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Category: United States

  • Nobody Saves the World

    Who will save the Palestinians from genocide? Nobody.
    Who will save Americans from moral, political, economic, and social decay? Nobody.

    Uncontrolled criminals prance around Gaza and West Bank neighborhoods, shooting whom they want, destroying what they don’t want, stealing whatever pleases them. The locals can’t interfere and the authorities have been told to protect the criminals from harm. Alarmed citizens in foreign neighborhoods organize to halt the criminality and are accused of illegal activity against the criminals, who are portrayed as victims. The appointed U.S. representative to the United Nations, previously a New York congressional representative, designates students who fought courageously to halt the genocide of the Palestinian people as anti-Semites. Some students are arrested for deportation, while the serial killers continue their “benevolent” activity of depopulating the earth. Is this science fiction of a dystopian world; no this is the reality of our dystopian world.

    A contradiction tells the true story.
    The students demonstrating against the obvious genocide of the Palestinian people, in which Israel, who claims to represent the Jewish people, is the perpetrator, are accused of anti-Semitism, of falsely labelling the Jewish community of being involved in the genocide, and supposedly, preventing some Jews from attending class. Nothing specific in these accusations and no names mentioned. If there have been anti-Jewish occurrences, they have been few and not alarming. Miscreants among the student protestors are incidental and are not representative of the mass of protestors.

    The contradiction occurs from the guardians against ant-Semitism asserting you cannot accuse all Jews of genocide because of the genocide tactics of Israel, and they accuse the protestors of being “Hamas managed” because a few of the student protestors may incline to favor Hamas. Adding to the contradiction is that labelling an organization, which notable and credible persons consider a “resistance organization,” and has never committed a terrorist action against the United States, is arbitrary and not a considered action. Not allowing people to express thoughts that do not violate laws or harm the American people is not thoughtful guidance; it is thought control, a perversion of the U.S. constitution. Giving more importance to a few Jews who could not attend class (Is this true?) rather than giving attention to the genocide of a population is demented.

    We realize the enormous problem the Palestinians have to survive the onslaught; we do not realize that this is a problem, a punishing and challenging problem, but is not the problem. The problem is the Zionist Israelis and their followers, who arm the murderers, steer the masses to accept criminally insane activities, determine our present, and command our future. Who are they and why do we have them determine our lives?

    If, at the end of the 19th century, a Jewish person was asked, “What does it means to be a Jew?” most would have stumbled over the question. At that time, a preponderance of Jews considered themselves “secular,” an expression that meant they did not want to be Christians or atheists. These Jews were mostly humanists, “a progressive philosophy of life that, without theism or other supernatural beliefs, affirms our ability and responsibility to lead ethical lives of personal fulfillment that aspire to the greater good” – American Humanist Association. Beneath the cloudy skies, there were reform Jews, Reconstructionist Jews, conservative Jews, orthodox Jews, ultra-orthodox Jews, and people who called themselves Jews by heritage. Zionist Jews made its entrance upon a disparate crew of worshippers and non-worshippers.

    Unlike other Jews who had interpretative connections to Judaism and positive reasons for expressing their alliance with Judaism, the Zionists had no connection to Judaism’s doctrines and an entirely negative approach. Their outlook that the Jews were a people who needed to be united in a nation, were subjected to cruel anti-Semitism that had no vindication, and only they knew the path to Nirvana did not agree with knowledge and attitudes of the 19th century Jewish community.

    A people is “a body of persons that are united by a common culture, tradition, or sense of kinship, that typically have common language, institutions, and beliefs, and that often constitute a politically organized group.” The late 18th century Jews, who lived in different countries, spoke different languages, and had different customs and histories did not fit the description. At the end of the 19th century, life was not perfect for European Jews (nor for anyone else), but they had made tremendous economic, social, and political gains, and the trend continued positive. With Jews represented in educational institutions and government positions, becoming well known in all cultural representations — music, art, theatre, and writing — and managing to become successful wage earners in many avenues of employment, the Zionist case that “Jews could never satisfactorily integrate into western nations” became more dubious with each passing day.

    Despite a century of repetition and recitation, little evidence exists of extensive deadly attacks on Jews in the late 19th century, during the era of incipient Zionism. A few isolated groups in France and Germany accused Jews of attempting to dominate the economy and culture. Due to these reason, some attacks occurred early in the century in Germany (Hep-Hep riots). Other happenings, which related to exaggeration of acts by Jews and the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881, occurred later in Russia. The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, an English-language reference work on the history and culture of Eastern Europe Jewry, prepared by the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and published by Yale University Press in 2008, relates,

    Anti-Jewish violence in the Russian Empire before 1881 was a rare event, confined largely to the rapidly expanding Black Sea entrepot of Odessa. The first Odessa pogrom, in 1821, was linked to the outbreak of the Greek War for Independence, during which the Jews were accused of sympathizing with the Ottoman authorities. Although the pogrom of 1871 was occasioned in part by a rumor that Jews had vandalized the Greek community’s church, many non-Greeks participated, as they had done during earlier disorders in 1859.

    The pogroms of 1881 and 1882, which occurred in waves throughout the southwestern provinces of the Russian Empire, were the first to assume the nature of a mass movement. Violence was largely directed against the property of Jews rather than their persons The total number of fatalities is disputed but may have been as few as 50, half of them pogromshchiki who were killed when troops opened fire on rioting mobs.

    In all of Europe, from what I have been able to confirm, less than 100 Jews were killed and possibly a few thousand were injured in anti-Jewish riots during the 100 years of the 19th century that witnessed the establishment of political Zionism. For context, compare those figures to two other atrocities during that time, which may be exaggerated and are rarely mentioned.

    Circassia, Caucasus 1864-1867, 400,000-1,500,000 perished or deported.
    Armenians, Turkiye, 1894-1896, 100,000 Armenians killed in Hamidian Massacres.

    The Zionist game plan in the late 1800s made no sense. Why would Western Jews, whose principal problem was verbal abuse from a few detractors, want to leave industrial nations and go to an unknown place and deprived area that had nothing to offer, except prevention by the local authorities and animosity by the local inhabitants? The East European Jews lived in difficult surroundings but had an escape route ─ from 1881 to 1914, more than 2.5 million Jews migrated from Eastern Europe. Of these, about two million reached the United States, 300,000 went to other overseas countries, and approximately 350,000 chose Western Europe.

    During the time that 2.5 million East European Jews migrated to Western nation, only 30,000 of them travelled to Palestine and 15,000 returned. It would take a century, if possible, to accommodate millions of new arrivals to Palestine. If the Zionists wanted to relive pressure on East European Jews, why didn’t they finance immigration to the United States? They’ll say that history proved them correct. Seems so, but not so; fortuitous events and plain luck enabled their agenda.

    From its beginnings to start of World War I, Zionism proved a stagnant adventure. During that period, about 80,000 Jews came to Palestine, not all of whom were Zionists, many being adventurists, utopian Socialists, and some seeking opportunities. By 1918, only about 60,000 remained. World War I conveniently destroyed the Ottoman Empire, and the mysterious Balfour Declaration revived the Zionist adventure. In addition, the League of Nations’ certification of the British Mandate in Palestine prevented the formation of a national Palestinian governing body and provided opportunities for English speaking European Jews to work in the British administration. Suddenly, there was no longer an impediment for Jews to enter Palestine. They came with the blessings of a Balfour Declaration that certified their validity and protection by his Majesty’s forces. From 1918-1922, approximately 24,000 Jews arrived in Palestine.

    The year 1924 was more fortuitous for the Zionists. The US Immigration Act closed the doors to mass Jewish immigration from East European nations and this Act steered Jews to Palestine. By 1931, Palestine housed 175,000 Jews. Did they arrive as Zionists or to seek an improved economic situation from their depressed surroundings? In the 1930’s, and until the end of World War II, Nazi persecutions of the Jews drove more than 60,000 German Jews to immigrate to Palestine (about 280.000 German and Austrian Jews migrated to other places, with about 125,000 managing to come to the to the United States).

    Revelations of the Holocaust and plight of Jewish refugees after World War II gained worldwide sympathy for the Zionist cause and propelled more immigrants to Palestine. The Cold War provided the most decisive benefit for Zionism ─ the Soviet Union support for an Israeli state drove the United States to compete for Zionist attention. Votes from both nations and a few bribes provided a narrow passage of United Nations Declaration 181 and established the Zionist state, one of the darkest days in world history.

    The rest is history, and that history is one of constant attacks on Palestinians, expropriation of their lands, ethnic cleansing, apartheid, oppression, battles between Israel and its adversaries, which Israel always won and from which it was able to expand its initial territory and dominate the original inhabitants of the Levant; not a proud outcome for Theodore Herzl, who, in his 1903 novel, Altneuland,

    ….did not foresee any conflict between Jews and Arabs. One of the main characters in Altneuland is a Haifa engineer, Reshid Bey, who is one of the leaders of the “New Society.” He is very grateful to his Jewish neighbors for improving the economic condition of Palestine and sees no cause for conflict. All non-Jews have equal rights, and an attempt by a fanatical rabbi to disenfranchise the non-Jewish citizens of their rights fails in the election which is the center of the main political plot of the novel.[

    The Zionist assumptions that the Jews were a people who needed to be united in a nation, were subjected to cruel anti-Semitism that had no vindication, and that only they knew the path to Nirvana have proven to be paranoid, diabolical, and senseless.

    A new people

    The Middle East and North African Jews who came to Israel were Arabs; the Ashkenazi were European; the Beta Israel were Ethiopians; and the Yemenites were from the Arabian Peninsula. Israel replaced the different languages, dialects, music, cultures, and heritage of these ethnicities with unique and uniform characteristics, and created a new people, the Israeli Jew, who spoke a new language, modern Hebrew. Reshef, Yael. Revival of Hebrew: Grammatical Structure and Lexicon, Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, (2013) reveals.

    While Modern Hebrew is largely based on Mishnaic and Biblical Hebrew, as well as Sephardi and Ashkenazi liturgical and literary tradition from the Medieval and Haskalah (18th century Jewish enlightenment) eras, and retains its Semitic character in its morphology and in much of its syntax, the consensus among scholars is that Modern Hebrew represents a fundamentally new linguistic system, not directly continuing any previous linguistic state, being a koine language (dialect) of the same language, based on historical layers of Hebrew, as well as incorporating foreign elements, mainly those introduced during the most critical revival period between 1880 and 1920, as well as new elements created by speakers through natural linguistic evolution.

    Destruction of centuries-old Jewish history and life in Tunisia, Iraq, Libya, and Egypt accompanied the creation of a new people. The Zionists, who complained about the persecution of Jews, wiped out Jewish history, determined who was Jewish, and required all Jews to shed much of their ancestral characteristics before they could integrate into the Israel community. The significance of the construction of a new Jew, in contrast to the reconstruction of an ancient Jew, has been given scant attention. The shaping of a new Jewish mind from a central educational source has distorted a population that previously had no central control and can no longer control individual destiny.

    Jews were the principal victims of the Nazi regime, and the Zionists have consistently publicized atrocities committed upon the Jews by their Nazi executions. The same Zionists, in their attempts to dominate the Palestinians, have adopted the Third Reich tactics they exposed and condemned. The evils of Nazism — separation of ethnicities, virulent nationalism, irredentism, constant warfare, racist laws, killing of opposition, punitive measures after an attack, ethnic cleansing, indoctrination of the young, and genocide are in the Zionist handbook and have been conveniently brushed away by Israel’s propaganda artists. The atrocities committed by the Nazi regime have earned their followers the adjectives of deranged and insane. Atrocities by the Israeli regime and its worldwide followers are lightly treated and tacitly supported by western nations and peoples. No epithets to their violent actions are applied. If this is a state that the Jews desire, a state built on oppression of other people, theft of their lands, and now an intentional genocide, then the Jews cannot escape the enmity of the world.

    Conclusion

    The real problem, which devours the Palestinians, is a Zionist movement that is irrational and demented. The ferocity and sadistic war against the Gazan people is the most cruel and unnecessary action against a people during modern times. Only the demented would follow up that war by reinvigorating it at a more escalated scale. We can understand the mentality that dictates the sadism by regarding expressions from Zionist leaders, a few of dozens. No rational leader or normal person would utter these disgusting words.

    “One million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail.” —Rabbi Yaacov Perrin, New York Times, Feb. 28, 1994.

    “The Palestinians are like crocodiles.” —Prime Minister Ehud Barak, Jerusalem Post, August 30, 2000.

    “They are beasts walking on two legs.” —Prime Minister Menachem Begin, in a speech to the Knesset, New Statesman, June 25, 1982.

    “We shall use the ultimate force until Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours.” —Deputy Prime Minister Rafael Eitan.

    “[When we build settlements] Arabs will only be able to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.” —Deputy Prime Minister Rafael Eitan

    “We shall reduce the Palestinians to a community of woodcutters and waiters.” —Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, 1960, The Arabs in Israel.

    “There is a huge gap between us and our enemies not just in ability but in morality, culture, sanctity of life, and conscience.” —President Moshe Katsav, Jerusalem Post, May 10, 2001.

    Trying to talk honestly, operate fairly, and cooperate with the irrational and demented is an almost impossible task. Talk of two-states, one state, and relieving the genocide goes nowhere. Even the academic analysis that indicates this is settler colonialism, of which there are elements, does not lead anywhere and may lead astray ─ the Western nations, to whom the Palestinians appeal, are not likely to admit to participation in settler colonialism. Best not to antagonize them. Settler colonialists need a reason for their voyages — free land, ample resources, and colonial protection. Palestine did not provide any of these ingredients for the original settlers. Palestine only provided Palestinians, waiting to be destroyed.

    The complacent world does not realize the immensity of the problem. Political, social, and economic life has been skewed by a control that dominates information and thought. The Ill equipped and easily manipulated are elected to highest political offices, partisan politics rules, and economic divide grows. Those, who have much, gain more; those who gain more dictate more. Defeat of Zionism is an international priority and can be done if the populations prioritize. If not ─ Nobody Saves the World. The demented command the future.

    The post Nobody Saves the World first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Chaos under Heaven: South Korea’s Deepening Political Debacle

    US Elites want South Korea to be a “dictatorship for democracy”

    Morse Tan, a high ranking former US State Dept. official, recently let the cat out of the bag on the US ruling elite position on South Korea’s Martial Law.  He declared that “Yoon declared Martial Law to preserve South Korea’s Democracy.”  Having previously labeled South Korea a model democracy, this is a No-Scotsman-move taken to absurdity.

    Now, Tan is not a current US government official, but he is an indicator of what the US national security state is thinking, in particular, what its neocon wing is thinking.  Tan also recently claimed that “the impeachment against Yoon is an insurrection” led by opposition party leader Lee Jae Myung “who wants to turn the country over to the Chinese communists”.

    As absurd and conspiratorial as these allegations sound, these are actually finely-tuned and well-honed Washington-CPAC talking points about Chinese threats and interference in Korea, and they are echoed endlessly, if histrionically by US flag-waving foot soldiers at South Korean protests and on Youtube.  These anti-China messages were also repeated in German State TV ARD’s documentary “Staatskrise im Schatten von China und Nordkorea” (State Crisis in the Shadow of China and North Korea), released to its German public television website on Feb 25th. The documentary claimed that China had hacked South Korea’s legislative election to put the opposition DP party into power, who are now taking their orders from North Korea and China to impeach YoonThere is clearly a highly convergent and disciplined campaign of anti-China propaganda around the impeachment. ARD has removed its documentary, but the damage has clearly been done.

    It’s impossible not to highlight the absurdity of Tan’s statement–“Yoon declared martial law (i.e. military dictatorship) to preserve democracy”.  And as a foreign national, Tan is breaking South Korean law by directly participating in domestic Korean politics.  But the free reign he is given, and the lack of disavowal or reprimand from the State Department–if only for his own safety–is very revealing.

    Tan’s position in the state department was Ambassador at Large.  These are powerful, Viceroy-type postings: they represent US policy and US interests on a (grand) strategic level. Consider other Ambassadors-at-Large: Averell Harriman, Henry Cabot Lodge,  Paul Nitze, Paul Bremer III, StrobeTalbott, Robert Gallucci. These are not individuals given to improvising and airing idiosyncratic personal opinions. As a former state Viceroy, with the enduring prestige and power of state connections, the platforms that Tan has been given to expound his views signal that he is expressing the direction of official doctrine, reflected both in Tan’s public statements, state media talking points, and the coordinated erasure of counterviewpoints.

    Strategic Unambiguity: What the US wants

    US policy on South Korea’s dictatorship/martial law is analogous to its policy on Taiwan: Strategic “ambiguity” in language, concrete support and escalation in actions. The “ambiguity” serves to pretextually mask war preparations against China. Of course, there is nothing ambiguous about the strategy, other than the desire for a fig leaf of plausible deniability.

    What the US wants from Korea is that which is strategically most advantageous for the US: a right wing Korean client regime to do the bidding of the US: escalate and prepare for war with China. This is a war that it has been envisioning since the early 2000’s and which was institutionalized by Obama’s “Pivot to Asia”. In fact, the reason Yoon was selected, elected, and lionized as South Korea’s president is because he was a walking neocon fulfillment list for this war.

    As these war preparations accelerate and intensify, a South Korean military dictatorship with the US in control of the South Korean military is the easiest and most advantageous configuration to enact these plans. The US will settle for a client-plutocratic democratic state, but dictatorship has actually been the historical norm since South Korea was created by the US.  Given the tight timelines involved, it is also possible for this configuration to be instituted again:  this project of war is urgent and time-bound–US natsec heavyweights have calendared 2025 and 2027 (“the Minihan” & “Davidson windows”) as the propitious date range to trigger war with China.

    Easy-peasy political proxy

    South Korea offers two key strategic advantages. First, geographically and historically, Korea has always been the on ramp and bridgehead for invasion into China. War with China has always started from the Korean peninsula or Taiwan island, usually as interlinked pairs. Second, South Korea has the world’s 3rd largest standing army–including reservists, 3.6 Million troops–,larger than the militaries of China and Russia combined. The US gets operational control over these troops immediately if there is war. War with China is thus most compatible and convenient with a South Korean dictatorship.

    There is very strong circumstantial evidence that the US knew beforehand about Yoon’s Martial Law declaration, due to the length and intricacy of the preparation and the aggressive military nature of the operation-which would have required coordination and communication with US forces in Korea. At the very least, they would have been aware. And regardless, they would have benefitted, geostrategically.

    Sworn testimony shows that Yoon’s gambit was to trigger war with North Korea (through drone attacks, missile attacks, shelling, false flag assassinations of opposition) to justify declaring Martial Law.  Only poor execution, North Korean forbearance, and rapid citizen mobilization prevented the seamless rollout of this military coup. Evidence has come out that Yoon was preparing repeated coups. Historically, all military coups on the southern peninsula have been greenlighted by the US.

    On that point, Morse Tan is the Nancy Pelosi of Korea: he functions like a Track II US envoy–cheerleading for a right-wing South Korean military coup, with just the slightest hint of plausible deniability.

    Note the dead radio silence out of Washington throughout this whole process: silence during the Martial Law declaration, silence after the rejection of Martial Law, silence after the impeachment, and silence throughout.  Not a word of critique or condemnation. Note also the deafening hush of the mainstream corporate media.

    Meanwhile, the fissures in SK society are approaching civil war.

    Institutional Civil War, Governmental chaos

    There is already intergovernmental war: on March 22 the CIO (Corruption Investigation Office, similar to the US Inspector General) raided the Prosecutor’s Office (similar to the Attorney General) for corruption, just days after the Prosecutor’s Office raided the CIO for evidence of warrant shopping on Yoon’s impeachment. This would be like the Inspector General raiding the Attorney General after the Attorney General raided the Inspector General.

    Yoon has been released from custody on a technicality (“counting hours, not days”) despite being indicted for insurrection. His co-conspirators are still incarcerated, but the ringleader is free, highlighting the absurdity of the ruling. The prosecutor’s office, ostensibly committed to prosecuting Yoon, did not even bother to file an appeal. The prosecutor’s office is considered to be Yoon’s private army–Yoon was the former prosecutor general of Korea, and he promised to create a “Republic of Prosecutors”.  That much he has been successful on.

