Category: United States

  • It’s been apparent for some time that the Israeli government intends to expel or kill the population of Gaza and claim the territory. This has become so obvious that even the establishment press is belatedly beginning to notice. In an editorial, the world’s leading business journal, the Financial Times, observed that “each new offensive makes it harder not to suspect that the ultimate goal of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition is to ensure Gaza is uninhabitable and drive Palestinians from their land” (emphasis mine). I’m not quite sure what would need to happen before the Financial Times would consider its suspicions confirmed; the Israeli Prime Minister is much more assertive about his intentions, he identified the expulsion of Gazans to be among his “clear conditions” for ending his genocidal campaign; he speaks of emptying Gaza as one empties a dustbin, and with the same regard for its contents. However, because coverage from the corporate press has been so incommensurate with the scale of the horrors, even this tepid statement from the Financial Times is progress.

    The Israelis have sought to render Gaza uninhabitable, and then encourage what they’re perversely calling “voluntary emigration.” They’ve embraced the logic that someone fleeing a burning building has “volunteered” to leap from the window. This strategy has many components to it: tens of thousands (at least) of Gazans have been massacred by the Israelis, most of the buildings have been destroyed (the Israelis have begun a campaign to eliminate the ones that remain standing after previous assaults), the Gazan health care infrastructure has been repeatedly attacked, and the entire Gaza Strip has been subjected to a medieval siege, the consequences of which have left the population critically short of food and medicine. After reducing Gaza to starvation through months of total blockade, Israel turned aid distribution into another mechanism of murder or expulsion.

    An entity with the philanthropic-sounding name the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), whose name is so starkly at odds with its function that it might have been coined by a satirist, has been tasked with providing aid to the Gazan population. Anyone familiar with Orwell could likely guess the character of a group with such a crudely propagandistic name. Some organizations have demonstrated the competence to deliver aid and the desire to do so efficaciously, but GHF isn’t one of them. Credible humanitarian organizations were disregarded and the GHF empowered, for reasons that Israeli officials have been forthcoming enough to articulate.

    The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was clear about why he decided to slightly relax the siege that Gaza had been subjected to: Israeli allies were beginning to become squeamish about the forced starvation of the entire population of Gaza. These same allies have supported the Israeli campaign despite the International Court of Justice ruling that it’s plausible Israel is violating the Genocide Convention, and despite the International Criminal Court issuing arrest warrants for top Israeli leaders. The supporters of Israel have demonstrated a willingness to tolerate a great deal of savagery. But Israel’s “closest friends in the world,” as Netanyahu tells us, can’t “handle pictures of mass starvation,” so “minimal” aid deliveries must be allowed. There are no moral concerns about causing a famine in Gaza, only pragmatic considerations. Netanyahu said that “we cannot reach a point of starvation, for practical and diplomatic reasons.” Doing so may cross a “red line” that could cause Israel to lose the support of the United States. Starvation is not wrong—merely inconvenient, like a dinner guest who overstays his welcome.

    Another key objective is to force the Gazan population to the southern portion of the territory and then induce them to leave for other countries. The Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, speaking at a conference in the first week of May, said: “Within a few months we will be able to declare that we have won. Gaza will be totally destroyed.” He went on to say: “The Gazan citizens will be concentrated in the south. They will be totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places.” Under the new scheme, the aid distribution sites were limited to only four locations (it was 400 locations when the United Nations was managing the dispersal of aid), and the sites were strategically located in the South of the Strip, which forces the population to congregate in these areas. They will reside under conditions that Israeli planners privately concede will be likened to “concentration camps.”

    But that’s only if the Palestinians reach the distribution sites. Kit Malthouse, a conservative member of parliament in the United Kingdom said that the aid distribution system the United Nations was managing was replaced with “a shooting gallery, an abattoir, where starving people are lured out through combat zones to be shot at.” The United Nations was less poetic when voicing its condemnation of the GHF scheme, it merely said that “aid distribution has become a death trap.” Every day brings news of another massacre at an aid distribution center. The public has been subjected to the standard Israeli deceptions about these incidents, but Israeli culpability becomes clear whenever the evidence is honestly interrogated. At the time of this writing, 245 Palestinian aid seekers have been killed by the Israelis and more than 2,152 were injured; the level of savagery is such that the number is certain to be greater within moments after being transcribed.

    Let us dispense with the fiction of ignorance. The evidence is not hidden, it is flaunted. The intent is not obscured, it is bragged about. The Israeli government, with the serene assurance of a state that knows its crimes will be subsidized, barely troubles itself with denials anymore. And the United States remains a participant in these crimes.

    The post Aid as a Means to Commit Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Protesters confront police on the 101 Freeway near the Metropolitan Detention Center of downtown Los Angeles, Sunday, June 8, 2025, following last night's immigration raid protest. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)

    On 11 June, the Substack, Closer to the Edge, penned a letter to the Los Angeles Police Department, and the opening graph says it all:

    You shot a journalist on live television. You struck another in the forehead while he was standing alone under a freeway. You sent one man into emergency surgery after punching a hole in his leg with a “less-lethal” round. You bruised a New York Times reporter’s ribcage. You gassed a foreign correspondent while she was wearing a press badge. You shot a 74-year-old woman in the back. You nailed a man in the chest with a 40mm grenade while he was holding a phone. And you left a woman bleeding from the skull in the middle of the street while people begged your officers to call an ambulance—and they didn’t.

    And now you’re “investigating.”

    Closer to the Edge maintains it has “completed a full, verified investigation of eight people injured by law enforcement during the protests in Los Angeles. Seven were journalists. One was a protester. All of them were harmed under your watch.”

    The Substack notes that it is “publishing” the stories of the victims of police violence “[w]ith verified quotes. With real names. With witness footage, medical updates, and your own damn statements when available. You told the public you’re investigating? Then we’ll do it faster, better, and with the one thing your officers seem allergic to: accountability.”

    Reuters is reporting that there has been over 30 incidents of police violence against journalists as tracked by the LA Press Club. According Reuters Helen Coster, “Journalists have been among those injured during protests” in recent days.

    Among the injured were Lauren Tomasi (Nine News Australia) who was struck by a rubber-bullet projectile; Toby Canham, freelance photojournalist for the New York Post, was hit in the forehead by a “hard rubbery” projectile; Nick Stern, a British photojournalist, was shot in the thigh with a projectile and required emergence surgery.

    The post LAPD Running Amok, Dishing out Numerous Injuries to Protesters and Journalists in LA first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Overnight, the Zionist entity of Israel escalated its war of aggression against Iran by launching unprovoked attacks on the Islamic Republic. The notion that a rogue ethnostate that is currently carrying out a genocide believes that it possesses the right to determine which countries can and cannot develop a nuclear weapon is both bizarre and egregious as well as brazenly hypocritical, and further demonstrates that the State of Israel operates firmly within the structures of white “supremacy” ideology, colonialism, and imperialism. Iran, like all sovereign nations, has the right to defend itself from aggression and uphold its security in the face of repeated threats and acts of war. This stands in stark contrast to Israel, which operates a settler colonial occupation of Palestine, as well as portions of Lebanon and Syria.

    The idea of Israel, the Zionist occupation, claiming a moral position is absurd. And the fact that the international community continues to give Israel any credibility is a dereliction of duty and forms a vacuum of morality for all of those who do not stand resolutely against its genocide in Palestine and its attacks on Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, and Iran. Israel’s immunity granted by Western colonial nations is a further reflection of the moral gulf between these states and the vast majority of humankind that subscribes  to values that uphold People(s)-Centered Human Rights, self-determination, and dignity.

    Israel’s unprovoked attack is another example of the lawlessness that is fully supported by the U.S. The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) rejects the notion that the U.S. was unaware of this attack. The U.S. had the ability to stop this attack if it was serious about containing Israel’s perpetual war crimes and disregard for international law, which is a  major threat to any form of true peace. The combination of Israel’s continued genocidal assaults and ethnic cleansing against the Palestinian people, and its bombings and occupations of portions of the sovereign nations of Syria and Lebanon prove that Israel and the U.S. are the most dangerous nations in the world. Their power must be dismantled.

    To conflate Israel’s actions with Jewish values is the height of antisemitism. Zionism, an ideology of white “supremacy,” must be wholly separated from Judaism’s teachings of justice, human rights, and inclusivity. Israel is no more a “Jewish state” than the U.S. is a “Christian state.” Both are violent constructs of ethnonationalism. BAP firmly rejects the conflation of Judaism with the barbarism of Zionism, just as we denounce the antisemitic trope that equates Zionism with Judaism itself.

    Israel’s militarism further threatens global stability by spiking the price of oil by 8 percent in one night. This economic shockwave further demonstrates why we must continue linking the devastation of war with the devastation associated with the climate catastrophe that is fueled by capitalist war profiteering interests of fossil fuel cartels and the military industrial complex who both benefit from the Israeli war machine at the expense of human life and the ecosystems necessary to sustain it. Israel’s aggression is capitalism’s credit card with an unlimited spending limit.

    History will remember this moment and Israel’s barbaric acts as an indelible and ignominious stain on international “law” and cooperation, people(s)-centered human rights and the basic tenets of human dignity.

    In Response, BAP Demands that : 

    • The UN Security Council and European Union impose immediate sanctions and consequences for Israel’s illegal acts, and institute an arms embargo.
    • The international community must expel Israel from the United Nations. It has no place among fraternal nations.
    • The international community categorically reject Israel’s fraudulent claims to jurisdiction over Iran’s lawful nuclear energy program.
    • The IAEA investigate Israel’s unregulated nuclear program with the same rigor applied to others.
    • U.S. lawmakers enforce laws prohibiting military aid to human rights violators by cutting off all arms transfers to Israel or face prosecution at the ICC and ICJ for complicity in war crimes.
    • The ICC indict and prosecute Israeli and U.S. officials for continued war crimes throughout West Asia and the lawlessness of genocide perpetuated against the Palestinian people.
    • All anti-imperialist, anti-war, pro-peace movements and organizations support Iran’s right to sovereignty, self-defense, and self-determination against Israel’s murderous aggression.
    The post The Middle East is on Fire because Israeli and U.S. Imperialism Lit the Match first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On Russia’s Sputnik News, Scott Ritter, who has honestly reported on this matter for over 25 years, said on June 13, that the Trump Administration worked with the Netanyahu Administration to plan this strike against Iran and is therefore already at war against Iran, and that almost certainly America will also become militarily engaged in it. He also says that the strike was devastatingly effective and was directed at and achieved three objectives: 1. decapitation; 2. eliminating air-defense; 3. greatly weakening Iran’s retaliatory capability.

    The decapitation was like what Israel had earlier achieved also against Hezbollah. Elimination of air-defense knocked out Iran’s Russian S-300 and S-400 air-defense systems, which perhaps had not been placed on high alert. Retaliatory capability was thus enormously weakened by the surprise attack taking-out much of Iran’s above-ground air force.

    Trump had participated by feigning to be negotiating with Iran and saying that Iran might experience a devastating Israeli invasion if Iran fails to accept Trump’s terms at the final talks that had been scheduled with Iran on Sunday June 15. Iran had carefully planned for that scheduled meeting. They trusted that Iran didn’t need to go undergound  yet (place all critical people and assets underground) until then. All of Iran’s leaders were to go to their bunkers, if needed, only on or after June 15 (if the alleged negotiations were to fail). The Trump-Netanyahu plan was for Iran’s top assets to be sitting ducks for this surprise attack. Iran fell for their con.

    Here are the sources:

    “Scott Ritter: US Lulled Iran to Sleep Using Nuclear Talks Deception, Allowing Israel to Strike”

    13 June 2025

    Israel has carried out an unprecedented attack on Iran, targeting its nuclear program, scientists, and senior military leaders. Sputnik asked veteran ex-Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter what just happened, and what comes next.

    The months of Iran-US nuclear talks essentially gave “Israel the opportunity for maximum surprise to achieve maximum damage,” with the strikes effectively amounting to “a joint US-Israeli attack on Iran,” Scott Ritter said. … “This, by any definition of the word, was a joint US-Israeli attack on Iran.” … “We are at war with Iran,.” … “If the Iranians have the capabilities that they claim to have and the resilience they claim to have, we will see an escalation. We will see Iran retaliating in a way that is not sustainable for Israel. But this is part of the Israeli trap to create the perception of existential struggle so that the United States will be confronted with a choice, let the Israeli ally suffer and perhaps be defeated, or to intervene and administer the coup de grâce against Iran. So, you know, we are looking at a long, drawn-out process that ultimately, I believe, will result in the United States entering this conflict on the side of Israel directly.” …

    “Scott Ritter: US Used Nuclear Talks to Set Up Israeli Strike on Iran | APT”

    13 June 2025

    “I believe that Israel and the United States coordinated very closely on this attack. This attack was a surprise attack. The Iranians were lulled into a false sense of complacency by the American insistence on focusing on a 6th round of negotiations that was scheduled to take place on Sunday. Israel was working with the United States on that narrative, saying that if there wasn’t a deal reached Sunday, then Israel would be considering an attack. This was very closely coordinated in order to give Israel the maximum opportunity for surprise to achieve maximum damage. … This was … a joint Israeli-American attack on Iran. … This attack was initiated with a decapitation strike that found many of the Iranian leaders in their homes. Had Iran been on high alert, these leaders would have been in a bunker. …”

    *****

    Anyone who continues to think that Trump is ‘the peace candidate’ is just as misinformed or stupid as Iran’s Supreme Leader was to think that the U.S. Government is serious about achieving peace instead of using ‘negotiations’ ONLY as a ploy to fool and thus defeat the countries it has already decided to “regime-change.” The U.S. regime is bipartisanly neoconservative. The only path to peace would be to replace it. Replacing one Party by another can’t even possibly free the American people from this dictatorship (which America became on 25 July 1945).

    The post Scott Ritter: “We are at war with Iran.” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US President Donald Trump sent in the military to suppress anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles this past weekend, but instead of stopping the protest movement in its tracks, demonstrations have taken place in cities across the entire United States to reject Trump’s immigration policies and crackdown.

    Since protests erupted against immigration raids in Los Angeles on Friday afternoon, they have spread to cities throughout the US, including New York City, Chicago, Denver, Dallas, Boston, and Atlanta.

    As the Trump administration scrambles to meet mass deportations quotas, with officials ramping up the immigration enforcement arrest quota to 3,000 per day, ICE operations have escalated to new heights.

    The post Movement Against ICE Raids Spreads To Cities Across The US appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • “We look for the poorest patients,” the Cuban doctor in charge of the eye clinic said. “Often we travel to remote rural areas and bring them to the clinic in a bus.” The clinic, located in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua, was part of Misión Milagro (Miracle Mission), a joint initiative run by the Cuban and Venezuelan governments. The larger mission has treated over seven million patients in 33 countries since 2004. Local Nicaraguan doctors, trained by the Cubans, are now in charge in Ciudad Sandino.

    Misión Milagro is despised by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Washington has imposed sanctions on officials in countries using this and other Cuban medical missions. Supposedly aimed at stopping the “trafficking” of medical staff, the real intent is to destroy services that have proved immensely popular for their free, high-quality treatment, often in remote areas with few health facilities. The US falsely demonizes Cuba’s aid as “forced labor,” which is also a source of income for the besieged country.

    Successes of Rubio’s “enemies of humanity”

    Rubio’s attack on medical brigades is only the most recent example of the hybrid warfare conducted by successive US administrations against Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. Already designated as “strategic threats” to US security, according to Rubio, these countries are now also labelled “enemies of humanity.” In reality, all three countries have made major advances in human development, albeit constrained (most heavily in Cuba’s case) by Washington’s attacks.

    Cuba’s medical brigades derive from its community-based health system, whose success is recognized in medical journals and affords Cubans a three-year greater life expectancy than people in the US. Health services in Venezuela and Nicaragua have learnt from this model. For example, Nicaragua’s 180 casas maternas, assisting women in the late stages of pregnancy, have drastically reduced maternal deaths.

    Venezuela leads Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) in building affordable housing; its Great Housing Mission, launched in 2011, handed over its five millionth home a year ago. Nicaragua is building more than 7,000 “social interest” homes annually.

    Cuba, sadly, has an ongoing housing crisis, primarily caused by the US embargo, which has produced a severe shortage of building materials. One-third of homes are unfit, while its 13,500 annual building program inevitably falls short.

    However, Cuba invested in its education system during the most prosperous years of the revolution, when it benefited from the international solidarity of the Soviet Union. Cuba’s schools serve the most remote communities, and attendance is close to 100%. ELAM, its medical school for internationals, has trained an astonishing 31,180 doctors from 122 countries.

    Venezuela invested heavily in education as a means of empowering the populace, building thousands of new schools in underserved barrios and rural areas. By 2005, illiteracy was eradicated using Cuban-developed methods. By 2008, four out of five young adults were enrolled in higher education, the highest rate in the region.

    All three countries guarantee free education at all levels, including university. Nicaragua, for example, has created new technical colleges training some 46,000 students.

    Cuba and Nicaragua are two of LAC’s safest countries. A common factor is that their police forces were completely reformed, post-revolution, and they have been able to limit drug trafficking and keep at bay the violent gangs that bedevil other countries.

    The Venezuelan revolution inherited chronically high crime levels, but in recent years has achieved a significant decrease in homicides, which has been publicized not only by Caracas but by the US president. However, Trump deceitfully claims Venezuela has achieved this by deliberately exporting its criminals to the US.

    In terms of national security, Nicaragua and Venezuela have among the lowest military spending levels in the LAC region; Cuba, subject to constant US threat, is among the highest. Nevertheless, its spending of around $130 million annually pales in comparison with that of over a trillion by the US.

    Socially conscious foreign policy

    Perhaps most challenging to the US has been the independent foreign policy and the championing of regional integration by the three countries striving for socialism.

    Back in 2004, Venezuela and Cuba successfully founded ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America), scuttling Washington’s neoliberal free trade FTAA initiative. Venezuela followed with PetroCaribe, supplying oil to Caribbean nations on favorable terms. The founding of CELAC (Community of Latin American and Caribbean States) in 2010, again spearheaded by Venezuela, provides an alternative to the US-dominated OAS (Organization of American States) as a region-wide political forum, which explicitly excludes the US and Canada.

    The three leftist states have also been international leaders in support of Palestine. Cuba was the first country in the LAC region to formally sever diplomatic relations with Israel in 1973. Nicaragua severed relations in 1982. These were temporarily reinstated by the neoliberal government in 1993, only to be again severed in 2010 after the Sandinistas returned to power. Venezuela severed relations with the Zionist state in 2009. Also in 2009, fellow ALBA nation Bolivia severed relations with Israel. These were temporarily reinstated in 2019 by the Áňez coup regime but again severed by the current Bolivian President, Luis Arce, in 2023. Last year, Nicaragua filed a case against Germany at the International Court of Justice over its military and political support of the genocide by Israel.

    Human rights weaponized

    Washington disregards the achievements in these three countries that former Trump functionary John Bolton called the “troika of tyranny,” instead weaponizing “human rights” to characterize them as authoritarian dictatorships. This is hypocritical in two senses.

    One is that their human rights records, by any standards, are no worse than those of many other countries in the region, and in most respects, they are better than those of the US itself.

    The other is that the US has been the primary cause of tightened security in these countries. The alleged limits on political expression are a response to constant interference – military interventions, coup efforts, and assassination attempts. Biden, for instance, upped the bounty on the head of Venezuela’s president to $25 million.

    Washington leads the chorus of complaints when a demonstration in Cuba is suppressed or a political party in Venezuela or Nicaragua is banned. The US tries to act as if it were an impartial observer, rather than – as is invariably the case – the funder or supporter of whatever opposition group is being “victimized.”

    Washington’s concern about “human rights” is a charade, which disappears if the government in question is a US client state, e.g., El Salvador.

    If countries pose a “strategic threat” to US interests, it is because of their record in improving the most important human rights, which, according to the United Nations, are “the right to life, food, education, work, health, and liberty.” In respect of these wider rights, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua show that huge progress can be made by progressive, revolutionary governments that have rejected the neoliberalism pursued in LAC countries favored by Washington.

    Sanctions on Venezuela have led to the deaths of over 100,000 Venezuelans by 2020. The blockade of Cuba, costing the country $13.8 million daily, is so destructive that nearly one in ten Cubans has left the country in the last three years. Nicaragua is losing $500 million in development funding annually because the US is blocking loans from the World Bank and other institutions.

    It could hardly be more obvious that Washington’s aim is to destroy each country’s social achievements and impoverish their people so that those who do not die, fall sick, or migrate eventually will rise up against their governments. And then the likes of Rubio make inane statements such as offering “unwavering support and solidarity for the Cuban people.”

    Washington’s endgame

    What do successive US administrations and the opposition groups that they support actually want to achieve in the targeted countries?

