian Eyad Ismoil parked a yellow Ryder van in the public parking garage beneath the World Trade Center. Later in the day, the van exploded, killing six people and injuring 1,042.
    • In June 1996, an enormous truck bomb detonated in the Khobar Towers residential complex for Air Force personnel in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing nineteen Americans and wounding 372.
    • Truck bomb explosions occurred on 7 August 1998 at U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya, and killed hundreds of people. The attacks were linked to local members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, under direction from Osama bin Laden.
    • Al-Qaeda associates bombed the U.S. Navy warship, USS Cole, in October 2000 and killed 17 sailors. Al-Qaeda in Yemen, soon to become al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, was born.

    No intelligence failures can possibly compare to those that enabled foreign terrorists to enter the United States, request one-way flying lessons, take planes up with no concern about being able to land them, book flight tickets, walk through airport inspections, seize commercial planes in mid-flight, and fly them into public buildings. No terrorist action has been as serious as those that occurred on September 11, 2001.

    Guided by a tendency to assist Radical Islam in its endeavors, the George Bush administration provided a route for al-Qaeda to mature into ISIS. The invasion of Iraq and disposal of a Saddam Hussein regime, which had prevented al-Qaeda elements from establishing themselves, exposed Iraq’s porous borders to Radical Islamic fighters. Founded in October 2004, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) emerged from a transnational terrorist group, created and led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His cohorts entered through Jordan, while al-Qaeda members forced out of Waziristan in Pakistan found a safe haven in Iraq. Fighters trained in the deserts of Saudi Arabia hopped planes to Istanbul and Damascus and worked their way across Syria into Iraq. Disturbed by the U.S. invasion and military tactics, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali Muhammad al-Badri al-Samarrai, later known as Al Baghdadi, founder of the Islamic Caliphate, transformed himself from a fun loving soccer player into a hardened militant and helped to found Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamaah (JJASJ) and countered the U.S. military in Iraq.

    After previous disastrous policies prepared the framework for ISIS to establish its caliphate, and spawn “look-alikes” in Yemen and throughout North Africa, President Barack Obama approached the dangerous situation with confusion. Not wanting to betray his French ally, Obama brought his country into the Libyan civil war and enabled Radical Islamists a safe haven in the new Libya

    Since the overthrow of Moammar Gadhafi, a leader who constrained al-Qaeda, militants from Libya have flowed east, through friendly Turkey into Syria and Iraq to join ISIS. Weapons captured from Gadhafi’s stockpiles have flowed west to equip al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Militants trained in post-Gadhafi Libya attacked tourists at beaches and museums in Tunisia; Boko Haram spreads havoc throughout northern Nigeria and parts of Chad.

    The al-Qaeda that the U.S. helped create committed the greatest single act of foreign destruction to American soil. The Afghanistan the U.S. helped establish became the Afghanistan the U.S. was  forced to combat and could not destroy. The Israel that the U.S. nourished and fortified contributed to the development of international terrorism and to the U.S. failure in containing  it, a common thread through all U.S. Middle East policy failures. The American people sat silently as its State Department and Israel brought terrorism to American shores.

    Peace between countries in the region

    Instead of bringing a pledged peace and stability to the Middle East, the U.S. has brought constant violence and mayhem. Except for Iraq’s wars against Iran and Kuwait, and some skirmishes in Yemen, the Middle East Arab nations have not attacked one another. The United States has been twice at war with Iraq and has engaged Syria, Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Patron Israel has fought wars with Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt and has had continuous strife with the Palestinians, which have exploded into intense battles in Gaza. The U.S. invasion of Iraq came from the bidding of the Neocons  ─ American officials allied with Israel. Deceptively portrayed as a war to defeat Saddam Hussein’s’ developments of farcical “weapons of mass destruction,” the invasion of Iraq used American forces to subdue Israel’s principal nemesis.

    Reasons for U.S. antipathy toward Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Yemen Houthis, and Iran are not clear. None of these nationalities have attacked the U.S. or its personnel. Their common expressions are opposition to (1) Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people; (2) seizing Arab lands, and (3) disturbing Muslim sites in Jerusalem. Without Israel, dominating their lives, the Middle East might have rivalries but warfare is not probable. U.S. policy of bringing peace between countries in the region could not succeed. Support of an aggressive Israel meant peace in the region was impossible.

    Nonproliferation of nuclear weapons

    Nonproliferation of nuclear weapons is best accomplished by making certain that no nation fears a nuclear threat. By ignoring Israel’s development of the atomic bomb, the U.S. made sure that Middle East nations felt constantly threatened by an aggressive Israeli military machine. Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Syria briefly sought nuclear developments and were stopped. Although denying it, Iran is presently believed to be in an advanced stage toward developing an atomic bomb. Do away with Israel’s atomic bombs and assuredly, Iran will halt its developments. Another failure of U.S. policy due to its strange relations with Israel.

    Free flow of energy and commerce to the global economy.

    OPEC determines the price of oil and the U.S. does not control OPEC. President Carter’s anxiety that closing the Strait of Hormuz will greatly disturb oil shipments to Western nations is exaggerated. The burning of oil by the U.S. fifth fleet in the Indian Ocean contributes as much to the price of oil as would the closure of the Straits of Hormuz. Well, not exactly, but it’s a point.

    In 2022, oil flow through the Straits “averaged 21 million barrels per day (b/d), or the equivalent of about 21% of global petroleum liquids consumption. Estimates are that” 82% of the crude oil and condensate that moved through the Strait of Hormuz went to Asian markets in 2022. China, India, Japan, and South Korea were the top destinations for the crude oil ….In 2022, the United States imported about 0.7 million b/d of crude oil and condensate from Persian Gulf countries through the Strait of Hormuz, accounting for about 11% of U.S. crude oil and condensate imports and 3% of U.S. petroleum liquids consumption.” China received 1/3 of the Asian market for the crude oil.

    Whose free flow of energy is the fifth fleet protecting? Very little to the Western markets; more to the Asian markets and mostly to China. The fifth fleet, which has been hanging around in the Indian ocean for thirty years waiting for Godot is principally occupied to defend Chinese (our nemesis) right to assure oil shipments.

    If the United States wants to assure Iran will not interfere with oil shipments, why not become friends with Iran? Good reason to be friends with the mullahs. Friends help friends, except when the “friend” is Israel.

    Want to receive shocks in free flow of oil, Israel is the “go to guy.” The deepest scarcity of oil and high prices occurred when oil producing Arab nations embargoed oil to the United States in retaliation for U.S. rescue mission of military shipments to Israel during the !973 Yom Kippur War, another U.S. Middle East policy of sacrificing the interests of the U.S. people to enhance Israel’s interests.

    Conclusion

    U.S. Middle East policies have been consistent failures, bringing great harm to Arab populations and to the American people. In all the policies, beginning with the ratification of the 1947 Partition Plan and arriving at military assistance to Israel in its 2023 war on Gaza, the Israel state appears and diverts the policies to catastrophes. Americans of good conscience stand aghast at Israel’s slaughter of the Palestinians and America’s participation in the genocide. They do not realize that the Palestinian genocide is a byproduct of 70 years of slaughter of the American psyche and its institutions. Too few take notice of the onslaught on American academic and press freedoms, corruption of American values, coopting of its political system, and reduction of its intellectual qualities. Assailants sink America further into an abyss and more Palestinians are murdered from the same assailants. Americans and Palestinians are “captured in a web that imprisons every faculty and sense.” Only a captured faculty can allow a genocide. No  genocide makes sense and this genocide makes all of us senseless.

    The post Failures of U.S. Middle East Policies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The US Sends Troops to Israel

    The dangers should be plastered on every wall in every office occupied by a military and political advisor.  Israel’s attempt to reshape the Middle East, far from giving it enduring security, will merely serve to make it more vulnerable and unstable than ever.  In that mix and mess will be its greatest sponsor and guardian, the United States, a giant of almost blind antiquity in all matters concerning the Jewish state.

    In a measure that should have garnered bold headlines, the Biden administration has announced the deployment of some 100 US soldiers to Israel who will be responsible for operating the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system.  They are being sent to a conflict that resembles a train travelling at high speed, with no risk of stopping.  As Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant promised in the aftermath of Iran’s October 1 missile assault on his country, “Our strike will be powerful, precise, and above all – surprising.”  It would be of such a nature that “They will not understand what happened and how it happened.”

    In an October 16 meeting between the Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Gallant, the deployment of a mobile THAAD battery was seen “as an operational example of the United States’ ironclad support to the defense of Israel.”  Largely meaningless bits of advice were offered to Gallant: that Israel “continue taking steps to address the dire humanitarian situation” and take “all necessary measures to ensure the safety and security” of UN peacekeepers operating in Lebanon’s south.

    The charade continued the next day in a conversation between Austin and Gallant discussing the killing of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar.  THAAD was again mentioned as essential for Israel’s “right to defence itself” while representing the “United States’ unwavering, enduring, and ironclad commitment to Israel’s security.”  (“Ironclad” would seem to be the word of the moment, neatly accompanying Israel’s own Iron Dome defence system.)

    A statement from the Pentagon press secretary, Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder, was a fatuous effort in minimising the dangers of the deployment.  The battery would merely “augment Israel’s integrated air defense system,” affirm the ongoing commitment to Israel’s defence and “defend Americans in Israel, from any further ballistic missile attacks from Iran.”

    The very public presence of US troops, working alongside their Israeli counterparts in anticipation of broadening conflict, does not merely suggest Washington’s failure to contain their ally.  It entails a promise of ceaseless supply, bolstering and emboldening.  Furthermore, it will involve placing US troops in harm’s way, a quixotic invitation if ever there was one.

    As things stand, the US is already imperilling its troops by deploying them in a series of bases in Jordan, Syria and Iraq.  Iran’s armed affiliates have been making their presence felt, harrying the stationed troops with increasing regularity since the Israel-Hamas war broke out on October 7 last year. A gradual, attritive toll is registering, featuring such attacks as those on the Tower 22 base in northern Jordan in January that left three US soldiers dead.

    Writing in August for the Guardian, former US army major Harrison Mann eventually realised an awful truth about the mounting assaults on these sandy outposts of the US imperium: “there was no real plan to protect US troops beyond leaving them in their small, isolated bases while local militants, emboldened and agitated by US support for Israel’s brutal war in Gaza, used them for target practice.”  To send more aircraft and warships to the Middle East also served to encourage “reckless escalation towards a wider war,” providing insurance to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he could be protected “from the consequences of his actions.”