    The Return of the Zombie

    Han Duck Soo, the impeached South Korean Prime minister (and former acting president) has just had his impeachment reversed yesterday, and is now acting president again.

    The constitutional court found that Han had violated the constitution (by refusing to appoint already approved justices to the Constitutional Court to rule on the impeachment issue) but they reinstated him anyway.  Never mind the irony that the court could have lacked standing to try his case if he had been successful in disabling the court. Han had also been tasked with appointing an independent counsel to investigate Yoon (to avoid the conflicts of interest that have appeared with the prosecutor’s office), but he had declined, leading to the current debacle of suspect loyalties and suspicious/delayed/tampered/sabotaged legal processes. One Constitutional Court justice claimed that the current political chaos was directly related to Han’s malfeasance and non-cooperation in these matters and found for impeachment–but she was a tiny minority of one in the ruling.

    The Constitutional Court’s ruling on Han Duck Soo was already problematic in that it was out of sequence. The fact that they ruled first before Yoon’s case, and ruled against impeachment is an ominous signal. Two other high officials, Kim Seong-hun, and Lee Kwang-woo (of the presidential security service), indicted for impeding Yoon’s arrest, have recently also had their arrest warrants rejected.  These are powerful figures who are now at large, with huge axes to grind. The trends are not in favor of impartial justice or peaceful resolution.

    Washington’s Dirty Hand

    The delayed impeachment ruling of Yoon itself is widely thought to be due to Washington’s pressure: it has been one month since the testimony was completed, but still there has been no ruling. This is abnormally long for what is an open-and-shut case: there is no doubt that Yoon declared Martial Law (he is on television declaring it!), and there is no doubt that he used extra-constitutional means–military force–to implement it and to try to prevent its rescission. But it’s widely considered that the ruling is delayed so that Lee Jae Myung’s appeal ruling (due on 3/26) will be decided before the Constitutional court’s ruling on Yoon is made public.

    This is because Lee Jae Myung, the opposition DP party chair, would be the leading candidate for president if the impeachment of Yoon triggers a snap election (in 60 days). He is currently 20+ points ahead of any other potential candidate by polling. The presidency would be his to take under normal circumstances.

    However, if Lee’s guilt is sustained by the appellate court, he would be stripped of all political rights for a decade, and the opposition DP would lose its strongest candidate.  Washington does not want Lee Jae Myung as president, because it’s understood that he would balance with China against the US, and de-escalate the coming war on China. Hence the delay. Opposition party representative Park Sun-won has verified that the US is exerting pressure through diplomatic channels to align the impeachment date as close to Lee Jae Myung’s sentencing as possible.

    On the Brink of Explosion

    South Korea is now a tinderbox on the brink.

    One million protestors hit the streets over the weekend, demanding the Constitutional court deliver its verdict immediately. Some of these protestors had been previously protesting in the snow for weeks, demanding justice.  From the right, there has been open aggression by right wing counter-impeachment protesters, paid up or pumped up with “anti-communist” fervor by religious leaders and the ruling party, repeating ARD and CPAC tropes on “Chinese communist intervention”. These shock troops have destroyed and rampaged through Seoul’s Western District Courthouse, assaulted opposition party politicians, as well as attacked Chinese tourists as “spies”. The right have openly spoken of reconstituting the North West Youth league–the genocidal red-baiting death squads of the Korean war.

    And so, it seems the American flag-waving beatings will continue until the anti-communist morale improves in the country.  Regardless of the rulings to come, South Korea’s destiny is precarious: more potential turbulence, more violence, even potential civil war. Certainly more twists and turns. If the constitutional court acquits Yoon, there will be mass popular protests in the millions: Yoon will be incapable of ruling and is likely to declare Martial Law again, if only to save his bacon (he is facing insurrection charges). Recent news has revealed that Yoon had plans to declare Martial Law multiple times.

    On the other hand, if the constitutional court successfully impeaches Yoon, the ruling party and its followers will pull out all the stops: street violence and a Maidan-type insurrection by the right wing cannot be ruled out.  The quiet acquiescence of the right as was the case after the Park Geun Hye impeachment is unlikely, given the heated propaganda allegations and the polarized ideology.

    So, South Korea is facing risky outcomes either way. The forces acting on this small country are immense. Whether Koreans get a clear diamond or spontaneous combustion from the immense pressure remains to be seen.

    There is a tiny, narrow path that would relieve pressure and facilitate a more peaceful outcome. If the US removes its finger from the scale in South Korean affairs–and disavows the US-flag-waving right that it is stoking and supporting–a single word of reprimand would deflate the South Korean rightwing like a sharp pin to a blow up doll.

    But that would take a geostrategic shift–a downshifting and downsizing dreams of US Hegemony, and a turn towards peace and win-win.

    Is the US capable of this? Or will it continue its dangerous ways? The fate of the peninsula–and possibly the planet–lies in the balance.

    The post Chaos under Heaven: South Korea’s Deepening Political Debacle first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump-Witkoff: “We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.” #2

    This is a continuation of my article yesterday “Trump/Witkoff: ‘We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.‘”

    In order to keep that article brief, I didn’t there go into the lies about history that Trump/Witkoff expressed, which they got from their Zionist (racist-fascist-imperialist-pro-Jewish, or “nazi”-Jewish for short) friends and acquaintances, which includes many of Trump’s political megadonors to whom Trump owes his 2014 electoral victory, and so Trump/Witkoff share those mega-billionaires’ values, which are Biblical values and therefore support Israel against the Palestinians and so make impossible any successful negotiation by them of the disagreements between Israel and Palestine. This continuation of the article will deal specifically with those historical lies, which Trump/Witkoff believe to be truths and show no interest whatsoever in re-examining the falsehoods that they believe from the Bible and from Israeli propaganda:

    Today (March 23rd) Larry C. Johnson addressed those historical falsehoods that Trump/Witkoff and other Zionists think to be true, and here is the opening of that article, which does such a good job of pointing them out so that there’s no need for me to do so, and I shall therefore merely comment here about it, after presenting its opening:

    *****

    Tucker Carlson’s Interview with Steve Witkoff Reveals Surprising Ignorance

    23 March 2025 by Larry C. Johnson

    I have recorded a video for Counter Currents on Tucker’s blockbuster interview with Trump’s “peace” emissary, Steve Witkoff. My editor is in a different time zone, so it may not go up until Monday. However, I do have some comments about what we have learned about Mr. Witkoff. For starters, he comes across as a descent, honorable guy. And, I am sure he is a smart lawyer who knows the real estate business in New York City and is a strong supporter of Donald Trump.

    However, he revealed a surprising depth of ignorance about the situation in Gaza and the war in Ukraine. I was shocked. One of the first bombshells to drop was his confession that he has not met with or talked to anyone from Hamas. All of his “diplomacy” with the Palestinians is via a Qatari cutout. If you are not talking to both sides and trying to establish your credibility, you cannot be an honest broker.

    Witkoff also admits that he was shown a Zionist propaganda film about October 7, which he claims shows evidence of multiple rapes of Israeli women by Hamas. We know, thanks to Max Blumenthal and the folks at the GreyZone, that there is no evidence to support this claim. [Actually, Wikipedia’s article “Hamas baby beheading hoax” is far better-documented and more informative about that “hoax” Trump/Witkoff still don’t even know is a hoax, though Alice Speri of “The Intercept” had first raised serious doubts as to its veracity on 12 October 2023, the day after the Israeli lie was asserted by Netanyahu and seconded by Biden; so, is Tulsi Gabbard actually failing at her job of writing and presenting the Daily Intelligence Brief to President Trump? How could Trump/Witkoff NOT know it was a hoax?] Witkoff makes no effort to hide his disdain for Hamas and accuses them falsely of using children as suicide bombers. Let me remind you of my earlier article, The Hard Facts About Palestinian Terrorism Debunk the Western Narrative. Here are some key highlights:

    While Israel and the West repeatedly and incessantly insist that Hamas is nothing more than one of the most deadly, formidable terrorist groups in the world, the data collected and published by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs debunks that narrative. The claim against Hamas is false. You don’t have to take my word for it, I am going to show you the data. The following tables and spreadsheets contain data collected by Israel between 27 September 2000 and 26 April 2024. [Israel continues to update the figures at the website linked above.]

    As an aside, Israel does not include the casualties suffered as a result of the 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas. Israel calls it, Swords of Iron. In contrast to the meticulous list of the name of every dead Israeli and foreign victim, who allegedly died at the hands of Palestinians, the Swords of Iron data does not name the victims, especially the 40 children that Israeli officials insist were killed by Hamas. I find that curious, to say the least.

    *****

    Larry Johnson’s closing paragraph opens with “Steve Witkoff is an intelligent man and is capable of learning new facts. But I fear that he is blinded by his own Zionist prejudices and will convince Trump to continue to support Israel’s campaign of genocide.” But how can “an intelligent man” believe the garbage he does? Especially if “he is blinded by his own Zionist prejudices” — which he so obviously IS? He CERTAINLY is NOT a person who ought to be negotiating between Israel (which he loves) and Hamas (which he hates). He is CLEARLY an ADVOCATE for Israel, AGAINST Hamas.

    Not only is Witkoff obviously stupid, but so too is Trump, for hiring such people in the first place. Their level of intelligence is scandalously low. That is dangerous for America, and for the entire world. The billionaires’ corruption of the U.S. Government has reached  such a nadir, so that everyone has good and sound reason to be afraid. America’s billionaire-ocracy (or aristocracy) have handed the White House off from one corrupt fool, Biden, to another corrupt fool, Trump.

    The post Trump-Witkoff: “We can’t accept any democracy in Gaza.” #2 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Revolution?

    I wonder how many people reading these words know the significance of April 19 to US Americans, and others, to all of us worldwide who value democracy and justice for all.

    What is April 19? It’s the 250th anniversary of the beginnings of the US American Revolution. On that day in 1775, in Concord and Lexington, Massachusetts, farmers and other working people stood their ground against redcoat British troops doing the bidding of King George III. It was the day of “the shot heard round the world” which eventually led to a victory in 1781 over the mighty British Empire after six years of war.

    It also led to the expansion of European American settlement across the continent in the decades afterwards, a process which nearly wiped out the Indigenous peoples who have lived here for thousands of years. Estimates are that 90% or more were killed either by disease or violent military action to force the survivors onto reservations so that the Europeans could take the land and the resources underneath it.

    Like so much else about this country, this 250th anniversary of the beginnings of what became the United States is a decidedly mixed bag.

    On balance, though, I see value to connecting the political uprising against the Trumpists with the uprising by revolutionary European Americans 250 years ago. Not by coincidence the success of this revolution was followed by the French Revolution, the Haitian Revolution, the Bolivar-led South American Revolution and eventually, in the USA, the Civil War that led to the end of the legal enslavement of African people. It led to the success of the women’s suffrage movement over 100 years ago, the rise of trade unionism, the Black Freedom movement in the 60’s which forced an end to Jim Crow segregation, the rise of Indigenous resistance and societal leadership, the LGBTQ movement, an environmental protection movement and more.

    Trump and his supporters want to take us backwards at least 90 years, to the time before the rise of industrial unionism and the CIO in the 30s and the existence of programs like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Their agenda is truly and profoundly un-American, and the mushrooming popular resistance movement should begin saying that loudly and clearly. We, our broadly based movement of movements in all its political, racial, gender, age and other diversity, are the “next one up” in the never-ending struggle toward a more just, peaceful and ecologically-connected world.

    Revolution or Reform?

    As is the case with any authentic mass movement that has a chance of winning, there are differing views on a range of topics, even as we are united on many, many issues and a generally progressive worldview.

    One very big one is whether what we are striving for should be viewed as defense of, as well as needed reforms to, the existing institutions of society or whether what we must be about should be viewed as revolutionary in its ambitions.

    For myself it’s the latter.

    A few days ago longtime progressive author and activist Michael Albert wrote about this issue of “reform or revolution.” He explored what his experiences have taught him about the difference between them. He called for a resistance movement today which had the maturity to appreciate that we need to develop a way of working so that all of us can join together in this existential battle for the future. Here’s how he summed up his main thoughts: “So, a reform and/or revolution bottom line: No to reformism. Yes to sustained reform struggles. No to mindless revolutionary posturing. Yes to wise, visionary long term commitment. As resistance grows and as views proliferate, stay together. We need each other.”

    Several years ago I wrote a book with the title, 21st Century Revolution: Through Higher Love, Racial Justice and Democratic Cooperation. In it I laid out what I saw as necessary to bring about the changes needed. As I concluded the book I quoted these words of a longtime friend and fighter for justice, the late Fr. Paul Mayer: “What history is calling for is nothing less than the creation of new human being. We must literally reinvent ourselves through the alchemy of the Spirit or perish. We are being divinely summoned to climb another rung on the evolutionary ladder, to another level of human consciousness.”

    In the end, it all comes down to the personal, how each one of us does the best we can, as lovingly as we can, as resolutely as we can, as clearly as we can, day after day, to help create a world for our children and grandchildren and the seven generations coming after us very different than the one we are living through right now. We cannot let them down.

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  • Film On Gaza Solidarity Encampments Launched Amid Crackdown On Activism

    A new documentary chronicling the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University will premier at the CPH:DOX Film Festival in Copenhagen on March 25, 2025. “The Encampments,” a film produced by BreakThrough News and Watermelon Pictures, “challenges the dominant media narrative by revealing the true spirit of the encampments—what it felt like to be there, the emotions that fueled the students, and what motivated their drastic action,” said directors Kei Pritsker and Michael T Workman.

    The film was produced by nonprofit media organization BreakThrough News, Grammy-award winning musician Macklemore, and Watermelon Pictures, a production company focusing on Palestinian-centered films.

    The post Film On Gaza Solidarity Encampments Launched Amid Crackdown On Activism appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • A Few Thoughts on Political Identity, Morality and Ukraine

    In the United States, for more than a hundred years, the ruling class interests tirelessly propagated anti-communism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy.

    — Michael Parenti, “Left Anticommunism”

    I will argue below that the liberal Russia-phobic meltdown over Ukraine is because allowing a truthful dialogue would reveal that it was a proxy war against Russia, provoked by the United States. This, in turn, would risk a political identity crisis among those for whom belief in “The Russia Threat” has been a touchstone of their political identity. What are the consequences when one’s deepest political beliefs are exposed as not just deeply flawed but morally wrong? What if one concludes or even suspects that they’ve been complicit in sending over one million Ukrainian soldiers — human beings — to their needless deaths? What if the 80-year narrative about a Russian invasion of Europe never had any basis in fact and that remains true today? Why are the real reasons that European leaders went along with Biden and now seek to sabotage peace in Ukraine? What if one discovers that NATO was an extension of US imperialism? If the “Russian threat” is called into question by the evidence, what else is one forced to rethink about the United States, one’s political identity and past behavior? What happens when it’s no longer possible for one to claim the moral high ground? I wrote the essay (abridged here) some five years ago and I’m reposting it because I believe it has special salience today.

    To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. — Charles Taylor

    In the early 1980s, which now seems a few lifetimes ago, I began offering a college seminar course titled “The Politics of Personal Identity,” quickly dubbed “POPI” by students. It was designed as a capstone course and limited to twelve seniors. Most of the identity groupings around today were addressed in readings, films and guest speakers. During the final weeks of the course, each student was responsible for giving a 45-minute oral presentation: “Who Am I? What Do I Believe? Why Do I Believe It?” This was followed by a lengthy period of questioning from the other seminar members and myself. Each of our guest speakers gave presentations on this topic and I presented my own on the last day of class. Germane to this was an exploration one’s political beliefs and their consequences was the critical component of the course and in what follows below.

    Before exploring identities like race, gender, class, ethnicity and others, we attempted to establish a framework by including the work of Canadian philosopher and political activist Charles Taylor and specifically, his pioneering ideas on the politics of identity. [Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).]

    For Taylor, “Selfhood and the good, or in another way, selfhood and morality, turn out to be inextricably intertwined themes. We are selves only in that certain issues matter to us. What I am as a self, my identity, is essentially defined by the way things have significance for me… We are selves only in that we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find an orientation to the good.” By his light, “Who I am” is most crucially this space of moral orientation “within which my most defining relations are lived out.”

    Taylor goes on, “My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame within which I can attempt to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” [Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989).]

    And this isn’t just a strong preference or attachment. It means that people are saying that if they were to lose this commitment or identification, “they would be at sea, as it were, they wouldn’t know anymore, for an important range of questions, what the significance of things was for them.”

    There is a sense of the ‘self’ that conveys to these beings of requisite depth to their identity or those who at the very least are struggling to find one. Others, who we judge as shallow, also have commitments but we see them as conventional and not the result of deep searching. And, as Taylor notes, those without any framework at all are pathologically amoral.

    We also read some work by the character actor and playwright Wallace Shawn, including this passage about how to act in a morally responsible way:

    My daily obligation was, first and foremost, to learn how to make a correct and careful study of the world. If I didn’t know what the world was like, how could I know what action to take? And so it turns out that morality insists upon accuracy — painstakingly steady and researched. (Wallace Shawn, Appendix to Aunt Dan & Lemon (1987).

    Shawn’s prescriptive obligation to study how the world works is especially difficult given that Americans are the most heavily propagandized citizens in the word. In any event, I hoped that Shawn’s words would resonate with the students, most of whom had also taken my intro course: International Politics: How the World Works, the bookend course to POPI. I was gratified that virtually all of the seminar participants made the connection and often referenced the intro course. (Note: I’m painfully aware of the immense difference between an intro course with two sessions for fourteen weeks to examine a subject versus the forced, frustrated and episodic nature of most exchanges about politics on Facebook and elsewhere.)

    And further, one cannot be a self strictly on one’s own. For starters, who did I interact with that helped me achieve self-realization? Who are those around me right now who contribute to my self-understanding? Beyond the standard sources, how widely have I searched? Is there evidence to support my conclusions — in this case about the USSR/Russia — or am I relying only on tradition, feelings and the accepted authorities? How has the “community” or culture within which I identify, affected my moral stands? Finally, it’s virtually impossible to have a sense of who/where I am without some grasp of how we got there. This can be painful and tempting to avoid, especially as one advances in age and possible regrets loom. Taylor asks us to consider what type of life is worth living? “E.g., what would a rich meaningful life, as against an empty one, or what would constitute an honorable life or the like?”

    In sum, my argument was that there’s a virtually seamless web connecting knowing ourselves, knowing how the world works, and knowing that something needs to be done — starting with oneself. Uncertainty, deliberation and experimentation about the specific course of action don’t detract from the wisdom found in the Asian proverb “To know and not to act is not to know.”

    Change is scary. My cautionary note to younger folks was that the older one gets the harder it is to rethink one’s political identity and question beliefs in which one has a considerable material and especially, psychic investment. Too many people adopt conventional liberal views and behavior in hopes this will stave off the gnawing feeling that something is seriously wrong.

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

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  • Trump’s Policy toward Latin America

    During his first term, President Donald Trump exerted a “maximum pressure” campaign against perceived U.S. adversaries in Latin America and elsewhere. Among other hardline policies, he levelled crippling sanctions against Venezuela—leading, ironically, to a mass exodus of Venezuelans to the United States—and reversed former President Barack Obama’s rapprochement with Cuba. But just how committed is Trump to fighting communism in Latin America at this particular moment—in Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua? Today, it’s anyone’s guess.

    Trump’s recent threats against Panama, Canada, and Greenland, on top of his clash with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, take the spotlight off the “real enemies,” as usually defined by Washington. In that sense, Trump’s foreign policy actions in the first two months of his second administration are a far cry from his first, when regime change was the unmistakable goal.

    In sharp contrast to the rhetoric of his first administration, in his March 4 address to the Joint Session of Congress Trump made no reference to Nicolás Maduro, Miguel Díaz-Canel, or Daniel Ortega. It’s even unclear whether Trump will pursue the use of international sanctions, which he ratcheted up against Venezuela and Cuba in his first government. So far, Trump has indicated that his use of “tariffs as punishment” may be preferable to international sanctions, which, as one insider stated, the president “worries are causing countries to move away from the U.S. dollar.”