    Over 30 years ago, prominent Cuban exiles were calling for “a sudden, dramatic and, if necessary, convulsive shift to free-wheeling capitalism.” Twenty years ago, the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba, established by President George Bush, outlined a broad neoliberal vision for the country. A trawl of recent statements by exile groups reveals many vague demands for “democracy,” “transparent institutions,” “support for youth,” and so on, with some limited, specific proposals such as “restitution of property rights” (for Cubans in Miami looking to cash in on potentially valuable property their families abandoned 60 years ago).

    The Nicaraguan opposition is profoundly divided between the left and the right, with the right seeking to exclude the left from power, while the marginal “left” opposition has never garnered significant political support (the Sandinistas successfully mobilized the progressive vote in elections). The UNAMOS party, some of whose members were formerly Sandinista officials in the 1980s, offers a program focused on restructuring the government with only vague objectives for social development.

    The far-right opposition in Venezuela, led by Washington’s darling Maria Corina Machado, promises a bloodbath with no amnesty for the Chavistas. Machado’s surrogate, Edmundo González Urrutia, ran for the presidency in 2024 on a platform calling for extreme neoliberal privatization of education, health care, housing, food assistance, and the national oil agency.

    Regardless of the expressed aims of opposition groups, the likely outcome if one or more of the three governments were to lose power is evident. The coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018 was a foretaste: murders of police and of Sandinista sympathizers, uncontrolled availability of firearms, empowerment of local criminals, importing violent gang members from El Salvador, destruction of public buildings, and much more.

    The kind of anarchic chaos that exists in Haiti is a very possible outcome, possibly leading to a repressive, authoritarian regime – but Washington-friendly – like that in Bukele’s El Salvador.

    The often-overlooked accomplishments of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have been made despite enduring aggressive US interventions. Washington continues to hypocritically weaponize human rights, using hybrid warfare to erode these achievements and justify regime change as a democratic project.

    The post Punishing Progress: Washington Targets Social Achievements of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • In Trump’s America, the bar for martial law is no longer constitutional—it’s personal.

    What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.

    Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.

    This is yet another manufactured crisis fomented by the Deep State.

    When Trump issues a call to “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” explaining to reporters that he wants to have them “everywhere,” we should all be alarmed.

    This is martial law without a formal declaration of war.

    This heavy-handed, chest-thumping, politicized, militarized response to what is clearly a matter for local government is yet another example of Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and the limits of his power.

    Political protests are protected by the First Amendment until they cross the line from non-violent to violent. Even when protests turn violent, constitutional protocols remain in place to safeguard communities: law and order must flow through local and state chains of command, not from federal muscle.

    By breaking that chain of command, Trump is breaking the Constitution.

    Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by civilian police, despite the objections of local and state leaders, crosses the line into authoritarianism.

    When someone shows you who they are, believe them.

    In the span of a single week, the Trump administration is providing the clearest glimpse yet of its unapologetic, uncompromising, corrupt allegiance to the authoritarian Deep State.

    These two events—the federalization of the National Guard deployed to California in response to protests and the president’s lavish, taxpayer-funded military parade in the nation’s capital—bookend the administration’s unmistakable message: dissent will be crushed, and power will be performed.

    Trump governs by force (military deployment), fear (ICE raids, militarized policing), and spectacle (the parade).

    This is the spectacle of a police state. One side of the coin is militarized suppression. The other is theatrical dominance. Together, they constitute the language of force and authoritarian control.

    Yet this is more than political theater; it is a constitutional crisis in motion.

    As we have warned before, this tactic is a familiar one.

    In times of political unrest, authoritarian regimes often invoke national emergencies as a pretext to impose military solutions. The result? The Constitution is suspended, civilian control is overrun, and the machinery of the state turns against its own people.

    This is precisely what the Founders feared when they warned against standing armies on American soil: that one day, the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them.

    It is a textbook play from the authoritarian handbook, deployed with increasing frequency under Trump. The optics are meant to intimidate, broadcast control, and discourage resistance before it even begins.

    Thus, deploying the National Guard in this manner is not just a political maneuver—it is a strategic act of fear-based governance designed to instill terror, particularly among vulnerable communities, and ensure compliance.

    America is being transformed into a battlefield before our eyes.

    Militarized police. Riot squads. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Stun grenades. Crowd control and intimidation tactics.

    This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.

    This is the language of force.

    This transformation is not accidental—it’s strategic. The government now sees the public not as constituents to be served but as potential combatants to be surveilled, managed, and subdued. In this new paradigm, dissent is treated as insurrection, and constitutional rights are treated as threats to national security.

    What we are witnessing today is also part of a broader setup: an excuse to use civil unrest as a pretext for militarized overreach.

    We saw signs of this strategy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where police failed to de-escalate and at times exacerbated tensions during protests that should have remained peaceful. The resulting chaos gave authorities cover to crack down—not to protect the public, but to reframe protest as provocation and dissent as disorder.

    Then and now, the objective wasn’t to preserve peace and protect the public. It was to delegitimize dissent and cast protest as provocation.

    It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the Deep State. The government wants a reason to crack down, lock down, and bring in its biggest guns.

    This is how it begins.

    Trump’s use of the military against civilians violates the spirit—if not the letter—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is meant to bar federal military involvement in domestic affairs. It also raises severe constitutional questions about the infringement of First Amendment rights to protest and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure.

    Modern tools of repression compound the threat. AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing software, biometric databases, and fusion centers have made mass control seamless and silent. The state doesn’t just respond to dissent anymore; it predicts and preempts it.

    While boots are on the ground in California, preparations are underway for a military spectacle in Washington, D.C.

    At first glance, a military procession might seem like a patriotic display. But in this context, it is not a celebration of service; it is a declaration of supremacy. It is not about honoring troops; it is about reminding the populace who holds the power and who wields the guns.

    This is how authoritarian regimes govern—through spectacle.

    By sandwiching a military crackdown between a domestic troop deployment and a showy parade, Trump is sending a unified message: This is about raw, unchecked, theatrical power. And whether we, the people, will accept a government that rules not by consent, but by coercion.

    The Constitution was not written to accommodate authoritarian pageantry. It was written to restrain it. It was never meant to sanctify conquest as a form of governance.

    We are at a crossroads.

    Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Strip away that consent, and all that remains is conquest through force, spectacle, and fear.

    As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we allow the language of fear, the spectacle of dominance, and the machinery of militarized governance to become normalized, then we are no longer citizens of a republic—we are subjects of a police state.

    The post The Spectacle of a Police State: This Is Martial Law Without a Formal Declaration of War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • As we have those great warriors leading our nation, let’s look at their military service. You know, the important things that so many love to thank them for. Let’s see, we have Donnie Trump, who supported the Vietnam War but just could not serve, due to 4 student deferments and then one medical for bone spurs in his foot. Yet, he stood tall in his salute to our boys in The Shit as the Nam was called. W Bush was one who served during the height of the Vietnam War, with the Texas Air National Guard. Now, for those who do not know or perhaps have forgotten, the Air Guard would be the LAST group to ever be called to leave our borders. By the way, W’s dad, Poppa Bush, was a Texas congressman at that time who vehemently supported the war, but made sure Junior would never go.

    Fast forward to today. We have JD Vance, who served in the Marines for four years but never had to see combat. JD was a public affairs officer — safe and sound, way behind the lines. His political counterpart, Captain Ron DeSantis, was another Iraqi War hero who served as a Navy lawyer… also never anywhere near the hornet’s nest. JD does love to talk tough now about China, our new enemy. Those damn Reds are making fortunes selling their shit to Wal-Mart, while they make deals with so many of our enemies worldwide — and yes, even our allies.

    As was spoken in the Groucho Marx film Duck Soup: “This means war!”

    Then we have little Marco Rubio, now a lieutenant for Trump Central. Marco was born in 1971, so could have served in the Iraq War in 2003 that he was proud to support wholeheartedly. Little Marco talks tough about our so-called adversary China, along with his great fervor for Israel’s genocide of Gaza (and that includes the West Bank).

    When all these great patriots walk by you or are on camera please stand up and salute them. For without them what would war really be?

    The post Thank You for Your (Safe) Service first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chaos at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site in Rafah. Photo: AP

    Recent reports say that US AID is considering giving $500 million to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—an “aid” initiative launched at Israel’s request. At first glance, that might sound like a generous effort to help desperate Palestinians in Gaza. But peel back even one layer, and you’ll find a deadly political scheme masquerading as humanitarian relief.

    This is not about helping hungry people. It’s about controlling them, displacing them, and starving them into submission.

    Let’s start with some basics. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not a humanitarian organization. It’s a U.S.- and Israeli-backed scheme run by people with no track record in neutral aid work. Its first director Jake Wood, resigned on May 25, saying the organization failed to uphold humanitarian principles. Then the Boston Consulting Group, which had secretly helped design GHF’s aid operations, pulled out and apologized to staff who were furious about the firm’s complicity in a system that enabled forced displacement and sidelined trusted UN agencies.

    GHF’s brand new director is Johnnie Moore, an American evangelical PR executive best known for helping Donald Trump recognize Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and push the U.S. embassy move there—a move that only fanned the flames of conflict.

    GHF’s entire premise is rooted in deception. It was launched with Israeli government oversight, without transparency, without independence, and—critically—without the participation of the United Nations or any respected humanitarian agencies. In fact, the UN has refused to have anything to do with it. So have groups like Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, and the World Food Programme, whose leaders have warned in no uncertain terms that GHF’s model militarizes aid, violates humanitarian norms, and places Palestinian lives at even greater risk.

    GHF has never been about delivering aid. It’s about using the illusion of aid to control the population of Gaza—and to give cover to war crimes.

    People in Gaza are starving because Israel wants them to. There are thousands of aid trucks, many loaded with supplies from the United Nations, that—for months—have been blocked from entering Gaza. They contain food, water, medicine, shelter materials—the lifeblood of a besieged civilian population. But instead of letting them through, the U.S. and Israel are pushing their own version of aid: a privatized, militarized operation. Armed U.S. contractors working with the GHF are reportedly earning up to $1,100 per day, along with a $10,000 signing bonus.

    The GHF plan is to make aid available only in the south, forcibly displacing people from the north—driving them toward the Egyptian border, where many fear a permanent expulsion is being engineered.

    From the very start of GHF’s operations, with the opening of two distribution sites in southern Gaza on May 26, the chaos turned deadly, with Israeli military shooting at hungry people seeking food. In its short time of operation, nearly 100 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded. These are not tragic accidents—they are predictable outcomes of militarizing aid.

    Let’s also address the fear-mongering claim that when the UN was in charge of aid delivery, food was being stolen by Hamas. There is no credible evidence of this and Cindy McCain, head of the World Food Programme, has publicly refuted this allegation, saying that trucks have been looted by hungry, desperate people.

    The real threat to aid integrity isn’t Hamas—it’s the blockade itself, which has created an artificial scarcity and fueled black markets, desperation, and chaos..

    To truly help the people of Gaza, here’s what needs to happen:

    • Shut down GHF and reject all militarized aid schemes.

    • Restore full U.S. funding to UNRWA and the World Food Programme—trusted, experienced agencies that know how to do this work.

    • Demand that Israel end the blockade. Let aid trucks in—UN trucks, Red Cross trucks, WFP trucks. Flood the strip with food, medicines, tents.

    • Demand an immediate ceasefire to stop the killing and create space for meaningful relief and political solutions.

    The starvation in Gaza is not a logistical failure. It is Israel’s political choice. And GHF is not a lifeline. It is a lie. It is complicity. It is diabolical. And U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to fund it.

    The post Don’t Fund the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation: It’s a Genocidal Smokescreen first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.


  • Dorothy Shea, interim US representative to the UN, vetoed a resolution for a permanent ceasefire and unrestricted humanitarian aid for Gaza on June 5th, 2025 – Photo via US mission to the UN.

    After twenty months of horror in Gaza, political rhetoric in Western countries is finally starting to shift—but will words translate into action? And what exactly can other countries do when the United States still shields Israel from efforts to enforce international law, as it did at the UN Security Council on June 5?

    On May 30, Tom Fletcher, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, accused Israel of committing a war crime by using starvation as a weapon against the people of Gaza. In a searing interview with the BBC, Fletcher explained how Israel’s policy of forced starvation fits into its larger strategy of ethnic cleansing.

    “We’re seeing food set on the borders and not being allowed in, when there is a population on the other side of the border that is starving,” Fletcher said. “And we’re hearing Israeli ministers say that is to put pressure on the population of Gaza.”

    He was referring to statements like the one from Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who openly admitted that the starvation policy is meant to leave Palestinians “totally despairing, understanding that there’s no hope and nothing to look for,” so that they will submit to ethnic cleansing from Gaza and a “new life in other places.”

    Fletcher called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to stop this campaign of forced displacement, and insisted, “we would expect governments all over the world to stand for international humanitarian law. The international community is very, very clear on that.”

    Palestinians might wish that were true. If the so-called international community were really “very, very clear on that,” the United States and Israel would not be able to wage a campaign of genocide for more than 600 days while the world looks on in horror.

    Some Western governments have finally started using stronger language to condemn Israel’s actions. But the question is: Will they act? Or is this just more political theater to appease public outrage while the machinery of destruction grinds on?

    This moment should force a reckoning: How is it possible that the U.S. and Israel can perpetrate such crimes with impunity? What would it take for U.S. allies to ignore pressure from Washington and enforce international law?

    If impoverished, war-ravaged Yemen can single-handedly deny Israel access to the Suez Canal and the Red Sea, and drive the Israeli port of Eilat into bankruptcy, more powerful countries can surely isolate Israel diplomatically and economically, protect the Palestinians and end the genocide. But they haven’t even tried.

    Some are now making tentative moves. On May 19, the U.K., France, and Canada jointly condemned Israel’s actions as “intolerable,” “unacceptable,” “abhorrent,” “wholly disproportionate” and “egregious.” The U.K. suspended trade talks with Israel, and they promised “further concrete actions,” including targeted sanctions, if Israel does not end its offensive in Gaza and lift its restrictions on humanitarian aid.

    The three countries publicly committed to the Arab Plan for the reconstruction of Gaza, and to building an international consensus for it at the UN’s High-Level Two-State Solution Conference in New York on June 17-20, which is to be co-chaired by France and Saudi Arabia.

    They also committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood. Of the UN’s 193 member states, 147 already recognize Palestine as a sovereign nation, including ten more since Israel launched its genocide in Gaza. President Macron, under pressure from the leftist La France Insoumise party, says France may officially recognize Palestine at the UN conference in June.

    Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, claimed during his election campaign that Canada already had an arms embargo against Israel, but was swiftly challenged on that. Canada has suspended a small number of export licenses, but it’s still supplying parts for Israel’s 39 F-35s, and for 36 more that Israel has ordered from Lockheed Martin.

    A General Dynamics factory in Quebec is the sole supplier of artillery propellant for deadly 155 mm artillery shells used in Gaza, and it took an emergency campaign by human rights groups in August 2024 to force Canada to scrap a new contract for that same factory to supply Israel with 50,000 high-explosive mortar shells.

    The U.K. is just as compromised. The new Labour government elected in July 2024 quickly restored funding to UNRWA, as Canada has. In September, it suspended 30 out of 350 arms export licenses to Israel, mostly for parts used in warplanes, helicopters, drones and targeting. But, like Canada, the U.K. still supplies many other parts that end up in Israeli F-35s bombing Gaza.

    Declassified UK published a report on the F-35 program that revealed how it compromises the sovereignty of partner countries. While the U.K. produces 15% of the parts that go into every F-35, the U.S. military takes immediate ownership of the British-made parts, stores them on British air force bases, and then orders the U.K. to ship them to Texas for use in new planes or to Israel and other countries as spare parts for planes already in use.

    Shipping these planes and parts to Israel is in clear violation of U.S., U.K. and other countries’ arms export laws. British campaigners argue that if the U.K. is serious about halting genocide, it must stop all shipments of F-35 parts sent to Israel–directly or indirectly. With huge marches in London drawing hundreds of thousands of people, and protests on June 17 at three factories that make F-35 parts, activists will keep applying more pressure until they result in the “concrete actions” the British government has promised.

    Denmark is facing a similar conflict. Amnesty International, Oxfam, Action Aid and Al-Haq are in court suing the Danish government and largest weapons company, Terma, to stop them sending Israel critical bomb release mechanisms and other F-35 parts.

    These disputes over Canadian artillery propellant, Danish bomb-release mechanisms and the multinational nature of the F-35 program highlight how any country that provides even small but critical parts or materials for deadly weapons systems must ensure they are not used to commit war crimes.

    So all steps to cut off Israel’s weapons supplies can help to save Palestinian lives, and the full arms embargo that the UN General Assembly voted for in September 2024 can be instrumental in ending the genocide if more countries will join it. As Sam Perlo-Freeman of Campaign Against the Arms Trade said of the U.K.’s legal obligation to stop shipping F-35 parts,

    “These spare parts are essential to keep Israel’s F-35s flying, and therefore stopping them will reduce the number of bombings and killings of civilians Israel can commit. It is as simple as that.”

    Germany was responsible for 30% of Israel’s arms imports between 2019 and 2023, largely through two large warship deals. Four German-built Saar 6 corvettes, Israel’s largest warships, are already bombarding Gaza, while ThyssenKrupp is building three new submarines for Israel in Kiel.

    But no country has provided a greater share of the tools of genocide in Gaza than the United States, including nearly all the warplanes, helicopters, bombs and air-to-ground missiles that are destroying Gaza and killing Palestinians. The U.S. government has a legal responsibility to stop sending all these weapons, which Israel uses mainly to commit industrial-scale war crimes, up to and including genocide, against the people of Palestine, as well as to attack its other neighbors.

    Trump’s military and political support for Israel’s genocide stands in stark contradiction to the image he promotes of himself as a peacemaker—and which his most loyal followers believe in.

    Yet there are signs that Trump is beginning to assert some independence from Netanyahu and from the war hawks in his own party and inner circle. He refused to visit Israel on his recent Middle East tour, he’s negotiating with Iran despite Israeli opposition, and he removed Mike Waltz as National Security Advisor for engaging in unauthorized warmongering against Iran with Netanyahu. His decisions to end the Yemen bombing campaign and lift sanctions on Syria suggest an unpredictable but real departure from the neocon playbook, as do his negotiations with Russia and Iran.

    Has Netanyahu finally overplayed his hand? His campaign of ethnic cleansing, territorial expansion in pursuit of a biblical “Greater Israel,” the deliberate starvation of Gaza, and his efforts to entangle the U.S. in a war with Iran have pushed Israel’s longtime allies to the edge. The emerging rift between Trump and Netanyahu could mark the beginning of the end of the decades-long blanket of impunity the U.S. has wrapped around Israel. It could also give other governments the political space to respond to Israeli war crimes without fear of U.S. retaliation.

    The huge and consistent protests throughout Europe are putting pressure on Western governments to take action. A new survey conducted in Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy and Spain shows that very few Europeans–between 6% and 16% in each country–find Israel’s assault on Gaza proportionate or justified.

    For now, however, the Western governments remain deeply complicit in Israel’s atrocities and violations of international law. The rhetoric is shifting—but history will judge this moment not by what governments say, but by what they do.

    The post Is There a Crack in Western Support for Genocide? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Call it what it is: a panopticon presidency.

    President Trump’s plan to fuse government power with private surveillance tech to build a centralized, national citizen database is the final step in transforming America from a constitutional republic into a digital dictatorship armed with algorithms and powered by unaccountable, all-seeing artificial intelligence.

    This isn’t about national security. It’s about control.

    According to news reports, the Trump administration is quietly collaborating with Palantir Technologies—the data-mining behemoth co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel—to construct a centralized, government-wide surveillance system that would consolidate biometric, behavioral, and geolocation data into a single, weaponized database of Americans’ private information.

    This isn’t about protecting freedom. It’s about rendering freedom obsolete.

    What we’re witnessing is the transformation of America into a digital prison—one where the inmates are told we’re free while every move, every word, every thought is monitored, recorded, and used to assign a “threat score” that determines our place in the new hierarchy of obedience.

    The tools enabling this all-seeing surveillance regime are not new, but under Trump’s direction, they are being fused together in unprecedented ways, with Palantir at the center of this digital dragnet.

    Palantir, long criticized for its role in powering ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) raids and predictive policing, is now poised to become the brain of Trump’s surveillance regime.

    Under the guise of “data integration” and “public safety,” this public-private partnership would deploy AI-enhanced systems to comb through everything from facial recognition feeds and license plate readers to social media posts and cellphone metadata, cross-referencing it all to assess a person’s risk to the state.

    This isn’t speculative. It’s already happening.

    Palantir’s Gotham platform, used by law enforcement and military agencies, has long been the backbone of real-time tracking and predictive analysis. Now, with Trump’s backing, it threatens to become the central nervous system of a digitally enforced authoritarianism.

    As Palantir itself admits, its mission is to “augment human decision-making.” In practice, that means replacing probable cause with probability scores, courtrooms with code, and due process with data pipelines.

