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Category: Militarism

  • The BBC’s political editor just accidently exposed how the broadcaster manipulates the public

    BBC political editor Chris Mason is just another in a long line of establishment shills at the broadcaster – following on from his infamous predecessor Laura Kuenssberg. However, at least the latter was a bit better at covering up the fact she was little more than a mouthpiece for the state. Mason inadvertently exposed during BBC News at Ten how corporate journalists like him help push the establishment’s line (and manipulate the rest of us into voting for its politicians) – even when it comes to war, armageddon, Keir Starmer, and the general election.

    Push the button for the general election, Starmer

    On Monday 3 June, BBC News at Ten host Fiona Bruce was presenting a segment on the Labour Party campaign. She said:

    Keir Starmer says if he becomes PM he would be prepared to use nuclear weapons to defend the UK.

    We can hear you collectively groaning. This is because the ‘if I was PM I would of course kill us all by firing our nuclear weapons’ is becoming a mainstay of general and party leadership elections in recent years. Theresa May did it in 2017. Liz Truss did it in 2022. They all wheel it out thinking it makes them look patriotic – when in fact it makes them look idiotic.

    However, on 3 June Mason actually exposed all these politicians as being even more idiotic; something he probably didn’t mean to do.

    Mason was at the press conference where Starmer said:

    [Nuclear weapons] a vital part of our defence, and of course that means we have to be prepared to use it.

    But Starmer didn’t say this off the cuff.

    Mason: stenographer for the state

    Oh no, he didn’t. It was Mason who asked the question in the first place – giving the BBC its headline. He said, all the while looking down at his pre-prepared notes:

    Keir Starmer, you could be prime minister next month. If circumstances necessitated it, would you authorise the firing of nuclear weapons, yes or no?

    So Starmer seemingly wasn’t going to mention ‘pressing the button’, until Mason asked him.

    This is not the first time the Labour leader has said this. But notice the pattern. Because as World Socialist Web Site documented, every time Starmer says ‘yes, I’ll push the button’, it’s in response to the question from a corporate journalist.

    You would be forgiven for thinking ‘well, maybe it’s Labour briefing these hacks to ask this’. However, casting our minds back to the last decade appears to show different.

    Of course, it was the same for Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader. A journalist asked him in 2016. Corbyn said no, setting in motion a ferocious backlash from the right of the party. Fast forward to the 2017 general election, and another one of Mason’s equally state-servile predecessors, Andrew Marr, asked Corbyn again. However, this time the then-Labour leader dodged answering properly.

    So, establishment lickspittles like Mason are just as war-mongering as the politicians they perform metaphoric fellatio on. However, there is an ironic twist with all of this.

    Whose nuclear weapons?

    For years, corporate hacks (or stenographers, depending on who we’re talking about) have pushed, pushed, and pushed some more on pushing the button. In reality, though, it’s been well documented that the UK’s nuclear weapons are reliant on the US for their production and maintenance.

    This makes the UK using them a grey area, due to the ‘politics and diplomacy’ of it all. While the UK technically has independent control over its nuclear weapons, as a Defence Select Committee report noted, the only time we’d probably fire ours would be to:

    give legitimacy to a US nuclear attack by participating in it.

    Second invasion of Iraq, anyone?

    Starmer: my dick is the biggest and I can wave it the hardest

    The point being, Mason and his ilk know full well the geopolitics of the UK’s nuclear weapons. But instead, they choose to manipulate the public into voting for which establishment politician in a suit can wave their dick the hardest – all in the name of some colonial-era notion of patriotism, and some easy headlines.

    Maybe Starmer should just press the button when he becomes PM, and put us all out of our misery.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By Steve Topple

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Let’s Dismantle the Existential Threat Known as the Military-Industrial Complex

    We need to talk about what bombs do in war. Bombs shred flesh. Bombs shatter bones. Bombs dismember. Bombs cause brains, lungs, and other organs to shake so violently they bleed, rupture, and cease functioning. Bombs injure. Bombs kill. Bombs destroy. Bombs also make people rich. When a bomb explodes, someone profits. And when someone profits, bombs claim more unseen victims. Every dollar spent on…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Palestine Action hit two Barclays branches – annihilating one and redecorating the other

    On Monday 3 June Palestine Action upped the ante over genocide-enabling Barclays – by targetting two locations of the Israel-complicit bank.

    Palestine Action: going after Barclays again

    Overnight, Palestine Action activists targeted the Bradford and Bolton branches of Barclays, investors in Israel’s largest weapons firm – Elbit Systems. This was Bolton:

    Activists left windows smashed and sprayed the banks red, marking them with a symbol of Palestinian bloodshed. This was Bradford:

    Barclays Bank holds over £1bn in shares and provides over £3bn in loans and underwriting to nine companies whose weapons, components, and military technology are being used by Israel in its genocidal attacks on Palestinians.

    Complicit in Israel’s genocide

    This includes General Dynamics, which produces the gun systems that arm the fighter jets used by Israel to bombard Gaza, and Elbit Systems, which produces armoured drones, munitions, and artillery weapons used by the Israeli military.

    Amongst Barclays £3bn investments and loans in companies facilitating the Gaza genocide, the bank holds shares in Elbit Systems which is the primary target of Palestine Action’s campaign. Elbit Systems provide 85% of Israel’s military drone fleet and land-based equipment, as well as bombs, missiles and other weaponry.

    The Israeli weapons maker market their weapons as “battle-tested” after they are developed during bombardments on occupied Palestine. Palestine Action’s campaign of direct action has seen hundreds of occupations, redecorations and other disruptive actions against Elbit Systems directly, forcing two of their weapons factories permanently shut.

    The direct action network has also undertaken to ensure that firms which facilitate Elbit operations are exposed and undermined, with Elbit investors targeted alongside landlords, suppliers, and other collaborators. To date, several companies including recruiters and an international law firm have all ended ties following a relentless campaign by the group.

    A Palestine Action spokesperson said:

    Broken windows and red paint is incomparable to the Palestinian blood spilt and the destruction of Gaza, which Barclays continues to profit from. Banks can not get away with murder and when all else fails, it’s up to the people to ensure humanity is upheld. Palestine Action will continue to act until the bank divests from Israel’s biggest weapons firm, Elbit Systems.

    Featured image and additional images via Neil Terry and Palestine Action

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Indigenous People of Guam Are Fighting US Militarism and Environmental Ruin

    The Indigenous Pacific Islander community in Guam — known as CHamorus — has long called out the United States military for the environmental and cultural damage enacted on their homeland. This process of occupation and destruction began when Guam was colonized in 1898 and continues to this day, as nearly one-third of the 30-mile long island remains occupied by the U.S. military. Several years ago…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • U.S. President Biden Now Authorizes Ukraine to Start WW3

    On May 31st, Politico headlined “Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons: It’s a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.” It reported:

    The Biden administration has quietly given Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia — solely near the area of Kharkiv — using U.S.-provided weapons, three U.S. officials and two other people familiar with the move said Thursday, a major reversal that will help Ukraine to better defend its second-largest city.

    “The president recently directed his team to ensure that Ukraine is able to use U.S. weapons for counter-fire purposes in Kharkiv so Ukraine can hit back at Russian forces hitting them or preparing to hit them,” one of the U.S. officials said, adding that the policy of not allowing long-range strikes inside Russia “has not changed.”

    Ukraine asked the U.S. to make this policy change only after Russia’s offensive on Kharkiv began this month, the official added. All the people were granted anonymity to discuss internal decisions that haven’t been announced. …

    In effect, Ukraine can now use American-provided weapons, such as rockets and rocket launchers, to shoot down launched Russian missiles heading toward Kharkiv, at troops massing just over the Russian border near the city, or Russian bombers launching bombs toward Ukrainian territory. But the official said Ukraine cannot use those weapons to hit civilian infrastructure or launch long-range missiles, such as the Army Tactical Missile System, to hit military targets deep inside Russia.

    It’s a stunning shift the administration initially said would escalate the war by more directly involving the U.S. in the fight. But worsening conditions for Ukraine on the battlefield –– namely Russia’s advances and improved position in Kharkiv –– led the president to change his mind. …

    What this means is that if Volodmyr Zelensky (whose legal term of office as Ukraine’s President ended on May 20) decides that Ukraine should use American weapons and bombs to hit “military targets” that are in Russia and “near the area of Kharkiv,” then the U.S. Government will not object. The article does not say how the phrase “military targets” there is being defined, nor how “near the area of Kharkiv” is being defined.

    The U.S. Government has been, to a large extent if not fully, operating or in control over the operation of those U.S.-made weapons; and, therefore, one may reasonably presume that any decision as to whether to use those weapons and bombs in any given instance will have the prior approval of both the Ukrainian and the American Governments.

    One also may reasonably assume that if ever Ukraine would violate Biden’s order in this regard, then Biden would condemn Ukraine for having done so. Whether or not Russia’s Government would take that as being sincerely an expression that only Ukraine was to blame for that U.S.-and-Ukraine attack against Russia is impossible reasonably to predict in advance. Consequently, if the limitations upon what Ukraine’s government can do with America’s weapons and bombs are not yet already over the limits of what will precipitate a nuclear attack by Russia against the United States and its colonies (‘allies’), as having “crossed over Russia’s red lines” of what Russia considers to constitute an acceptable violation of Russia’s national security, then how Russia will respond in any case if Ukraine will violate Biden’s command and Biden will condemn Ukraine for that, is likewise impossible reasonably to predict in advance. However, if Russia will in such an instance unleash its estimated 5,580 nuclear weapons against the U.S. and its colonies, then there will be a debate among the immediate survivors of WW3 regarding whether the villain here was Biden or instead Putin, or both.

    If WW3 will happen before America’s November 5 elections, then if such elections will be held, either Donald Trump or Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will be the President starting in 2025. If WW3 will happen after such elections, then America’s voters today should know that on May 28, the Washington Post, headlined “Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour”, and reported that at one fundraising event for billionaires and centi-millionaires (not for mere voters), “he suggested that he would have bombed Moscow and Beijing if Russia invaded Ukraine or China invaded Taiwan.” In other words: to him, regarding the current war in Ukraine, and regarding the long-sought-by-the-U.S.-Government war in Taiwan, those two wars and to-become wars, are not merely “other people’s wars,” but these are our wars — meaning those American billionaires’ and centi-millionaires’ wars — to which he, as the U.S. President, would respond immediately by bombing, respectively, Russia and China.

    Though the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia (which blacklists [blocks from linking to] sites that aren’t CIA-approved) says nothing about the former President of Ukraine Volodmyr Zelenskyy being no longer legally after 20 May 2024 Ukraine’s President, and he did announce that the 20 May 2024 elections would be cancelled, he still does serve as-if he is Ukraine’s President, and is not questioned about that in U.S.-and-allied media. No polling has been done regarding whom Ukrainians would vote for if they were allowed to vote. However, on 15 February 2024, Yahoo News headlined “New poll shows Zelenskyy’s approval dips 5 points in Ukraine after departure of General Zaluzhnyi” and buried in its news-report that the poll showed that as-of February 24, the level of “trust” in leading political figures by the Ukrainian public were: Valerii Zaluzhnyi – 94%; Kyrylo Budanov – 66%; Volodymyr Zelenskyy – 64%; Serhiy Prytula – 61%; and Oleksandr Syrskyi – 40%. Zaluzhnyi was appointed Ukraine’s Ambassador to UK on 7 March 2024, after having been fired by Zelenskyy as Ukraine’s top General. Zelenskyy replaced him with Oleksandr Syrskyi.

    In any case, Ukraine has been ruled by America’s President ever since February 2014, and Russians have long known that this is so.

    The post U.S. President Biden Now Authorizes Ukraine to Start WW3 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Genocide Joe and Sunak commit war crimes in Yemen under cover of Trump’s guilty verdict

    Former president and likely Republican presidential-nominee Donald Trump is now, finally, a convicted felon. So, with the corporate media forcing all eyes on Trump’s conviction, what better time for Butcher Biden to rack up some war crimes? Because, not to be outdone, as the Trump news dropped, Genocide Joe was busy bombing the hell out of Yemen.

    Naturally, the US’s imperial lackey the UK jumped in on the colonial chest-thumping, to prop up their genocidal axis of evil with Israel in the Middle East.

    Bombing Yemen as Trump found guilty

    On Thursday 30 May, a New York jury found Donald Trump guilty on 34 charges of election fraud. As Reuters reported, the former president had falsified:

    documents to cover up a payment to silence a porn star ahead of the 2016 election.

    That very same day however, the US and UK rained bombs down on Yemen in the middle of the night:

    The US and UK military claimed to have targeted thirteen locations where they had identified buildings:

    housing drone ground control facilities and providing storage for very long range drones, as well as surface to air weapons

    To many, the uncanny timing, with Trump’s conviction swallowing up the media’s attention, was glaringly obvious:

    War criminals all round

    Consequently, an orange jumpsuit might match Trump’s complexion, but he’s not the only one who’d wear it well:

    Because of course, Trump too committed atrocious war crimes against people in Yemen:

    Essentially then, courts have convicted Trump for hush money to a porn star, but blatant murderous war crimes? Nah. Naturally, this suits Butcher Biden and his drone-strike-happy presidential predecessor Barrack Obama down to the ground.

    What’s more, that barely scratches the surface of US and UK war crime complicity. Even now, the duopoly of dying colonial empires are abetting war criminal Netanyahu in his brutal ethnic extermination of Palestinians. I’m old enough to remember when Israel used US-made munitions to burn 45 Gazans to death in a Rafah refugee camp.

    Unsurprisingly, the pair are gearing up to obstruct Netanyahu’s arrest after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for it. As the Canary’s James Wright wrote:

    In other words, Western leaders are arguing that international law does not apply to the West or its allies.

    To date, evidently so.

    Election season: nationalistic imperialism on steroids

    Rancid displays of toxic imperialism? Now election season really is in full swing:

    In short, buckle up for a self-aggrandising spiel of jingoistic imperial impulses from small men in suits for the next six months. Right on cue, here’s Sunak cracking out the ol’ “self defence” chestnut:

    Of course, for the chef’s kiss of timing – parliament – you know, that institution of elected representatives meant for holding government to account, is now dissolved. Naturally, this was the same day Sunak was getting in bed with Butcher Biden to rain terror and death down on people in Yemen:

    Some on X highlighted the attack on Yemen in the context of Sunak’s gross theatre of nationalistic pride-come-election stunt:

    Bombing Yemen to propping up Israel’s genocide in Gaza

    Ultimately however, despite Biden and Sunak’s best PR obfuscation tactics, the reasons for their criminal bombardment didn’t escape peoples’ notice. Specifically: sustaining Israel’s genocide in Gaza:

    Because despite the bullshit pretexts, at the heart of this is Palestine. Notably, the US and UK airstrikes are retaliation to Yemen blockading Israel-bound vessels fueling its genocide:

    Another poster highlighted the appalling racist double-standards at play in the Western corporate media and political establishment:

    At the end of the day, the US and UK can talk big on international law, but the majority world knows, the Zionist apologist war-mongers, with ally Israel, are the biggest war criminals going.

    Feature image via the White House/Wikimedia, in the public domain

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • UK government facing questions over British spy planes’ involvement in Israel’s war crimes

    The International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) has written a letter to the UK government seeking “urgent clarification” on British spy planes flying over Gaza during Israel’s genocidal assault. Crucially, it raises vital questions over potential UK complicity in Israeli war crimes in Palestine.

    UK Spy planes over Gaza

    An investigation by Declassified UK revealed on 8 May that the UK’s Royal Air Force (RAF) has conducted 200 surveillance flights over Gaza since 3 December. As the investigative news outlet reported:

    All the British spy flights have taken off from RAF Akrotiri, the UK’s sprawling air base on Cyprus, and have been in the air for around six hours.

    Gaza sits around 30 minutes flight time from the base so it is likely the RAF has gathered around 1,000 hours of surveillance footage over Gaza.

    What’s more, Declassified identified that the RAF were operating a spy flight over Gaza at the time Israel assassinated seven World Central Kitchen (WCK) aid workers.

    Since its investigation, the RAF has continued these reconnaissance flights. This included a RAF aircraft flying over Gaza on 26 May. Of course, this was the same day Israel brutally massacred 45 displaced Gazans in a Rafah refugee camp in the so-called ‘safe zone’.

    In its statement in December, the MoD claimed it was conducting these flights in “support of the ongoing hostage rescue activity”. Moreover, it said that:

    Only information relating to hostage rescue will be passed to the relevant authorities responsible for hostage rescue.

    However, Declassified’s findings has brought these claims into question.

    Now, a new Declassified investigation has additionally unearthed more prospective evidence of UK complicity in Israel’s genocidal siege. In tandem with these spy flights, it found that the British military has flown 60 aircraft to Israel since it started its genocide in Gaza. Notably, while it acknowledged the purpose of the visits remained “unclear”, it identified these as cargo planes capable of carrying over 100 soldiers, as well as weaponry.

    Israel commits war crimes as UK aircraft look on

    Given all this, on 30 May, the IJCP sent a letter to the UK’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO).

    Specifically, the letter argues that the government must disclose certain information to the UK public. Firstly, this concerns if the RAF is sharing intelligence from these reconnaissance flights with the Israeli military. In particular it states that in light of Israel’s WCK and Rafah refugee camp strikes:

    The public urgently requires information about these and other incidents, to establish whether British intelligence was in Israeli hands at the time of the strikes, including intelligence potentially used for target acquisition.

    On top of this, it seeks to establish if the UK is sharing information from these missions with the International Criminal Court (ICC). The IJCP wrote:

    It is also imperative to know whether footage captured of these apparent war crimes will be shared with the Hague. In Parliament, Defence Secretary Grant Shapps declined five times to confirm or deny whether such intelligence will be shared with the ICC. This is despite the fact that the UK, as a State Party to the Rome Statute, has committed to support the ICC’s mandate to prosecute individuals for international crimes.

    Echoing this, ICJP legal officer Zaki Sarraf stated:

    The government has provided the public with little-to-any information on the nature or volume of intel shared with Israel, nor whether it will be shared with the ICC. On both counts, it is imperative that the public knows. British spy planes flying over Gaza whilst Israel commits brutal war crimes against the Palestinians is deeply concerning, particularly considering the UK government’s opacity on the issue.

    Feature image via EGCC Aviation – Youtube

    By Hannah Sharland

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • If The Wars Go On

    I suppose my title could have been couched in the singular form, as Hermann Hesse, the Nobel Prize winning German/Swiss author, did with his collection of anti-war essays about World War I (the war to end all wars that didn’t), If The War Goes On . . .  

    Or more appropriately, I might have eliminated that conditional “If” since it seems Pollyannish.

