radiofree.asia

Category: United States

  • US-Australia space launch treaty go for launch

    Australia’s space treaty with the United States will be ratified and come into force later this year after winning broad support from lawmakers during a five-month parliamentary inquiry. A joint committee examining the Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA) has recommended “binding treaty action be taken” despite residual concerns from some industry players. The TSA provides a…

    The post US-Australia space launch treaty go for launch appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • China: Wheat-smuggling US is “Undeniably Responsible” for Syria’s Food Insecurity

    According to CCTV’s latest investigative report, the US troops in Syria have been smuggling local wheat crops out of Syria, using more than 10 trucks every day. To cover the smuggling activity, local checkpoints would stop all passers-by and check their phones to delete any related photos. What’s your comment? 

    Mao Ning: Once a wheat exporter, Syria now finds around 55 percent of its population facing food insecurity. The US is undeniably responsible for this. The US says it’s there to fight terrorism, but the reality says it’s there to plunder. The US keeps emphasizing human rights, but the reality abounds with US violations of people’s rights to subsistence and life in other countries. The US brands itself as a guardian of democracy, freedom and prosperity, but the reality shows its true identity as a manufacturer of humanitarian crises.

    The US needs to earnestly respect Syria’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, immediately end its illegal military occupation in Syria, stop plundering Syria’s resources, and take concrete actions to make up for the damages done to the Syrian people.

    The post China: Wheat-smuggling US is “Undeniably Responsible” for Syria’s Food Insecurity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • George C. Marshall: Founder of Orwellian Deep State

    Most geopolitics’ nerds know George C. Marshall as President Harry S. Truman’s Secretary of State, 1947-49, and Secretary of Defense, 1950-51, credited with initiating $13 billion Marshall Plan for rebuilding European economies devastated by the war.

    But few people know that as Chief of Staff of the US Army during World War II, Gen. George C. Marshall organized the largest military expansion in the US history, inheriting an outmoded, poorly equipped army of 189,000 men that grew into a force of over eight million soldiers by 1942, a forty-fold increase within the short span of three years.

    Rumors circulated by the end of the war that Marshall would become the Supreme Allied Commander for the Allied invasion of Normandy in June 1944. However, Franklin D. Roosevelt selected relatively modest Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower for the momentous march to victory, because Roosevelt felt threatened by Marshall’s power and ambitions.

    Thus, after the war, Eisenhower was hailed as liberator of Europe from the Nazi occupation who subsequently rose to prominence as the president, whereas the principal architect of the US deep state and a military genius who was instrumental in making the United States a global power died in relative obscurity.

    Ever since Marshall, however, the United States has been ruled by the top brass of the Pentagon while presidents have been reduced to the ceremonial role of being public relations’ representatives of the deep state, pontificating and sermonizing like priests to gullible audiences at home and abroad on the virtues of supposed American democracy, rule of law and civil liberties.

    Though a clarification is required here that US presidents indeed have the power to order withdrawal of troops from inconsequential theaters of war, such as the evacuation of US forces from Iraq as directed by former President Obama in 2011 or the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan as ordered by President Biden in 2021, as the perceptive military brass is courteous enough to bow to sane advice of purported chosen representatives of the people and ostensible commander-in-chief of the armed forces in order to maintain the charade of democracy in the eyes of the public.

    But in military oligarchy’s perpetual conflict with other major world powers deemed existential threats to the US security interests, such as arch-rivals Russia and China, as in the Ukraine War, civilian presidents, whether Biden or Trump, don’t have the authority to overrule the global domination agenda of the Pentagon.

    In fact, the deep state has murdered US presidents in cold blood for appeasing adversaries and daring to stand up to the deep state, for instance the assassination of the Kennedy brothers in the sixties after the Cuban missile crisis in 1962.

    Though credulous readers of mainstream media designate alternative media’s erudite writers casting aspersions over perfectly “natural murders” of John and Robert F. Kennedy that were nothing more than “coincidences” as cynical “conspiracists.”

    The gullible sheeple believe the Kennedy brothers didn’t die at all. In fact, they were raised from the dead by the Almighty and ascended alive into heaven like Jesus Christ and will be resurrected on the Day of Judgment to give credible testimony regarding their real executioners. Religiously held beliefs regarding the purported strength of American democracy are just beliefs, no matter how absurd, hence there is no cure for “the united state of denial.”

    Sarcasm aside, it’s noteworthy the national security and defense policies of the United States are formulated by the all-powerful civil-military bureaucracy, dubbed the deep state, whereas the president, elected through heavily manipulated electoral process with disproportionate influence of corporate interests, political lobbyists and billionaire donors, is only a figurehead meant to legitimize militarist stranglehold of the deep state, not only over the domestic politics of the United States but also over the neocolonial world order dictated by the self-styled global hegemon.

    All the militaries of the 32 NATO member states operate under the integrated military command led by the Pentagon. Before being elected president, General Dwight Eisenhower was the first commander of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE).

    The commander of Allied Command Operations has been given the title Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR), and is always a US four-star general officer or flag officer who also serves as the Commander US European Command, and is subordinate to the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.

    The incumbent Godfather of the Cosa Nostra is Gen. Charles Q. Brown since October 2023 following the retirement of Gen. Mark Milley who completed his tenure of four tumultuous years, including the Ukraine War and the Capitol riots, in September as the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff.

    Although officially the CIA falls under the Department of State, the FBI under the Department of Justice and the NSA under the Department of Defense, all of these security agencies take orders from the Pentagon’s top brass, the de facto rulers of the imperial United States.

    Moreover, it’s worth pointing out that although the Pentagon is officially headed by the Secretary of Defense, who is typically a high-ranking retired military officer, the Secretary is simply a liaison between the civilian president and the military’s top brass, and it’s the Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff who calls the shots on military affairs, defense and national security policy.

    In Europe, 400,000 US troops were deployed at the height of the Cold War in the sixties, though the number has since been brought down after European clients developed their own military capacity following the devastation of the Second World War. The number of American troops deployed in Europe now stands at 50,000 in Germany, 15,000 in Italy and 10,000 in the United Kingdom.

    Since the beginning of Ukraine War in 2022, the United States has substantially ramped up US military footprint in the Eastern Europe by deploying tens of thousands of additional NATO troops, strategic armaments, nuclear-capable missiles and air force squadrons aimed at Russia, and NATO forces alongside regional clients have been provocatively exercising so-called “freedom of navigation” right in the Black Sea and conducting joint military exercises and naval drills.

    Regarding the global footprint of the United States troops, 275,000 US military personnel are currently deployed across the world, including 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East, in addition to the aforementioned number of US troops deployed in Europe.

    Clearly, through the transatlantic NATO military alliance, the overseas deployment of US forces in client states and the presence of aircraft-carriers in the international waters that are similar to floating air bases, the deep state rules not only the imperial United States but the entire unipolar world.

    The post George C. Marshall: Founder of Orwellian Deep State first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Confronting NATO’s War Summit in Washington

    Anti-NATO protest in Chicago, 2012. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky.

    After NATO’s catastrophic, illegal invasions of Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan, on July 9th NATO plans to invade Washington DC. The good news is that it only plans to occupy Washington for three days. The British will not burn down the U.S. Capitol as they did in 1814, and the Germans are still meekly pretending that they don’t know who blew up their Nord Stream gas pipelines. So expect smiling photo-ops and an overblown orgy of mutual congratulation.

    The details of NATO’s agenda for the Washington summit were revealed at a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Prague at the end of May. NATO will drag its members into the U.S. Cold War with China by accusing it of supplying dual-use weapons technology to Russia, and it will unveil new NATO initiatives to spend our tax dollars on a mysterious “drone wall” in the Baltics and an expensive-sounding “integrated air defense system” across Europe.

    But the main feature of the summit will be a superficial show of unity to try to convince the public that NATO and Ukraine can defeat Russia and that negotiating with Russia would be tantamount to surrender.

    On the face of it, that should be a hard sell. The one thing that most Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. When asked in a November 2023 Economist/YouGov poll “Would you support or oppose Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a ceasefire now?,” 68% said “support,” and only 8% said “oppose,” while 24% said they were not sure.

    However, while President Biden and NATO leaders hold endless debates over different ways to escalate the war, they have repeatedly rejected negotiations, notably in April 2022, November 2022 and January 2024, even as their failed war plans leave Ukraine in an ever worsening negotiating position.

    The endgame of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia once it is facing total defeat and has nothing left to negotiate with – exactly the surrender NATO says it wants to avoid.

    As other countries have pointed out at the UN General Assembly, the U.S.and NATO’s rejection of negotiation and diplomacy in favor of a long war they hope will eventually “weaken” Russia is a flagrant violation of the “Pacific Settlement of Disputes” that all UN members are legally committed to under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. As it says in Article 33(1),

    The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.

    But NATO’s leaders are not coming to Washington to work out how they can comply with their international obligations and negotiate peace in Ukraine. On the contrary. At a June meeting in preparation for the Summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to put NATO’s military support to Ukraine “on a firmer footing for years to come.”

    The effort will be headquartered at a U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and involve almost 700 staff. It has been described as a way to “Trump proof” NATO backing for Ukraine, in case Trump wins the election and tries to draw down U.S. support.

    At the Summit, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wants NATO leaders to commit to providing Ukraine with $43 billion worth of equipment each year, indefinitely. Echoing George Orwell’s doublethink that “war is peace”, Stoltenberg said, “The paradox is that the longer we plan, and the longer we commit [to war], the sooner Ukraine can have peace.”

    The Summit will also discuss how to bring Ukraine closer to NATO membership, a move that guarantees the war will continue, since Ukrainian neutrality is Russia’s principal war aim.

    As Ian Davis of NATO Watch reported, NATO’s rhetoric echoes the same lines he heard throughout twenty years of war in Afghanistan: “The Taliban (now Russia) can’t wait us out.” But this vague hope that the other side will eventually give up is not a strategy.

    There is no evidence that Ukraine will be different from Afghanistan. The U.S. and NATO are making the same assumptions, which will lead to the same result. The underlying assumption is that NATO’s greater GDP, extravagant and corrupt military budgets and fetish for expensive weapons technology must somehow, magically, lead Ukraine to victory over Russia.

    When the U.S. and NATO finally admitted defeat in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who had paid in blood for the West’s folly, while the US-NATO war machine simply moved on to its next “challenge,” learning nothing and making political hay out of abject denial.

    Less than three years after the rout in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Austin recently called NATO “the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” It is a promising sign for the future of Ukraine that most Ukrainians are reluctant to throw away their lives in NATO’s dumpster-fire.

    In  an article titled “The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old,” the Quincy Institute’s Mark Episkopos wrote, “Western planning continues to be strategically backwards. Aiding Kyiv has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close”.

    Episkopos concluded that “the key to wielding [the West’s] influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory…”

    We would add that this was a trap set by the United States and the United Kingdom, not just for Ukraine, but for their NATO allies too. By refusing to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanding this “zero-sum framing of victory” as the condition for NATO’s support, the U.S. and U.K. escalated what could have been a very short war into a protracted, potentially nuclear, war between NATO and Russia.

    Turkish leaders and diplomats complained at how their American and British allies undermined their peacemaking, while France, Italy and Germany squirmed for a month or two but soon surrendered to the war camp.

    When NATO leaders meet in Washington, what they should be doing, apart from figuring out how to comply with Article 33(1) of the UN Charter, is conducting a clear-eyed review of how this organization that claims to be a force for peace keeps escalating unwinnable wars and leaving countries in ruins.

    The fundamental question is whether NATO can ever be a force for peace or whether it can never be anything but a dangerous, subservient extension of the U.S. war machine.

    We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today’s multipolar world: an aggressive, expansionist military alliance whose inherent institutional myopia and blinkered, self-serving threat assessments condemn us all to endless war and potential nuclear annihilation.

    We suggest that the only way NATO could be a real force for peace would be to declare that, by this time next year, it will take the same steps that its counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, took in 1991, and finally dissolve what Secretary Austin would have been wiser to call “the most dangerous military alliance in history.”

    However, the world’s population that is suffering under the yoke of militarism cannot afford to wait for NATO to give up and go away of its own accord. Our fellow citizens and political leaders need to hear from us all about the dangers posed by this unaccountable, nuclear-armed war machine, and we hope you will join us—in person or online—in using the occasion of this NATO summit to sound the alarm loudly.

    The post Confronting NATO’s War Summit in Washington first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Confronting NATO’s War Summit in Washington

    Anti-NATO protest in Chicago, 2012. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky.

    After NATO’s catastrophic, illegal invasions of Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan, on July 9th NATO plans to invade Washington DC. The good news is that it only plans to occupy Washington for three days. The British will not burn down the U.S. Capitol as they did in 1814, and the Germans are still meekly pretending that they don’t know who blew up their Nord Stream gas pipelines. So expect smiling photo-ops and an overblown orgy of mutual congratulation.

    The details of NATO’s agenda for the Washington summit were revealed at a NATO foreign ministers’ meeting in Prague at the end of May. NATO will drag its members into the U.S. Cold War with China by accusing it of supplying dual-use weapons technology to Russia, and it will unveil new NATO initiatives to spend our tax dollars on a mysterious “drone wall” in the Baltics and an expensive-sounding “integrated air defense system” across Europe.

    But the main feature of the summit will be a superficial show of unity to try to convince the public that NATO and Ukraine can defeat Russia and that negotiating with Russia would be tantamount to surrender.

    On the face of it, that should be a hard sell. The one thing that most Americans agree on about the war in Ukraine is that they support a negotiated peace. When asked in a November 2023 Economist/YouGov poll “Would you support or oppose Ukraine and Russia agreeing to a ceasefire now?,” 68% said “support,” and only 8% said “oppose,” while 24% said they were not sure.

    However, while President Biden and NATO leaders hold endless debates over different ways to escalate the war, they have repeatedly rejected negotiations, notably in April 2022, November 2022 and January 2024, even as their failed war plans leave Ukraine in an ever worsening negotiating position.

    The endgame of this non-strategy is that Ukraine will only be allowed to negotiate with Russia once it is facing total defeat and has nothing left to negotiate with – exactly the surrender NATO says it wants to avoid.

    As other countries have pointed out at the UN General Assembly, the U.S.and NATO’s rejection of negotiation and diplomacy in favor of a long war they hope will eventually “weaken” Russia is a flagrant violation of the “Pacific Settlement of Disputes” that all UN members are legally committed to under Chapter VI of the UN Charter. As it says in Article 33(1),

    The parties to any dispute, the continuance of which is likely to endanger the maintenance of international peace and security, shall, first of all, seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation, arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice.

    But NATO’s leaders are not coming to Washington to work out how they can comply with their international obligations and negotiate peace in Ukraine. On the contrary. At a June meeting in preparation for the Summit, NATO defense ministers approved a plan to put NATO’s military support to Ukraine “on a firmer footing for years to come.”

    The effort will be headquartered at a U.S. military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, and involve almost 700 staff. It has been described as a way to “Trump proof” NATO backing for Ukraine, in case Trump wins the election and tries to draw down U.S. support.

    At the Summit, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg wants NATO leaders to commit to providing Ukraine with $43 billion worth of equipment each year, indefinitely. Echoing George Orwell’s doublethink that “war is peace”, Stoltenberg said, “The paradox is that the longer we plan, and the longer we commit [to war], the sooner Ukraine can have peace.”

    The Summit will also discuss how to bring Ukraine closer to NATO membership, a move that guarantees the war will continue, since Ukrainian neutrality is Russia’s principal war aim.

    As Ian Davis of NATO Watch reported, NATO’s rhetoric echoes the same lines he heard throughout twenty years of war in Afghanistan: “The Taliban (now Russia) can’t wait us out.” But this vague hope that the other side will eventually give up is not a strategy.

    There is no evidence that Ukraine will be different from Afghanistan. The U.S. and NATO are making the same assumptions, which will lead to the same result. The underlying assumption is that NATO’s greater GDP, extravagant and corrupt military budgets and fetish for expensive weapons technology must somehow, magically, lead Ukraine to victory over Russia.

    When the U.S. and NATO finally admitted defeat in Afghanistan, it was the Afghans who had paid in blood for the West’s folly, while the US-NATO war machine simply moved on to its next “challenge,” learning nothing and making political hay out of abject denial.