    In this new regime, your innocence will be irrelevant. The algorithm will decide who you are.

    To understand the full danger of this moment, we must trace the long arc of government surveillance—from secret intelligence programs like COINTELPRO and the USA PATRIOT Act to today’s AI-driven digital dragnet embodied by data fusion centers.

    Building on this foundation of historical abuse, the government has evolved its tactics, replacing human informants with algorithms and wiretaps with metadata, ushering in an age where pre-crime prediction is treated as prosecution.

    Every smartphone ping, GPS coordinate, facial scan, online purchase, and social media like becomes part of your “digital exhaust”—a breadcrumb trail of metadata that the government now uses to build behavioral profiles. The FBI calls it “open-source intelligence.” But make no mistake: this is dragnet surveillance, and it is fundamentally unconstitutional.

    Already, government agencies are mining this data to generate “pattern of life” analyses, flag “radicalized” individuals, and preemptively investigate those who merely share anti-government views.

    This is not law enforcement. This is thought-policing by machine, the logical outcome of a system that criminalizes dissent and deputizes algorithms to do the targeting.

    Nor is this entirely new.

    For decades, the federal government has reportedly maintained a highly classified database known as Main Core, designed to collect and store information on Americans deemed potential threats to national security.

    As Tim Shorrock reported for Salon, “One former intelligence official described Main Core as ‘an emergency internal security database system’ designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law.”

    Trump’s embrace of Palantir, and its unparalleled ability to fuse surveillance feeds, social media metadata, public records, and AI-driven predictions, marks a dangerous evolution: a modern-day resurrection of Main Core, digitized, centralized, and fully automated.

    What was once covert contingency planning is now becoming active policy.

    What has emerged is a surveillance model more vast than anything dreamed up by past regimes—a digital panopticon in which every citizen is watched constantly, and every move is logged in a government database—not by humans, but by machines without conscience, without compassion, and without constitutional limits.

    This is not science fiction. This is America—now.

    As this technological tyranny expands, the foundational safeguards of the Constitution—those supposed bulwarks against arbitrary power—are quietly being nullified and its protections rendered meaningless.

    What does the Fourth Amendment mean in a world where your entire life can be searched, sorted, and scored without a warrant? What does the First Amendment mean when expressing dissent gets you flagged as an extremist? What does the presumption of innocence mean when algorithms determine guilt?

    The Constitution was written for humans, not for machine rule. It cannot compete with predictive analytics trained to bypass rights, sidestep accountability, and automate tyranny.

    And that is the endgame: the automation of authoritarianism. An unblinking, AI-powered surveillance regime that renders due process obsolete and dissent fatal.

    Still, it is not too late to resist—but doing so requires awareness, courage, and a willingness to confront the machinery of our own captivity.

    Make no mistake: the government is not your friend in this. Neither are the corporations building this digital prison. They thrive on your data, your fear, and your silence.

    To resist, we must first understand the weaponized AI tools being used against us.

    We must demand transparency, enforce limits on data collection, ban predictive profiling, and dismantle the fusion centers feeding this machine.

    We must treat AI surveillance with the same suspicion we once reserved for secret police. Because that is what AI-powered governance has become—secret police, only smarter, faster, and less accountable.

    We don’t have much time.

    Trump’s alliance with Palantir is a warning sign—not just of where we are, but of where we’re headed. A place where freedom is conditional, rights are revocable, and justice is decided by code.

    The question is no longer whether we’re being watched—that is now a given—but whether we will meekly accept it. Will we dismantle this electronic concentration camp, or will we continue building the infrastructure of our own enslavement?

    As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we trade liberty for convenience and privacy for security, we will find ourselves locked in a prison we helped build, and the bars won’t be made of steel. They will be made of data.

    The post Trump’s Palantir-Powered Surveillance Is Turning America Into a Digital Prison first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Not so much criminals as the foundations of the rule of law — that is what has infiltrated the United States from Latin America. That seems to be a major thread running through Greg Grandin’s wonderful new history of the hemisphere, America, América: A New History of the New World. It’s a book you can dive back into repeatedly, not to mention fantasize about someone compacting it into a short slideshow for the benefit of the President of the United States.

    British settler colonists in North America had their preachers and writers, but those individuals had a tendency to pretend Native Americans were not real, did not exist, perhaps never had existed, or simply didn’t count for much on empty land, or didn’t count because they were to be pushed out or eliminated rather than lived with. Spain, in contrast, generated a tremendous raging debate between supporters and denouncers of its killing, robbery, theft, enslavement, and terrorizing of indigenous people. Spain broke new ground, according to Grandin, in producing criticism of its own atrocities as it conquered South America.

    In very rough terms, this is similar to the contrast between U.S. media noncoverage of the genocide in Gaza and Israeli media’s inclusion of denunciations of the same. It’s one thing to live where you can’t escape drunk country musicians singing about being free, and perhaps something else to live where you can hear voices saying some of the things that most need saying. In both cases, the brutal atrocities go on, but in one, there are seeds of some future change planted.

    Voices like those of Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolomé de Las Casas laid the foundations for modern international law, but did so very differently from Dutch and English writers. The Spanish tradition is at least as tied up in religion as the English, and has certainly needed to evolve during these past four or five hundred years. But Grandin identifies a basis for a future pluralistic society, even in the belief that populations were diverse yet all descended from Adam and Eve. One can also, I think, see in the tradition of public confessions something of a precursor of truth and reconciliation commissions. In Latin America, unlike the North, dying conquistadores in the sixteenth century commonly confessed their part in the Conquest and paid restitution. NB: They did not admit to having strayed from proper conquest behavior into illicit atrocities. Rather, they admitted to participation in a Conquest understood to have been wrong and evil in its totality.

    Seen from a perspective that includes Latin America, Las Casas — who went beyond Erasmus, Moore, or anybody else — begins to look like the father of international legal standards applied equally to all of humanity, not to mention of self-determination and governance by the consent of the governed. He got there first. He drew the logical conclusions, such as the abolition of slavery. And he acted on those conclusions to as great an extent and for as long as perhaps any other person who has lived.

    The world was not, even in the seventeenth century, strictly separated into different legal traditions. The English read Las Casas, but they often read him with an eye to understanding how evil the Spanish were, in contrast to the English, or to get ideas for how to be more evil toward the Irish themselves. Perhaps they could have read him more in order to do as Las Casas recommended, more in order to outgrow dehumanization and division. Defining certain people as not really people was a skill that increased in English culture as colonization and slavery expanded.

    Hugo Grotius read Vitoria, but — like Aquinas before him and like all “just war” theory — Grotius was after excuses for wars. War might be regulated, but not banned. John Locke drew heavily on Spanish writers like Juan de Mariana and José de Acosta, but he reached his own conclusions, including that land could be taken from anyone not farming it. For a great many years, Spanish writers denounced war and slavery as parts of the Conquest, whereas Locke, Smith, Hume, et alia, at best wrote rules to regulate such evils as war and slavery, leaving us to this day with a culture that hardly murmurs about the crime of war but chatters endlessly about “possible war crimes” — almost always only mysteriously “possible,” never verified.

    Francisco de Miranda (1750-1816) and Simón Bolívar (1783-1830) sought a confederacy of independent nations in Latin America. The United States served as a partial inspiration but was not of much actual help. Thomas Jefferson’s house, just down the road from mine, had numerous books by Las Casas and other Spanish writers in it, yet he flipped their views upside down, declaring that “white” nations had the right to control non-white peoples in lands they claimed and to deny access to other “white” nations. He called this “a kind of international law for America.” The United States has sought its own unique “international law” from that day to this.

    The Doctrine of Discovery — the idea that a European nation can claim any land not yet claimed by other European nations, regardless of what people already live there — dates back to the fifteenth century and the Catholic church, but it was put into U.S. law in 1823, the same year as Monroe’s fateful “Doctrine” speech. It was put there by Monroe’s lifelong friend, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall. The United States considered itself, perhaps alone outside of Europe, as possessing the same discovery privileges as European nations. Perhaps coincidentally, in December 2022, almost every nation on Earth signed an agreement to set aside 30% of the Earth’s land and sea for wildlife by the year 2030. The exceptions were only the United States and the Vatican, not the nations of Latin America.

    While the U.S. had broken free of British rule and thereby rid itself of a mother country that was moving rapidly toward the abolition of slavery, movements for independence from Spain in South America generally sought freedom from slavery as well as from foreign empire. The U.S. tradition of slave-owners like Patrick Henry making speeches about being metaphorically enslaved was a northern hypocrisy where revolution was a rich man’s game. Moves for independence in the South were, to some extent, more of a popular revolt. They were, at the very least, not a revolt to maintain slavery or to expand empire, and not to combine numerous colonies into one, at least not immediately. Rather, Bolivarianism amounted to a push to create simultaneously several free and independent nations, some through violence and some without it. By the early nineteenth century, there were nine of them, newly independent, or 10 counting Haiti.

    Latin America was not yet called Latin America and was not some sort of flawless paradise. Wealth extremes (greater than in the U.S. of that day, though not greater than the U.S. of this day) and all kinds of cruelty persisted. But, not only was slavery being abolished, but something else of great potential was being created. Numerous new nations jointly developed means of nonviolently and legally arbitrating boundary disputes, dealing with each other as equals and not enemies.

    Bolivar proposed a Congress in Panama among sister nations that would

    • agree to mutual defense,
    • condemn Spain for the suffering it had caused in the New World (has the U.S. done that yet with regard to England?),
    • promote the independence of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Canary Islands, and the Philippines (the U.S. was supporting Spanish rule over Cuba as more likely to lead to later U.S. rule over Cuba),
    • repudiate the doctrines of discovery and conquest,
    • abolish slavery,
    • recognize Haiti, and
    • legalize agreed-upon borders.

    Here we see an early version of the League of Nations or the United Nations just beginning to come into being.

    Slavery had already been ended — and without a horrific U.S.-style Civil War — in Chile, Bolivia, and parts of Mexico. Central America ended it in 1824. Colombia and Venezuela were ending it, but it persisted in Peru and Brazil.

    In taking up such matters of domestic policy at an international gathering like the Panama Congress of 1826, something else — another grave evil in the world, one that afflicts the United States — was being prevented from ever being born in Latin America. This evil is the passionate aversion to anyone outside a nation having any say over what that nation does. When you read the Constitutions of various European nations today that describe transferring power to international institutions, you can just feel the veins bursting in the faces of outraged U.S. politicians. In 1826, vicious fury burst forth at the very idea that the United States would send anyone to a Congress in Panama to sit with potentially non-white people to decide anything about the sacred U.S. right to enslave human beings. In the words of Grandin, this “jolted the Age of Jackson into existence.” It hasn’t let up much since. The U.S. would later reject the League of Nations as one among equals and only join the United Nations over which it held a veto.

    By 1844, Latin American statesmen had been working on theories and plans for international law for decades, and Juan Bautista Alberdi gave the name “American International Law” to a set of principles that included rejection of the doctrines of discovery and conquest, equality of nations despite their size, non-intervention, usi possidetis, and impartial arbitration. Alberdi also wrote a book in 1870, available online for free in English, titled The Crime of War. This is a book filled with hundreds of pages arguing almost the identical arguments that war abolitionists use today. It’s an outlawry book a half century before the movement to outlaw war. It’s a book making the case for neutrality (see page 262), perhaps a century before the power of neutrality was widely appreciated and 150 years before it disastrously ceased to be. Latin American nations continued to push such a vision on the United States for years.

    At the Hague Peace Conference of 1907, 18 of the 44 nations represented were from Latin America, and it was there that Latin American ideas of multilateralism and sovereignty are thought to have really taken hold.

    Woodrow Wilson (U.S. president, 1913-1921) may look in retrospect like mostly a talk and not much action, a promising savior who didn’t save us, a warrior to end war who gave us more war, a Barack Obama of his day. But early Wilson, before World War I, had some substance, and some of the talk was well worth hearing, and a lot of it came from south of the U.S. border. Wilson was outraged by and sought to reverse his predecessor’s interference in Mexico. He also apologized to Colombia for the U.S. role in removing Panama from it, and paid Colombia $25 million for the loss. Wilson was unable to resolve crises in Mexico but did not make the usual U.S. move of reaching for larger weapons. Instead, he accepted a proposal from Chile for Argentina, Brazil, and Chile to meet with the U.S. and Mexico and work out a solution. They met for two months on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. The United States then joined Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Guatemala, Uruguay, Colombia, and Costa Rica in announcing a new joint policy toward Mexico. (Can you hear the Muricafirsters screaming in outrage?) When World War I got going, Latin American governments favored neutrality. The President of Mexico proposed a collective trade embargo on the belligerents. Wilson wasn’t wise enough to listen.

    Imagine if McKinley had listened when Spain had proposed neutral arbitration to resolve U.S. war lies over the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor!

    But Wilson did listen to Latin American advocates for international law, whose work increasingly influenced U.S. scholars. Wilson said that “Pan-Americanism” was what he wanted to model the world on, but only after the war.

    When the war had ended and the League of Nations was being planned and negotiated, Wilson had in mind a vision straight out of South America, and he wanted to apply it to the Earth. He had three barriers to face, however, and could not overcome them. One was that he was generally lying in bed, sick.

    The second was that he was a serious racist — as were others involved — or at least that he felt obliged to please racists back home. When Japan proposed that the covenant to create the League of Nations support “equality of nations and just treatment of their nationals,” the racists wouldn’t stand for it. As a result, some in Japan concluded that their best path forward was not the rule of law but the creation of an empire, or “an Asian Monroe Doctrine.” This was the same conference that viciously punished Germany, thereby laying the groundwork for the other “theater” of World War II as well, and the same conference at which Wilson refused to meet with Ho Chi Minh, just to pile on the future catastrophes being seeded.

    The third problem was U.S. exceptionalism. The U.S. insisted on putting the Monroe Doctrine into the League of Nations, giving itself the power to violate the basic premise of the League at will. This was enough to poison the whole project, but not enough to win support for it in the U.S. Senate.

    Latin American nations had pushed for a truly equitable League of Nations, and every last one of them joined it, such as it was. But when the League actively supported imperialism, Costa Rica, in 1925, was the first to leave it. Meanwhile, something was infiltrating Latin America from the north: weapons. The arms profiteers were pushing sales hard and encouraging conflicts to boost them. European debts to Latin America for crops and resources supplied during World War I were paid off in left-over weapons, which strikes me as the opposite of paying off a debt. And the United States was still plying its beloved Monroe Doctrine, but it was now joined by imitators in Japan, Italy, England, and Germany, all declaring their own Monroe Doctrines.

    President Franklin Roosevelt improved U.S. treatment of Latin America and took Latin American ideas to lay plans for the United Nations. Grandin sadly and typically switches into war supporter mode when it comes to World War II. The fact that Roosevelt was lying when he claimed to have in his possession Nazi plans to take over South and Central America, is relegated by Grandin to a footnote that itself avoids quite telling the story. The U.S. exploitation of Latin America for World War II is recounted quite positively. And then comes the post-war planning. FDR told Stalin and Churchill that Latin America should be the model. FDR’s advisor Sumner Welles drafted plans for the United Nations based on his experiences in Latin America. At the meeting in San Francisco, Latin American delegations pushed for the UN to ban war and create a court of arbitration, among many other positive steps.

    But Latin American nations also demanded something I see as far less helpful than Grandin seems to. They wanted to hold onto a regional alliance as a commitment to defend each other. While others rightly feared that this could break the world up into sections, the final UN Charter nonetheless put into Article 51 that nations could act “collectively.”

    This became an excuse for institutions seemingly at odds with the very purpose of the UN Charter, most notably NATO. Grandin quotes John Foster Dulles and Winston Churchill praising Latin America for this, and he argues that without this “compromise,” the United Nations might not have been created. But without Latin America demanding something at odds with the basic project, no compromise would have been needed.

    After World War II, the U.S. rebuilt Germany with the Marshall Plan. George Marshall took part in a meeting in Bogotá in 1948 at which the nations of Latin America essentially asked, “Where is our Marshall Plan?” Of course, there was none, but can you imagine if there had been, if nations of the whole globe had been aided instead of armed? The post-war U.S. government wanted little to do with laws, rules, morality, or cooperation. Coups, weapons, bases, and invasions would be the order of the day. Pretty much from that day to this, with the addition of demonization.

    And yet Latin America goes on showing the way. More than anywhere else in the world, Latin America is a nuclear-free zone, supports the International Criminal Court, opposes the genocide in Gaza, and refuses to support either side of the war in Ukraine. Wearing North American blinders makes it hard even to recognize that as leadership. I hope that such recognition, and appreciation of past efforts too, sets in before it is too late.

    The post Law, Not Crime, Has Come from South of the Border first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Thailand and the United States have opened a new Center of Excellence on Humanitarian Demining Missions in Ratchaburi. The Thailand Mine Action Center (TMAC), working with the US Department of Defense, will use the facility to train Thai and international teams in landmine clearance. The opening ceremony was attended by senior military leaders from both […]

    The post Clearing the Way: Thailand and US Open Regional Demining Hub appeared first on Asian Military Review.

    This post was originally published on Asian Military Review.

  • A previous article, “Challenging China,” described the mixed and managed economy that enables China (PRC) to overcome the economic pressures posed by an overly contentious America. More to it.

    China’s mixed and managed economy is designed to match its stage of development and is well managed. The U.S. non-managed economy has no design and does not match its advanced stage of economic development. China uses exports to grow its economy and limit debt. The U.S. runs severe deficits in its trade balance and needs a growing debt to finance the trade deficit and to increase the GDP. The rapidly growing debt portends economic decline, and there is no certified way to escape the predicament. U.S. hegemony and world leadership appears doomed. The sooner the U.S. leaders recognize the dangers and readjust the economy, the less will be the slide. More on this later. Facts and statistics supply the proof that the PRC has successfully met the challenges.

    Overly contentious USA

    Using sanctions from legislative directives, rather than pursuing cooperative efforts to combat China’s rise to the world’s number one industrial power, the U.S motivates China to become self-sufficient in technological applications, temporarily interrupts China’s advances, and eventually causes havoc to American companies

    Citing security concerns, the U.S. Congress, in 2019, passed the National Defense Authorization Act and essentially banned use of telecommunication equipment from 5G network pioneer Huawei and smartphone manufacturer ZTE. In June 2020, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) designated ZTE a national security threat. The security concerns proceeded from a possibility that the Chinese government could demand the habits of American citizens, similar to the information that Google and a host of advertising firms gather from internet searchers.

    Huawei is of more major significance, but ZTE’s shrugging off the sanctions deserves mention. Its steady revenue growth until facing competition from other companies, relates its success.

    This telecom company entered the smartphone market in 2010 and now has the 12th spot in the listing of the Largest Smartphone Manufacturers & Brands in the World. ZTE is also the 6th largest supplier in the Global 5G Infrastructure Market.

    Huawei, global leader in development of 5G networks and China’s technology powerhouse, reeled from U.S. sanctions and stumbled as a boxer from an unaware punch. Predictions had Huawei barely surviving. Labelled as a company the U.S. could not do with, Huawei is now the company the world cannot do without. Refuting U.S. attempts to restrict its advances, Huawei expanded into new markets, into new industries, and developed unique alternatives to the denied technologies.

    After years of “barely surviving,” Huawei is a leading network company on the globe, having constructed approximately 30% of worldwide 5G base stations, and is fourth in global smartphone manufacturing. After losing access to Google’s Android and Oracle’s software, Huawei developed its own operating system, Harmony OS, which has become the second most popular mobile operating system in China and, by 2025, was installed in over 900 million devices.

    In 2022, the Commerce Department informed NVidia and AMD to restrict exports of AI-related chips to China, and informed chip equipment makers — Lam Research, Applied Materials and KLA — to restrict sending tools to the PRC for manufacturing advanced chips. China’s tech giant responded by challenging NVidia artificial intelligence dominance with its Ascend 910D AI processor chip, which “reflects China’s strategic push to develop indigenous semiconductor capabilities.” The U.S. did not respond to Huawei’s advance with its own technology advancements and again responded with threats. On May 15, 2025, the Trump administration warned that using Huawei’s AI chips might violate US export laws.

    Ignoring U.S. threats, Huawei expanded use of its chips into the automotive industry and set a new standard for smart driving and self-driving technology.

    Huawei’s ambitious undertaking includes the introduction of cutting-edge smart vehicles equipped with advanced autonomous driving technologies. The company is leveraging its prowess in artificial intelligence (AI) and big data to enhance vehicle performance and safety features. With a focus on seamless connectivity and user experience, Huawei is positioning itself as a significant player in the highly sought-after smart driving space, previously dominated by traditional automotive giants and tech firms like Tesla.

    In August 2023, President Biden issued an Executive Order “Addressing United States Investments in Certain National Security Technologies and Products in Countries of Concern.” The order prohibited U.S. investments in semiconductors and microelectronics, quantum information technologies, and artificial intelligence technologies in China. In November 2024, “The U.S. reportedly ordered TSMC to halt shipments of advanced chips to Chinese customers that are often used in artificial intelligence applications.”