    It’s a long hard road, this anti-war business.  During the first Cold War and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis in the early sixties when Kennedy and Krushchev narrowly avoided blowing the world to smithereens, Bob Dylan put it right in his fierce song, Masters of War:

    (Verse 1)

    Come, you masters of war
    You that build the big guns
    You that build the death planes
    You that build all the bombs
    You that hide behind walls
    You that hide behind desks
    I just want you to know
    I can see through your masks

    (Verse 3)

    Like Judas of old
    You lie and deceive
    A world war can be won
    You want me to believe
    But I see through your eyes
    And I see through your brain
    Like I see through the water
    That runs down my drain

    Indeed there is a system of war that guarantees that the various wars go on and on ad infinitum, and they are linked.  It is why the warfare state has killed our anti-war leaders, first and foremost JFK for turning against war in the last year of his presidency.  Then in 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy in quick succession.  It is why if you dare to look around the world today, you will see that there is a series of wars happening, not only in the obvious places like Ukraine and Gaza, but in places that you may never have heard of, and if you peek a bit further into their causes, you will discover that a familiar culprit with 750 plus military bases around the world has its hand in most of them – the United States of America.

    These wars have their cold and hot phases.  There are days when the corporate media let them sleep and other times when the same media wake them a bit, but never enough to wake their readers up to the reality of the deadly game.  That is the media’s job as stenographers for the warfare state.  Wars being essentially the health of the state, as Randolph Bourne wrote long ago, they provide vast profits for the military-industrial complex/Wall St., whether they are in preparation or in operation, awake or asleep, hot or cold.  Ray McGovern, the former CIA analyst with a moral conscience, has aptly named this vast interlocking propaganda apparatus the military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think-tank complex, MICIMATT.  It is a complex that blatantly serves the interests of the masters of war who “ain’t worth the blood/that runs in [their] your veins,” in Dylan’s words.

    The preparation for war is war.  What is prepared must be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, so other weapons can be prepared to be used up, and on and on until one day no one is left to use anything, for the world will be used up in a nuclear conflagration.  These weapons are produced in nice clean factories that pay good wages to people who take their pay and go their way, giving their souls to the killers.  For the U.S. economy is built on the waging of wars so continuous that it is nearly impossible to find a break between its hot and cold phases, or what seems like decent employment and the diabolic.  They are so intertwined.  It is a system of capitalistic finance, a revolutionary system that builds to destroy.

    The U.S spends nearly $900  billion dollars annually on “defense” spending; this is more than China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, the U.K., Germany, France, South Korea, and Japan combined.  The U.S.A. is a warfare state; it’s as simple as that.  And whether they choose to be aware of it or not, the vast majority of Americans support this killing machine by their insouciance and silence.  That their country is spending up to 2 trillion dollars on modernizing its nuclear weapons disturbs them  not.  It is a death cult.  Some – as I myself have done mistakenly – talk about the “deep state” or some other deceptive phrase that conceals the truth that the official state is the “deep state.”  It stares us in the face, but many refuse to stare it back down.  It is too obvious, standing, as it does, in the way of a life of illusions.

    And what is equally apparent today – or should be if one is not asleep – is that because of the war policies of the U.S., the chances of another world war and the use of nuclear weapons is rising by the day.  Despite all its denials to the contrary, the US/NATO is pushing for open warfare with Russia that will involve the use of nuclear weapons.

    Our masters of war are pushing us toward a nuclear abyss.

    In a recent perceptive article, “Russia and China Have Had Enough,” Pepe Escobar writes truths many prefer not to hear.  That there is no split between Russia and China but the opposite – a rock solid Russia-China strategic partnership and a determination to oppose and defeat the U.S./UK/NATO hybrid war tactics across Eurasia and the Middle East.  That the more these U.S.-led forces attempt to destroy Russia, the more the expanding alliances involved in the Shanghai Cooperative Agreement (SCO) and the expanding BRICS partnerships of emerging economies (originally just Brazil, Russia, India, and then South Africa; now also Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, United Arab Emirates, with many more countries waiting to join) will gain in power.  In Escobar’s words, “. . . the Global Majority is on the move: Russia is closely cooperating, increasingly, with scores of nations in West Asia, wider Asia, Africa and Latin America.”

    Despite this fact, the United States and its allies blithely continue as if their control of the world order is secure.  That they can butcher and badger the world into submission.  The insane are usually deluded, but when they control nuclear weapons, the people of the world need to awaken.

    Ray McGovern, a Russia expert, (see raymcgovern.com) has echoed Escobar on the absurdity of the Russian China split; has emphasized how Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians has made it an isolated but desperate pariah state; and how the U.S. war against Russia in Ukraine is leading to the increased use of  U.S. tactical nuclear weapons that could lead to full-scale nuclear war.  He is not alone in this warning.

    There are many signs that we are moving toward a nuclear war with calls for U.S./NATO to support more strikes inside Russia, crossing a very dangerous Russian red line.  Russia has made it very clear they will respond.  As politicians of various stripes – French President Macron, NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, et al. have ecstatically been urging the Biden administration, who needs no urging, to escalate the war in Ukraine by attacking Russia proper (“The time has come for allies to consider whether they should lift some of the restrictions they have put on the use of weapons they have donated to Ukraine,” Stoltenberg told The Economist.), Mike Whitney has written about a recent such attack that should send chills down everyone’s spines –  “Washington Attacks Key Elements of Russia’s Nuclear Umbrella Threatening Entire Global Security Architecture.” – but  since the corporate media ignore it, most will dream away and get their barbecues ready for Fourth of July celebrations.  They and the flag-dressed Dolly Parton can sing all they want about when Johnny comes marching home again, but Dolly and no one will be jolly if there are no homes to march to, no Johnnies marching anywhere but to death, no anything.  Just a wasteland.

    Michel Chossudovsky, Ray McGovern, Eva Bartlett, Craig Murray, Patrick Lawrence, Vanessa Beeley, Pepe Escobar, Oliver Stone, Andrew Napolitano, Craig Paul Roberts, Chris Hedges, Alastair Crooke, Caitlin Johnstone, Peter Koenig, Finian Cunningham, Diana Johnstone, Lew Rockwell, and so many other sane but marginalized writers whose names I am omitting as I write quickly, are warning us of our closeness to nuclear annihilation.  Cassandras all, I fear.  Marginalized prophets such as writer and antinuclear activist James W. Douglass (Lightning East to West, JFK and the Unspeakable, etc.) have been issuing such warnings for decades.  It is understandable that so many turn away from such warnings, for the thought of a nuclear war induces deep anxiety hard to control.  But unless the vast majority can break through such reticence and see through the official propaganda, the world will be destroyed by madmen sooner or later.  The signs today all point to sooner, for we are on the edge of the abyss.

    Former British diplomat Alistair Crooke, in a recent article – The brink of dissolution: Neurosis in the West as the levee breaks – writes about how the Biden administration’s policy toward Russia-China, not to say Israel-Palestine, being nothing more than more of the same, is stupid, self-defeating, and very dangerous.  Rather than accepting that its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is a disaster, the U.S. is escalating the conflict to a terrifying level.  Rather than accepting the obvious deep alliance between China and Russian exemplified in the recent hug between Putin and Xi and their joint 8,000 word joint statement, Biden has said, “Russia is in a very, very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China.” 

    It doesn’t get any stupider.  But when more of the same doesn’t work and you can’t accept the reality of a changing world order, you do more of the same.  Crooke writes:

    The paradox is that Team Biden – wholly inadvertently – is midwifing the birth of a ‘new world’. It is doing so by dint of its crude opposition to parturition. The more the western élites push against the birthing – through ‘saving Zionism’; ‘saving European Ukraine’ and by crushing dissent – perversely they accelerate the foundering of Leviathan.

    President Xi’s double farewell hug for President Putin following their 16-17 May summit nonetheless sealed the birth – even the New York Times, with customary self-absorption, termed the warm embrace by Xi as ‘defiance of the West’.

    The root of the coming dissolution stems precisely from the shortcoming that the NY Times headline encapsulates in its disdainful labelling of the seismic shift as base anti-westernism.

    More of the same, yes, that is Biden’s approach, inflamed regularly by the anti-Russian hatred spewed by The New York Times and its ilk.  It is an obsession bordering on full-fledged madness, yet it is integral to the belief that the U.S. is an empire and will remain one while the rest of the world can go to hell.  Such a mindset is behind the U.S.’s abrogating all the nuclear weapons treaties that provided a semblance of security that nuclear weapons would not be used.

    Crooke ends his piece with these sobering words:

    Put plainly, with the U.S. unable to exit or to moderate its determination to preserve its hegemony, Lavrov [Sergey Lavrov, Russian Foreign Minister] sees the prospect for increased western weapons provision for Ukraine. The discourse of military escalation is in fashion in Europe (of that there is no doubt); but both in the Middle East and Ukraine, western policy is in deep trouble. There must be doubts whether the West has either the political will, or the internal unity, to pursue this aggressive course. Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.

    Let me repeat that last understated sentence: “Dragging wars are not traditionally thought to be ‘voter friendly’ when campaigning reaches its peak.”  And so?  More of the same?

    Ray McGovern suggest what is more likely:

    Israel [is] becoming a dangerous pariah; Ukraine/US/NATO a dangerous loser. As Israel defies the UN, and as the “exceptional” geniuses around Biden ignore Kremlin warnings regarding provocations re Ukraine, the likelihood increases for US use of tactical nukes.

    Desperadoes do desperate things.  In Biden and Netanyahu we have two blood-thirsty nihilists at the end of their ropes.  These masters of war make me think that a better title for this piece would have been:

    If the World Goes On.

    The post If The Wars Go On first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Unbecoming American: Bombs of August

    The idea that the Anglo-American Empire wages war by mistake is not new. Nor are the kinds of mistake novel. There appears to be an entire school of historical literature based on the premise that when the paragons of benevolence among the English-speaking peoples go forth to war then it is almost entirely unintentional. Apologist from down under, Christopher Clark, made a great impression with his slightly Germanophilic addition to the literature ten years ago. Belligerence is conceded occasionally, like when some functionary pronounces that the mainly brown people on the planet need to be regularly instructed in obedience. However, all the really messy wars are attributed to miscalculation. In other words, failing in subterfuge, the regime(s) are compelled to slaughter millions to adjust for their errors of judgement.

    I was a high school student when an Anglophone South African, on whose daughter I had a crush at the time, recommended to me The Guns of August, a historical novel by Barbara Tuchman. Subsequently I read her The Zimmermann Telegram too. Tuchman was a good writer, in the sense that it was a pleasure to read her books. Probably she was also a good historian in the sense of propagandist for national stories. A daughter of the Wertheim and Morgenthau banking dynasty, one need not cast aspersions to contemplate a particular bias in recounting an epoch of immense importance to family fortunes.  In any event, both accounts present the Great War (WWI) in the style of British pageantry, a blood-drenched coronation for the world to come. It is not enough that the history of the twentieth century is told by the victors, a careful genealogy indicates that it is also narrated with the greatest literary skill by the merchant-adventurers (aka bankers) that have funded or plundered along the way.

    Summer approaches. This August 110 years will have lapsed since the general mobilization with which four years of murderous class war commenced. The Great War was not the end of an era of peace. It was the regurgitation of the blood splashed by the Maxim and Hotchkiss guns throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. This August 79 years ago, the US Empire incinerated two Japanese cities with atomic bombs— other cities, including Tokyo, had already been burned to the ground with conventional incendiaries. In February of 1945, more than 3,900 tons of HE and incendiary were dropped on civilians in the city of Dresden before the one-bomb solution had been perfected. Summer approaches with rumours of F-16 V “Fighting Falcons”, atomic bomb platforms, to be delivered to the Ukraine theatre of the Empire’s barely undeclared war against the Russian Federation. The triggers are already being shrink-wrapped in the polystyrene of official apology. With the forward deployment of Pfizer, Moderna, and the regiments of the medical-pharmament in 2020, the decks have been cleared. If “the big one” comes, nearly a billion people will not be able to tell whether they are dying from genetic-engineering injections or radioactive force projection.

    In 2016, a good friend of mine joined me for a nine-hour performance of The Last Days of Humanity (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit) by Karl Kraus, on the stage of Teatro Nacional de São João in Porto. Kraus called it a “Mars play”. Written between 1915 and 1922, this play is some five-hundred pages long. It dramatizes all the insidious and infuriating aspects of the war — including especially the mendacity and perversion of language — that began in August 1914 (also the title of a 1971 Solzhenitsyn novel). When we left the theatre, I said to my friend essentially, “they know not what they do”. Of course I meant the theatre company that had prepared and performed this marathon drama. Last year, I met the theatre director in the rua Santa Catarina and repeated to him those very words. He smiled and acknowledged my appreciation of the grand performance. However it was clear he did not understand my reference to prophesy.

    We wait irradiated by the mirages of the “phony war” in our partially personal digital devices for the moment when violent fantasies are no longer virtual. Satiated by malignant narcissism and stimulated by transhuman lust, the switches and circuits inflame as we anticipate August infame.

    The post Unbecoming American: Bombs of August first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin

    Professor Jeffrey Sachs is the President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. He is the author of many best selling books, including The End of Poverty and The Ages of Globalization. Here he is with probably the smartest and most accurate assessment of the Ukraine war, and American foreign policy more broadly, ever caught on tape.

    The post The Untold History of the Cold War, CIA Coups Around the World, and COVID’s Origin first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A new campaign will stop a UK/US/Australian joint military plan in Wales – and it’s a phoenix of one from the 90s

    A new campaign calling itself PARC Against DARC has announced its official launch on Wednesday 29 May, aiming to stop UK/US/Australia militaries’ plans to create a 27-dish ‘Deep Space Advanced Radar Concept’ – ‘DARC’ high-power radar station at Cawdor Barracks, Brawdy, Pembrokeshire, in the heart of the St. David’s peninsula.

    PARC Against DARC

    Their brand new website, www.parcagainstdarc.com comes as part of the launch and states that the proposals are:

    One of the most health-hazardous, tourism-ruining, skyline blighting military installations ever proposed anywhere in the UK.

    As part of ‘AUKUS’ – the three-way security pact between Australia, the UK, and the US – the military plans are to build three DARC radar installations around the world, one in each of the three countries. The radars would track foreign countries’ communications and military satellites in space, so that British, US, and Australian aircraft could then destroy them with anti-satellite missiles at will.

    This prompts the question on the PARC Against DARC website:

    When did Dewisland, Pembrokeshire or humankind ever vote for the US military to control all of space?

    A scoping report was submitted to Pembrokeshire County Council last year and in attempts to sell the project in a press release the US/UK Military made claims that the project would create one hundred new jobs. However, campaigners say these jobs would be mostly for American specialists and not locals, so in real terms this equates to a massive 300 job loss at the existing site.

    PARC Against DARC is launching what it describes as an “extremely robust campaign website, ‘ram-packed’ with calls to action” along with social media pages, a petition, a campaign crowdfunder as well as lobbying tools.

    Multiple arguments against DARC

    The website outlines several key arguments against DARC including the a security argument, an environmental argument and a health argument, in which it describes “a litany of potential health risks”, stating:

    The science is crystal clear, and decades of research show it: The higher incidence rates of cancers and other health complications experienced by residential populations in the closest vicinity of some particularly higher-powered, long range broadcast-capable radiofrequency installations are undeniable.

    The campaign launch comes in response to announcements from the UK government’s defence minister Grant Shapps last December that St David’s is their ‘preferred UK site’ for the DARC radar array.

    Campaigners point out that while the Ministry of Defence (MoD) might usually be shrouded in secrecy, it simply wouldn’t be right for it to use this lack of transparency to push through dangerous and potentially hazardous plans such as these. Therefore the onus and responsibility is squarely on the MoD to prove the safety of such a vast and environmentally impactful infrastructure proposal. They have a duty of care to do so.

    PARC Against DARC will host a public launch meeting at Solva Memorial Hall at 7pm on Thursday 27 June where speakers and experts will update on the unfolding situation.

    There will also be an open discussion at the meeting where all concerned parties can discuss plans to oppose the proposals and to get involved in the campaign. Organisers invite all residents, local businesses and elected representatives who have concerns about DARC to attend the meeting and make their voice heard.

    Second time around for PARC

    This isn’t the first time this battle has been fought.

    PARC (Pembrokeshire Against Radar Campaign) was originally set up back in 1990 when the US Military attempted to build a similar radar installation on the Dewisland peninsula back then.

    However, the PARC Campaign was so successful and achieved such strong support both locally and nationally that in 1991, Margaret Thatcher (the then-UK prime minister) was forced to publicly announce cancellation of the project in parliament.

    Campaigners say that the strength of public opposition to the radar also led to the sitting Conservative MP Nicholas Bennett losing his seat in parliament.

    The revamped 2024 operation already boasts an impressive and formidable level of support ranging from local, Welsh and UK organisations such as CND and Stop the War Coalition, as well as individual supporters such as Leanne Wood, Labour’s Beth Winter (MP for Cynon Valley), and Plaid Cymru’s Heledd Fychan MS for South Wales Central.

    Campaigners say they especially encourage local businesses organisations and individuals to add their name to the growing list of supporters, highlighting that this support will be vital to demonstrate a vast and diverse range of opposition to the proposals.

    Making Wales vulnerable

    Anthony Slaughter, leader of Wales Green Party, said:

    Wales Green Party fully supports the PARC campaign and will work together with them and others to resist the proposed Deep Space Advanced Radar Concept (DARC) being built in Pembrokeshire.

    The proposed facility will make this part of Wales vulnerable to future attacks as part of any resulting conflict triggered by its use and represents an unacceptable militarisation of space. In an increasingly unstable world with multiple conflicts raging across the globe and impacting heavily on the poorest and most vulnerable communities.

    The UK government should not be cooperating in this drive to extend these wars into space. Governments at every level have a duty to work towards creating a fairer, more equal and peaceful world for future generations and should play no part in this dangerous escalation of warmongering.

    We also note the potential health risks and environmental damage that this project would cause which also underline the urgent need for this campaign to be supported at both local and national levels.

    Stop the DARC

    A spokesperson from PARC Against DARC concluded:

    The fight is on! We fully intend to win the battle to stop the radar as they did in the 90’s. The MOD are making out as if it’s just a formality to gain planning permission for this huge project, even insinuating in their press that they just need to ‘run it past the local parish council’ or such like.

    This is simply not the case; we know that major infrastructure projects like these require specialist planning permission which can only be granted by Pembrokeshire County Council, and that there will be several environmental impact assessment stages they’d have to clear long before they could ever begin building.”

    Our plan is to fight them at every level and on every front to make absolutely sure that these proposals are never passed by our elected representatives in County Hall. We will build on the strong history of the previously victorious campaign and echo all of its strengths & successes.

    Last time there were huge rallies, marches and demonstrations and ultimately the entire county stood strong together to fight off the proposals. We are absolutely confident that we will create this avalanche of opposition once again so that these plans will never see the light of day.