    Daniel Davis, a military expert at Defense Priorities, is firmly logical on the point of enlisting US personnel in the Israeli cause. “Naturally, if Americans are killed in the execution of their duties, there will be howls from the pro-war hawks in the West ‘demanding’ the president ‘protect our troops’ by firing back on Iran.”  It was “exactly the sort of thing that gets nations sucked into war they have no interest in fighting.”

    Polling, insofar as that measure counts, suggests that enthusiasm for enrolling US troops in Israel’s defence is far from warm.  In results from a survey published by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations in August, some four in ten polled would favour sending US troops to defend Israel if it was attacked by Iran.  Of the sample, 53% of Republicans would favour defending Israel in that context, along with four in 10 independents (42%), and a third of Democrats (34%).

    There have also been some mutterings from the Pentagon itself about Israel’s burgeoning military effort, in particular against the Lebanese Iran-backed militia, Hezbollah.  In a report from the New York Times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., is said to be worried about the widening US presence in the region, a fact that would hamper overall “readiness” of the US in other conflicts.  Being worried is just the start of it.

    The post The US Sends Troops to Israel first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Despite Lammy’s claims, evidence PROVES Labour is STILL complicit in Israel’s war crimes

    A new briefing from Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) reveals that, despite imposing a partial arms sales suspension, the Labour Party government is still complicit in Israel’s war crimes in Gaza.

    Labour arms sales leave complicity wide open

    On 2 September, the government suspended just 30 out of about 350 export licences to Israel. The briefing provides detailed analysis of UK arms export licences, what is included in the partial embargo, and more importantly, what has been omitted and what remains unknown, with a focus on the exports of components for the F-35 combat aircraft.

    F-35 components, so long as they are not sent directly to Israel, are exempted from the suspension, despite evidence Israel is using F-35s to commit violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL).

    On the very day Labour arms sales suspension was announced, Danish NGO Danwatch revealed that an F-35 was used in July to drop three 2000lb bombs in an attack on a so-called “safe zone” on Al-Mawasi in Khan Younis, killing 90 people. The attack almost certainly violated IHL.

    The UK makes 15% of every F-35. CAAT estimates the value of UK parts in the 39 planes delivered to Israel so far since 2016 is roughly £360 million. This is almost three times as much as the value of all the other aircraft-related licences to Israel over the same period.

    The F-35 is almost certainly the single largest and most important part of the UK arms trade with Israel. Since F-35 exports are made using an open licence that allows unlimited exports, these figures are often omitted in media reporting of UK arms sales to Israel which tend to focus on single licences as these are the only licences with a financial value attached.

    The F-35 is central to this

    This figure does not include spare parts. Freedom of Information requests by CAAT reveal that the number of uses of the Open General Export Licence (OGEL) for the F-35 to deliver parts directly to Israel nearly tripled in 2023.

    We do not know when in any year deliveries occurred, or how much was delivered each time, but this jump very likely indicates an increased demand by Israel for spare parts since 7 October. We also don’t know how often the OGEL was used to export spare parts to the US or to the global F-35 stockpile that were subsequently exported to Israel.

    Despite the government accepting that F-35 components could be used by Israel in its genocide in Gaza, and suspending direct exports, it made an exception for components going into the global stockpile that could still be exported to Israel. MP Hamish Falconer stated this was:

    to ensure international peace and security it was necessary to take the specific measure of excluding exports to the F-35 program from the scope of the suspension, but this exclusion should not in principle apply to licences for F-35 components which could be identified as going to Israel.

    CAAT argues in the briefing that the government is making up the rules as it goes, and that it is making this exception to appease both the US and the arms industry.

    The briefing also highlights other problematic exports and exposes the lack of transparency in the UK arms licensing system.

    The UK is still complicit in Israel’s war crimes

    Another key issue identified in the briefing is the failure to ban arms exports to the Israeli arms industry for use in systems intended for export to a third country. However, there are no guarantees that some of the exported components do not also go into equipment for use by the Israeli military. Moreover, by supporting Israel’s domestic arms industry, the UK government is facilitating Israel’s ability to commit war crimes in Gaza and Lebanon.

    Emily Apple, CAAT’s media coordinator stated:

    This damning briefing reveals that the Labour government is still complicit in Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It lays bare the lack of transparency in UK arms exports, and shows that Labour is making up the rules as it goes along.

    Despite the partial suspension, it is still business as usual for arms dealers to profit from the genocide of Palestinian people, and the Labour government has shown clearly that it will continue to prioritise the profits of arms dealers over Palestinian and Lebanese lives. A full two way arms embargo is needed immediately. There can be no excuses, no exceptions and no loopholes.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Nuclear Fever: War Mongering on Iran

    The recent string of exaggerated military successes – or at least as they are understood to be – places Israel in a situation it has been previously used to: prowess in war.  Such prowess promises much: redrawing boundaries; overthrowing governments; destroying the capabilities of adversaries and enemies.  Nothing, in this equation, contemplates peace, let alone diplomatic resolution. It’s playground pugilism that rarely gets out of the sandpit.

    In Washington, a fever has struck regarding Israel’s advances.  The outbreak has stirred much enthusiasm in a doctrine that has been shown, time and again, to be wretchedly uncertain and grossly dangerous.  With no concrete evidence of imminent harm to US interests, it featured in the highest policy planning circles that oiled an invasion of Iraq in 2003.  While the stated objective was the disarming of Saddam Hussein’s regime for having Weapons of Mass Destruction it turned out not to have, the logic was one of pre-emptive strike: we attack the madman in Baghdad before he goes nuclear and loses it.

    The establishment wonk on empire and espionage at the Washington Post, David Ignatius, offers a fairly meaningless assessment in terms of claimed Israeli dominance over Iran and its proxies.  After a year of conflict, Israel had “gained what military strategists call ‘escalation dominance’”.  The implication: a decisive attack on Iran is imminent.

    The point here (at this juncture, the mind lost seeks sanctuary in a mental asylum of lunatic reassurances), is that attacking Iran in toto will not result in much by way of retaliatory detriment.  Some bruising, surely, but hardly lingering flesh wounds.  Israel has, it would seem, been working some magic, spreading its own view that Iran has a gruesome plan in its military vault: eliminating Israel by 2040.

    In Foreign Policy, Matthew Kroenig, generously self-described as a national security strategist, blusters for war.  “Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” he asserts with childish longing.  The reason for such an attack lies in a presumption.  Yet again, the doctrine of pre-emption, one hostile to international law and the UN Charter, plays out its feeble rationale.  Evidence, in such cases, is almost always scanty.  Kroenig, however, is certain.  Iran will secure one bomb’s worth of weapon-grade material within a matter of weeks.  The rest is obvious.  No evidence is offered, nor does it even matter, given Kroenig’s longstanding zeal in wishing to rid Iran of its nuclear facilities.

    The Atlantic Council has also suggested a policy that what is good for the goose of Christian-Jewish freedom is not good for the gander of Persian Shia ambition.  It is exactly this full-fledged hypocrisy that the despots of the secular tyranny in North Korea realised in dealing with Washington.  Beware the nostrums against nuclear armament.

    In a report authored by both Democrats and Republicans for the Council, a warning of chilling absurdity is offered: “The United States needs to maintain a declaratory policy, explicitly enunciated by the president, that it will not tolerate Iran getting a nuclear weapon and will use military force to prevent this development if all other measures fail.”

    Instead of resisting belligerent chatter, the authors suggest that the US threaten Iran through announcing “yearly joint exercises with Israel, such as Juniper Oak and seek additional funding in the next budget cycle to speed research and development of next-generation military hardware capable of destroying Iran’s nuclear program.”

    Kroenig shows his usual stuffing.  Iran can never have nuclear weapons, because the United States and Israel say so.  (The Sunni powers, for their own reasons, agree.)  This form of perennial idiocy could apply to all the powers that have nuclear weapons, including Israel itself.  At one point, no state should have had that relic of sadism’s folly.  Then they came in succession after the United States: the Soviet bomb, the Britannic bomb, the Gallic bomb.  Throw in China, India, Pakistan, Israel.  Plucky, deranged North Korea, was wise to note the trend, showing lunacy to be eternally divisible.

    It is precisely that sort of logic that has drawn such comments as this from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a May interview: “Iran’s level of deterrence will be different if the existence of Iran is threatened.  We have no decision to produce a nuclear bomb, but we will have to change our nuclear doctrine if such threats occur.”  This month, almost 40 legislators penned a letter to the Supreme National Security Council calling for a reconsideration of current nuclear doctrine.  The greater the fanatic’s desire to remove a perceived threat, the more likely an opponent will give basis to that threat.

    For all the faux restraint being officially aired in Washington regarding Israel’s next round of military assaults, there is enormous sympathy, even affection, for the view that wrongs shall be righted, and the mullahs punished.  Bedding for a more hostile response to Iran also features in the inane airings of the presidential election.  Vice President Kamala Harris, in an interview with 60 Minutes, remarked that, “Iran has American blood on its hands, okay?” In making that claim, she suggested that Tehran was somehow Washington’s greatest adversary.

    In response to this fatuous remark, Justin Logan of the Cato Institute offers an ice-cold bath of reason: “This is not the Wehrmacht in 1940.”  The path to dominating the Middle East hardly involves such tools as propaganda, proxy operations and psychological warfare “much less becoming the greatest threat to the United States.”

    The nuclear option is now available to governments that should never have had them.  But acquiring the dangerously untenable followed.  To assume that brutal, amputation loving theocrats in Tehran should not have them defies the trajectory of a certain moronic consistency.  The Persian bomb is probably imminent, and it is incumbent on the murderous fantasists in Israel and the United States to chew over that fact.  Unfortunately for the rest of us, the fetish against acquisition risks expanding a conventional conflict through testing the will and means of a power that, while wounded, hardly counts as defeated.

    The post Nuclear Fever: War Mongering on Iran first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • ‘Silent Coup’ reveals how corporations ‘steal resources and ransack the poor’ from the shadows

    The excellent and massively important Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy is now available in paperback. To mark the occasion, we spoke to its co-author Matt Kennard. And we delved into the book, including a powerful new foreword from Jeremy Corbyn.

    As Kennard and co-author Claire Provost write, a key reason for reading the book is that:

    To have hope for a better future we must know more about both of these things: how corporations have stolen our power, and how we can work to get it back.

    Because of the extreme corporate bias of our mainstream media, however, most people don’t hear about either the architects of the current system or the people around the world resisting that system. And that’s where the book comes in.