    Unlike Trump’s policies on immigration, trans rights, and taxation, his Latin American policy is plagued by vacillations and uncertainties, a sign of his deepening reliance on a transactional approach to foreign policy. The anti-communist hardliners in and outside of the Republican party are not pleased.

    The Venezuelan Pendulum

    Take Venezuela as an example. The Venezuelan opposition led by María Corina Machado had all the reason to be upbeat when Trump won in November and then chose Latin America hawk Marco Rubio as Secretary of State.

    “Sadly, Venezuela is governed by a narco-trafficking organization,” Rubio declared at his confirmation hearing, in which his appointment was unanimously ratified. He then said that “the Biden administration got played” when it negotiated with Maduro in late- 2022 and issued a license to Chevron, which is “providing billions of dollars into the regimes’ coffers.” With regard to Cuba, Rubio issued an ominous warning: “The moment of truth is arriving, Cuba is literally collapsing.”

    Events in Syria added to the euphoria on the right. Just days before Trump’s inauguration, Machado told the Financial Times, “Don’t you think [the generals supporting Maduro] look in the mirror and see the generals which Assad left behind?”

    But then came the friendly encounter between Trump’s envoy for special missions Richard Grenell and Maduro in Caracas in late January, when Maduro agreed to turn over six U.S. prisoners in Venezuela and facilitate the return of Venezuelan immigrants from the United States. Days later, the Biden-approved license with Chevron for exploiting Venezuelan oil, constituting a quarter of the nation’s total oil production, was allowed to roll over. At the same time, Grenell declared that Trump “does not want to make changes to the [Maduro] regime.”

    To complicate matters further, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would cancel Biden’s extension of Temporary Protected Status for over 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants, on grounds that “there are notable improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health, and crime that allow for these nationals to be safely returned to their home country.”

    These developments did not sit well with the Miami hawks and the Venezuelan opposition. Notorious Miami Herald journalist Andres Oppenheimer put it forcefully: “The handshake of Grenell and Maduro fell like a bucket of cold water on many sectors of the Venezuelan opposition… and was like a legitimation of the Maduro government.” Oppenheimer went on to point out that although the Trump government denied it had cut a deal with Maduro, “many suspicions have been raised and will not dissipate until Trump clarifies the matter.”

    After Grenell’s trip to Venezuela, the issue of the renewal of Chevron’s license took surprising twists and turns. In a video conversation on February 26, Donald Trump Jr. told María Corina Machado that just an hour before, his father had tweeted that Chevron’s license would be discontinued. Following a burst of laughter, a delighted Machado directed remarks at Trump Sr.: “Look, Mr. President, Venezuela is the biggest opportunity in this continent, for you, for the American people, and for all the people in our continent.” Machado appeared to be attempting to replicate the deal between Zelensky and Trump involving Ukraine’s mineral resources.

    But simultaneously, Mauricio Claver-Carone, the State’s Department’s Special Envoy for Latin America, told Oppenheimer that the license granted Chevron was “permanent” and automatically renewed every six months. Then, just one week later, Trump reversed his position again. Axios reported that the latest decision was due to pressure from three Florida GOP House members who threatened to withhold votes for Trump’s budget deal. Trump allegedly acknowledged this privately, telling insiders: “They’re going crazy and I need their votes.”

    Trumpism’s Internal Strains

    Trump’s threats against world leaders come straight out of his 1987 book The Art of the Deal. For some loyalists, the strategy is working like magic. Trump’s approach can be summarized as “attack and negotiate.” “My style of deal-making is quite simple,” he states in the book. “I aim very high, and then I just keep pushing and pushing… to get what I’m after.”

    This is precisely what happened when Trump announced plans to “reclaim” the Panama Canal, prompting a Hong Kong-based firm to reveal plans to sell the operation of two Panamanian ports to a consortium that includes BlackRock. Not surprisingly, Trump took credit for the deal.

    A similar scenario played out in the case of Colombia, in which President Gustavo Petro yielded on U.S. deportation flights to avert trade retaliations. For the same reasons, Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum began sending 10,000 troops to the northern border to combat irregular crossings and then, on March 6, asked Trump by phone: “’How can we continue to collaborate if the U.S. is doing something that hurts the Mexican people?” In response, Trump temporarily suspended the implementation of 25 percent tariffs on Mexican goods.

    In The Art of the Deal, Trump boasts about this strategy of bluffing, such as when he told the New Jersey Licensing Commission that he was “more than willing to walk away from Atlantic City if the regulatory process proved to be too difficult or too time-consuming.” Similarly, Trump has repeatedly stated that the United States does not need Venezuelan oil. In fact, global oil volatility and the possibility that other nations will gain access to Venezuela’s vast oil reserves are matters of great concern to Washington.

    The “Art of the Deal” approach to foreign policy exemplifies Trump’s pragmatic tendency. The Maduro government and some on the left welcome the pragmatism because it leaves open the possibility of concessions by Venezuela in return for the lifting of sanctions. Venezuelan government spokespeople, at least publicly, give Trump the benefit of the doubt by attributing his annulment of Chevron’s license and other adverse decisions to pressure from Miami’s far right. The Wall Street Journal reported that several U.S. businesspeople who traveled to Caracas and “met with Maduro and his inner circle say the Venezuelans were convinced that Trump would… engage with Maduro much like he had with the leaders of North Korea and Russia.”

    But this optimism overlooks the contrasting currents within Trumpism. Although the convergences are currently greater than the differences, priorities within the MAGA movement sometimes clash. On the one hand, right-wing populism spotlights the issue of immigration, anti-“wokism,” and opposition to foreign aid, all designed to appeal beyond the Republican Party’s traditional upper and upper-middle class base of support. On the other hand, the conventional far right calls for nothing short of regime change and destabilization actions against Venezuela and Cuba. While progressives have sharply different views on Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, the far-right hawks currently define all three governments as “leftist” and, in the recent words of Rubio, “enemies of humanity.”

    Maduro’s agreement to collaborate on the repatriation of immigrants in return for the renewal of the Chevron license exemplifies the conflicting priorities within Trumpism. For the anti-left far right, the alleged deal was a “betrayal” of principles by Washington, while for the right-wing populists it was a victory for Trump, especially given the enormity of Venezuela’s immigrant population.

    Another example of clashing priorities upheld by the two currents is the Trump administration’s decision to cut foreign aid programs to a bare minimum. In his recent address to Congress, Trump denounced an $8 million allotment to an LGBTQ+ program in an African nation “nobody has heard of,” and other alleged woke programs. Even Florida’s hawk senator Rick Scott has questioned the effectiveness of foreign aid, saying: “Let’s see: the Castro regime still controls Cuba, Venezuela just stole another election, Ortega is getting stronger in Nicaragua.” Scott’s statement reflects Trump’s transactional thinking regarding the Venezuelan opposition: too many dollars for regime-change attempts that turned out to be fiascos.

    In contrast, hawk champion Oppenheimer published an opinion piece in the Miami Herald titled “Trump’s Foreign Aid Cuts are a Boon for Dictators in China, Venezuela and Cuba.”

    The issue of U.S. aid has also produced infighting from an unexpected source: within the Venezuelan right-wing opposition. Miami-based investigative journalist Patricia Poleo, a long-time opponent of Hugo Chávez and Maduro, has accused Juan Guaidó and his interim government of pocketing millions, if not billions, granted them by the U.S. government. Poleo, now a U.S. citizen, claims that the FBI is investigating Guaidó for mishandling the money.

    The influence of the anti-leftist component of Trumpism can’t be overstated. Trump has become the leading inspiration of what has been called the new “Reactionary International,” which is committed to combatting the Left around the world. Furthermore, the hawks who have expressed interest in toppling the Maduro government (which the populist current is not at all opposed to either)—including Rubio, Elon Musk, Claver-Carone, and National Security Advisor Michael Waltz—populate Trump’s circle of advisors.

    It is not surprising that during the honeymoon phase of Trump’s presidency, a populist wish list would receive considerable attention. But the annexation of the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland is unrealizable, as is the conversion of Gaza into a Riviera of the Middle East. His tariff scheme is not far behind. Furthermore, while his use of intimidation has helped him gain concessions, the effectiveness of this bargaining tactic is limited—threats lose power when endlessly repeated. Finally, Trump’s unfulfilled promises to lower food prices and achieve other economic feats will inevitably add to the disillusionment of his supporters.

    Trump loathes losing and, in the face of declining popularity, he is likely to turn to more realistic goals that can count on bipartisan support in addition to endorsement from the commercial media. In this scenario, the three governments in the hemisphere perceived to be U.S. adversaries are likely targets. Short of U.S. boots on the ground—which would not garner popular support—military or non-military action cannot be discarded against Venezuela, Cuba, or Nicaragua, or, perhaps, Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua.

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  • How Miriam Adelson Exemplifies the Supreme Court’s Rulings that Political Corruption Is Protected by the 1st Amendment

    Here is a case that so richly displays the thorough-going corruptness of the U.S. Government so that to document it in its structural details — as will be done here — is to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the U.S. is, in fact, a dictatorship (controlled by a Deep State consisting not of its bureaucracy but of its billionaires), not at all a democracy, regardless of what the U.S. Constitution says; and it also displays how flagrantly our Constitution is routinely being violated by this Government, which, consequently, now must be seriously doubted as to this Government’s very legitimacy:

    Donald Trump as President is doing the work of his third-biggest political donor the Israeli-American thirty-billionaire Miriam Adelson, who demands Governmental punishment of students who protest against — or even just privately oppose — the Israel-U.S. ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

    While Israel provides the troops, America (under both Biden and now Trump) provides the weapons, ammunition, and satellite intelligence, that together are producing the slaughter in, and ethnic cleansing of, Gaza; and Adelson wants it to continue so as to eliminate completely (via extermination and/or expulsion) the people who live there. Students in America who have joined public demonstrations against this ethnic-cleansing are called by Adelson and her hired agent, Trump, “anti-Semites” and supporters of “terrorists” for opposing it. Here’s how this is playing out today:

    On March 19, the Wall Street Journal headlined “Columbia Is Nearing Agreement to Give Trump What He Wants: The school faces a deadline to yield to administration demands in negotiations over federal funding,” and reported that, in order to get Trump “to restore $400 million in federal funding,” Columbia University will punish enough the students who opposed the ethnic-cleansing of Gaza.

    The U.S. Government’s poster-boy of this ‘anti-Semitism’ and support of ‘terrorists’ is the Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil, whom Adelson-Trump and their Administration, have in detention awaiting forced expulsion from the United States. On March 11, CNN headlined “Who is Mahmoud Khalil? Palestinian activist detained by ICE over Columbia University protests” and reported that, “‘As a Palestinian student, I believe that the liberation of the Palestinian people and the Jewish people are intertwined and go hand-by-hand and you cannot achieve one without the other,’ he told CNN last spring when he was one of the negotiators representing student demonstrators during talks with Columbia University’s administration.” Here is the 2-minute video of him being arrested while his wife cries “I don’t know what to do!” and the federal agents refuse to identify themselves, as they drive her husband away in an unmarked car. Trump wants Khalil to be flown out of the country as soon as possible.

    Also on March 19, City Journal, of the right-wing, rabidly “corporationist” (as Mussolini proudly described himself) Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which had been set up and maintained by Ronald Reagan’s CIA chief Bill Casey and some billionaires, headlined “Who Are the Shadowy Figures Defending Mahmoud Khalil? The accused Hamas sympathizer is shrouded in mystery—and so are his supporters.” In the fascist world, not merely freedom of speech and of the press cannot be tolerated, but also freedom-of-association (which the Supreme Court accepts as being protected in order for the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment to be meaningful — even billionaires need freedom-of-association) cannot be tolerated — and this is today’s U.S.A. Whereas during the long period of U.S. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and of the Senator Joseph R. McCarthy witch-hunts against communists, freedom-of-association did not exist in the United States, it started to exist in order to protect businessmen, in Roberts v. United States Jaycees (1984), and then further in order to protect discrimination against homosexuals, in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale (2000). But now, freedom-of-association likewise might, yet again, no longer exist in the U.S.

    Also on March 19, Politico made public another case, which, in some ways, is even more extreme than that of Khalil, especially against freedom-of-association. It headlined “Badar Khan Suri, a fellow at Georgetown, says he is being punished because of the suspected views of his wife, a U.S. citizen with Palestinian heritage. Masked immigration agents arrested a Georgetown University fellow and told him his visa had been revoked, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.” The Departments of State and of Homeland Security were involved in this action. The article says that Dr. Suri has no criminal record, and that “Suri is a postdoctoral fellow at the Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, which is part of the [Georgetown] university’s School of Foreign Service. According to his court petition and a university directory, he is teaching a class this semester on ‘Majoritarianism and Minority Rights in South Asia.’ Suri has a Ph.D. in peace and conflict studies from a university in India.” Suri has been removed from his home and his wife in Virginia, and — en-route to a detention facility in Texas — is reported to be at “an Immigration and Customs Enforcement ‘staging’ center at the Alexandria, Louisiana, airport,” ultimately to be flown back to India. This is like, if the totalitarian-minded long-time and founding chief of the ‘Justice’ Department’s FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, were now the President of the United States (which, fortunately, he never was) — he, too, routinely violated the Constitution and broke the law that he was supposedly enforcing.

    Here is how the U.S. Supreme Court itself has produced these and other such results — blatant and increasingly routine violations of the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment (among others) (as a therefore treasonous — anti-U.S.-Constitution — Supreme Court):

    The Court’s 1976 Buckley v. Valeo ruling said that the existing political-campaign-expenditure ceiling imposed “direct and substantial restraints on the quantity of political speech” and so the Court invalidated three expenditure limitations as violating the First Amendment. In other words: they said that money is “speech” — the more spending of it in politics, the better (although the First Amendment says nothing about the “quantity” of “political speech” — the Supreme Court there invented that concern, though the Founders never expressed it) — and so any limitations on campaign-spending would violate the First Amendment’s free-speech clause. (The Court’s ruling even included the brazenly stupid falsehood: “The quantity of communication by the contributor does not increase perceptibly with the size of his contribution, since the expression rests solely on the undifferentiated, symbolic act of contributing.” So, a million-dollar contribution is merely “symbolic.”) The overall limitations on expenditures by federal candidates and their committees were therefore struck down by the Court, as being inconsistent with (their lie-based interpretation of) freedom-of-speech. Thus (despite their lie that all of this is merely “symbolic” — which they knew wasn’t at all true), people who donate more to politicians should have a bigger say in who wins office than people who can’t. This ruling — granting the rich person a bigger say in ‘our’ government than the poor person has — is widely considered to have opened the floodgates for corruption to control the U.S. Government.

    The Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling said that the anti-corruption interest is not sufficient to displace the speech in question from Citizens United, and that “independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” This ruling — based on that blatant lie by the U.S. Supreme Court — is widely considered to be the death-knell for any hope of democracy in the United States, because it opened the floodgates for corruption to rule the U.S. Government at the other end — this time, not at the candidates-end (like Buckley) but at the donors-end (the Citizens United donors-group), by the ruling’s alleging that a “corporation” is a “person,” whose free-speech right can be expressed by its political-campaign donations, without any legal limit (the more that corporations donate to political campaigns, the better, according to the U.S. Supreme Court).

    This leaves American politics in a perfectly libertarian (or “neoliberal”) condition, such that property (a person’s net worth — wealth) reigns (on a one-dollar-one-vote basis); persons (one-person-one-vote) really don’t rule in America, because the super-rich need only to donate enough to the most-corrupt candidates so as to defeat any honest political competitor (i.e., any candidate who actually intends to fulfill on his/her public campaign-promises to the voters). Only the campaign-promises (usually made in private) to the mega-donors will be actuated as governmental policies once the winner is in office. And the scientific findings unanimously CONFIRM that at least ever since 1980, this is the way it is, in the United States.

    And once this is the way it is, the public (the voters, the consumers, the workers — the public, as opposed to the OWNERS of corporations — and especially the billionaires who control the corporations) are, in any situation that involves their personal rights as against the corporate owners, actually powerless, because the super-rich now control the Government and can always far outspend (on lawyers and anything else) any one of them (any non-rich person). This is NOT “equal justice under law.” Or, as one of the mega-billionaires himself said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (There are only around a thousand billionaires in the U.S., and they rule over the entire population of 340 million.) That statement, made in 2006, is by now, very clearly an understatement: the billionaires have already won. The U.S. Constitution already means only what America’s super-rich WANT it to mean. If you want it to mean something else than what they want it to mean, then you will need to be able to outspend them to achieve that in the actual Government. (And the billionaires control almost all of the ‘nonprofits’ that advertise they represent “the public interest”; so, if what you want is inconsistent with what the billionaires want, then you won’t get any help from them to make that case.) This is the present reality, and only a Second American Revolution might be able to restore some democracy here, because, right now, we don’t have any — none, at all, in the United States of America. This is a proven fact — proven many times over. Anyone who continues to refer to the U.S. as being a “democracy” is either a fool or a liar. And America isn’t a dictatorship by “the bureaucrats,” nor by “the Democrats,” nor by “the Republicans” — it is being done by the billionaires, ones such as Adelson on the Republican Party side, and ones such as Soros on the Democratic Party side, who are collectively puppet-masters for the entire corrupt political show, which show elicits anger from the public against the puppets, instead of against the puppeteers, who fund and run the show.

    On March 19, Dawn News in Pakistan headlined “Mahmoud Khalil Wins Legal Battle Over Deportation” and reported that a judge ruled that Khalil’s case must be heard by a court, not result in his immediate deportation, and that a court in New Jersey must consider whether his rights of free speech and due proces have been violated by Trump. No timeline was set for a ruling, and so Khalil might continue in prison in Louisiana for a long time while his appeal moves forward in the courts.

    On the night of March 20, ABC News headlined “Judge blocks deportation of Georgetown fellow detained by immigration authorities” and reported that Badar Khan Suri’s lawyers had filed suit against the U.S. by saying that “the Trump administration appeared to be targeting the Georgetown University fellow due to his wife’s identity as a Palestinian and her constitutionally protected speech.” So, now, the judge is requiring Trump’s people to justify their action.

    Therefore, even if these and other similar cases might produce ultimate wins for the victims, their cases could produce long terms in prison while the courts consider them. If, at the end of these cases, Trump loses, there is still the question of whether Trump will do what judges order him to do. Of course, if he won’t, then congressional Democrats might try to impeach and remove him. At that point, it will be again Democratic Party billionaires versus Republican Party billionaires. What could be more serious would be if the result would be a Constitutional crisis: a contest of wills between the Executive and the Judicial branches of the U.S. Government. That would be a much better, more substantive, outcome. It could produce the necessary Second American Revolution, if the American public decide to make it so. Leaving such matters only to the billionaires to settle, needs to stop at some point, because, otherwise, America will simply continue to rot. The more that the billionaires continue to succeed against the public, the more that the country itself will continue to rot.

    The post How Miriam Adelson Exemplifies the Supreme Court’s Rulings that Political Corruption Is Protected by the 1st Amendment first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Tragedy of Syria


    It is cruelly fitting that one of the acknowledged cradles of civilization is now a showroom for the cruelties, irrationalities, and injustices of the modern capitalist world.

    At various times, Syria was part of the lands that were widely admired for their enlightened governance, tolerance, and economic development.

    Today, Syria is a wasteland, divided into parcels, and occupied by alien forces that show no regard for the country’s legacy or the unity and well-being of its people.

    After four hundred years of reasonably stable, tolerant, and peaceable existence under Ottoman rule, the people of the country now known as Syria experienced the heavy hand of European imperialism. With the Sykes-Picot agreement, Syria became the “responsibility” of France after World War I, existing essentially as a French colony with its artificial boundaries established by European powers.

    Understandably, the colonial subjects resisted. As it always does, the anti-colonial struggle provided the impetus for consolidating a nation in a space where a country never existed. As with the seminal anti-colonial victory in what is now the US, the fight against the French was an essential condition to the forging of the Syrian nation-state. Nation-building emerges from and advances from the struggle against domination, for independence.