    Featured image via PARC Against DARC

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Profiteering Military Will Praise War and Parade During America’s Memorial Day of Solemn Mourning


    U.S. Memorial Day, originally intended as a solemn day of mourning for families of dead veterans has long become an opportunity for jingoistic war celebration, deceiving politicians and recruiting officers to parade and glorify warfare as a means to entrap young volunteers for future wars.

    Instead of solemn mourning, on Memorial Day, war promoting corporate media, having tricked so many Americans into fighting and dying in unjust, murderous wars based on lies, now hypes our loved ones’ inglorious death as beautiful military service to entice recruits for their continuing wars.

    We need a memorial day to commemorate all victims of war, especially the civilians. That way people will become aware of the true effect of war and be more ready to oppose war when politicians call for it.

    How many tens of thousands of conscience stricken veterans of US wars in small countries can forget faces of ‘enemy’ dead? – finding smiling photos of beautiful children and wives in the caps or pockets of their clothes? How many American veterans were ashamed to be murdering guys defending their country against our bombing and invasion. Remembering them with love officially on Memorial Day would shake up the war mongers and challenge lies past and present about our wars.

    Let’s not limit those Memorial Day moments of silent mourning solely for Americans, who ‘gave’ their lives in far away places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia just to name a few of the nations invaded by Americans. 

    To honor only US military dead is to glorify the military mindset. Not only that, but all around the world via satellite TV, families still mourning their children’s deaths or maiming, watch clips of Americans publicly honoring US military who fell attacking their countries.

    A pretty slick suckering-in, that military use of the word “honor,” as indiscriminate praise for killing designated enemies of the corporatist governed US, as if they were enemies of the American people. Honoring them as heroes draws a boy in to prove his manhood. Mourning dead military is a turn-off for boys considering enlisting. Mourning is anti-war! Bad for war profits. “Honoring” is pro-war! War is good for the stock market and the profit margins of U.S. weapons manufacturing corporations, conversantly profitable for the American war investing community suspected of criminal insanity.

    The U.S. corporation Lockheed Martin is the world’s largest arms-producing and military services company, with arms sales of nearly $60 billion. Raytheon Technologies, Northrop Grumman Corp., Boeing, and General Dynamics Corp. are the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th largest in the world.

    Let’s have U.S. Memorial Day become “Victims of War Day” to foster war prevention

    Americans should no longer participate in selective mourning only America’s war dead, and instead mourn all victims of war, the millions of civilians, the hundreds of thousands of our designated enemies fallen in their motherlands, and only then, having put others first, as in common humility, will we have the right to mourn the tens of thousands of our very own fellow citizens who sacrificed their lives for, or thinking it was for, the good of our nation.

    Mourn — Not Honour — Americans Who Died in Dishonourable “Mistaken” Wars for GOP, DEMS and the Wall Street Deep State.

    Humankind is in an ugly period of suffering in the bloody hands of imbecilic investors in war, who own the American government and media and who cannot stop themselves from planning war, even terminal nuclear war, since they know that wars make money. Their funded elected politicians and media praise war on Memorial Day.

    Memorial Day! Mourn US Soldiers Killed in Criminally Dishonorable Wars in Other Peoples’ Countries! Imagining what many GIs who lost their lives might be saying on Memorial Day if they could speak from their graves: “While our family and friends mourn our absence, conglomerate owned media, after having used our patriotism to have us fight criminally unjust wars based on lies, now hypes our inglorious death as beautiful military service, blacking out our senseless massacres of millions over the last 60 years and more.”

    Knowledgeable, informed, really patriotic Americans mourn firstly the millions that Americans have slaughtered and only then mourn U.S. soldiers.

    A Veterans For Peace Memorial Day Press Release might say that VFP, or at least many if not all VFP, first mourn the patriots of US invaded countries that fell fighting against overwhelming odds, and their civilian countrymen and children who fell in harms way of those US invading forces. Nothing less than this can dent the Memorial Day adulation for dying for what Martin Luther King called “atrocity wars to maintain predatory investments.”

    What Dead GIs Would Say to the World on Memorial Day about Being Praised as Heroes. If they could speak from their graves, GIs who died shamefully killing, maiming and destroying civilian populations, would appeal to Majority Humanity in the ever targeted and plundered Global South, to effect the same level of solidarity that the racist neocolonial investment banker-driven imperialists of the First World, of mostly Caucasian population display, and bring their five centuries of brutal genocidal Western domination to an end.

    A growing number of Americans are now able to include mourning the billions who have suffered under U.S. led permanent war hegemony, and this writer agrees with those peoples historians who understand that America has become weakened by having self-destroyed it’s economic advantage through spending wildly, unintelligently and massively on its military,* and China will come to be in financial position to offer U.S. a deal better than war, and bring about war investors’ military industrial complex failure to keep power in a war weary U.S.A.

    Post Script:

    This encouraging the honouring and remembering all victims of war on Memorial Day is not new idea. Its long been the hope, plan and fervent desire of peace activists.

    …as in 2022, the Memorial Day Massachusetts Peace Action Society announced, “Today, Memorial Day, activists will gather to honor and remember all victims of war.”

    The post Profiteering Military Will Praise War and Parade During America’s Memorial Day of Solemn Mourning first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Biden Continues to Provide Israel Billions for War Crimes

    As Israeli forces continue to carry out war crimes in Gaza, the United States has seen growing popular opposition to military aid to Israel’s far right government. Since the Nixon administration, the United States has been sending over $2 billion in taxpayer-funded military aid to Israel every year. Starting in 2016, it was raised to $3.8 billion annually, supplemented by an additional $14.1…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pacifists already pledge to resist National Service plans from the desperate Tories

    British pacifists have said they will refuse to join or in any way support the military under the Tories’ plans to reintroduce National Service ahead of the general election, if the scheme is ever implemented.

    National Service: the backlash begins

    In the first major announcement of his general election campaign, Rishi Sunak said a future Tory government would introduce the scheme in 2025, forcing 18-year-olds either to join the military for 12 months full-time or to work one weekend per month in their community with organisations such as fire, police and the NHS.

    Labour have called the scheme ‘unfunded’ and criticised the Tories for cutting military spending, without raising any objection to the principle of reintroducing national service.

    Members of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), the UK’s leading pacifist organisation, have lambasted the plans, pointing out that they are designed to whip up support for the armed forces and an increasingly aggressive UK foreign policy.

    Although the Tories claim that the plan does not amount to conscription, the PPU has accused them of attempting to introduce ‘conscription by stealth’.

    The PPU has pledged to resist National Service and to support future conscientious objectors, warning the government that the scheme would be met by waves of resistance from young people.

    In anticipation of the backlash, the home secretary James Cleverly has said 18-year-olds who refuse to participate would not be sent to prison.

    Earlier in the year, the head of the British Army called for a ‘citizen army’ to prepare for a future land war with Russia and referred to the British public as a ‘pre-war generation’, provoking speculation about a return of conscription.

    At the time, the Tory government were quick to deny any possibility that conscription would be reintroduced.

    A general election gimmick, or a dangerous policy shift?

    Geoff Tibbs from the PPU said:

    Sunak’s announcement signals a dangerous shift in politics. Conscription has quickly turned from a distant historical memory into a very real possibility, which we need to resist at every turn.

    This is a transparent attempt by the government to whip up everyday militarism and nationalist fervour in support of their reckless foreign policy, ahead of the general election. With the UK’s military spending and nuclear arsenal growing fast, this move sends another provocative signal to Russia and China, which can only make the world more unsafe.

    The PPU, founded in 1934, has opposed conscription in the UK and around the world for ninety years. Many of its original members were conscientious objectors in the First World War and many went on to become conscientious objectors in WWII.

    As the British section of War Resisters’ International (WRI), the PPU stands in solidarity with people refusing National Service in the many countries worldwide where conscription is in force, including in Russia, Ukraine, and Israel.

    The PPU recently marked International Conscientious Objectors’ Day (15 May), along with many other peace organisations in the UK and around the world, to raise awareness of the struggles of conscientious objectors and to send them a message of solidarity.

    Featured image via the Canary

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • In Hoc Signo Vinces


    The Son of God Goes Forth to War

    In 1812, need I say more, Reginald Heber composed the hymn of the Church Militant, the text of which bears citation in full:

    The Son of God goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain; his blood red banner streams afar: who follows in his train? Who best can drink his cup of woe, triumphant over pain, who patient bears his cross below, he follows in his train.

    That martyr first, whose eagle eye could pierce beyond the grave; who saw his Master in the sky, and called on him to save. Like him, with pardon on his tongue, in midst of mortal pain, he prayed for them that did the wrong: who follows in his train?

    A glorious band, the chosen few, on whom the Spirit came, twelve valiant saints, their hope they knew, and mocked the cross and flame. They met the tyrant’s brandished steel, the lion’s gory mane; they bowed their heads the death to feel: who follows in their train?

    O noble army, men and boys, the matron and the maid, around the Savior’s thrown rejoice, in robes of light arrayed. They climbed the steep ascent of heaven, through peril, toil and pain; O God, to us may grace be given, to follow in their train.

    According to the astute analyst Mr Mike Whitney, Mr Richard Haass (I wonder whether the name originally meant hate i.e. Hass or hare i.e. Haase), a reverend brother of the Rhodes-Rothschild congregation for the propagation of the faith, has arrived at the same conclusions of his brethren in uniform that the battlefield triumph of the legacy SS battalions and reconstituted Ukrainian military product (Kiever Velveeta) is beyond achievement. As Mr Whitney points out, not only outliers like Scott Ritter, Douglas MacGregor or Larry Wilkerson have stopped singing hymns of immanent victory over the reincarnation of Ivan and Stalin, but members of the general staff have changed their tunes.

    Whereas the professionals cautiously suggest, if not request, disengagement, the real government for whom Richard Haass is a representative “influencer” complacently advises that the West in NATO assembled must and will now shift gears. If an M1 Abrams cannot manage a 15 degree incline in snow or mud, then it is just a matter of firing more rocketry. That is to the extent that overt military support is relevant.

    Clearly Mr Haass also has the strategy of Brzezinski in Afghanistan in mind. Recall the latter’s offensive pronouncement that creating the pseudo-Islamic terrorist forces in Afghanistan (actually the beginning of “America’s own Ghurka regiments”) was justified as a means of destroying the Soviet Union.

    Instead of faux-Muslims, Ukraine is run by crypto-Zionist terrorists who operate Ukraine just like Hamid Karzai ran Afghanistan.

    Depopulating Ukraine also benefits the criminal cashflow underlying the plunder of the territory still known by that name.

    As we have both argued to different degrees, this was war against Russia from the beginning.

    Paul Craig Roberts has insisted from the beginning that Putin failed to see the obvious, thus prolonging the campaign to the brink. I disagree. In real politics it makes a difference what you say too. The tacit avoidance of the obvious (and here Stalin was compelled to act the same) has been necessary to prepare and force the other side to escalate in language first.

    Of course this is not 1938 and Putin is not leading a state out of civil war. Germany’s role has been muted because the “Nazis” are already in the Ukraine. From current reports they are engaged in clearing the corridor for a vain but violent missile cruise to Moscow and Sevastapol. Moreover a great deal of Western war preparation was accomplished by the COVID-19 campaign, whose effects on the Western mass psychology and economy are far from dissipated (as they too are entering a new only vaguely perceivable phase).

    Yet one can see that the Istanbul format was an attempt to reach something equivalent to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. That failed – showing that the West learned from its mistake in the last war against Russia.

    Why is there such an obvious discrepancy between official US military assessments and those of the Establishment? Let us recall that the notorious Pentagon Papers reported the warrior’s pessimistic appraisal of US efforts in Indochina. The late Daniel Ellsberg adroitly “neglected” to include the crucial CIA chapters in his conscientious exposure. Vietnam was a CIA (corporate) war with military cover. The same applies to the Ukraine. Vladimir Putin surely knows that. However there are also rules in covert warfare. One of them is that the general public must remain confused or ignorant of the underlying business driving the visible and tangible hostilities. Mr Putin has repeated that all wars end with negotiation. Hence his refusal to table demands or assertions that could render the malicious incapable of concessions demonstrates a profound belief in diplomacy foreign not only to perfidious Albion but to its genotypes in the Anglo-American Empire.

    Therefore, the professional soldiers (as opposed to paramilitary party cadres in cabinet of general staff) can honestly say what they have been educated to see while the political commissariat repeats the substance of their daily briefings.

    For the US, WW2 became desperate only once it was clear that the Wehrmacht was on the retreat. The panic of 1944 that precipitated Normandy and the formal abandonment of fascist (Vichy) and occupied France was triggered by a similar adjustment. 1945 delivered Germany and Japan to US occupation where they have remained ever since. [Except for the interregnum of an East Germany state from 1949 to 1990 — DV ed] It also initiated the kind of war that international financial functionary Bernard Baruch was credited with calling “cold”.

    The physical space has not changed. The strategic objectives remain more or less the same as in the Fourth Crusade (including the sack of major Near Eastern population centers). However, there has been an enormous compression of time and lethality.

    The inhabitants of Western Eurasia aka Europe are supposed to be simultaneously impoverished and enlisted as Crusaders, think of the 1212 “Children‘s Crusade”. The masses of psychologically maimed since 2020 are to find their salvation in vicarious battle with the “Ivan”. The rabinnical-papal absolutism on the Tiber has long been a patron of perdition. However, there is some irony in the regnal name blessing the slaughter on the Bosporus and elsewhere East. Innocent III was anything but. However innocence and purity, like hygiene and solidarity have become the highest virtues among the quick and the dead of the dissolving Western Empire.

    Salvation is just over the rainbow, as the popularity of those banners demonstrates.

    In Hoc Signo…

    The post In Hoc Signo Vinces first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XV Nagasaki, 1982, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    For Prabir, who is now out of jail.

    On the evening of 14 May, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken climbed onstage at Barman Dictat in Kyiv, Ukraine, to pick up an electric guitar and join the Ukrainian punk band 19.99. Ukrainians, he said, are ‘fighting not just for a free Ukraine, but for a free world’. Blinken and 19.99 then played the chorus of Neil Young’s ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’, entirely ignoring the implications of its lyrics – much like Donald Trump, who, to Young’s irritation, used the chorus in his 2015–2016 presidential campaign.

    In February 1989, the day after Young received the news that his band’s tour in the USSR fell through, he penned the song’s lyrics, resting on his criticisms of the Reagan years and the first month of George H. W. Bush’s presidency. While it sounds patriotic on the surface, that song – like Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the USA’ (1984) – is deeply critical of the hierarchies and humiliations of capitalist society.

    The three verses of ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ paint a picture of despair (‘people shufflin’ their feet/ people sleepin’ in their shoes’) defined by the drug epidemic plaguing the poor (a woman ‘puts the kid away/ and she’s gone to get a hit’), the collapse of educational opportunities (‘there’s one more kid/ that will never go to school’), and a growing population that lives on the street (‘we got a thousand points of light/ for the homeless man’). Springsteen’s song, written in the shadow of the US war on Vietnam (‘so they put a rifle in my hand/ sent me off to a foreign land/ to go and kill the yellow man’), also captured the strangulation of the working class in the US, many of whom were unable to get a job after returning from a war they did not want (‘down in the shadow of the penitentiary/ out by the gas fires of the refinery/ I’m ten years burning down the road/ nowhere to run ain’t got nowhere to go’).

    These are songs of anguish, not anthems of war. To chant ‘born in the USA’ or ‘keep on rockin’ in the free world’ does not evoke a sense of pride in the Global North but a fierce criticism of its ruthless wars. ‘Keep on rockin’ in the free world’ is pickled in irony. Blinken did not get it, nor did Trump. They want the allure of rock and roll, but not the acidity of its lyrics. They do not understand that Neil Young’s 1989 song is the soundtrack of the resistance to the US wars that followed against Panama (1989–1999), Iraq (1990–1991), Yugoslavia (1999), Afghanistan (2001–2021), Iraq (2003–2011), and many more.


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XIII Death of the American Prisoners of War, 1971, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    Blinken went to Kiev to celebrate the passing of three bills in the US House of Representatives that appropriate $95.3 billion for the militaries of Israel, Taiwan, Ukraine, and the United States. This is in addition to the more than $1.5 trillion that the US spends on its military every year. It is obscene that the US continues to supply Israel with deadly munitions for its genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, including the $26.4 billion it promised to Israel in the new bills while feigning concern for the starvation and slaughter of Palestinians. It is ghastly that the US continues to prevent peace talks between Ukraine and Russia while funding the former’s demoralised military (including $60.8 billion for weapons in the new bills alone) as the US seeks to use the conflict to ‘see Russia weakened’.

    At the other end of Eurasia, the US has, similarly, used the issue of Taiwan in its efforts to see China ‘weakened’. That is why this supplemental appropriation allots $8.1 billion for ‘Indo-Pacific security’, including $3.9 billion in armaments for Taiwan and $3.3 billion for submarine construction in the US. Taiwan is not alone as a potential frontline state in this pressure campaign against China: the newly formed Squad, made up of Australia, Japan, the Philippines, and the US, uses solvable conflicts between the Philippines and China as opportunities to weaponise dangerous manoeuvres with the hope of provoking a reaction from China that would give the US an excuse to attack it.


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XIV Crows, 1972, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    Our new dossier, The New Cold War is Sending Tremors Through Northeast Asia, published in collaboration with the International Strategy Centre (Seoul, South Korea) and No Cold War, argues that ‘the US-led New Cold War against China is destabilising Northeast Asia along the region’s historic fault lines as part of a broader militarisation campaign that extends from Japan and South Korea, through the Taiwan Strait and the Philippines, all the way to Australia and the Pacific Islands’. The bogeyman for this build-up in what the US calls the ‘Indo-Pacific’ (a term developed to draw India into the alliance to encircle China) is North Korea, whose nuclear and missile programmes are used to justify asymmetrical mobilisation along the Pacific edge of Asia. That South Korea’s military budget in 2023 ($47.9 billion) was more than twice North Korea’s GDP ($20.6 billion) in the same year is just one example that highlights this imbalance. This use of North Korea, the dossier argues, ‘has always been a fig leaf for US containment strategies – first against the Soviet Union and today against China’. (You can read the dossier in Korean here).


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, XII Floating Lanterns, 1968, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    In the early years of the US development of the ‘Indo-Pacific strategy’, Chinese scholars such as Hu Bo, Chen Jimin, and Feng Zhennan argued that the term was merely conceptual, limited by the contradictions between the countries involved in the development of the Chinese containment strategy. Over the past few years, however, a new view has developed that these shifts in the Pacific pose a serious threat to China and that the Chinese must respond with bluntness to prevent any provocation. It is this situation, characterised by the US’s creation of alliances that are designed to threaten China (the Quad, AUKUS, JAKUS, and the Squad) alongside China’s refusal to bend before the hyper-imperialism of the Global North, that creates a serious threat in Asia.