    It hopes to inform and empower readers by providing not only proof of the silent coup that has occurred, but also of “examples around the world of local communities winning, against the odds, battles against transnational corporate power”. As the authors insist:

    Hidden scripts and untold stories – once found – can be torn up, or built on.

    Kennard: we can run economies democratically

    The Canary asked Kennard about the structure of the book, and he said “We started on the international legal system that allows corporations to sue states then discovered each subsequent section as we went”. The “information we were finding”, he added, “guided us to the next element of corporate control that we felt we had to look at”. And he stressed that:

    There is some overlap between all the sections because this is a massive infrastructure that is all linked by design. It operates as a strait-jacket that seeks to make it impossible for any so-called sovereign government to move against corporate power.

    Within this infrastructure of corporate control, he stated that “the aid industry is particularly important because it gives the system a patina of altruism and ‘doing good’, so it is supported by many well-meaning people”. He continued:

    One of the biggest revelations I had doing the reporting from 25 countries was that nearly all corporate projects in the developing world are supported by some aid money of some sort. This money often insures them against risk and allows them to get cheap loans.

    The whole capitalist system is undergirded by the aid industry which operates as a state insurance and subsidy mechanism to the corporate sector. It goes against everything about how we are told capitalism works.

    I’m not against aid as an idea if it was done as it is presented, but agencies like the World Bank are concerned with upholding a certain neoliberal way of managing economies around the world and because they have all the credit it is very hard for countries to say no and take a different course in terms of a development model.

    But one thing that shines through is the way the book shares stories of hope. As Kennard told the Canary:

    Everywhere we went we saw the other side of this corporate takeover, which was resistance by the people on the ground.

    Literally nowhere I went was this system not being opposed by groups of differing size and strength. In El Salvador we saw a huge mobilisation against ISDS after their country was sued for not granting an environmental permit to a mining company.

    In Argentina we saw the amazing advances made in the ‘fabricas nomads’ (taken factories) which grew up after the cataclysmic financial crisis in the country in 2001. Workers took control of the companies that went bust and ran them themselves.

    There were difficulties and obstacles but they still exist to this day and give a taste of what is possible if power is wrenched back to workers and how our economy could be run along democratic lines, if they were allowed.

    Silent Coup: the road to dystopia and the road away from it

    Although the story of corporate control goes back to colonial times, the authors explain in the book, it was only after the end of the Cold War that the offensive really ramped up. With the Soviet Union out of the way:

    Each of the areas of global corporate power we look at – control over laws, economies, territories and the use of force – reached dizzying new heights.

    There has been resistance, though. And one example they give is the Zapatista movement in southern Mexico, which proved that the success of the global elite’s power grab is not inevitable.

    The authors highlight in particular how ‘joint-stock companies’ (which raise money by promising a share in future profits) were a crucial part of the colonial story. Bit by bit, these companies escaped from the regulation of nation states. In some cases, corporations have even ended up running “whole cities and territories”. And thanks to legal professionals, they have risen to the status of “legal ‘persons’, with corresponding ‘rights’ and protections”.

    In 2023, for example, Kennard and Provost explain that elite backers of Donald Trump set out to “sue Mexico for $3 billion in land dispute with peasants”. This came after the Mexican government had finally ordered corporate giant Amway to return land they had reportedly purchased illegally many years before. But that’s not the type of story the corporate media is fond of sharing. So as the authors insist, stories like these from the book “are too often unfolding above our heads and in the shadows.

    If the dominance of corporations continues, they stress, it won’t be possible to avoid the most severe consequences of the climate crisis we’re living through. Campaigners, however, are ramping up efforts to “block or dismantle structures benefitting corporations at the expense of people and the environment, while also building new structures and rewriting the rules for a better future”.

    Legal warfare, foreign aid, ‘special zones’, and private-sector mercenaries

    Summarising the four main parts of the book, Kennard told the Canary:

    The first section deals with the investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) system which is a legal mechanism which allows multinational corporations to sue governments all over the world for enacting policies they don’t like, from not granting environmental permits to increasing the minimum wage.

    The second section focuses on so-called foreign aid, which most people think of string-free gifts from the rich world to the poor. This is a completely misplaced assumption. Aid actually developed as a way to repackage economic imperialism after decolonisation after World War 2. Many of the institutions which compose the ecosystem, from USAID to World Bank, are about greasing the entry of corporations into new markets, and subsiding the corporations at the same time.

    The third section deals with what are called Special Economic Zones or Economic Processing Zones, there’s many names. But what they are is carved out pieces of territories where corporations often don’t have to abide by national laws to do with taxation, customs, duties, labour rights, a whole panoply of different carve outs. There are now thousands of them around the world and extreme neoliberal policies are piloted in them and then rolled out at a national level.

    The last section deals with the privatisation of the use of force in our society, whether that be the proliferation of private military contractors helping nation states fight wars, or private security guarding gated communities and other corporate sites around the world. This has huge import for our political systems as the right to the ‘legitimate use of force’ has up until recently always rested with the nation state through the military and police and other agencies. This is now moving to the private sphere, which is thus far completely unregulated.

    Corbyn: Silent Coup will inform, empower, and activate people

    In Jeremy Corbyn’s foreword to the book, he explains how global corporations filled the power vacuum that European empires left behind and used their power to “sabotage the growth of democracy”. But he insists that they’re vulnerable when ordinary people are actually aware of what they’re doing.

    A case in point, regarding the awful behaviour of private corporations, is “how the water companies pollute British rivers and seas by letting raw sewage flow into them”. Although the current government may not be a fan of the idea, he stresses that the obvious solution is to “tell them to bog off and take our water utilities into public ownership”. And if people saw through the corporate PR and really knew about all of the other horrors going on, they would say much the same thing.

    Praising Silent Coup, he stresses that:

    This book demonstrates, with many examples, how a silent yet steady takeover of government and the economy by corporate power means we are faced with a combination of corporate greed, consumerism and a media that is not prepared to investigate the reality of what is happening in front of them.

    A group of Colombian land rights campaigners once told him “political power comes from the power of communities to influence and pressurise those in government”. And the ability to do that, he says, depends on the information those communities have. “To inform people is to empower and activate them”, he insists, and that’s what Silent Coup does.

    Kennard: join a union and support independent media

    Kennard agrees that the information in the book is about empowering people to fight back. As he told us when speaking about the action he would like people to take after reading the book:

    I think the most important thing is to spread the knowledge. This system gets away with all the exploitation and rapacity because it operates in the shadows. We need people to understand the intricacies of the corporate system because when they do they understand that it is about stealing resources and ransacking the poor, the same dynamic since the age of empire began.

    He added:

    Then we need to build up the only force that can challenge this system on the scale it needs to be challenged: organised labour. Join a union and most importantly make that union democratic and responsive to workers.

    And finally, he stressed:

    All the revelations and analysis in the book is impossible to get into the mass media because it is largely owned by the forces we are exposing. We need to build a new media independent of corporate and state control that provides a truthful account of who and what runs our society untainted by the powerful forces which do not want the truth to come out.

    I am hopeful that we are making advances in this regard with outlets like the Canary, Declassified UK and many others. It’s a long-term project but is the most important part of any move towards to creating a world and global economy that is run in the interests of people not concentrated wealth and power.

    We highly recommend reading the book, which you can get here.

    Featured image supplied

    By Ed Sykes

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Deconstructing a Military Mindset

    The views expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of Georgia Tech, the US Air Force, Department of Defense, or the US Government.

    Somewhere around the age of 20, I sat in a large auditorium at the United States Air Force Academy with a thousand other cadets and cheered at footage of real drone strikes on real people, laughing along with everyone else as we watched little, pixelated figures run for cover that we all knew was futile. When I look back on that event, I wonder what part of me I had to sacrifice to find humor in the loss of life.

    In many ways, it’s thanks to the Air Force Academy that I currently have an anti-war stance. I was given the tools to examine my military service and foreign policy in a couple mundane, core classes: law and ethics, though my ethics course has stuck with me the most, ironically enough. I hated my ethics course because I thought most of it was redundant and self-explanatory: don’t do bad things! I couldn’t understand why people dedicated their lives to it.

    Despite my best efforts, I learned a lot about the darker side of American history – we talked about the My Lai Massacre, the dropping of the atomic bombs, Ehren Watada and his refusal to deploy in an unjust war, drone warfare and the moral implications of being so far removed from the resultant violence. We learned to question the moral nature of military decisions.

    This was quite a shock to someone like me, who had until then been so inundated with military stories of valor and bravery, but I wrote it off as best as I could, unwilling to put in the work of deconstructing a pro-military mindset that was six years in the making.

    It wasn’t until 2024 that the pieces of the puzzle started coming together for me.

    The active genocide in Gaza is in blatant disregard of international law and in violation of every rule surrounding civilian casualties in war, both concepts that were heavily covered during my academy schooling. I had tried to take a neutral stance, one that would allow me to continue justifying the US’ actions, but seeing in the news and talking to veterans and active duty members who had the courage to speak up gave me the push I needed to decide for myself that I wouldn’t stand by anymore.

    I was horrified at the violence that was being endorsed and supported by our government in clear violation of what I had once thought was basic ethics. More than that, I realized that the U.S. decides who is worthy of life and who is to die, and by being part of the military, I have a hand in that. War is a terrible business, one that we’ve become desensitized to, and I don’t believe that we have to accept the inevitability of violence.

    I encourage everyone currently serving to critically examine the nature of their service.

    As an active duty service member, I have been told repeatedly that military strength is the only way to counteract the threats we face in the world. But once again we see violence, this time perpetrated by the Israeli government, only leads to death and destruction in an ever growing conflict. Hate begets hate.

    The post Deconstructing a Military Mindset first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Militarism Remains Front and Center for Many Filipino Voters in 2024

    One of the largest and most visible contingents marching outside the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago this past August was the “U.S. Out of the Philippines.” Its participants included Malaya Movement, Chicago Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (CCHRP), AnakBayan Chicago, and AnakBayan at UIC. The contingent was calling for the end of U.S. militarism in the Philippines…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • North Korea Does Not Pose a Threat to the United States

    In an election year, both US parties are competing to outdo one another with hawkish rhetoric on the Korean Peninsula, leaning heavily into the strategy of confrontation with China through the US-South Korea-Japan tripartite alliance; a flawed vision that threatens to “erupt into a regional war, a full-scale war, or even a nuclear war.”