    As a result, Xiaomi, a leading smartphone manufacturer, which has expanded into electric SUV car production, developed its 3-nanometre XRing O1 system-on-a-chip (SoC). Following Apple, Qualcomm, and MediaTek, Xiaomi became the fourth tech company in the world to design a 3-nanometer mobile SoC for mass production. A Chinese company can now compete with American companies in selling the unique chips, and Qualcomm, which has been a long-standing supplier of mobile chips to Xiaomi, might have its sales disrupted.

    Statistics tell the story

    What have all these underhanded means to stifle the Chinese economy accomplished? Statistics in the following table tell the story. The Chinese economy surpassed the U.S. economy in 2022 and is leaving Uncle Sam far behind.


    The table shows that China deserves consideration for the title of the world’s greatest economy. Start with the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), a favorite statistic for those who boast of America’s prominence.

    The U.S. has a higher GDP than China. China has a higher GDP/PPP. Unlike nominal GDP, which uses current exchange rates, GDP/PPP adjusts for differences in price levels between countries and provides a more realistic measure of the value of goods and services produced. Another consideration is the value given to components of the GDP. Capital, hard goods, and agriculture supply the most needed wants to a community, and their purchases play a more significant role in the economy. The service economy, a paramount feature of the U.S. economy, exaggerates its GDP. One dollar of purchase in goods production requires time for feedback to the manufacturer before other goods are replenished and additional purchases augment the GDP. Purchases in the service economy quickly pass the same money from one service provider to another and elevate the GDP. Industrial output, whether for domestic or foreign use, more appropriately demonstrates the robustness of an economy. China leads the United States in industrial output and demonstrated robustness by becoming the leading manufacturer and exporter of automobiles.

    A comparison between two dynamos of each nation, U.S. Tesla and China BYD, automobile manufacturers and innovators that rose rapidly against established competitors, complete the story. BYD, which started at about the same time as Tesla, has surpassed Tesla in automobile sales.

    BYD Revenue

    Tesla Revenue

    <

    More than that, BYD has accomplished what was never considered possible; with a fully charged battery and a full tank of gas, unbiased testing of its new hybrid auto technology showed a driving range of 1,305 miles before charge or fill up. Its fully electric models use advanced sodium ion batteries and, in 5 minutes, can be charged to obtain a 250 mile range. A vertically integrated company, which manufactures its parts and is a leading provider of electric car batteries, BYD sells its autos at the lowest prices in China.

    Revisions by BYD include paring the price of its Seagull hatchback to 55,800 yuan ($7,780), a 20% reduction to a model that was already the carmaker’s cheapest and one that had garnered global attention for its sub-$10,000 price tag. The Seal dual-motor hybrid sedan (direct competitor to the $37,000 Tesla Model 3) saw the biggest price cut at 34%, or by 53,000 yuan to 102,800 yuan ($14,333). (ED: These may be temporary price cuts.)

    Fatal Decline of the Imperial Power

    The U.S. cannot compete with or contain China. Using China as a scapegoat for its global economic decline has proved counterproductive. Better for the U.S. to cooperate with the PRC, realistically examine its economy, become aware of its limitations, and take decisive action to prevent a fatal decline.

    The hindrances to economic progress is fourfold:

    (1) Debt drives the economy and the debt has become unmanageable.
    (2) Manufacturers have established offshore facilities to open new markets and to compete more effectively.
    (3) Off shore production and having the dollar as an international currency has produced a high trade deficit.
    (4) U.S. markets in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America have eroded.

    Debt drives the U.S. economy and, the two charts indicate that without increasing the exorbitant debt, the economy will stagnate.

    GDP/PPP

     

    All Sectors Debt

    Given a money supply to purchase goods and services, how can production and eventual sales of goods and services advance without increases in the money supply? One way is to increase the velocity of money, which occurred with on-time inventory, credit card purchasing, and computer speedup of financial transactions. These phenomena occurred during past decades and exploded the GDP. Another means is by having a positive trade balance; selling goods externally. If these means are not occurring, and they no longer are, increases in the money supply are required to increase production and sell additional goods.

    U.S. goods trade deficit increased in 2024 to a record $1.2 trillion, and, although many economists excuse the trade deficit, saying that,

    a trade deficit can only arise if foreigners invest more in the US than Americans invest abroad. In other words, a country can only have a trade deficit if it also has an equally sized investment surplus. The US is able to sustain a large trade deficit because so many foreigners are eager to invest here,

    is more a rationalization than a reality. The trade deficit arose because American industry found it more profitable to produce overseas and made the dollar the international currency. As an international currency, the dollar is in demand and its exchange rate is high compared to other currencies. The strong dollar raises the prices of U.S. goods, makes its exports expensive and its imports cheap. Yes, the balance of payments must be equalized, and the dollars return as either purchase of government securities ─ one principal reason for rise in government debt ─ or purchase of U.S. assets. The former has become unwieldly, leading to high interest rates and the latter gives foreign interests increased power in the American system. Having a positive balance of trade reduces government debt and foreign influence.

    Government debt is not the total problem. A system that exists by debt is the real problem. For a free wheeling and profit first economy that generates huge trade deficits to grow, the money supply must grow. Because money is created by either bank loans (debt) or Federal Reserve borrowings from the Treasury (debt), all money is debt. For the economy to continually grow, debt must continually grow. Soon, financing the debt and its increasing interest rates will be a difficult problem. Credit will freeze, loans will default, and the money supply will shrink. Boom will become bust. The United States has no choice but to have its economy more managed and align government and industry in common goals that correct the trend to a fatal decline.

    Tariffs as a government money raiser and incentive to produce locally will be another tax on the American consumer and will not stimulate private investment in internal production to replace foreign imports. So, why not maintain low priced imports and tax the consumer for another goal ─ government investment in competitive industries. Cooperation between government and industry, rather than free-wheeling economics will enable more rational decisions and predictable operations.

    The United States pioneered the global economy but globalization is no longer a perfect fit for the economically mature nation. Markets once lost are usually lost for a long time. Preserving present markets and finding niche markets for specialized goods, which the omnipresent U.S. economy has many, will stabilize exports.

    History shows that private industry has never been the source of solutions to economic lapses. Changes in life style and a return to the cohesion and social legislation that characterized the Franklin Delano Roosevelt era might solve the economic, social, and political declines predicted for America’s future. The democratic socialization of America is begging to begin.

    The post Fatal Decline of the Imperial Power first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On 23 May 2020, I headlined “Israel — an enemy of America” and documented that though U.S. taxpayers donate to Israel each year $3.8 billion, of which 3.3 billion goes to pay American weapons-producers such as Lockheed Martin to supply Israel with weaponry, Israel’s record has been as an enemy of the U.S. (or at least of the American people), NOT as a friend, and also not merely neutral. That article got me to thinking about whether the U.S. Government controls Israel’s Government, or instead vice-versa; and, now, I shall present my conclusion about this (that America’s Government is controlled by Israel’s Government) by first presenting what I think are the most relevant evidences in order to decide the matter.

    The evilness of the people who lead Israel has been blatant ever since Israel’s founding in 1948, but Israel has been heavily backed by the U.S. Government throughout the entire period. Albert Einstein was a prominent American when he was one of the signatories to a letter to the editor of the New York Times, on 4 December 1948, in which he and many other prominent American Jews condemned as “fascists” (but hadn’t Americans fought AGAINST fascists in WW II?) Menachem Begin and Yitzak Shamir and their gangs who slaughtered whole Arab villages in order to seize their land for Zionist Jews to take as ‘Israel’, and the letter’s signatories strongly condemned that movement — the movement which created this apartheid racist ‘Israel’ — as being “akin in its organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties,” against which America had waged World War II. But today’s American Government represents those “Nazi and Fascist parties,” against their victims (the Palestinians), even though during WW II, Americans had even died fighting against such evil people as the founders of Israel’s Government were. (Israel was created not merely by racist-fascist Jews such as Ben Gurion etc., but most especially by the Christian Harry Truman, who was America’s all-time-worst President; he started the Cold War, and started America on the imperialistic path that now is called “neoconservatism,” which produced also the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and other such imperialistic global-conquest ventures that have destroyed many nations. Almost as soon as FDR died, Truman turned the Government to be and become what has since been consistently neoconservative — even decades before that term, “neoconservatism,” for America’s version of the racist-fascist-imperialist, or “Nazi,” ideology yet existed. Truman was the first neocon.)

    Had Americans been wrong in WW II to have fought against Nazis and Fascists, or are today’s Americans aware that the current U.S. Government is protecting Israel’s ideological Nazis and fascists against any rights for Palestinians — against rights for the descendants of the survivors of Jewish racist fascist imperialism, or “Nazism”? Does Israel represent American values, really — or does it represent instead the values of America’s enemies, such as the current U.S. Government itself is (as will be subsequently exemplified here)? Not only does Israel represent the ideology against which the U.S. under FDR went to war in WW2, but Israel has even been at war AGAINST the U.S.

    On 8 June 1967, Israel intentionally attacked and sank the USS Liberty, slaughtering 34 of our sailors, and injuring another 172. The official U.S. government inquiry by an independent study Commission headed by Admiral Thomas H. Moorer, found that, “after eight hours of aerial surveillance, Israel launched a two-hour air and naval attack against the USS Liberty, the world’s most sophisticated intelligence ship.” “Unmarked Israeli aircraft dropped napalm canisters on the Liberty’s bridge, and fired 30mm cannons and rockets into our ship.” “Israeli torpedo boats later returned to machine-gun at close range three of the Liberty’s life rafts that had been lowered into the water by survivors to rescue the most seriously wounded.” “There is compelling evidence that Israel’s attack was a deliberate attempt to destroy an American ship and kill her entire crew.” “Israel committed acts of murder against American servicemen and an act of war against the United States.” “The White House deliberately prevented the U.S. Navy from coming to the defense of the Liberty.” “Surviving crewmembers were later threatened with ‘court-martial, imprisonment or worse’ if they exposed the truth; and were abandoned by their own government.” “The White House deliberately covered up the facts of this attack from the American people.” “This attack remains the only serious naval incident that has never been thoroughly investigated by Congress; to this day, no surviving crewmember has been permitted to officially and publicly testify about the attack.” “There has been an official cover-up without precedent in American naval history.”

    The USS Liberty Veterans Association delivered to the Executive Agent for the U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, on 8 June 2005, their own 35-page study report backing this up and urging retaliation. It quoted from Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence at the time of the USS Liberty attack. He supported, as Helms put it, “the board’s finding that there could be no doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing in attacking the Liberty. I have yet to understand why it was felt necessary to attack this ship or who ordered the attack.” The Veterans Association concluded that, “the fact that the Israeli government and its surrogates in the United States have worked so long and hard to prevent an inquiry itself speaks volumes as to what such an inquiry would find. The USS Liberty Veterans Association, Inc. respectfully insists that the Secretary of the Army convene an investigatory body to undertake the complete investigation that should have been carried out thirty-eight years ago.” Their study and urging were simply ignored (not only by ‘our’ Government but by its ‘news’-media including all of the ’top’ ones).

    The Palestinians’ cause is also the cause of the American people. The current American Government, bipartisanly in both of its political Parties, does not represent the American people — it is hostile against us, and does only what it must in order to fool us into thinking to the contrary of the ugly reality: that America is a dictatorship by only its billionaires (of both political Parties, and all religions).

    When Einstein and those other prominent American Jews in 1948 wrote condemning the individuals who had created Israel, here was the immediate historical context:

    The 452-page study, published in 1974, The Population of Israel, which was produced for the Demographic Center of the Prime Minister’s Office in Israel and by the Institute of Contemporary Jewry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, mentions only in passing, on its page 401, that there were an “estimated 1,200,000 settled Arabs in Palestine at the end of 1947” and acknowledges there also that the total number of Arabs then “within the territory of Israel” was 777,700. The next page then mentions — also only in passing — that “The estimate of Non-Jews found in Israel in 1949 (including some returnees, during 1949) is about 160,000.” (That number included not only Arabs but all “non-Jews,” such as non-Arab Christians.) So: even Israel (though they never explicitly assert this, since it’s so damning) has acknowledged that over (777,700-160,000=) 617,770  of the 777,700 Arabs who were “within the territory of Israel” in 1947, or over 80% of them all, were gone in 1949. Though they never assert this elimination of 80%+ of that land’s Arabs, they give those numbers, from which any reader who can add and subtract will inevitably conclude that at least 80% of the Arabs disappeared from “Israel” during 1948, which happens to have been the year of Israel’s creation. 80+%. Only less than one-fifth of them were still in Israel. European Christians — not only Germans, and not only in Germany but in many countries — perpetrated the Holocaust against Jews, and those 80+% of “Israel”s Arabs got treated by these surviving Jews remarkably like European Christians had treated so many of these Jews. These Jews absorbed into themselves what had been the the worst majority-Christian culture (especially its prevalent anti-Jewish bigotry, though now having a different target) and then practiced it against the local Muslims in this part of Arabia. Whether or not they were practicing what they preached, they practiced what they had learned. And without the continuing and ongoing yearly support of the American people, this could not have happened and still be happening. It would not happen.

    On 29 April 2020, the great independent American investigative journalist Gareth Porter headlined “With apparently fabricated nuclear documents, Netanyahu pushed the US towards war with Iran”, and he reported that there is “little room for doubt that the documents introduced to Western intelligence [in] 2004 were, in fact, created by the Mossad.” Those are the documents upon the basis of which American sanctions were placed against Iran for its having a nuclear-weapons program (which Israel itself actually does have), which Iran did not have and was not even seeking — the documents were instead Israeli forgeries. “Netanyahu’s multiple levels of deception have been remarkably successful, despite having relied on crude stunts that any diligent news organization should have seen through. Through his manipulation of foreign governments and media, he has been able to maneuver Donald Trump and the United States into a dangerous process of confrontation that has brought the US to the precipice of military conflict with Iran” — instead of against Israel (which was warranted). Netanyahu has even lied to claim that Hitler didn’t initiate the idea of exterminating all of the world’s Jews, the leader of the Palestinians initiated that idea. Just as Hitler lied to ‘justify’ spreading his hatred, Netanyahu likewise does, and Pompeo also does, and Blinken does, and all U.S. international-affairs officials do — of all Presidencies ever since Truman. Maybe the biggest difference between Israel and America is that only the U.S. regime claims to be “upholding the rule of law” and “protecting human rights” while it flagrantly violates both. The brazenness of the U.S. regime’s hypocrisy is unprecedented and historically unique, but otherwise it’s a rather normal fascist — if not outright Nazi (like Israel’s) — government.

    American taxpayers spend $3.8 billion per year as a donation to Israel, of which $3.3 billion goes to Israel’s military. Every American (including all recent Presidents) who has participated in imposing that burden upon us is a traitor against America, and so too is every American who has hidden or tried to hide from the American public the reality, instead of to expose it and to prosecute it. This Government, by such liars, rapes the minds of the American people so as to have this ‘democracy’ of fooled voters.

    In 2024, that $3.8 billion donated to Israel’s Nazi Government was escalated to $18 billion in order to provide Israel the weapons, ammunition, and satellite intelligence to exterminate the Gazans (under the propaganda-cover of ‘defeating Hamas’) and also to escalate the thefts of land and property of the West Bank Palestinians.

    These evils are politically bipartisan in the U.S.: the billionaires who control BOTH of America’s political Parties want this; so, it is the policy of the U.S. regime and of its ‘news’-media.

    I used to think that America’s Government controls Israel’s Government, but now I believe that it’s instead vice-versa, because all of the evidences seem to point to America’s Government being controlled by Israel’s Government. Whenever the U.S. Government urges Israel’s to tone down its Nazism (for the sake of international appearances), the response of Israel’s Government has been to ignore the U.S. regime’s request to soften what it is doing; the U.S. Government’s request that Israel’s Government make Israel’s barbarism less obvious in order not to excessively blacken America’s international reputation, is denied, turned down. The U.S. regime will thus go down in shame because it — for whatever reason — refuses to declare Israel to be itself an enemy of the U.S., as Israel has always been. The record is clear that Israel embodies Jewish Nazism, which it calls “Zionism.” Of course, anyone can be a Zionist, just like, in Hitler’s time, anyone (except a Jew) could be a Nazi. And in America, there are many Christian Zionists, not ONLY Jewish ones. And, somehow, Zionists — in both Israel and the U.S. — have a virtual lock-hold over ‘our’ Government. And almost all the rest of our population are simply passive about it.

    That’s the reality. Is it acceptable? If not, will we accept it, or will we instead replace the regime that controls us? (In any case, that regime is our billionaires.) If so, how?

    The post Does Israel Control America, or Does America Control Israel? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “But truth’s a menace. Science is a public danger.” (Aldous Huxley, Brave New World, 1932). Huxley’s “World State” promotes stability and social harmony over scientific progress. According to the dystopian World State, science is a threat that challenges existing beliefs, which leads to “questioning the established order.”

    2025 – America Decommissions Science

     The decommissioning of government-funded science appears to be a directive calling for: “Decommission but leave just enough of a shell to make it appear to be operational.”

    In reaction to deep budget cuts, America’s most respected science journal, Nature, reports, “Trump Proposes Unprecedented Budget Cuts to US Science,” May 2, 2025: “Huge reductions, if enacted, could have ‘catastrophic’ effects on US competitiveness and the scientific pipeline.” Excusez-moi! What about Making America Great Again?

    Or is America’s premier science journal “making stuff up about competitiveness?” Here’s where science becomes a nuisance by exposing haphazard wussy illogical policy decisions that serve to diminish the economy, unless, of course, Nature is erroneously making stuff up, but nobody can Make America Great Again by undercutting ‘competitiveness’. That’s backwards, not forwards.

    Looking forward: “Federal funding for basic scientific research delivers demonstrable returns on investment. A recent economic impact study found that every dollar invested in federal biomedical research funding generated nearly $2.56 in economic impact, supporting more than 400,000 jobs and catalyzing nearly $95 billion in new economic activity nationwide in 2024. Economists have also found that government investments in scientific research and development have provided returns of 150% to 300% since World War II.” (The Science Coalition)

    Science Budget Cuts Will Target US GDP, Down!

    Over the past 50 years, science research and development (R&D) have contributed significantly to economic growth, with estimates ranging from one-quarter to one-half of the total growth (Source: Association of American Universities). Sorrowfully, the Trump administration budget cuts, as well as proposed additional cuts, to federally funded science research are certain to cut GDP growth, based upon 50 years of statistics.

    Indeed, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists picked up on the damage caused by outrageous, unnecessary budget-cuts to science: “Decommissioned, Retired, Paused: The Weather, Climate, and Earth Science Data the Government Doesn’t Want You to See,” May 20, 2025: “On May 12, the Unidata program paused most of its operations due to a lapse in funding from the National Science Foundation… Shuyi Chen, a professor of atmospheric and climate science, told the Bulletin that virtually any university faculty member who teaches oceanography, atmospheric science, or climate science uses Unidata for research and educational purposes. But it’s not just researchers, in the United States and abroad, who depend on Unidata. These are also tools used for weather forecasting and preparing for extreme events, like floods, winter storms, hurricanes, and wildfires. She also has had students go on to work in the insurance industry, many of whom use Unidata for risk analysis.”

    But Unidata is only one of many data sources vastly cut by the new administration. NOAA recently announced that it is retiring the Billion-Dollar Weather and Climate Disasters database, which has tracked the damage from floods, hurricanes, and other large disasters since 1980. Twenty-two other NOAA data products have likewise been retired or decommissioned over the past month.

    The DEI Sham

     The Trump administration has made radical reductions in staffing and funding in U.S. science-related agencies, including the National Institutes of Health (the nation’s crown jewel of healthcare research) and the Food and Drug Administration. The elimination of key NIH programs based on concerns about DEI will severely damage effective solutions for health research. It is bone-headed.

     Over the past two decades, the NIH has, as the Trump administration decries, prioritized expanding the scope of populations considered in the research it funds. It did so for very good, evidence-based reasons.” (“The Trump Administration’s NIH and FDA Cuts Will Negatively Impact Patients,” Brookings, May 14, 2025).

    The key to effective healthcare research has universally moved away from discoveries and treatments based upon restricted, homogeneous sample populations that disregard diversity of populations; rather, recognizing DEI for its value proposition as previous discoveries/treatments based upon narrowly defined homogeneous samples once introduced to the real world proved to be inadequate, hence the term “efficiency effectiveness gap.” DEI makes research much more effectively broad reaching and profitable.

    “DEI is not some free-floating ideology that considers a range of backgrounds, treatment differentials, and geographical gaps as ends in themselves. In practice, the NIH infrastructure shifted toward a prioritization of conditions and approaches that evidence indicated were more likely to close the gap between technological development and effectiveness in practice,” Ibid.