    Less than three years after the rout in Afghanistan, US Defense Secretary Austin recently called NATO “the most powerful and successful alliance in history.” It is a promising sign for the future of Ukraine that most Ukrainians are reluctant to throw away their lives in NATO’s dumpster-fire.

    In  an article titled “The New Theory of Ukrainian Victory Is the Same as the Old,” the Quincy Institute’s Mark Episkopos wrote, “Western planning continues to be strategically backwards. Aiding Kyiv has become an end in itself, divorced from a coherent strategy for bringing the war to a close”.

    Episkopos concluded that “the key to wielding [the West’s] influence effectively is to finally abandon a zero-sum framing of victory…”

    We would add that this was a trap set by the United States and the United Kingdom, not just for Ukraine, but for their NATO allies too. By refusing to support Ukraine at the negotiating table in April 2022, and instead demanding this “zero-sum framing of victory” as the condition for NATO’s support, the U.S. and U.K. escalated what could have been a very short war into a protracted, potentially nuclear, war between NATO and Russia.

    Turkish leaders and diplomats complained at how their American and British allies undermined their peacemaking, while France, Italy and Germany squirmed for a month or two but soon surrendered to the war camp.

    When NATO leaders meet in Washington, what they should be doing, apart from figuring out how to comply with Article 33(1) of the UN Charter, is conducting a clear-eyed review of how this organization that claims to be a force for peace keeps escalating unwinnable wars and leaving countries in ruins.

    The fundamental question is whether NATO can ever be a force for peace or whether it can never be anything but a dangerous, subservient extension of the U.S. war machine.

    We believe that NATO is an anachronism in today’s multipolar world: an aggressive, expansionist military alliance whose inherent institutional myopia and blinkered, self-serving threat assessments condemn us all to endless war and potential nuclear annihilation.

    We suggest that the only way NATO could be a real force for peace would be to declare that, by this time next year, it will take the same steps that its counterpart, the Warsaw Pact, took in 1991, and finally dissolve what Secretary Austin would have been wiser to call “the most dangerous military alliance in history.”

    However, the world’s population that is suffering under the yoke of militarism cannot afford to wait for NATO to give up and go away of its own accord. Our fellow citizens and political leaders need to hear from us all about the dangers posed by this unaccountable, nuclear-armed war machine, and we hope you will join us—in person or online—in using the occasion of this NATO summit to sound the alarm loudly.

    The post Confronting NATO’s War Summit in Washington first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump/Biden Debate Immigration: US Foreign Policy as a Driver Is Ignored

    Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

    — Emma Lazarus’s inscription on the Statue of Liberty

    The contestants squared off in the first of the US presidential debates of 2024. Both wore identical white shirts and navy suits with American flag lapel pins. One wore a red tie; the other a blue one. There were other differences, but none quite so substantive.

    The immigration issue dominated the debate. The challenger claimed that the country was being menaced by immigrants – marauding hordes of rapists, murders, and mentally ill. They were the ruination of the nation. Social Security and Medicare were jeopardized by the alien element. Immigrants endangered the jobs of blacks and Hispanics. There was nothing good and a lot bad about the threat of the foreign-born, who should be deported in large numbers according to Mr. Trump.

    According to the US Census Bureau, the percent foreign-born in the US increased 15.6% from 2010 to 2022, comprising 13.9% of the total population. A significant one in seven people in the US were not born here.

    Some of our past presidents celebrated that we are a “nation of immigrants”:

    + Ronald Reagan said, “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

    + George H.W. Bush said, “Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future.”

    + George W. Bush said, “People around the world…come to America. Their talent and hard work and love of freedom have helped make America the leader of the world.”

    And incumbent President Biden said…well, nothing to counter Trump’s chauvinistic slander. Not a peep could be heard in defense of immigrants. There was no contesting of the calumny heaped upon immigrants nor was there any recognition of their humanity from Mr. Biden. Rather, his silence – his failure to confront Trump’s pandering to nimby nativism – was complicity by default.

    Trump-Biden immigration policy and practice compared

    On the issue of immigration, there was no substantive debate on June 27. Drilling deeper, the political practice of the former president and the current president bear more similarities than differences.

    Earlier in June, Biden made what the press characterized as a “drastic crackdown” on immigration “closing” the southern border by issuing an executive order to partially ban asylum proceedings. Under Biden, NPR observed, the southern border has been further reinforced, with more military operations and “expedited removals,” than ever before. NPR concluded, “Biden’s asylum restrictions mirror those implemented by Trump.”

    While president, Trump had used the excuse of the Covid pandemic to invoke the controversial Title 42 public health measure to allow the expulsion of some 400,000 from the border and deny asylum appeals. Despite his campaign promise for a more humane immigration policy, Biden continued Title 42 until May 2023, when the Covid emergency was officially ended. Two million people were ejected under Biden’s watch.

    Thus Biden expelled five times as many migrants as Trump, although that partially reflects more migrants on the border. Overall, Biden has been slightly less draconian than Trump, allowing greater use of humanitarian parole and ending holding families in ICE detention. Biden also reinstated an older version of the citizenship exam after Trump had made the test more difficult.

    In the debate, Biden defended his immigration policies, claiming that the Republicans had his hands tied. But as researcher Laura Carlson observed from Mexico, Biden has adopted the Republican framework of immigration as a threat to national security. Neither candidate offered anywhere near a humane solution for the “huddled masses” on the border. Neither did they address why so many risk so much and endure such hardship to mass on the border. (Spoiler alert: it’s not because they crave “our democracy.”)

    Alternative views on immigration excluded

    Presumptive Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein presented a different perspective on immigration. Barred from the CNN debate, she appeared in a Zoom meeting following the main event. Stein certainly qualified to be included in the nationally-televised debate, because she would be on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the presidency. But her stances on global warming, peace in Ukraine, no war on China, and against genocide in Palestine would have been against the grain of the two major parties and the corporate media.

    Stein was not only excluded from the debate, but the Democrats are trying to keep her from contending in the election. Per a recent Green Party post: “The dirty trick Dems slapped us with legal action to try to keep Jill off the ballot. They’re making good on their threats to sue us off the ballot everywhere and keep our time and resources tied up in frivolous litigation.”

    Had Stein been in the debate, she would have implicated US foreign policy as a significant driver of migration to the US. Washington’s promotion and in some cases imposition of a neoliberal economic model, which fails to meet people’s material needs, pushes immigration. Export of the “war on drugs” and sanctioning some one third of humanity are related push factors fueling immigration.

    Among the Latin American source countries, immigration has spiked from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua precisely because these states, striving for socialism, have been targeted for regime change by Washington. US-imposed unilateral coercive measures punish citizens with the misfortune to have leaders not to Washington’s liking.

    These measures, euphemistically called sanctions, are designed to make life miserable. According to Switzerland-based international human rights lawyer Alfred de Zayas, sanctions are used by the US “to blackmail, bully and intimidate states that do not readily accept US hegemony.” He adds, “the US has no legal or moral right to sanction or ‘punish’ other states.”

    From Nicaragua, journalist John Perry observes, “blaming migration on ‘repressive dictatorships’ allows Washington to pretend that its policies are helping Nicaraguans, when in fact they are impoverishing them.”

    Ending the illegal US sanctions would not stop all migration from the impacted countries, but it would be a step in reducing the pressure on the US border. Although Trump and Biden bickered over addressing the symptoms, they remained seemingly clueless about what causes immigration.

    Future of US immigration policy

     For partisan US politics, the immigration issue is a political football. For a different perspective, a recent Chinese report on human rights in the US is instructive: “Political strife has become a defining feature of US immigration policy. Politicians have forsaken the rights and welfare of immigrants, engaging in divisive attacks on each other over immigration issues…The immigration issue has thus fallen into a vicious circle without a solution.”

    Jill Stein’s presence at the debate would surely have elevated it. Toward the end of the two-man slime fest, Biden mumbled – but with great conviction – something about his “handicap.” One would have thought that the incumbent would not have broached the question of his competence. But it turned out to be a golf thing. Trump immediately claimed greater prowess on the links. On the positive side, the debate did not get into pickleball. Nor did they get into immigration causes or solutions, demonstrating the vacuousness of the debate and the impoverished choices offered by the two-party system come November.

    The post Trump/Biden Debate Immigration: US Foreign Policy as a Driver Is Ignored first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Trump/Biden Debate Immigration: US Foreign Policy as a Driver Is Ignored

    Give me your tired, your poor,
    Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
    The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
    Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
    I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

    — Emma Lazarus’s inscription on the Statue of Liberty

    The contestants squared off in the first of the US presidential debates of 2024. Both wore identical white shirts and navy suits with American flag lapel pins. One wore a red tie; the other a blue one. There were other differences, but none quite so substantive.

    The immigration issue dominated the debate. The challenger claimed that the country was being menaced by immigrants – marauding hordes of rapists, murders, and mentally ill. They were the ruination of the nation. Social Security and Medicare were jeopardized by the alien element. Immigrants endangered the jobs of blacks and Hispanics. There was nothing good and a lot bad about the threat of the foreign-born, who should be deported in large numbers according to Mr. Trump.

    According to the US Census Bureau, the percent foreign-born in the US increased 15.6% from 2010 to 2022, comprising 13.9% of the total population. A significant one in seven people in the US were not born here.

    Some of our past presidents celebrated that we are a “nation of immigrants”:

    + Ronald Reagan said, “If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

    + George H.W. Bush said, “Immigration is not just a link to America’s past; it’s also a bridge to America’s future.”

    + George W. Bush said, “People around the world…come to America. Their talent and hard work and love of freedom have helped make America the leader of the world.”

    And incumbent President Biden said…well, nothing to counter Trump’s chauvinistic slander. Not a peep could be heard in defense of immigrants. There was no contesting of the calumny heaped upon immigrants nor was there any recognition of their humanity from Mr. Biden. Rather, his silence – his failure to confront Trump’s pandering to nimby nativism – was complicity by default.

    Trump-Biden immigration policy and practice compared

    On the issue of immigration, there was no substantive debate on June 27. Drilling deeper, the political practice of the former president and the current president bear more similarities than differences.

    Earlier in June, Biden made what the press characterized as a “drastic crackdown” on immigration “closing” the southern border by issuing an executive order to partially ban asylum proceedings. Under Biden, NPR observed, the southern border has been further reinforced, with more military operations and “expedited removals,” than ever before. NPR concluded, “Biden’s asylum restrictions mirror those implemented by Trump.”

    While president, Trump had used the excuse of the Covid pandemic to invoke the controversial Title 42 public health measure to allow the expulsion of some 400,000 from the border and deny asylum appeals. Despite his campaign promise for a more humane immigration policy, Biden continued Title 42 until May 2023, when the Covid emergency was officially ended. Two million people were ejected under Biden’s watch.

    Thus Biden expelled five times as many migrants as Trump, although that partially reflects more migrants on the border. Overall, Biden has been slightly less draconian than Trump, allowing greater use of humanitarian parole and ending holding families in ICE detention. Biden also reinstated an older version of the citizenship exam after Trump had made the test more difficult.

    In the debate, Biden defended his immigration policies, claiming that the Republicans had his hands tied. But as researcher Laura Carlson observed from Mexico, Biden has adopted the Republican framework of immigration as a threat to national security. Neither candidate offered anywhere near a humane solution for the “huddled masses” on the border. Neither did they address why so many risk so much and endure such hardship to mass on the border. (Spoiler alert: it’s not because they crave “our democracy.”)

    Alternative views on immigration excluded

    Presumptive Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein presented a different perspective on immigration. Barred from the CNN debate, she appeared in a Zoom meeting following the main event. Stein certainly qualified to be included in the nationally-televised debate, because she would be on the ballot in enough states to theoretically win the presidency. But her stances on global warming, peace in Ukraine, no war on China, and against genocide in Palestine would have been against the grain of the two major parties and the corporate media.

    Stein was not only excluded from the debate, but the Democrats are trying to keep her from contending in the election. Per a recent Green Party post: “The dirty trick Dems slapped us with legal action to try to keep Jill off the ballot. They’re making good on their threats to sue us off the ballot everywhere and keep our time and resources tied up in frivolous litigation.”

    Had Stein been in the debate, she would have implicated US foreign policy as a significant driver of migration to the US. Washington’s promotion and in some cases imposition of a neoliberal economic model, which fails to meet people’s material needs, pushes immigration. Export of the “war on drugs” and sanctioning some one third of humanity are related push factors fueling immigration.

    Among the Latin American source countries, immigration has spiked from Venezuela, Cuba, and Nicaragua precisely because these states, striving for socialism, have been targeted for regime change by Washington. US-imposed unilateral coercive measures punish citizens with the misfortune to have leaders not to Washington’s liking.

    These measures, euphemistically called sanctions, are designed to make life miserable. According to Switzerland-based international human rights lawyer Alfred de Zayas, sanctions are used by the US “to blackmail, bully and intimidate states that do not readily accept US hegemony.” He adds, “the US has no legal or moral right to sanction or ‘punish’ other states.”

    From Nicaragua, journalist John Perry observes, “blaming migration on ‘repressive dictatorships’ allows Washington to pretend that its policies are helping Nicaraguans, when in fact they are impoverishing them.”

    Ending the illegal US sanctions would not stop all migration from the impacted countries, but it would be a step in reducing the pressure on the US border. Although Trump and Biden bickered over addressing the symptoms, they remained seemingly clueless about what causes immigration.

    Future of US immigration policy

     For partisan US politics, the immigration issue is a political football. For a different perspective, a recent Chinese report on human rights in the US is instructive: “Political strife has become a defining feature of US immigration policy. Politicians have forsaken the rights and welfare of immigrants, engaging in divisive attacks on each other over immigration issues…The immigration issue has thus fallen into a vicious circle without a solution.”

    Jill Stein’s presence at the debate would surely have elevated it. Toward the end of the two-man slime fest, Biden mumbled – but with great conviction – something about his “handicap.” One would have thought that the incumbent would not have broached the question of his competence. But it turned out to be a golf thing. Trump immediately claimed greater prowess on the links. On the positive side, the debate did not get into pickleball. Nor did they get into immigration causes or solutions, demonstrating the vacuousness of the debate and the impoverished choices offered by the two-party system come November.

    The post Trump/Biden Debate Immigration: US Foreign Policy as a Driver Is Ignored first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The U.S. Has Imposed Sanctions on Georgia and Nicaragua …

    Source: Georgia Today

    Politicians in the small Caucasian nation of Georgia have been sanctioned by Washington for “undermining democracy” and depriving Georgian people of “fundamental freedoms,” simply because its parliament has passed a law to control foreign influence over Georgian politics.

    Politicians in another small country, Nicaragua, were subjected to U.S. sanctions for doing the same. Although the two countries are very different, there are striking similarities in the ways that Washington and its allies have striven to undermine their sovereignty.

    In both cases, legislation to limit foreign influence followed coup attempts against popularly elected governments. The governing Georgian Dream Party, having won three elections since 2012, has survived two U.S.-orchestrated coup attempts since 2020.

    Nicaragua’s ruling Sandinista Party had also won three elections in 12 years when a coup was thwarted in 2018 (it has since won another election, in 2021). Both countries’ governments found that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) financed from abroad were heavily involved in these insurrections and moved to control them. And both modeled their legislation—not on Russia as is claimed—but on longstanding U.S. federal law.

    The Foreign Agents Registration Act (“FARA”) came into force in the U.S. in 1938. It requires NGOs and other organizations and individuals who receive funding from abroad to register as “foreign agents.” FARA-style legislation now exists in many other countries.

    In recent years the U.S. has used FARA to crack down on what The New York Times called “prominent Washington research groups [receiving] tens of millions of dollars from foreign governments,” creating a “muscular arm of foreign governments’ lobbying in Washington.”

    The Times article is replete with arguments for taming the influence of foreign governments on U.S. politics. Indeed, Washington’s most recent concern has been to expose what have been dubbed “Trojan horse” charities, those NGOs that have political objectives behind their charitable work.

    However, neither Washington nor its allies abroad or in the corporate media approve of countries outside the West adopting similar powers. The reason is, of course, that they might expose the very Trojan horses created by Washington or by European capitals to interfere in those countries’ politics or even to provoke regime change.

    Both Georgia and Nicaragua want to protect their sovereignty and try to limit foreign influence over their national affairs—aims that are uncontroversial in Western countries.