    In her closing speech during the 2024 Democratic National Convention, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris presented the most openly militaristic take on Washington’s Korea policy “since the GOP convention that nominated [Senator Barry] Goldwater in 1964.” Harris’ hawkish view all but discards diplomacy to focus on herding South Korea and Japan together to form a US-led military triad to confront Chinese interests in East Asia. The candidate’s stance, echoed by the majority of the democratic party, raises what has been called a “truly baffling” prospect of a “Democratic president more aggressive towards [North Korea] than her Republican counterpart.”

    This comes at a time when the virtually nonstop US-led war drills in South Korea have achieved a level of scope and intensity that far exceeds even that of the Cold War.  Taking place in the heavily militarized Korean Peninsula and ostensibly directed at the ubiquitous “North Korean threat,” these exercises are in fact a preparation for a future US-led war against China as part of Washington’s bold new Indo-Pacific strategy.

    These momentous developments cap two years of virtually unabated military maneuvers at North Korea’s doorstep, beginning in 2023 with:

    • 250+ days of US and South Korean joint war drills
    • 21 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea
    • 10+ UN Command joint military maneuvers

    From January 1 to August 10, 2024 there have been:

    • 180 days of US and South Korean joint war drills
    •  17 instances in which US strategic assets, including nuclear-capable weapon platforms, were deployed to South Korea

    With the advent of the Biden administration, the prospect of a negotiated peace with North Korea all but vanished with the ultimate collapse of the modest confidence-building agreement in 2018 between Seoul and Pyongyang and South Korea, and Washington’s North Korea policy shifted to empowering South Korea’s autocratic Yoon administration to spearhead the “end of the North Korean regime” while the US steadily incorporates Korean military potential into its anti–China front.

    The “North Korean threat” has long served as the justification for the increasingly formidable US forward military position in Asia, but how much of a threat does North Korea actually pose to the US?

    North Korea spends only $4 billion annually on defense while the US annual defense budget is close to $900 billion. For North Korea to engage in the offensive use of its military against the US would be little short of suicide.

    In addition to this basic fact, the commander of US Forces Korea himself, Gen. Paul LaCamera, has openly stated that North Korea’s military posture and policy is to establish deterrence and defend its sovereignty, and has characterized Kim Jong-un’s top priorities as “regime survivability” and “preparing to defend his nation.”

    Kim himself has repeatedly stated that North Korea: “will never unilaterally unleash a war.”  Kim’s most urgent priority has been economic development under the “Regional Development 20×10 Policy,” an ambitious 10-year-plan to provide badly-needed improvements to civilian infrastructure and services for ordinary North Koreans.

    In spite of the relentlessly “manufactured image of a war-mad Kim Jong-un,” recent opinion polls show that only 2% of Americans named North Korea as a threat to the US, apparently evincing the common-sense realization that a weak country’s deterrent posture is not regarded as a real threat to the United States.

    Coexistence is an overlooked option

    Current US policy in the Korean peninsula is an extension of its Indo-Pacific doctrine, and relies on coupling economic warfare with military and political pressure against Pyongyang to maintain the level of tension required for the continued deployment of US forward assets against China.

    As Washington veers ever further into its collision course with China, it has recast South Korea as a “linchpin of the US-China strategy in Northeast Asia”; deepening the integration of US assets with South Korean conventional forces and inducting local troops to serve under US command as cannon fodder for a brewing regional war far beyond the confines of the Korean Peninsula.

    The US considers tensions in the Korean Peninsula necessary to justify its forward position in East Asia, which is underpinned by the garrisons it maintains in South Korea and Japan and solidified by its de facto control over the nominally independent military forces of these states. The US has been attempting to prod Beijing into a conflict over Taiwan in the same manner as it has provoked Russia into war over the Ukraine.

    One consequence of this strategy is that Washington’s hostility towards North Korea is becoming ever more entrenched in US foreign policy, with the US provoking South Korea, a US client state that lacks strategic independence, to escalate tensions with Pyongyang as a prelude to instigating a regional conflict with China. Under the pretext of deterring North Korea, the US is forcing South Korea into a brewing confrontation with China, in which the primary role of the South Korean military would be to tie down vital Chinese forces in a bloody inter-Korean conflict, giving the US a freer hand in the broader theater of operations.

    To help cement its hold over South Korea at this crucial juncture in Washington’s grand Indo-Pacific strategy, the Biden administration has propped up the authoritarian and deeply unpopular President Yoon Seok-yeol, whose signature foreign policy platform is a steadfast commitment to allowing his nation to be dragooned into the brewing US war with China. According to the latest opinion survey, more than 66% of South Koreans think that Yoon’s subordination to the US Indo-Pacific strategy makes Korea less safe.

    But what if relations with the North were treated as an inter-Korean or even a purely regional issue, and were decoupled from Washington’s broader anti-China strategy? The prospect of coexistence with the North possesses immense potential for stability and prosperity in the region.

    A North Korea free of US-led sanctions and unburdened by an overriding drive to shore up national  defense could arguably be a regional economic powerhouse. Given that North Korea has been vigorously pushing for ambitious economic development since its last nuclear weapons test in 2017, analysts foresee the North achieving meaningful economic development under the right conditions.

    If geopolitical conditions evolve to the point where some initial meaningful economic engagement becomes possible for the US and South Korea, Kim’s domestic agenda offers important benchmarks for collaboration and support that should be a starting point for helping him achieve success on improvements in the lives of the North Korean people.

    An economically integrated Korean peninsula in a multipolar Northeast Asia has the potential to be the “world’s next epicenter of change,” placing the combined economy of the Korean peninsula second only to China, the US, and India, with the North accounting for approximately one-fourth of this total economic potential.

    Arguably, a fundamental geopolitical shift with respect to North Korean economic integration is already underway: namely, the gradual erosion of US economic isolation as the North strengthens its ties with the two of the world’s largest economies: Russia and China. These developments occur at a critical historical juncture shaped by an increasing trend toward multipolarity coupled with the shifting geopolitical balance of power in Northeast Asia.

    America’s long-term strategic interest lies in unlocking the potential domestic benefits to the US of opening up the North Korean economy rather than attempting to maintain its hegemony through the relentless pursuit of regional destabilization in preparation for a future Sino-American conflict.

    Washington should instead work to reduce regional tensions by halting the increasingly provocative nuclear-conventional war games in the Korean Peninsula and putting US-North Korea normalization at the center of US foreign policy.

    The post North Korea Does Not Pose a Threat to the United States first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • UN’s High Ideals Brought down by American Legislation

    After a full year of unbridled genocide in Gaza, escalating slaughter in the West Bank, and now similar crimes inflicted on the Lebanese, Britain’s brand-new prime minister Keir Starmer made this astounding announcement the other day: “We stand with Israel.”

    He also has the UK military helping to protect Israel from Iran’s rockets while doing nothing to defend unarmed Palestinian women and children from the daily carnage inflicted by Israel’s “most moral” military.

    He refers to Hamas’s murderous breakout last October 7 but never mentions Israel’s massacres and other atrocities against Palestinians in the decades leading up to October 7. Yet he practised as a human rights lawyer and was Director of Public Prosecutions. Would you believe it?

    So what makes Western leaders abandon all sense of justice, all common sense and all norms of human decency in order to support, protect and supply a rogue regime in its lust to dominate, oppress, steal and butcher? Why such adoration for Israel in our corridors of power? Nobody I’ve spoken to can understand it.

    But it looks like the culprit could be America’s QME doctrine. In 2008 Congress enacted legislation requiring that US arms sales to any country in the Middle East other than Israel must not adversely affect Israel’s “qualitative military edge” (QME).

    Ensuring the apartheid state always has the upper hand over it neighbours

    Legislation defines QME as “the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from nonstate actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or nonstate actors.”

    In a speech to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on 4 November 2011, Andrew Shapiro (Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs at the State Department), enlarged on QME saying: “As a result of the Obama Administration’s commitment, our security relationship with Israel is broader, deeper and more intense than ever before. One of my primary responsibilities is to preserve Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge, or QME. This is not just a top priority for me, it is a top priority for the Secretary and for the President.

    “It is widely known that our two countries share a special bond that is rooted in our common values and interwoven cultures…. We are committed to that special bond, and we are going to do what’s required to back that up, not just with words but with actions.’

    “The cornerstone of America’s security commitment to Israel has been an assurance that the United States would help Israel uphold its qualitative military edge. This commitment was written into law in 2008 and each and every security assistance request from the Israeli Government is evaluated in light of our policy to uphold Israel’s Qualitative Military Edge.”

    ‘Strongly in sync’

    Shapiro explained how, for three decades, Israel had been the leading beneficiary of US security assistance through the Foreign Military Financing programme (FMF) which was providing $3 billion per year for training and equipment. A 2007 memorandum of understanding provided for $30 billion in security assistance over 10 years, allowing Israel to purchase the sophisticated defence equipment it needs to maintain its qualitative military edge. 60 percent of US security assistance funding to some 70 countries went to Israel.

    And here’s the funny bit. Shapiro claimed: “Our support for Israel’s security helps preserve peace and stability in the region. If Israel were weaker, its enemies would be bolder. This would make broader conflict more likely, which would be catastrophic to American interests in the region. It is the very strength of Israel’s military which deters potential aggressors and helps foster peace and stability. Ensuring Israel’s military strength and its superiority in the region, is therefore critical to regional stability and as a result is fundamentally a core interest of the United States.”

    That’s worked well, hasn’t it?

    “The United States also experiences a number of tangible benefits from our close partnership with Israel. For instance, joint exercises allow us to learn from Israel’s experience in urban warfare and counterterrorism.” Yes, gained from decades of assaults, bombardments and brutal persecution of the captive Palestinian people under Israeli military occupation.

    “Israeli technology is proving critical to improving our Homeland Security and protecting our troops. One only has to look at Afghanistan and Iraq…..

    “Israel is a vital ally and serves as a cornerstone of our regional security commitments. From confronting Iranian aggression, to working together to combat transnational terrorist networks, to stopping nuclear proliferation and supporting democratic change and economic development in the region – it is clear that both our strategic outlook, as well as our national interests are strongly in sync…. Our security assistance to Israel also helps support American jobs, since the vast majority of security assistance to Israel is spent on American-made goods and services.”

    It was then time for him to demonise Iran. “The Iranian regime continues to be committed to upsetting peace and stability in the region and beyond. Iran’s nuclear program is a serious concern, particularly in light of Iran’s expansion of the program over the past several years in defiance of its international obligations.”