    But it was not a sufficient condition. After World War II, when France proved unable to maintain its colonies, the new Syria had to fulfill other difficult conditions of nation-building. Decolonization left the scars of oppression– social, political, and economic backwardness.

    Without independent political organizations and well-established institutions, the military– made up of anti-colonial fighters, tribal militias, even former French collaborators– served as a unifying force. Politics was conducted through the often-violent clash of military factions. Countering this chaos was the impact of Arab nationalist and Arab socialist secular trends emerging throughout the Middle East. Ba’athism and Nasserism were two progressive influences tempering Islamic fundamentalism, tribalism, and the complacency of feudal and primitive capitalist economies.

    Concurrent with aid from the Soviet Union and the guarantee of Syrian sovereignty against imperialist aggression, the alliance of the military, the Ba’ath Party, and the Communist Party consolidated and took a leftward turn, strengthening their hand against the backward elements. This progressive development in the energy-rich Middle East did not go unnoticed by the United States and its then-designated local police agents: Israel and Iran.

    In the ensuing years, Syria continued to struggle for national unity, agrarian reform, and modernization under the 30-year presidency of Hafez Al-Assad. Assad brought a measure of stability and peace, while imperialism encouraged and materially supported the Muslim Brotherhood and other fundamentalists to undermine these secular developments.

    Typically, European and US ideologues railed against the fragile state, condemning its failure to embrace modern capitalist institutions while these same ideologues were encouraging feudal jihadists to rebel against secularism.

    With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the death of the elder Assad, the tenuous progress of Syria, its independence, and its unity were weakened. Under the leadership of the younger, less visionary Bashir al-Assad, without any powerful allies, and with active and determined plotters in Washington, the future of Syria was in doubt. Assad’s flirtation with market economics and privatization brought his regime no respite from imperialist machinations.

    In 2011, protests against Assad’s rule were co-opted by foreign security services. Through the auspices of the CIA, through its vast network of ready and willing jihadists, and armed with weapons shipped from the overthrown government of Libya, a brutal proxy war was launched. Neo-Ottoman Turkey threw its own jihadists into the fight. And the US armed and unleashed Kurdish nationalists to further pressure the Assad government and serve US interests.

    What the mainstream media called “a Revolution and the Syrian Civil War” was, in fact, a conflict of proxies and of foreign intervention. In response to Turkish and US meddling and to the arrival of hordes of foreign jihadists, Hezbollah militias and Iranian and Russian forces came to the assistance of the weak Assad government forestalling the chaos that follows forcible regime change.

    As the war reached somewhat of a stalemate, Assad stood in Damascus, ruling the little that was left of the country’s infrastructure, housing, economy, and territorial integrity. US Marines occupied a portion of Syria with its oil resources. Kurds ruled in another part of the country under US protection. The US’s NATO ally, Turkey– hostile to the Kurds– ruled in another part of Syria, supporting their favored brand of head-chopping jihadists. Israel took advantage of weakened foes and occupied a large slice of Syria nearer to Damascus, while destroying all Syrian military assets in Southern Syria.

    If this reverse of nation-building, this nation-degrading process seems familiar, it should. It resembles all too well the willful, post-Cold War, systematic destruction of fragile states constructed around multiple ethnicities and enjoying a measure of national independence. Without the international leverage of a socialist bloc, led by the powerful Soviet Union, the imperialist bloc disposed of contrarian states like Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Libya, usually by fomenting ethnic strife or supporting elite demands. Failing states throughout Africa and Asia bear similar scars, inflicted by great powers bent on strengthening their spheres of interest, as France attempts in sub-Saharan Africa.

    In late 2024, Turkey unleashed its own stable of radical, fundamentalist head-choppers, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, against the Assad regime from its lair in Idlib province. The demoralized, spent forces of Assad’s military were swiftly overwhelmed. Despite designation as a “terrorist group” by the UN (and the US), HTS was heralded by most of the US and European mainstream media as victorious freedom fighters. Reporters flocked to Damascus– after staying far away for years, while reporting from Beirut and the US embassy– to “prove” the evil of the Assad regime. Easily duped by local opportunists, much of the reportage collapsed as facts and evidence came forward.

    Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of HTS anointed himself the new Syrian head of state, adopted a proper Western suit, shaved his beard, and pronounced a new era of peace and harmony, while outlawing political parties, postponing a new constitution, and cancelling elections until far off in the future. Such is the new Syrian Democracy.

    But public relations cannot restrain the blood lust of the fundamentalist head-choppers. In 2025, HTS elements began a vengeance campaign against Baa’ath cadre, former military leaders, and religious “infidels,” killing and attacking civilians in Alawite and Christian villages.

    Understandably, a new resistance is emerging. Bizarrely, EU authorities blame the massacres on those resisting HTS.

    No doubt at the urging of its foreign sponsors (especially the US), HTS and the Kurds were herded into a cooperative agreement in March that includes the merging of its “military institutions” — a move that hopes to strengthen their hand against future Syrian resistance and present an image of unity to the rest of the world. The Kurds give the US greater influence at the expense of the Turks.

    The last pages of the Syrian tragedy are yet to be written.

    There are lessons to be learned.

    The post-Soviet era has emboldened a ruthless, cruel imperialism. Without the threat of Soviet power to present a counterforce, the US, NATO, and other powers are free to impose their will on other states, including taking their own rivalries to the brink of World War. Few remember that the then-real threat of Soviet intervention, stopped the Israelis from passing beyond the Golan Heights and marching to Damascus during the Six Day War– a principled act of international solidarity.

    As a corollary, it is impossible to fail to note that there are no similar counterbalancing forces today. There have been no political, economic, or military powers demonstrably committed to a principled defense of weaker states threatened by imperialist aggression since the Cuban and Soviet defense of Angola and the defeat of South African apartheid aggression in the 1980s.

    That reality is not only a tribute to the socialist internationalism of the past, but a sobering message to those on the left who interpret the realignment of great powers– the so-called tendency to multipolarity– as a new kind of anti-imperialism. The experience of Syria– left on its own to defend its integrity and sovereignty against the agents of backwardness and great-power interests– speaks to the impotence of the so-called BRICS block. Issuing protests, resolutions, and condemnations is no substitute for action or material aid. Russian support, once so vital to Assad’s defense, failed to rise against HTS and is now offered shamelessly to its former foe.

    Capitalist alliances around spheres of influence or temporary common interests are far removed from principled anti-imperialism, a stance only possible apart from the logic of capitalist competition. Anti-imperialism is a principle, not a self-interested calculation.

    The post The Tragedy of Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Final Hours of Jessie Hoffman

    Three hours before he was to be murdered by the State of Louisiana, Jessie Hoffman greeted me with a strong handshake and an embrace.  He stared deep into my eyes and thanked me for coming.  We discussed his son, also named Jessie, and how proud he has made his dad.

    Also visiting were three of the many lawyers who had been fighting for his life, Cecelia Trenticosta Kappel of the Loyola Center for Social Justice, Samantha Bosalavage Pourciau of the Promise of Justice Initiative, and Sarah Ottinger, who had been representing Jessie Hoffman for 19 years.  I was there to witness the murder of Mr. Hoffman if Louisiana reversed its course and allowed one of the legal team to remain through the whole process.

    Already in the room when we arrived was Rev. Reimoku Gregory Smith, a Buddhist priest Hoffman chose to accompany him.  Jessie is a practicing Buddhist and has been a leader among those in prison for decades.  Reverend Reimoku was in long black robes.  He was serene and almost glowing in kindness.

    We sat around a big wooden conference table that had the logo of the State of Louisiana carved into the middle of it.  Uniformed officers from the Louisiana State Penitentiary sat in opposite ends of the room.  There were two big pictures on the walls – one of Elijah on a flaming chariot and one of Daniel in the lion’s den.

    The room in which Louisiana planned to murder Jessie Hoffman was steps away.

    Jessie Hoffman is about six feet tall and muscular.  He was wearing a black t-shirt that said Life Row in white letters on it – the name that its 50 plus occupants prefer to call what the outside world calls death row.  He has been fasting for days and mostly sits quietly with his arms on the wooden table, staring intently at whoever was talking to him.

    Jessie was holding his favorite book, THE HEART OF THE BUDDHA’S TEACHING: Transforming Suffering into Peace, Joy and Liberation by Thich Nhat Hanh.  Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese Buddhist Zen Master, author, poet and peacemaker who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967 by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

    Jessie asked Reverend Reimoku to read his favorite passage from the book to us.  It was called the Four Immeasurable Minds: Loving-Kindness, Compassion, Joy and Equanimity.  He read and reflected as we took in these words together.  Jessie occasionally closed his eyes.

    Louisiana was scheduled to murder Jessie Hoffman by first immobilizing him by tying down his arms, hands, legs and torso on a crucifix-like platform. Then, once he was helpless to resist, they would cover his face with an industrial-grade respirator and pump his lungs full of poison high-grade nitrogen gas.  Nitrogen gas causes death by depriving the body of oxygen, essentially causing suffocation in a phenomenon known as hypoxia.  This method is so horrible all but two states have stopped using nitrogen gas on animals declaring it inhumane.  The United Nations Commissioner on Human Rights has condemned the use of nitrogen gas in executions saying its use could amount to torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading punishment in violation of international human rights law.

    Jessie Hoffman was to be murdered by Louisiana because he had as a teenager, after years of shocking physical, sexual and psychological abuse, committed a horrible murder in 1996.

    Now the Louisiana Governor claimed it was necessary for the state to respond to this murder by itself murdering Jessie Hoffman to “prioritize victims over criminals.”

    Yet the actual family members of the victim of Jessie’s murder were not asking Louisiana to murder him.

    The victim’s sister-in-law specifically asked Louisiana not to murder Jessie Hoffman, saying “Executing Jessie Hoffman is not justice in my name, it is the opposite.”

    The victim’s husband refused to attend the state execution and said he is now “indifferent to the death penalty vs life in prison without parole.” He also stated another reason for not attending was that he was “just not really feeling like I need to watch another human being die.”

    Years before, Jessie Hoffman wrote a statement apologizing to the victims.  Louisiana refused to deliver it to the family.

    Jessie and the victim’s sister-in-law tried to talk by zoom so Jessie could apologize to her directly but Louisiana would not allow it.

    As our visit continued, another long-time lawyer arrived.  Caroline Tillman, who has been working to save Jessie Hoffman from state murder for 22 years, came directly from federal court in New Orleans.  Teams of lawyers tried to stop the state murder of Jessie Hoffman, filing in several state and federal courts.  Only the U.S. Supreme Court had not been heard from yet.

    More prayers were said.  The letter from the sister-in-law asking that the state murder not go forward was read aloud.  More prayers.  More than 250 faith leaders had recently signed letters asking Louisiana not to revive the practice of state murder with nitrogen gas.

    With less than an hour to go before the scheduled murder of Jessie Hoffman, the Warden came in and politely but firmly terminated the lawyers’ visit.  He refused permission to allow any lawyer to stay and witness the murder of Jessie Hoffman. Only Reverend Reimoku was allowed to remain.

    After the lawyers were escorted out, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop the murder of Mr. Hoffman by a vote of 5-4, one vote short of the 5 votes needed for a stay.

    The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana could now begin.

    John Simmerman, a journalist with nola.com, was one of two media witnesses allowed to view the execution of Jessie Hoffman.  He reports that at 6:21 the ultra-high-grade nitrogen was pumped into the immobilized Mr. Hoffman.  His breathing became uneven. His chest rose.  He made a jerking motion. His body shook.  His fingers twitched. He pulled at the table. His hands clenched. His breathing slowed. His head moved inside the mask.  He jerked slightly around 6:27 and stopped moving.  Louisiana officials reported the poison gas was pumped into Jessie Hoffman for 19 minutes until he was pronounced dead.  The last view of Jessie Hoffman with his face now uncovered showed “his head was tilted back, teeth exposed in a grimace.”

    The murder of Jessie Hoffman by Louisiana was now complete.

    Samantha Pourciau, who was with Jessie Hoffman on his final day on earth, said: “Tonight, while many in our state cannot afford groceries, the state used countless resources to kill one man. The governor cannot cloak this in fighting for victims, because today we learned that this is not, in fact, what this family wants. This is what the governor wants. This has been in service of no one, but the bloodlust of our state government.”

    The post The Final Hours of Jessie Hoffman first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • What It Means to Weaponize the Government

    President Trump’s declaration of war as a justification for using wartime powers to sidestep constitutional protections is indeed a war, but it is a war waged by the president against dissent, against due process, and against the very foundations of our constitutional republic.

    This is what it means to weaponize the government.

    When the government turns its power against its own people—through surveillance, retaliation, censorship, and intimidation—it ceases to serve the public and instead becomes a weapon of oppression.

    According to the Political Dictionary:

    The term ‘weaponize’ refers to the strategic manipulation or transformation of information, institutions, or social issues into tools for gaining political advantage. This could involve exploiting existing laws, harnessing social media algorithms for disinformation campaigns, or turning otherwise neutral or benign elements of governance into divisive issues for the purpose of delegitimizing opponents or rallying a base.

    Time and again, leaders have stretched—or outright shattered—the limits of power, weaponizing government power through unjust laws, surveillance, or outright suppression.

    Each power grab is a step toward the erosion of liberty.

    John Adams used the Alien and Sedition Acts to prosecute journalists and political opponents.

    Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, allowing the military to detain individuals without trail and suppressing Confederate sympathizers and political dissenters.

    Under Woodrow Wilson, the Espionage and Sedition Acts were used to crack down on anti-war activists, socialists, and labor organizers, including Eugene V. Debs, who spoke out against World War I.

    Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that led to the internment of over 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, based on suspicions of disloyalty, despite little to no evidence.

    Richard Nixon harnessed the power of the FBI, CIA, and IRS, to harass, spy on and sabotage his political opponents and perceived enemies.

    Spanning numerous presidential administrations, from FDR to Nixon, the FBI’s covert intelligence program COINTELPRO was used to infiltrate, discredit and disrupt civil rights leaders, anti-war activists, and other political dissidents.

    In a bid to fight so-called disinformation, Biden pressured social media companies to censor and suppress individuals expressing views perceived as conspiratorial or extremist, especially as they related to COVID-19.

    And then there’s Donald Trump, who is setting new records for how far he’s willing to go to retaliate against his perceived enemies and sidestep the rule of law.

    Indeed, Ken Hughes, an investigative journalist who spent two decades listening to Richard Nixon’s Secret White House Tapes, has concluded that Nixon’s abuses of presidential power—which included weaponizing the government to “sabotage Vietnam peace talks to damage the Democrats’ 1968 presidential campaign, to time his withdrawal from Vietnam to help his 1972 reelection campaign, and to spring former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa from prison in return for the union’s political support”—pale beside Trump’s abuses.

    Trump, who once vowed to end government overreach and the weaponization of the federal government, now openly uses its full force against his critics, dismantling democratic norms, consolidating power in ways that defy the Constitution, and directing an all-out weaponization of the federal government against his perceived enemies, which translates to anyone who dares to oppose him.

    If Trump were just a petty blowhard, that would be one thing.

    Unfortunately, having populated his administration with individuals more loyal to him than to the Constitution, Trump is getting drunk on power.

    The danger is not so much Trump as it is his enablers-to-abuse, the many minions within his administration and beyond who are eager to carry out unlawful orders, defy the courts, ignore Congress’ mandate, trample rights, and butcher the Constitution, all in the so-called name of putting America first.

    If this keeps up, America, once looked upon as a bastion of freedom and economic opportunity, will be the last place anyone ever thinks of when they hear the words freedom, justice and equality.

    Every action taken by the Trump administration in defiance of the rule of law—whether or not that action is motivated by a legitimate concern for national security—pushes us that much closer to the complete dismantling of our constitutional republic.

    Don’t be so carried away by fear-inducing tales of rapists and foreign invaders and corruption that you let the government get away with murder… the painful execution of our rights.

    That way lies tyranny.

    You can see the pattern forming already.

    When anti-war protesters are made to disappear—snatched up late at night by plain-clothes men who refuse to identify themselves and then transported thousands of miles away, to a private prison in a state more favorable to dubious detentions—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    When Venezuelan migrants are rounded up and deported out of the country, heads shaven and in chains, without any due process—without being identified, without being charged formally with a crime, without getting a chance to plead their innocence against those charges and, if found guilty, then convicted—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    When major law firms are barred from interacting with federal agencies or entering federal buildings—an outright attempt to chill First Amendment activity and hamstring businesses that challenge government overreach—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    When huge swaths of our nation’s history (including the Constitution and Bill of Rights) are being erased from websites, government buildings, archives, educational curriculum—in the so-called name of combatting discrimination—we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    When Trump administration sycophants from the vice president on down are openly deriding and defying the courts while proclaiming the imperial supremacy of their exalted leader, we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    When the president of the United States threatens other nations militarily, talks openly about seizing foreign lands, stirs up international tensions, and rattles the war drums, we are wading deep into authoritarian territory.

    Trump, adept at twisting facts and spinning lies, is working hard to insist that these end-runs around the rule of law are for our safety.

    Don’t believe him. Words are cheap.

    More importantly, don’t trust him. Bind him down with the chains of the Constitution.

    The only real protection we have against tyranny is the rule of law, provided that you have a populace and a system of government that holds the rule of law as inviolable.

    That is our real power: the extent to which we hold fast to the Constitution and demand that the government and its agents do so, as well.

    The moment that we relent in that commitment—the moment that we look the other way and let first a few encroachments slide, then ever more and more—is the moment that the Constitution loses its power to protect us against tyranny.

    That is what is unfolding right now.

    This is the devil’s bargain that we are being asked to enter into with Trump: empty promises and a one-way street to a dictatorship in exchange for our freedoms.

    Watch out.

    When any politician claims to be saving you money by imposing tariffs that ramp up inflation and cutting government programs aimed at educating the masses, feeding the hungry, and helping the poor, disabled and elderly, all the while spending taxpayer money on his own lavish lifestyle and self-serving government programs, you’d better beware. Your hard-earned dollars will be next in line to be seized, spent and squandered.

    When any politician suggests that you relinquish your freedoms—of speech, assembly, due process, association, etc.—in exchange for promises of greater security, you’d better beware. Your freedoms will be next on the chopping block.

    When any politician persuades you to look the other way while innocent individuals are rounded up alongside suspected criminals just because they look a certain way or talk a certain way or belong to a particular demographic, you’d better beware. Your right to due process will be next.

    When any politician comes up with a vast array of reasons why he doesn’t need to obey court rulings—because they were issued verbally, because his power trumps that of the courts, because he doesn’t need to follow the law outside America’s borders—you’d better beware. This shifty reasoning for breaking the law could be used against you next.

    There can be no doubt about the nature of what is taking place right now.

    This is war.

    President Trump’s justification for defying the courts and doing whatever he wants in pursuit of his political agenda (arresting protesters, carrying out mass arrests and deportations, muzzling critics, seizing funds, dismantling agencies, usurping congressional powers) is that “this is war.”

    Here’s the thing, though: Trump may be using his war powers as commander-in-chief to bypass the Constitution at every turn, but the only war being waged is a war against the Constitution and the rule of law and the American people.

    Congress, which has the sole power to declare war under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11, has yet to do so. And still Trump is using the emergency wartime powers of the presidency to sidestep accountability and due process.

    In ruling after ruling, the courts, which have the judicial power to rein in overreach and misconduct, are repeatedly declaring unconstitutional the Trump administration’s steady dismantling of the government and refusal to stay within the purview of his official powers. And still Trump is unilaterally hacking away at the very foundations of our system of government.

    If the president refuses to be held accountable, if he insists that his power is supreme, if he abuses the power of his office to wreak havoc and revenge, if he reduces our republic to rubble and tramples over the Constitution and disregards the rule of law, he is aligning himself with every despot, dictator and tyrant to have walked the earth.

    We’ve been here before. We know how this story ends.

    It takes time and effort and a willingness on the part of “we the people” to look beyond our differences and stand united in opposition to oppression, but when we do that, freedom prevails in the end.

    Next year will be the 250th anniversary of the birth of this country, when America’s founders declared their independence from King George’s tyranny. What’s just as important, however, is what came before that: the small steps of rebellion, resistance and outrage that said, “enough is enough.”