    Before implementing its equivalent of FARA, Nicaragua’s population of under seven million sustained no less than 7,000 NGOs, most of which were likely to have been dependent on foreign funding. Georgia’s current position is far more extreme: A country of just 3.8 million people hosts around 26,000 NGOs, the vast majority funded from abroad.

    Of course, in both countries these non-profits have often been involved in worthwhile humanitarian work. But, again in both cases, Washington and its allies have also been financing bodies that can legitimately be called Trojan horses.

    And as Kit Klarenberg points out in The Grayzone, NGOs in Georgia have until now benefited from lax rules about foreign funding—as indeed those in Nicaragua did before its 2020 legislation took effect.

    What do Trojan horse NGOs actually do? Their websites typically have mission statements and programs aimed at “promoting democratic values,” “capacity building,” “strengthening civil society,” advocating “good governance,” “raising civic awareness” and finding “a new generation of democratic youth leaders.”

    These are essentially labels for what is really pro-Western propaganda, often directed at young people who are simultaneously encouraged to adopt “modern,” “liberal” values and lifestyles and be critical of their governments for failing to toe Washington’s line.

    There are prizes: salaried jobs, training courses (perhaps overseas) for NGO recruits, opportunities to learn English, and more. As Jacobin puts it, “working in an NGO is a fast track to high incomes, perks like foreign travel and embassy receptions, and being part of the elite.”

    Georgians wave U.S. and Ukrainian flags as they protest the government’s proposed “foreign influence transparency law.” [Source: thegrayzone.com]

    Unmentioned in public documents might be training in organizing “non-violent” anti-government protests and exploiting social media to foster discontent. In the Georgian context, this is called a “color revolution” which, as The Nation puts it, “has become a byword for pro-Western, protest-driven regime change.” In Nicaragua, Yorlis Luna talked to young people who explained how Trojan horse NGOs schooled them to prepare for the “peaceful protests” that quickly became a violent coup attempt in 2018.

    When well-funded NGOs join forces with local “human rights” bodies and with local media that are also foreign-funded, the combined effects can be powerful. In Georgia, The Nation quotes labor activist Sopo Japaridze as saying that there does not appear to be a single major foreign-funded civil society or media organization that is not fervently opposed to the elected government. “The entire ecosystem is against them,” he says, “and the NGOs have more power and influence than the government does internationally.” Similar words could have been used to describe Nicaragua in 2018.

    While regime change was the U.S. objective in both countries, the motivation differed. Nicaragua was targeted because it poses the “threat of a good example”—a socialist-oriented country in a region which the U.S. views as its “backyard.”

    Georgia is being targeted because of its balanced political position, moving toward future membership of the European Union while maintaining peaceful relations with its next-door neighbor, Russia. As its prime minister points out, both Washington and its EU allies want Georgia firmly in the anti-Russia camp, a new “frontline against Russia.”

    Where does a Trojan horse NGO get its funding for its regime-change work? The foreign funding of Nicaraguan NGOs was little known-about before the coup attempt in April 2018, but within a month an article in Global Americans, “Laying the groundwork for insurrection,” highlighted Washington’s role.

    Then on June 14, Kenneth Wollack, now chairman of the federally funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), bragged to the U.S. Congress that NED had trained 8,000 young Nicaraguans to take part in the uprising. USAID later launched a specific program aimed at influencing the outcome of the 2021 elections. I have documented the role of U.S.-funded NGOs in the coup attempt and in subsequent regime-change efforts in Nicaragua.

    In Georgia, foreign funding of NGOs is out in the open. Jacobin says that 90% of NGOs are financed from abroad, and prominent ones, such as the Economic Policy Research Center, the Europe Georgia Institute and the Institute for Development of Freedom of Information, make no secret of having funding sources such as the NED, the European Union and even NATO. One that receives NED funding, the Shame Movement, is explicit about its aim of drawing Georgia into the European Union.

    Klarenberg reports that, in 2023, when Georgian Dream made a previous attempt to bring in a FARA-style law, it had to capitulate when vast, violent crowds, with the Shame Movement “in the vanguard,” threatened to overrun parliament and bring about a color revolution.

    Members of Shame Movement speaking outside of Georgia’s parliament. [Source: rferl.org]

    The “outsized role” played by foreign-funded bodies has, according to Jacobin, “led the country into a chronic democratic crisis.” It is therefore hardly surprising that the government continues to push ahead with legislation to control them.

    What is such a law and what happens when it is implemented? FARA-style laws generally do not prohibit foreign funding, they simply require it to be declared, so that the way it is used can be documented and made transparent. NGOs that are really Trojan horses can then be identified. Closures of NGOs inevitably result—but usually only a small minority are identified as Trojan horses.

    Most closures come about because NGOs cannot or will not comply with more stringent accounting requirements, or the change brings to light redundant NGOs that exist in name only.

    In Australia, more than 10,000 non-profits were closed when its FARA-style law was implemented. The equivalent authorities in the U.S. and UK close thousands of NGOs each year for non-compliance or because they cease to operate.

    Nicaragua has closed about half of the NGOs it had before its FARA-style law took effect, and while the initial closures were Trojan horses the vast majority have lost their NGO status through non-compliance or because they are effectively defunct.

    Protest against NGO law. [Source: nbcrightnow.com]

    The Trojan horse role of NGOs was perhaps most obvious in Russia, a developed country which nevertheless had many foreign-funded charities before it introduced a FARA-style law in 2012. Scott Ritter reports that the law “proved to be the death knell for U.S., UK, and EU-funded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that had spent more than two decades trying to, according to their leaders, shape Russian civil society along Western lines.”

    In 2015, Russia blacklisted the National Endowment for Democracy but nevertheless, in 2021, the NED still had more than 60 Russia-oriented projects, valued in the millions of dollars, but presumably now based outside the country.

    When the foreign funding of NGOs comes under threat from an equivalent to FARA, it is hardly surprising that the NGOs protest.

    This happened in the U.S. when it toughened foreign agent rules in 2022, provoking a response from NGOs across the political spectrum.

    It happened in Australia in 2018 and in the UK in 2023 when they announced similar laws. Protests from NGOs in Georgia were to be expected, just as they were in Nicaragua, because the NGO sectors are heavily dependent on foreign funding and fear its loss, job cuts and possible closures.

    What distinguishes the protests in Georgia and Nicaragua, and indeed other non-Western countries such as Thailand where controls on NGOs have been tightened, is that the threat of FARA-style legislation is used to create a sort of moral panic by human rights bodies, the corporate media and the spokespeople for Western governments.

    According to this narrative, such a law would not just bring over-zealous regulation of one sector of society, but threaten the whole society’s freedom of expression and its democratic values. This claim is used to justify the mobilization of well-publicized anti-government protests, ostensibly non-violent, but which can rapidly provoke a response from police that can justify violence in return.

    As political scientist Glenn Diesen points out, “the media shows some pictures of protests and we are ready to redefine democracy as the rule of a loud Western-backed minority to support intimidations, sanctions and a coup.”

    While the cases of Georgia and Nicaragua differ somewhat, because in Georgia “non-violent” protests responded to the impending legal changes while in Nicaragua they were ostensibly about minor changes in state-funded pensions, in both cases the regime-change motivation of the protesters quickly became apparent.

    Diesen notes that the same occurred in Ukraine in 2014: Western governments and NGOs “backed an unconstitutional coup against a democratically elected government and the coup was only supported by a minority of Ukrainians. Yet, it was sold to us as ‘pro-Ukrainian’ and a ‘democratic revolution’ so we supported it without any critical debate.”

    The unconstitutional coup in Ukraine was, from Washington’s viewpoint, a success. But similar actions in Georgia and Nicaragua have – so far – been counterproductive. To alleviate the damage being done by US sanctions, Nicaragua is developing close relations with both China and Russia. Meanwhile, after passing the legislation to control NGOs this month, the Georgian Dream party is reported to be “actively working” to restore the country’s diplomatic relations with Russia.

    One final intriguing connection between Georgia and Nicaragua is the presence of a global NGO called the Center for Applied NonViolent Actions and Strategies (CANVAS), headed by Slobodan Djinovic, which claims to have trained regime-change activists in 52 countries. CANVAS, supported by USAID, had been training activists in Georgia at the end of 2023 when the “color revolution” appeared to be imminent.

    Whether CANVAS had a role in Nicaragua’s 2018 insurrection is unclear, but the NGO has certainly been active in Venezuela and a CANVAS official visited Nicaragua in the aftermath of the coup attempt. Djinovic uses Nicaragua’s failed coup as a case study in a course on “non-violence” that he teaches at Harvard.

    Sanctions imposed by the White House on Georgian officials who are promoting FARA-style legislation mirror the steps taken against the Nicaraguan government when it did the same in 2020. Instead of admitting that laws to oversee the foreign funding of non-government organizations have been adopted by many Western-aligned countries, Georgia’s plan has been dubbed “Russian Law,” just as—at the time—Nicaragua’s equivalent was labeled “Putin Law.”

    Corporate media such as the BBC have repeated Washington’s line and quote Secretary of State Antony Blinken at length, without pointing out his hypocrisy in criticizing a country for adopting legislation that is, in reality, based on U.S. law, not Russia’s.

    The irony is that FARA was originally sold as a means of defending democracy when it was introduced in the U.S. more than 80 years ago. But if a similar law is used by a country which Washington or its allies regard as disobedient, such use is painted as an attack on democracy and as a step on the road to authoritarian government.

    Dubbing the legislation as “Russian law” or “Putin law” makes the message clear.

    • First published in CovertAction Magazine

    The post The U.S. Has Imposed Sanctions on Georgia and Nicaragua … first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • There Is No Such Thing as a Small Nuclear War

    Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.

    There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.

    This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.

    For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.

    Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).

    This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.

    Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.

    How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?

    The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.

    This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.

    Nadia Abu-Aitah (Switzerland), Breaking Free, 2021.

    Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?

    The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).

    No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.

    The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.

    The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.

    How Are the Warring Parties to Negotiate?

    Hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine, both sides began to talk about a drawdown of tensions. These negotiations developed in Belarus and Turkey before they were scuttled by NATO’s assurances to Ukraine of endless and bottomless support to ‘weaken’ Russia. If those early negotiations had developed, thousands of lives would have been spared. All such wars end in negotiations, which is why the sooner they could have happened, the better. This is a view that is now openly acknowledged by Ukrainians. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told The Economist that negotiations are on the horizon.

    For a long time now, the Russia-Ukraine frontline has not moved dramatically. In February 2024, the Chinese government released a twelve-point set of principles to guide a peace process. These points – including ‘abandoning the Cold War mentality’ – should have been seriously considered by the belligerent sides. But the NATO states simply ignored them. Several months later, a Ukraine-driven conference was held in Switzerland from 15–16 June, to which Russia was not invited and which ended with a communiqué that borrowed many of the Chinese proposals about nuclear safety, food security, and prisoner exchanges.

    Velislava Gecheva (Bulgaria), Homo photographicus, 2014.

    While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.

    Both Russia and Ukraine are willing to negotiate. Why should the NATO states be allowed to prolong a war that threatens world peace? The upcoming NATO summit in Washington from 9–11 July must hear, loudly and clearly, that the world does not want its dangerous war or decadent militarism. The world’s peoples want to build bridges, not blow them up.

    Maxim Kantor (Russia), Two Versions of History, 1993.

    Briefing no. 14, a clear assessment of current dangers around the escalation in and around Ukraine, underscores the need, as Abdullah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way party in Morocco and I wrote in the Bouficha Appeal Against the Preparations for War in 2020, for the peoples of the world to:

    • Stand against the warmongering of US imperialism, which seeks to impose dangerous wars on an already fragile planet.
    • Stand against the saturation of the world with weapons of all kinds, which inflame conflicts and often drive political processes toward endless wars.
    • Stand against the use of military power to prevent the social development of the peoples of the world.
    • Defend the right of countries to build their sovereignty and their dignity.

    Sensitive people around the world must make their voices heard on the streets and in the corridors of power to end this dangerous war, and indeed to set us on a path beyond capitalism’s world of unending wars.

    The post There Is No Such Thing as a Small Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • There Is No Such Thing as a Small Nuclear War

    Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.

    There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often reported – the entire adult population of the Soviet Union. Yet, since the European appeal of 1980, it feels as if each decade has been more and more dangerous than the previous one. ‘It is still 90 seconds to midnight’, the editors at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (the keepers of the Doomsday Clock) wrote in January. Midnight is Armageddon. In 1949, the clock sat at three minutes to midnight, and in 1980 it had retreated slightly from the precipice, back to seven minutes to midnight. By 2023, however, the clock’s hand had moved all the way up to ninety seconds to midnight, where it remains, the closest we have ever been to full-scale annihilation.

    This precarious situation is threatening to reach a tipping point in Europe today. To understand the dangerous possibilities that could be unleashed by the intensified provocations around Ukraine, we collaborated with No Cold War to produce briefing no. 14, NATO’s Actions in Ukraine Are More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis. Please read this text carefully and circulate it as widely as possible.

    For the past two years, Europe’s largest war since 1945 has been raging in Ukraine. The root cause of this war is the US-driven attempt to expand the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) into Ukraine. This violates the promises the West made to the Soviet Union during the end of the Cold War, such as that NATO would move ‘not one inch eastward’, as US Secretary of State James Baker assured Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Over the past decade, the Global North has repeatedly snubbed Russian requests for security guarantees. It was this disregard for Russian concerns that led to the outbreak of the conflict in 2014 and the war in 2022.

    Today, a nuclear-armed NATO and a nuclear-armed Russia are in direct conflict in Ukraine. Instead of taking steps to bring this war to an end, NATO has made several new announcements in recent months that threaten to escalate the situation into a still more serious conflict with the potential to spill beyond Ukraine’s borders. It is no exaggeration to say that this conflict has created the greatest threat to world peace since the Cuban Missile Crisis (1962).

    This extremely dangerous escalation confirms the correctness of the majority of US experts on Russia and Eastern Europe, who have long warned against the expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe. In 1997, George Kennan, the principal architect of US policy in the Cold War, said that this strategy is ‘the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era’. The Ukraine war and the dangers of further escalation fully affirm the seriousness of his warning.

    Elif Uras (Turkey), Kapital, 2009.

    How Is NATO Escalating the Conflict in Ukraine?

    The most dangerous recent developments in this conflict are the decisions by the US and Britain in May to authorise Ukraine to use weapons supplied by the two countries to conduct military attacks inside Russia. Ukraine’s government immediately used this in the most provocative way by attacking Russia’s ballistic missile early warning system. This warning system plays no role in the Ukraine war but is a central part of Russia’s defence system against strategic nuclear attack. In addition, the British government supplied Ukraine with Storm Shadow missiles that have a range of over 250 km (155 miles) and can hit targets not only on the battleground but far inside Russia. The use of NATO weapons to attack Russia risks an equivalent Russian counter-response, threatening to spread the war beyond Ukraine.

    This was followed by NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg’s June announcement that a NATO headquarter for operations in the Ukraine war had been created at the US military base in Wiesbaden, Germany, with 700 initial staff. On 7 June, French President Emmanuel Macron said that his government was working to ‘finalise a coalition’ of NATO countries willing to send troops to Ukraine to ‘train’ Ukrainian forces. This would place NATO forces directly in the war. As the Vietnam War and other conflicts have shown, such ‘trainers’ organise and direct fighting, thus becoming targets for attacks.

    Nadia Abu-Aitah (Switzerland), Breaking Free, 2021.

    Why Is Escalation in Ukraine More Dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis?

    The Cuban Missile Crisis was the product of an adventurist miscalculation by Soviet leadership that the US would tolerate the presence of Soviet nuclear missiles only 144 km from the nearest US shore and roughly 1,800 km from Washington. Such a deployment would have made it impossible for the US to defend against a nuclear strike and would have ‘levelled the playing field’, since the US already had such capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. The US, predictably, made it clear that this would not be tolerated and that it would prevent it by any means necessary, including nuclear war. With the Doomsday Clock at 12 minutes to midnight, the Soviet leadership realised its miscalculation and, after a few days of intense crisis, withdrew the missiles. This was followed by a relaxation of US-Soviet tensions, leading to the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963).