    Speaking of international obligations, how safe is the region under the threat of Israel’s nukes? Why is Israel the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty? Are we all supposed to believe that Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nuclear warheads pose no threat? Why hasn’t Israel signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, and why has it signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention?

    Shapiro went on: “Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas enables these groups to fire rockets indiscriminately at Israeli population centers.” A bit like America’s support for the Israeli Offence Force then. “Iran’s extensive arms smuggling operations, many of which originate in Tehran and Damascus, weaken regional security and disrupt efforts to establish lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. As change sweeps the region, Iran has and should be expected to continue its attempts to exploit much positive change for its own cynical ambitions.”

    And are we to believe that Israel’s long-term illegal occupation of its neighbours’ territories such as Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and Shebaa Farms has nothing whatsoever to do with the Zionists’ “cynical ambitions”? Has it never occurred to the Americans that Israel’s QME — all that power in the hands of an abusive regime — makes peace impossible? It is deeply worrying that successive US administration don’t seem to realise that Israel doesn’t want peace and never has — that peace gets in the way of its territorial ambitions. Or has America indeed realised this and made it part of the US’s “cynical ambition”.

    Shapiro complained that despite its instability Syria was still providing Hezbollah with critical military and logistical support and that Syria might be supplying sophisticated missile technology. Perhaps he forgets that Hezbollah was set up in 1982 by Muslim clerics to fight the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.

    “For six decades, Israelis have guarded their borders vigilantly,” he said. But he surely knows that Israel has never declared its borders for the simple reason it intends to constantly expand them.

    “We are taking steps to help Israel better defend itself from the threat of rockets from Hezbollah and Hamas. This is a very real daily concern for ordinary Israelis living in border towns such as Sderot, who know that a rocket fired from Gaza may come crashing down at any moment.” Funny he should mention Sderot, now home to Israeli land-grabbers. It is built on the lands of a Palestinian village called Najd, which was ethnically cleansed by Jewish terrorists in May 1948 before Israel declared itself a state. The 600+ villagers, all Muslim, were forced to flee for their lives.

    Najd was not allocated to the Jews in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, they stole it using armed force. Britain, the mandated government, was in charge while this and many other atrocities were committed by rampaging Jewish militia, Najd being one of 418 Palestinian villages and towns they wiped off the map. Its 82 homes were bulldozed and their inhabitants, presumably, became refugees in nearby Gaza. Their families are probably still living in camps there. The sweet irony is that some of them are quite likely manning the rocket launchers.

    Being a target for Gaza’s rockets and only a mile from the prison camp fence, Sderot has become known as ‘the bomb shelter capital of the world’, residents having little time to take cover. It is now a major propaganda asset of the Israeli regime and a compulsory stop on the brainwash tour for gullible politicians and journalists. When Barak Obama visited in 2008 he said: “If somebody was sending rockets into my house where my two daughters sleep at night, I would do everything to stop that, and would expect Israel to do the same thing.” Yes, Mr Obama. But hopefully you wouldn’t be such a plonker as to live on land stolen from your neighbour at gun-point.

    Shapiro revealed that the funding for Iron Dome was above and beyond the $3 billion from FMF. He also remarked that “many Israeli officers and enlisted personnel attend US military schools such as the National War College. These personnel exchanges allow Israel’s future military leaders to acquire essential professional skills, as well as build life-long relationships with their U.S. military counterparts.”

    So it really is a cosy setup.

    Additionally, “Israel benefits from a War Reserve Stockpile that is maintained in Israel by US European Command. This can be used to boost Israeli defenses in the case of a significant military emergency…. Israel is also able to access millions of dollars in free or discounted military equipment each year through the Department of Defense’s Excess Defense Articles program.”

    Sheer bribery

    Shapiro also touched on how the US keeps other nearby nations sweet. “Our longstanding friendship and our extraordinary relationship of cooperation is reflected in the more than $300 million in security assistance that we provide Jordan annually…. For the past 30 years, the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has served as the basis for the $1.3 billion in annual Foreign Military Financing (FMF) that we provide Egypt. This assistance helps Egypt maintain a strong and disciplined professional defense force that is able to act as a regional leader and a moderating influence. Our assistance helps build ties between militaries, ensures that foreign militaries conduct themselves in restrained and professional ways, and creates strong incentives for recipient countries to maintain good ties with the United States.

    “We have continued to rely on Egypt to support and advance US interests in the region, including peace with Israel, confronting Iranian ambitions, interdicting smugglers, and supporting Iraq.”

    Shapiro was also aware of diplomatic efforts from some quarters to question Israel’s legitimacy. “As the President has said, Israel’s legitimacy is not a matter for debate. We have consistently opposed efforts to isolate Israel. We have stood up strongly for Israel and its right to defend itself…. We have refused to attend events that endorse or commemorate the flawed 2001 World Conference Against Racism, which outrageously singled out Israel for criticism. This Administration has also made clear that a lasting and sustainable peace can only come though negotiations and remains firmly opposed to one-sided efforts to seek recognition of statehood outside the framework of negotiations, whether in the UN Security Council or other international fora.”

    QME’s collision with international law

    He was referring, presumably, to those same old lopsided negotiations that have led nowhere. Israel has no claim to self-defence against a threat emanating from a territory it belligerently occupies. That has been made perfectly clear by the UN and other authorities. It’s the Palestinians who have a cast-iron right to self-defence, using “armed struggle” if necessary, against Israel’s illegal military occupation and murderous oppression (UN Resolutions 37/43 and 3246). UN Resolution 3246 also calls for all States to recognize the right to self-determination and independence for all peoples subjected to colonial and foreign domination and to assist them in their struggle.

    Furthermore Palestinians should not have to negotiate their freedom and self-determination – it’s theirs by right and doesn’t depend on anyone else, such as Israel or the US, agreeing to it. The US, UK and Israel (the latter stating repeatedly that it will not allow a Palestinian state to be created) arrogantly ignore the rights of others. But legal opinion (Wilde) has it that when 138 of the world’s states at the UN General Assembly voted in 2012 to re-designate Palestine’s status from ‘non-member Entity’ to ‘non-member State’, this had the effect of establishing statehood.

    Seriously, could no-one see that America’s crooked QME doctine would clash with justice and international law?

    A further boost to this US-Israel love affair came in July 2012 with an Act called the United States-Israel Enhanced Security Cooperation Act of 2012. It included the following policy statement:

    (1) To reaffirm our unwavering commitment to the security of the State of Israel as a Jewish state. As President Barack Obama stated on December 16, 2011, ‘‘America’s commitment and my commitment to Israel and Israel’s security is unshakeable.’’ And as President George W. Bush stated before the Israeli Knesset on May 15, 2008, on the 60th anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel, ‘‘The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friend ship runs deeper than any treaty.’’.

    (2) To help the Government of Israel preserve its qualitative military edge amid rapid and uncertain regional political trans-formation.

    (3) To veto any one-sided anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations Security Council.

    (4) To support Israel’s inherent right to self-defense.

    (5) To pursue avenues to expand cooperation with the Government of Israel both in defense and across the spectrum of civilian sectors, including high technology, agriculture, medicine, health, pharmaceuticals, and energy.

    (6) To assist the Government of Israel with its ongoing efforts to forge a peaceful, negotiated settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that results in two states living side-by-side in peace and security, and to encourage Israel’s neighbors to recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

    (7) To encourage further development of advanced technology programs between the United States and Israel given current trends and instability in the region.

    Policy (6) is nonsensical given the Israelis’ continuing refusal to recognize Palestine’s right to statehood, the recent passing of nation state laws reinforcing Israel’s apartheid, and the sidelining of international law and justice in seeking instead to settle the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by arm-twisting negotiation.

    Need to eliminate the Zionist Tendency

    As Shapiro reminded his audience, President Truman famously took just 11 minutes to extend official, diplomatic recognition to the State of Israel when it was founded in 1948. He didn’t even have the sense to sleep on it, and the US’s unwavering commitment to Israel’s security has been one of the fundamental tenets of America’s national security ever since. While Truman, a self-declared Zionist, felt sorry for “the victims of Hitler’s madness” his hasty decision created millions of victims of Israel’s evil intent, which was so obvious from the start and is now laid bare for all to see.

    It seems as if the UK has been roped in and superglued to America’s ridiculous infatuation with the apartheid regime and its genocidal maniacs. Here it’s a criminal offence to show support for Hamas or Hezbollah, but it’s business as usual with the loathsome regime in Israel. Clubs supporting Israel are still allowed to flourish at Westminster.

    Our new trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds is reported to be in talks with a minister in Tel Aviv, Nir Barkat, who is one of the more extreme proponents of Israel’s brutal war in Gaza. The department says: “Our teams will be entering negotiating rooms as soon as possible, laser-focused on creating new opportunities for UK firms”, while British embassy officials in Israel talk about the “tremendous opportunity for collaboration between Israeli and British companies”.

    Reynolds was responsible for the decision to end a mere 30 out of the 350 arms export licences to Israel, which was widely considered insufficient for sending the right message. Unsurprisingly Reynolds is a vice-chair of Labour Friends of Israel. As such he appears to be in breach of the Government’s Ministerial Code and Principles of Public Life which state that “holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work….. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.” But people with such dangerous affiliation are allowed to occupy many senior Government positions.

    The influence of the Israel lobby is so strong, and its enforcers so enmeshed in the fabric of Westminster politics, that politicians feel they must join their party’s Friends of Israel group and undergo indoctrination to qualify for a senior position.

    With American presidents and senior politicians “either side of the aisle” so firmly shackled to Israel’s nauseating ambitions, it’s no surprise that their poodle, the UK, is similarly compromised. Successive prime ministers and their foreign secretaries have been amazingly keen to endorse Israel’s sense of impunity and grovel to its stooges inside and outside Westminster. How are we to rid ourselves of this malign influence?

    One of the first tasks in securing peace is to purge the ‘Zionist tendency’ from all corridors of power in the West. This is where the problem lies. These are Israel’s pimps and stooges who identify with Zionism and promote its sinister and unlawful ambitions inside the UK and other Western parliaments. They are the root cause of strife in the Middle East. Time they were removed.