    America’s Crippled Interior DoD

     Cuts to agencies within the United States Department of Health and Human Services such as FDA, CDC, and NIH are cuts to the “interior department of defense” much as the Pentagon is the Department of Defense against foreign attack. Yet, the Pentagon budget at $850 billion hasn’t seen a foreign invasion since Pearl Harbor (1941). Meanwhile. the department of interior defense, where budgets are being heavily slashed at FDA, CDC, NIH met the challenge of 103,000,000 Americans hit by Covid-19 with 1,200,000 deaths five years ago by performing a “medical miracle,” orchestrating/funding a vaccine within one year to save millions of lives. Previously, the record time to bring a vaccine to market was four years for the mumps outbreak in the 1960s

    Indeed, interior department of defense agencies should be on the same budgetary footing as the Department of Defense for the Pentagon. Yet the budget for the nation’s interior department of defense, NIH, FDA, CDC is unbelievably slashed. For example, the largest most important of the three agencies for internal defense, NIH’s budget for 2025 was/is $48.5billion but Trump proposes cutting to $27 billion for 2026. This is the “crown jewel” of biomedical research in America. Former NIH employees, anonymously, claim the next pandemic or epidemic will be the disaster of all disasters. Meanwhile, the Pentagon ($850 billion), twiddling its thumbs, patiently waits, and waits, and waits for the next “Pearl Harbor.”

    Repeating the obvious: That’s $850 billion to prevent the next Pearl Harbor versus $48 billion (soon dropping to $27 billion) for NIH interior defense against diseases.

    Already, the NIH has $2.4 Billion in canceled and frozen grants and contracts, fired 1,200 employees, plus induced retirement and resignations from a yet unspecified number. The Trump administration’s 2026 Budget proposes a 37% further cut to the agency. Meanwhile, over 3,500 jobs at the FDA have been eliminated, and the administration has hinted at further restructuring of the agency. The former head of the FDA claims the FDA ‘as we know it’ is gone for good.

    Eureka! Ninety-three years since Huxley’s epigram, “Truth is a menace. Science is a public danger” resurfaces in full living color in the year 2025, as America’s interior department of defense for healthcare is ironically crippled, and the country reverts to principles espoused in literature on the heels of the Roaring Twenties (1920-29) at the doorstep of the Great Depression (1929-39) in a time of indecisive decisions, once again, history repeating itself. How’d that work out?

    The post Science Decommissioned! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • IMG_E4476.JPG

    The ghosts of Paul Weyrich, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, the OG’s (Old Guard) of the religious right are dancing these days. Since his inauguration, Trump has rewarded his religious right allies with executive orders creating a “Religious Liberty Commission” and a “Task Force to Eliminate Anti-Christian Bias.”

    “Together they will put the force of the federal government behind the conspiracy theories, false persecution claims, and reactionary policy proposals of the Christian nationalist movement, including its efforts to undermine separation of church and state,” Right Wing Watch’s Peter Montgomery recently reported.

    On May 1, members of the religious liberty commission were announced, and nearly all are ultra-conservative Christian nationalists with a huge right-wing agenda. The commission’s chair is Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, and its vice chair is Ben Carson.

    Right Wing Watch profiled several of the commission’s members:

    • Paula White, serving again as Trump’s faith advisor in the White House, has used her position to elevate the influence of dominionist preachers and Christian nationalist activists. A preacher of the prosperity gospel, White has repeatedly denounced Trump’s opponents as demonic. When Trump announced the Religious Liberty Commission, White made the startling assertion, “Prayer is not a religious act, it’s a national necessity.”
    • Franklin Graham, the more-political son of the famous evangelist Billy Graham, is a MAGA activist and fan of Vladimir Putin’s anti-gay policies who backed Trump in 2016 as the last chance for Christians to save America from godless secularists and the “very wicked” LGTBT agenda. After the 2020 election Graham promoted Trump’s stolen-election claims and blamed the Jan. 6 violence at the Capitol on “antifa.”
    • Eric Metaxas, a once somewhat reputable scholar who has devolved into a far-right conspiracy theorist and MAGA cultist, emceed a December 2020 “Stop the Steal” rally at which Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes threatened bloody civil war if Trump did not remain in power.
    • Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who helped lead U.S. Catholic bishops’ opposition to legal abortion and LGBTQ equality, was an original signer of the 2009 Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto for Christian conservatives who declared that when it comes to opposition to abortion and marriage equality, “no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.”
    • Kelly Shackleford, president of First Liberty, who works to undermine church-state separation via the courts; Shackleford has endorsed a Christian nationalist effort to block conservative judges from joining the Supreme Court if they do not meet the faith and worldview standards of the religious right.
    • Allyson Ho, a lawyer and wife of right-wing Judge James Ho, has been affiliated with the anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ equality religious-right legal groups Alliance Defending Freedom and First Liberty Institute.

    Other commission members include Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Word on Fire ministry; 2009 Miss USA runner-up Carrie Prejean Boller; TV personality Dr. Phil McGraw; and Rabbi Meir Soloveichik.

    Montgomery noted that “Advisory board members are divided into three categories: religious leaders, legal experts, and lay leaders. The list is more religiously diverse than the commission itself; in addition to right-wing lawyers and Christian-right activists, it includes several additional Catholic bishops, Jewish rabbis, and Muslim activists.”

    Notable new advisory board members:

    • Kristen Waggoner, president of the mammoth anti-LGBTQ legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, which uses the courts to make “generational” wins like the overturning of Roe v. Wade, has been named as a possible Supreme Court Justice by the Center for Judicial Renewal, a Christian nationalist project of the American Family Association’s advocacy arm. The ADF is active around the world.  
    • Ryan Tucker, senior counsel and director of the Center for Christian Ministries with Alliance Defending Freedom.
    • Jentezen Franklin, a MAGA pastor, told conservative Christians at a 2020 Evangelicals for Trump rally, “Speak now or forever hold your peace. You won’t have another chance. You won’t have freedom of religion. You won’t have freedom of speech.”
    • Gene Bailey, host of FlashPoint, a program that regularly promotes pro-Trump prophecy and propaganda on the air and at live events. Bailey has said the point of FlashPoint’s trainings is to help right-wing Christians “take over the world.” FlashPoint was until recently a program of Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel.
    • Anti-abortion activist Alveda King, a niece of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., once dismissed the late Coretta Scott King’s support for marriage equality by saying , ‘I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t.”
    • Abigail Robertson, CBN podcast host and granddaughter of Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

    Donald Trump claiming that he’s the front man for “bringing religion back to our country,” is as if the late Jeffrey Epstein claimed that he was working to end sex trafficking.

    The Freedom From Religion Foundation called Trump’s religious liberty commission “a dangerous initiative,” that “despite its branding, this commission is not about protecting religious freedom — it’s about advancing religious privilege and promoting a Christian nationalist agenda”.

    The post Welcome to the Inquisition: Trump’s Christ Nationalist Brigades Aim to Gut Church-State Separation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • A short guide on how to engineer a genocide by starvation and ethnic cleansing:

    1. Choose your moment. Ok, you’ve been ethnically cleansing, occupying, oppressing, and killing your neighbours for decades. The international courts have ruled your actions illegal. But none of that will matter the moment your neighbours retaliate by attacking you. Don’t worry. The Western media can be relied on to help out here. They will be only too ready to pretend that history began on the day you were attacked.

    2. Declare, in response, your intention to starve your neighbours, treating them as “human animals”, by blocking all food, water, and power. You will be surprised by how many Western politicians are ready to support this as your “right to defend yourself”. The media will echo them. It is important not to just talk about blocking aid. You must actually do it. There will be no serious pushback for many, many months.

    3. Start relatively slowly. Time is on your side. Let a little bit of aid in. But be sure to relentlessly smear the well-functioning, decades-old aid distribution system run by the international community, one that is transparent, accountable, and widely integrated into the communities it serves. Say it is infiltrated by “terrorists”.

    4. Use that claim – evidence isn’t really necessary, the western media never ask for it – as the pretext to bomb the aid system’s warehouses, distribution centres, and community kitchens. Oh, and don’t forget to bomb all the private bakeries, destroy all the farmland, shoot all the animals, and kill anyone who tries to use a fishing boat, so that there are no other sources of food. You are now in control of the trickle of aid reaching what is rapidly becoming a severely malnourished population.

    5. Time to move into higher gear. Stop the international community’s aid from getting in altogether. You will need a humanitarian cover story for this bit. The danger, particularly in an age of social media, is that images of starving babies will make you look very bad. Hold firm. You can get through this. Claim – again, evidence isn’t really necessary, the western media won’t ask for it – that the “terrorists” are stealing the aid. You will be surprised how willing the media is to talk about babies going “hungry”, ignoring the fact that you are starving them to death, or speak of a “famine”, as though from drought and crop failure, not from your carefully laid plans.

    6. Don’t lose sight of the bigger story. You are blocking aid to “eradicate the terrorists”. After all, what is the worth of a baby, of a child – all one million of them – in the fight to eliminate a rag-tag army of lightly armed “terrorists” who have never waged their struggle outside of their historic homeland?

    7. Now that the population is entirely at your disposal, you can roll out a “humanitarian” alternative to the existing system you have been vilifying and wrecking. Probably best to have been working on this part of the plan behind the scenes from early on, and to have regularly consulted with the Americans on how to develop it. You may even find they are willing to fund it. They usually are. You can obscure their role by using the term “private contractors”.

    8. It’s time for implementation. Obviously, the point is not to really distribute aid. It is all about providing a cover story so that the starvation and ethnic cleansing can continue. Ensure that you provide only a tiny amount of aid and make it available only at a few distribution points you have set up with these “private contractors”. This has two advantages.

    9. It forces the population to come to the areas you want them in, like luring mice into a trap. Get them to the very edge of the territory, because from there you will be best positioned at some point to drive them over the border and get rid of them for good.

    10. Your system will lead to chaos, as desperate, starving people fight for food. That’s great for you. It makes them look like a swarming mass of those “human animals” you were talking about from the start. Don’t they deserve their fate? And it means that young, fit men – especially those from large, often armed, criminal families – will end up with most of the food. The stuff they can’t grab at the distribution points, they will ambush later as people try to return home laden with their heavy aid packages. That may seem counter-productive, given that you’re claiming to want to eliminate the “terrorists”. Won’t these fit, young men, as conditions degenerate further, provide a future source of recruits to the “terrorists”? But remember, the real goal here is to starve the population as quickly as possible. The young, the elderly, the sick, and the vulnerable are the ones who will die first. The more of them who start dying, the faster the pressure builds on everyone else to flee the territory to save themselves.

    You are nearly there. True, faced with the emaciated bodies of your victims, Western politicians will start making harsh pronouncements. But they have already given you a massive head start of 20 months. Be grateful for that. You don’t need much longer. While they dither, you can get on with the job of extermination. Leave it to the history books to judge what really happened.

    The post A Short Guide on How to Starve a Population to Death first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • A public opinion poll in 2023 found that 64% of likely United States voters thought that our government should officially recognize the Island of Taiwan as an independent nation, while a poll this year found that 82% of them believe that Taiwan “is” independent. A few months ago the U.S. State Department removed a line from their website stating that the US does not support Taiwan independence, triggering a rebuke from Beijing that this “sends a seriously erroneous message to the separatist forces” in Taiwan. Consistent with such views among U.S. citizens and State Department officials, the number of U.S. military personnel on Taiwan has increased recently. It was previously known that the number stationed there was 41; now, according to the testimony of retired Navy Rear Admiral Mark Montgomery on 15 May, there are approximately 500.

    U.S. experts speak of war with China. The U.S. and China are apparently preparing for it (Peter Apps, “US Prepares for Long War with China that Might Hit Its Bases, Homeland,” Reuters, 19 May 2025). And according to opinion polls, a large percentage of Americans, if not the majority, do support using U.S. troops to defend Taiwan. Thus it is important in 2025 to understand Taiwan’s special status and U.S.-China relations.

    The civil war between the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continued intermittently from 1927 until 1949, when the Communists won control over mainland China. The war resulted in the premature deaths of millions of people, with a large portion of those non-combatants. In 1949 the head of the Guomindang, Chiang Kaishek (1887-1975), known today as “Jiang Jieshi” by most mainland Chinese speakers, retreated to the Island of Taiwan with the remnants of his forces and “established a relatively benign dictatorship” there, executing one thousand farmers, workers, intellectuals, students, labor union activists, and apolitical civilians during the White Terror in the 1950s. (Po Chien CHEN and Yi-hung LIU, “A Spark Extinguished: Worker Militancy in Taiwan after World War II [1945-1950],” Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace, eds., Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, Verso, 2022). The martial law that Jiang Jieshi imposed in 1949 lasted for nearly four decades, until 1987.

    Under his reign there were two Taiwan Strait crises in which a hot war between the Guomindang and the CCP almost broke out. The most dangerous, in terms of the prospects for decent human survival, was probably the second crisis, in 1958. It almost resulted in a nuclear war, according to the late Daniel Ellsberg. At a point in time when U.S.-backed Jiang Jieshi aspired to take back all of China, the U.S. had a secret plan to “hit every city in the Soviet Union and every city in China.” The U.S. military was prepared to annihilate 600 million people, a “hundred Holocausts,” Ellsberg explained. Today the Island of Taiwan may or may not be the “most dangerous place on Earth,” as the Economist called it (Justin Metz, “The Most Dangerous Place on Earth,” The Economist, 1 May 2021), but given the constant tension between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (i.e., Taiwan) during the last three quarters of a century, the fact that the U.S. and the PRC are both nuclear powers, the fact that U.S. intelligence leaders have recently called the CCP the “most consequential threat” to U.S. national security, and the fact that the Trump administration is riddled with China hawks underscores how important it is, for our species as a whole, and especially for people in East Asia, that sincere agents of peace understand Taiwan.

    Over the course of nearly half a century, Jiang Jieshi and his party received constant diplomatic support, weapons, and billions of dollars in aid from the U.S.  Our government has recently even “quietly unfrozen about $870 million in security assistance programs for Taiwan.” With all this U.S. “support” for, or U.S. domination of, Taiwan, what does the word “sovereignty” mean in Taiwan’s case? And what does it mean for an island of 23 million people to prepare to fight with the PRC, with its population of 1.4 billion? How can Lai Ching-te say that they must prepare for war?

    To understand the fight between the Republic of China and the PRC, and the intervening/interfering role of the U.S., one must have a basic understanding of the nature of this fight. A little study of the historical context in which Jiang Jieshi first seized power a century ago might help. This month marks 100 years since the start of the May Thirtieth Movement, when Chinese workers stood up against the imperialism of the West and Japan, while at the same time taking on the greedy business class and the power-hungry warlords of China.

    Chinese Workers Struggle for Dignity in 1925

    Back in 1925, Shanghai was known as “the Paris of the East,” and like Paris, it was a place where the rich could have fun as they liked and the poor had to suffer as they must. The workers of Shanghai suffered the injustices of colonialism and racism. Rich Europeans and Japanese colonizer-parasites had carved up the city and set up their own “International Settlement,” that they, rather than the Chinese, governed. This Settlement allowed them to live among and exploit the local laborers even as they disrespected them with the pejorative “coolies.” Some Japanese said they were “worthless” and called them “foreign slaves” (S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses: Nationalism and Labor in Shanghai, 1895-1927, Duke UP, 2002, page 163).

    Shanghai had been a frequent site of labor “unrest” for some time. It was not a coincidence that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had been founded there in 1921. Early in 1925 a Japanese company that owned a cotton mill had rejected an agreement made by the striking workers and a mediation board. The conflict reached a head on the 15th of May that year when the managers of the mill locked out the workers and stopped paying their wages. (Apo Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement to the Canton Strike,” Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour). In this conflict, Japanese supervisors physically beat several workers and one foreman shot and killed a 20-year-old worker, a Communist, by the name of Gu Zhenghong.

    This was not the first time that foreign bosses had murdered Chinese workers, but it was said that “Japanese capitalists treat Chinese laborers like cattle and horses” (S.A. Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 164). Many people, not only workers and students but also Chinese business persons, were fed up that year, in 1925. On the 30th of May nearly 10,000 demonstrators marched through the streets of Shanghai to the International Settlement where the British, French, Japanese, and other privileged foreigners lived. It was guarded by foreign soldiers and police. (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”). The British chief of police gave orders to fire on the protesting workers and students, and thirteen people were killed, shot at “point-blank range” (Working Class History, PM Press, 2020, page 111-12).  Dozens were injured. This triggered what is known today as the May Thirtieth Movement. Through the cooperation of workers, students, and many Chinese businesses, a general strike was organized in Shanghai. There were at least 135 solidarity strikes in other regions. (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

    By one estimate, there were already 84,000 unionized workers in Shanghai at this time and many unions had contributed to building worker solidarity (Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 154). Up until the May Thirtieth Incident, the Shanghai Federation of Syndicates (SFS) had been a leading labor organization, if not the leading organization in Shanghai. It had been established in 1924, mainly by right-wing members, but also by many anarchists, such as Shen Zhongjiu (1887–1968), the editor of the anarchist journal Free Man (Ziyou ren) and later the chief editor of Revolution (Geming). Anarchism was the “central radical stream” in China after the First World War. And there had been a “long-standing indigenous libertarian tradition” in China (Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, PM Press, 2010, page 519).

    Many SFS labor activists distrusted the Communist Party because they felt that CCP intellectuals tried to speak for the workers. The SFS had a “vaguely anarchist orientation,” but did not espouse federalism. (Smith, Like Cattle and Horses 155-59). Chinese anarchists in general, regardless whether they were members of SFS, had vocally opposed the CCP’s statist goals and promotion of “proletarian dictatorship” and “iron discipline.” But the fledgling CCP was on the ball. They “instantly launched a campaign calling for solidarity with the textile workers, a boycott of Japanese products, and a public funeral” for Gu Zhenghong (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

    In the city of Guangzhou, already an industrial center near Hong Kong then, anarchists had established at least 40 unions by 1921, and had been collaborating since 1924 with the Guomindang labor leaders in the syndicalist movement. The Guomindang was founded in 1924 by Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925) in Guangzhou, and many anarchists and communists had collaborated with them for years.  In May 1925 the “Second National Labour Conference” was held in Guangzhou. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) was established, representing 166 trade unions and 540,000 members. It was a national umbrella organization that functioned as a platform to coordinate different forces among workers, including non-party actors. After the Shanghai Massacre, the ACFTU called for a demonstration on 2 June and a solidarity strike. In the wake of the Massacre, many more workers joined unions (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”).

    Union leaders organized a strike in Guangzhou and in nearby Hong Kong. This strike began on 19 June. Soon, 250,000 workers hand had joined and many students in Hong Kong were also mobilized. In fact, half the labor force of Hong Kong was on strike, paralyzing the city. By the 21st of June, there was a full embargo against the foreign powers, and on the 23rd of June, a public procession in solidarity with the May Thirtieth Movement. The joint foreign security force with police from multiple countries opened fire on students and killed fifty-two people.

    1925 was the beginning of a period of very active worker resistance, that is sometimes called the “Revolution of 1925-1927.” It was a time of many large uprisings, often or usually very violent, and a time of dedicated labor organizing. Through this revolution, Chinese workers regained some dignity, but true liberation was put on the back burner. According to the historian Gotelind Müller, “the CCP worked on Comintern instructions in a united front with the Guomindang, an authoritarian party populist in rhetoric but tied in practice to defending the interests of China’s business groups and rural elites. The terms of the alliance required the CCP’s subordination to the Nationalist [i.e., Guomindang] leaders and the submersion of its membership.” She explains that, just as with anarchists elsewhere, “Chinese anarchists were at first sympathetic to the Bolsheviks but by the mid-1920s they saw the regime in Moscow as oppressive.”

    Meanwhile, Mao Zedong knew that something was happening, and he became very interested in this movement in the summer of 1925 (Rebecca Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth Century World, Duke UP, 2010, page 29). In addition to labor unions in the city, peasant unions were also forming, appearing in Hunan and surrounding provinces. Mao saw revolutionary potential among them, even more than among workers in the cities. This put him in opposition to the orthodox Marxist approach.

    A Year of Strikes: 1926

    There were even more strikes in 1926 than in 1925, and some of the rulers of China resorted to violence to keep them down. “During 1926 in Shanghai there were, according to one official survey, 169 strikes affecting 165 factories and companies and involving 202,297 workers.” Half of them were “wholly or partially successful.” (Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 1938). In May 1926 the Third Labor Congress was held in Guangzhou, with the participation of 699 labor organizations, who claimed to represent 1.24 million workers.

    And it was at this point, when things were going so well for the workers, that Jiang Jieshi started abandoning them and dismissed his Soviet advisors (Dennis Showalter, “Bring in the Germans,” The Quarterly Journal of Military History 28:1, page 60). It was the Soviets who had urged the Communists of China to work with the Guomindang.