    No bullets flew between the US and the USSR in 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis was an extremely dangerous short-term incident that could have ignited large-scale – including nuclear – war. However, unlike the Ukraine war, it did not flow from an already existing and intensifying dynamic of war by either the US or the USSR. Thus, while extremely dangerous, the situation could also be, and was, rapidly resolved.

    The situation in Ukraine, as well as the growing conflict around China, are more structurally dangerous. Direct confrontation is taking place between NATO and Russia, where the US just authorised direct military strikes (imagine if, during the 1962 crisis, Cuban forces armed and trained by the Soviet Union had carried out major military strikes in Florida). Meanwhile, the US is directly raising military tensions with China around Taiwan and the South China Sea, as well as in the Korean Peninsula. The US government understands that it cannot withstand erosion to its position of global primacy and rightly believes that it may lose its economic dominance to China. That is why it increasingly moves issues onto the military terrain, where it still maintains an advantage. The US position on Gaza is significantly determined by its understanding that it cannot afford a blow to its military supremacy, embodied in the regime that it controls in Israel.

    The US and its NATO partners are responsible for 74.3% of global military spending. Within the context of the US’s increasing drive for war and use of military means, the situation in Ukraine, and potentially around China, are, in reality, as dangerous, and potentially more dangerous, than the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    Tatiana Grinevich (Belarus), The River of Wishes, 2012.

    How Are the Warring Parties to Negotiate?

    Hours after Russian troops entered Ukraine, both sides began to talk about a drawdown of tensions. These negotiations developed in Belarus and Turkey before they were scuttled by NATO’s assurances to Ukraine of endless and bottomless support to ‘weaken’ Russia. If those early negotiations had developed, thousands of lives would have been spared. All such wars end in negotiations, which is why the sooner they could have happened, the better. This is a view that is now openly acknowledged by Ukrainians. Vadym Skibitsky, deputy head of Ukraine’s military intelligence, told The Economist that negotiations are on the horizon.

    For a long time now, the Russia-Ukraine frontline has not moved dramatically. In February 2024, the Chinese government released a twelve-point set of principles to guide a peace process. These points – including ‘abandoning the Cold War mentality’ – should have been seriously considered by the belligerent sides. But the NATO states simply ignored them. Several months later, a Ukraine-driven conference was held in Switzerland from 15–16 June, to which Russia was not invited and which ended with a communiqué that borrowed many of the Chinese proposals about nuclear safety, food security, and prisoner exchanges.

    Velislava Gecheva (Bulgaria), Homo photographicus, 2014.

    While a number of states – from Albania to Uruguay – signed the document, other countries that attended the meeting refused to sign on for a range of reasons, including their sense that the text did not take Russia’s security concerns seriously. Among the countries that did not sign are Armenia, Bahrain, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Libya, Mauritius, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates. A few days before the Switzerland conference, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin stated his conditions for peace, which include a guarantee that Ukraine will not join NATO. This view is shared by those countries of the Global South that did not join the Switzerland statement.

    Both Russia and Ukraine are willing to negotiate. Why should the NATO states be allowed to prolong a war that threatens world peace? The upcoming NATO summit in Washington from 9–11 July must hear, loudly and clearly, that the world does not want its dangerous war or decadent militarism. The world’s peoples want to build bridges, not blow them up.

    Maxim Kantor (Russia), Two Versions of History, 1993.

    Briefing no. 14, a clear assessment of current dangers around the escalation in and around Ukraine, underscores the need, as Abdullah El Harif of the Workers’ Democratic Way party in Morocco and I wrote in the Bouficha Appeal Against the Preparations for War in 2020, for the peoples of the world to:

    • Stand against the warmongering of US imperialism, which seeks to impose dangerous wars on an already fragile planet.
    • Stand against the saturation of the world with weapons of all kinds, which inflame conflicts and often drive political processes toward endless wars.
    • Stand against the use of military power to prevent the social development of the peoples of the world.
    • Defend the right of countries to build their sovereignty and their dignity.

    Sensitive people around the world must make their voices heard on the streets and in the corridors of power to end this dangerous war, and indeed to set us on a path beyond capitalism’s world of unending wars.

    The post There Is No Such Thing as a Small Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Assange’s Release: Exposing the Craven Media Stable

    The WikiLeaks project was always going to put various noses out of joint in the journalistic profession.  Soaked and blighted by sloth, easily bought, perennially envious, a good number of the Fourth Estate have always preferred to remain uncritical of power and sympathetic to its brutal exercise.  For those reasons, the views of Thomas Carlyle, quoting the opinion of Edward Burke in his May 1840 lecture that “there were Three Estates in Parliament; but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” seem quaintly misplaced, certainly in a modern context.

    The media response to the release of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange from his scandalous captivity after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the US Espionage Act of 1917 provides a fascinating insight into a ghastly, craven and sycophantic tendency all too common among the plodding hacks.

    Take, for instance, any number of journalists working for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, official national broadcaster and devotee of the safe middle line.  One, a breakfast news anchor for the network’s meandering twenty-four-hour service, has a rather blotted record of glee regarding the mistreatment of Assange over the years.

    Michael Rowland, torturously insipid and ponderously humourless, had expressed his inexpressible joy when the Ecuadorian government cut off Assange’s access to the Internet while confined to the country’s London embassy.  “A big gold star to Ecuador,” he chirped on March 28, 2018.  Andrew Fowler, another journalist and far more seasoned on the rise of WikiLeaks, reproached Rowland on Twitter, as the X platform was then called. “Why would silencing a fellow journalist be supported?”  For Rowland, the matter was as clear as day.  “That remains a disputed opinion, Andrew.  Publisher and activist yes. But you put yourself in a small camp calling him a journalist.”

    These points matter, because they go to the central libelling strategy of the US government’s prosecution so casually embraced by mainstream outlets.  In such a generated smokescreen, crimes can be concealed, and the revealers shown to be those of bad faith.  Labels can be used to partition truth, if not obscure it altogether: a publisher-activist is to be regarded more dimly than the establishment approved journalist.

    The point was rather well made by Antony Loewenstein, himself an independent journalist keen to ferret out the grainier details of abusive power.  When interviewed by none other than Rowland himself, he explained, with unflagging patience, the reasons why Assange and Wikileaks are so reviled by the orthodox scribblers of the Fourth Estate.  WikiLeaks, he stated with salience, had confronted power, not succumbed to it.

    Rowland could only reiterate the standard line that Assange had admitted guilt for a “very serious offence”, refusing to examine the reasons for doing so, or the implications of it.  Again, the vulgar line that Assange had “put US lives at risk” with the WikiLeaks disclosures was trotted out like an ill-fed nag. Again, Loewenstein had to remind Rowland that there was no evidence that any lives had been exposed to harm, a point made in several studies on the subject from the Pentagon to the Australian Defence Department.

    The tendency is pestilential.  While more guarded in his current iteration as a professor of journalism, Peter Greste, formerly a journalist for Al Jazeera, was previously dismissive in the Sydney Morning Herald of Assange’s contributions as he was brutally evicted from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.  “To be clear, Julian Assange is no journalist, and WikiLeaks is not a news organisation.”  An organisation boasting “the libertarian idea of radical transparency” was “a separate issue altogether from press freedom.”

    While approving the publishing activities centred on the release of the Collateral Murder video showing the killing of civilians including two Reuters journalists by Apache helicopters, and the release of the Afghanistan War Logs, the Iraq War Logs and “Cablegate”, Greste fell for the canard that the publisher did not redact names in documents to “protect the innocent” by dumping “them all onto his website, free for anybody to go through, regardless of their contents or their impact they might have had.”

    There is no mention of the decrypting key carelessly included in WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy by its bumbling authors David Leigh and Luke Harding, or the fact that the website Cryptome was the first to publish the unredacted files ahead of WikiLeaks.  There is certainly no discussion of the extensive redacting efforts Assange had made, as many of his collaborators testify to, prior to the release in November 2010.

    Writing on June 25 in The Conversation, Greste displays the emetic plumage of someone who has done an about face.  “It is worth pausing for a moment to consider all Assange has been through, and to pop a bottle of champagne to celebrate his release,” he writes distastefully, also reflecting on his own carceral experiences in an Egyptian prison cell.  He also claims that the role of WikiLeaks, in checking “the awesome power that governments wield”, should be celebrated, while stating, weakly, that he never believed that Assange should “have been charged with espionage.”

    In such shifting views, we see wounded egos, cravenness, and the concerns about an estate whose walls had been breached by a usurping, industrious publisher.  By all means use the spoils from Assange and his leakers, even while snorting about how they were obtained.  Publish and write about them in the hope of getting a press award.  Never, however, admit that Assange is himself a journalist with more journalism awards than many have had hot dinners.  In this grotesque reality, we are now saddled with a terrifying precedent: the global application of a US espionage statute endangering journalists and publishers who would dare discuss and run material on Washington’s national security.

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  • Myanmar’s civil war… will the U.S. escalate a proxy war against China?

    A civil war has been raging for three years, although the nation has always been gripped by inter-ethnic violence since independence in 1948 as a legacy of British colonialist abuse.

    KJ Noh is a seasoned political analyst and commentator on the Asia-Pacific region. He says the U.S. is already heavily involved in fanning the civil war in this Southeast Asian nation because Washington views it as a critical opportunity to destabilize China’s strategic interests.

    See this informative background article here.

    China has invested hugely in its southern neighbor with a 2,000-kilometer land border. Myanmar is a vital partner in Beijing’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative projects to boost global trade.

    This makes Myanmar a priority target for Washington to provoke and destabilize China.

    See this previous article on SCF which looks at recent calls by deep-state think-tanks in the US urging for more military intervention by Washington in Myanmar’s civil war.

    KJ Noh has written for Asia Times, Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, and other alternative media outlets. He discusses how the U.S. has used Myanmar (formerly Burma) for decades as a launchpad for proxy wars against China’s interests, going back to the Korean War (1950-53).

    Western media, in hock to U.S. imperialist interests, have distorted the conflict in Myanmar as the fault of China’s alleged interference when, in reality, the opposite is true. It is Washington that has continually meddled in the internal affairs of Myanmar, including helping to precipitate a military coup in the country in February 2021.

    China is invested in creating a stable, peaceful neighbor. Beijing is trying to mediate a national settlement with all the parties. But as long as the U.S. keeps meddling in Myanmar, the conflict is liable to become protracted and much worse.

    The Western corporate-controlled media are portraying the civil war as a simplistic binary situation of “pro-democracy groups” versus a military junta backed by China. This is a gross misrepresentation. But such a distortion is usefully providing the US political cover for increasing its malign interference.

    KJ Noh says the U.S. is not interested in a peaceful, democratic Myanmar. It is only interested in exploiting the suffering of the people as a way to damage China.

    Peace is possible in Myanmar. But not while the U.S. continues gearing up to intervene with “humanitarian aid” (military aid) and self-serving media lies.

    Otherwise, Myanmar is shaping up to be another endless war for U.S. imperialism and America’s next proxy war against China.

    • K.J. Noh is a long time activist, writer, and teacher. He is a member of Veterans for Peace and works on global justice issues. He can be reached at: moc.liamgnull@84hon.j.k.

    • This interview first appeared in Strategic Culture Foundation

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  • How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade

    The future of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, a target of US imperial power since its inception in 1998, may be decided on July 28, the date of their presidential election.

    Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.

    This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.

    Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.

    Ron explained that the Venezuelan people and government have achieved remarkable progress, resisting Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign. A tanking economy has now been reversed. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction.

    Instead of irrevocably crashing the economy, according to Ron, the US hybrid warfare against Venezuela exposed the US-backed opposition, who have called for sanctions against their own people and have even treasonously endorsed a US-backed military coup option.

    Economist Yosmer Arellán, who is associated with the Central Bank of Venezuela and has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures, also addressed the webinar. Arellán spoke of the pain visited upon the Venezuelan people by the US sanctions.

    The economist explained that the economy was further impacted by the crash in oil prices, beginning in 2014, as well as by overcompliance with the economic coercive measures by third-parties fearful of US reprisals. Then Covid hit. During the height of the pandemic, even though Venezuela had the hard currency, US sanctions blocked the financial transactions necessary to buy vaccines. He likened such measures to “bombs dropped on our society.”

    In contrast, Venezuela’s economic situation is now looking comparatively bullish. On the same day as the webinar, President Maduro announced oil production had recovered to one million barrels a day. Earlier this month, the five millionth home was delivered as part of the Great Housing Mission social program.

    Arellán described what he called the three-step “virtuous formula” for recovering the economy. This is a model, he added, for the some one third of humanity being punished by US unilateral coercive measures.

    First came resistance in the face of the “extortion” of the unilateral coercive measures. Venezuela learned through trial and error how to do more with less. Out of necessity, the country began to wean itself from dependence on oil revenues which had fallen over 90%. Small and medium businesses were promoted. The private sector, despite being prone to oppose the socialist project, was also punished by the US measures. Today, big business is investing more in domestic productive capacity, according to Arellán.

    Second was halting the economic freefall and achieving economic stability. Two areas in particular were key: rationalizing the exchange rate of the Venezuelan bolivar in relation to the US dollar and taming runaway inflation. Monthly inflation got down to 1.2%, a previously unheard of low rate.

    Third has been the recovery stage, transforming the economy from one dependent on oil revenues to buy foreign goods to one that is now over 90% food sovereign. The economy is being diversified with the sober understanding that relief from the US imperialist hybrid war is unlikely in the near future.

    Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron further explained the political dimensions of the US sanctions, which were designed to reverse the sizable achievements of the Chávez years. The aim, he said, was to kill hope and blame socialism for the attacks of “predatory capitalism.” The Venezuelan state was robbed by the US and its allies: seizure of overseas assets; dispossession of  CITGO, the state-owned oil subsidiary in the US; and confiscation of gold reserves held abroad.

    The “perversity of sanctions,” according to Ron, is that they undermine the social functions of the state to support the welfare of the people. That is, they try to cripple the government in order to make socialism look bad.

    Ron gave the example of the 16% malnutrition rate when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. By 2011, the rate was reduced to only 3%. But with the US maximum pressure campaign, the rate shot up to 13% (still better than before the revolution but punishing nonetheless).

    Venezuela experienced record out migration. This emigration was not due, as claimed by the US, to political persecution but was precipitated by worsening economic prospects caused primarily by the US politically-motivated sanctions. But now, Ron explained, citizens are returning to Venezuela and a new vice-ministry to assist their return has been created.

    Washington tried to isolate Venezuela both financially and diplomatically. Four years ago the US and some 50 of its allies recognized the parallel government of “interim president” Juan Guaidó, who had never even run for national office in Venezuela. Today only the US, Israel, and a few others still fail to recognize the elected government.

    Meanwhile, Venezuela has forged significant new economic and political ties with Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran among others. Regional alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states, such as ALBA, have been strengthened. Close cooperative relations have been reinforced with friendly governments in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, three of the four leading economies in Latin America.  And Venezuela is orienting toward the Global South, with the possibility of joining the expanded BRICS+ alliance of emerging economies looking increasingly likely.

    Indeed, far from being isolated, Ron noted, Venezuela has further integrated into an emerging multipolar world. Venezuela was just elected to a vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

    Ron credited current successes to the political will of a strong and unwavering leadership under President Maduro, which he characterized as a “collective leadership” encompassing many actors. This was coupled with organized “people power.” Both, he emphasized, were needed. Venezuela, he concluded, demonstrated the people’s willingness to face challenges and a government that did not give up on the battle for socialism.

    The post How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • How Venezuela Is Overcoming the US Blockade

    The future of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, a target of US imperial power since its inception in 1998, may be decided on July 28, the date of their presidential election.

    Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.

    This election is taking place in the context of US unilateral coercive measures. These so-called sanctions have amounted to an actual economic and financial blockade designed to cripple the economy and cause the people to renounce their government. Such outside interference by Washington is tantamount to electoral blackmail.

    Yet Carlos Ron, Venezuela’s deputy minister of foreign affairs for North America, is confident that the government party will win. He spoke on June 25 at a webinar organized by the Venezuela Solidarity Network.

    Ron explained that the Venezuelan people and government have achieved remarkable progress, resisting Washington’s “maximum pressure” campaign. A tanking economy has now been reversed. By the end of 2023, Venezuela had recorded 11 quarters of consecutive growth after years of economic contraction.