    The post UN’s High Ideals Brought down by American Legislation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • As a Rabbi, Taking Direct Action Against Genocide Is Part of My Sacred Practice

    In Judaism, the first 10 days of the new year — a period we are observing this week — are a time of committed reflection. As I reflect on this year of death and destruction, I think of all the lives that have been taken — 1,189 Israelis were killed or taken hostage and at least 42,000 Palestinians and likely far more were killed. Every human killed in the past year was someone else’s entire world.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Facilitators of Imperialist Terror, Enemies of Socialism


    Photo Above, Yemen, January 2024: U.S and British forces, backed by the Australian, Canadian and New Zealand imperialists, hit Yemeni people and Yemen’s Houthi forces with deadly air and missile strikes. Human Rights Watch facilitated the attacks by producing a report accusing Yemen’s Houthis of “war crimes” for their laudable efforts to defend the people of Gaza through blocking Israel-linked shipping traversing through the Red Sea. By helping to attack actions in support of the Palestinian people of Gaza, Human Rights Watch is complicit in Israel’s ongoing Gaza genocide.7 April 2024: Today, in the course of giving his Israeli ally the gentlest of slaps on its wrists for murdering aid workers, Britain’s foreign minister, David Cameron, referred to Israel as “a proud and successful democracy.” This compliment was given while Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people of Gaza! And while the Israeli regime is forcing the Palestinian people in the West Bank to live under brutal Apartheid conditions! As for the capitalist ruling class of Britain itself and that of the U.S., Australia, Germany, France and other “Western democracies”, their self-description as “liberal-democracies” supposedly gave them the license to invade Iraq and kill hundreds of thousands of her people on the basis of a false pretext; and today to arm, support and help direct Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It is in the name of “standing up for democracy” that these Western ruling classes are threatening China in the waters of the South China Sea off her own coast and massively arming the anti-China, Western-puppet Taiwanese regime. And it is supposedly a quest to “defend our democratic values” that is driving the Western regimes to engage in a massive military build-up towards war against socialistic China and her North Korean socialistic ally. Here in Australia, the capitalist rulers believe that their status as a supposed “Western democracy” allows their state institutions to continue to strip Aboriginal children from their families and culture in the name of “child protection” and their governments to impose curfews and compulsory “income management” schemes discriminatorily targeting Aboriginal people. Australia’s capitalist government thinks that its self-proclaimed status as a “democracy” allows it to maintain housing policies that enable the capitalist bigwigs that they serve – and other wealthy individuals – to rip off huge fortunes from speculative property investments and exorbitant rents, while shoving millions of low-income renters into poverty and sometimes even homelessness. All of this is supposedly acceptable, because the people are said to have “freely” decided themselves through “democracy”.

    However, the truth is that in these “Western-style democracies” the masses are not truly deciding. To be sure, the “democratic” form of capitalist tyranny is preferable to other, still more repressive, forms of capitalist rule. For it allows the working class masses to more easily organise resistance against their own exploitation. However, in truth, the democracy that exists in capitalist “liberal democracies” is only a “democracy” for the capitalist class. Just like other forms of capitalist rule – like fascism, military dictatorship, absolute monarchy and theocratic dictatorship – the “democratic” form of capitalism is still in essence the dictatorship of the capitalist class over working class people. For in the “democratic” form of capitalist state as in the fascist form, the enforcement arms of the state – the police, army, courts, prisons and bureaucracy – are themselves tied to the financially dominant capitalist class and inevitably serve the exclusive interests of this class. This remains the case no matter who wins elections. Moreover, although “parliamentary democracy” under capitalism allows “one person one vote”, the means to shape public opinion – and in the end that means how people vote too – overwhelmingly resides with the super-rich capitalists. It is this class that owns the media. It is they who, in great disproportion to their numbers, have the financial resources to fund political parties, pay for political advertising, hire lobbyists and establish “independent” think tanks. Whereas in the fascist and military dictatorship form of capitalist rule, capitalist interests are enforced mostly through naked force, in the “democratic” form of capitalist rule, capitalist power is, in the first instance, mostly enforced through deception (and when this doesn’t work, they can of course revert to brutal repression and, if necessary, will even seek to overthrow their own “democracy” and replace it with the fascist form of capitalist rule).

    Of all the different means of deception that the capitalists have at their disposal, their most effective tools are their supposedly “independent”, “human rights organisations”. These are especially crucial for the capitalists of the richer, imperialist ruling classes to make their “own” masses support their predatory interests abroad. Among such “human rights organisations”, there is one that stands out for its level of influence, Human Rights Watch (HRW). When the mainstream Western media or a Western ruling class politician wants to attack an overseas enemy of the capitalist ruling class that they serve, the “credible source” that they will most often quote is HRW. This in turn boosts the authority of HRW.

    HRW’s number one aim is to vilify the socialistic states: the Peoples Republic of China, Cuba, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK – “North Korea”), Vietnam and Laos. HRW also targets any other state that happens to be in the gun sights of the U.S.-led Western imperialists. In 2011, HRW played a key role in facilitating the NATO operation in Libya to overthrow the government of Muammar Gaddafi, who the Western imperialists had decided was not bowing down enough before their demands to be allowed to continue to rule such an oil-rich country. In the lead up to the NATO intervention in Libya that began on 19 March 2011, HRW unleashed a torrent of hyped-up “reports” of alleged human rights atrocities by the Libyan government that provided the “human rights cover” for NATO’s intervention.  There was, for example, this “report” that HRW released just six days before NATO’s terror bombing was unleashed. Then as NATO continued to rain death upon the people of Libya, HRW produced more “reports” of supposed atrocities by Libyan government forces (for example) that served to justify the continuation of the blood-soaked Western imperialist, “regime-change” operation.

    Tripoli, Libya, 19 June 2011: Doctors stand near the bodies of a man and a child killed when NATO destroyed yet another residential building in the Libyan capital during their neo-colonial 2011 military intervention in Libya. Through greatly hyped-up and one-sided “human rights reports” in the days leading up to the NATO attack, Human Rights Watch’s propaganda provided the “human rights” “justification” for the brutal NATO onslaught.
    Photo: Ivan Sekretarev/AP

    The Devious Nature of Human Rights Watch’s “Even Handedness”

    To give themselves credibility, HRW will occasionally also report on human rights violations by the U.S. and other Western ruling classes. But they will mostly only report problems that everyone already knows about and which have been substantiated many times over. That way their “exposés” of human rights atrocities of Western capitalist regimes do minimal damage. In contrast, when HRW launches an attack on China, Cuba or another socialistic state, or on a capitalist state that is being too independent of the Western imperialist rulers, they will produce either entirely new claims or spread, as fact, highly disputed claims made by others – most of which are usually completely unsubstantiated or simply plain lies. Moreover, whenever attacking supposed human rights violations in a workers state or other country in the firing sights of Western imperialism, HRW will not only use the most extreme language as possible but will always make their shrill statements in the context of accusing the targeted state of having an “abysmal human rights record”. By contrast, whenever HRW feels compelled to acknowledge human rights problems in Western capitalist countries they use moderate language and emphasise that the issues occur in the context of the state having an otherwise “strong record of protecting civil and political rights”. Having a “strong record of protecting civil and political rights” is precisely how the Human Rights Watch (HRW) World Report 2022 described the human rights record of Australia’s capitalist regime. The very regime whose special forces murdered dozens of Afghan civilians in cold-blooded, racist executions during their war-crime-ridden participation in the two decade-long U.S./NATO occupation, whose racist police and prison guards have killed, or otherwise caused, the deaths of hundreds of Aboriginal people in custody over the last three decades and which brutally imprisons asylum seekers in offshore hell-holes.

    The full range of HRW’s methods of deception were unleashed during their propaganda campaign buttressing the 2011 NATO operation in Libya. For example, HRW acknowledged that NATO killed civilians during their Libya operation but greatly downplayed the numbers. HRW stated that NATO killed “at least 72 civilians”, when even other pro-Western sources acknowledge that the NATO airstrikes killed at least several hundred civilians – and other sources report the number of civilians killed by NATO in the thousands. In contrast, HRW greatly exaggerated the number of civilians killed by the Gaddafi government enemies of NATO.

    As well as greatly downplaying the numbers of civilians killed by NATO, HRW despicably praised NATO for supposedly making genuine efforts to protect civilians during its 2011 Libya intervention! Check out this disgusting HRW apology for NATO war crimes in Libya disguised as a “criticism”:

    “NATO says it took extensive measures to minimize civilian harm, and those measures seem to have had a positive effect: the number of civilian deaths in Libya from NATO strikes was low given the extent of the bombing and duration of the campaign. Nevertheless, NATO air strikes killed at least 72 civilians, one-third of them children under age 18. To date, NATO has failed to acknowledge these casualties or to examine how and why they occurred.”

    “Unacknowledged Deaths”, 12 May 2012, HRW website

    The truth is that the 2011 NATO regime-change operation that HRW deviously facilitated with its “human rights” reports not only directly killed thousands of civilians in air strikes but produced a horrific, new imperialist-created “order” in Libya. That “order” immediately resulted in murderous racist violence against black African residents of Libya. In the following years, it produced multi-sided sectarian violence and clashes between rival warlords that killed tens of thousands of Libyan people. Human Rights Watch has a lot of blood on its hands!

    HRW followed its Libya playbook when “reporting” on the upheaval in Syria that erupted in 2011. Initially the anti-government protests in Syria had a multi-directional quality. But by early 2012, the U.S.-led imperial powers had taken effective political hegemony of the movement and turned it into an armed proxy war aimed at toppling Syria’s Bashar al-Assad government and replacing it with one more subservient to the Western imperialists. As they poured arms, intelligence and training into their armed proxies, HRW filled the information space with one-sided, hyped-up and often false reports accusing Syrian government forces of horrific crimes. Without ever openly stating their intentions, HRW were key propagandists who justified the imperial powers’ proxy war to subordinate Syria. This proxy war caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrian people and the forced displacement of millions more. HRW has much complicity in this carnage!