    The last section of the dossier, ‘A Path to Peace in Northeast Asia’, offers a window into the hopes of the people’s movements in Okinawa (Japan), the Korean peninsula, and China to find a pathway to peace. Five simple principles anchor this path: end the dangerous alliances, US-led war games in the region, and US intervention into the region, and support unity across struggles in the region as well as frontline struggles to end militarisation in Asia. The latter point is being fought on several fronts by those living near Okinawa’s Kadena Air Base and Henoko Bay as well as South Korea’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defence installation and Jeju Naval Base, to name a few.


    Iri and Toshi Maruki, X Petition, 1955, from The Hiroshima Panels.

    Several years ago, I visited the Maruki Gallery outside Higashi-Matsuyama city in Saitama, where I saw the remarkable murals made by Ira Maruki (1901–1995) and Toshi Maruki (1912–2000) to remember the terrible violence of the nuclear bombs that the US government dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These murals, in the traditional Japanese ink wash style sumi-e, depict the immense human toll of the ugliness of modern warfare. Thanks to the chief curator Yukinori Okamura and the international coordinator Yumi Iwasaki, we were able to include some of these murals in our dossier and in this newsletter.

    In 1980, the South Korean military dictatorship arrested Kim Nam-ju (1945–1994) and thirty-five other leftists on the grounds that they were involved in the National Liberation Front Preparation Committee. Kim was a poet and a translator who brought Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks and Ho Chi Minh’s writings into Korean. While in Gwangju Prison for eight years, Kim wrote a range of powerful poetry, which he was able to smuggle out for publication. One of those poems, ‘Things Have Really Changed’, is about the suffocation of the ambitions of the Korean people over their own peninsula.

    Under Japanese imperialism, if Joseon people
    shouted ‘Long Live Independence!’,
    Japanese policemen came and took them away,
    Japanese prosecutors interrogated them,
    Japanese judges put them on trial.

    Japan withdrew and the US stepped in.
    Now if Koreans
    say ‘Yankee Go Home’,
    Korean police come and take them away,
    Korean prosecutors interrogate them,
    Korean judges put them on trial.

    Things have really changed after liberation.
    Because I shouted ‘Drive out the foreign invaders!’,
    people from my own country
    arrested me, interrogated me, and put me on trial.

    The post Keep on Rockin’ in the Free World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Australia’s Anti-ICC Lobby

    Throwing caution to the wind, grasping the nettle, and every little smidgen of opportunity, Australia’s opposition leader, Peter Dutton, was thrilled to make a point in the gurgling tumult of the Israel-Hamas war.  Israel’s leaders, he surmised, had been hard done by the International Criminal Court’s meddlesome ways.  Best for Australia, he suggested, to cut ties to the body to show its solidarity for Israel.

    Dutton had taken strong issue with the announcement on May 20 by ICC prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan that requests for five arrest warrants had been sought in the context of the Israel-Hamas War. They included Hamas chief Yahya Sinwar, the commander-in-chief of the Al-Qassam Brigades Mohammed Al-Masri, Ismail Haniyeh, head of the Hamas Political Bureau, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant.

    The measure was roundly condemned by Israel’s closest ally, the United States.  US President Joe Biden’s statement called the inclusion of Israeli leaders “outrageous”.  There was “no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”  US lawmakers are debating steps to sanction ICC officials, while the US Secretary of State Antony Blinken has promised to cooperate with the measure.

    The United Kingdom also struck the same note,  “There is no moral equivalence between a democratically elected government exercising its lawful right to self-defence and the actions of a terrorist group,” declared UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak during a Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQ) session in the House of Commons.  When asked if he would, in the event of the warrants being issued, comply with the ICC and arrest the named individuals, a cold reply followed.  “When it comes to the ICC, this is a deeply unhelpful development … which of course is still subject to final decision.”

    Australia, despite being a close ally of Israel, has adopted a somewhat confused official response, one more of tepid caution rather than profound conviction.  Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese thought it unwise to even take a formal stance.  “I don’t comment on court processes in Australia, let alone court processes globally, that which Australia is not a party,” he told journalists.

    In light of what seemed like a fudge, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade thought it appropriate to issue a clarifying statement that “there is no equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”  Treasurer Jim Chalmers followed suit.  “There is no equivalence between Hamas the terrorist organisation and Israel, we have it really clear in condemning the actions of Hamas on October 7, we have made it clear we want to see hostages released, and we want to see the Israeli response comply completely with international humanitarian law.”

    Albanese’s opposite number preferred a punchier formula, coming out firmly on the side of Israel and donning gloves against the ICC and its “anti-Semitic stance”.  The PM had “squibbed it”, while his response had tarnished and damaged Australia’s “international relationships with like-minded nations”.  “The ICC,” Dutton insisted on May 23, “should reverse their decision and the prime minister should come out today to call for that instead of continuing to remain in hiding or continuing to dig a deeper hole for himself.”

    Opposition Liberal MP and former Australian ambassador to Israel, Dave Sharma, is also of the view that Australia examine “our options and our future co-operation with the court” if the arrest warrants were issued.  Swallowing whole the conventional argument that Israel was waging a principled war, he told Sky News that everything he had seen “indicates to me Israel is doing its utmost to comply with the principles of international humanitarian law”.

    The ears of Israeli officials duly pricked up.  Israel’s Strategic Affairs Minister and Observer of its War Cabinet, Ron Dermer, was delighted to hear about Dutton’s views.  “I didn’t know the head of your opposition had said that,” Dermer told 7.30, “I applaud him for doing it.”

    In a sense, Dutton and his conservative colleague are expressing, with an unintended, brute honesty, Australia’s at times troubled relationship with international law and human rights.  Despite being an enthusiastic signatory and ratifier of conventions, Canberra has tended to blot its copybook over the years in various key respects.  Take for instance, the brazen contempt shown for protections guaranteed by the UN Refugee Convention, one evidenced by its savage “Turn Back the Boats” policy, the creation of concentration camps of violence and torture in sweltering Pacific outposts and breaching the principle of non-refoulement.

    On the subject of genocide, Australian governments had no appetite to domestically criminalise it till 2002, despite ratifying the UN Genocide Convention in 1949.  And as for the ICC itself, wariness was expressed by the Howard government about what the body would actually mean for Australian sovereignty.  Despite eventually ratifying the Rome Statute establishing the court, the sceptics proved a querulous bunch.  As then Shadow Foreign Affairs Minister Kevin Rudd noted, “John Howard is neither Arthur nor Martha on ratification of the International Criminal Court.”

    While serving as Home Affairs minister, Dutton preferred to treat his department as an annex of selective law and order indifferent to the rights and liberties of the human subject. For him, bodies like the ICC exist like a troublesome reminder that human rights do exist and should be the subject of protection, even at the international level.

    The post Australia’s Anti-ICC Lobby first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law

    The application for arrest warrants by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim A.A. Khan in the Israel-Hamas War gives us a chance to revisit a recurring theme in the commission of crimes in international humanitarian law.  Certain states, so this logic goes, either commit no crimes, or, if they do, have good reasons for doing so, be they self-defence against a monstrous enemy, or as part of a broader civilisational mission.

    In this context, the application for warrants regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Defence Minister, Yoav Gallant, merits particular interest.  Those regarding the Hamas trio of its leader Yahya Sinwar, Mohammed Al-Masri, the commander-in-chief of Al-Qassam Brigades, and the organisation’s political bureau head Ismail Haniyeh, would have left most Western governments untroubled.

    From Khan’s perspective, the warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant will focus on policies of starvation, the intentional causing of “great suffering, or serious injury to body or health”, including cruel treatment, wilful killing or murder, intentional attacks on the Palestinian population, including extermination, persecution and other inhumane acts falling within the Rome Statute “as crimes against humanity”.

    The ICC prosecutor’s assessment follows the now increasingly common claim that Israel’s military effort, prosecuted in the cause of self-defence in the aftermath of the October 7 attacks by Hamas, is not what it claims to be.  Far from being paragons of proportionate warfare and humanitarian grace in war, Israel’s army and security forces are part of a program that has seen needless killing and suffering.  The crimes against humanity alleged “were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against the Palestinian civilian population pursuant to State policy.”

    The reaction from the Israeli side was always expected.  Netanyahu accused the prosecutor of “creating a false symmetry between the democratically elected leaders of Israel and the terrorist chieftains”.  He rejected “with disgust the comparison of the prosecutor in The Hague between democratic Israel and the mass murderers of Hamas”.

    Israeli President Isaac Herzog also found “any attempt to draw parallels between these atrocious terrorists and a democratically elected government of Israel – working to fulfil its duty to defend and protect its citizens in adherence to the principles of international law […] outrageous and cannot be accepted by anyone.”

    Israel’s staunchest ally, sponsor and likewise self-declared democracy (it is, in fact, a republic created by those suspicious of that system of government), was also there to hold the fort against such legal efforts.  US President Joe Biden’s statement on the matter was short and brusque: “The ICC prosecutor’s application for arrest warrants against Israeli leaders is outrageous.  And let me be clear: whatever this prosecutor might imply, there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas.”

    The democracy-as-purity theme, one used as a seeming exculpation of all conduct in war, surfaced in the May 21 exchange between Senator James Risch, the top Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and US Secretary of State Antony Blinken.  Was the secretary, inquired Risch, amenable to supporting legislation to combat the ICC “sticking its nose in the business of countries that have an independent, legitimate, democratic judicial system”?  (No consideration was given to the sustained efforts by the Netanyahu government to erode judicial independence in passing legislation to curb the discretion of courts to strike down government decisions.)

    The response from Blinken was agreeable to such an aim.  There was “no question we have to look at the appropriate steps to take to deal with, again, what is a profoundly wrong-headed decision.”  As things stand, a bill is already warming the lawmaking benches with a clear target.  Sponsored by Arkansas Republican Senator Tom Cotton, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act would obligate the President to block the entry of ICC officials to the US, revoke any current US visas such officials hold, and prohibit any property transactions taking place in the US.  To avoid such measures, the court must cease all cases against “protected persons of the United States and its allies”.

    The Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer similarly saw the prosecutor’s efforts as a pairing of incongruous parties. “The fact however that the leader of the terrorist organisation Hamas whose declared goal is the extinction of the State of Israel is being mentioned at the same time as the democratically elected representatives of that very State is non-comprehensible.”

    From the outset, such statements do two things.  The first is to conjure up a false distinction – that of equivalence – something absent in the prosecutor’s application.  The acts alleged are relevant to each specified party and are specific to them.  The second is a corollary: that democracies do not break international law and certainly not when it comes to war crimes and crimes against humanity, most notably when committed against a certain type of foe.  The more savage the enemy, the greater the latitude in excusing vengeful violence.  That remains, essentially, the cornerstone of Israel’s defence argument at the International Court of Justice.

    Such arguments echo an old trope.  The two administrations of George W. Bush spilled much ink in justifying the torture, enforced disappearance and renditions of terror suspects to third countries during its declared Global War on Terror.  Lawyers in both the White House and Justice Department gave their professional blessing, adopting an expansive definition of executive power in defiance of international laws and protections.  Such sacred documents as the Geneva Conventions could be defied when facing Islamist terrorism.

    Lurking beneath such justifications is the snobbery of exceptionalism, the conceit of power.  Civilised liberal democracies, when battling the forces of a named barbarism, are to be treated as special cases in the world of international humanitarian law.  The ICC prosecutor begs to differ.

    The post A Misplaced Purity: Democracies and Crimes Against International Law first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Palestine Action hit back at John Woodcock after they had to lawyer-up over his new report

    The following article is a comment piece from Palestine Action

    On Tuesday 21 May, secretary of state James Cleverly will present former Labour MP John Woodcock (otherwise known as Lord Walney)’s 240-page review on disruptive protest to the House of Commons. The report’s release, initially set to be on Wednesday 15 May (Nakba Day) was delayed, after Palestine Action’s lawyers pointed out Woodcock’s failure to meet his legal obligations as an independent advisor to the government.

    Namely, he did not consult Palestine Action and the other groups mentioned in his report on its contents, nor provided the opportunity to ask for clarifications or a right to reply.  

    Woodcock: avoiding accountability via parliament

    Cleverly will now lay the document before MPs following the ‘Motion for Unopposed Return’ procedure, under the pretext that it was written by an independent advisor.

    This enables the report to be published as a House of Commons paper, which means it comes with the protection of parliamentary privilege — a form of legal immunity that prevents any group named in the report from claiming defamation.

    By publishing the review in this manner, Cleverly and Woodcock are using procedure in a deliberate attempt to avoid accountability – described by Shami Chakrabarti in a recent news article published by the Guardian as an ‘abuse of parliamentary privilege.’  

    John Woodcock, the so-called independent advisor responsible for writing the report, claimed to apply an “objective standard” throughout — though it was only in October 2023 that he referred to Palestine Action in a tweet as “Hamas’s little helpers.”

    Far from impartial

    This assertion of impartiality seems even more dubious, when one considers his ties to the arms industry and long-standing connections with the Israel lobby group “Labour Friends of Israel” — where he acted as chair of the organisation from July 2011 to January 2013. He also makes frequent visits to Israel, with his most recent trip taking place between 2-7 January 2024. Described as a “solidarity visit,” Woodcock’s flights and accommodation were paid for by the European Leadership Network (ElNet UK) – all amidst the ongoing genocide in Gaza. 

    Currently, Woodcock is advisor to the “Purpose Business Coalition”.

    One of its clients is Leonardo UK, which has worked with the Purpose Coalition since March 2022. Palestine Action identifies Leonardo UK as an arms company that is facilitating Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.

    The weapons manufacturer has been a key focus of the group’s direct-action campaign to shut Elbit down and all its affiliates, with sites across the country repeatedly targeted — from activists occupying one of Leonardo’s factories in Edinburgh, to spray painting the London HQ.  

    Shilling for arms manufacturers and the West

    Whilst Woodcock registered his interest as chair of the Purpose Business Coalition, he excluded his role as chair for the Purpose of Defence Coalition (PDC) – a distinct entity from the Purpose Business Coalition.

    The PDC website was promptly removed, alongside a page on Leonardo and the Purpose Coalition, over the weekend after Woodcock was questioned on it. At the PDC’s launch event on 18 July 2023 in Parliament, which was “powered by Leonardo UK”, Woodcock said the following [emphasis added]:

    Russia’s war on Ukraine has caused a seismic shift in the world. It has highlighted the crucial nature of defence in upholding our values and the need for a vibrant, well-regulated defence industry. The best defence companies have always acted with high ethical standards but their central role in helping the Ukrainian people to defend their sovereignty, and the significant investment they make in the communities where they operate, is rightly prompting ESG investors to look again at the sector. 

    That is why I am proud to launch the Purpose Defence Coalition, part of the wider Purpose Coalition, to bring together the defence sector’s most innovative leaders and businesses to share best practice and develop policy solutions.

    Featured image via Palestine Action and Wikimedia

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Tories slammed over “ineffective” response to Israel AND for not stopping arms sale – by their OWN watchdog

    On Tuesday 21 May the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI) has released its rapid review on UK aid to Gaza. It has criticised the UK government’s “ineffective” response regarding humanitarian aid. However, ICAI also highlights the fact that the UK has still not suspended arms sales to Israel.

    Israel: UK response not fit for purpose

    ICAI’s review finds that UK aid to Gaza is still largely blocked from entering Gaza despite efforts to improve access.

    The UK aid watchdog has also found that diplomatic efforts have so far been ineffective in securing access to get enough aid into Gaza to address the mounting humanitarian catastrophe, worsening as Israel’s invasion of Rafah progresses.

    So far, Israel has killed over 35,500 people in Gaza, mostly women and children. Meanwhile, International Criminal Court (ICC) chief prosecutor Karim Khan has submitted his case to ICC judges that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant should face arrest for war crimes. However, there is every possibility countries like the UK could give them diplomatic protection.

    As the Southend Echo reported, ICAI chief commissioner Tamsyn Barton said:

    While the UK has significantly increased aid to Gaza in response to the crisis it’s clear that very little is reaching those who urgently need it, with restrictions on land access – the only way to move enough aid – increasing and the situation for aid workers increasingly perilous.

    She also noted that “the UK and other donors’ diplomatic attempts to improve access and save lives have so far been ineffective shows how fragile the system underpinning international humanitarian law is, confronting a hugely complex crisis such as this”.

    Where is the suspension of arms sales?

    The ICAI report also notes that the US, Spain, Canada, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands have all paused arms licenses or shipments to Israel over fears that they may be used in violation of international humanitarian law.

    While, at the time of writing, the government has declined to publish their assessment of whether international humanitarian law has been breached but the foreign secretary stated in April that he expected Israel to “abide by international humanitarian law, even when challenged”.

    In reaction to the ICAI review Gideon Rabinowitz, director of policy and advocacy at Bond, the network for UK NGOs, said:

    The UK’s diplomatic efforts to halt the Rafah offensive and rapidly increase humanitarian assistance in Gaza have been ineffective and ignored. As 1.4 million displaced civilians shelter in Rafah, the UK government must increase pressure and not be afraid to enforce strong diplomatic action to urgently prevent any further assault on Rafah and demand an immediate lasting ceasefire.

    The UK must also set out when it will resume funding to UNRWA, and suspend arms sales to Israel for as long as there is a risk they may be used to violate international law.

    Featured image via Wikimedia

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Tories quietly change the law to give arms factories PROTECTION from protesters under ‘National Security’ guff

    The Tories have quietly changed the law to allow arms factories to call themselves “prohibited places”. This is under the guise of national security. It means companies such as Elbit can get protesters like Palestine Action arrested for simply protesting over Israel – and don’t think Elbit is already taking full advantage of this.

    Arms factories: National Security Act protection

    Campaigners say they will not be intimidated and will continue taking action against the arms trade despite a clause in the National Security Act that potentially outlaws protests at hundreds of arms companies across the country. This includes some of the UK’s biggest arms companies and others who are complicit in arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza, including BAE Systems and Elbit Systems.

    The act, which received Royal Assent in July 2023, was highlighted as a draconian threat by the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) in 2022 in relation to protests outside military bases.

    However, campaigners in Bristol noticed on 25 April that Elbit Systems is now displaying notices advising people that its premises is now a “prohibited place” under the act. A notice to defence contractors issued in April 2024 further reveals that its provisions have been extended to all arms companies that have contracts to supply UK defence.  The document also advises companies to display signage to show they are “prohibited places”:

    According to the notice, under the act, the factories and offices of these companies are now designated as “prohibited places” with a raft of offences attached to them.

    Banged up for protesting

    This includes an offence, with a maximum penalty of 14 years, if a person “accesses, enters, inspects, passes over or under, approaches or is in the vicinity of a prohibited place” and they “know or ought reasonably to know” their actions are “prejudicial to the safety or interests of the United Kingdom.”

    There is also a lesser offence, with a maximum penalty of six months imprisonment for accessing, entering or inspecting without prejudicing the interests of the UK.