    What we are now experiencing is a civil war, devised and instigated in part by the Deep State.

    The objective: compliance and control.

    The strategy: destabilize the economy, polarize the populace, escalate racial and political tensions, intensify the use of violence, and then, when all hell breaks loose, clamp down on the nation for the good of the people and the security of the nation.

    The outcome for this particular conflict is already foregone: the Deep State wins.

    The Deep State wins by ensuring that we are censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down. It wins by monitoring our speech and activities for any sign of “extremist” activity. It wins by ensuring that we are estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us. It wins by saddling us with taxation without representation and a government without the consent of the governed.

    It wins by terminating the Constitution (or rewriting the Constitution).

    So where does that leave us?

    “We” may have contributed to our downfall through our inaction and gullibility, but we are also the only hope for a free future.

    After all, the Constitution begins with those three beautiful words, “We the people.”

    Those three words were intended as a reminder to future generations that there is no government without us: our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

    When we forget that, when we allow the “Me” of a self-absorbed, narcissistic, politically polarizing culture to override our civic duties as citizens to collectively stand up to tyranny and make the government play by the rules of the Constitution, that is when tyranny rises and freedom falls

    Remember, there is power in numbers.

    Not the kinds of numbers that Trump likes to spout about landslide victories and electoral mandates, but the most powerful numbers of all: the sheer, overwhelming mass of humanity that is “we the people” of these United States of America.

    If there is any means left to us for thwarting the government in its relentless march towards outright dictatorship, it rests with us.

    Ultimately, that’s what the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution is all about: it affirms that “we the people” have all the power, and what powers we do not explicitly give to the federal government or the states, we retain. We may appoint government representatives to act in our stead, but we never relinquish that power altogether.

    That’s where Trump and his Deep State handlers get it wrong. Speaking through him and his administration, they claim that this dismantling of the federal government is a bid to return power to local communities and state governments, but it’s not their government to dismantle, nor is it their power to return.

    We are the government, and we are the power, and it’s time “we the people” reminded the government and its henchmen of that important fact.

    The power still lies with us.

    We must resist every attempt to erode our freedoms, demand accountability, and uphold the Constitution—before it’s too late.

    It’s time to invalidate governmental laws, tactics and policies that are illegitimate, egregious or blatantly unconstitutional.

    Nullify everything the government does that flies in the face of the Constitution.

    Flood your representatives’ phone lines, inboxes and townhall meetings with your discontent.

    Protest everything that tramples on the Constitution.

    Stand up for your own rights, of course, but more importantly, stand up for the rights of those with whom you might disagree.

    Defend freedom at all costs. Defend justice at all costs. Make no exceptions based on race, religion, creed, politics, immigration status, sexual orientation, etc.

    Don’t play semantics. Don’t justify. Don’t politicize it.

    If it carries even a whiff of tyranny, oppose it.

    Demand that your representatives in government cut you a better deal, one that abides by the Constitution and doesn’t just attempt to sidestep it. That’s their job: make them do it.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, all freedoms hang together. They fall together, as well.

    The post What It Means to Weaponize the Government first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • This Is Trump’s Genocide Now

    This is Trump’s genocide. Trump is just as culpable for what happens in Gaza as Netanyahu. Just as guilty as Biden was during the last administration.

    Trump signed off on the reignition of the Gaza holocaust. He spent weeks sabotaging the ceasefire and then gave the thumbs up to the resumption of the genocide. He did this while bombing Yemen and threatening war with Iran for Israel.

    I don’t know why Trump has done these things. Maybe it’s all for the Adelson cash. Maybe Epstein recorded him doing something unsavory with a minor during their long association and gave it to Israeli intelligence for blackmail purposes. Maybe he owed somebody a favor for bailing him out of his business failures in the past. Maybe he’s just a psychopath who enjoys murdering children. I don’t know, and it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he did it, and he is responsible for his actions.

    Trump supporters will justify literally anything their president does using whatever excuses they need to, but they are only revealing how completely empty and unprincipled their political faction is. They are unthinking worshippers of power who go along with whatever the president tells them to. By continuing to support Trump even as he continues Biden’s legacy of mass murder in the middle east, they are proving themselves to be mindless stormtroopers for the empire in full view of the entire world.

    You can still support Trump if you hate immigrants and LGBTQ people and want lower taxes for the obscenely wealthy, but there is no legitimate reason to support him on antiwar or anti-establishment grounds. He’s just another evil Republican mass murderer president.

    *****

    Republicans in 2002: We need more authoritarianism and more wars in the middle east. Anyone who disagrees is a terrorist supporter.

    Republicans in 2025: We need more authoritarianism and more wars in the middle east. Anyone who disagrees is a terrorist supporter, and antisemite.

    *****

    By the way has anyone checked on the western Zionist Jews? How are their feelings feeling today? Are they feeling nice feelings or bad feelings? Are their feelings feeling safe or unsafe? We need wall to wall news coverage of this supremely urgent issue; no time to cover any other story.

    *****

    I write so much about the fake “antisemitism crisis” not only because it’s being used to destroy civil rights throughout the western world, but because it’s one of the most dark and disturbing things I’ve ever witnessed.

    It’s been so intensely creepy watching all of western society mobilize around a complete and utter fiction in order to stomp out all criticism of a foreign state. It’s about as dystopian a thing as you can possibly imagine, all these pundits and politicians pretending to believe that Jewish safety is seriously being threatened by an epidemic of antisemitism which must be aggressively silenced by any means necessary. All to shut down opposition to the worst inclinations of a genocidal apartheid state and the complicity of our own western governments with its crimes.

    And we’re all expected to treat this scam seriously. Anyone who says the emperor has no clothes and calls this mass deception what it is gets tarred with the “antisemite” label and treated as further evidence that we’re all a hair’s breadth from seeing Jews rounded up onto trains again if we don’t all hurry up and shut down anti-genocide protests on university campuses. They’re not just acting out a fraudulent melodrama staged to rob us of our rights, they’re demanding that we participate in it by pretending it’s not what it plainly is.

    It’s not just tyranny, it’s tyranny that orders people to clap along with it. It’s such a disgusting, evil thing to do to people. Such psychologically dominating abusive behavior. The more you look at it, the creepier it gets.

    *****

    The anti-imperialist left is what MAGA and right wing “populism” pretend to be. We ACTUALLY oppose the empire’s warmongering — not only when Democrats are in power. We ACTUALLY want to defeat the deep state — we don’t applaud billionaire Pentagon contractors like Elon Musk taking power. We ACTUALLY oppose the establishment order — because the establishment order is capitalist. We ACTUALLY stand up to the powerful — we don’t offload half the blame onto immigrants and marginalized groups.

    The anti-imperialist left is also what liberals pretend to be. We ACTUALLY support the working class. We ACTUALLY stand up for the little guy. We ACTUALLY want justice and equality. We ACTUALLY support civil rights. We ACTUALLY oppose tyranny.

    Everything the human heart longs for lies in the death of capitalism, militarism and empire, and yet both of the dominant western political factions of our day support continuing all of these things. This is because westerners spend their entire lives marinating in power-serving propaganda which herds them into these two mainstream political factions to ensure that they will pose no meaningful challenges to our rulers. All political energy is funneled into movements and parties which are set up to maintain the status quo while pretending to support the people, with the illusion of political freedom sustained by a false two-party dichotomy in which both factions serve the same ruling power structure.

    Of course, what mainstream liberalism and right wing “populism” have to offer that anti-imperialist socialism does not is the ability to win major elections with successful candidates. This is because generations of imperial psyops have gone into stomping out the anti-imperialist left in the western world, and because only candidates which uphold the status quo are ever allowed to get close to winning an election. This doesn’t mean mainstream liberalism or right wing “populism” are the answer, it just means our prison warden isn’t going to hand us the keys to the exit door.

    At some point we’re going to have to rise up and use the power of our numbers to force the urgently needed changes we long to see in our world. Everything in our society is set up to prevent this from ever happening. That’s all the two mainstream political factions are designed to do. That’s why they both have phony “populist” elements within them which purport to be leading a brave revolutionary charge against the establishment, while herding everyone into support for the two status quo political parties. And that’s why the anti-imperialist left is everything they pretend to be.

    The post This Is Trump’s Genocide Now first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Release of the Epstein Files

    View Epstein files here (redacted on steroids!)

    The post Release of the Epstein Files first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Israel Doesn’t Care about the Captives

    What excuses has Israel given for renewing the genocide:

    1. Israel says it is trying to force Hamas to release the captives in Gaza.

    Yet, as we know from those already released, the indiscriminate bombing of Gaza only increases the chances the captives will be killed. There is no plausible scenario in which dropping US-supplied 2,000lb bombs across Gaza makes any Israeli held in the enclave safer or brings them home sooner.

    In any case, there was a known and easy way for Israel to get the last of the captives back. They were due to be freed in the second phase of the ceasefire agreement, already well past its implementation date. But weeks ago Israel decided to tear up the agreement it had signed and impose new terms in which the rest of the captives would have to be returned – and without Israel either ceasing its fire or withdrawing from the enclave, as it had agreed to do.

    What Israel’s return to genocide shows is that the Israeli government would rather kill the remaining captives – vaporising them with Trump’s latest shipment of 2,000lb bombs – than either make a concession to secure their release or place any limitation on its ability to slaughter the people of Gaza.

    2. Israel claims Hamas was re-arming and planning a new attack.

    As ever, Israel is inverting the truth. It was Israel that was re-armed by the Trump administration with the bombs now tearing apart Gaza’s children. Hamas – isolated from the outside world – had no obvious route to re-arming.

    And as for plans for another October 7, both Hamas and the world were shocked its fighters managed to break out of the tiny, besieged territory of Gaza the first time. Hamas assumed it would be a suicide mission. It succeeded only because Israel had grown so complacent in its 17-year siege of the enclave, it imagined the 2.3 million people there were permanently entombed.

    Israel’s assumption was the Palestinians would never manage to find a way out of the giant concentration camp Israel had built for them. Israel will not likely drop its guard again any time soon.

    In other words, Israel is flat-out lying about its reasons for renewing the slaughter. It is lying as it has done over and over again, throughout the past 18 months.

    Israel always intended to reboot the genocide as soon as the Trump administration had been able to take credit for negotiating the ceasefire. Then they could work together to concoct a new set of pretexts – based on lies about who was violating the ceasefire – to justify why more of Gaza’s children needed to be murdered.

    Certainly, Joe Biden and his officials must be put on trial in the Hague for the first 15 months of the genocide. But it is Trump and his administration that are responsible for every Palestinian death from here on out.

    The post Israel Doesn’t Care about the Captives first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • I Resigned 22 Years Ago from the US Government over the Bush War on Iraq

    Two years ago, on March 19, 2003, I resigned from the US Department of State. I was the Deputy chief of mission at the US Embassy in UlaanBaatar, Mongolia and the third U.S. government employee to resign in opposition to the U.S. war on Iraq. I resigned on the day the Bush administration began the 10-year U.S. war on Iraq, March 19, 2003.

    Twenty-two years later, I don’t regret my decision one bit.

    President Bush, like the presidents before and after him, lied. His specific lie was about the reason for the U.S. to attack and kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

    In 2003, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell’s lie was about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction when international weapons inspectors were very clear in their statements that after their exhaustive investigation there were no weapons of mass destruction.

    Instead, Bush was following the advisors who wrote the guidebook Project for the New American Century which called for the overthrow of seven countries in the Middle East, and Iraq was the first to be overthrown.

    The names of the authors of this war on the world, the “War on Terror,” still live in infamy: Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Pearlman, Douglas Feith and of course, Vice President Dick Cheney.

    Bush had already lied about the reason to send U.S. military into Afghanistan. Instead of mounting an international police dragnet for the leaders of al Qaeda that planned and executed the events of 9/11, the Bush administration wanted to have a platform next to Iran from which to conduct a war on Iran.  But, the small, underfunded, poorly-trained Taliban kept the U.S. military and the highly trained and poorly motivated Afghan Army on the run for the 20 years that the U.S. was in Afghanistan.

    I was a part of the team that reopened the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan in December 2001.  Our small group of diplomats realized very quickly that going after al Qaida was not the main objective of U.S. intervention in Afghanistan.   The focus of U.S. policies and funding in 2002 was elsewhere…and it turned out to be in overthrowing Sadam Hussein in Iraq.

    If I had one more resignation….no, two more resignations

    One Resignation over Biden’s Complicity in the Genocide of Gaza

    In the next twenty-two years there have been numerous times I felt that if I had still been in the U.S. government, I would have resigned.

    President Joe Biden’s complicity in the Israeli genocide of Gaza which began in October 2023 deserved resignation…and 14 U.S. government employees have resigned over the weapons and encouragement the Biden administration gave to the Israeli government in the genocide of Gaza with over 60,000 Palestinians killed and tens of thousands still under the rubble by the time Biden left office, with no attempt at getting the Israeli government to stop the killings.

    And, let’s not forget the Obama-Biden complicity in the U.S. orchestrated events in Ukraine that, including the 2014 right wing, nationalist overthrow of the government and broken promises to Russia that Ukraine would not become a part of NATO that led to the terrible war between Ukraine and Russia and the fueling of that war by the Biden administration with weapons and total lack of any attempt to bring an end to the dangerous conflict.

    Another resignation over Trump’s Actions Domestically and Internationally-Project 2025

    And right now, another resignation would be coming from me if I were still in the U.S. government.

    Four Presidential administrations after I resigned-Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump- another roadmap for domestic and international lawbreaking and chaos is guiding a President: Project 2025.

    While Trump, like Bush before him, disavowed knowledge of any plan cooked up by advisors, Trump is playing into the hands of those with an agenda that will haunt him, an agenda much more wide-ranging than the one Bush allowed to happen.

    The rails are off for the destruction of the U.S. government with massive firings of civil servants.  Reasonable government reform and downsizing has become government destruction led by unelected Elon Musk, the world’s richest person who has some of the largest government contracts (many of which have been under investigation) leading a team of very young technology mavericks who have no knowledge of the government and are taking over the computer information of the entire U.S. government firing tens of thousands of employees with a keystroke.

    Trump is emboldened by the lack of Congressional outrage and now is threatening to invade Panama and Greenland and is bullying Canada about becoming a state of the United States, to which the Canadian public and officials have rightly responded with a hockey warning to Trump “Elbows up!”

    Shamefully, the “peace” candidate Trump humiliated and bullied Ukrainian president Zelensky in the White house in a meeting over the sale of Ukrainian minerals to pay the U.S. for its weapons in its war with Russia.

    While the “peace candidate” Trump’s go-to-envoy, billionaire real estate investor, Steve Witkoff did hammer out of much needed ceasefire in the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the ceasefire has now ended in an Israeli two-week blockade of Gaza of food, water, shelter and electricity and continuation of massive bombing of Gaza and $12 billion more from the U.S. in killer weapons.  As the ceasefire came into effect, Trump, true to his style, told the world that Palestinians need to leave Gaza so it can be built back into something “wonderful”…. but without them.

    And, don’t get me started on the kowtowing by government agencies, universities and corporations to Trump on the elimination of DEI, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion as his henchmen to erase women, minorities, disabled and gender in his white, male, nationalist agenda seemingly spearheaded by the very unqualified (on every level) Secretary of Offensive Pete Hegseth.

    So many issues…. and opportunities for resignation and resistance.

    From Resignation to Resistance

    I resigned two decades ago from criminal U.S. policies and now I am in my 22nd year of resistance to criminal policies of successive administrations.

    Working with many, many organizations on the local (Hawaii Peace and Justice, World Can’t Wait, Students and Faculty for Palestine, Hawaii For Palestine: Under the Olive Tree), national (CODEPINK: Women For Peace, Veterans For Peace,  Shut Down Drone Warfare) and international levels (International Peace Bureau, NO to NATO, No to War, World Beyond War, Women Cross DMZ, Pacific Peace Network, Ban Killer Drones) has given me outlets for protest and, very importantly, being with others who are deeply concerned about U.S. administration actions here in our own country and around the world.

    You Must Resist

    If you are not yet resisting, please join the millions who are on the streets, in Congress, at town hall meetings, writing emails and calling to end the assault on our country and the world. I have put links to many of the organizations with which I work. Please join us!!!

    The post I Resigned 22 Years Ago from the US Government over the Bush War on Iraq first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Dealing with Government Repression, 2025

    The attempted deportation of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, met with dramatic and widespread resistance, is one of the first, high profile, specifically targeted repressive acts by the Trump regime, but it won’t be the last. There is no question about their intention to create a permanently repressive and dictatorial government, a government of, by and for the overwhelmingly white and male billionaire elite and those sucking up to them for their own personal gain.

    Fortunately, this is not a popular government. Polls taken a few days ago by CNN, Reuters and Quinnipiac put Trump’s favorable ratings at an average of 44% and unfavorable ratings at 53%. On the economy CNN has him at 44-56%.

    Trump’s declining popular support and the rise over the last 40 days of a powerful, visible, resistance movement that shows every sign that it will continue to grow and expand (April 5!) is part of why Trump spoke at the Justice Department two days ago.

    His speech made clear the Trump intention to use the FBI, other federal agencies and the courts to try to silence those who oppose him. In the words of a Reuters story, “Trump has moved swiftly to exert control over the Justice Department (DOJ) since returning to office, challenging a decades-old tradition that the top U.S. law enforcement agency operates with a degree of independence from the White House.”

    The Brennan Center for Justice released an analysis in late January of what Project 2025 put forward as far as how the DOJ should function under a Trump regime. Here is some of what they said:

    Pam Bondi, Trump’s pick for attorney general, spent much of her Senate confirmation hearing attempting to allay concerns about the weaponization of the Justice Department, but she avoided direct questions about Trump’s pledge to prosecute specific adversaries. Trump has already signed two executive orders tasking the attorney general to conduct investigations into the previous administration. The politicization of the DOJ could occur in multiple ways.

    While not explicitly outlined in Project 2025, removing barriers between the DOJ and the White House could allow the president to exert more control over individual prosecutors and investigators as they evaluate cases and choose whom to prosecute. The president campaigned on the promise of investigating and prosecuting those he perceived to be his rivals. Political appointees like the attorney general could be removed if they refuse to pursue politically motivated investigations…

    The White House could assert more direct political influence on DOJ operations by removing expert civil servants, including people with decades of experience as prosecutors and investigators who have served under administrations of both parties. They could be replaced with ideological loyalists who lack key institutional knowledge that is essential for the daily operation of many law enforcement agencies. Indeed, dismissals and transfers of top justice department officials has already begun…

    The relationship between the White House and the Justice Department envisioned by the authors of Project 2025 would breed a culture of impunity. Although the document does not touch on pardons, by bringing the DOJ under its close control, the White House could order officials to turn a blind eye to criminal behavior committed by friends of the administration. The combination of the promise of pardons and the presidential immunity granted by the Supreme Court increases this risk.

    Successful Resistance

    There are a number of things which are essential to successful resistance to government repression. When I say “successful” I don’t mean that there won’t be casualties on our side, people behind bars, some for months or years, or people physically attacked and injured or worse, or job losses or greater economic hardship. It is clear that under a Trump/MAGA regime this is all likely to some degree.

    Several things which can lessen all of those negatives are these:

    -good legal representation in court. It is good to see the way that many lawyers and progressive legal organizations are stepping up to challenge, in most cases successfully, the Trump executive orders issued so far;

    -a loving community of support. This can be within an organization, within the local area where we live, via social media or other forms of communication, and/or just within a family. We all need to do our best to help foster and strengthen these necessary support networks;

    -broad community support when repression happens. If people and groups that are attacked, in whatever way, are not seen as, or do not come to be known as, honest and genuine human beings trying to be a positive force, it is going to be hard to rally and manifest the breadth of support probably necessary. Indeed, if we are such people already, attacks on us can immediately or over time serve to undercut support for the repressors, strengthen our movement of movements.