    Today, HRW are at it again! This time they are facilitating the attacks of the U.S., British, Australian and other Western imperialists against the most effective international solidarity actions with the embattled Palestinian people over these last six months – the Yemeni Houthi actions to stop Israeli related shipping from traversing the Red Sea. As the U.S.-led imperialist powers took political steps to justify their impending air strikes against the Yemeni supporters of the Palestinian people, HRW provided the “human rights” justification for the attacks by despicably accusing the Yemeni Houthis of “war crimes” for the Houthis’ laudable actions to resist the Gaza genocide by targeting Israeli-linked shipping. To be sure, with Israel’s ongoing genocide of the people of Gaza obvious to most of the world, HRW also has to make stern criticisms of Israel. If they did not do so, they would lose all credibility and thus all ability to serve Western imperialism. However, by equating resistance actions in support of Israel’s victims with Israel’s genocidal terror, HRW is obscuring the one-sided genocide that is taking place. To facilitate attacks on pro-Palestinian resistance actions when a horrific slaughter of Palestinian people is taking place is to be complicit in the mass murder of the Palestinian people. Therefore, HRW shares responsibility for the slaughter of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

    18 April 2024: Palestinian people survey the damage in the Nuseirat refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip following yet another murdering Israel strike.
    Photo: Xinhua

    Funded and Led By Wealthy Western Capitalists and Serving Their Class Interests

    Although HRW would like to portray itself as a “grassroots” organisation standing up for “human rights”, it is the very opposite of that. Headquartered in the U.S., HRW is a multi-hundred million dollar operation funded by super wealthy American and other Western donors and corporations. It is indeed run like a corporation. The outfit’s CEO, Kenneth Roth, is paid an annual salary package in excess of $A1.05 million per year (!!) … hardly the practice of an organisation that claims to be devoted to “bringing greater justice and security to the oppressed around the world”! For the last two years, HRW’s annual revenue averaged over $A163 million per year – overwhelmingly from contributions from rich donors and millions more from fundraising events.

    HRW goes to great lengths to hide exactly who the wealthy donors and corporations backing it are. Despite its frequent criticism of various adversaries of Western imperialism for “lack of transparency”, HRW is itself a very shadowy organisation. One massive donor to HRW that the organisation has had to confirm is anti-communist billionaire, George Soros. In September 2010, HRW announced that Soros would be donating a massive $US100 million to the group over ten years. That means that this leaching hedge fund manager, known for his extreme criticisms of socialistic China and his earlier funding for the political forces that destroyed the East European and Soviet workers states through capitalist counterrevolution, has been providing a large proportion of HRW’s funding. Indeed, such corporate bigwigs also make up a big and leading part of HRW’s Board of Directors. Like Soros, many of them extracted their wealth from the especially parasitic finance sector. Thus, one of the two Co-Chairs of HRW’s Board is co-founder and General Partner of venture capitalist group Index Ventures, Neil Rimer. The other Co-Chair, Amy Rao, is a former CEO of a Silicon Valley company. Many of the Board’s Vice Chairs are also bigwigs of investment firms, including the chairman of Japanese financial services company, Monex Group, Oki Matsumoto. This HRW Vice Chair owns $A180 million of shares in his company. Another Vice Chair is Principal at financial services firm KME Consulting, Kimberly Marteau Emerson. Emerson had earlier worked in Bill Clinton’s administration as a senior political appointee and as a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department; which exemplifies the close links between the HRW and the U.S. regime. Indeed, one of the only officers in HRW’s Board who has not been a corporate bigwig is the former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria and the Republic of Congo, Robin Sanders. Meanwhile, the Australian in the HRW Board and indeed a Vice Chair of the Board, is one of the two owners and co-chairs of Australian private equity firm, CHAMP Private Equity, Joseph Skrzynski. Skrzynski, who was once also the chairman of SBS, is known for his ownership of extravagant beach-side mansions in Palm Beach and Elizabeth Bay.

    Given that it is both funded by capitalist tycoons and other wealthy Western donors and led by corporate bigwigs it is little surprise that HRW takes a political line of strident opposition to the workers states created through the overthrow of capitalism. Indeed, anti-communist opposition to socialistic states goes to the very roots of HRW. HRW began in 1978 with Helsinki Watch – an organisation formed to support anti-communist forces seeking to overthrow the workers states then ruling the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. This fundamental purpose of HRW, to provide the “human rights” cover to forces seeking the counterrevolutionary overthrow of socialistic states, has not changed to this very day.

    With HRW, together with the rest of the imperialist ruling classes, having succeeded in destroying the former Soviet and East European workers states, their focus has now turned to the goal of destroying the remaining workers states. That HRW has gained much greater prominence in recent years is a reflection of the increasing desperation of the imperialist rulers to achieve this goal. With socialistic China’s spectacular successes in lifting her people out of poverty and improving the economic and cultural lives of her population such a stark contrast to the periodic economic crises, stagnant real wages, growing homelessness, divided societies, social malaise and decay of the capitalist world, the imperialist rulers know that they must destroy socialistic rule in China in order to ensure their own tyrannies at home. They are looking to the likes of HRW to rise to the occasion and spearhead the “human rights propaganda” front of their all-sided Cold War against Red China and the other socialistic states. And unfortunately, HRW is indeed rising to the task! HRW has played a lead role in selling the lie that Red China is persecuting her Uyghur minority and blares anti-communist, anti-PRC propaganda over Tibet, Hong Kong, COVID and a whole lot of other matters.

    It is notable that HRW lists the Ford Foundation as one of their key partners. Established in 1936 by the big-time capitalist Ford family that owned the Ford Motor company, the Ford Foundation has always been devoted to buttressing capitalist rule and opposing communism. It worked closely with the CIA to both spread anti-communist propaganda and to assist CIA covert interference operations around the world. In the 1960s, the Ford Foundation trained elite students in Indonesia in both pro-capitalist political and economic ideology and anti-communist military operations. These students would play an important role in the CIA-backed, 1965 far-right coup in Indonesia that saw the Indonesian military and anti-communist mobs slaughter between one million to two million Indonesian communists, trade unionists, women’s rights activists and members of the Chinese and other minority communities. That HRW and the Ford Foundation should today be working closely together is thus completely natural. It is a bond between organisations that serve the same masters – the U.S. and other Western capitalist classes – share the same anti-communist ideology and have similar blood-soaked histories of providing the “human rights” and “pro-democracy” cover for hideous imperialist-orchestrated terror.

    Separately and Independently Serving Western Imperialist Interests

    It is worth noting that the biggest single backer of HRW, liberal billionaire George Soros, happens to be a favourite hostile target of the reactionary far-right sections of the Western ruling classes. The far right of the capitalist establishment and its liberal wing, exemplified by the likes of Soros and HRW, truly hate each other on many issues. However, when it comes to China and other socialistic states, these feuding wings of the imperialist ruling classes – and the mainstream conservatives in between – unite as one to oppose these workers states. And they also unite as one to oppose most other states that refuse to submit to the “rules-based world order” – which, in practice, is really a “might is right” tyranny – created and dominated by the U.S. and its junior imperialist partners.

    In Australia, too, we see such collaboration between the organisations and representatives of the different ruling class-supporting factions in order to advance the interests of the capitalist class – especially when it comes to attacking the socialistic states. Thus, the ALP, the Teal “independents”, the Liberals and the Far-Right parties will openly cooperate to advance the Australian capitalist regime’s aggressive, U.S.-allied, military buildup targeting socialistic China. They also come together to push through legislation and other measures that allow the regime to forcefully repress and intimidate any people from Australia’s Chinese community and beyond who dare to make statements positive about the PRC. Often such collaboration extends to the Greens – such as in making lying attacks on China and North Korea over “human rights violations” or in preventing the PRC-sponsored, language-teaching Confucius Institutes from teaching Chinese language in Australian schools (the latter McCarthyist campaign was actually driven by Greens politician, David Shoebridge).

    As well as open collaboration between the squabbling wings of Western ruling classes (and the social democratic organisations supporting them), they coordinate behind the scenes. You can bet that senior U.S. ruling class politicians and CIA and State Department officials are making clear to leaders of HRW what they would like the “independent human rights organisation” to emphasise. Often this may be done in an informal manner such as when they run into each other at social functions or at events promoting one of the political forces that they both support. However, for the most part, HRW does not take direct orders from the U.S. regime. There is no overall conspiracy as such. For HRW doesn’t need to receive direct orders! What makes HRW, other prominent Western “human rights” NGOs, all the arms of the U.S. and allied regimes, the different factions of the U.S., British, Australian and other U.S.-allied ruling classes, all the mainstream Western media and all well-funded think tanks in Western countries (like Australia’s ASPI and Lowy Institute) all sing basically the same tune is that they are all institutions ultimately controlled by, often directly funded by and always serving the interests of the very same people – that is, the closely-allied, Western imperialist exploiting classes. In other words, all these institutions and organisations are designed to serve either the U.S. capitalist class or allied capitalist ruling classes – like the Australian one. The fact that they are all not, for the most part, acting together in a giant conspiracy but rather act independently for the same cause, each with their own separate emphasis and nuances and sometimes even openly bickering with each other on the details, actually makes them all the more effective in advancing the predatory interests of the U.S., British and Australian imperialist ruling classes and their allies. For this makes it easier for the likes of HRW to claim that they are “independent”, “non-partisan” organisations.

    HRW likes to present itself as a grass-roots organisation supporting the under-dog that is driven by nice, compassionate people who truly care about “human rights”. But the truth is that Human Rights Watch is an incredibly rich organisation directly funded by American and other Western capitalists and by wealthy, upper-middle class Western individuals. It is led by corporate bigwigs and dedicated to serving the predatory interests of the mass murdering, genocide-in-Gaza-supporting, U.S, British, Australian and allied imperialist ruling classes. We must push back against and discredit the extremely harmful, pro-imperialist propaganda that is being spouted out by Human Rights Watch! This includes through exposé’s of HRW’s deeds facilitating war-criminal-ridden, Western interventions in Libya and Syria; and now through providing the “human rights” cover for U.S./British/Australian/Canadian/New Zealand attacks aimed at crushing Yemeni support for the embattled Palestinian people of Gaza. We must also encourage any current, or former, volunteers and staff working for HRW, who mistakenly thought that they were joining a genuine human rights organisation and who are now disgruntled, to blow the whistle on the highly secretive organisation, expose all its funding sources and make the public aware of all of HRW’s connections to Western regime officials and unsavoury, imperialist-backed “rebel” groups in socialistic countries and other Western-targeted states. We in Trotskyist Platform also call on all genuine opponents of capitalism and imperialism to build street protests and pickets against Human Rights Watch. Let us work hard to obliterate blood-soaked Human Rights Watch through all political means available!

    The post Facilitators of Imperialist Terror, Enemies of Socialism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Russia Confirms Liberation of Key Donbass Town

    Russia confirms liberation of key Donbass townFILE PHOTO. ©  Sputnik/Alexey Maishev

    Russian forces have completely liberated the town of Ugledar in the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), the Defense Ministry in Moscow has confirmed.

    Ukrainian forces had controlled the settlement since 2014, when the DPR declared independence following a US-backed coup in Kiev. Ugledar was a strategically important position, featuring high-rise buildings overlooking the surrounding plain.