    The act also gives the police new authoritarian powers to compel anyone in, or adjacent to, a prohibited place to leave the area if an officer “reasonably believe[s] that exercising the power is necessary to protect the safety or interests of the United Kingdom.” Failure to comply with an order carries a maximum sentence of three months imprisonment.

    However, a briefing published by Netpol highlights that while the use of signs and the threat of this legislation is designed to scare and deter people, protest against arms companies is still legal.

    The briefing also points out that while there is potential for repression and abuse of this legislation, there will be a very high threshold for a successful prosecution that shows anti-arms trade protesters are acting against the UK’s safety and interest.

    Repressing protest at arms factories

    Campaign Against Arms Trade’s media coordinator Emily Apple said:

    This is clearly an attempt to repress and deter protests against arms companies – but this is an attempt that will fail. These companies are complicit in the horrific war crimes Israel is committing in Gaza. They are profiting from genocide, and ordinary people across the country are taking action on an almost daily basis against these merchants of death.

    We will not be intimidated and we will not be deterred. Our government is refusing to impose an arms embargo despite overwhelming evidence Israel is breaking International Humanitarian Law so it is down to all of us to take action. It is not in the UK’s interest, and it does not make the UK safe, to break international law and arm a genocide, and we will challenge any attempt to use this act against campaigners.

    Network for Police Monitoring’s campaigns coordinator Kevin Blowe said:

    The wave of recent new anti-protest laws over the last few years have left many in the movements we work with uncertain about their rights and the limits of police powers. We feel this confusion is exactly what government wanted and the intention behind new signs threatening arrest on the grounds of “national security”.

    This is why it is so important for campaigners to know their rights and stand their ground when confronted by police efforts to try and move them. In Netpol’s experience, the prospect of arbitrary misuse of the stated aims of this legislation, simply because it is convenient in the moment for the police when facing demonstrators, is far greater than the likelihood of successful prosecutions.

    This is one of the reasons why we call on the Home Office to publish – sooner rather than later – its promised guidelines on how prohibited places are “policed appropriately”. We need to know what to expect – or else to expect the worst.

    Featured image via Netpol

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Indeed, there is no comparison: Israel’s crimes are far worse than Hamas’

    There is one thing we should all be able to agree with Benjamin Netanyahu on: Any comparison between Israel’s war crimes and those of Hamas is, as the Israeli prime minister put it, “absurd and false” and a “distortion of reality”.Here’s why:

    * Israeli war crimes have been ongoing for more than seven decades, long predating Hamas’ creation.

    * Israel has kept the Palestinians of Gaza caged into a concentration camp for the past 17 years, denying them connection to the outside world and the essentials of life. Hamas managed to besiege a small part of Israel for one day, on October 7.

    * For every Israeli killed by Hamas on October 7, Israel has slaughtered at least 35 times that number of Palestinians. Similar kill-ratios grossly skewed in Israel’s favour have been true for decades.

    * Israel has killed more than 15,000 Palestinian children since October – and many tens of thousands more Palestinian children are missing under rubble, maimed or orphaned. By early April, Israel had killed a further 114 children in the West Bank and injured 725 more. Hamas killed a total of 33 Israeli children on October 7.

    * Israel has laid waste to Gaza’s entire health sector. It has bombed its hospitals, and killed, beaten and kidnapped many hundreds of medical personnel. Hamas has not attacked one Israeli hospital.

    * Israel has killed more than 100 journalists in Gaza and more than 250 aid workers. It has also kidnapped a further 40 journalists. Most are presumed to have been taken to a secret detention facility where torture is rife. Hamas is reported to have killed one Israeli journalist on October 7, and no known aid workers.

    * Israel is actively starving Gaza’s population by denying it food, water and aid. That is a power – a genocidal one – Hamas could only ever dream of.

    * Israel has been forcibly removing Palestinians from their lands for more than 76 years to build illegal Jewish settlements in their place. Hamas has not been able to ethnically cleanse a single Israeli, nor build a single Palestinian settlement on Israeli land.

    * Some 750,000 Palestinians are reported to have been taken hostage and jailed by Israel since 1967 – an unwelcome rite of passage for Palestinian men and boys and one in which torture is routine and military trials ensure a near-100% conviction rate. Until October 7, Hamas had only ever managed to take hostage a handful of the Israeli soldiers whose job is to oppress Palestinians.

    * And, while Hamas is designated a terrorist organisation by western states, those same western states laud Israel, fund and arm it, and provide it with diplomatic cover, even as the World Court rules that a plausible case has been made it is committing a genocide in Gaza.

    Yes, Netanyahu is right. There is no comparison at all.

    The post Indeed, there is no comparison: Israel’s crimes are far worse than Hamas’ first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Inside one Israeli death and torture camp

    Palestinians participate in a sit-in protest at Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah, on 5 May. They denounced the assassination of Dr. Adnan Al-Barash in an Israeli prison.  (Ali Hamad APA images)

    Torture, amputations and the fetid smell of untreated wounds hang heavy in the air at the Sde Teiman facility.

    An army base situated between Beersheba and Gaza in the southern Negev region, it was turned into a detention center for Palestinians, including abductees from Gaza, before they are transferred to other prisons.

    Three Israelis who worked at the facility, and possibly participated in abuses against Palestinians, gave testimonies and pictures to CNN of what they witnessed.

    The whistleblowers painted a grim picture of what amounts to a torture camp, where Palestinians are held without charge, interrogated and filtered through to detention centers or sent back to Gaza.

    The facility is segregated into two areas: one designated for the detention of 70 Palestinians from Gaza, where they are subjected to severe physical restraint, CNN reported.

    The other section serves as a so-called field hospital, where injured detainees are immobilized and strapped to their beds, forced to defecate in their diapers and fed through straws.

    At least three army bases have been transformed into detention facilities since Israel’s genocide in Gaza began on 7 October, at least so far as the Israeli military has admitted to: Sde Teiman in Israel, and the Anatot and Ofer military bases in the occupied West Bank.

    The number of Palestinians detained at those facilities is unknown.

    During its ground invasion, the Israeli army converted schools within the Gaza Strip into military bases and detention centers, according to the group Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.

    One notable example is the Salah al-Din preparatory school in Gaza City. That school was transformed by Israeli occupation forces into a detention and interrogation center for hundreds of Palestinians in February.

    Recent legal amendments have paved the way for such facilities, notably the “unlawful combatant law,” which expands Israeli authorities’ powers to detain Palestinians without charge, trial, seeing a judge or legal oversight for up to 75 days after arrest.

    Detainees may also be deprived of legal counsel for up to six months.

    “Unlawful combatants” have previously included individuals such as an elderly Palestinian woman with Alzheimer’s.

    Formerly detained Palestinians at Sde Teiman have also described the harrowing conditions inflicted by Israeli authorities.

    Pictures leaked to CNN depict rows of prisoners handcuffed, blindfolded and held behind a fence under floodlights.

    “The prisoners are subjected to collective beatings and abuse by soldiers, using profanities that prisoners are unable to repeat,” prisoners rights group Addameer reported.

    “They are also forced to kneel on gravel or asphalt, spending their days with their hands bound and blindfolded, unable to speak to each other.”

    Addameer said Israeli interrogators torture detainees and subject them to “dignity-stripping treatment,” including stress positions for hours as well as sleep deprivation.

    UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestine refugees, has collected information from hundreds of Palestinians who were detained since the beginning of Israel’s ground operation in late October last year, The New York Times reported.

    Israeli authorities subjected Palestinians – “men and women, children, older persons, persons with disabilities,” according to UNRWA – to ill-treatment throughout their detention, including sexual abuse and threats of sexual violence.

    “Paradise for interns”

    Abducted Palestinians in the prison camp are subjected to routine amputations due to severe cuff injuries, an Israeli field doctor who had worked at the camp revealed to the newspaper Haaretz last month.

    Whistleblowers provided CNN with descriptions of the field hospital at the camp, and the broadcaster created a 3D video model illustrating these accounts. The illustration depicted detainees lying horizontally, nearly naked, wearing diapers, with their hands and feet tied down to beds.

    The video depicted a tent with up to 20 detainees.

    One of the whistleblowers, who worked as a medic at the detention center’s so-called field hospital, described it as a playground for unqualified medical personnel. He even admitted to lacking the appropriate training for the treatment he was asked to administer.

    “It is a paradise for interns because it’s like you do whatever you want,” he said.

    “I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise,” he added.

    “Just being there felt like being complicit in abuse.”

    The same whistleblower said he witnessed an amputation performed due to injuries sustained by handcuffing.

    Israeli authorities ensured that the identities of unqualified personnel were shielded from any potential future investigations by abstaining from signing any medical documents. This confirmation aligns with a report published earlier this year by Israeli rights group Physicians for Human Rights-Israel.

    Dr. Mohammed al-Ran, a Palestinian with Bosnian citizenship who headed the surgical unit at the Indonesian hospital in northern Gaza, described to CNN what he witnessed while he was held at the Sde Teiman prison camp.

    After Israeli forces seized him in December at the al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, al-Ran was stripped, blindfolded, handcuffed, and crowded into the back of a truck with other Palestinian detainees, many of whom were also barely clothed, before being transported to the facility.

    During his 44-day detention in the facility, the doctor spent most of his time serving as an intermediary between the prisoners and the guards.

    It was during this period, when he was no longer blindfolded, that he witnessed the worst of the atrocities.

    “Part of my torture was being able to see how people were being tortured,” he told CNN.

    “At first you couldn’t see. You couldn’t see the torture, the vengeance, the oppression,” he added.

    “When they removed my blindfold, I could see the extent of the humiliation and abasement … I could see the extent to which they saw us not as human beings but as animals.”

    Worse than death

    “Addameer asserts that there is a reasonable basis to claim that the occupying forces are committing war crimes and crimes against humanity against prisoners from the Gaza Strip,” the prisoners group said.

    This encompasses complicity by the government, judges, prison authorities, police and the military, thereby undermining the credibility of any self-examinations, when and if they occur.

    In March, a revealing exposé by Haaretz disclosed that at least 27 Palestinians have died while in Israeli custody since 7 October. Only six have been identified, according to Addameer.

    However, this figure could potentially be higher, given disturbing reports of Palestinians dying in detention.

    For instance, news only broke weeks after Dr. Adnan al-Bursh, the 50-year-old head of orthopedics at Gaza City’s al-Shifa hospital, was killed in Ofer Prison in the West Bank on 19 April, according to the Palestinian Authority.

    Many Palestinians in Gaza remain missing, whether being trapped beneath the rubble of buildings targeted by Israeli shelling in Gaza, or laid to rest without identification – whether through Palestinian efforts to honor the dead or within mass graves created by Israeli soldiers during ground invasions.

    Some Palestinians may view those facilities as their last chance to locate their missing family members.

    However, a former detainee asserts this is a fate worse than death.

    As Dr. Mohammed al-Ran was being released, a fellow prisoner implored him to locate his family in Gaza and deliver them a message.

    “He asked me to tell them that it is better for them to be martyrs,” al-Ran recounted to CNN.

    “It is better for them to die than to be captured and held here.”

    • First published in The Electronic Intifada

    The post Inside one Israeli death and torture camp first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “Extremely Harrowing”: British Surgeon’s Gaza Testimony Buried By The “MSM”

    Propaganda by omission is a dominant feature of the ‘mainstream’ news media. Indeed, it is a requirement. Rather than serving the public interest by fully exposing the brutal machinations of power, state-corporate media shield Western governments and their allies from scrutiny and focus the public’s attention on the crimes of Official Enemies.

    Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza is but the latest example. Consider the dearth of media coverage given to the compelling and shocking testimony provided by leading British surgeon, Professor Nick Maynard, who works as a consultant gastrointestinal surgeon at Oxford University Hospital.

    Maynard left Gaza just before Israel took control of the Rafah border crossing with Egypt on 7 May. He had been operating on Palestinian patients for two weeks and he gave a very disturbing account of what he had observed.

    The first topic he highlighted was ‘the direct targeting of healthcare workers’ by the Israeli military, describing how ‘hundreds have been killed’ and ‘hundreds have been abducted’. Maynard had personally worked with one young doctor and one young nurse who had been abducted and held in captivity for 45 days and 60 days, respectively. They both gave him ‘very graphic and stark descriptions of their daily torture at the hands of the Israeli defence force’. He described the experience of hearing their stories as ‘extremely harrowing’.

    Maynard had also been to Gaza over Christmas and New Year where he worked at Al-Aqsa hospital. He “spent the whole two weeks operating all the time on major explosive injuries to the abdomen and to the chest. And it was really nonstop.”

    His visit was unexpectedly cut short in early January when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) ordered the medical staff, along with the hospital’s 600 patients, to evacuate the hospital. A few British newspaper reports that included accounts by Maynard and colleagues were published at the time on the “nightmare” of working in “one of ‘Gaza’s last functioning hospitals” (Daily Mirror, 18 January, 2024), “The single worst thing I’ve seen” (Daily Telegraph, 12 January, 2024), and “British surgeon haunted by Gaza horrors pledges to go back” (The Times, 4 February, 2024).

    In March, the Guardian reported that a delegation of American and British doctors had arrived in Washington DC to tell the Biden administration that the Israeli military was systematically destroying Gaza’s health infrastructure in order to drive Palestinians out of their homes. Maynard was quoted, accusing the IDF of committing “appalling atrocities”, although the article did not address these in depth.

    He said:

    “The IDF are systematically targeting healthcare facilities, healthcare personnel and really dismantling the whole healthcare system.”

    He continued:

    “It’s not just about targeting the buildings, it’s about systematically destroying the infrastructure of the hospitals. Destroying the oxygen tanks at the al-Shifa hospital, deliberately destroying the CT scanners and making it much more difficult to rebuild that infrastructure. If it was just targeting Hamas militants, why are they deliberately destroying the infrastructure of these institutions?”

    According to Maynard, Israel’s strategy of targeting hospitals and healthcare facilities is intended to drive the Palestinians from their homes:

    “It persuades the local population to leave. If a hospital has been dismantled, if the locals see there is no medical care available and see the disrupted infrastructure, it’s yet another factor that drives them south.” [At that time, Israel had designated the south of Gaza a “safe zone” for Palestinians to seek refuge.]

    In an interview with Nick Ferrari of London-based LBC radio on 2 April, Maynard made further shocking revelations. The timing of the interview was linked to the IDF having just destroyed another hospital, Al-Shifa, where Maynard had also previously worked. Around 400 Palestinians had reportedly been killed in a brutal two-week attack by Israeli forces.

    Maynard told Ferrari:

    “Every single part of the hospital has been destroyed. The whole infrastructure of the hospital has been destroyed. When I spoke to Marwan [a Palestinian colleague] yesterday, he told me there were 107 patients, 60 medical staff. God only knows what has happened to them. I think we’ve seen some of the pictures. Surgeons I know have been executed in the last 48 hours there. Bodies have been discovered in the last 12-24 hours who had been handcuffed, with their hands behind their back. [Our added emphasis].”

    He added:

    “And so, there is no doubt at all, that multiple healthcare workers have been executed there in the last few days.”

    Ferrari then asked:

    “You believe executed by whom, doctor?”

    Maynard:

    “By the Israeli Defence Force.

    Ferrari:

    “Why would they seek to execute surgeons and medical professionals?”

    Maynard:

    “Well, they’ve been doing it since October the 7th. Over 450 healthcare workers have been killed. Friends of mine that I’ve worked with over the years. Many have been abducted as well, and nothing has been heard of them since. So, there is no doubt in my mind that – I can bear witness to this from my time at Al-Aqsa hospital and from talking to people that there has been direct targeting of the healthcare system in Gaza, direct targeting of hospitals and multiple killings of healthcare workers.”

    Maynard also made clear that neither he, nor any of his colleagues, ever saw evidence of Hamas using hospitals or healthcare facilities as bases for their operations, despite numerous Israeli claims to the contrary.

    BBC Silence

    “Mainstream” media showed minimal interest in this highly credible testimony from a British surgeon on Israel’s deliberate targeting of healthcare workers, including actual execution of surgeons. As far as we can see, there is nothing about Maynard’s testimony exposing these executions on the BBC News website.

    An article on the Guardian website on 7 April did cover Maynard’s testimony about targeting of healthcare workers and infrastructure, but made no mention of his statement that Palestinian surgeons had been executed by Israeli soldiers. Nor was it mentioned anywhere else in the entirety of the British national press.

    The Telegraph carried an interview with Maynard on 12 January in which he said:

    “here can be certainly no doubt in my mind from what I’ve recently witnessed that [Israel] are directly targeting healthcare structures with a view to completely disabling the healthcare system in Gaza.”

    The Telegraph appears not to have reported Maynard’s subsequent claim that he personally knew surgeons who have since been executed by Israeli soldiers.

    On 13 May, International Nurses Day, the Gaza Health Ministry announced that at least 500 medical personnel had been killed by Israel since 7 October. Dr Omar Abdel-Mannan, a paediatric neurologist and co-founder of Healthcare Workers for Palestine, said that the only way Israel could ‘justify’ these killings would be if they see these healthcare workers not as humans, but as “human animals”. As readers may recall, Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant infamously described his Palestinian enemies as “human animals”.

    Of his most recent trip, Maynard said that:

    “the very strong narrative of the patients I was treating over the last two weeks were those with terrible infective complications as a direct result of malnutrition, and this was very stark indeed.”

    He gave a graphic insight into the hellish conditions:

    “And I operated on many patients in the last two weeks who had awful complications from their abdominal surgery related to inadequate nutrition, and particularly those with [the] abdominal wall breaking down. So, literally their intestines end up hanging outside. And the intestinal repairs that have been carried out to deal with the damage to the bowels leaking, so their bowel contents leaking out from different parts of the abdomen, covering their bodies, covering their beds.”

    He drew particular attention to:

    “The lack of resources to deal with these inadequate numbers of colostomy bags, wound management devices and nutritional support.”

    Maynard explained the consequences for patients:

    “They get this vicious cycle of malnutrition, infection, wounds breaking down, more infection, more malnutrition. So, it’s devastating and we will see far more of that over the coming months.”

    He gave examples of two young female patients he had treated: Tala who was 16 and Lama who was 18, both of whom had survivable injuries. Tragically, they both died “as a direct result of malnutrition”.

    This was yet more shocking and credible testimony from an experienced British consultant surgeon. It should have been headline news across the British press and broadcasting outlets. But searches of the Lexis-Nexis database of newspapers, together with Google searches, reveal minimal “mainstream” coverage: one article in the Independent.

    If this had been evidence against “Putin’s Russia” or “Assad’s Syria”, it would have generated huge headlines, in-depth reporting and anguished commentary across all major news media. Once again, we see the insidiously corrupt phenomenon of propaganda by omission.