    I was a defendant in two major political trials during the Vietnam War, one in Harrisburg, Pa. and one in Rochester, NY. Because of the successful integration in both cases of good legal representation with effective community organizing leading to widespread and visible popular support, the Nixon Administration lost in the Harrisburg case and did poorly in the Rochester one. Though eight of us charged with six felonies were convicted there, a jury’s “recommendation of leniency” in sentencing and broad support within the Rochester community led to sentences of from one year to a year and a half. Prior to trial we fully expected to spend 5-10 years in prison because of what we had been caught doing overnight inside a federal building: destroying Selective Service files for young men about to be sent to Vietnam, finding incriminating documents within the (J. Edgar Hoover) FBI office and disrupting the offices of the US Attorney.

    It is truly a lesson of history: politically smart and legally strong responses to attempted efforts to harass or jail us can immediately or over time serve to undercut support for the repressive government and strengthen our movement of movements. Si, se puede!

    The post Dealing with Government Repression, 2025 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Poland’s Nuclear Weapons Fascination

    With the Ukraine War and the retreat of the United States from what has routinely been called Europe’s security architecture, states are galloping to whatever point of presumed sanctuary is on offer. The general presumption is that the galloping is done in the same step and rhythm. But Europe, for all the heavy layers of union driven diplomacy, retains its salty differences.

    Poland is particularly striking in this regard, having always positioned itself as a defender against the continent’s enemies, perceived or otherwise. This messianic purpose was well on show with the exploits of King John III Sobieski in his triumphant defence of Vienna against the Ottoman Empire in 1683. The seemingly endless wars against Russia, including the massacres and repressions, have also left their wounding marks on a fragile national psyche.

    These marks continue to script the approach of Warsaw’s anxiety to its traditional enemy, one that has become fixated with a nuclear option, in addition to a massive buildup of its armed forces and a defence budget that has reached 4.7% of its national income. While there is some disagreement among government officials on whether Poland should pursue its own arsenal, a general mood towards stationing the nuclear weapons of allies has taken hold. (As a matter of interest, a February 21 poll for Onet found that 52.9 percent of Poles favoured having nuclear weapons, with 27.9 percent opposed.)

    This would mirror, albeit from the opposite side, the Cold War history of Poland, when its army was equipped with Soviet nuclear-capable 8K11 and 3R10 missiles. With sweet irony, those weapons were intended to be used against NATO member states.

    The flirtatious offer of French President Emmanual Macron to potentially extend his country’s nuclear arsenal as an umbrella of reassurance to other European states did make an impression on Poland’s leadership. Prudence might have dictated a more reticent approach, but Prime Minister Donald Tusk would have none of that before the Polish parliament. In his words, “We must be aware that Poland must reach for the most modern capabilities also related to nuclear weapons and modern unconventional weapons.” According to the PM, “this is a race for security, not for war.”

    The Polish President, Andrzej Duda, is also warm to the US option (he has been, over his time in office, profoundly pro-American), despite Tusk’s concerns about a “profound change in American geopolitics”. He was already ruminating over the idea in 2022 when he made the proposal to the Biden administration to host US nuclear weapons, one that was also repeated in June 2023 by then-Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. To have such weapons in Poland was a necessary “defensive tactic […] to Russia’s behaviour, relocating nuclear weapons to the NATO area,” he explained to the BBC. “Poland is ready to host this nuclear weapon.”

    Duda then goes on to restate a familiar theme. Were US nuclear weapons stored on Polish soil, Washington would have little choice but to defend such territory against any threat. “Every kind of strategic infrastructure, American and NATO infrastructure, which we have on our soil is strengthening the inclination of the US and the North Atlantic Alliance to defend this territory.” To the Financial Times, Duda further reasoned that, as NATO’s borders had moved east in 1999, “so twenty-six years later there should also be a shift of the NATO infrastructure east.”

    Much of this seems like theatrical, puffy nonsense, given Poland’s membership of the NATO alliance, which has, as its central point, Article 5. Whether it involves its protection by a fellow NATO ally using conventional or nuclear weapons, hosting such nuclear weapons is negated as a value. Poland would receive collective military aid in any case should it be attacked. But, as Jon Wolfsthal of the Federation of American Scientists reasons, an innate concern of being abandoned in the face of aggression continues to cause jitters. Tusk’s remarks were possibly “a signal of concern – maybe to motivate the United States, but clearly designed to play on the French and perhaps the British.”

    The crippling paranoia of the current government in the face of any perceived Russian threat becomes even less justifiable given the presence of US troops on its soil. According to the government’s own information, a total of 10,000 troops are present on a rotational basis, with US Land Forces V Corps Forward Command based in Poznań. In February, Duda confirmed to reporters after meeting the US envoy to Ukraine Gen. Keith Kellogg that there were “no concerns that the US would reduce the level of its presence in our country, that the US would in any way withdraw from its responsibility or co-responsibility for the security of this part of Europe.”

    Duda goes further, offering a sycophantic flourish. “I will say in my personal opinion, America has entered the game very strongly when it comes to ending the war in Ukraine. I know President Donald Trump, I know that he is an extremely decisive man and when he acts, he acts in a very determined and usually effective way.” With those remarks, we can only assume that the desire to have massively lethal weapons on one’s own soil that would risk obliterating life, limb and everything else is but a sporting parlour game of misplaced assumptions.

    The post Poland’s Nuclear Weapons Fascination first appeared on Dissident Voice.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Dr. Oz’s Nomination Fuels Fears For Crucial Health Programs

    Health workers and patients are mobilizing against the appointment of Dr. Mehmet Oz as head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), one of several controversial health-related nominations submitted by the Trump presidency. Many have expressed concern over what Dr. Oz’s leadership would mean for the largest US healthcare programs and, consequently, access to healthcare across the country.

    If confirmed, Oz would be in charge of over USD 1 trillion and overall coverage administration. While he is a recognized surgeon, he is better known for promoting dubious nutrition advice through his public platforms.

    The post Dr. Oz’s Nomination Fuels Fears For Crucial Health Programs appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • US and EU Supported al-Qaeda in Syria

    The key decision was when Barack Obama finally decided in December 2012 to arm al-Qaeda in Syria so as to bring down Syria’s Government. That culminated a U.S. policy since 1949, which was aimed against Russia and against Palestinians.

    It is an established fact that U.S. President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Chuck Hagel, and the rest of Obama’s Administration, were seeking to replace the non-sectarian Assad Government in Syria, by a government that would please the fundamentalist-Sunni, or “Salafist,” Saud family, who own Saudi Arabia. Throughout the U.S.-and-allied media, the only problem in Syria was Bashar al-Assad, who led that country, and therefore regime-change was supposed to be the solution for Syria, though the only Syrians who supported overthrowing Assad were a small minority, jihadists led by Syria’s al-Qaeda, and in Syria’s northeast, separatist Kurds also supported overthrowing Assad, because they wanted to create a Kurdistan, which would be the first Kurdish nation. The press throughout the U.S. empire hid from the public the fact that the U.S. was supporting al-Qaeda in Syria. For example, on 13 January 2017, the BBC, one of the U.S. Government’s most reliable propaganda agencies (though not from the U.S. Government), headlined “Obama’s Syria legacy: Measured diplomacy, strategic explosion“, and opened:

    How did a man who took office espousing a new era of engagement with the world end up a spectator to this century’s greatest humanitarian catastrophe? …

    Despite the pressing moral imperative, Obama remained convinced a military intervention would be a costly failure.

    He believed there was no way the US could help win the war [a civil war there, which he himself had helped to produce] and keep the peace without a commitment of tens of thousands of troops. The battlefield was too complex: fragmented into dozens of armed groups and supported by competing regional and international powers.

    However, on 12 August 2012, Obama was warned by the Defense Intelligence Agency that “THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION [to Syria’s Government] WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE [actually replace] THE SYRIAN REGIME.” Then in December 2012, Obama settled upon his policy of arming the jihadists in Syria under al-Qaeda’s leadership, and using circuitous ways of getting to the jihadists weapons from around the world, so as to hide America’s involvement as the chief coordinator and funder. The world’s largest Embassy, America’s in Iraq, was running this operation. Each year, the main decisions for this operation were being made not only by Obama but at the annual private Bilderberg conferences, which bring together over a hundred top aristocrats from each NATO country so as to provide the coming year’s guidance to NATO’s Secretary General. Although some of the attendees there were currently holding a public office in their country, many did not but instead were multibillionaires or otherwise top consultants to billionaires; so, the Bilderberg conferences are officially private, not at all public; and, in the United States and its allied countries, there is nothing illegal about major decisions concerning war and peace and other major Governmental policies being determined entirely in secret and off-the-record, in these ‘democracies’. From a policy-standpoint in the collective West — this bastion of ‘democracies’ against ‘tyrannies’ — the U.S.-and-allied countries have developed a very efficient system that essentially no longer needs the public, who are no longer real participants to be informed but have become instead mere subjects to be deceived and pay taxes so as to fund these Governments to do the work that those masters (U.S.-and-allied billionaires) want to be done (even if for ONLY private reasons).

    On March 11, I headlined “America won in Syria and continues to win there; the massacres are now accelerating.” Because Obama-Biden-Trump got their Syrian al-Qaeda proxy-army to final victory and it is doing there what al-Qaeda does, this is an American-Government success-story that America’s Government DON’T want to brag about nor even to acknowledge publicly. We slaughtered madly in Korea and in Vietnam and in Iraq and in Afghanistan and in Libya, and by using coups and proxy-armies in Ukraine and in so many other countries; but America’s victory in Syria is one that ‘our’ ‘news’-media are NOT reporting, because they don’t want us to know about it.

    The post US and EU Supported al-Qaeda in Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Ukraine Timeline Tells the Tale


    May 18, 2015: Remains of an Eastern Orthodox church after shelling by the Ukrainian Army near Donetsk International Airport. Eastern Ukraine. (Mstyslav Chernov. CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

    Special to Consortium News and published there on February 25, 2025

    The way to prevent the Ukraine war from being understood is to suppress its history.

    A cartoon version has the conflict beginning on Feb. 24, 2022 when Vladimir Putin woke up that morning and decided to invade Ukraine.

    There was no other cause, according to this version, other than unprovoked, Russian aggression against an innocent country.

    Please use this short, historical guide to share with people who still flip through the funny pages trying to figure out what’s going on in Ukraine.

    The mainstream account is like opening a novel in the middle of the book to read a random chapter as though it’s the beginning of the story.

    Thirty years from now historians will write about the context of the Ukraine war: the coup, the attack on Donbass, NATO expansion, rejection of the Minsk Accords and Russian treaty proposals — without being called Putin puppets.

    It will be the same way historians write of the Versailles Treaty as a cause of Nazism and WWII, without being called Nazi-sympathizers.

    Providing context is taboo while the war continues in Ukraine, as it would have been during WWII. Context is paramount in journalism.

    But journalists have to get with the program of war propaganda while a war goes on. Journalists are clearly not afforded these same liberties as historians. Long after the war, historians are free to sift through the facts.

    The Ukraine Timeline

    World War II— Ukrainian national fascists, led by Stepan Bandera, at first allied with the German Nazis, massacre more than a hundred thousands Jews and Poles.

    1950s to 1990 – C.I.A. brought Ukrainian fascists to the U.S. and worked with them to undermine the Soviet Union in Ukraine, running sabotage and propaganda operations. Ukrainian fascist leader Mykola Lebed was taken to New York where he worked with the C.I.A. through at least the 1960s and was still useful to the C.I.A. until 1991, the year of Ukraine’s independence. The evidence is in a U.S. government report starting from page 82. Ukraine has thus been a staging ground for the U.S. to weaken and threaten Moscow for nearly 80 years.

    November 1990: A year after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Charter of Paris for a New Europe (also known as the Paris Charter) is adopted by the U.S., Europe and the Soviet Union. The charter is based on the Helsinki Accords and is updated in the 1999 Charter for European Security. These documents are the foundation of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. The OSCE charter says no country or bloc can preserve its own security at another country’s expense.

    Dec. 25, 1991: Soviet Union collapses. Wall Street and Washington carpetbaggers move in during the ensuing decade to asset-strip the country of formerly state-owned properties, enrich themselves, help give rise to oligarchs, and impoverish the Russian, Ukrainian and other former Soviet peoples.

    1990s: U.S. reneges on promise to last Soviet leader Gorbachev not to expand NATO to Eastern Europe in exchange for a unified Germany. George Kennan, the leading U.S. government expert on the U.S.S.R., opposes expansion. Sen. Joe Biden, who supports NATO enlargement, predicts Russia will react hostilely to it.

    1997: Zbigniew Brzezinski, former U.S. national security adviser, in his 1997 book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, writes:

    “Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state.”

    New Year’s Eve 1999: After eight years of U.S. and Wall Street dominance, Vladimir Putin becomes president of Russia. Bill Clinton rebuffs him in 2000 when he asks to join NATO.

    Putin begins closing the door on Western interlopers, restoring Russian sovereignty, ultimately angering Washington and Wall Street. This process does not occur in Ukraine, which remains subject to Western exploitation and impoverishment of Ukrainian people.

    Feb. 10, 2007: Putin gives his Munich Security Conference speech in which he condemns U.S. aggressive unilateralism, including its illegal 2003 invasion of Iraq and its NATO expansion eastward.

    He said: “We have the right to ask: against whom is this [NATO] expansion intended? And what happened to the assurances our western partners made after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them.”


    Putin speaks three years after the Baltic States, former Soviet republics bordering on Russia, joined the Western Alliance. The West humiliates Putin and Russia by ignoring its legitimate concerns. A year after his speech, NATO says Ukraine and Georgia will become members. Four other former Warsaw Pact states join in 2009.

    2004-5: Orange Revolution. Election results are overturned giving the presidency in a run-off to U.S.-aligned Viktor Yuschenko over Viktor Yanukovich. Yuschenko makes fascist leader Bandera a “hero of Ukraine.”

    April 3, 2008: At a NATO conference in Bucharest, a summit declaration “welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO”. Russia harshly objects. William Burns, then U.S. ambassador to Russia, and presently C.I.A. director, warns in a cable to Washington, revealed by WikiLeaks, that,

    “Foreign Minister Lavrov and other senior officials have reiterated strong opposition, stressing that Russia would view further eastward expansion as a potential military threat. NATO enlargement, particularly to Ukraine, remains ‘an emotional and neuralgic’ issue for Russia, but strategic policy considerations also underlie strong opposition to NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. In Ukraine, these include fears that the issue could potentially split the country in two, leading to violence or even, some claim, civil war, which would force Russia to decide whether to intervene. … Lavrov stressed that Russia had to view continued eastward expansion of NATO, particularly to Ukraine and Georgia, as a potential military threat.”

    A crisis in Georgia erupts four months later leading to a brief war with Russia, which the European Union blames on provocation from Georgia.

    November 2009: Russia seeks new security arrangement in Europe. Moscow releases a draft of a proposal for a new European security architecture that the Kremlin says should replace outdated institutions such as NATO and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).

    The text, posted on the Kremlin’s website on Nov. 29, comes more than a year after President Dmitry Medvedev first formally raised the issue. Speaking in Berlin in June 2008, Medvedev said the new pact was necessary to finally update Cold War-era arrangements.

    “I’m convinced that Europe’s problems won’t be solved until its unity is established, an organic wholeness of all its integral parts, including Russia,” Medvedev said.

    2010: Viktor Yanukovich is elected president of Ukraine in a free and fair election, according to the OSCE.

    2013: Yanukovich chooses an economic package from Russia rather than an association agreement with the EU. This threatens Western exploiters in Ukraine and Ukrainian comprador political leaders and oligarchs.

    February 2014: Yanukovich is overthrown in a violent, U.S.-backed coup (presaged by the Nuland-Pyatt intercept), with Ukrainian fascist groups, like Right Sector, playing a lead role. Ukrainian fascists parade through cities in torch-lit parades with portraits of Bandera.


    Protesters clash with police in Kiev, Ukraine, February 2014. (Wikimedia Commons)

    March 16, 2014: In a rejection of the coup and the unconstitutional installation of an anti-Russian government in Kiev, Crimeans vote by 97 percent to join Russia in a referendum with 89 percent turnout. The Wagner private military organization is created to support Crimea. Virtually no shots are fired, and no one was killed in what Western media wrongly portrays as a “Russian invasion of Crimea.”

    April 12, 2014: The Coup government in Kiev launches war against anti-coup, pro-democracy separatists in Donbass. Openly neo-Nazi Azov Battalion plays a key role in the fighting for Kiev. Wagner forces arrive to support Donbass militias. U.S. again exaggerates this as a Russian “invasion” of Ukraine. “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in 19th century fashion by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext,” says U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who voted as a senator in favor of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 on a completely trumped up pre-text.

    May 2, 2014: Dozens of ethnic Russian protestors are burnt alive in a building in Odessa by neo-Nazi thugs. Eight days later, Luhansk and Donetsk declare independence and vote to leave Ukraine.

    Sept. 5, 2014: First Minsk agreement is signed in Minsk, Belarus by Russia, Ukraine, the OSCE, and the leaders of the breakaway Donbass republics, with mediation by Germany and France in a Normandy Format. It fails to resolve the conflict.

    Feb. 12, 2015: Minsk II is signed in Belarus, which would end the fighting and grant the republics autonomy while they remain part of Ukraine. The accord was unanimously endorsed by the U.N. Security Council on Feb. 15. In December 2022 former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admits West never had intention of pushing for Minsk implementation and essentially used it as a ruse to give time for NATO to arm and train the Ukraine armed forces.

    2016: The hoax known as Russiagate grips the Democratic Party and its allied media in the United States, in which it is falsely alleged that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to get Donald Trump elected. The phony scandal serves to further demonize Russia in the U.S. and raise tensions between the nuclear-armed powers, conditioning the public for war against Russia.

    May 12, 2016: The US activates missile system in Romania, angering Russia. U.S. claims it is purely defensive, but Moscow says the system could also be used offensively and would cut the time to deliver a strike on the Russian capital to within 10 to 12 minutes.

    June 6, 2016: Symbolically on the anniversary of the Normandy invasion, NATO launches aggressive exercises against Russia. It begins war games with 31,000 troops near Russia’s borders, the largest exercise in Eastern Europe since the Cold War ended. For the first time in 75 years, German troops retrace the steps of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union across Poland.

    German Foreign Minister Frank Walter-Steinmeier objects. “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through saber-rattling and warmongering,” Steinmeier stunningly tells Bild am Sontag newspaper. “Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.”

    Instead, Steinmeier calls for dialogue with Moscow. “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation,” he warns, adding it would be “fatal to search only for military solutions and a policy of deterrence.”

    December 2021: Russia offers draft treaty proposals to the United States and NATO proposing a new security architecture in Europe, reviving the failed Russian attempt to do so in 2009. The treaties propose the removal of the Romanian missile system and the withdrawal of NATO troop deployments from Eastern Europe. Russia says there will be a “technical-military” response if there are not serious negotiations on the treaties. The U.S. and NATO essentially reject them out of hand.

    February 2022: Russia begins its military intervention into Donbass in the still ongoing Ukrainian civil war after first recognizing the independence of Luhansk and Donetsk.

    Before the intervention, OSCE maps show a significant uptick of shelling from Ukraine into the separatist republics, where more than 10,000 people have been killed since 2014.


    Ukrainian troops in the Donbass region, March 2015. (OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons)

    March-April 2022: Russia and Ukraine agree on a framework agreement that would end the war, including Ukraine pledging not to join NATO. The U.S. and U.K. object. Prime Minister Boris Johnson flies to Kiev to tell Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to stop negotiating with Russia. The war continues with Russia seizing much of the Donbass.

    March 26, 2022: Biden admits in a speech in Warsaw that the U.S. is seeking through its proxy war against Russia to overthrow the Putin government. Earlier in March he overruled his secretary of state on establishing a no-fly zone against Russian aircraft in Ukraine. Biden opposed the no-fly zone, he said at the time, because “that’s called World War III, okay? Let’s get it straight here, guys. We will not fight the third world war in Ukraine.”

    September 2022: Donbass republics vote to join the Russian Federation, as well as two other regions: Kherson and Zaporizhzhia.

    May 2023: Ukraine begins a counter-offensive to try to take back territory controlled by Russia. As seen in leaked documents earlier in the year, U.S. intelligence concludes the offensive will fail before it begins.