    “As a result of conclusive operations by the units of the ‘East’ group of forces, the town of Ugledar in the DPR has been liberated,” the Russian Defense Ministry announced on Thursday.

    Video footage and images of Russian troops in control of Ugledar appeared on social media on Wednesday, showing a flag raised over its administration building. Later in the day, the Ukrainian high command said it had ordered “a maneuver of withdrawal” from the town. It was unclear whether any units had actually been able to leave the operational encirclement.

    According to a security source who spoke to TASS news agency, Russian forces had almost completed “mopped up” the Ukrainian resistance as of Wednesday afternoon. Some of Kiev’s units had suffered “huge losses” after not being able to leave, the source added.

    The 72nd Brigade of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which was stationed in Ugledar, had reportedly sought permission to retreat last week, as Russian troops cut off their supply lines and placed the town under siege. According to multiple Russian military correspondents, their requests were denied because losing Ugledar would look bad while Vladimir Zelensky was visiting the US.

    Russian forces had tried to take Ugledar on several occasions in the past. The most promising attack saw them capture the adjacent cottage district, but ultimately failed because of Ukrainian artillery support located in Kurakhovo to the north. In recent weeks, however, Russian advances collapsed the Ukrainian front north of Kurakhovo and threatened that town as well.

    The post Russia Confirms Liberation of Key Donbass Town first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • October’s Surprise Party

    As another October approaches, the beautiful season of colors begins here in New England. Call it October’s Surprise Party. The turning leaves with all their colors come to announce the earth’s glory, the possibility of peace and happiness for all.

    Yet as the month transpires and November nears, I think we might expect what for many will be the unexpected, as Bob Dylan reminds us with “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.” Listen: “I heard the sound of a thunder that roared out a warnin’/I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world.”

    A Black Swan event or the expected?

    And if that hard rain does fall, it won’t just be those ravishing leaves that will be pounded down and die. First comes the beauty, then the dying follows, as every fall decrees.  And while nature always brings the rebirth of spring, in their hubris, humans, thinking they are gods, have devised a technological solution that can bring all life to an end for good – nuclear weapons.

    That their government is provoking their use by waging a war against Russia via Ukraine and backing the Israeli Middle East slaughter and genocide is not a thought that most Americans choose to entertain as they blithely go about their lives.  Such lucidity is deemed too depressing.

    Dylan wrote that song in the summer of 1962, 62 years ago (a symbolic number by the way), shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis that October when nuclear annihilation was avoided at the last minute when John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev came to their senses.

    Today we are even closer than ever to a nuclear war, as those who closely follow such events tell us.  Scott Ritter, the former U.S. Marine and UN weapons inspector who tried to stop the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 by reporting that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is one.  He is joined by a host of lonely voices crying out their warnings: ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern, journalist Pepe Escobar, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, the late Daniel Ellsberg and Randy Kelher, the author James W. Douglass who has been writing and demonstrating (with his wife Shelley) against nuclear weapons for nearly half-a-century, peace activist and former CIA officer Elizabeth Murray, et al. (my apologies for limiting the list).  Many of these irenic and fatidic voices warning the world of the closeness of nuclear war have appeared on Andrew Napolitano’s illuminating Judging Freedom interview show.  Their voices are easily available, for now.

    Ritter, who is being hounded by the U.S. government, has just written an article, “Life Pre-empted” whose opening line reads as follows: “If you’re not thinking about the end of the world by now, you’re either braindead or stuck in some remote corner of the world, totally removed from access to news.” [my emphasis]

    He is right, although contemplating our nearness to nuclear war no doubt gives most people such a serious case of the megrims that they turn away. It is understandable but must be resisted if the world is to avoid disaster.  A world-wide antinuclear movement is necessary, one that links the dangers of the U.S. aggressive Ukrainian proxy-war against Russia with the U.S./Israeli genocide of Palestinians and its expanded war throughout the Middle East together with the U.S. provocations of China.

    Even the corporate mainstream media are here and there starting to recognize the growing danger of nuclear war.  Of course, they blame Russia for this, as they do for everything, even as most of the world correctly points the finger at the United States.

    For it is the USA together with its NATO lap dogs that have brought us to this point, as they have spent decades surrounding Russia with troops and missiles and waging a war to conquer Russian via Ukraine.  For those who don’t know this history, they are in for a big surprise if Russia responds and the nuclear missiles fly, as Pepe Escobar recently tweeted about a statement by Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev, the former president of Russia and presently the deputy chairman of its Security Council:

    IT’S THUNDERBOLT TIME Medvedev Unplugged does know his Latin. But then Russian educational standards are in a class by itself, as I never cease to learn here in Moscow. Commenting on the update of Russia’s nuclear doctrine, Medvedev noted, “This change in our country’s guidelines for using nuclear weapons, in and of itself, may cool the ardor of those of our opponents who have not yet lost their sense of self-preservation. As for the dim-witted, only the Roman maxim remains: caelo tonantem credidimus Jovem Horace’s Odes. AnRegnare …” All of us who studied Latin know that comes straight from Horace and it goes straight to the point: thunder out of the sky reminds everyone that Jupiter rules. Medvedev’s metaphor is a beauty: the only way the “dim-witted” – Hegemonic and the vassal swamp – will learn is when the Russian Jupiter releases a thunderbolt.

    Let us hope it doesn’t come to that.  But the danger of a nuclear war has increased dramatically as the Biden administration continues to up the ante with its support for Ukraine and Israel.  If it approves the Ukrainian request to use U.S., British, and French-supplied long-range missiles for strikes deep inside Russia, all bets are off.  And the world awaits Russian ally Iran’s response to the current Israel bombing of Lebanon and the killing of Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader of the Lebanese Hezbollah resistance movement, a war crime of another government that believes there will be no repercussions for their actions.

    The American public’s problem is not really ignorance of Latin (that is a symptom of a much greater ignorance), but being unable to recognize the truth about its leaders’ insane aggression and nuclear gamesmanship.  A knowledge of the Roman and Greek Classics reminds us that evil is real and tragedy descends on those who surpass the limits.  The tragic flaw – hamartia – is not part of the American lexicon. Disney World talk is.

    Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently issued a warning to the US/NATO that Russia’s nuclear policy has changed as a result of US/NATO/Ukraine’s attacks inside Russia.  “Aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, with the participation or support of a nuclear state, is proposed to be considered as a joint attack on the Russian Federation,” he said.  As a result, he added, “We reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression against Russia and Belarus.”

    But the Biden/Harris administration’s idiot leaders push the nuclear envelope thinking Russia is bluffing.  In their desire to conquer Russia, they have lost all reason and continue on a trajectory that started long ago but has now hit a crisis point.

    For those who think this war against Russia will come to a peaceful conclusion, I refer them to a series of articles in the propaganda organ of the U.S. “deep state,” which is really very shallow and obvious – the journal Foreign Affairs ( January/February 2023) – the mouthpiece for the Council of Foreign Relations.  There you will read articles promoting the destruction of Russia, regime change, and the removal of Vladimir Putin, etc.  All justified by America’s God-given right to rule the world.  One article by Robert Kagan, the neoconservative adviser to Republican and Democratic administrations and the husband of the infamous Victoria Nuland, a central figure in the 2014 US-engineered Ukrainian coup d’état, is laughable, but that it is taken seriously is a sign that the ruling elites are so deluded and intent on never stopping to try to destroy Russia that they will claim anything, no matter how contrary to obvious facts.  They just make things up to fit their narrative.

    In “A Free World If You Can Keep It,” Kagan writes, presumably with a straight face, the following: “Similarly, Putin’s serial invasions of neighboring states have not been driven by a desire to maximize Russia’s security. Russia’s never enjoyed greater security on its western frontier than during the three decades after the end of the Cold War…. But at no time since the fall of the Berlin Wall has anyone in Moscow had reason to believe that Russia faced the possibility of attack by the West.” [my emphasis]

    This crap is so laughable if it weren’t so dangerous and delusional.  If Kagan actually believes what he is saying, which I doubt, then he is dumber that a rock. Since the end of the Cold War, US/NATO has, contrary to their promises, continually moved east, surrounding Russia right up to its borders with troops, bases, and missiles aimed at Russia.  Clear provocations and threats that Russia has been complaining about for a long time.

    *****

    So October approaches, the month of Halloween, actors, and masks.  Gore Vidal got a laugh when years ago he referred to Ronald Reagan as our “acting president.”  But we’ve had six acting presidents since and their acts have left millions dead and wounded around the globe, including thousands of American troops.  The American electoral system is a horror show, a spectacle in what Guy DeBord called “The Society of the Spectacle.”  Many Americans have acquiesced in this ongoing tragedy, playing their parts in this deadly charade. The ghosts of all these victims walk among us, and they will haunt us until we come to life by admitting our own complicity in their deaths. The show must not go on, but it will, as long as we keep acting our parts.

    The Classical scholar Norman O. Brown so well describes our stage set: “Ancestral voices prophesying war; ancestral spirits in the danse macabre or war dance; Valhalla, ghostly warriors who kill each other and are reborn to fight again.  All warfare is ghostly, every army an exercitus feralis (army of ghosts), every soldier a living corpse.”

    So many Americans mask themselves from this savage truth in a futile, face-saving, phony performance.  The act is wearing thin. It is time to see through the illusion that a world war is not in the making, unless vast numbers arise from their sleep and oppose it.

    It is not just our “leaders” who perform at the Devil’s Masquerade Ball, which is the charade we call American Exceptionalism or The American Way of Life. I think of how all persons are, by definition, masked, the word person being derived from the Latin, persona, meaning mask.  Another Latin word, larva, occurs to me, it too means mask, ghost, or evil spirit.

    The living masks light up for me as I think of ghosts, the dead, all the souls and spirits circulating through our days.  The murdered ghosts demanding retribution, and the spirits of the brave and truthful ones urging us to oppose the killers.

    While etymology might seem arcane, I rather think it offers us a portal into our lives, not just personally, but politically and culturally as well. Shakespeare was right, of course, “all the world’s a stage,” though I would disagree that we are “merely” players. It does often seem that way, but seeming is the essence of the actor’s show and tell.

    Who are we behind the masks? Who is it uttering those words coming through the masks’ mouth-holes (the per-sona, Latin, to sound through)?

    October’s surprise party is coming.

    “I heard ten thousand whispering and nobody listening,” sings Dylan.

    The post October’s Surprise Party first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

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