    On 18 March, there was a massacre of anti-imperialist protesters in front of Beiyang Government headquarters. The Beiyang Government was run by warlords like Duan Qirui (1865-1936), who was tight with Japan. They were the main government of China between 1912 and 1928, and were based in Beijing.

    Among those injured during the 18 March massacre was the leader Li Dazhao (1889-1927), who had co-founded the CCP with Chen Duxiu (1879-1942). Chen Duxiu had also founded the progressive journal New Youth (Xin Qingnian) in 1916, advocating human rights, democracy, science, and even Esperanto. Influenced by the October Revolution, it was openly promoting communism in 1920.

    The great writer Lu Xun, who is often credited with modernizing Chinese literature, wrote about the March 1926 massacre in some detail in “In Memory of Miss Liu Hezhen.” Lu Xun wrote, “On March 18 in the fifteenth year of the Republic of China, Duan Qirui’s government ordered guards with guns and bayonets to surround and slaughter the unarmed protesters in front of the gates of the State Council, the hundreds of young men and women whose intent was to lend their support in China’s diplomatic dealings with foreign powers. An order was even issued, slandering them as ‘mobsters’!” (Lu Xun, “In Memory of Liu Hezhen,” Jottings Under Lamplight, Harvard UP, 2017, page 72).

    Meanwhile in June, Jiang Jieshi was put in charge of the Northern Expedition aimed at removing the warlords from power and unifying the country.

    Jiang Jieshi’s 1927 Slaughters

    In 1927 rich men slaughtered workers like never before. Early on, the CCP suspected that something was up. On 26 January an internal Party memo read, “The most important problem which requires our urgent consideration at the moment is the alliance of foreign imperialism and the [Guomindang] right wing with the so-called moderate elements of the [Guomindang], resulting in internal and external opposition to Soviet Russia, communism, and the labor and peasant movements” (Michael D. Wilson, United States Policy and the Nationalist Revolution in China, 1925-1928, UCLA dissertation, 1996, page 121). The Communists knew that the Guomindang was allied with the “Powers,” i.e., the empires of the West and Japan. Yet they still encouraged workers to trust the Guomindang.

    Around this time in early 1927, a powerful Communist-led union called the Shanghai General Labour Union (GLU) launched two insurrections. Their first insurrection was a general strike from the 19th to the 22nd of February, and their second was a strike supported by an armed militia from the 21st to 22nd of March. The strike in February “shut post offices, all cotton mills, and most essential services” (S.A. Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising and the Shanghai Massacre,” Proletarian China: A Century of Chinese Labour, and Working Class History 41). This contributed greatly to the popularity of both the Guomindang and the CCP in Shanghai.

    For their second insurrection in March, the GLU’s plan was “to take control of the city first and then welcome” Jiang Jieshi. But the British, the Americans, and the Japanese in Shanghai already knew the script. Written in 1938, Harold Isaacs’ historical account got to the heart of the matter:

    The prevailing attitude among them during those early weeks of 1927 seemed to be to hear and protect the evils they had rather than fly to others they knew not of. For to your foreign business man, banker, soldier, consul, and missionary, this incomprehensible unrest, these endless slings and arrows for which they were the quivering targets, seemed the blows of a universally outrageous fortune. They could not make out who were the hares and who the hounds. So they barricaded their settlements behind gates and barbed wire. From overseas came regiment after regiment and whole fleets to protect them against all contingencies. Only the keenest among them understood from the beginning that their bread was buttered on the same side as that of the Shanghai bankers and oriented themselves accordingly. They knew Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi] as a politically-minded militarist who wore a coat of many colours. If the Shanghai bankers were ready to back him, they knew they could follow suit. Only the workers of Shanghai stood between them and the consummation of the deal. Chiang’s coming would remove this obstacle. Thus by February when Chiang’s troops advanced into Chekiang, the situation was vastly clarified for all concerned except the workers and the Communist leaders for whom Chiang still remained the hero-general of the revolution. (Harold Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 1938).

    But as evidenced by the quote from the CCP internal Party memo, the Communist leaders, too, knew what was happening, that Jiang Jieshi was not on their side.

    “On 21 March between 600,000 and 800,000 workers struck in demand for an end to militarist rule of the city. Among the workers who played key roles were the printers, postal workers, and mechanics. Several thousand radicals also formed an armed militia that occupied key sections of the city” (St. James Encyclopedia of Labor History Worldwide: Major Events in Labor History and Their Impact).

    On the same day that these Communist supporters of Jiang Jieshi launched their violent take-over of Shanghai, Guomindang troops took control of the City of Nanjing, attacked foreigners and looted foreign property there, “including the American, British, and Japanese consulates.” (Wilson, United States Policy and the Nationalist Revolution in China, 1925-1928, page 111). Foreigners were frightened by these attacks and they blamed it on communists, not on Jiang Jieshi. “Actually, however, the nationalists [i.e., Guomindang] were the perpetrators of this series of attacks on foreign civilians. Some foreign officials, such as the Japanese Consul General, thus advised [Jiang Jieshi] to crack down on the radical elements in the city” (St. James Encyclopedia…). This is remembered as the “Nanking Incident of 1927.”

    On 22 March, the stage was set for the great betrayal and a years-long bloodbath. On that day, a subordinate of Jiang Jieshi, called off the strike in Shanghai and ordered the suppression of the labor unions and other radical groups (Wilson 110). With thousands of soldiers in toe and at his command, Jiang Jieshi himself arrived on 26 March and began meeting with members of the local Guomindang, the Shanghai business community, and the gangsters. He was promised financial support “if he broke from the communists and pledged to ‘regulate’ the relationship between labor and capital” (St. James Encyclopedia…).

    April 1927: Let the Reign of Terror Begin

    Jiang Jieshi agreed with these parasitic foreigners that the changes being proposed by the workers and the Communists were too radical. “It should have come as no surprise to anyone that [Jiang Jieshi] decided to move against the radicals, as he had already done so in several other cities in late March” (St. James Encyclopedia…), but many Chinese workers as well as French, German, and Russian communists continued to believe in him.

    After the Guomindang’s attack on Westerners and Japanese in Nanjing (i.e., the Nanking Incident of March 1927), Jiang Jieshi started to seek support from Japan and the U.S. rather than the USSR and the CCP (Wilson 33, 72, 134).

    Jiang Jieshi viewed the success of the peasants and the workers as a threat to his party’s political, military, and social control, and this is one reason why he initiated the April 12th Shanghai Massacre, in which the Guomindang slaughtered communists in Shanghai and other places. According to Vincent Kolo, the “capitalist class and rural landowners whose sons were well represented in the officer corps of the [Guomindang] armies grew fearful of the increasingly radical demands of the working class (for shorter work hours and against the terror regime in many factories) and the peasantry (for land reform and against the crushing taxes of the landlord class)” (Kolo, “90 Years since Chiang Kai-shek’s Shanghai Massacre,” Chinaworker.info).

    On 5 April Jiang Jieshi “instituted martial law and ordered the disarming of all bearers of arms not properly registered with the Nationalist Army” (Wilson 123). On the 11th, Wang Shouhua [the President of the GLU] was thrown in a sack and “buried alive” (Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising”). By the morning of the 12th, the worker militias “had been crushed,” according to historian S.A. Smith. That day, Jiang Jieshi hired hundreds of armed gangsters to massacre labor leaders and communists (Wilson, page 124).

    Even so, the tenacious workers, led mainly by the GLU, called a general strike for the 13th of April. “240,000 workers walked out” (Smith, “The Third Armed Uprising”). Machine gunners opened fire on their parade. “Attackers” engaged in “stabbing, shooting, and clubbing the panic-stricken crowd.” One hundred were killed. But even on the 14th, the majority of striking workers did not give up.

    By the 15th, the GLU estimated that three hundred trade union activists had been killed. It is estimated that by the end of the year, two thousand “Communists and worker militants” had lost their lives. The Guomindang killed “thousands of worker activists” in Shanghai, Wuhan, and Guangzhou (Leong, “From the May Thirtieth Movement…”). “Over the following twelve months, more than three hundred thousand people would be killed in the Guomindang’s anti-communist purges” (Working Class History 80-81).

    The police of “Qingbang and Hongbang brutally executed the captured communist and union members by slaughtering them and putting them in the crater of a locomotive.” (“4.12 Shanghai Coup,” Namuwiki, 15 April 2025). Communists refer to the following years of Guomindang massacres as the “White Terror.” By one estimate, this White Terror resulted in the deaths of one million people (Karl, Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World 33). Enabled by the governments of the U.S. and other countries, Jiang Jieshi began in 1947 another White Terror on the Island of Taiwan. It did not end until 1987.

    This is the way that Jiang Jieshi thanked the peasant and worker revolutionaries who had propelled his party to power. His rewards for this great achievement of “unifying” the nation included generous financial support from the business class of Shanghai (David Lowe, “Generalissimo,” The Weekly Standard 9:27:22, page 43), lots of help of various kinds from the Powers of the West and Japan, and recognition from the Empires that he was the legitimate ruler of China.

    With his solid track record of bullying into submission Chinese workers, the U.S. showered Jiang Jieshi with treasure for decades, until his death in 1975. The U.S. was the first foreign country to step forward and grant recognition to his new regime (in 1928), and soon the U.S. would begin supporting him financially and militarily, too, even when informed U.S. observers, such as John King Fairbank (1907-91) labeled his Party as “proto-fascist.” For Fairbank, the Guomindang were a “small political group holding tenaciously to power…with hopes of using industrialization as a tool of perpetuating their power and with ideas which are socially conservative and backward-looking” (Wilson 2).

    Yokomitsu Riichi, the Japanese ultra-rightist author who wrote the novel Shanghai (1931), presented in that story a surprisingly similar picture of the political and economic situation of China, a country where parasites of the West, Japan, and even China committed state violence against them and stole the fruits of their labor. For example:

    He [Sanki] fell silent. He had detected the strength of will of the authorities who had hired Chinese to kill Chinese.

    [Fang Qiu-lan, a woman to whom Sanki is attracted and a Communist who organizes workers in Japanese textile factories:]  “That’s right. The craftiness of the British authorities isn’t new. The history of the modern Orient is so filled with the crimes of that country that if you tried to add them up, you’d be paralyzed. Starving millions of Indians, disabling Chinese with the opium trade. These were Britain’s economic policies. It’s the same as using Persia, India, Afghanistan, and Malaysia to poison China. Now we Chinese must resist completely.” (Yokomitsu Riichi, Shanghai: A Novel by Yokomitsu Riichi, Dennis Washburn, trans., Center of Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2001, page 153).

    Since 1950, the United States has sold Taiwan nearly $50 billion in “defense equipment and services, with a number of large sales during recent U.S. administrations.” Is this how we deliver “power to the people” and peace in East Asia? Were we promoting industrial democracy by increasing the wealth and power of Jiang Jieshi even after he committed massacres of Chinese workers with impunity? Don’t the people of Taiwan, the vast majority of whom are Han Chinese, deserve credit for sprouting democracy even under the sun-starved, U.S.-backed dictatorship of Jiang Jieshi? Where in the U.S. is there any recognition of the crimes that the U.S. committed against the Han Chinese and other ethnic groups of Taiwan and the rest of China? How solid is the foundation on which the current President Lai Ching-te stands, the man who called himself a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence” in 2017? When we spend 250 million U.S. dollars on an upgrade on our “informal,” 10-acre embassy in Taiwan, is that an example of how we adhere to our One China policy? Even merely with the foregoing brief exploration of the history of the obvious class struggle in China a century ago, and quick examples of U.S. support for Jiang Jieshi’s attacks on the working class of China, one can see that U.S. dollars were spent on death, destruction, and tyranny rather than on democracy and peace.

    The post A Sketch of the Origins of Jiang Jieshi’s Relationship with the United States first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The pro-government alliance achieved a sweeping victory in Venezuela’s May 25 elections, while a fractured opposition suffered losses. Western media distorted the results – spinning low turnout claims, ignoring the role of illegal US sanctions, and offering selective sympathy to elite opposition figures.

    Opposition fractures, pro-government consolidates

    At stake for the 54 contesting Venezuelan political parties were seats for 285 National Assembly deputies, 24 state governors, and 260 regional legislators.

    The pro-government coalition won all but one of the governorships, taking three of the four states previously held by the opposition. The loss of the state of Barinas was particularly symbolic, for this was the birthplace of former President Hugo Chávez, and especially so, because the winner was Adán Chávez, the late president’s older brother.

    Likewise, the Chavista alliance swept the National Assembly, securing 253 out of 285 seats. Notable exceptions were the election of opposition leaders Henrique Capriles and Henri Falcón, both of whom are former presidential candidates.

    The New York Times reported the same outcomes but spun it as the “results [rather than the vote]…stripped the opposition of some of the last few positions it held,” inferring fraud.

    However, this election outcome was not unexpected, as the opposition was not only divided but also had a significant portion opting to boycott the vote. The pro-government forces enjoyed a unified effort, an efficient electoral machine, and grassroots support, especially from the communal movement.

    “After 32 elections, amidst blockades, criminal sanctions, fascism and violence,” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro affirmed, “today we showed that the Bolivarian Revolution is stronger than ever.”

    Opposition self-implodes

    The headline from Le Monde spun the voting thus: “Venezuela holds divisive new elections.” Contrary to what the headline suggests, the divisiveness was not the government’s doing, but due to the opposition’s perennial internecine warfare.

    While the pro-government Great Patriotic Pole alliance around the ruling Socialist Party (PSUV) “works in unison,” according to opposition leader Henrique Capriles, the electoral opposition is divided into three warring camps. They, in turn, were surrounded by a circular firing squad of the far-right abstentionists, calling for a vote boycott.

    The abstentionists were assembled around Maria Corina Machado. She had been pardoned for her involvement in the short-lived 2002 US-backed coup but was subsequently disqualified from running for office for constitutional offenses. Following Washington’s lead, which has not recognized a Venezuelan presidential election as legitimate since 2012, the far-right opposition rejected electoral means for achieving regime change and has even pleaded in effect for US military intervention.

    Machado’s faction, which claimed that Edmund González Urrutia won the 2024 presidential election, does not recognize their country’s constitutional authority. Consequently, when summoned by the Venezuelan Supreme Court, they refused to present evidence of their victory, thereby removing any legal basis for their claimed victory to be accepted. Machado maintained that voting only “legitimizes” the government, bitterly calling those participating in the democratic process “scorpions.”

    Machado spent the election in self-imposed hiding. She further dug herself into a hole, after urging even harsher punishing US sanctions on her own people, by appearing to support Trump’s sending of Venezuelan migrants to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador.

    El Pais sympathized with her as “driven by the strength of the pain of being a mother who has been separated from her three children.” The WaPo described the middle-aged divorcé from one of the wealthiest families in Venezuela as a “courageous leader” whose “three children are exiled abroad.” In fact, her adult children live comfortably in the US and Colombia.

    To this manufactured sympathy for the privileged, Venezuelan-Canadian sociologist Maria Paez Victor asks, “Where are the defenders of the human rights of Venezuelans?” She excoriates the collective West for its selective concern for human rights, emphasizing the neglect of Venezuelans’ rights amid external pressures and US sanctions.

    The disputed Essequibo

    The headline for The New York Times’s report spun the elections with: “Venezuela is holding an election for another country’s land.” This refers to the elections for governor and legislators in Essequibo (Guayana Esequiba in Spanish), which is, in fact, a disputed land.

    For nearly two centuries, Venezuelans have considered that region part of their country, having wrested it from Spanish colonialists in 1835. In the questionable Paris Arbitral Award, with the US representing Venezuela, the Essequibo was handed over to the UK in 1899 (then colonial British Guiana and now the independent nation of Guyana). Ever since, it has been contested territory.

    In 1962, Venezuela formally revived its claim at the UN, asserting that the 1899 award was null and void. Not surprisingly, the Times sides with Guyana, or more precisely with what they report as “Exxon Mobil’s multibillion-dollar investments” plus “military ties with the US.”

    This first-time vote for political representation in the Essequibo is seen by Venezuelans across their political spectrum as an important step to assert their claim. It follows a referendum in 2023, which affirmed popular support for the Essequibo as part of their national territory. The actual voting was held in the neighboring Bolivar state.

    On cue, the western-aligned press criticized the vote on the Essequibo as a “cynical ploy” by the Maduro administration to divert attention from other pressing problems. Meanwhile, they obscure the increasing US military penetration in neighboring Guyana and in the wider region.

    Yet even the NYT had to admit: “Claims to the Essequibo region are deeply ingrained among many Venezuelans… [and even] María Corina Machado, the most prominent opposition leader, visited the area by canoe in 2013 to advance Venezuela’s claim.” Venezuelan journalist Jésus Rodríguez Espinoza (pers. comm.) described the vote as “an exercise in national sovereignty.”

    Illegal sanctions – the elephant in the room

    WaPo opinion piece claims, “that the actual root cause of poverty has been a lack of democracy and freedom,” as if the US and its allies have not imposed sanctions deliberately designed to cripple the Venezuelan economy. These “unilateral coercive measures,” condemned by the UN, are illegal under international law because they constitute collective punishment.

    But the fact that Venezuelans had to vote while being subjected to illegal coercion is completely ignored by the corporate press. That is, the existence of sanctions is recognized, but instead of exposing their illegal and coercive essence, the press normalizes them. The story untold by the press is the courage of the Venezuelan people who continue to support their government under such adverse conditions.

    Disparaging the election

    Washington and its aligned press cannot question the popular sweep for the Socialist Party’s alliance in Venezuela, because it is so obvious. Nonetheless, they disparage the mandate. The chorus of criticism alleges the fraudulent nature of previous elections, although it is a geopolitical reality that Washington considers any popular vote against its designated candidates illegitimate.

    For this particular election, these State Department stenographers focused on the supposedly low turnout. In fact, the turnout was typical for a non-presidential election contest and fell within the same percentage range as US midterm elections.

    Moreover, the pro-government slate actually garnered more votes than it had in the previous regional elections. The Chavista core of older, working class women remains solid.

    When Elvis Amoroso, president of Venezuela’s authority (CNE), qualified the turnout percentages to apply to “active voters,” he meant those in-country. Due to the large number of recent out-migrations, a significant number are registered but cannot vote because they are abroad.

    What was notably low was the voting for the highly divided opposition, with major factions calling for a boycott. Further, the opposition had been discredited by revelations that some had received and misused hundreds of millions of dollars from USAID. More than ever, the inept opposition has exposed itself in a negative light to the broad electorate. 

    The overwhelming sentiment on the street in Venezuela is for an end to partisan conflict and for continuing the slow economic recovery. Challenges ahead include inflationary winds, a rising unofficial dollar exchange rate, and, above all, the animus of the Trump administration, which is currently in internal debate over whether to try to deal the Bolivarian Revolution a quick or a slow death. Either way, destabilization efforts continue.

    To which Socialist Party leader and Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello said: “No one can stop our people. Not sanctions, nor blockades, nor persecution – because when a people decide to be free, no one can stop them.”

    The post Ballots and Bias: How the Press Framed Venezuela’s Regional and Legislative Elections first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Last Thursday, May 22, a coalition named Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza kicked off a 40-day fast outside the United Nations in Manhattan in protest against the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. Military veterans and allies pledged to fast for 40 days on only 250 calories per day, the amount recently reported as what the residents of Gaza are enduring.

    The fasters are demanding:

    1) Full humanitarian aid to Gaza under UN authority, and

    2) No more U.S. weapons to Israel.

    Seven people are fasting from May 22 to June 30 outside the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, where they are present from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Mondays through Fridays. Many others are fasting around the U.S. and beyond for as many days as they can. The fast is organized by Veterans For Peace along with over 40 co-sponsoring organizations.

    Remarkably, over 600 people have registered to join the fast. Friends of Sabeel, NA, is maintaining the list of fasters.

    Who will stop the genocide in Palestine, if not us? That is the question that the fasters and many others are asking. The U.S. government is shamelessly complicit in Israel’s genocide, and to a lesser extent, the same is true for the European governments.  The silence and inaction of most Middle Eastern countries is resounding. Lebanon, Yemen, and Iran, the only countries to come to Palestine’s aid, have been bombed by Israel and the U.S., with the threat of more to come. Syria, another country that stood with Palestine, has been “regime changed” and handed over to former al-Qaeda/ISIS extremists.

    On the positive side, some governments are making their voices heard. South Africa and Nicaragua have taken Israel and Germany, respectively, to the International Court of Justice – Israel for its genocide, and Germany for providing weapons to Israel.  And millions of regular people around the globe have protested loudly and continue to do so.

    Here in the United States, Jewish Voice for Peace has provided crucial leadership, pushing back against the phony charges of “anti-semitism” that are thrown at the student protesters whose courageous resistance has spoken for so many.  University administrators have been all too quick to crack down on the students, violating their right to freedom of speech, but even these universities have come under attack from the repressive, anti-democratic Trump administration.