    June 2023: A 36-hour rebellion by the Wagner group fails, when its leader Yevegny Prigoshzin takes a deal to go into exile in Belarus. The Wagner private army, which was funded and armed by the Russian Ministry of Defense, is absorbed into the Russian army. The Ukrainian offensive ends in failure at the end of November.

    September 2024: Biden deferred to the realists in the Pentagon to oppose long-range British Storm Shadow missiles from being fired by Ukraine deep into Russia out of fear it would also lead to a direct NATO-Russia military confrontation with all that that entails.

    Putin warned at the time that because British soldiers on the ground in Ukraine would actually launch the British missiles into Russia with U.S. geostrategic support, it “will mean that NATO countries — the United States and European countries — are at war with Russia. And if this is the case, then, bearing in mind the change in the essence of the conflict, we will make appropriate decisions in response to the threats that will be posed to us.”

    November 2024: After he was driven from the race and his party lost the White House, a lame duck Biden suddenly switched gears, allowing not only British, but also U.S. long-range ATACMS missiles to be fired into Russia. It’s not clear that the White House ever informed the Pentagon in advance of a move that risked the very World War III that Biden had previously sought to avoid.

    February 2025: The first direct contact between senior leadership of the United States and Russia in more than three years takes place, with a phone call between the countries’ presidents and a meeting of foreign ministers in Saudi Arabia. They agree to begin negotiations to end the war.

    *****

    This timeline clearly shows an aggressive Western intent towards Russia, and how the tragedy could have been avoided if NATO would not allow Ukraine to join; if the Minsk accords had been implemented; and if the U.S. and NATO negotiated a new security arrangement in Europe, taking Russian security concerns into account.

    The post Ukraine Timeline Tells the Tale first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Scrooged 2025

    In Charles Dicken’s classic novel Scrooge, later made into the great film A Christmas Carol, we see Ebenezer Scrooge being paid a visit at his office on Christmas Eve. The men visiting him are looking for donations to help the poor and destitute:

    “At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,” said the [one of the gentlemen], taking up a pen, “it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.”

    “Are there no prisons?” asked Scrooge.

    “Plenty of prisons,” said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.

    “And the Union workhouses?” demanded Scrooge. “Are they still in operation?”

    “They are. Still,” returned the gentleman, “I wish I could say they were not.”

    “The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?” said Scrooge.

    “Both very busy, sir.”

    “Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course,” said Scrooge. “I’m very glad to hear it.”

    “Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,” returned the gentleman, “a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?”

    “Nothing!” Scrooge replied.

    “You wish to be anonymous?”

    “I wish to be left alone,” said Scrooge. “Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don’t make merry myself at Christmas and I can’t afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned: they cost enough: and those who are badly off must go there.”

    “Many can’t go there; and many would rather die.”

    “If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

    Look around you folks, at what this Trump 2.0 with help by Elon Musk is doing to our nation and the working stiffs who make up 99+ % of us. This is the great upheaval for Capitalism on Steroids! Just the plan to cut Medicaid funding is enough to scurry us all to the poorhouse. How many MAGA  supporters of Trump and Musk will be affected by these cuts? All those working stiff and retired working stiff seniors will one day need to enter a nursing home or assisted living, and the money is not there to aid them… while Trump’s billionaire and mega millionaire friends and supporters get more tax breaks… it would be too late by then.

    When our drinking water becomes even more leaded and putrid by industrial wastes and poisons, there will no EPA to soothe us. When schools are forbidden to teach about the evils of American slavery, replaced in the curriculum by teaching about The Gulf of America… we are done for. When the Center for Disease Control and Prevention is replaced by The Center for Freedom and Liberty, better put on those N-95 masks folks. When the Trump-Musk tariffs see massive boycotts on American exports by various nations worldwide, who will finally stop this financial bleeding of working stiffs and poor?

    As with Scrooge isn’t it funny how the Super Rich, who never had to worry about enough money for housing or food and medicine, love to speak down to us all? The ‘ arrogance of indigence’ becomes deafening. Watch the great Norman Jewison 1975 film Rollerball  and see what can happen when Corporations control us… completely! In the 1976 Sidney Lumet classic film Network the big cheese, Jensen of the media giant, tells it straight to Howard Beale, the radical newscaster: “There is no America, there is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT, AT&T and Dupont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today!”

    Wouldn’t it be great if next Christmas ( or much sooner) those Ghosts of Christmas come to visit Trump and Musk as they sleep? Hope springs eternal.

    The post Scrooged 2025 first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Seize the Moment: End the War in Ukraine!

    The Peace In Ukraine Coalition is cautiously optimistic about emerging possibilities for ending the war in Ukraine. It is a good thing that the U.S. and Russia are talking. An end to the hostility between the two nuclear superpowers would bring a sigh of relief to people all over the world.

    We do not know if the Trump administration, Russia and Ukraine will be able to achieve a lasting peace in Ukraine. We encourage diplomacy, however, rather than fear it. We want the killing to stop as soon as possible. For three years we have been calling for a ceasefire, negotiations and an end to US weapons shipments that fuel the war. We are encouraged that in this moment there is a possibility of real progress towards peace.

    Successive U.S. administrations insisted on expanding NATO – an anti-Russia military alliance – to Russia’s very borders, despite warnings by senior U.S. diplomats, academics, and secretaries of defense that NATO expansion was unnecessary and would likely provoke a war.  President Biden shares particular responsibility, because he was President Obama’s point man on Ukraine in 2014, and because the Biden administration rejected multiple chances for peace, both before and after Russia’s invasion. A less aggressive U.S. foreign policy would have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of young soldiers and saved hundreds of billions of dollars.

    Misinformation about the Ukraine war is rampant. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the oft-repeated contention that Russia intends to invade other European countries. Even now the word “unprovoked” is dutifully repeated throughout the U.S. media sphere.

    By hitching itself to the tragically flawed policy of the Biden administration, the Democratic Party is now seen by many as “the war party.” This does not mean that the Republican Party has morphed into the party of peace. One need look no further than U.S. facilitation of Israel’s blatant genocide in Gaza to see that both major political parties have blood on their hands.

    According to recent polls, a majority of the Ukrainian people want a ceasefire and negotiations to end the war. They have suffered far too much already. Continuing the war will only result in further death and destruction.

    NO MORE KILLING IN OUR NAME!!
    Diplomacy to End the War In Ukraine
    End U.S.-Israeli Genocide in Palestine


    We Call for:

    Good faith negotiations for a lasting peace in Ukraine and Europe
    An end to U.S. military involvement in Ukraine, with weapons, intelligence and advisers
    An end to the expansion of NATO

    The Peace In Ukraine Coalition is comprised of many national and local peace groups, including CODEPINK, DSA – International Cttee., Massachusetts Peace Action, World Beyond War and Veterans For Peace.

    The post Seize the Moment: End the War in Ukraine! first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • USA Is #1 Arms Dealer, Exporting 43% Of World’s Weapons

    The United States is by far the biggest arms dealer on Earth, responsible for 43% of all weapons exports from 2020 to 2024.

    The US transferred 7.3 times more weapons than China, and 5.5 times more than Russia.

    In fact, Russia’s global arms exports declined by 64% from 2020 to 2024, and China’s fell by 5.4%, whereas those of the US grew by 21%.

    There were also large increases in weapons exports during this five-year period in Italy (+138%), Spain (+29%), France (+11%), and South Korea (+4.9%).

    This is according to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

    The post USA Is #1 Arms Dealer, Exporting 43% Of World’s Weapons appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Movements Worldwide Call For End To US Military Exercises In Koreas

    Pressure continues to grow against the ongoing Freedom Shield 25, a joint military exercise between the US and South Korea.

    The International People’s Assembly (IPA) and International League of Peoples Struggle (ILPS) joined Nodutdol, an anti-imperialist Korean diaspora group, in launching a joint statement calling for the Freedom Shield military exercises to be cancelled, claiming it is drumming up threats of war on the Korean peninsula. The anti-imperialist and anti-war platforms bring together hundreds of people’s movements and organizations across the world.

    The post Movements Worldwide Call For End To US Military Exercises In Koreas appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • What to Do When Faced with Tariffs? Diversify


    The New York Times yesterday (11 March 2025) headlined: “Trump Intensifies Statehood Threats in Attack on Canada.” What particularly stood out was the sub headline: “The U.S. president on Tuesday reiterated his claims on Canada’s territory as he increased tariffs, threatening to bring the country’s economy to its knees.”

    How are Canadians supposed to feel about being threatened? How are Canadians to feel about the indignity of being brought economically to their knees? It calls to mind the invocation of Mexican revolutionary Emilio Zapatista who stated: “It is better to die on your feet than to live on your knees!”

    The article opens:

    The fresh attacks President Donald Trump aimed at Canada on Tuesday extended beyond imposing more tariffs on America’s neighbor and NATO ally, and laid out in the clearest terms yet his vision for annexing Canada and making it part of the United States.

    Trump is a selfish, narcissistic, vain person (e.g., here and here), and that plays well to a certain audience. It is obvious from his pandering to the public, his name calling of others (e.g., referring to Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau as a governor of the 51st state), his preening with bold sharpie-signed documents held up for cameras, his declarations affecting others without first speaking to the others.

    It is about Trump’s vision for Canada. It’s an all stick and no carrot approach. That is what annexation is: “possession taken of a piece of land or a country, usually by force or without permission: The country’s annexation of its neighbor caused an outcry.”

    Past and present Canadian governments (and the Canadians who elect so-called representatives to the parliament) are responsible for Canada’s exports being so reliant on the US market rather than diversifying its trade into other world markets.

    It doesn’t have to stay that way. In fact, it is a rude wake-up call that Canada must not rely on the US to be a faithful and steadfast partner. Canada’s dignity and sovereignty1 demand a change in the status quo.

    Unlike China, Canada is unprepared for round two of a Trump administration.

    The US economy is forecast by many commentators to be heading for a recession, something that Trump does not deny. China, on the other hand, has set its 2025 GDP growth target at around 5%. It seems futile to tie one’s ship-of-state to another sinking ship.

    Canada says it will fight fire with fire, that it will reciprocate the US tariffs. This is a lose-lose proposition. Canada needs to get off its knees and seek a win-win, respectful relationship — something that China always promotes. No need to completely disengage with the US, but apply to BRICS and the BRI and develop relations with the Global South. Pursue a path that is best for Canadians.

    ENDNOTE:

    The post What to Do When Faced with Tariffs? Diversify first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    Canada’s dignity and sovereignty will always be morally challenged given that it exists on the dispossession of its Indigenous peoples — a lamentable criminality that Canada shares with the US.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins

    Once the principle is established that the government can arrest and jail protesters… officials will use it to silence opposition broadly.

    — Heather Cox Richardson, historian

    You can’t have it both ways.

    You can’t live in a constitutional republic if you allow the government to act like a police state.

    You can’t claim to value freedom if you allow the government to operate like a dictatorship.

    You can’t expect to have your rights respected if you allow the government to treat whomever it pleases with disrespect and an utter disregard for the rule of law.

    There’s always a boomerang effect.

    Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting America’s borders or making America great again—rest assured, these same practices can and will be used against you when the government decides to set its sights on you.

    Arresting political activists engaged in lawful, nonviolent protest activities is merely the shot across the bow.

    The chilling of political speech and suppression of dissident voices are usually among the first signs that you’re in the midst of a hostile takeover by forces that are not friendly to freedom.

    This is how it begins.

    Consider that Mahmoud Khalil, an anti-war protester and recent graduate of Columbia University, was arrested on a Saturday night by ICE agents who appeared ignorant of his status as a legal U.S. resident and his rights thereof. That these very same ICE agents also threatened to arrest Mahmoud’s eight-months-pregnant wife, an American citizen, is also telling.

    This does not seem to be a regime that respects the rights of the people.

    Indeed, these ICE agents, who were “just following orders” from on high, showed no concern that the orders they had been given were trumped up, politically motivated and unconstitutional.

    If this is indeed the first of many arrests to come, what’s next? Or more to the point, who’s next?

    We are all at risk.

    History shows that when governments claim the power to silence dissent—whether in the name of national security, border protection, or law and order—that power rarely remains limited. What starts as a crackdown on so-called “threats” quickly expands to include anyone who challenges those in power.

    President Trump has made it clear that Mahmoud’s arrest is just “the first arrest of many to come.” He has openly stated his intent to target noncitizens who engage in activities he deems contrary to U.S. interests—an alarmingly vague standard that seems to change at his whim, the First Amendment be damned.

    If history is any guide, the next targets will not just be immigrants or foreign-born activists. They will be American citizens who dare to speak out.

    If you need further proof of Trump’s disregard for constitutional rights, look no further than his recent declaration that boycotting Tesla is illegal—a chilling statement that reveals his fundamental misunderstanding of both free speech and the rule of law.

    For the record, there is nothing illegal about exercising one’s First Amendment right of speech, assembly, and protest in a nonviolent way to bring about social change by boycotting private businesses. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co. (1982) that nonviolent boycotts are a form of political speech which are entitled to First Amendment protection.

    The problem, unfortunately, when you’re dealing with a president who believes that he can do whatever he wants because he is the law is that anyone and anything can become a target.

    Mahmoud is the test case.

    As journalists Gabe Kaminsky, Madeleine Rowley, and Maya Sulkin point out, Mahmoud’s arrest for being a “threat to the foreign policy and national security interests of the United States” (note: he is not actually accused of breaking any laws) is being used as a blueprint for other arrests to come.

    What this means is that anyone who dares to disagree with the government and its foreign policy and express that disagreement could be considered a threat to the country’s “national security interests.”

    Yet the right to speak out against government wrongdoing is the quintessential freedom.

    Indeed, the First Amendment does more than give us a right to criticize our country: it makes it a civic duty. Certainly, if there is one freedom among the many spelled out in the Bill of Rights that is especially patriotic, it is the right to criticize the government.

    Unfortunately, the Deep State doesn’t take kindly to individuals who speak truth to power.

    This is nothing new, nor is it unique to any particular presidential administration.

    Throughout history, U.S. presidents have used their power to suppress dissent. The Biden administration equated the spread of “misinformation” with terrorism. Trump called the press “the enemy of the people” and suggested protesting should be illegal. Obama expanded anti-protest laws and cracked down on whistleblowers. Bush’s Patriot Act made it a crime to support organizations the government deemed terrorist, even in lawful ways. This pattern stretches back centuries—FDR censored news after Pearl Harbor, Woodrow Wilson outlawed criticism of war efforts, and John Adams criminalized speaking against the government.

    Regardless of party, those in power have repeatedly sought to limit free speech. What’s new is the growing willingness to criminalize political dissent under the guise of national security.

    Clearly, the government has been undermining our free speech rights for quite a while now, but Trump’s antagonism towards free speech is taking this hostility to new heights.

    The government has a history of using crises—real or manufactured—to expand its power.

    Once dissent is labeled a threat, it’s only a matter of time before laws meant for so-called extremists are used against ordinary citizens. Criticizing policy, protesting, or even refusing to conform could be enough to put someone on a watchlist.

    We’ve seen this before.

    The government has a long list of “suspicious” ideologies and behaviors it uses to justify surveillance and suppression. Today’s justification may be immigration; tomorrow, it could be any form of opposition.

    This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

    It’s just a matter of time.

    It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

    The groundwork has already been laid.

    Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

    So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government could get you labeled as a terrorist.

    After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

    This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

    It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.

    Having allowed the government to expand and exceed our reach, we find ourselves on the losing end of a tug-of-war over control of our country and our lives. And for as long as we let them, government officials will continue to trample on our rights, always justifying their actions as being for the good of the people.

    Yet the government can only go as far as “we the people” allow. Therein lies the problem.

    This is not just about one administration or one set of policies. This is a broader pattern of governmental overreach that has been allowed to unfold, unchecked and unchallenged. And at the heart of this loss of freedom is a fundamental misunderstanding—or even a deliberate abandonment—of what sovereignty really means in America.

    Sovereignty is a dusty, antiquated term that harkens back to an age when kings and emperors ruled with absolute power over a populace that had no rights. Americans turned the idea of sovereignty on its head when they declared their independence from Great Britain and rejected the absolute authority of King George III. In doing so, Americans claimed for themselves the right to self-government and established themselves as the ultimate authority and power.

    In other words, as the preamble to the Constitution states, in America, “we the people”—sovereign citizens—call the shots.

    So, when the government acts, it is supposed to do so at our bidding and on our behalf, because we are the rulers.

    That’s not exactly how it turned out, though, is it?

    In the 200-plus years since we boldly embarked on this experiment in self-government, we have been steadily losing ground to the government’s brazen power grabs, foisted upon us in the so-called name of national security.

    The government has knocked us off our rightful throne. It has usurped our rightful authority. It has staged the ultimate coup. Its agents no longer even pretend that they answer to “we the people.”

    This is how far our republic has fallen and how desensitized “we the people” have become to this constant undermining of our freedoms.

    If we are to put an end to this steady slide into totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none, we must begin by refusing to allow the politics of fear to shackle us to a dictatorship.

    President Trump wants us to believe that the menace we face (imaginary or not) is so sinister, so overwhelming, so fearsome that the only way to surmount the danger is by empowering the government to take all necessary steps to quash it, even if that means allowing government jackboots to trample all over the Constitution.

    Don’t believe it. That argument has been tried before.

    The government’s overblown, extended wars on terrorism, drugs, violence and illegal immigration have all been convenient ruses used to terrorize the populace into relinquishing more of their freedoms in exchange for elusive promises of security.

    We are walking a dangerous path right now.

    Political arrests. Harassment. Suppression of dissident voices. Retaliation. Detention centers for political prisoners.

    These are a harbinger of what’s to come if the Trump administration carries through on its threats to crack down on any and all who exercise their First Amendment rights to free speech and protest.

    We are being acclimated to bolder power grabs, acts of lawlessness, and a pattern of intimidation, harassment, and human rights violations by government officials. And yet, in the midst of this relentless erosion of our freedoms, the very concept of sovereignty—the foundational idea that the people, not the government, hold ultimate power—has been all but forgotten.

    “Sovereignty” used to mean something fundamental in America: the idea that the government serves at the will of the people, that “we the people” are the rightful rulers of this land, and that no one, not even the president, is above the law. But today, that notion is scarcely discussed, as the government continues its unchecked expansion.

    We have lost sight of the fact that our power is meant to restrain the government, not the other way around.

    Don’t allow yourselves to be distracted, derailed or desensitized.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the moment these acts of aggression becomes the new normal, authoritarianism won’t be a distant threat; it will be reality.

    The post When Dissent Becomes a Crime: The War on Political Speech Begins first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • On Stupidity

    Stupidity, stupidity everywhere – and not a word to witness.

    “Stupid” is a commonplace term casually used in everyday conversation. Much less so in writing – especially when the subject is political personalities. It is heavily weighted with inhibition. Why this hesitation? Why at a time when manifest stupidity in speech and action is rampant?

    “Stupid” is both blunt and conclusive. Straight-forward. It does not welcome qualification or discussion. It implies: matter settled, closed. Moreover, it suggests a character flaw as well as low intelligence. That somehow makes us uncomfortable. So we prefer: dense, slow, thick, dim or dim-witted; or pithy euphemisms, e.g. “not the sharpest tool in the kit” or “none too swift” or “slow on the uptake” or “not playing with a full deck” or “in so far over his head that the bubbles don’t reach the surface.” In addition, there are those words that refer directly to intelligence: moron, imbecile, idiot. They, too, are in currency but suffer from the disability of taking in vain a descriptive word that refers to the poor souls who are born with mental deficiencies.

    “Stupid” is used as an epithet 95% of the time. Not as a depiction of someone’s Intelligence Quotient (IQ). To do so in the latter sense is to complicate matters. Intelligence, as we now are aware, is a broad concept that covers 5 or 6 or 7 mental attributes whose correlations are quite low. So, almost no one thinks that through before throwing the word around. To the degree that one might consider meanings, it implies lack of logic – the core characteristic of conventional IQ intelligence.