    Instead of irrevocably crashing the economy, according to Ron, the US hybrid warfare against Venezuela exposed the US-backed opposition, who have called for sanctions against their own people and have even treasonously endorsed a US-backed military coup option.

    Economist Yosmer Arellán, who is associated with the Central Bank of Venezuela and has collaborated with the UN Special Rapporteur on the impact of unilateral coercive measures, also addressed the webinar. Arellán spoke of the pain visited upon the Venezuelan people by the US sanctions.

    The economist explained that the economy was further impacted by the crash in oil prices, beginning in 2014, as well as by overcompliance with the economic coercive measures by third-parties fearful of US reprisals. Then Covid hit. During the height of the pandemic, even though Venezuela had the hard currency, US sanctions blocked the financial transactions necessary to buy vaccines. He likened such measures to “bombs dropped on our society.”

    In contrast, Venezuela’s economic situation is now looking comparatively bullish. On the same day as the webinar, President Maduro announced oil production had recovered to one million barrels a day. Earlier this month, the five millionth home was delivered as part of the Great Housing Mission social program.

    Arellán described what he called the three-step “virtuous formula” for recovering the economy. This is a model, he added, for the some one third of humanity being punished by US unilateral coercive measures.

    First came resistance in the face of the “extortion” of the unilateral coercive measures. Venezuela learned through trial and error how to do more with less. Out of necessity, the country began to wean itself from dependence on oil revenues which had fallen over 90%. Small and medium businesses were promoted. The private sector, despite being prone to oppose the socialist project, was also punished by the US measures. Today, big business is investing more in domestic productive capacity, according to Arellán.

    Second was halting the economic freefall and achieving economic stability. Two areas in particular were key: rationalizing the exchange rate of the Venezuelan bolivar in relation to the US dollar and taming runaway inflation. Monthly inflation got down to 1.2%, a previously unheard of low rate.

    Third has been the recovery stage, transforming the economy from one dependent on oil revenues to buy foreign goods to one that is now over 90% food sovereign. The economy is being diversified with the sober understanding that relief from the US imperialist hybrid war is unlikely in the near future.

    Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron further explained the political dimensions of the US sanctions, which were designed to reverse the sizable achievements of the Chávez years. The aim, he said, was to kill hope and blame socialism for the attacks of “predatory capitalism.” The Venezuelan state was robbed by the US and its allies: seizure of overseas assets; dispossession of  CITGO, the state-owned oil subsidiary in the US; and confiscation of gold reserves held abroad.

    The “perversity of sanctions,” according to Ron, is that they undermine the social functions of the state to support the welfare of the people. That is, they try to cripple the government in order to make socialism look bad.

    Ron gave the example of the 16% malnutrition rate when Hugo Chávez was elected president in 1998. By 2011, the rate was reduced to only 3%. But with the US maximum pressure campaign, the rate shot up to 13% (still better than before the revolution but punishing nonetheless).

    Venezuela experienced record out migration. This emigration was not due, as claimed by the US, to political persecution but was precipitated by worsening economic prospects caused primarily by the US politically-motivated sanctions. But now, Ron explained, citizens are returning to Venezuela and a new vice-ministry to assist their return has been created.

    Washington tried to isolate Venezuela both financially and diplomatically. Four years ago the US and some 50 of its allies recognized the parallel government of “interim president” Juan Guaidó, who had never even run for national office in Venezuela. Today only the US, Israel, and a few others still fail to recognize the elected government.

    Meanwhile, Venezuela has forged significant new economic and political ties with Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran among others. Regional alliances with Cuba, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and some Caribbean states, such as ALBA, have been strengthened. Close cooperative relations have been reinforced with friendly governments in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, three of the four leading economies in Latin America.  And Venezuela is orienting toward the Global South, with the possibility of joining the expanded BRICS+ alliance of emerging economies looking increasingly likely.

    Indeed, far from being isolated, Ron noted, Venezuela has further integrated into an emerging multipolar world. Venezuela was just elected to a vice-presidency of the UN General Assembly.

    Ron credited current successes to the political will of a strong and unwavering leadership under President Maduro, which he characterized as a “collective leadership” encompassing many actors. This was coupled with organized “people power.” Both, he emphasized, were needed. Venezuela, he concluded, demonstrated the people’s willingness to face challenges and a government that did not give up on the battle for socialism.

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Gaza is Changing All of Us

    The images from Gaza are painful beyond measure. (Hadi Daoud APA images)

    I scroll through news and photos and videos daily.

    I check Whatsapp first thing in the morning for messages from friends in Gaza and send off a few to ask how they’re doing.

    They tolerate my stupid question. I’m not really asking, though, because I know they’re not okay.

    I just want to make sure they’re alive.

    To send them love. To tell them I’m thinking of them.

    I wonder if it’s for them or for me. I love and miss them and wish I never left Gaza because now I can’t get back since Israel is controlling the Egyptian border.

    I also check the resistance Telegram channels daily to see if they have posted new videos. Their epic bravery renews my optimism and sense of revolutionary determination.

    Most of the scenes on my scroll are painful beyond measure. The livestreamed atrocities I consume by day are processed in my dreams by night.

    Gaza doesn’t leave me.

    I’m not alone. Nearly all of my friends say the same and I see random people on social media losing their minds over what they’re witnessing.

    Most of them are ordinary citizens who’ve never been political. Their initiation into geopolitical order is genocide – headless, limbless, faceless Palestinian babies and children, with Israeli soldiers and civilians cheering it all on.

    Day in and day out.

    I watched a British soldier today scream at the world on social media, unable to contain his pain and disbelief at the unimaginable cruelty.

    The reel went on for several minutes. The soldier’s face turned red and his veins bulged and his eyes misted.

    How long?

    Gaza is changing all of us.

    How long will this go on?

    No protest, no resignation, no complaint to the International Court of Justice, no pressure seems to curtail Israel’s insatiable bloodlust and criminal war machine.

    Now the Israelis want to bomb Lebanon, threatening to turn Beirut into Gaza.

    If Israel were a person, they would be locked up in a maximum security prison for the world’s worst criminals.

    The creation of this settler colony was the biggest geopolitical blunder in modern history, threatening to drag the whole world into an inferno. Palestinians are already there, in the pits of Israel’s depravity, burning and dying and screaming for help.

    On my last trip to Gaza, I took over 60 pounds of food for just one family.

    A friend’s mother knew a woman who knew another woman who had three kids with phenylketonuria (PKU), a hereditary condition that makes children unable to metabolize phenylalanine, an amino acid found in most foods. Without a special diet low in phenylalanine, PKU will lead to mental disabilities, seizure disorders and other neurological conditions.

    Israel’s blockade of food to the strip made it impossible for the mother to find the food they needed, and giving her children regular bread was akin to slowly poisoning them. My friends in Egypt weren’t able to locate the special pasta and flour so I ordered it from a company in the US and hauled it in an overweight suitcase across the world, then across the border to Gaza.

    There, I delivered the goods through a friend traveling to Nuseirat, the area in central Gaza where the family was at the time. Later that day, the mother sent photos and videos of her children eating the pasta, smiling, grateful and gleeful.

    She had also baked them cookies from the special dough.

    I think about them often, for the supply I brought has surely run out by now.

    I wonder, too, if they survived the Nuseirat massacre on 8 June. Or were they among the 270 lives sacrificed to extract four Israeli captives?

    I wonder how many other people with PKU have been forced daily to choose between hunger or neurological poison.

    I think of little Zeina, a young friend I made.

    I fell in love with her and her family – one brother and loving parents. All of them kind and smart and close knit.

    But when it was time for me to leave, Zeina meekly took me aside when no one would notice. She was trembling slightly.

    “Can I go with you when you leave?” she pleaded.

    I don’t believe in lying to children, though the truth was hard to utter. The best I could do was promise to come back and assure her that this horror would end.

    Eventually, it will end.

    I don’t know how long she had waited for the right opportunity to take me aside, or if she had practiced how she would ask me. I think she believed there was a chance and I know she felt she was betraying her family because she later begged me not to tell her mom.

    There are hundreds of thousands of children like Zeina, traumatized in ways none of us can truly comprehend. Their brains are rewiring and their childhood no longer resembles childhood.

    Only the willfully ignorant and morally vacuous, which may well be one in the same, are untouched by this holocaust in real time.

    The rest of us are awake and enraged and mobilizing.

    Gaza has altered our collective DNA. We are united in our love and pain and resolve to resist and escalate until Palestine is liberated and these genocidal Zionists are held to account in the same manner Nazis were.

    • Article first published in The Electronic Intifada

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  • Did The West Provoke The Ukraine War? Sorry, That Question Has Been Cancelled

    Is it possible for an entire ‘mainstream’ media system – every newspaper, website, TV channel – to completely suppress one side of a crucial argument without anyone expressing outrage, or even noticing? Consider the following.

    In February 2022, Nigel Farage, former and future leader of the Reform UK party, tweeted that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was:

    ‘A consequence of EU and NATO expansion, which came to a head in 2014. It made no sense to poke the Russian bear with a stick.’

    In a recent interview, the BBC reminded Farage of this comment. He responded:

    ‘Why did I say that? It was obvious to me that the ever-eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union was giving this man [Putin] a reason to his Russian people to say they’re coming for us again, and to go to war.

    ‘We’ve provoked this war – of course it’s his fault – he’s used what we’ve done as an excuse.’

    The BBC quickly made this a major news story by publishing a front page, top headline piece by BBC journalist Becky Morton who cited, and repeated, high-level sources attacking Farage. Morton wrote:

    ‘Former Conservative Defence Secretary Ben Wallace, who is not standing in the election, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme Mr Farage was like a “pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar”.’

    And:

    ‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was echoing Mr Putin’s “vile justification” for the war and Labour branded him “unfit” for any political office.’

    Morton then repeated both criticisms:

    ‘Mr Wallace – who oversaw the UK’s response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 – said Mr Farage “is a bit like that pub bore we’ve all met at the end of the bar” and often presents “very simplistic answers” to complex problems.’

    And:

    ‘Conservative Home Secretary James Cleverly said Mr Farage was “echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine”.’

    Morton piled on the pain:

    ‘Labour defence spokesman John Healey said Mr Farage’s comments made him “unfit for any political office in our country, let alone leading a serious party in Parliament”.

    ‘Former Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson accused Mr Farage of “parroting the Kremlin Line” and “producing new excuses for the brutal, unprovoked attack”.’

    Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson are all, of course, influential, high-profile figures; compiling their criticisms in this way sent a powerful message to BBC readers. Remarkably, one might think – given the BBC’s supposed devotion to presenting ‘both sides’ of an argument – Morton offered no source of any kind in support of Farage’s argument.

    The BBC intensified its coverage by opening a ‘Live’ blog (reserved for top news stories, disasters and scandals) on the issue, titled:

    ‘Farage “won’t apologise” for Ukraine comments after Starmer and Sunak criticism’

    The BBC reported:

    ‘Keir Starmer has called Nigel Farage’s comments on Ukraine “disgraceful” as Rishi Sunak says they play into Putin’s hands’

    Again, nowhere in the ‘Live’ blog coverage did the BBC cite arguments in support of Farage’s argument. Is it because they don’t exist?

    In June 2022, Ramzy Baroud interviewed Noam Chomsky:

    ‘Chomsky told us that it “should be clear that the (Russian) invasion of Ukraine has no (moral) justification.” He compared it to the US invasion of Iraq, seeing it as an example of “supreme international crime.” With this moral question settled, Chomsky believes that the main “background” of this war, a factor that is missing in mainstream media coverage, is “NATO expansion.”

    ‘”This is not just my opinion,” said Chomsky, “it is the opinion of every high-level US official in the diplomatic services who has any familiarity with Russia and Eastern Europe. This goes back to George Kennan and, in the 1990s, Reagan’s ambassador Jack Matlock, including the current director of the CIA; in fact, just everybody who knows anything has been warning Washington that it is reckless and provocative to ignore Russia’s very clear and explicit red lines. That goes way before (Vladimir) Putin, it has nothing to do with him; (Mikhail) Gorbachev, all said the same thing. Ukraine and Georgia cannot join NATO, this is the geostrategic heartland of Russia.”’

    We know people are interested in Chomsky’s views on the Ukraine war because when we posted a comment from him on X it received 430,000 views and 7,000 likes (huge numbers by our standards).

    In 2022, John Pilger commented:

    ‘The news from the war in Ukraine is mostly not news, but a one-sided litany of jingoism, distortion, omission.  I have reported a number of wars and have never known such blanket propaganda.

    ‘In February, Russia invaded Ukraine as a response to almost eight years of killing and criminal destruction in the Russian-speaking region of Donbass on their border.

    ‘In 2014, the United States had sponsored a coup in Kiev that got rid of Ukraine’s democratically elected, Russian-friendly president and installed a successor whom the Americans made clear was their man.’

    Pilger added:

    ‘Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is wanton and inexcusable. It is a crime to invade a sovereign country. There are no “buts” – except one.

    ‘When did the present war in Ukraine begin and who started it? According to the United Nations, between 2014 and this year, some 14,000 people have been killed in the Kiev regime’s civil war on the Donbass. Many of the attacks were carried out by neo-Nazis.’

    In May 2023, economist Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote:

    ‘Regarding the Ukraine War, the Biden administration has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Ukraine War started with an unprovoked attack by Russia on Ukraine on February 24, 2022. In fact, the war was provoked by the U.S. in ways that leading U.S. diplomats anticipated for decades in the lead-up to the war, meaning that the war could have been avoided and should now be stopped through negotiations.

    ‘Recognizing that the war was provoked helps us to understand how to stop it. It doesn’t justify Russia’s invasion.’ (Our emphasis)

    Sachs has previously been presented as a credible source by the BBC on other issues. In 2007, Sachs gave five talks for the BBC’s Reith Lectures.

    The New Yorker magazine described political scientist Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago as ‘one of the most famous critics of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War’. Mearsheimer commented:

    ‘I think the evidence is clear that we did not think he [Putin] was an aggressor before February 22, 2014. This is a story that we invented so that we could blame him. My argument is that the West, especially the United States, is principally responsible for this disaster. But no American policymaker, and hardly anywhere in the American foreign-policy establishment, is going to want to acknowledge that line of argument…’

    There are numerous other credible sources, including Benjamin Abelow, author of How The West Brought War to Ukraine (Siland Press, 2022) and Richard Sakwa, Frontline Ukraine: Crisis in the Borderlands (Yale University Press, 2022). Journalist Ian Sinclair, author of The March That Shook Blair (Peace News, 2013), published a collection of material titled:

    ‘Testimony from US government and military officials, and other experts, on the role of NATO expansion in creating the conditions for the Russian invasion of Ukraine’

    Sinclair cited, for example, current CIA Director William Burns:

    ‘Sitting at the embassy in Moscow in the mid-nineties, it seemed to me that NATO expansion was premature at best and needlessly provocative at worst.’

    And George F. Kennan, a leading US Cold War diplomat:

    ‘…something of the highest importance is at stake here. And perhaps it is not too late to advance a view that, I believe, is not only mine alone but is shared by a number of others with extensive and in most instances more recent experience in Russian matters. The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era’.

    We can understand why the BBC might want to cite Sunak, Starmer, Wallace, Cleverly, Healey and Robertson, but we can’t understand why it would ignore the counterarguments and sources cited above.

    It gets worse. A piece in the Daily Mail essentially repeated the BBC performance with endless vitriolic comments again cited from Sunak, Starmer, Cleverly, Healey, Robertson and several others. And again, no counterarguments.

    A Reuter’s report quoted Sunak and Healey but no counterarguments.

    ITV cited former prime minister Boris Johnson:

    ‘To try and spread the blame is morally repugnant and parroting Putin’s lies.’

    No counterarguments were allowed, other than from Farage himself. At a recent rally, he held up a front-page headline from the i newspaper in 2016, which read, tragicomically:

    ‘Boris blames EU for war in Ukraine’

    That about sums up the state of both Boris Johnson and UK politics generally.

    The Telegraph cited Cleverly and other high-profile sources attacking Farage:

    ‘Tobias Ellwood, the former Tory defence minister, told The Telegraph: “Churchill will be turning in his grave. Putin, already enjoying how Farage is disrupting British politics, will be delighted to hear this talk of appeasement entering our election debate.”