    It is noteworthy that, last November, the BBC News website did feature Maynard, “who’s been travelling to the Gaza Strip and West Bank for more than a decade.” Six months ago, he was once again on “standby to go and work in operating theatres with the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians”. With remarkable courage, he told the BBC:

    “I think there is fear, apprehension, not knowing what one would find, but I think the other motives for doing so… are so powerful that they outweigh everything else. I consider it a huge privilege to be in a position to help these people who need help more than most of us can possibly understand.”

    Now that Maynard has returned from Gaza with horrific accounts, not least of the murder of healthcare workers by the Israeli military, the BBC appears not in the least interested. When we pointed this out via X (formerly Twitter), directly challenging John Neal, editor of BBC News at One, Six and Ten, and Paul Royall, executive editor of the BBC News Channel, the public response was huge. Our social media outreach is routinely suppressed by the deliberately obscure algorithms of Facebook and X. But this particular tweet spread widely by our standards, being shared 740 times at the time of writing. Shamefully, there has been no response from the BBC.

    When Genocide Is Merely “War”

    In the meantime, BBC News persists in labelling the Gaza genocide as the ‘Israel-Gaza war’. The day after it was reported that almost half a million Palestinians had fled Rafah in the south of Gaza, despite having previously been designated a “safe zone” by Israel, as discussed above, the BBC failed to follow up on the story.

    One was presumably supposed to imagine that this huge number of people was no longer in danger: at risk of being bombed or dying under Israeli-imposed hunger, malnutrition and disease.

    That same week, the BBC News website had as many as four ‘Live’ feeds running simultaneously. Not one of them focused on the Israeli-inflicted horrors in Gaza. This is truly remarkable. Has there been a BBC directive from senior management not to give too much attention to Israel’s genocide of Palestinians? Where are the BBC whistleblowers who can let the public know what’s going on inside the corporation?

    A vanishingly rare exception appeared on 24 October 2023, when BBC correspondent Rami Ruhayem – a former journalist for the Associated Press, who has worked as a journalist and producer for BBC Arabic and the BBC World Service since 2005 – sent a letter to the BBC’s Director-General, Tim Davie:

    “Dear Tim,

    I am writing to raise the gravest possible concerns about the coverage of the BBC, especially on English outlets, of the current fighting between Israel and Palestinian factions.

    “It appears to me that information that is highly significant and relevant is either entirely missing or not being given due prominence in coverage.”

    The emphasis now is emphatically on “missing”. It seems the global student and other protests have prompted the BBC to attempt to limit public dissent.

    By contrast, BBC journalists can be quick to respond when they feel they have been subjected to unjust criticism. On 13 May, we retweeted a clip from Saul Staniforth, a media activist with a large following on X, about Israel banning Al Jazeera. Staniforth had included a quote from Sebastian Usher, a BBC News Middle East analyst:

    “Al Jazeera – I think many people, if they DO watch it, WOULD see it as some kind of propaganda.”

    We asked:

    “And how do you think many people see BBC News?”

    Clearly piqued, Usher contacted us the following day to say that his quote had been taken out of context. He said it was a direct response during a live interview to a question on the likely reaction by Israelis to the closing of Al Jazeera. He considered Staniforth’s tweet and our follow-up seriously misleading and the exact opposite of the tenor of his reporting on the issue.

    We asked him which words he had used to express solidarity with Al Jazeera, or to speak out for press freedom and free speech. He declined to provide such a statement, saying that as a BBC journalist he was unable to do so in a public forum. Usher added that in his reporting he stressed that Al Jazeera sees its mission as righting what it believes is imbalance on Gaza reporting in international media by giving more space to Palestinian voices and voices on the ground.

    We were happy to include the points he had made, which we did via Facebook and X. Usher responded to our very reasonable response with a grudging “Ok”.

    It is worth noting that Usher strongly objected to being “quoted out of context” while working for a media organisation clearly trying to suppress public outrage at an ongoing genocide by reducing coverage.

    Moreover, the essential observation we made stands: many people at home and abroad regard BBC News as an outlet of western propaganda. Its abject performance during the Gaza genocide – “the Israel-Gaza war”, as the state-mandated broadcaster puts it – is ample proof.

    The post “Extremely Harrowing”: British Surgeon’s Gaza Testimony Buried By The “MSM” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hell in a Very Small Place

    Hell: the creditor of last resort

    Note: While I was writing this I thought about many things I experienced and read. Then as I was posting this the title of a book I read many years ago came to mind. Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. Fall was and remained a sympathizer with the imperial powers that exploited Indochina, both French and American. His account of the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu was a combination of despair and appeal for a more sensible counter-insurgency strategy that would waste fewer (French) lives. While Gaza and Dien Bien Phu are by no means politically or historically comparable. The ambiguities in the assessment of this military operation do bear some similarity to the contradictions among opponents of the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza. Thus the reference to Fall’s title is not intended as analogy or allegory but as cognitive provocation.

    Between BlackRock and a hard place

    According to published sources, whatever one may think of Wikipedia’s notoriously selective entries, the university named after the Puritan merchant-adventurer of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Harvard, constitutes a corporation with the largest academic endowment in the world, valued at some USD 50 billion as of 2022. This had led to at least one wag designating “Harvard” as a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio. Hedge funds are unregulated entities that permit people with real money to move it from one source of extraction to another with various benefits such as offshore opacity, tax avoidance, and sundry immunities obtained through the efforts of correspondingly empowered managers to influence investment conditions and outcomes. The hedge fund is a modern version of the Latin Church’s vast traffic in salvation, otherwise known as the indulgence business and Crusades.

    Salvation is the intangible product promised by the Latin Church in the context of its risk management business. Financial risk management is the modern product for which the hedge fund was developed. The rabbinical-papal financial services industry — concentrated in the Vatican by Innocent III —  is composed of the congregations that preach damnation, those that preach salvation, and the orders and offices that deliver the risk management products, i.e. various types of sacraments, indulgences, dispensations and preferment. Parallel to but in fact a logical extension of the Latin Church’s financial system, the hedge fund has superseded the bank as the core instrument for trading life in return for death.

    The university corporations upon which the US Ivy League were based are found in the renowned collegiate universities located in Cambridge and Oxford. Unlike most universities today, the collegiate university was created on the basis of ecclesiastical endowments — hedge funds by which the founders secured dispensation and protected their wealth from those they had robbed in their lifetime. When the Latin Church was nationalized under the Tudors, the English Church succeeded in title but the business continued otherwise unabated. The history of exclusion from the Oxford and Cambridge colleges has been presented as a history of arbitrary prejudice and discrimination, all of which was successively remedied by the post-1945 order. This is a crass avoidance of the real issue. The Oxford or Cambridge college was foremost a financial institution. One must recall that both universities were entitled to send members to the House of Commons. That was not because of their learned activity but because they were property and asset holders and as such satisfied the requirements for the franchise whereas municipalities with ordinary tenants did not.

    In other words to become a member of a college in either university made one a shareholder in the corporation and at least a limited beneficiary of the wealth extraction instruments inherent in these entities. From the standpoint of the university corporations, it was clearly inconceivable that persons otherwise not entitled to property or the franchise be admitted to these universities. The fact that Oxford and Cambridge graduates enjoyed privileged access to government, after the precedence of aristocracy and the great public schools, was not based on academic merit but on class membership and in some cases meritorious service to the ruling class. The US elite universities were founded with the same principles and the same structures, albeit without the loyal toast at high table. Later foundations, the post-colonial colleges and universities were controlled by a similar business model. Then the 1862 (and 1890) Morrill Acts, created the basis for the so-called Land Grant universities. Federal land, generously transferred from the indigenous population to the US government, was allocated to the states for the purpose of establishing universities, mainly of the agricultural and technical type. These were a departure from the collegiate structure and more closely resembled the German technical college. Toward the end of the 19th century the US would largely abandon the English model in favour of the German Hochschule. On one hand this was because the Anglo-American elite needed engineers and technicians to develop the country and lacked (rejected) the occupational dual-education system common on the Continent. On the other hand it was implicitly desired to replace hereditary aristocracy with quasi-hereditary “meritocracy”. The Ivy League was to continue to indoctrinate the senior civil service and managerial class as well as issue credentials to the runs of the plutocratic litter so as to preserve the latent class structure in America’s “classless society.” The Anglo-American elite, in contrast to the latifundista of the “Blessed Isle”, recognized the need for merchants and engineers or mechanics to convert a stolen and progressively vacated continent into fungible assets. The settler-colonial elite in North America did not have the benefit or obstacle of the millions with which first the East India Company and then HM Viceroy was confronted.

    As a result of this distinct historical development most of the US higher (tertiary) education system is in fact state established and funded by the public purse. After the Second World War, the US elite — in panic after failure to destroy the Soviet Union or even inhibit its technological and social development — adopted legislation to inject massive amounts of public funds into education, a policy deeply antithetical to Anglo-American elite culture, Thomas Arnold and John Dewey notwithstanding. Harvard and Yale graduates were forced to recognize that even their theological seminaries (the new business schools) were not enough to train the masses of indoctrinated technicians needed to confront the Ivan who had not only taken Berlin but launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. Places like Michigan State specialized in counter-insurgency to help the regime terrorize Vietnamese. However even here the bulk of the money went to private universities. This was not only because of the personal union of grantors and grantees but because funnelling public funds for research at MIT or Columbia promoted the money-laundering schemes by which these foundations retained their exclusivity.

    Behind the mask of merit, the endowment (and the gravy train to public research funding) permit the university to operate profitably without regard for tuition fees. Essentially the “research grants” subsidize these tax dodges (universities are generally tax-exempt and can accept donations for tax exemption) and constitute a covert subsidy to those corporations or wealthy individuals who endow them. What is in a name? A library by any other name would smell as mouldy.

    There is another less obvious but intellectually insidious aspect of this business model. Elite universities become repositories of rare and valuable cultural, intellectual and scientific resources. They are able to hoard them and restrict access accordingly. Thus a poor or mediocre scholar can establish himself as an authority by virtue of using the sources held by such endowments to which others have only restricted access, if any. In a system where canonical texts are used to exemplify dominant ideology, limiting access to such materials gives authority to the loyal servants while diminishing that of scholars forced to rely on secondary or even tertiary sources. It should be recalled that until the Reformation even possession of a Bible by anyone without ecclesiastical license could be punished by death. When our loquacious regurgitators of doctrine and dogma preach against conspiracy they are protected by the locks and keys of the Hoover Institution and the US Holocaust Museum as well as the soft files that saturate the corporate, espionage and secret police bureaucracies.

    Which leads us to the business at hand: what is actually happening at the renowned universities of the Great North American republic? The charming claims that academic freedom is being violated are really nothing more than charming. As George Carlin said about “rights”, they are a cute idea. There has never been anything called “academic freedom”, unless one means by that “free enterprise” applied to universities as businesses. As I have already argued elsewhere, science was wholly replaced by Science after the Manhattan Project and the less known biological warfare unit run by Merck during the great war against communism (aka WW2). Where scholarship has been genuinely free it has been despite the university not because of it. The same applies even more rigorously to teaching. There is a reason why teacher colleges (once the only venues to accept women) were called “normal schools”. John Dewey, celebrated for his assertions that education was essential for democracy, never vocally challenged the plutocracy that obstructed it. His education for democracy was ultimately distilled into indoctrination of an emergent multi-ethnic society such that they possessed no identity capable of coherent interest articulation. Unlike the Soviet Union, defunct successor to a historically multi-ethnic state, the US was not only founded on the extermination of the indigenous but on the acidic brain dissolution of the immigrant. Genetic engineering is in fact a deep technological application of the ideology by which humans can be infinitely reconfigured beyond Donald Cameron’s reprogramming at the Allan Memorial between 1957 and 1964.

    Barely buried, the FBI asset and GE lackey appointed governor of California and later POTUS, Ronald Wilson Reagan, was canonized for his propaganda (to use the term Edward Bernays did his best to replace) contributions to the complete privatization of what little public and potentially democratic space had emerged in the US despite the victory of finance capital in 1913. Under so-called New Deal policies, the historic mercenary forces of corporate industrial and financial capital managed by so-called White Shoe law firms in cooperation with the US Marine Corps (don’t take my word for it, USMC General Smedley Butler knew what he was he was being ordered to do), was temporarily nationalized. As the war drew to an end there were some who wanted to dissolve these state agencies like the OSS and return liability for piracy to the private sector. However the prescient, mainly Ivy League, elite recognized that the propaganda they had embedded in the UN Charter made a return to open corporate criminality bad for the US image in the competition with the unfortunately surviving system competitor. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 preserved the state protection of the US plutocracy that prevails to this day. Saint Ronald is worshipped like Our Lady of Fatima, by the witting for his PR success and the unwitting because of their blind faith.

    Meanwhile there have been numerous challenges to the brutality perpetrated by the militarized police forces of cities where even elite universities reside. They have not prevented the police repression. However some have at least insinuated—as in the case of Columbia — that the actions are not entirely based on local law enforcement perceptions. The relationship between a certain Ms Weiner, as head of NYPD intelligence and counter-terrorism (let’s call it NYC’s Phoenix Program) embedded in the university faculty like what the NSDAP called a “Führungsoffizier” (a party leadership officer responsible for assuring ideological compliance under the Hitler regime) and NYPD liaison to the state terrorist apparatus in Tel Aviv has been illuminated without innuendo. The investigators recognize that the conclusions one can draw are hopelessly obvious. This archetypical infiltration of a primary academic and research institution has been rightfully criticized. However it is not a new phenomenon. The FBI and through cut-outs the CIA have always had agents in the educational institutions deemed critical for the system. These agents served as “talent scouts” and police informers. What appears quite unique to this period of campus protest is on one hand the willingness of students to make demands on the “official permanent and privileged victim state” aka as the State of Israel in Palestine and the violence with which the agents and assets of that State without constitutional or moral boundaries are prepared to perpetrate in their largest host country. As Ron Unz et al. have said with justifiable vehemence, the masks have fallen. The State of Israel is demonstrably capable not only of buying the entire federal legislature and considerable assets at state level, it is able and willing to dictate individual police actions at municipal and university level.

    The debate has begun — albeit only among already sensitized critics — about how the precedent set by Lyndon Johnson in suppressing the investigation and condemnation of the State of Israel for its murderous attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 created the immunity of that settler-colonial regime’s officials from any liability under any recognized law. The blatant interventions have followed pronouncements by the reigning head of government with such rapidity that only an idiot could imagine that diplomatic channels were even necessary. This atrocious and obvious capacity to intervene in the minutia of US domestic politics (whereby these are surely not purely domestic matters) may, even if only at the pace of snails or winter maple syrup, produce a partial revulsion against the gut feeling of many sharing that primitive spirit of national sovereignty residual from the 19th century.

    Yet beyond the mathematical equation by which the thermodynamics of dog and tail are integrated, there is a more elemental quality that bears consideration. Morse Peckham once wrote and frequently said that “man does not live by bread alone, but mostly by platitudes”. Thomas Friedman wrote that McDonald’s was inseparable from McDonnell Douglas (all now Boeing, I believe). And Harvard is a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio.

    Take these platitudes seriously for a moment, in their combination. It helps to be specific. A McDonald’s in Saigon needed an F-4 Phantom. And hedge funds need collection agents, too. Before 1947 these were usually the USMC. Ajax and PBSuccess were the style of the 1950s. FUBELT was the name given to the CIA’s operation on behalf of ITT et al. University students were a disproportionate target of the first wave since they formed the potential cadre in support of the Allende government. In fact, at least two academic economists from North America were successfully marginalized for the rest of their careers just because they supported the new government and not the Rockefeller economics of the University of Chicago. Not only is there no academic freedom under capitalism there is unlimited vindictiveness toward those who violate the free market. We do not know what the cryptonyms for the current counter-insurgency operations are. However, it is important to see their true origins.

    While there is no doubt as to the smell of cordite and the hands upon which the powder stains can be found, a more fundamental force is at work, that of the hedge fund. The world’s leading hedge fund and the paramount of this criminal tribe is BlackRock, known also through the peculiar person of one Mr Laurence Douglas Fink, where students of his alma mater have recently been attacked by SA-like gangs for protesting against the mass murder perpetrated by the armed forces of the state occupying Palestine, is reported to have more than USD 10 trillion (billion in continental terms) of “assets under management”. There are diagrams that illustrate the degree to which just this hedge fund has penetrated the world economy, both private and private-public. There is no reason to doubt that the hubris of this graduate of the First Boston school of financial engineering (aka as legalized securities fraud) reflects the asset class to which he belongs.

    It may help to diverge for a moment to explain a few basics of the formal corporate and municipal debt business. Gustavus Meyer’ History of the Great American Fortunes (written before he, like Ida Turbell in the matter of Standard Oil, was persuaded to write with more sympathy) explains in lay vocabulary how the bond and stock market actually function. Corporate finance is taught at business schools like typing is taught at vocational schools. However once one has obtained a proper degree in finance or business from one of the gateway institutions—or through viciousness has worked his or her way up after graduation from a less prestigious school — the process begins by which one learns the work of hard selling, usury, stock watering, legislative influence, tax and accounting fraud and deployment of ratings agencies. In short, an investment banking apprenticeship is a course in how — in Adam Smith’s terms — one meets to collude, fix prices and manipulate markets. Cigars only available to those who can evade the general embargo beyond the Strait of Florida or the narcotics beyond the substance control by the CIA/DEA lubricate the Rolex and Patek Philippe adorned wrists.

    These cardinals and bishops, prelates of finance capital, sell financial salvation to unwitting penitents and their pastors. They must protect the faith in their product, the belief in the sin for which these sacraments, indulgences and penance are sold. They must retain the value of the derivative instruments for which universities (and other tax dodges) have been established. At the height of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition together with whatever massed mercenary forces and police power the rabbinical papacy could command, from Brazil to Wittenberg, from Rome to Lima, from Milan to Manila, perpetrated every conceivable and heinous violence against ordinary humans to preserve the credit rating, to secure the value of discounted cash flows.

    And so it is today. What we witness at US universities, especially those financed for the benefit of tax dodging hedge fund operators, is command performance. These are not merely the punishment ordered by some barbarian of Polish descent leading a settler-colonial regime in Palestine. These are the acts of the apostles. Acts of the apostles of the holy hedge funds who have succeeded the Latin Church — although consensually — to deliver truly catholic salvation. Salvation that is wealth for the quick and the grave for the dead.

    The post Hell in a Very Small Place first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hell in a Very Small Place

    Hell: the creditor of last resort

    Note: While I was writing this I thought about many things I experienced and read. Then as I was posting this the title of a book I read many years ago came to mind. Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. Fall was and remained a sympathizer with the imperial powers that exploited Indochina, both French and American. His account of the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu was a combination of despair and appeal for a more sensible counter-insurgency strategy that would waste fewer (French) lives. While Gaza and Dien Bien Phu are by no means politically or historically comparable. The ambiguities in the assessment of this military operation do bear some similarity to the contradictions among opponents of the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza. Thus the reference to Fall’s title is not intended as analogy or allegory but as cognitive provocation.