    Peace-loving people are frustrated and angry. Some are worried they will be detained or deported. And many of us are suffering from Moral Injury, concerned about our own complicity. How are we supposed to act as we watch U.S. bombs obliterate Gaza’s hospitals, mosques, churches, and universities?  What are we supposed to do when we see Palestinian children being starved to death, systematically and live-streamed?

    Because our movement is nonviolent, we do not want to follow the example of the young man who shot and killed two employees of the Israeli Embassy in Washington, DC. However, we understand his frustration and the driving force behind his forceful action. We take courage from the supreme sacrifice of U.S. Airman Aaron Bushnell, who self-immolated in front of the Israeli Embassy, asking, “What would you do?”

    Student protesters at several universities around the country have initiated “hunger strikes,” a protest tactic often considered a last resort. Now they have been joined by military veterans.

    “Watching hundreds of people maimed, burned, and killed every day just tears at my insides,” said Mike Ferner, former Executive Director of Veterans For Peace and one of the fasters.  “Too much like when I nursed hundreds of wounded from our war in Vietnam,” said the former Navy corpsman. “This madness will only stop when enough Americans demand it stops.”

    Rev. Addie Domske, National Field Organizer for Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA), said, “This month I celebrated my third Mother’s Day with a renewed commitment to parent my kid toward a free Palestine. As a mother, I am responsible for feeding my child. I also believe, as a mother, I must be responsive when other children are starving.

    Kathy Kelly, board president of World BEYOND War, also in NY for the fast, said, “Irish Nobel laureate Mairead Maguire, at age 81, recently fasted for forty days, saying ‘As the children of Gaza are hungry and injured with bombs by official Israeli policy, I have decided that I, too, must go hungry with them, as I in good conscience can do no other.’ Now, Israel intensifies its efforts to eradicate Gaza through bombing, forcible displacement, and siege. We must follow Mairead’s lead, hungering acutely for an end to all weapon shipments to Israel. We must ask, ‘who are the criminals?’ as war crimes multiply and political leaders fail to stop them.”

    Another faster is Joy Metzler: 23, Cocoa, FL., a 2023 graduate of the Air Force Academy who became a Conscientious Objector and left the Air Force, citing US aggression in the Middle East and the continued ethnic cleansing in all of Palestine. Joy is now a member of Veterans For Peace and a co-founder of Servicemembers For Ceasefire.

    “I am watching as our government unconditionally supports the very violations of international law that the Air Force trained me to recognize,” said Joy Metzler. “I was trained to uphold the values of justice, and that is why I am speaking out and condemning our government’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”

    I spoke with VFP leader Mike Ferner on Day 7 of his Fast. The NYPD had just told him and the other fasters that they could no longer sit down in front of the US Mission to the UN on the little stools they had brought. But Mike Ferner was not complaining. He said:

    “We go home every night to a safe bed, and we can drink clean water. We are not watching our children starve to death before us. Our sacrifice is a small one. We are taking a stand for humanity, and we encourage others to do what they can.  Demand full humanitarian relief in Gaza under UN authority, and an end to U.S. weapons shipments to Israel. This is how we can stop the genocide.”

    More information about how you can participate or support the fasters is available at
    Veterans and Allies Fast for Gaza.

    To arrange interviews with the fasters, contact Mike Ferner at 314-940-2316.

    The post Why Are Veterans and Allies Fasting for Gaza? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • At the core of most demands for the US empire, we’re asking for kindergarten ethics– is that a stretch? It’s what the climate movement teaches about our relationship with the Earth: not to take and take and extract and extract because we have a reciprocal relationship. For most of its history, the US has largely ignored this, and that remains the case when it comes to the string of accusations leveled against the current president of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré. And if all of us– the climate movement, peace lovers, people with basic compassion–want to save the planet, we need to stand against the attempts of the US and NATO/Western powers in trying to intervene in the Sahel’s process of sovereignty.

    Several weeks ago, Michael Langley, the head of US Africa Command (or AFRICOM), testified in front of the Senate Armed Services Committee and stated that Ibrahim Traoré, the current president of Burkina Faso, “is using the country’s gold reserves for personal protection rather than for the benefit of its people,” an absurd claim, considering that the US Department of Defense, which Langley works for, has stolen $1 trillion from US taxpayers in this year’s budget alone. What’s more, AFRICOM itself has a deadly, well-documented history of plundering the African continent, often in coordination with NATO.

    Take a guess why Langley might want to delegitimize Traoré’s governance and the larger project of the Alliance of Sahel States/AES (made up of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, all of which have recently allied under a confederation after recent seizures of power). Any takers? Hint: the answer is natural resources and military presence. Traoré has nationalized Burkina Faso’s foreign-owned gold mines in an attempt to actually use the land’s resources to benefit its people. Similarly, upon taking power in Niger, the current president, Abdourahamane Tchiani, nationalized uranium and banned foreign exports. Notably, a quarter of Europe’s uranium, crucial for energy usage, comes from Niger. Considering Traoré’s crucial role in developing the identity of the AES as one of the more vocal and charismatic leaders, targeting Traoré is part of a larger project by the US/EU/NATO axis targeting the AES project at large. Recently, this new AES leadership has launched new green energy and educational initiatives. Meanwhile, the US has pulled out of the Sahel states as the AES asserts its sovereignty in defiance of decades of Western-backed instability.

    Traore’s Burkina Faso is not the first Pan-African project to come under attack by the US/EU/NATO axis of power. Just as the vague claims from Langley serve to cast doubt on Traore’s ability to lead a nation, past Pan-African leaders who have dared to challenge imperialism and prioritize their citizens have also come under fire. For instance, former president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara, was assassinated in 1987 after putting the Burkinabè people’s needs first by rejecting IMF loans and demands, implementing nationwide literacy and vaccine campaigns, and spearheading housing and agrarian reform. Time and again, France and the US have taken decisive action against leaders who have promoted Pan-Africanism and environmental stability over the interests of Western powers. We’re watching it happen live now, and have a responsibility to stand up for Traorè and the AES before it’s too late.

    When a country doesn’t bend its knees to Washington, the standard US playbook is one of environmental death, either via hybrid or classic warfare. Venezuela has refused to grant US corporations unfettered access to its oil reserves – the world’s largest –  and thus has been forced to use them as a lifeline. The US has punished Venezuela by imposing unilateral sanctions that have prevented the proper maintenance of the country’s oil pipelines, resulting in harmful leaks. In the Congo–one of the lungs of the Earth–the West’s decades-long quest for uranium and other rare minerals has led to mass deforestation, destroyed water quality, and unleashed military forces that have killed millions. And of course, the US is backing the ecocide/genocide in Palestine in order to maintain the existence of a proxy-state in an oil-rich region.

    When the US military – the #1 institutional polluter in the world – “intervenes”, the only environmental outcome is climate collapse. And even when countries play by Washington’s rules, the US will still militarize, build more toxic bases, seek continued extraction, and create mass poverty. For the survival of the people and planet, we must resist this imperial expansion.

    Any movement concerned with transitioning from an extractive to a regenerative economy must stand against US and Western intervention in the Sahel and advocate for Pan-African projects and a multilateral world. The emergence of a multipolar world means that projects like the AES have partners beyond the region: during Traoré’s most recent visit to Moscow, he met with the heads of state of Russia, China, and Venezuela. The US, of course, threatened by the loss of its dominion, insists on pursuing a dangerous cold war against China, to contain China’s influence, refuses to cooperate on green technology, and plows through any region that it views as a battleground, be it the Asia-Pacific or the Sahel. And always at the expense of life in all forms.

    So if we are in a project for life, why, then, are we often met with hesitation in climate spaces to stand against this imperialist extraction? We need to reflect on a few questions. Whose lives do we sacrifice for “strategy”? Which environmental sacrifice zones are we silent about because of the “bigger picture?” What extraction and militaristic build-up do we let happen to theoretically prevent planetary death that is already happening via our own government down the road? Are we avoiding building connections with popular movements because of donors who only fund dead ends? We have a choice to make: allow the doomsday clock threatening climate death and total catastrophe to keep ticking or reverse course and breathe life into something new.

    Traorè’s historic meeting with China, Russia, and Venezuela is a glimpse of what’s on the horizon. As people of the world rise against imperialism and neocolonialism, it is up to us in the US climate movement to stand unequivocally in support of projects of self-determination.

    Although our lifestyles will certainly look different once we no longer have uninhibited access to the gold, cobalt, uranium, and other resources that are routinely extracted from the African continent and its people, we must prioritize building a more just and healthy relationship with the planet and all its people. If leaders such as Traore succeed in revolutionizing agriculture and resource extraction at a sustainable pace that benefits workers, what might that signal for a new world order in which exploited Africans and their lands do not form the cheap material base for the world? What might we build in place of extractive economies to usher in a green future for all?

    The post Fighting for the Planet means Sovereignty for the Sahel first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On April 22, militants from The Resistance Front (TRF), a group accused by Indian authorities of being linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist group, slaughtered 26 tourists in the resort town of Pahalgam in the Indian administered portion of Kashmir. This came as a rude shock to the Indian military establishment, which decided that rebellious sentiments in the region had declined. (In March 2025, an assessment concluded that a mere 77 active militants were busying themselves on India’s side of the border.)

    The feeling of cooling tensions induced an air of complacency. Groups such as the TRF, along with a fruit salad of insurgent outfits – the Kashmir Tigers, the People’s Anti-Fascist Front, and the United Liberation Front of Kashmir – were all spawned by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s August 2019 revocation of Article 370 of the Indian Constitution, which granted Kashmir singular autonomy. TRF has been particularly and violently opposed to the resettlement of the Kashmiri pandits, which they see as an effort to alter the region’s demography.

    The murderous incident raised the obvious question: Would Modi pay lip service to the 1972 Shimla Agreement, one that divided Kashmir into two zones of administration separated by a Line of Control? (A vital feature of that agreement is an understanding that both powers resolve their disputes without the need for third parties.)

    The answers came promptly enough. First came India’s suspension of the vital Indus Water Treaty, a crucial agreement governing the distribution of water from India to Pakistan. Pakistan reciprocated firmly by suspending the Shimla Agreement, expelling Indian military diplomats, halting visa exemptions for Indian citizens, and closing the Wagah border for trade.

    Hindu nationalism proved particularly stirred, and Modi duly fed its cravings. On May 7, India commenced Operation Sindoor, involving what were purportedly precision missile attacks on nine militant camps in Pakistan and the Jammu and Kashmir area controlled by Islamabad. The operation itself had a scent of gendered manipulation, named after the vermillion used by married Hindu women to symbolise the durable existence of their husbands. Two female military officers – Colonel Sofiya Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh – were tasked with managing the media pack.

    The Indian briefings celebrated the accuracy of the strikes on what were said to be the sites of Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, and Hizbul Mujahideen. Thirty-one suspected terrorists were said to have perished, though Pakistan insisted that civilians had been killed in this apparent feast of forensic precision. India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh would have none of it: Indian forces had only “struck only those who harmed our innocents”.

    The next day, it was operations against Pakistan’s air defence systems in Lahore that stole the show. The inevitable Pakistani retaliation followed on May 10, with the Indian return serve against 11 Pakistani air bases. What followed is one version: Pakistan’s military broke into a sweat. A cessation of hostilities was sought and achieved. Armchair pundits on the Indian side celebrated: India had successfully targeted the terrorist cells supported by Pakistan. If one is to read Anubhav Shankar Goswami seriously, Operation Sindoor was a stroke of genius, threatening “the Pakistan Army’s strategic shield against terrorists”.

    More accurately, this was a lovely little spilling of blood with weaponry between callow sibling throats, a pattern familiar since 1947. The two countries have fought four full-blown conflicts, two over Kashmir. Along the way, they have made the world a lot safer by acquiring nuclear weapons.

    There was something for everyone in this retaliatory and counter-retaliatory feast. India claimed strategic proficiency, keeping censorship on the matter tight. Pakistan could claim some prowess in shooting down five Indian jets, using Chinese weaponry, including the J-10.  With pride and pomp, they could even appoint Pakistani Army chief Asim Munir to the post of Field Marshal, an absurdly ceremonial gesture that gave the impression that the army had restored its tattered pride. It was to be expected that this was ample reward for his, in the words of the government, “strategic leadership and decisive role” in defeating India.

    The only ones to be notably ignored in this display of subcontinental machismo were the Kashmiris themselves, who face, in both the Pakistan and Indian administered zones, oppressive anti-terrorism laws, discriminatory practices, and suppression of dissent and free speech.

    Ultimately, the bickering children were convinced to end their playground antics. The fact that the overbearing headmaster, the unlikely US President Donald Trump, eventually brought himself to bear on proceedings must have irritated them. After four days of conflict, the US role in defusing matters between the powers became evident. Kashmir, which India has long hoped to keep in museum-like storage, away from the international stage, had been enlivened.  Trump even offered his services to enable New Delhi and Islamabad a chance to reach a more enduring peace. Praise for the president followed, notably from those wishing to see the Kashmir conflict resolved.

    In one sense, there seems to be little reason to worry. These are countries seemingly linked to sandpit grievances, scrapping, gouging, and complaining about their lot. Even amidst juvenile spats, they can bicker yet still sign enduring ceasefires. In February 2021, for instance, the militaries of both countries cobbled together a ceasefire which ended four months of cross-border skirmishes. A mere two violations of the agreement (how proud they must have been) was recorded for the rest of the year. In 2022, a solitary incident of violation was noted.

    A needlessly florid emphasis was made on the conflict by Indian political scientist Pratap Bhanu Meta.  This was an encounter lacking a “decisive victory and no clear political end”. It merely reinstated “the India-Pakistan hyphenation”. In one sense, this element of hyphenation – the international perception of two subcontinental powers in an eternal, immature squabble – was something India seemed to be marching away from. But Prime Minister Modi, despite his grander visions for India, is a sectarian fanatic. History shows that fanaticism tends to shrink, rather than enlarge, the mind. In that sense, he is in good company with those other uniformed fanatics in uniform.

    The post Squabbling Siblings: India, Pakistan and Operation Sindoor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • In this image from video, Bruce Springsteen performs during a Celebrating America concert on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 2021, part of the 59th Inauguration Day events for President Joe Biden sworn in as the 46th president of the United States. (Biden Inaugural Committee via AP)

    Donald Trump went off the rails again early in the morning of Monday, May 19, calling for a “major investigation” of Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé and other celebrities who endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, accusing them of taking illegal payments from Harris’ campaign for their endorsement.

    “Monday’s post was different in that it actually calls for retribution in the form of an investigation against Springsteen and Beyoncé, as well as Oprah Winfrey and U2 singer Bono,” the Arizona Republic’s Bill Goodykoontz reported. “I am going to call for a major investigation into this matter. Candidates aren’t allowed to pay for ENDORSEMENTS, which is what Kamala did, under the guise of paying for entertainment. In addition, this was a very expensive and desperate effort to artificially build up her sparse crowds. IT’S NOT LEGAL!”

    How will Attorney General Pam Bondi respond?

    It wasn’t long after Bruce Springsteen lashed out at what the singer/songwriter called the “treasonous” Trump in Manchester, England, on the first stop of his “Land of Hope and Dreams” tour, Trump responded on his social media platform, calling Springsteen “just a pushy, obnoxious JERK, who fervently supported Crooked Joe Biden, a mentally incompetent FOOL, and our WORST EVER President, who came close to destroying our Country“.

    Trump added: “Springsteen is ‘dumb as a rock,’ and couldn’t see what was going on, or could he (which is even worse!)? This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just ‘standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

    Trump and Springsteen represent two very different faces of American culture, one forged in the boardrooms, gold-plated towers of Manhattan, and realty television, while Springsteen made his bones in dive bars of New Jersey. Trump, with his bombast and branding, rose to political power by channeling discontent, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and racism into a populist wave. With Springsteen, “The Boss,” who also spent decades giving voice to that same discontent through gritty lyrics and blue-collar anthems, there is always a sense of positivity; that America can live up to its lofty ideals.

    The contrast is more than stylistic, it’s visceral and philosophical. Trump, a wannabe emperor, has often spoken of winning, power, loyalty from his acolytes, and spectacle. Springsteen sings about struggle, working-class dignity, and the quiet resilience of ordinary people. During Trump’s presidency, Springsteen became an outspoken critic, saying the country had lost its soul. Trump, meanwhile, has dismissed artists like Springsteen as out of touch elites.

    While Trump was mainly focusing on Springsteen’s remarks, for some inexplicable reason, he renewed his attack on Taylor Swift. Minutes before his Springsteen rant, he wrote: “Has anyone noticed that, since I said ‘I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,’ she’s no longer ‘HOT?’” MSNBC noted that “Swift, the top-selling global artist of 2024, has stepped away from the spotlight in recent months after wrapping her record-breaking international ‘Eras Tour’ in December. Trump lashed out at her during the 2024 election cycle after she endorsed Democratic nominee Kamala Harris.

    “The American Federation of Musicians of the United States and Canada will not remain silent as two of our members − Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift − are singled out and personally attacked by the President of the United States,” the group said. “Bruce Springsteen and Taylor Swift are not just brilliant musicians, they are role models and inspirations to millions of people in the United States and across the world. … Musicians have the right to freedom of expression, and we stand in solidarity with all our members.”

    At a performance after Trump’s rant, The Boss repeated his remarks about Trump at the E Street Band’s May 17 show at the Co-op Live in Manchester, England. Springsteen also repeated his statement on free speech before “My City of Ruins”: “There’s some very weird, strange, and dangerous (expletive) going on out there right now. In America, they are persecuting people for using their right to free speech and voicing their dissent. This is happening now.”

    The Arizona Republic’s Goodykoontz pointed out that “according to Verify, as long as candidates disclose payment [it is legal]. The Harris campaign paid Winfrey’s production company $1 million for helping produce a campaign rally in 2024. The Harris campaign also paid Beyoncé’s production company $165,000 after the singer appeared at a campaign event (Beyoncé didn’t perform).

    “The campaign has denied that it made personal payments to any artist or performer, with a spokesperson telling Deadline, ‘We do not pay. We have never paid any artist and performer.’ Payments to production companies and crews are routine.”

    In 2003, at a concert in London, The Dixie Chicks (now known as The Chicks) spoke out against George W. Bush and the Iraq War, triggering a backlash that had an enormous effect on the group’s career. The Dixie Chicks were at the time one of the country’s most popular acts. The statement triggered a backlash from American country listeners, and the group was blacklisted by many country radio stations, received death threats and was criticized by other country musicians.

    Was Trump threatening Springsteen by telling him that “we’ll all see how it goes for him!” when he returns to this country?

    The post Trump Calls For Investigations of Springsteen, Beyoncé, Oprah and U2’s Bono for Endorsing Harris first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Most of Mohammed Mohsen’s neighbors live in a state of deprivation and hunger, reliant on the World Food Programme for daily survival. When he is able to get donations from individuals abroad, Mohsen delivers food baskets to his community in the Al-Jawf governorate in northeastern Yemen. In pictures he sent me from his most recent distribution two months ago, thin children — one wearing a flower print dress, another a yellow beanie — stand next to large white sacks of flour, sugar and rice and yellow jugs of cooking oil.

    When he makes these deliveries to families, he says, ​“they feel happy and joyful, especially the children, and they hope it will continue.”

    The post How The United States And Israel Are Starving Yemen appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • The horrific images of children starving in Gaza, due to Israel’s cruel, inhumane blockade of all humanitarian aid since early March, shocks the world’s conscience. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recently announced plan to distribute aid, while forcing Gazans to move yet again, is a spurious cover for his and Trump’s ethnic cleansing scheme.

    Yet concrete action to end this calamity is hard to organize. How does a genocide end? And specifically, how do people of conscience, acting with majority support of the US public, organize to end it?

    The lack of true democracy in the United States, so evident in domestic policy on many issues, is even worse in terms of foreign policy, especially regarding the mostly ironclad support for Israel. However, cracks are showing, and they must be exploited quickly.

    Earlier this week, US Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) brought his S. Res. 224, calling for an end to the humanitarian blockade on Gaza, to the Senate floor. The resolution had the support of all Democrats, except Sen. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, and the two Independents who caucus with the Democrats, Senators Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Angus King (I-ME).

    The resolution was predictably blocked from getting a vote by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair James Risch (R-ID), but was significant as no other legislative measure in the year and half since the war on Gaza began has garnered such widespread, albeit partisan support (no Republicans supported it, nor have any called for a ceasefire or cutting off US weapons to Israel).

    A companion resolution in the House of Representatives will be introduced very soon, and while both would be non-binding, they represent progress in the long struggle to exert pressure on Israel, and Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank and East Jerusalem are keenly aware of US political developments. Additionally, the Senate will likely soon vote on Joint Resolutions of Disapproval (JRDs) to stop specific US weapons transfers to Israel. Sen. Sanders forced such votes twice since November, and while they failed, the upcoming votes should attract more support, and add to the pressure on the Israeli government, which of course is opposed by most Israelis.