    ‘Lord West of Spithead, the former chief of the naval staff, said: “Anyone who gives any seeming excuse to president Putin and his disgraceful attack … is standing into danger as regards their views on world affairs.” James Cleverly, the Home Secretary, wrote on X, formerly Twitter: “Just Farage echoing Putin’s vile justification for the brutal invasion of Ukraine.”

    ‘Liam Fox, the former Tory defence secretary, told The Telegraph: “The West did not ‘provoke this war’ in Ukraine and it is shocking that Nigel Farage should say so.”’ (Daily Telegraph, ‘Farage: West provoked Russia to attack Ukraine’, 22 June 2024)

    Again, all alternative views were ignored as non-existent.

    In the Independent, journalist Tom Watling packed his article with comments from Sunak, Starmer and Wallace. Again, no counterarguments were allowed.

    The Guardian cited Sunak, Healey and Cleverly. Again, no counterarguments were included. (Peter Walker, ‘Nigel Farage claims Russia was provoked into Ukraine war’, The Guardian, 21 June 2024)

    With such limited resources, it is difficult for us to wade through all mentions of this story, but we will stick our necks out and suggest that it is quite possible that no sources supporting Farage’s argument have been cited in any UK national newspaper.

    By any rational accounting, this ‘mainstream’ coverage is actually a form of totalitarian propaganda. It has denied the British public the ability to even understand the criticisms. Most people reading these reports will simply not understand why Farage made the claim – it is a taboo subject in ‘mainstream’ coverage – and so they have no way of making sense of either his argument or the backlash. This is deep bias presented as ‘news’. It is fake news.

    And this suppression of honest journalism in relation to one of the most dangerous and devastating wars of our time, in which our own country is deeply involved, is happening in the run up to what is supposed to be a democratic election.

    None of the above is intended as a defence of Farage’s wider political stance. On the contrary, we agree with political journalist Peter Oborne:

    ‘Farage, a close ally of Donald Trump, who has supported Marine Le Pen in France and spoken at an AfD rally in Germany, fits naturally into the rancid politics of the far-right movements making ground across Europe and in the United States.’

    Farage and his far-right views have been endlessly platformed by the BBC.

    Needless to say, the Ukraine war is only one of many key issues that are off the agenda for our choice-as-no-choice political system. In a rare example of dissent, Owen Jones commented in the Guardian:

    ‘Is this a serious country or not? It is egregious enough that this general election campaign is so stripped of discussion about the defining issues facing us at home for the next half decade, whether that be public spending, the NHS or education. But it is especially shocking how quickly the butchery in Gaza – and the position of this imploding government and its successor – has been forgotten.’

    Jones noted:

    ‘On Thursday night’s BBC Question Time leaders’ special, there was not a single question or answer on Gaza.

    ‘Seriously? Clearly this is an issue that matters to many Britons.’

    Earlier this month, Professor Bill McGuire, Emeritus Professor of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College London commented:

    ‘The most astonishing thing about the UK election campaign is not what the leaders and parties are saying, but what they are NOT saying

    ‘It beggars belief that the #climate is simply not an issue and – as far as I have heard – has not been addressed by either leader

    ‘Just criminal’

    It works like magic: two major political parties ostensibly representing the ‘left’ and ‘right’ of the political spectrum, but both actually serving the same establishment interests, naturally ignore issues that offend power. Establishment media can then also ignore these issues on the pretext that the party-political system covers the entire spectrum of thinkable thought, and that any ideas outside that ‘spectrum’ have no particular right to be heard at election time. Indeed, to venture beyond the carefully filtered bubble of party politics is seen as actually undemocratic. As one ITV journalist reported:

    ‘Outrage at Nigel Farage’s comments about the war in Ukraine has drawn criticism from all corners of British politics.’

    Not quite. They drew criticism from the select few corners of British politics that are allowed to exist in our ‘managed democracy’.

    The post Did The West Provoke The Ukraine War? Sorry, That Question Has Been Cancelled first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • NATO’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War

    The world is at its most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. Back then, however, the fear of total destruction consumed the public; today, few people seem even to be aware of this possibility.

    It is easily imaginable that nuclear war could break out between Russia (and perhaps China) and the West, yet politicians continue to escalate tensions, place hundreds of thousands of troops at “high readiness,” and attack military targets inside Russia, even while ordinary citizens blithely go on with their lives.

    The situation is without parallel in history.

    Consider the following facts. A hostile military alliance, now including even Sweden and Finland, is at the very borders of Russia. How are Russian leaders—whose country was almost destroyed by Western invasion twice in the twentieth century—supposed to react to this? How would Washington react if Mexico or Canada belonged to an enormous, expansionist, and highly belligerent anti-U.S. military alliance?

    As if expanding NATO to include Eastern Europe wasn’t provocative enough, Washington began to send billions of dollars’ worth of military aid to Ukraine in 2014, to “improve interoperability with NATO,” in the words of the Defense Department. Why this Western involvement in Ukraine, which, as Obama said while president, is “a core Russian interest but not an American one”? One reason was given by Senator Lindsey Graham in a recent moment of startling televised candor: Ukraine is “sitting on $10 to $12 trillion of critical minerals… I don’t want to give that money and those assets to Putin to share with China.”

    As the Washington Post has reported, “Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium and massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.” Ukraine also has colossal reserves of natural gas and oil, in addition to neon, nickel, beryllium, and other critical rare earth metals. For NATO’s leadership, Russia and, in particular, China can’t be permitted access to these resources. The war in Ukraine must, therefore, continue indefinitely, and negotiations with Russia mustn’t be pursued.

    Meanwhile, as Ukraine was being de facto integrated into NATO in the years before 2022, the United States put into operation an anti-ballistic-missile site in Romania in 2016. As Benjamin Abelow notes in How the West Brought War to Ukraine, the missile launchers that the ABM system uses can accommodate nuclear-tipped offensive weapons like the Tomahawk cruise missile. “Tomahawks,” he points out, “have a range of 1,500 miles, can strike Moscow and other targets deep inside Russia, and can carry hydrogen bomb warheads with selectable yields up to 150 kilotons, roughly ten times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.” Poland now boasts a similar ABM site.

    American assurances that these anti-missile bases are defensive in nature, to protect against an (incredibly unlikely) attack from Iran, can hardly reassure Russia, given the missile launchers’ capability to launch offensive weapons.

    In another bellicose move, the Trump administration in 2019 unilaterally withdrew from the 1987 Treaty on Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. Russia responded by proposing that the U.S. declare a moratorium on the deployment of short- and intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe, saying it wouldn’t deploy such missiles as long as NATO members didn’t. Washington dismissed these proposals, which upset some European leaders. “Has the absence of dialogue with Russia,” Emmanuel Macron said, “made the European continent any safer? I don’t think so.”

    The situation is especially dangerous given what experts call “warhead ambiguity.” As senior Russian military officers have said, “there will be no way to determine if an incoming ballistic missile is fitted with a nuclear or a conventional warhead, and so the military will see it as a nuclear attack” that warrants a nuclear retaliation. A possible misunderstanding could thus plunge the world into nuclear war.

    So now we’re more than two years into a proxy war with Russia that has killed hundreds of thousands of people and has seen Ukraine even more closely integrated into the structures of NATO than it was before. And the West continues to inch ever closer to the nuclear precipice. Ukraine has begun using U.S. missiles to strike Russian territory, including defensive (not only offensive) missile systems.

    This summer, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway, and Belgium will begin sending F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine; and Denmark and the Netherlands have said there will be no restrictions on the use of these planes to strike targets in Russia. F-16s are able to deliver nuclear weapons, and Russia has said the planes will be considered a nuclear threat.

    Bringing the world even closer to terminal crisis, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg states that 500,000 troops are at “high readiness,” and in the next five years, NATO allies will “acquire thousands of air defense and artillery systems, 850 modern aircraft—mostly 5th-generation F-35s—and also a lot of other high-end capabilities.” Macron has morphed into one of Europe’s most hawkish leaders, with plans to send military instructors to Ukraine very soon. At the same time, NATO is holding talks about taking more nuclear weapons out of storage and placing them on standby.

    Where all this is heading is unclear, but what’s obvious is that Western leaders are acting with reckless disregard for the future of humanity. Their bet is that Putin will never deploy nuclear weapons, despite his many threats to do so and recent Russian military drills to deploy tactical nuclear weapons. Given that Russian use of nuclear warheads might well precipitate a nuclear response by the West, the fate of humanity hangs on the restraint and rationality of one man, Putin—a figure who is constantly portrayed by Western media and politicians as an irrational, bloodthirsty monster. So the human species is supposed to place its hope for survival in someone we’re told is a madman, who leads a state that feels besieged by the most powerful military coalition in history, apparently committed to its demise.

    Maybe the madmen aren’t in the Russian government but rather in NATO governments?

    It is downright puzzling that millions of people aren’t protesting in the streets every day to deescalate the crisis and pull civilization back from the brink. Evidently the mass media have successfully fulfilled their function of manufacturing consent. But unless the Western public wakes up, the current crisis might not end as benignly as did the one in 1962.

    The post NATO’s Endgame Appears to Be Nuclear War first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies

    One of the longest sagas of political persecution is coming to its terminus.  That is, if you believe in final chapters.  Nothing about the fate of Julian Assange seems determinative.  His accusers and inquisitors will draw some delight at the plea deal reached between the WikiLeaks founder’s legal team and the US Department of Justice.  Others, such as former US Vice President, Mike Pence, thought it unjustifiably lenient.

    Alleged to have committed 18 offences, 17 novelly linked to the odious Espionage Act, the June 2020 superseding indictment against Assange was a frontal assault on the freedoms of publishing and discussing classified government information.  At this writing, Assange has arrived in Saipan, located in the US commonwealth territory of Northern Mariana Islands in the Western Pacific, to face a fresh indictment.  It was one of Assange’s conditions that he would not present himself in any court in the United States proper, where, with understandable suspicion, he might legally vanish.

    As correspondence between the US Department of Justice and US District Court Chief Judge Ramona V. Manglona reveals, the “proximity of this federal US District Court to the defendant’s country of citizenship, Australia, to which we expect he will return at the conclusion of proceedings” was also a factor.

    Before the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands, he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information under the Espionage Act of 1917, or section 793(g) (Title 18, USC).  The felony carries a fine up to $10,000 and/or up to 10 years in prison, though Assange’s time in Belmarsh Prison, spent on remand for some 62 months, will meet the bar.

    The felony charge sheet alleges that Assange knowingly and unlawfully conspired with US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, then based at Operating Base Hammer in Iraq, to receive and obtain documents, writings and notes, including those of a secret nature, relating to national defence, wilfully communicated those documents from persons with lawful possession of or access to them to those not entitled to receive them, and do the same from persons unauthorised to possess such documents.

    Before turning to the grave implications of this single count and the plea deal, supporters of Assange, including his immediate family, associates and those who had worked with him and drunk from the same well of publishing, had every reason to feel a surreal sense of intoxication.  WikiLeaks announced Assange’s departure from London’s Belmarsh Prison on the morning of June 24 after a 1,901 day stint, his grant of bail by the High Court in London, and his release at Stansted Airport.  Wife Stella regularly updated followers about the course of flight VJ199.  In coverage posted of his arrival at the federal court house in Saipan, she pondered “how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls” of his Belmarsh cell.

    As for the plea deal itself, it is hard to fault it from the emotional and personal perspective of Assange and his family.  He was ailing and being subjected to a slow execution by judicial process.  It was also the one hook upon which the DOJ, and the Biden administration, might move on.  This being an election year in the US, the last thing President Biden wanted was a haunting reminder of this nasty saga of political persecution hovering over freedom land’s virtues.

    There was another, rather more sordid angle, and one that the DOJ had to have kept in mind in thinning the charge sheet: a proper Assange trial would have seen the murderous fantasies of the CIA regarding the publisher subject to scrutiny.  These included various possible measures: abduction, rendition, even assassination, points thoroughly explored in a Yahoo News contribution in September 2021.

    One of the authors of the piece, Zach Dorfman, posted a salient reminder as news of the plea deal filtered through that many officials during the Trump administration, even harsh critics of Assange, “thought [CIA Director Mike] Pompeo’s extraordinary rendition plots foolhardy in the extreme, and probably illegal.  They also – critically – thought it might harm Assange’s prosecution.”  Were Pompeo’s stratagems to come to light, “it would make the discovery process nightmarish for the prosecution, should Assange ever see trial.”

    From the perspective of publishers, journalists and scribblers keen to keep the powerful accountable, the plea must be seen as enormously troubling. It ultimately goes to the brutal exercise of US extraterritorial power against any publisher, irrespective of outlet and irrespective of nationality.  While the legal freight and prosecutorial heaviness of the charges was reduced dramatically (62 months seems sweetly less imposing than 175 years), the measure extracts a pound of flesh from the fourth estate.  It signals that the United States can and will seek out those who obtain and publish national security information that they would rather keep under wraps under spurious notions of “harm”.

    Assange’s conviction also shores up the crude narrative adopted from the moment WikiLeaks began publishing US national security and diplomatic files: such activities could not be seen as journalistic, despite their role in informing press commentary or exposing the venal side of power through leaks.

    From the lead prosecuting attorney Gordon Kromberg to such British judges as Vanessa Baraitser; from the national security commentariat lodged in the media stable to any number of politicians, including the late California Democrat Dianne Feinstein to the current President Joe Biden, Assange was not of the fourth estate and deserved his mobbing.  He gave the game away.  He pilfered and stole the secrets of empire.

    To that end, the plea deal makes a mockery of arguments and effusive declarations that the arrangement is somehow a victory for press freedom.  It suggests the opposite: that anyone publishing US national security information by a leaker or whistleblower is imperilled.  While the point was never tested in court, non-US publishers may be unable to avail themselves of the free speech protections of the First Amendment.  The Espionage Act, for the first time in history, has been given a global, tentacular reach, made a weapon against publishers outside the United States, paving the way for future prosecutions.

    The post The Release of Julian Assange: Plea Deals and Dark Legacies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Electing the Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear from Trump or Biden

    No matter what carefully crafted sound bites and political spin get trotted out by Joe Biden and Donald Trump in advance of the 2024 presidential election, you can rest assured that none of the problems that continue to undermine our freedoms will be addressed in any credible, helpful way by either candidate, despite the dire state of our nation.

    Indeed, the 2024 elections will not do much to alter our present course towards a police state.

    Nor will the popularity contest for the new occupant of the White House significantly alter the day-to-day life of the average American greatly at all. Those life-changing decisions are made elsewhere, by nameless, unelected government officials who have turned bureaucracy into a full-time and profitable business.

    In the interest of liberty and truth, here are a few uncomfortable truths about life in the American police state that we will not be hearing from either of the two leading presidential candidates.

    1. The government is not our friend. Nor does it work for “we the people.”

    2. By gradually whittling away at our freedoms—free speech, assembly, due process, privacy, etc.—the government has, in effect, liberated itself from its contractual agreement to respect our constitutional rights while resetting the calendar back to a time when we had no Bill of Rights to protect us from the long arm of the government.

    3. Republicans and Democrats like to act as if there’s a huge difference between them and their policies. However, they are not sworn enemies so much as they are partners in crime, united in a common goal, which is to maintain the status quo.

    4. Presidential elections merely serve to maintain the status quo. Once elected president, that person becomes part of the dictatorial continuum that is the American imperial presidency today.

    5. The U.S. government is spending money it doesn’t have on foreign aid programs it can’t afford, all the while the national debt continues to grow, our domestic infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our borders continue to be breached. What is going on? It’s obvious that a corporatized, militarized, entrenched global bureaucracy is running the country.

    6. 1984 has become an operation manual for the omnipresent, modern-day surveillance state.

    7. When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals. In the current governmental climate, obeying one’s conscience and speaking truth to the power of the police state can easily render you an “enemy of the state.”

    8. If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it. Americans only think they’re choosing the next president. In truth, however, they’re engaging in the illusion of participation culminating in the reassurance ritual of voting. It’s just another manufactured illusion conjured up in order to keep the populace compliant and convinced that their vote counts and that they still have some influence over the political process.

    9. More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, the U.S. government has become a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.