    Between BlackRock and a hard place

    According to published sources, whatever one may think of Wikipedia’s notoriously selective entries, the university named after the Puritan merchant-adventurer of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Harvard, constitutes a corporation with the largest academic endowment in the world, valued at some USD 50 billion as of 2022. This had led to at least one wag designating “Harvard” as a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio. Hedge funds are unregulated entities that permit people with real money to move it from one source of extraction to another with various benefits such as offshore opacity, tax avoidance, and sundry immunities obtained through the efforts of correspondingly empowered managers to influence investment conditions and outcomes. The hedge fund is a modern version of the Latin Church’s vast traffic in salvation, otherwise known as the indulgence business and Crusades.

    Salvation is the intangible product promised by the Latin Church in the context of its risk management business. Financial risk management is the modern product for which the hedge fund was developed. The rabbinical-papal financial services industry — concentrated in the Vatican by Innocent III —  is composed of the congregations that preach damnation, those that preach salvation, and the orders and offices that deliver the risk management products, i.e. various types of sacraments, indulgences, dispensations and preferment. Parallel to but in fact a logical extension of the Latin Church’s financial system, the hedge fund has superseded the bank as the core instrument for trading life in return for death.

    The university corporations upon which the US Ivy League were based are found in the renowned collegiate universities located in Cambridge and Oxford. Unlike most universities today, the collegiate university was created on the basis of ecclesiastical endowments — hedge funds by which the founders secured dispensation and protected their wealth from those they had robbed in their lifetime. When the Latin Church was nationalized under the Tudors, the English Church succeeded in title but the business continued otherwise unabated. The history of exclusion from the Oxford and Cambridge colleges has been presented as a history of arbitrary prejudice and discrimination, all of which was successively remedied by the post-1945 order. This is a crass avoidance of the real issue. The Oxford or Cambridge college was foremost a financial institution. One must recall that both universities were entitled to send members to the House of Commons. That was not because of their learned activity but because they were property and asset holders and as such satisfied the requirements for the franchise whereas municipalities with ordinary tenants did not.

    In other words to become a member of a college in either university made one a shareholder in the corporation and at least a limited beneficiary of the wealth extraction instruments inherent in these entities. From the standpoint of the university corporations, it was clearly inconceivable that persons otherwise not entitled to property or the franchise be admitted to these universities. The fact that Oxford and Cambridge graduates enjoyed privileged access to government, after the precedence of aristocracy and the great public schools, was not based on academic merit but on class membership and in some cases meritorious service to the ruling class. The US elite universities were founded with the same principles and the same structures, albeit without the loyal toast at high table. Later foundations, the post-colonial colleges and universities were controlled by a similar business model. Then the 1862 (and 1890) Morrill Acts, created the basis for the so-called Land Grant universities. Federal land, generously transferred from the indigenous population to the US government, was allocated to the states for the purpose of establishing universities, mainly of the agricultural and technical type. These were a departure from the collegiate structure and more closely resembled the German technical college. Toward the end of the 19th century the US would largely abandon the English model in favour of the German Hochschule. On one hand this was because the Anglo-American elite needed engineers and technicians to develop the country and lacked (rejected) the occupational dual-education system common on the Continent. On the other hand it was implicitly desired to replace hereditary aristocracy with quasi-hereditary “meritocracy”. The Ivy League was to continue to indoctrinate the senior civil service and managerial class as well as issue credentials to the runs of the plutocratic litter so as to preserve the latent class structure in America’s “classless society.” The Anglo-American elite, in contrast to the latifundista of the “Blessed Isle”, recognized the need for merchants and engineers or mechanics to convert a stolen and progressively vacated continent into fungible assets. The settler-colonial elite in North America did not have the benefit or obstacle of the millions with which first the East India Company and then HM Viceroy was confronted.

    As a result of this distinct historical development most of the US higher (tertiary) education system is in fact state established and funded by the public purse. After the Second World War, the US elite — in panic after failure to destroy the Soviet Union or even inhibit its technological and social development — adopted legislation to inject massive amounts of public funds into education, a policy deeply antithetical to Anglo-American elite culture, Thomas Arnold and John Dewey notwithstanding. Harvard and Yale graduates were forced to recognize that even their theological seminaries (the new business schools) were not enough to train the masses of indoctrinated technicians needed to confront the Ivan who had not only taken Berlin but launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. Places like Michigan State specialized in counter-insurgency to help the regime terrorize Vietnamese. However even here the bulk of the money went to private universities. This was not only because of the personal union of grantors and grantees but because funnelling public funds for research at MIT or Columbia promoted the money-laundering schemes by which these foundations retained their exclusivity.

    Behind the mask of merit, the endowment (and the gravy train to public research funding) permit the university to operate profitably without regard for tuition fees. Essentially the “research grants” subsidize these tax dodges (universities are generally tax-exempt and can accept donations for tax exemption) and constitute a covert subsidy to those corporations or wealthy individuals who endow them. What is in a name? A library by any other name would smell as mouldy.

    There is another less obvious but intellectually insidious aspect of this business model. Elite universities become repositories of rare and valuable cultural, intellectual and scientific resources. They are able to hoard them and restrict access accordingly. Thus a poor or mediocre scholar can establish himself as an authority by virtue of using the sources held by such endowments to which others have only restricted access, if any. In a system where canonical texts are used to exemplify dominant ideology, limiting access to such materials gives authority to the loyal servants while diminishing that of scholars forced to rely on secondary or even tertiary sources. It should be recalled that until the Reformation even possession of a Bible by anyone without ecclesiastical license could be punished by death. When our loquacious regurgitators of doctrine and dogma preach against conspiracy they are protected by the locks and keys of the Hoover Institution and the US Holocaust Museum as well as the soft files that saturate the corporate, espionage and secret police bureaucracies.

    Which leads us to the business at hand: what is actually happening at the renowned universities of the Great North American republic? The charming claims that academic freedom is being violated are really nothing more than charming. As George Carlin said about “rights”, they are a cute idea. There has never been anything called “academic freedom”, unless one means by that “free enterprise” applied to universities as businesses. As I have already argued elsewhere, science was wholly replaced by Science after the Manhattan Project and the less known biological warfare unit run by Merck during the great war against communism (aka WW2). Where scholarship has been genuinely free it has been despite the university not because of it. The same applies even more rigorously to teaching. There is a reason why teacher colleges (once the only venues to accept women) were called “normal schools”. John Dewey, celebrated for his assertions that education was essential for democracy, never vocally challenged the plutocracy that obstructed it. His education for democracy was ultimately distilled into indoctrination of an emergent multi-ethnic society such that they possessed no identity capable of coherent interest articulation. Unlike the Soviet Union, defunct successor to a historically multi-ethnic state, the US was not only founded on the extermination of the indigenous but on the acidic brain dissolution of the immigrant. Genetic engineering is in fact a deep technological application of the ideology by which humans can be infinitely reconfigured beyond Donald Cameron’s reprogramming at the Allan Memorial between 1957 and 1964.

    Barely buried, the FBI asset and GE lackey appointed governor of California and later POTUS, Ronald Wilson Reagan, was canonized for his propaganda (to use the term Edward Bernays did his best to replace) contributions to the complete privatization of what little public and potentially democratic space had emerged in the US despite the victory of finance capital in 1913. Under so-called New Deal policies, the historic mercenary forces of corporate industrial and financial capital managed by so-called White Shoe law firms in cooperation with the US Marine Corps (don’t take my word for it, USMC General Smedley Butler knew what he was he was being ordered to do), was temporarily nationalized. As the war drew to an end there were some who wanted to dissolve these state agencies like the OSS and return liability for piracy to the private sector. However the prescient, mainly Ivy League, elite recognized that the propaganda they had embedded in the UN Charter made a return to open corporate criminality bad for the US image in the competition with the unfortunately surviving system competitor. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 preserved the state protection of the US plutocracy that prevails to this day. Saint Ronald is worshipped like Our Lady of Fatima, by the witting for his PR success and the unwitting because of their blind faith.

    Meanwhile there have been numerous challenges to the brutality perpetrated by the militarized police forces of cities where even elite universities reside. They have not prevented the police repression. However some have at least insinuated—as in the case of Columbia — that the actions are not entirely based on local law enforcement perceptions. The relationship between a certain Ms Weiner, as head of NYPD intelligence and counter-terrorism (let’s call it NYC’s Phoenix Program) embedded in the university faculty like what the NSDAP called a “Führungsoffizier” (a party leadership officer responsible for assuring ideological compliance under the Hitler regime) and NYPD liaison to the state terrorist apparatus in Tel Aviv has been illuminated without innuendo. The investigators recognize that the conclusions one can draw are hopelessly obvious. This archetypical infiltration of a primary academic and research institution has been rightfully criticized. However it is not a new phenomenon. The FBI and through cut-outs the CIA have always had agents in the educational institutions deemed critical for the system. These agents served as “talent scouts” and police informers. What appears quite unique to this period of campus protest is on one hand the willingness of students to make demands on the “official permanent and privileged victim state” aka as the State of Israel in Palestine and the violence with which the agents and assets of that State without constitutional or moral boundaries are prepared to perpetrate in their largest host country. As Ron Unz et al. have said with justifiable vehemence, the masks have fallen. The State of Israel is demonstrably capable not only of buying the entire federal legislature and considerable assets at state level, it is able and willing to dictate individual police actions at municipal and university level.

    The debate has begun — albeit only among already sensitized critics — about how the precedent set by Lyndon Johnson in suppressing the investigation and condemnation of the State of Israel for its murderous attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 created the immunity of that settler-colonial regime’s officials from any liability under any recognized law. The blatant interventions have followed pronouncements by the reigning head of government with such rapidity that only an idiot could imagine that diplomatic channels were even necessary. This atrocious and obvious capacity to intervene in the minutia of US domestic politics (whereby these are surely not purely domestic matters) may, even if only at the pace of snails or winter maple syrup, produce a partial revulsion against the gut feeling of many sharing that primitive spirit of national sovereignty residual from the 19th century.

    Yet beyond the mathematical equation by which the thermodynamics of dog and tail are integrated, there is a more elemental quality that bears consideration. Morse Peckham once wrote and frequently said that “man does not live by bread alone, but mostly by platitudes”. Thomas Friedman wrote that McDonald’s was inseparable from McDonnell Douglas (all now Boeing, I believe). And Harvard is a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio.

    Take these platitudes seriously for a moment, in their combination. It helps to be specific. A McDonald’s in Saigon needed an F-4 Phantom. And hedge funds need collection agents, too. Before 1947 these were usually the USMC. Ajax and PBSuccess were the style of the 1950s. FUBELT was the name given to the CIA’s operation on behalf of ITT et al. University students were a disproportionate target of the first wave since they formed the potential cadre in support of the Allende government. In fact, at least two academic economists from North America were successfully marginalized for the rest of their careers just because they supported the new government and not the Rockefeller economics of the University of Chicago. Not only is there no academic freedom under capitalism there is unlimited vindictiveness toward those who violate the free market. We do not know what the cryptonyms for the current counter-insurgency operations are. However, it is important to see their true origins.

    While there is no doubt as to the smell of cordite and the hands upon which the powder stains can be found, a more fundamental force is at work, that of the hedge fund. The world’s leading hedge fund and the paramount of this criminal tribe is BlackRock, known also through the peculiar person of one Mr Laurence Douglas Fink, where students of his alma mater have recently been attacked by SA-like gangs for protesting against the mass murder perpetrated by the armed forces of the state occupying Palestine, is reported to have more than USD 10 trillion (billion in continental terms) of “assets under management”. There are diagrams that illustrate the degree to which just this hedge fund has penetrated the world economy, both private and private-public. There is no reason to doubt that the hubris of this graduate of the First Boston school of financial engineering (aka as legalized securities fraud) reflects the asset class to which he belongs.

    It may help to diverge for a moment to explain a few basics of the formal corporate and municipal debt business. Gustavus Meyer’ History of the Great American Fortunes (written before he, like Ida Turbell in the matter of Standard Oil, was persuaded to write with more sympathy) explains in lay vocabulary how the bond and stock market actually function. Corporate finance is taught at business schools like typing is taught at vocational schools. However once one has obtained a proper degree in finance or business from one of the gateway institutions—or through viciousness has worked his or her way up after graduation from a less prestigious school — the process begins by which one learns the work of hard selling, usury, stock watering, legislative influence, tax and accounting fraud and deployment of ratings agencies. In short, an investment banking apprenticeship is a course in how — in Adam Smith’s terms — one meets to collude, fix prices and manipulate markets. Cigars only available to those who can evade the general embargo beyond the Strait of Florida or the narcotics beyond the substance control by the CIA/DEA lubricate the Rolex and Patek Philippe adorned wrists.

    These cardinals and bishops, prelates of finance capital, sell financial salvation to unwitting penitents and their pastors. They must protect the faith in their product, the belief in the sin for which these sacraments, indulgences and penance are sold. They must retain the value of the derivative instruments for which universities (and other tax dodges) have been established. At the height of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition together with whatever massed mercenary forces and police power the rabbinical papacy could command, from Brazil to Wittenberg, from Rome to Lima, from Milan to Manila, perpetrated every conceivable and heinous violence against ordinary humans to preserve the credit rating, to secure the value of discounted cash flows.

    And so it is today. What we witness at US universities, especially those financed for the benefit of tax dodging hedge fund operators, is command performance. These are not merely the punishment ordered by some barbarian of Polish descent leading a settler-colonial regime in Palestine. These are the acts of the apostles. Acts of the apostles of the holy hedge funds who have succeeded the Latin Church — although consensually — to deliver truly catholic salvation. Salvation that is wealth for the quick and the grave for the dead.

    The post Hell in a Very Small Place first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel’s conscientious objectors are subject to attacks, prison, and human rights abuses

    An Israel-based conscientious objector, who spoke at an event to mark International Conscientious Objectors’ Day, has called for support and solidarity for ‘refuseniks’ facing persecution around the world.

    Conscientious objectors: under attack in Israel

    In the many countries where there is conscription, people refusing military service are often imprisoned or forced to become refugees.

    The Israeli conscientious objector, Or, has drawn attention to this widespread human rights abuse. She herself has served multiple prison sentences for her refusal to join the Israeli military.

    The call came as International Conscientious Objectors’ Day (15 May) was marked around the world, to raise awareness of the struggles of conscientious objectors and to send them a message of solidarity.

    The current war in Israel and Gaza has drawn fresh attention to the stance of Israeli conscientious objectors, who have spoken out against the assault on Gaza and the system of Israeli apartheid and occupation. Eighteen-year-old Tal Mitnick was the first to declare a conscientious objection since October last year and has since been followed by several others.

    Moreover, according to the Refuser Solidarity Network, hundreds more Israelis have refused to participate in the war, both conscripts and reservists. Many, knowing the consequences of conscientious objection, seek exemption on mental health grounds.

    Young Israelis who declare a conscientious objection are aggressively questioned and can be given repeated sentences in military prison, whilst often facing stigmatisation and ostracism from wider society.

    It is a human right

    Conscientious objection is recognised a human right, covered under ‘the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion’ in the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

    However this right is seldom fully upheld by governments. In both Russia and Ukraine, for instance, conscientious objectors face imprisonment for refusing to fight.

    In Russia their treatment is especially severe, with conscientious objectors receiving up to ten years in prison. Because of the risks they face, the majority of conscientious objectors to the fighting are likely to be among the hundreds of thousands of people who have left both countries since the Russian invasion.

    Or, who is a member of the Israeli feminist and anti-militarist organisation New Profile, said:

    Most conscientious objectors stay under the radar because of the social consequences of refusing to join the army.

    Supporting conscientious objectors for me is to fight against militarisation around the world, is to speak up for what they believe in, whether they are in Israel, Turkey, Myanmar, North Korea, South Korea, Finland or Iran. To remember the young people making brave choices, saying NO I am not going to kill or get killed, I choose peace.

    Members of the UK’s leading pacifist organisation, the Peace Pledge Union, have welcomed Or’s comments. They have previously called on the UK government to offer asylum to Russians fleeing conscription and defended the rights of British COs.

    Watch the Peace Pledge Union’s event below:

    Featured image via Peace Pledge Union

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • Gaza is our moment of truth

    A protest by students at George Washington University. Probal Rashid SIPA USA)

    Powerful student movements in the 1960s and 1970s shook the world’s conscience to end America’s slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia. The moral force of Black people rising together in their pain and rage against legislated racism changed the social fabric of America, ending formal segregation and ushering a new era in the struggle against institutional racialism.

    Power did what power does, deploying brute force, murder, intimidation, silencing, marginalizing, surveillance and all manner of corrupt policing.

    We see the outcome and we think we know it.

    Labels like “victory” and “advancement” are applied. “Civil rights” is a term spoken as an absolute, a singular point of history with a terrible before and liberated after.

    It’s the “happy ending” reframing of what is indeed a boundless thread of struggle for Black liberation stretching in both directions through time.

    The resilience of elite capitalist rule relies heavily on such narrative construction that manipulates public imagination with platitudes and reversible concessions, followed by a rebranding of oppression.

    Enslavement becomes mass incarceration and purposeful drug addiction. Segregation is sacrificed to be replaced with conscription of Black faces around the same table of power ethos.

    Rebooted with greater cruelty

    Power adapted since the 1960s, creating new stops, levers, gates and gatekeepers. They lulled us back into their system, rebooted it with greater cruelty and corruption, and retooled it with distractions and celebrity worship while they consolidated and concentrated power in the hands of a tiny minority.

    They bought politicians, who in turn work to safeguard and increase the wealth and influence of this elite minority, turning millionaires into billionaires and soon trillionaires, a staggering wealth gap built on the misery of the masses. They created laws to exonerate their criminality and criminalize dissent.

    They busted up the unions, subjugated workers and pitted them against each other. Instead of confronting the bosses, workers were manipulated into demanding iron borders and separation of families at those borders.

    They gutted regulations and bought up the airwaves to now dictate the content of 95 percent of everything we see, hear and read in the way of journalism, entertainment, education and cultural productions.

    This is the reason terrorist characters dominate Arab depictions in Hollywood. It’s the reason for the unusually high number of casual mentions of Israeli benevolence or genius in so many television series and films; the reason why Palestinian humanity is ignored or at best obscured in both print and broadcast news media no matter how many atrocities we face at Israel’s hands.

    It’s why Black media outlets, owned and run by Zionists of all stripes, take out hit pieces on the likes of Amanda Seales for her righteous stand on Palestine.

    Instead of paying taxes, these billionaires “donate” to universities sufficient sums to impose their vision not only for higher education, but for the acceptable expression of constitutional rights like the First Amendment.

    For example, outraged by a Palestinian literature festival – a beautiful celebration of Palestinian excellence and indigenous heritage – the billionaires Marc Rowan, Dick Wolf and the Lauder family conspired to remove the president of the University of Pennsylvania for her insufficient deference to their interpretation of academic freedom.