    Legislative initiatives are far from the only strategies and tactics being employed by peace and human rights activists. Other recent and upcoming events and opportunities include the following:

    Activists led by Montgomery County, Maryland Peace Action showed up at new US Senator Angela Alsobrooks’ “Sick of It” rally protesting the Trump/Musk cuts to health programs, and had a strong showing about also being sick of the Gaza genocide, including confronting the senator. It may have had some impact, as she later signed onto Sen. Welch’s resolution, after having been largely silent on the genocide in Gaza, and voting against Sen. Sanders’ most recent JRDs.

    The impressive anti-genocide commencement speech by George Washington University student Cecelia Culver has received significant media coverage. She is now shamefully being investigated by the university. Similarly, New York University student Logan Rozos condemned the Gaza genocide in his commencement speech, and the university is withholding his diploma. Both students, along with other students similarly persecuted for speaking out for an end to the horrors in Gaza, deserve support and solidarity.

    Reprising and expanding an effort from last year, New Hampshire peace activist Bob Sanders is conducting a cross country bike ride to raise awareness of the dire situation in Gaza.

    Veterans for Peace and other allies are supporting a 40 day fast for Peace in Gaza.

    Groups in the Philadelphia will hold a People’s War Crimes Tribunal on May 31, building on the difficult but necessary advocacy aimed at Sen. Fetterman.

    Lastly, Do Not Turn on Us is a new initiative calling on military and National Guard personnel to refuse unlawful, fascist orders. While more aimed at stopping fascism in the United States, it certainly is a contribution to the overall movement to establish peace, human rights and the rule of law, domestically and internationally.

    Will any of these efforts, along with many others, overcome powerful political forces that perpetuate genocide, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid against the Palestinian people? No one can know for sure, but all are worthy of support and persistence. As Ms. Culver stated, none of us are free until Palestine is free.

    The post The Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza Must End Now first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Just as Nazi Germany sought the total elimination of Jewish life, the state of Israel, with full U.S. support, is now openly pursuing the systematic annihilation of the people of Gaza, the acceleration of mass displacement in the West Bank, and the denial of Palestinian nationhood itself. Those who dare to speak out are vilified, censored, or stripped of their livelihoods, ensuring complicity through coercion. The Black Alliance for Peace rejects this moral and political blackmail. True solidarity demands courage—refusing to be silenced or pacified as we witness, document, and resist this ongoing genocide. History will judge not only the perpetrators but also those who stood by in cowardly silence.

    BAP will not allow false accusations of antisemitism to be cynically weaponized as a political tool to suppress dissent, shield Israel from accountability, and provide cover for cowards in “Western” governments. The prevention of genocide  is a duty of all of humanity, and threats and symbolic gestures are not enough. The foreign ministers of Australia, Canada, Belgium, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom issued a statement this week condemning Israel for depriving Palestinians in Gaza of urgently needed humanitarian aid. While the state of Israel, as an occupying power, has a legal responsibility to provide aid, simply providing aid is not the issue. Israel imposed the blockade of food, water, fuel, and medicine creating and perpetuating ethnic cleansing, a genocidal act, a crime that most of the Western powers have supported by either giving material aid to Israel or doing nothing to prevent these war crimes.

    Now the UK, Canada, and France have issued a late, ineffectual, and hypocritical call for Israel to allow aid into Gaza, yet even at this late stage, they fall short of taking any legitimate action to stop the continuous unfolding horror. The Genocide Convention is clear – states have a responsibility to prevent and punish the crime of genocide. As the states of the “West” are unwilling to prevent and punish genocide, and they have shown time and time again that they are, then more decisive action is needed.

    The project of the zionist occupation is premised on the destruction of Palestinian life, culture, and community – it is the zionist occupation’s existence in this form that has resulted in this 19-month-long genocidal campaign and emerging Final Solution against the Palestinian people. The current positions of states of the “West” that call for aid while legitimizing the occupation of Palestine will at best enable limited and momentary relief, while ensuring the maintenance of this white supremacist, genocidal project. Instead, there must be immediate & concrete measures taken against the racist fascist zionist occupation that goes by the name of “Israel” – arms embargo, economic sanctions, suspension of credit, goods produced from any part of “Israel,” and the arrest and prosecution of prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders and further warrants for other genocide enablers such as Joe Biden and Donald Trump!

    Those with the power to do so can either take such measures or abdicate their humanity. Palestine will not be free until Zionism, along with all white supremacist ideologies, is defeated. BAP will continue to do everything in its power to ensure the final defeat of global white supremacy that is materially grounded in imperialism.

    We have chosen the side of humanity. Our lives, like the lives of Palestinians, are inextricably bound by this historical imperative.

    The post Justice Demands Action against Zionism, not Hypocritical Rhetoric from the States of the “West” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • On Monday President Donald Trump telephoned President Vladimir Putin and they talked for two hours before Trump put lunch in his mouth and Putin his dinner.

    On the White House schedule, there was no advance notice of the call and no record afterwards. The White House log is blank for Trump’s entire morning while the press were told he was at lunch between 11:30 and 12:30.

    Putin went public first, making a statement to the press which the Kremlin posted at 19:55 Moscow time; it was then 12:55 in Washington. Click to read.

    Trump and his staff read the transcript and then composed Trump’s statement in a tweet posted at 13:33 Washington time, 20:33 Moscow time. Click to read.

    If Secretary of State Marco Rubio and General Keith Kellogg, the president’s negotiator with the Ukraine and FUGUP (France, United Kingdom, Germany, Ukraine, Poland), were consulted during Trump’s prepping, sat in on the call with the President,  or were informed immediately after the call, they have remained silent.

    The day before, May 18, Rubio announced that the Istanbul-II meeting had produced agreement “to exchange paper on ideas to get to a ceasefire. If those papers have ideas on them that are realistic and rational, then I think we know we’ve made progress. If those papers, on the other hand, have requirements in them that we know are unrealistic, then we’ll have a different assessment.” Rubio was hinting that the Russian formula in Istanbul, negotiations-then-ceasefire, has been accepted by the US. What the US would do after its “assessment”, Rubio didn’t say – neither walk-away nor threat of new sanctions.

    Vice President JD Vance wasn’t present at the call because he was flying home from Rome where he attended Pope Leo XIV’s inaugural mass. “We’re more than open to walking away,” Vance told reporters in his aeroplane. “The United States is not going to spin its wheels here. We want to see outcomes.” Vance prompted Trump to mention the Pope as a mediator for a new round of Russian-Ukrainian negotiations, first to Putin and then in public.

    Kellogg is refusing to go along. He tweeted on Sunday: “In Istanbul @SecRubio  made it clear that we have presented ‘a strong peace plan’. Coming out of the London meetings we (US) came up with a comprehensive 22 point plan that is a framework for peace. The first point is a comprehensive cease fire that stops the killing now.”

    FUGUP issued their own statement after Trump’s call. “The US President and the European partners have agreed on the next steps. They agreed to closely coordinate the negotiation process and to seek another technical meeting. All sides reaffirmed their willingness to closely accompany Ukraine on the path to a ceasefire. The European participants announced that they would increase pressure on the Russian side through sanctions.”

    This signalled acceptance with Trump of the Russian formula, negotiations-then-ceasefire, and time to continue negotiating at the “technical” level. The sanction threat was added. But this statement was no longer FUGUP. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was omitted; so too Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk. The Italian, the Finn and the European Commission President were substituted. They make FUGIFEC.

    Late in the Paris evening of Sunday French President Emmanuel Macron attempted to keep Starmer in Trump’s good books and preserve the ceasefire-first formula. “I spoke tonight,” Macron tweeted, “with @POTUS @Keir_Starmer @Bundeskanzler  and @GiorgiaMeloni  after our talks in Kyiv and Tirana. Tomorrow, President Putin must show he wants peace by accepting the 30-day unconditional ceasefire proposed by President Trump and backed by Ukraine and Europe.” By the time on Monday that Macron realized he had been trumped, the Elysée had nothing to say.

    By contrast, Italian Prime Minister Meloni signalled she was happy to line up with Trump and accept Putin’s negotiations-then-ceasefire. “Efforts are being made,” Meloni’s office announced, “for an immediate start to negotiations between the parties that can lead as soon as possible to a ceasefire and create the conditions for a just and lasting peace in Ukraine.”  Meloni claimed she would assure that Pope Leo XIV would fall into line. “In this regard, the willingness of the Holy Father to host the talks in the Vatican was welcomed. Italy is ready to do its part to facilitate contacts and work for peace.”

    For the time being, Putin’s and Trump’s statements have put Rubio, Kellogg and the Europeans offside. Decoding the two president’s statements shows how and why.

    President Putin’s Statement


    Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76953 

    President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Good evening.

    Our colleagues asked me to briefly comment on the outcome of my telephone conversation with the President of the United States.This conversation has effectively taken place and lasted more than two hours. I would like to emphasise that it was both substantive and quite candid. Overall, [1] I believe it was a very productive exchange.

    First and foremost [2], I expressed my gratitude to the President of the United States for the support provided by the United States in facilitating the resumption of direct talks between Russia and Ukraine aimed at potentially reaching a peace agreement and resuming the talks which, as we know, were thwarted by the Ukrainian side in 2022 [3].

    The President of the United States shared his position [4] on the cessation of hostilities and the prospects for a ceasefire. For my part, I noted that Russia also supports a peaceful settlement of the Ukraine crisis as well. What we need now is to identify the most effective [5] ways towards achieving peace.

    We agreed with the President of the United States that Russia would propose and is ready to engage with the Ukrainian side on drafting a memorandum [6] regarding a potential future peace agreement. This would include outlining a range of provisions, such as the principles for settlement, the timeframe for a possible peace deal, and other matters, including a potential temporary ceasefire, should the necessary agreements [7] be reached.

    Contacts among participants of the Istanbul meeting and talks have resumed, which gives reason to believe that we are on the right track overall [8].

    I would like to reiterate that the conversation was highly constructive, and I assess it positively. The key issue, of course, is now for the Russian side and the Ukrainian side to show their firm commitment to peace and to forge a compromise that would be acceptable to all parties.

    Notably, Russia’s position is clear. Eliminating the root causes [9] of this crisis is what matters most to us.

    Should any clarifications be necessary, Press Secretary [Dmitry] Peskov and my aide, Mr Ushakov [10], will provide further details on today’s telephone talks with President Trump.

    Keys to Decode

    1. This is a qualifier, meaning there are serious differences on the details — Putin asked Trump to pause, halt or cease all arms deliveries to the Ukraine, including US arms shipped through Israel, Germany, and Poland. This is a bullet Trump hasn’t bitten, yet.

    2. Putin has made a firm decision to give Trump the “peace deal” he has asked for and wishes to announce at a summit meeting. In their call Putin was mollifying Trump’s disappointment at the failure of their plan to meet when Trump was in the Middle East. A Russian source comments: “Whatever concessions have to be made will be made only by Putin and only to Trump. The Europeans are trying to hog the headlines and turn their defeat into some sort of victory – Trump won’t let them have it and Putin won’t either.”

    3. Putin does not publicly admit the mistakes he made with Roman Abramovich and Vladimir Medinsky in March 2022 at Istanbul-I. They have now been corrected at the  consensus decision-making session with the military and intelligence chiefs (May 14 Kremlin session) and then on May 16 in Istanbul with Admiral Igor Kostyukov of the GRU seated on Medinsky’s right with General Alexander Fomin, Deputy Minister of Defence. For more details, click to listen.


    Source: https://ria.ru/20250516/peregovory-2017151081.html
    At top left, 2nd from left, Fomin, then Kostyukov (obscured) and then Medinsky.

    4. Soft qualifier. This means Putin did not agree with several of Trump’s points relating to intelligence sharing, arms deliveries, Ukrainian elections.

    5. Future tense. Putin suggested to  Trump that he stop Kellogg and FUGUP encouraging Zelensky. Putin made an especially negative remark about the role played by Prime Minister Starmer.

    6. This is a Russian lesson in escalation control. By putting the memorandum of understanding in Russian hands to initiate, Putin returns to the key parts of the December 17, 2021, draft treaty which President Joseph Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken summarily dismissed. Placing agreement on these terms first, before a temporary ceasefire, and making that ceasefire conditional on ceaseforce (halt to battlefield intelligence sharing and arms re-supply), Putin has invited Trump to choose between the US and FUGUP; between Zelensky and an elected successor;  and between his personal negotiator advisors, Steven Witkoff and General Kellogg.

    7. Reiteration of the formula, negotiations first, then ceasefire.

    8. Qualifier repeated – see Key 1.

    9. This phrase refers to the European security architecture and mutual security pact of December 2021, as well as to the two declared objectives of the Special Military Operation — demilitarization and denazification.

    10. Following Putin’s statement, Ushakov added: “other details of the telephone conversation. Among other things, Putin and Trump touched upon the exchange of prisoners of citizens of the two countries: the format of ‘nine nine’ is being worked out. The leaders also discussed their possible meeting and agreed that it should be productive, so the teams of the presidents will work out the content of the summit between Russia and the United States.”

    President Trump’s Statement

    Tweet source: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/114535693441367601

    Trump followed in a stumbling speech in the Rose Garden in which, referring to the morning telephone call, he said “they [Putin] like Melania better.”

    Just completed my two hour call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia. I believe it went very well. Russia and Ukraine will immediately start negotiations toward a Ceasefire [1] and, more importantly, an END to the War. The conditions for that will be negotiated between the two parties, as it can only be, because they know details of a negotiation that nobody else would be aware of. [2] The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent. If it wasn’t, I would say so now, rather than later. Russia wants to do largescale TRADE with the United States when this catastrophic “bloodbath” is over, and I agree [3]. There is a tremendous opportunity for Russia to create massive amounts of jobs and wealth. Its potential is UNLIMITED. Likewise, Ukraine can be a great beneficiary on Trade, in the process of rebuilding its Country.

    Negotiations between Russia and Ukraine will begin immediately. I have so informed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, of Ukraine, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, of Italy, Chancellor Friedrich Merz, of Germany, and President Alexander Stubb, of Finland, during a call with me,[4]  immediately after the call with President Putin. The Vatican, as represented by the Pope [5] has stated that it would be very interested in hosting the negotiations. Let the process begin! [6]

    Keys to Decode

    1. Trump accepts that negotiations should come before ceasefire.

    2. This amounts to rejection of Kellogg’s 22-point term paper first decided with Zelensky and FUGUP in London on April 23 and repeated by Macron the night before Trump’s telephone call; as well as rejection of Witkoff’s term paper discussed at the Kremlin on April 25.


    Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/76797
    From left to right: Witkoff’s interpreter, Witkoff, Putin, Ushakov, Russian interpreter, Kirill Dmitriev. For analysis of the term sheets, read this.

    3. Agreement with the business deal-making which Witkoff has been discussing with Kirill Dmitriev. For the deal beneficiaries on both sides, read this.

    4. This list includes two Germans, both Russia haters — Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Ursula von der Leyen, former German defense minister and supporter of the German rearmament plan to continue the war with Russia into the future. The British Prime Minister has been dropped by Trump, and also Polish Prime Minister Tusk. Included for the first time in this context are the Italian and Finnish representatives with whom Trump has demonstrated personal rapport. Research by Manos Tzafalias indicates that there is a substantial money interest in Finland for Trump’s associate, Elon Musk.

    5. Prompt from the Catholic convert, Vice President Vance.


    Vance and Rubio meeting with Pope Leo XIV on May 18. They invited the Pope to make an official visit to Washington. The last papal visit to the White House was in September 2015 on the invitation of President Obama and Vice President Biden.

    6. Trump has covered his disappointment at failing to hold a summit meeting with Putin in Istanbul on the afternoon of May 16 by dismissing the negotiations which occurred without him. For details of Trump’s abortive summit plan, read this.

    The post Putin-Trump Phone Call on Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • A $5 million gold card. A reality show for migrants. A birthright under assault.

    Let us be very clear: the Trump Administration does not want citizenship to be a right. They want it to be a reward for the loyal, the rich, or the compliant.

    To this end, President Trump’s bid to unilaterally end birthright citizenship for children born in the United States to undocumented immigrants is a modern-day Trojan horse masquerading as a concern for national security.

    This is not about protecting America, but redefining America from the top down.

    That redefinition is already underway.

    The Trump Administration’s plans to sell $5 million “gold cards” to wealthy investors as a path to citizenship and consideration of a pitch for a reality show that would “pit immigrants against each other for a chance at a fast-tracked path to citizenship” are not just absurd—they’re obscene.

    They reveal a government willing to reduce constitutional rights to commodities, auctioned off to the highest bidder or trivialized for ratings.

    This governing by performance turns a constitutional guarantee into a privilege for sale or spectacle. It’s part of a calculated effort to recast citizenship as conditional, transactional, and exclusionary. Whether by wealth, loyalty, or ideology, this emerging framework decides who is “deserving” of rights—and who is not.

    It is fear-based nationalism that disguises a deeper threat: the normalization of government power to decide who is entitled to rights and who is not.

    We see this in action with the Trump Administration’s stance on childbirth and citizenship.

    It’s a contradiction: while the Trump Administration decries falling birthrates and offers financial incentives for childbirth, it demonizes birthright citizenship for the very communities that are actually having children and contributing significantly to the economy without any guarantee of anything in return.

    Yet this brazenly hypocritical double standard is just a distraction, part of the political theater designed to pit Americans against each other while the power brokers rewrite the rules behind closed doors.

    The real power play rests in the Trump Administration’s efforts to gut the Fourteenth Amendment, sidestep the courts, and redefine who qualifies as American—all by executive fiat.

    Redefining citizenship by executive order is not governance. It is a bloodless coup—one that overthrows a constitutional republic founded on the rule of law—to reconfigure the face of the nation in the image of the unelected Deep State and its machinery of control.

    Enacted in the wake of the Civil War, the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to ensure that all persons born on U.S. soil would be recognized as full citizens—a direct rebuke to the Supreme Court’s infamous Dred Scott decision, which held that Black Americans could not be citizens. Its language is unambiguous: all persons born or naturalized in the U.S., and subject to its jurisdiction, are citizens.

    This principle was upheld by the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), which affirmed that children born in the U.S. to foreign nationals are entitled to citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment.

    That precedent still stands.

    Yet that legacy—of constitutional protections prevailing over prejudice—is now at risk.

    Some have recently argued—including the Trump Administration in legal filings—that the Fourteenth Amendment was intended solely to grant citizenship to the children of former slaves after the Civil War, and thus no longer applies to children born to undocumented immigrants. But if that logic is taken seriously, it undermines the citizenship of everyone born in America.

    After all, if the government—not the Constitution—gets to decide who qualifies as a citizen, then no one’s status is secure.

    If your citizenship depends on government approval, your rights aren’t inalienable—they’re transitory privileges.

    That’s not just bad law. It’s tyranny in the making.

    Despite Trump’s attempts to rule by fiat and executive order, presidents cannot pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they will honor.

    Yet perhaps even more concerning than Trump’s war on birthright citizenship itself is the administration’s underlying legal strategy to test the limits of judicial authority—specifically, to restrict the power of federal district courts to issue nationwide injunctions against unconstitutional actions.

    You see, this is not just an immigration battle, nor is it only a challenge to the Fourteenth Amendment.

    It is a calculated attempt to strip the judiciary of its ability to check executive abuse and a full-frontal assault on the judiciary’s role as a co-equal branch of government entrusted with interpreting the law and defending individual rights against majoritarian overreach.

    If successful, it would mark a seismic shift in the balance of powers, subordinating the courts to the whims of the executive branch.

    As James Madison wrote, the accumulation of all powers in the same hands may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.

    The same unchecked power used to deny citizenship to the children of immigrants today could just as easily be turned against you to strip you of your citizenship, based on your political beliefs, religious views, or failure to toe the party line.

    This is the danger the Founders warned against: a government that grants rights only to the loyal, the favored, or the compliant.

    And make no mistake: what we’re witnessing is another point along the slippery slope of the effort to recast birthright citizenship—not as a right—but as a privilege, subject to political approval and ideological purity tests.

    In this emerging framework, being born in America is no longer enough—you must also prove your worth, allegiance, and compliance.

    Worse still, this would set a precedent that constitutional rights can be rewritten by executive whim, paving the way for even greater erosions of liberty.

    If we do not hold the line here, this erosion of liberty will only accelerate.

    Birthright citizenship is more than a legal technicality. It is a cornerstone of American democracy and equality. The attempt to destroy it through executive power is a direct threat to the rule of law, the independence of the judiciary, and the future of liberty in America.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if the government can erase one constitutional right today, it can erase another tomorrow.

    This is exactly why the Founders drafted a Constitution that limits power and protects individuals, not just the popular or the powerful.

    Once we allow the government to decide who is “deserving” of rights, we’ve already surrendered the rule of law. What remains is not a constitutional republic, but an empire of arbitrary rule.

    The post They’re Coming for Your Birthright: Citizenship as Spectacle, Transaction, or Privilege first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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