    10. The government knows exactly which buttons to push in order to manipulate the populace and gain the public’s cooperation and compliance. This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding. This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

    11. The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder. The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.

    12. Every U.S. citizen is now guilty until proven innocent.

    13. “We the people” are no longer shielded by the rule of law. While the First Amendment—which gives us a voice—is being muzzled, the Fourth Amendment—which protects us from being bullied, badgered, beaten, broken and spied on by government agents—is being disemboweled.

    14. Privacy, as we have known it, is dead. Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.

    15. Private property means nothing if the government can take your home, car or money under the flimsiest of pretexts, whether it be asset forfeiture schemes, eminent domain or overdue property taxes.

    16. If there is an absolute maxim by which the federal government seems to operate, it is that the American taxpayer always gets ripped off.

    17. From the moment they are born to the time they legally come of age, young people are now wards of the state.

    18. All you need to do in order to be flagged as a suspicious character, labeled an enemy of the state and locked up like a dangerous criminal is use certain trigger words, surf the internet, communicate using a cell phone, drive a car, stay at a hotel, purchase materials at a hardware store, take flying or boating lessons, appear suspicious, question government authority, or generally live in the United States.

    19. The government is pushing us ever closer to a constitutional crisis.

    20. Our freedoms—especially the Fourth Amendment—continue to be choked out by a prevailing view among government bureaucrats that they have the right to search, seize, strip, scan, spy on, probe, pat down, taser, and arrest any individual at any time and for the slightest provocation.

    These are not problems that can be glibly dismissed with a few well-chosen words, as most politicians are inclined to do.

    No matter which candidate wins this election, the citizenry and those who represent us need to own up to the fact that there can be no police state—no tyranny—no routine violations of our rights without our complicity and collusion—without our turning a blind eye, shrugging our shoulders, allowing ourselves to be distracted and our civic awareness diluted.

    Likewise, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, these problems will continue to plague our nation unless and until Americans wake up to the fact that we’re the only ones who can change things for the better and then do something about it. After all, the Constitution opens with those three vital words, “We the people.”

    There is no government without us—our sheer numbers, our muscle, our economy, our physical presence in this land.

    We are the government.

    The post Electing the Next Dictator: Ugly Truths You Won’t Hear from Trump or Biden first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Julian Assange Is Released from Prison: What Does it Mean?

    Lifesize bronze sculpture featuring (L-R) former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and former US soldier Chelsea Manning convicted of violations of the Espionage Act, on May 1, 2015 at Alexanderplatz square in Berlin. (AFP Photo / Tobias Schwarz) © AFP

    The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, will at long last taste freedom again. He should never have been imprisoned. Nevertheless, the release is conditional on his accepting to plead guilty to espionage in the United States — in the far-flung US territory of Saipan. There he is to be sentenced to 62 months of time already served. However, it is much longer that 62 months. Since Sweden ordered an arrest of Assange over rape allegations in 2010, Assange has found himself under some form of incarceration until his current release.

    There are some important takeaways from this gross dereliction of justice.

    One: The rape allegations, that continue to appear in lazy media, were false, and this was attested to by the two women in the case. The allegations were a political construction between Sweden acting on behalf of the US. The United Kingdom abetted the US’s scheming against Assange. No western nations stepped forward to criticize the treatment. Graciously, president  Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador offered asylum for Assange in Mexico.

    Why was Assange being targetted? Because WikiLeaks has released scads of classified US military documents on the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq,  diplomatic cables, and the devastating video Collateral Murder. When US citizen Daniel Ellsberg released the “Pentagon Papers” for publication, he was charged with theft on top of espionage, but government chicanery caused it to end up in a mistrial. Whereas president Richard Nixon failed miserably against Ellsberg, Donald Trump and Joe Biden persevered and kept Assange under some form of lock-and-key.

    Two: Assange is not guilty. He is guilty of journalism, which is not a crime. He did not commit treason against the US. He is an Australian citizen and not a US citizen. He did not commit espionage. Assange is not a spy and neither was he a thief. He is a publisher, and when WikiLeaks published the leaks, Assange was doing what the New York Times did when they published the “Pentagon Papers.”

    Nonetheless, Assange is human. He has parents, a wife, and kids. Assange realizes that he was up against the state machinery of the US, UK, Sweden, and the collusion of Ecuador under president Lenin Moreno. Crucial was the unwillingness of pre-Albanese Australian administrations to fight for one of its citizens.

    If the Deep State in the US can have its own president assassinated without consequences, then it can easily have a single person put in some form of incarceration for as long as it intends.

    After years and years of incarceration — especially in the notorious Belmarsh prison, his health diminishing, missing his family — that Assange would have accepted the release terms of a rogue empire is completely understandable.

    Three: Justice is all too often not just. Justice delayed is justice denied goes the legal maxim. Unfortunately, Assange is not an isolated example. Edward Snowden cannot return stateside. Seeing what has happened to Assange reinforces that the US government will mete out injustice to him.

    Four: Monopoly media continues to evince that it is an organ of government and corporations. Why so? First, because they are instruments of power. Second, they found themselves all too often scooped by WikiLeaks on major stories.

    Five: The bad: this is a blow to freedom of speech and the right of the public to know what their government is doing.

    Six: More bad: it is too easy to demonize a hero, to torture a hero, and to do this even though there is a significant (although arguably not numerous enough) global movement in support of a hero.

    Seven: Even more bad: people must keep in mind the other heroes out there who brought corruption, war crimes, crimes against peace and humanity to the public consciousness and as a consequence face persecution, imprisonment, assassination, and whatever sordid punishments the machinery of rogue states can cook up. People like Daniel Ellsberg, William Binney, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, George Galloway, conscientious objectors, truth tellers, resistance fighters, among others.

    Eight: Assange is a hero. Heroes tend to be too loosely defined. Scoring a boatload of goals does not one a hero make, neither does crooning a hit song make one a hero, nor does attaining ultra wealth. Heroes are embued with a highly developed sense of morality and transcend themselves by working for the greater good of humanity and the world.

    Nine: It is a Pyrrhic victory for Empire. Yes, Assange was brought to the point of having to confess guilt, but who knows what Assange and WikiLeaks will do for exposing crimes of state from here on.

    Ten: Whatever Assange decides to do in the future, his decision is earned. He has already done so much for the people who want transparency and who want their governments held to account.

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  • Quibbling About Killing: Netanyahu’s Spat with Washington

    Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is unhappy.  Not so much with the Palestinians, whom he sees as terroristic, dispensable and a threat to Israeli security.  Not with the Persians, who, he swears, will never acquire a nuclear weapon capacity on his watch.  His recent lack of happiness has been directed against the fatty hand that feeds him and his country’s war making capabilities.

    On June 18, the Israeli PM released a video decrying Washington’s recent conduct towards his government in terms of military aid.  It was “inconceivable that in the past few months, the administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel.”  Having claimed such an idea to be inconceivable, Netanyahu proceeded to conceive.  He stated that US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken had “assured” him “that the administration is working day and night to remove these bottlenecks. I certainly hope that’s the case.  It should be the case.”

    The release coincided with efforts made by President Joe Biden’s envoy, Amos Hochstein, to cool matters concerning Israel-Hezbollah hostilities, a matter that threatens to move beyond daily border skirmishes.  It was also a pointed reference to the halt in a single shipment of 2000 pound (900kg) bombs to Israel regarding concerns about massive civilian casualties over any planned IDF assault on Rafah.

    The White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was uncharacteristically unadorned in frankness.  “We genuinely do not know what he is talking about.”  Discussions between US and Israeli officials were continuing.  “There are no other pauses – none.”  It fell to the White House National Security Communications advisor, John Kirby, to field more substantive questions on the matter.

    On June 20, Kirby admitted to being perplexed and disappointed at Netanyahu’s remarks, “especially given that no other country is doing more to help Israel defend itself against the threat by Hamas”.  As he was at pains to point out, the US military industrial complex had enthusiastically furnished “material assistance to Israel” despite the pause on the provision of 2,000-pound bombs.  The notion “that we had somehow stopped helping Israel with their self-defense needs is absolutely not accurate”.  Netanyahu, in other words, was quibbling about the means of inflicting death, a matter of form over substance.

    Blinken confirmed as much, stating that the administration was “continuing to review one shipment that President Biden has talked about with regard to 2000-pound bombs because of our concerns about their use in densely populated areas like Rafah.”  All other matters were “moving as it normally would move.”

    These remarks are unequivocally true.  Annual military assistance to Israel from US coffers totals $3.8 billion.  In April, President Joe Biden approved the provision of $17 billion in additional assistance to Israel amidst the continued pummelling of Gaza and the starvation of its thinning population.  The Biden administration has also badgered Democratic lawmakers to give their blessing to the sale of 50 F-15 fighters to Israel in a contract amounting to $18 billion.  But this, according to accounts from Israel’s Channel 12 and the German paper Bild, has been less than satisfactory for Israel’s blood lusting prime minister.

    The disgruntled video precipitated much agitation among officials in the Biden administration.  In an Axios report, three, inevitably anonymised, offer their views.  One found it “hard to fathom” how the video “helps with deterrence.  There is nothing like telling Hezbollah that the US is withholding weapons from Israel, which is false, to make them feel emboldened.”

    The interviewed officials all admitted to Netanyahu’s inscrutability.  A half-plausible line was ventured: running up points on the domestic front ahead of a visit to Washington from Israel’s defence minister, Yoav Gallant.  Not that the strategy was working for opposition leader, Yair Lapid, who found Netanyahu’s effort damaging in its reverberating potential.  From Moscow to Tokyo, “everyone is reaching the same conclusion: Israel is no longer the closest ally of the US.  This is the damage Netanyahu is causing us.”

    Kirby’s remarks deserve scrutiny on another level. For one, they suggest a rationale that would have done much in flattening Israeli egos.  “The president put fighter aircrafts up in the air in the middle of April to help shoot down several hundred drones and missiles, including ballistic missiles that were fired from Iran proper at Israel.”

    Here arises an important omission: the intervention by the US was part of a coordinated, choreographed plan enabling Iran to show force in response to the April 1 Israeli strike on its ambassadorial compound in Damascus while minimising the prospect of casualties.  Accordingly, Tehran and Washington found themselves in an odd, unacknowledged embrace that had one unintended consequence: revealing Israeli vulnerability.  No longer could Israel be seen to be self-sufficiently impregnable, its defences firmly holding against all adversaries.  In a perverse twist on that dilemma, a strong ally providing support is bound to be resented.  Nothing supplied will ever be, or can be, enough.

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  • Black Alliance for Peace Condemns US Black (Mis)Leaders for their Support of US Military Intervention and Occupation of Haiti

    The Haiti/Americas Team of the Black Alliance for Peace rebukes the US Black “misleadership” class for its support of the latest US invasion and occupation of Haiti. We condemn the participation of this class in discussions with the US security state and its promotion of imperialist foreign policy objectives aimed at undermining Haitian sovereignty and dignity.

    On March 29, 2024, US Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer led a meeting on Haiti policy with a selected group of “leaders of U.S.-based Black civil rights groups.” The White House’s Readout lists the participants as Reverend Al Sharpton of the National Action Network, Ron Daniels of the Institute of the Black World (IBW21), Marc Morial, President of the National Urban League, Derrick Johnson, President of the NAACP, and Jocelyn McCalla, Senior Policy Advisor for the Haitian-American Foundation for Democracy. Why would the U.S. National Security office sponsor a meeting about Haiti with these groups? The readout claims the U.S. is committed to “ensuring a better future for Haiti.” But the most significant aspect of the meeting was the need, according to the White House, to rally support for “the UN-authorized Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission to Haiti and lifting up Haitian-led solutions to the political impasse.”

    It seems that these Black misleaders huddling around the latrine of white power were given their marching orders to manufacture Black consent for continued US occupation and oppression of Haiti. Since that meeting, there has been a ramping up of US Black voices supposedly speaking on behalf of Haiti and Haitians. From Jesse Jackson to Al Sharpton, the main goal seems to be to rally the US Black community to support US foreign policy objectives, using Haiti as staging ground.

    Ron Daniels of IBW21 has been the most egregious, using the crisis in Haiti to raise funds for his organization, while propagating vile stereotypes about Haitian society and supporting US imperialism. In his recent “Haiti on Fire” articles, Daniels describes the country as a “virtual failed state” and a “narco-state” controlled by “vicious gangs,” calling for the Core Group to take the lead in Haiti, and claiming that only a US-ordered, Kenya-led mercenary mission can solve Haiti’s problems.

    By intent or ignorance, Daniels does not once mention the role of the US, France, and Canada in fomenting the crisis in Haiti, portraying it instead as a recent, self-inflicted problem caused by gangs and a few elites. Daniels does not acknowledge that this latest racist western media fascination with “gangs” only began in 2022 as the US was trying to keep its puppet Prime Minister, Ariel Henry, in power. What is most disturbing is that Daniels accepts that the Core Group, the foreign occupying force in Haiti, has legitimacy and has the right to take rule over Haiti. Never mind that Haitian people see the Core Group as a criminal, colonial entity. Daniels also celebrates the US-installed “Presidential Council” in Haiti, stating that this will lead to a “people-based democracy.” Someone should remind Daniels that there is no democracy under occupation.

    But we know that it was the US and Core Group – under the cover of pliant misleaders of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) – that handpicked the Haitian participants in the Presidential Council. We also know that all participants in this Council had to first agree to this illegal foreign military invasion of Haiti. In effect, Daniels is not only calling on the same white supremacist arsonists to put out the fire that they themselves lit in Haiti, he also supports another US-led military invasion and occupation of Haiti!

    BAP calls on those who support Haiti to not fall for the language of “solidarity” with Haiti when these Black hucksters of hegemony are using their platform and the language of “brotherhood” and “sisterhood, and a cynical co-optation of “Pan-Africanism” to help US imperialism snuff out Haitian sovereignty. We must remember that the crisis in Haiti is a crisis of imperialism.

    Ron Daniels and the IBW21, as well as these other Black misleaders, should be condemned for supporting US imperial policy against the First Black Republic in the modern world. These selected “Leaders of Civil Rights Groups” would do well to know that they are just the third group of Black faces that the US is instrumentalizing,  to invade Haiti, following the pattern set by the CARICOM countries and Kenya (which the U.S. is bribing with $300,000 to pretend to lead this disastrous mission). Are they wondering why the US, France, or Canada are refusing to lead the mission, or why they are only now involving them in the discussion? As we have said of the Kenyan government and the CARICOM governments providing armed mercenaries to kill Haitian people, this is Blackface imperialism.

    We would also like to point out to these Black “leaders” that this planned invasion of Haiti, though heralded as a “UN” mission, is actually not. It has the sanction of the UN Security Council, but the UN did not want to take responsibility for the mission because it would need to apply too much “robust use of force” on Haitian people.

    The Black Alliance for Peace continues to denounce US imperialism. But we especially condemn the Black faces of imperialism. We call on all those committed to a world without colonies to reject the Black faces of empire and their lies. Disband the Core Group! End the BINUH occupation! Stop all efforts to impose a new invasion on Haiti!

    Dump the Imperialists in Blackface! Solidarity with the resistance! Long live a free Haiti!

    The post Black Alliance for Peace Condemns US Black (Mis)Leaders for their Support of US Military Intervention and Occupation of Haiti first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • A Philippines-China Clash in the South China Sea


    Donald Trump was likeliest correct when he told a CNN reporter: “Your organization’s terrible. … You are fake news.”

    The bias is so blatantly obvious in the 20 June 2024 CNN headline: “‘Only pirates do this’: Philippines accuses China of using bladed weapons in major South China Sea escalation.” To adduce that it is a bias is simple. Consider that this current news story could have been titled: “Only imperialist lackeys do this: China accuses Philippines of hiding behind the US in its attempt to violate China’s ‘indisputable sovereignty’ in the South China Sea escalation.” That would provide a different perspective to consider in a headline. But it would still be biased. It is a bias because it does not dedicate itself to providing verifiable and relevant facts and background from all perspectives to allow readers to reach their own conclusions. Mind you, one of those seemingly biased headlines may have been accurate. This is because a person may well be biased to factual reporting whatever those facts reveal themselves to be. To strike a headline that does not prejudice the reader, consider: “Clash in the South China Sea between China and the Philippines.” Then consider the factuality of what is argued in an article as each side makes its case.