    Enlisting their hired goons in Congress, they and others of their ilk, like Bill Ackman, denigrated and/or removed more university presidents for the same reason.

    They even managed to bring the internet – which gave the 1990s generation hope for real democracy – under their nefarious control through algorithms and various forms of surveillance and censorship.

    Hiding the horrors

    Americans tried to stop the march of US corporate and Zionist warmongers toward war in the early 2000s, but they marched on, trampling our will and the bodies of millions of Iraqis. And the world watched as the US pulverized Iraq, a once glorious, high functioning ancient society.

    An “embedded” media hid the bloody horrors and kept the secrets of US corporate looting of Iraq’s treasures and laundering of US tax dollars through rebuilding schemes.

    Desensitized, Americans didn’t bother protesting when the US did the same in Libya, spurring a staggering de-development of one of Africa’s most advanced nations into a veritable human slave market.

    The enslavement and mutilation of Congolese children and whole families in mineral mines to benefit American tech billionaires (as well as Israel’s blood diamond trade) barely elicit a blip in Western media, a shockingly cruel reality they continue to obscure.

    There are hundreds more examples of American and Israeli militarism killing and destroying others in the service of this ruling corporate class.

    Mass surveillance of the populace followed the gutting and looting of public education in the United States. The rich got richer and the poor became destitute.

    In the name of technology and efficiency, capitalists degraded our food and water – poisoned them even – benefitting pharmaceutical billionaires who keep the masses teetering on the edge of health.

    Popular gurus pushed philosophies of individualism, contempt for family, and various forms of alienation that shattered community and social or familial bonds, leaving vast swaths of the people unable to cope with life without drug varieties, both legal and illegal.

    They have weighed us down with the fake dreams they scripted for us – insurmountable debt as a stand-in for family and education, blood diamonds as a stand-in for love and carnage abroad as a stand-in for greatness. They sold us a glorious pile of shit and made us think it was a normal – even inevitable – way of life.

    They glorified obsessive consumerism and obscenely ostentatious lifestyles. And we let them, believing it was our choice.

    But we had none.

    An American illusion

    Choice, like democracy and free press, is an American illusion, a fairytale they peddle in school, newspapers and songs.

    Look how quickly they disbanded, silenced and erased memory of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011. Look how we are taught to believe that change can only come through the ballot box, where we’re told to “choose” between two war criminals one election after another.

    This moment of livestreamed genocide is the culmination of decades of global capitalist criminality and genocidal Western and Zionist imperialism. We watch in horror as whole Palestinian families are buried alive in their homes, crushed beneath the weight of rubble, their bodies torn and shredded.

    Then they gaslight us.

    Politicians, spokespeople, pundits, journalists and broadcasters take to the airways to convince us that we hadn’t just seen brains, tongues and eyeballs spilling from the crushed skulls of children and babies. Or worse, that they somehow deserved it.

    “Fog of war.”

    “Collateral damage.”

    “Hamas. Hamas. Hamas.”

    “The only democracy.”

    “Self-defense.”

    Over and over they use their wicked justifications and obfuscations. They speak to us as if we’re stupid because they’re accustomed to our silence and acquiescence.

    And they go on, prancing into the Met Gala in obscene finery, the vulgarity of which is made all the more apparent in juxtaposition to the burned and dismembered small bodies on the same day, pouring into Gaza’s few remaining hospitals, screaming, bewildered, in shock and in pain.

    But thank God for the students.

    Thank God for every Palestinian journalist and every Palestinian healthcare worker risking their lives day in and out to serve their people.

    For every fighter choosing martyrdom over indignity.

    For the local organizations and activists you never hear about, but whose work has been keeping thousands alive. I dare not say their names, lest they become targets.

    For Naledi Pandor in South Africa, Francesca Albanese at the United Nations and Clare Daly in the European Parliament.

    For the masses rising up in #Blockout2024. For artists and musicians from Roger Waters and Talib Kweli, to Macklemore and Black Thought, Questlove and more.

    For Yemen, South Africa and Colombia. For every person who refuses to remain silent.

    All dots connected

    This time is different from the uprisings of the 1960s and 1970s. There is a new sense of global interconnection, an emerging class consciousness and foundational political analyses predicated on post-colonial studies and intersectionality.

    Back then the white students protesting the war wouldn’t unite with the Black Panthers because they couldn’t connect the dots. All dots are connecting now.

    Gaza is no longer the enclave sealed and besieged by Israel and Abdulfattah al-Sisi’s Egypt into a concentration camp. Gaza is no longer the densely-populated strip of Israeli-occupied land.

    Rather, Gaza is now all the world.

    Gaza is our collective moment of truth, the meaning in our lives. It is the clarity we need and seek.

    It is the definitive divide between us and the ruling class that tramples us.

    It is us or them. There is no middle place now.

    All the borders fade, leaving us united to confront this greedy genocidal minority everywhere.

    Gaza is the most anguished place on earth at this hour, dimmed by unimaginable Zionist cruelty, which their military and society conduct with perverted glee that they set to music for TikTok.

    And from this tortured place of rubble, death and misery there springs the greatest light we have ever known to guide us out of the darkness in which we’ve been forced to live. The light of our ancestors – from Palestine and Alkebulan to Turtle Island and Aotearoa.

    Gaza may well be our last chance to save humanity.

    If we allow the wheels of this genocidal Zionist engine to keep turning, there will be no more limits to fascism. There will be no shame or red lines before which they will halt.

    This struggle can no more be just about a ceasefire. It must demand liberation and accountability across our burning planet.

    Already they are using the tactics of brute force, violent intimidation, suspension and marginalization. They will attempt the same dismantlement, silencing and erasure they did with the Occupy Wall Street movement.

    They will offer half-baked promises with no teeth, enough to quiet matters long enough to adopt new strategies and enact new laws.

    If we stop they will adapt, and they will do so with artificial intelligence, against which we may well have no defenses, not for a long time to come. So beware of their concessions.

    Beware of victory that pulls us back into the lanes they made.

    We cannot allow Israeli genocide against a defenseless and captive indigenous population to become a whitewashed, declawed historic moment of before and after.

    We cannot leave the lawns and streets and courts and battlefields until Zionism is dismantled and Palestine is free.

    This moment belongs to the people. We can dream our own dreams and create a new world in every personal act of refusal to participate in this horrible system predicated on genocide and unending exploitation.

    Together we are powerful beyond our wildest imaginations. Compassion and defiance are our superpowers, and this is just our origin story.

    The youth are leading and showing us that the future is ours, if we dare to claim it.

    • First published in The Electronic Intifada

    The post Gaza is our moment of truth first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Richard Burgon outs Rishi Sunak as heartless with a question on Israel at PMQs

    At Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), former shadow justice secretary under Jeremy Corbyn Richard Burgon challenged Rishi Sunak on Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people:

    30,000 Palestinian deaths – not enough to move this Prime Minister to end arm sales to Israel. The killing of British aid workers – not enough to move the Prime Minister to end arm sales. It even seems that, unlike the US, an all out assault on Rafah with all the death and destruction that would entail, wouldn’t be enough.

    So just what on earth would be enough to finally move this Prime Minister into the same position as the majority of the British public and end arm sales to Israel?

    Burgon points out that we’re seven months into Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza and yet no war crime is enough for Sunak to end arm sales.

    UK involvement in Israel’s genocide

    The UK licensing of arms and components for Israel’s military makes Sunak’s government complicit.

    Campaign Against Arms Trade now estimates that UK arms exports to Israel total at least £1bn since 2015 – double what the government says it is.

    The estimate comes because the government uses open licenses to cook the figures. This is where companies can export unlimited amounts of specific military equipment under one license.

    Israel is also using F-35 jets to bombard Gaza, which British BAE Systems provides 15% of the parts for.

    Israel’s crimes against humanity include a targeted drone strike against World Central Kitchen staff. As Burgon notes, three British aid workers were among those killed. The drone contained a UK-made engine.

    This is one of several documented instances where aid workers coordinated with Israel for safety, only for Israel to then kill them.

    As Burgon alluded to at PMQs, the US has paused one shipment of bombs, claiming its trying to pressure Israel to protect civilians in the south Gazan city of Rafah.

    But the pause is a drop in the ocean. The US is Israel’s largest arms supplier and now plans to send a new, additional $1bn weapons package to the state.

    Israeli tanks have been pushing further into Rafah where an increased ground assault would make the humanitarian situation even worse.

    PMQs: a cruel joke

    At PMQs, Sunak responded to Burgon:

    As part of the government’s robust arms control regime, we do regularly review advice to ensure compliance with international law… our position with regards to export licenses… is unchanged… and it is indeed in line with other partners including the United States

    Under domestic and international law, the UK must stop issuing arms licenses if there’s even a risk the recipient will use them to commit war crimes.

    Yet it was in January when the International Court of Justice ruled that its “plausible” Israel is committing genocide in Palestine.

    So the UK’s so-called “robust arms control regime” seems to be a cruel joke.

    And as Burgon said at PMQs, this view is out of step with the British public. 56% of people believe the government should end arms and spare part sales to Israel, compared to 17% who don’t.

    The former shadow justice secretary is right to raise this in parliament. It’s utterly shameful that the UK government hasn’t ended arm sales to the longstanding war criminals in Israel’s government.

    Featured image via The Mirror – YouTube

    By James Wright

    This post was originally published on Canary.

  • The Arsenal of Genocide: the U.S. Weapons That Are Destroying Gaza

    Protesters block the entrance to the BAE factory in Kent, UK. (Photo credit: Reuters)

    On May 8, 2024, as Israel escalated its brutal assault on Rafah, President Biden announced that he had “paused” a delivery of 1,700 500-pound and 1,800 2,000-pound bombs, and threatened to withhold more shipments if Israel went ahead with its full-scale invasion of Rafah.

    The move elicited an outcry from Israeli officials (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir tweeted “Hamas loves Biden”), as well as Republicans, staunch anti-Palestinian Democrats and pro-Israel donors. Republicans immediately prepared a bill entitled the Israel Security Assistance Support Act to prohibit the administration from withholding military aid to Israel.

    Many people have been asking the U.S. to halt weapons to Israel for seven months, and, of course, Biden’s move comes too late for 35,000 Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza, mainly by American weapons.

    Lest one think the administration is truly changing its position, two days after announcing the pause, the State Department released a convoluted report saying that, although it is reasonable to “assess” that U.S. weapons have been used by Israeli forces in Gaza in ways that are “inconsistent” with international humanitarian law, and although Israel has indeed delayed or had a negative effect on the delivery of aid to Gaza (which is illegal under U.S. law), Israel’s assurances regarding humanitarian aid and compliance with international humanitarian law are “credible and reliable.”

    By this absurd conclusion, the Biden administration has given itself a green light to keep sending weapons and Israel a flashing one to keep committing war crimes with them.

    In any event, as Colonel Joe Bicino, a retired U.S. artillery officer, told the BBC, Israel can “level” Rafah with the weapons it already has. The paused shipment is “somewhat inconsequential,” Bicino said, “a little bit of a political play for people in the United States who are… concerned about this.” A U.S. official confirmed to the Washington Post that Israel has enough weapons already supplied by the U.S. and other allies to go ahead with the Rafah operation if it chooses to ignore U.S. qualms.

    The paused shipment really has to be seen in the context of the arsenal with which the U.S. has equipped its Middle Eastern proxy over many decades.

    A Deluge of American Bombs

    During the Second World War, the United States proudly called itself the “Arsenal of Democracy,” as its munitions factories and shipyards produced an endless supply of weapons to fight the genocidal government of Germany. Today, the United States is instead, shamefully, the Arsenal of Genocide, providing 70% of the imported weapons Israel is using to obliterate Gaza and massacre its people.

    As Israel assaults Rafah, home to 1.4 million displaced people, including at least 600,000 children, most of the warplanes dropping bombs on them are F-16s, originally designed and manufactured by General Dynamics, but now produced by Lockheed Martin in Greenville, South Carolina. Israel’s 224 F-16s have long been its weapon of choice for bombing militants and civilians in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria.

    Israel also has 86 Boeing F-15s, which can drop heavier bombs, and 39 of the latest, most wastefully expensive fighter-bombers ever, Lockheed Martin’s nuclear-capable F-35s, with another 36 on order. The F-35 is built in Fort Worth, Texas, but components are manufactured all over the U.S. and in allied countries, including Israel. Israel was the first country to attack other countries with F-35s, in violation of U.S. arms export control laws, reportedly using them to bomb Syria, Egypt and Sudan.

    As these fleets of U.S.-made warplanes began bombing Gaza in October 2023, their fifth major assault since 2008, the U.S. began rushing in new weapons. By December 1, 2023, it had delivered 15,000 bombs and 57,000 artillery shells.

    The U.S. supplies Israel with all sizes and types of bombs, including 285-pound GBU-39 small diameter glide bombs, 500-pound Mk 82s, 2,000-pound Mk 84s and BLU-109 “bunker busters,” and even massive 5,000-pound GBU-28 bunker-busters, which Israel reportedly used in Gaza in 2009.

    General Dynamics is the largest U.S. bomb manufacturer, making all these models of bombs. Most of them can be used as “precision” guided bombs by attaching Raytheon and Lockheed Martin’s Paveway laser guidance system or Boeing’s JDAM (Joint Direct Attack Munitions) GPS-based targeting system.

    Little more than half of the bombs Israel has dropped on Gaza have been “precision” ones, because, as targeting officers explained to +972 magazine, their Lavender AI system generates thousands of targets who are just suspected rank-and-file militants, not senior commanders. Israel does not consider it worth “wasting” expensive precision munitions to kill these people, so it uses only “dumb” bombs to kill them in their homes—obliterating their families and neighbors in the process.

    In order to threaten and bomb its more distant neighbors, such as Iran, Israel depends on its seven Lockheed Martin KC-130H and seven Boeing 707 in-air refueling tankers, with four new, state-of-the-art Boeing KC46A tankers to be delivered in late 2025 for over $220 million each.

    Ground force weapons

    Another weapon of choice for killing Palestinians are Israel’s 48 Boeing Apache AH64 attack helicopters, armed with Lockheed Martin’s infamous Hellfire missiles, General Dynamics’ Hydra 70 rockets and Northrop Grumman’s 30 mm machine guns. Israel also used its Apaches to kill and incinerate a still unknown number of Israelis on October 7, 2023—a tragic day that Israel and the U.S. continue to exploit as a false pretext for their own violations of international humanitarian law and of the Genocide Convention.

    Israel’s main artillery weapons are its 600 Paladin M109A5 155 mm self-propelled howitzers, which are manufactured by BAE Systems in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. To the layman, a self-propelled howitzer looks like a tank, but it has a bigger, 155 mm gun to fire at longer range.

    Israel assembles its 155 mm artillery shells from U.S.-made components. One of the first two U.S. arms shipments that the administration notified Congress about after October 7 was to resupply Israel with artillery shell components valued at $147.5 million.

    Israel also has 48 M270 multiple rocket launchers. They are a tracked version of the HIMARS rocket launchers the U.S. has sent to Ukraine, and they fire the same rockets, made by Lockheed Martin. U.S. Marines used the same rockets in coordination with U.S. airstrikes to devastate Mosul, the second largest city in Iraq, in 2017. M270 launchers are no longer in production, but BEA Systems still has the facilities to produce them.

    Israel makes its own Merkava tanks, which fire U.S.-made tank shells, and the State Department announced on December 9, 2023, that it had notified Congress of an “emergency” shipment of 14,000 120 mm tank shells worth $106 million to Israel.

    U.S. shipments of artillery and tank shells, and dozens of smaller shipments that it did not report to Congress (because each shipment was carefully calibrated to fall below the statutory reporting limit of $100 million), were paid for out of the $3.8 billion in military aid that the United States gives Israel each year.

    In April, Congress passed a new war-funding bill that includes about $14 billion for additional weapons. Israel could afford to pay for these weapons itself, but then it could shop around for them, which might erode the U.S. monopoly on supplying so much of its war machine. That lucrative monopoly for U.S. merchants of death is clearly more important to Members of Congress than fully funding Head Start or other domestic anti-poverty programs, which they routinely underfund to pay for weapons and wars.

    Israel has 500 FMC-built M113 armored personnel carriers and over 2,000 Humvees, manufactured by AM General in Mishawaka, Indiana. Its ground forces are armed with several different types of U.S. grenade launchers, Browning machine-guns, AR-15 assault rifles, and SR-25 and M24 SWS sniper rifles, all made in the USA, as is the ammunition for them.

    For many years, Israel’s three Sa’ar 5 corvettes were its largest warships, about the size of frigates. They were built in the 1990s by Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, but Israel has recently taken delivery of four larger, more heavily-armed, German-built Sa’ar 6 corvettes, with 76 mm main guns and new surface-to-surface missiles.

    Gaza Encampments Take On the Merchants of Death

    The United States has a long and horrific record of providing weapons to repressive regimes that use them to kill their own people or attack their neighbors. Martin Luther King called the U.S. government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world,” and that has not changed since he said it in 1967, a year to the day before his assassination.

    Many of the huge U.S. factories that produce all these weapons are the largest employers in their regions or even their states. As President Eisenhower warned the public in his farewell address in 1960, “This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry” has led to “the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.”

    So, in addition to demanding a ceasefire, an end to U.S. military aid and weapons sales to Israel, and a restoration of humanitarian aid to Gaza, the students occupying college campuses across our country are right to call on their institutions to divest from these merchants of death, as well as from Israeli companies.

    The corporate media has adopted the line that divestment would be too complicated and costly for the universities to do. But when students set up an encampment at Trinity College in Dublin, in Ireland, and called on it to divest from Israeli companies, the college quickly agreed to their demands. Problem solved, without police violence or trying to muzzle free speech. Students have also won commitments to consider divestment from U.S. institutions, including Brown, Northwestern, Evergreen State, Rutgers and the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

    While decades of even deadlier U.S. war-making in the greater Middle East failed to provoke a sustained mass protest movement, the genocide in Gaza has opened the eyes of many thousands of young people to the need to rise up against the U.S. war machine.

    The gradual expulsion and emigration of Palestinians from their homeland has created a huge diaspora of young Palestinians who have played a leading role in organizing solidarity campaigns on college campuses through groups like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). Their close links with extended families in Palestine have given them a visceral grasp of the U.S. role in this genocide and an authentic voice that is persuasive and inspiring to other young Americans.

    Now it is up to Americans of all ages to follow our young leaders and demand not just an end to the genocide in Palestine, but also a path out of our country’s military madness and the clutches of its deeply entrenched MICIMATT (military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media- academia-think-tank) complex, which has inflicted so much death, pain and desolation on so many of our neighbors for so long, from Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan to Vietnam and Latin America.

    The post The Arsenal of Genocide: the U.S. Weapons That Are Destroying Gaza first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.