    Squirt kerosene on a simmering barbecue – that’s stupid. Sending more troops to Afghanistan in 2017 when you’ve failed miserably to achieve your (undefined) objective over the past 15 years with much larger contingents is stupid, i.e., illogical. Denouncing China as America’s enemy on whom it plans to impose severe economic sanctions while senior officials publicly predict war within 10 years, and then beseeching Beijing for assistance in keeping the dollar the global currency by ending its sale of U.S. securities; and then demanding that China slow its economic growth because 1) it causes balance-of-trade imbalances, and 2) that would reduce its oil imports thereby minimizing Russian revenue from its sales on a softer world market (as did Janet Yellin on two separate visits) – that’s stupid. Silently letting Turkey provide crucial material support to ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria while decrying terrorist acts by jihadis in the US and Europe is stupid, i.e., illogical. (The Obama administration soon joined in supplying arms indirectly those same groups, then helped secure their control of the Idlib enclave which was their base for the eventual breakout a few months ago; now in power they are massacring Alawites and Christians). Bestowing praise and honors on the Saudi leaders as declared brothers in the “war on terror” when in fact these very persons have done more to propagate the fanatical creed that inspires and justifies acts of terror is stupid, i.e., “illogical.”

    These instances of stupid behavior draw our attention to the connections between intelligence and knowledge – between “stupidity” and “ignorance.” Stupid (illogical) behavior is more likely when you don’t know what you’re doing because important information is missing. In the examples cited, though, the information that is the foundation for logical thinking was known to the parties taking those actions. Not just accessible – it is lodged (somewhere) in the brain of the actor. “Dumb”1 in popular usage is the word that combines “stupid” and “ignorant” – with the connotation that the ignorance is willful. That is a pertinent notion to which we’ll return.

    Assuming that the “stupid’ actors are not mentally deficient, why do they act as if they are? That is the persistent question that crops us as we see and read the antics of public officials, commentators, and a host of celebrity personalities. Several explanations, not excuses, come to mind.

    One is that there exists an implicit logic that is not acknowledged but salient for the person(s) involved. The Pentagon brass may well have been less concerned about “winning” in Afghanistan, whatever that means, than they were living with the intolerable perception that they “lost.” No general cum security policy-maker wants to be saddled with the label of “loser.” That sensitivity can become institutionally generalized; Generals Mattis and McMaster were in little danger of being blamed personally for failure in Afghanistan. What seems to count is that they did not want the U.S. military to be stigmatized as a failure. They were acutely aware of how much the image of the uniformed military suffered as a result of America losing its first war in Vietnam. It follows that they might hope against hope that the outcome can be fudged enough so as to escape that fate. There is a practical side to this concern, too. Failure, as perceived in the public eye, could tarnish the resplendent image so successfully cultivated during the “war on terror” era. That could translate into less support for bigger budgets, less lucrative consultancies after retirement, and less acclaim. And a weaker voice in policy debates.

    If one were to postulate that these are cardinal objectives, then campaigning to send several thousand more troops on a strategically pointless mission is logical – and the plan’s promoters not as stupid as they appear. What of senior policymakers in and around the White House who did not share those particular interests? They, indeed, were stupid.

    Another instructive example is Barack Obama’s announcing the conclusion of an historic, arduously negotiated nuclear treaty with Iran (JPOA) in a speech that vilifies the Tehran regime as a tyranny that sponsors terrorism, aims to dominate the Persian Gulf, and endangers Israel. Thereby, he emboldened opponents of the accord to attack it – clearing the way for its abrogation by Trump a few years later. The net result: we now are on the brink of war with Iran because of its nuclear activities. Stupidly illogical? Perhaps not. Obama, on narrow political grounds, was trying to insulate himself from a barrage of criticism from Washington hard-liners and the Zionist lobby. Only two years earlier, he had infuriated them by scotching plans for American military strikes against government forces in response to chemical attacks blamed on the Assad regime (in fact, a false flag operation by MI-6 and their White Hats in collaboration with the jihadi rebels); hence, the perceived need to mollify them. So, it can be seen as logical given his weighting of interests and priorities. Not stupid – just self-centered and unresponsive to the public good, vintage Obama.

    A second reality to keep in mind is that governments are plural nouns – or, pronouns with multiple antecedent nouns. The numerous organizations, bureaucracies and individuals involved in decision-making typically lead to a convoluted process wherein it is easy to lose track of purposes, priorities and coordination. Where little discipline is imposed by the chief, the greater the chances that the result will be contradictory, disjointed, sub-optimal and often poorly executed policies. At the present moment, we are witnessing a disjointed Trump administration, that in regard to Ukraine/Russia, 6 individuals are pursuing 7 different lines as indicated by their public remarks – an octopus trying to put on a pair of mismatched socks. All exacerbated by a scatterbrained Chief Executive who contradicts himself – as well his senior deputies – on a nightly basis.

    Another kind of impediment to coherent, reality-based policymaking arises when the opposite condition prevails: an elaborate process involving several parties with divergent perspectives and parochial interests concludes with an agreement on a lowest common denominator basis. Arduously reached, that decision becomes frozen, insulated from new information or changes in the environment due to the fear that any revision would unravel the consensus – a form of groupthink. An extreme example of this phenomenon is provided by the EU where 27 sovereign states must agree before any policy can be enunciated. In Brussels, success is proclaimed when they reach accord as if negotiating among themselves is tantamount to negotiating an accord with other governments. A similar example is presented by the current campaign of the Trump administration to press Ukraine into negotiations with Russia. The tussle between Washington and Kiev is taken to be the crucial step toward resolution of the conflict. In fact, the ideas being bandied about as key ingredients of a settlement already have been absolutely rejected by Moscow – in particular, the much ballyhooed ceasefire that is a Western pipedream. As yet, they have not even been formally conveyed to the Russians. Stupid – or pathological?

    Finally, we should recognize that rigorous thinking is far from the norm – at the highest levels of government as well as in everyday life. It takes a combination of education/training, experience, intellectual integrity, a cultivated sense of responsibility, discomfort with deciding on the basis of skimpy or suspect information, and an ingrained preference for knowing why you’re doing something instead of flying by the seat of your pants. True, when practiced and reinforced, rigorous thinking can become habitual – just like other modes of human behavior. There are multiple influences, though, that militate against that habit taking root and being sustained. They include the lure of celebrity, time pressures due to an excess of travel and/or summonses to mind-numbing TV interviews, long-tedious-inconclusive meetings (such as those presided over by Susan Rice which drove Chuck Hagel out of government), endless bureaucratic games-playing, distracted Chief Executives who demand ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answers to complex issues. Altogether, the tumult can soften the toughest mind. Weaker minds simply latch onto whatever conventional wisdom and catch phrases are floating around in order to remain relevant and minimally functional in the kaleidoscopic setting of most administrations.

    All of these patterns with attendant adverse consequences are more likely to crystallize into stupid acts when the man nominally in charge lacks the intelligence, emotional stability, self-awareness and/or advisors to recognize either the requirements for sound policymaking or for implementation. A lack of capacity to accept responsibility and to be held accountable exacerbates matters.

    A business career such as Trump’s is not the desired preparation. Not only is that world fundamentally different from the world of public affairs (and especially foreign policy) Further, Trump partially compensated for his flaws through coercion, cheating, and duplicity. And at the end of the day, he could rig the books. That modus operandi doesn’t fly in the Middle East or in dealing with the likes of Vladimir Putin or Xia Jinping. It could, and does, win elections in a country where ignorance and “obtuseness”, in its many inglorious forms, are commonplace.

    “Willful ignorance,” or “studied ignorance,” is an increasingly familiar phenomenon. Not just in Washington but among heads of large organizations of all stripes (e.g. universities). The inclination to avoid acquiring knowledge about a matter either at hand or looming is not necessarily a sign of stupidity. Here, too, there may be hidden considerations at play. American foreign policymakers may have wish to mask the Kabul government’s faltering popular support because doing so means a fundamental rethink of aims- an agonizing reappraisal for which they are unprepared intellectually, politically, and diplomatically. (MB: substitute Ukraine)

    Making no effort to uncover the facts only becomes “stupid” where the responsible official then does things, as a consequence, that harm his interests. That has been the case in Syria where Barack Obama refused to come to terms with the uncomfortable truth that the “rebels” were overwhelmingly Salafist jihadis. In this case, an admission of that cardinal truth would pose the stark choice between continuing to back an al-Qaeda2-led cause or reversing course in tilting toward the Assad regime. The President lacked the courage to deal with the wide-ranging ramifications of that; so, he deluded himself into pursuing a will-o’wisp that existed only in the imaginings of those who were keen on an American military intervention. By surrounding himself with a rogue Secretary of Defense, a strategically disoriented Secretary of State, a self-absorbed, unpracticed National Security Advisor, and an obstreperous UN Ambassador, Obama fostered an environment that enabled his escapist behavior. So, too, did his ritual deference to the warped liturgy of the foreign policy Establishment that they represented.

    For a President to avoid acting “stupidly,” he need not have an exceptional IQ – or score remarkably high on other dimensions of intelligence. Two things are most important: he must be honest with himself; and he must put in place a policy system that is both logical in process and self-aware as to why decisions are taken with what end in mind. To borrow an analogy from the football terminology favored in the corridors of Washington power: you can win a championship with a simply competent quarterback if the other pieces are in place and he follows a disciplined script. (Bart Starr of the old Green Bay Packers). An emotionally handicapped or narcissistic quarterback – however talented – will cripple a team sooner or later. One who suffers from the latter condition(s), along with a lack of athletic talent, is a guarantor of disaster. “Stupidity” will be the least of the derogatory terms applied to the ensuing performance; that word should be reserved for those who chose him.

    Moral: we should not hesitate to call things as they are. Feigned politeness in situations marked by systematic deceit, ill-will and harm to the nation serves no good purpose. Concerned about the proverbial “dignity of the office?” Take your shoes off before entering the Oval Office. If “stupidity” displayed by stupid people is what we observe, virtue lies in calling it by its name.

    The foregoing discussion pertains directly to government leaders. What of those non-official members of the “foreign affairs community” – the think tank pundits, the media personalities, the op ed columnists? These days, the thinking of most mirrors that of those in government positions. The unstated or unconfirmed premises, the partial or selective information, the logical flaws. The main differences are that they write/speak at far greater length, compose longer sentences, and use polysyllabic words. The level of intellectual rigor, though, is pretty much the same.

    ENDNOTES:

    The post On Stupidity first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    “Dumb” as a pejorative has been out of favor for some time. It sounds stale to the post-modern ear. Only be adding the suffix “SOB” or “bastard” does it make any impact. That may be changing, though. The comeback of “dumb” could well have something to do with the fact that it rhymes with “Trump.” The German spelling “Drump” has even truer resonance.
    2    Abu Mohammad al-Julani, nom de guerre of Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, and Abu Bakra al-Baghdadi of ISIS notoriety were confederates in the al-Qaeda subsidiary al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia that had been active in Iraq after the 2003 American invasion and occupation. Soon after the civil war in Syria broke out in 2011, they went their more or less separate ways: al-Baghdadi leading the Islamic State and Julani controlling al-Nusra as it came to be known. Over time, al-Nusra became the dominant force in the opposition coalition. It used its non-jihadi allies as convenient cover. American aid, along with that of European supporters, was laundered through those other groups. In effect, they served as a postal drop box. Over the eight years when al-Nusra ran the Idlib pocket under Turkish protection, they set up a repressive Islamic autocracy. They also assembled a multiethnic force including ISIS remnants, Uigurs, Uzbeks, Afghans, Chechens that acted as Turkish mercenaries in Libya, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. Now, they enjoy a measure of independence as militias in the new-found regime of Jalani’s Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – its latest organizational incarnation. However, they could not commit the massacres against the Alawites without Jolani’s tacit approval, and HTS security forces, too, were involved.

    For the record: among Syria’s 4.5 million Alawites, few supported Assad to the end and active opposition to the HTS takeover was very limited.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael Brenner.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Trump Denies Student Loan Relief To Nonprofit Workers

    Trump signed an executive order on Friday, March 7, which directs the Education Department to exclude student loan forgiveness for workers at certain organizations which “engage in activities that have a substantial illegal purpose,” appearing to target some nonprofit groups at odds with his political agenda.

    Under the new order, workers would be disqualified from the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Program if the Trump administration deems that their employers violated federal immigration laws, supported “terrorism”, or engaged in so-called “child abuse,” which includes “the chemical and surgical castration or mutilation of children or the trafficking of children to so-called transgender sanctuary States for purposes of emancipation from their lawful parents” – a clear attack on organizations that may support transgender rights.

    The post Trump Denies Student Loan Relief To Nonprofit Workers appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • European Leaders Plan Massive Increase in Defense Spending

    European leaders meeting in an “Emergency War Summit” in Brussels have agreed on huge increases in arms spending. On entering the meeting, Denmark’s Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, declared “Spend, spend, spend on defense and deterrence.” And in response to an interviewer’s question, French Prime Minster Francois Bayrou dismissed the idea that the French public should have any say in this decision, adding “We can’t let the country be disarmed.” (CNews and Europe 1). French President Macron asserts that peace will come only when Russia is “pacified” and Zelensky, Macron and Starmer will try to meet with Trump once again to hear him reiterate, “No, Non, Hi (Ukrainian) and Nyet.

    European leaders have been junior partners, via NATO, with US imperialism (think Libya and Iraq) but now the section of the US ruling class that’s behind Trump is openly severing the partnership. These leaders are bobbing and scrambling to hang on to their old role or find a new one for themselves. Reputations and institutions are at stake and it’s not clear that they can finesse their way out because they’ve always counted on an official narrative about Russia that will be put to the test.

    As Alexander Mercouris has noted, the real fear among European leaders is if the US and Russia achieve peaceful relations and a Great Power reset, the fictional “Russia threat” that’s been perpetrated on ordinary Europeans will gradually diminish and people will realize they’ve been lied to all along. For now, we can hope that ordinary Europeans will resist how Europe’s ruling elite try to create hysteria, double down on stupidity (“going batshit crazy” in Mark Sleboba’s words) and eviscerate social programs.

    Europeans, as well as their US counterparts, who are unwilling to swallow the official propaganda are subjected to unrelenting Putin-baiting — including from liberals and even self-identified leftists — but we refuse to be silenced. We need to do a better job of using our access to social media to show people that the “Ukraine project” was a proxy war as a prelude to attacking Russia. Finally, we can hope that this will lead to an actual left rising in Europe and the United States.

    The post European Leaders Plan Massive Increase in Defense Spending first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump’s Main Targets to be Cut

    Trump’s Presidency thus far exhibits the most extreme example that I have ever found of a national leader who not only represents ONLY the extremely rich but who especially despises the poor — it’s a value-system that a person’s moral value is his/her net worth: a person’s value is his/her wealth, neither more nor less than that. The four main federal expenditures that Trump and Musk are investigating for “waste, fraud, and abuse” are Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Assistance to the poor. Whereas Social Security and Medicare are relatively safe against being cut, since those are not annually appropriated by Congress, Medicare and assistance to the poor (both of which serve ONLY the poor) ARE appropriated annually by Congress, and signed into law by the President; and, so, those two will likely be cut the most. (They are in what our Government calls “discretionary spending.” You know: they’re things such as yachts.)

    The federal Department that the Trump Administration is the least seeking for cuts is the by-far costliest federal Department (at roughly $900 billion per year), which is the only federal Department that has never been audited and that consequently is the most corrupt and wasteful, the Defense Department (Pentagon), which Department is the basic or even only market for the products of firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, General Dynamics and Northrup Grumman, etc., which firms (except for Boeing) don’t even have any significant consumer markets — their profits depend totally or almost totally on sales to the U.S. Government itself and to its allied Governments; and, so, they need to control the U.S. Government in order to control their markets, which they consequently do, by means of America’s furiously revolving-door between the public sector and the private sector, so that becoming a part of this “military-industrial complex” is the surest way to become and remain a billionaire in today’s America, regardless of whether or not the U.S. economy is doing well from the standpoint of consumers (the general public — which includes lots of ‘worthless’ people, individuals who owe more than they own).

    Trump’s first major achievement as America’s President was to arrange the largest single armaments sale in all of history, which was $404 billion to the Saud family in 2017 (“Made In America” of course, by companies that are in his debt.)

    All other federal Departments (the ones that serve the public instead of serve mainly the billionaires who own controlling interests in ‘defense’-related corporations) are being subjected by the Trump Administration to heavy pressure to cut all other Departments, this pressure coming from President Trump and from America’s wealthiest individual Elon Musk (Trump’s biggest-of-all campaign contibutor at over $270 million (“SpaceX”), whose fortune was built upon $38 billion in investments from the Pentagon but also from some other (‘defense’-related) federal agencies. You know, he is one of America’s ‘self-made billionaires’. (Trump, who is himself a billionaire, was born to Fred Trump, the NYC real-estate tycoon.)

    As I headlined and explained on March 5, “Only the US Defense Department’s Budget Will NOT be Cut.” That is exactly the opposite of what the American people want, as I shall now document:

    On February 14, the AP had headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds.

    On March 5, the Jeff-Bezos-owned Washington Post headlined “GOP must cut Medicaid or Medicare to achieve budget goals, CBO finds: The nonpartisan bookkeeper said there’s no other way to cut $1.5 trillion from the budget over the next decade.” Though the CBO is ‘nonpartisan’ as between the Democratic and Republican Parties, it is (since both are) entirely beholden to America’s billionaires; and, so, that term there is deceptive. What that ‘news’-report is reporting is that the sense of Congress (even including Democrats there) is that a way needs to be found to cut $1.5T from ‘Medicare or Medicaid” (which, since only Medicare, health care to the poor, is ‘discretionary’, Medicare is not) over the next ten years.

    On March 8, ABC News and Yahoo News headlined “DOGE is searching through Social Security payments looking for fraud,” and reported that “The Department of Government Efficiency is sifting through $1.6 trillion worth of Social Security payments — records that include a person’s name, birth date and how much they earn — in an anti-fraud effort that has advocates worried the Trump administration could start denying payments to vulnerable older Americans.” It reported the lies by the Trump Administration to ‘justify’ what they are doing, but the matter will be settled in court, by politically-appointed judges; and, so, mere truth and falsity won’t necessarily deterrrmine the ruling, especially not if a billionaire is worth a thousand mere millionaires (and paupers are worth nothing).

    Heck, the U.S. Government spends around $1.6 trillion per year on its military ($900 billion of it paid by the Pentagon, and $700 billion of it out of other federal Departments), and yet still has only the world’s second-best military (Russia’s, costing a tenth of that, being #1); and the amount of corrution there is astronomical; so, if Trump/Musk REALLY wanted to cut what’s euphemistically called “waste, fraud, and abuse” (but is overwhelmingly corruption) ALL of the cuts would be coming from there.

    What is supposed to happen when a Government represents ONLY an aristocracy? In 1776, the answer was Revolution. We are there again — or else we never will be again, and will instead continue to accept the continued systematic looting of the American people, this time by DOMESTIC (instead of English) billionaires. It’s not a conflict between Democrats versus Republicans; that’s merely the method to distract us. It is a conflict between the billionaires versus the public.

    As the liberal (Democratic Party) wing of America’s aristocracy said, in the person of its Warren Buffett, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (He told this to the conservative Ben Stein reporting in the aristocracy’s New York Times, under the headline “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning,” on 26 November 2006, but that newspaper won’t let readers access the article online, and instead prefer to charge anyone who seeks to see whether or not the quotation is authentic — it is. And the statement is true. But the 31 March 2019 issue of Forbes headlined “Reimagining Capitalism: How The Greatest System Ever Conceived (And Its Billionaires) Need To Change,” and reported: “‘America works, and it works now better than it ever worked,’ Buffett says.” Better for himself and other billionaires, that is. But not for the bottom 90%, and it worked lousy for the bottom 50%, and still worse — economic decline — for the bottom 25%. But to the liberal Buffett, that’s still “better than it ever worked.”

    Liberal versus conservative makes little real difference nowadays, but is more of a difference in style, so as to distract the public from the REAL conflict. They do it all the time.

    The post Trump’s Main Targets to be Cut first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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