    Of primary consideration in the Philippines-China conflict is which country is supported by evidence in its claims of sovereignty over the shoal known as Ren’ai Jiao in China and Second Thomas Shoal in the West.

    CNN writes,

    In 2016, an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in favor of the Philippines’ claims in a landmark maritime dispute, which concluded that China has no legal basis to assert historic rights to the bulk of the South China Sea.

    But Beijing has ignored the ruling.

    What is conceded by CNN is that China has “historic rights to the bulk of the South China Sea.” What CNN asserts is that “historic rights” have no “legal basis.” Historic rights are nonetheless considered nebulous by some scholars. (see Justin D. Nankivell, “The Role of History and Law in the South China Sea and Arctic Ocean,” National Bureau of Asian Research, 7 August 2017. “… many states have different interpretive understandings of the authority of the law of the sea, which invariably lead to different strategic outcomes in foreign policy decision-making and maritime practice.” And Clive R. Symmons, “Historic Rights and the ‘Nine-Dash Line’ in Relation to UNCLOS in the Light of the Award in the Philippines v. China Arbitration (2016) concerning the Supposed Historic Claims of China in the South China Sea: Whatnow Remains of the Doctrine?” wherein it was acknowledged that clarification was needed for “… the meaning of various formerly interchangeably-used terms relating to historic maritime claims [as used in customary international law] : such as ‘historic rights’ [which now can be seen to have both a broad and narrow meaning, …,] p 27.)

    On 7 July 2016, I noted that China’s claim of sovereignty for the entirety of the South China Sea preceded the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. China claims its activities in the South China Sea date back to over 2,000 years ago having conferred sovereignty and maritime rights.

    China has been the first to discover, name and develop the group of islands in the South China Sea, which have been known as the Nanhai Islands in China. For centuries, the Chinese government had been the administrator of the islands by putting them under the administration of local governments, conducting military patrols and providing rescue services.The Nansha [Spratly] and Xisha [Paracel] Islands, occupied by Japan during World War II, were returned to China as part of the territories stolen from China. This has been clearly set out in international documents such as the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Proclamation. China sent government and military officials to recover the islands and deployed troops there.

    KJ Noh compellingly refuted the UNCLOS ruling in his article “Making a Mockery of International Law.”

    The key issue is over territorial sovereignty–who owns the islands…

    The Chinese claim these islands back to the 2nd century BCE, to the Han Dynasty. They claim constant usage, fishing, habitation, travel, mapping of the Islands, intensifying from the Ming Dynasty onwards, and produce historical documents to that effect.

    Other countries make other various historical claims: the Vietnamese claim usage from the 17th century onwards.

    The Philippines claim that the lands were terra nullius–uninhabited land–and therefore belong to them, as they fall within their maritime Exclusive Economic Zone of 200nm. They also claim that Tomas Cloma, a businessman and adventurer discovered, and then claimed for himself these islands in the 1956, before selling them to the Filipino Government for a single dollar.

    CNN writes, “What happens in the South China Sea has profound implications for the US, which has a mutual defense treaty with the Philippines that dates back decades.”

    The US (which has not ratified UNCLOS) insists on China respecting international law and backed the Philippines seeking international arbitration. One wonders what the world would be like if the US insisted on Israel adhering to international law or, for that matter, that the US respect international law. The US rejected the 1986 World Court judgment against the US’s unlawful use of force in Nicaragua.

    Furthermore,

    It is farcical for Americans to push for purported liberation of lands for other peoples. Why? Because if one grouping of people is entitled to country status in a delimited territory, then that same principle must apply to all peoples in similar circumstances. The US would have to recognize Palestinian statehood in historical Palestine. The same would apply to the Kurds, the Kashmiris, the Basques in France and Spain, the Catalans in Spain, etc. National liberation can not be seriously considered as just a pick-and-choose principle among peoples seeking liberation in a homeland.

    Even worse, not only is it farcical, it is hypocritical for Americans. If Americans (and let’s be specific to certain Americans because here we are mainly discussing Americans derived from European migrants) are to be regarded as earnest and sincere in advocating the liberation of peoples elsewhere, then one should first look in one’s own backyard before calling for an overhaul of a neighbor’s backyard. To express fidelity with H.R. 6948, the US would have to turn over Puerto Rico to Puerto Ricans, Guam to the Chamorros, the Chagos archipelago to the Chagossians (yes, Britain lays claim, but the Chagossians were expelled at the request of the US military), and others.

    And let’s not forget the conquered islands of Hawai’i, 3860 km (2400 miles) from the US mainland. Or that the entirety of the country known as the USA is based on the genocide of the Original Peoples.

    *****

    There was a confrontation between Filipino forces and Chinese forces. The Philippines charge that the Chinese Coast Guard used bladed weapons appears to be corroborated by video footage. However, a snippet of video is hard to draw any pertinent conclusions from. What is required is a release of all the footage. Nonetheless, if China used excessive force compared to the Philippines and some Filipinos were subsequently injured, then China deserves some criticism for that.


    An undated photo of the amphibious BRP Sierra Madre the Philippines have used as an outpost in the South China Sea. (Getty Images/Jay Directo)

    CNN informs that the Philippine mission was to resupply its soldiers stationed on a beached World War II-era warship, BRP Sierra Madre, that asserts Manila’s territorial claims over the atoll. China holds that the vessel was illegally beached.

    “Let me stress that what directly led to this situation is the Philippines’ ignoring of China’s dissuasion and deliberate intrusion into the waters of Ren’ai Jiao which is part of China’s Nansha Qundao,” Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said.

    Lin asserts that China’s action was professional and restrained and aimed at stopping the illegal “resupply mission,” and that the China Coast Guard didn’t take direct measures against the Philippine personnel.

    “The Philippine operation was not for humanitarian supplies at all. The Philippine vessels carried not only construction materials but also smuggled weapons. They also intentionally rammed into Chinese vessels and splashed water and threw things on Chinese law-enforcement personnel,” said Lin. “These actions have obviously aggravated tensions at sea and seriously threatened the safety of Chinese personnel and ships.”

    US State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said the “United States stands with its ally the Philippines and condemns the escalatory and irresponsible actions” by China.

    That the US did not come to the aid of the Philippines, as per 1951 mutual defense treaty commitments, seems condemnatory of the US. “However,” said Derek Grossman, a senior defense analyst at the RAND Corporation, “in practical terms, the Philippines itself would have to initiate a move to activate (it) before the US would intervene militarily.”

    A Global Times editorial scoffed at this.

    Washington is distorting the truth. The facts of this conflict are clear, and the China Coast Guard (CCG) has responded: the Philippines broke its promise by sending a supply ship and two inflatable boats to illegally enter the waters adjacent to the Ren’ai Jiao of China’s Nansha Islands on Monday, in an attempt to deliver supplies to its illegally grounded warship. What’s worse, the Philippine supply ship deliberately and dangerously approached and collided with normally sailing Chinese vessels. CCG took control measures in accordance with the law, including issuing warnings, intercepting, boarding and conducting inspections, and forcibly driving them away, actions which were reasonable, lawful, professional and standardized.

    There was indeed a physical confrontation. What the US — which supports the Israeli amped-up genocide in historical Palestine — thinks is obviated by its callous disregard for human life. Right or wrong will be determined by which country has the better claim to sovereignty over the South China Sea, its islands, and its islets.

    Lastly, it would be prudent if the Philippines more carefully considered who their friends really are.

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  • Is the Reign of the Dollar Coming to an End?

    Jiang Tiefeng (China), Stone Forest, 1979.

    In early June, a rumour began to circulate – which was widely reported in the Indian press as true – that the government of Saudi Arabia had allowed its petrodollar agreement with the United States to lapse. This agreement, made in 1974, is quite straight-forward and fulfills various needs of the US government: the US purchases oil from Saudi Arabia, and Saudi Arabia uses that money to buy military equipment from US arms manufacturers while holding the income from the oil sales in US Treasury Bills and in the Western financial system. This arrangement to recycle oil profits into the US economy and the Western banking world is known as the petrodollar system.

    This non-exclusive arrangement between the two countries never required the Saudis to limit their oil sales to dollars or to recycle their oil profits exclusively in US Treasury Bills (of which it holds a considerable $135.9 billion) and Western banks. Indeed, the Saudis are free to sell oil in multiple currencies, such as the Euro, and participate in digital currency platforms such as mBridge, a trial initiative of the Bank of International Settlements and the central banks of China, Thailand, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).  Nonetheless, the rumour that this decades-long petrodollar agreement had come to an end reflects the widespread expectation that a seismic shift in the financial system will overturn the rule of the Dollar-Wall Street regime. It was a false rumour, but it carried within it a truth about the possibilities of a post-dollar or de-dollarised world.

    Xu Lei (China), Map of the Mountains and Seas, 2003

    The invitation extended to six countries to join the BRICS bloc last August was a further indication that such a shift is underway. Among these countries are Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, although Saudi Arabia has yet to finalise its membership. With its expanded membership, BRICS would include the two countries with the largest and second largest gas reserves in the world (Russia and Iran, respectively) and the two countries that accounted for nearly a quarter of global oil production (Russia and Saudi Arabia, all figures as of 2022). The political opening between Iran and Saudi Arabia, brokered by Beijing in March 2023, as well as the signs that the US allies UAE and Saudi Arabia seek to diversify their political linkages, demonstrate the possible end of the petrodollar system. That was at the heart of the rumour in early June.

    However, this possibility should not be exaggerated, as the Dollar-Wall Street regime remains intact and significantly powerful. Data from the International Monetary Fund shows that, as of the last quarter of 2023, the US dollar accounted for 58.41% of allocated currency reserves, which is far more than the reserves held in euros (19.98%), Japanese yen (5.7%), British pound sterling (4.8%), and Chinese renminbi (short of 3%). Meanwhile, the US dollar remains the main invoicing currency in global trade, with 40% of international trade transactions in goods invoiced in dollars despite the fact that the US share of global trade is just 10%. While the dollar remains the key currency, it nonetheless faces challenges around the world, with the share of the US dollar in allocated currency reserves declining gradually but steadily over the last twenty years.

    Three factors are driving de-dollarisation: the US economy’s lack of strength and potential that began with the Third Great Depression in 2008; the aggressive use of illegal sanctions – especially financial sanctions – by the United States and its Global North allies against one quarter of the countries in the world; and the development and strengthening of relations between countries of the Global South, especially through platforms such as BRICS. In 2015, BRICS created the New Development Bank (NDB), also known as the BRICS Bank, to navigate a post-Dollar-Wall Street regime and to produce facilities to further development rather than austerity. The creation of these BRICS institutions and the increased use of local currencies to pay for cross-border trade created an expectation of hastened de-dollarisation. At the 2023 BRICS summit in Johannesburg, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva repeated the call to increase the use of local currencies and perhaps create a BRICS-denominated currency system.

    There has been a vibrant debate about de-dollarisation amongst those who have worked in the BRICS institutions and in the large countries that are interested in de-dollarisation, such as China, about its necessity, prospects, and the difficulties of finding new ways to hold currency reserves and invoice global trade. The most recent issue of the international journal Wenhua Zongheng (文化纵横), a collaboration between Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and Dongsheng, is dedicated to this topic. In the introduction to ‘The BRICS and De-Dollarisation: Opportunities and Challenges’ (volume 2, issue no. 1, May 2024), Paulo Nogueira Batista Jr., the first vice president of the NDB (2015–2017), summarises his considerable reflections on the importance of moving away from the Dollar-Wall Street regime and on the political and technical difficulties of such a transition. BRICS, he correctly asserts, is a diverse group of countries with very different political forces in charge of the different states. The political agendas of its members – even with the new mood in the Global South – are particularly diverse when it comes to economic theory, with many of the BRICS states remaining committed to neoliberal formulas while others seek new development models. One of the most important points raised by Nogueira is that the United States ‘will in all likelihood use all the many instruments at its disposal to struggle against any attempt to dethrone the dollar from its status as linchpin of the international monetary system’. These instruments would include sanctions and diplomatic threats, all of which would dampen the confidence of governments that have weaker political commitments and are not backed by popular movements committed to a new world order.

    Hung Liu, Sisters, 2000; Lithograph with chine collé on paper, 22 x 29 3/4 in.; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Gift of the Harry and Lea Gudelsky Foundation, Inc.; © Hung Liu

    De-dollarisation was moving at a very slow pace until 2022, when the Global North countries began to confiscate Russian assets held in the Dollar-Wall Street financial system and anxiety spread across many countries about the safety of their assets in the North American and European banks. Though this confiscation was not new (the United States has done this before to Cuba and Afghanistan, for instance), the scale and severity of these confiscations operated as a ‘confidence-destroying’ measure, as Nogueira puts it.

    Nogueira’s introduction is followed by three essays by leading Chinese analysts of the current shifts in the world order. In ‘What Is Driving the BRICS’ Debate on De-Dollarisation?’, Professor Ding Yifan (senior fellow at Beijing’s Taihe Institute) charts the reasons why many Global South countries now seek to trade in local currencies and to offload their reliance upon the Dollar-Wall Street regime. He emphasises two factors that put into question whether or not the dollar will be able to continue to serve as an anchor currency: first, the weakness of the US economy due to its reliance upon military spending over productive investment (the former of which accounts for 53.6% of total world military spending) and, second, the US’s history of breach of contract. At the close of his article, Ding reflects on the possibility of the Global South countries accepting the Chinese renminbi (RMB) as their reference currency, since China’s manufacturing capabilities make the RMB valuable as a way to buy Chinese goods.

    Yet, in his essay ‘China’s Foreign Exchange Reserves: Past and Present Security Challenges’, Professor Yu Yongding (member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences) is cautious about the possibility of the RMB supplanting the dollar. For the RMB to become an international reserve currency, Yu argues, ‘China must fulfill a series of preconditions, including establishing a sound capital market (especially a deep and highly liquid treasury bond market), a flexible exchange rate regime, free cross-border capital flows, and long-term credit in the market’. This would mean that China would have to eschew its capital controls and begin to offer RMB treasury bonds for international buyers. RMB internationalisation, Yu argues, ‘is a goal worth pursuing’, but it is not something that can take place in the short run. ‘Distant water’, he writes poetically, ‘will not quench immediate thirst’.

    Xu De Qi (China), China Flower, 2007.

    So, where do we go from here? In his article ‘From De-Risking to De-Dollarisation: The BRICS Currency and the Future of the International Financial Order’, Professor Gao Bai, who teaches at Duke University in the United States, concurs that there is a pressing need to overcome the Dollar-Wall Street regime and that there is no easy way forward at this time. Local currency use has expanded – such as between Russia and China as well as between Russia and India – but such bilateral arrangements are insufficient. Increasingly, as a recent report from the World Gold Council shows, central banks around the world have been buying up gold for their reserves and thereby driving up its price (the spot price for gold is over $2,300 per ounce, far above the $1,200 per ounce price where it hovered in 2015). If no immediate currency is available to supplant the US dollar, Gao argues, then the Global South countries should establish a ‘reference value for settlements in their local currencies and an exchange platform to support such settlements. The great demand for such a valuation provides an opportunity for the creation of a BRICS currency’.

    The new issue of Wenhua Zongheng provides a clear and thoughtful assessment of the problems with the Dollar-Wall Street regime and the need for an alternative. The wide array of ideas that are on the table reflect the diversity of discussions taking place within policy circles around the world. We are keen to summarise these ideas and test their technical feasibility and their political viability.

    Irene Chou (China), The Universe Is My Mind, 2002.

    It is important to note that two of the BRICS countries have elected new governments this year. In India, the far-right government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi returns to power, but with a much-reduced mandate. Given that the Modi government has put forward a policy of ‘national interest’, it is likely that it will continue to play a role in the BRICS process and to use local currencies to buy goods such as Russian oil. Meanwhile, South Africa’s ruling alliance, led by the African National Congress (ANC), has formed a government with the right-wing Democratic Alliance, which is committed to US imperialism and is not keen on the BRICS agenda. With the likely entry of Nigeria into the BRICS bloc, BRICS’ centre of gravity on the African continent might shift northward.

    During the hard years of struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa, ANC member Lindiwe Mabuza (known as Sono Molefe) began to collect poems written by women in the ANC camps. Guerrilla fighters, teachers, nurses, and others sent in poems that she published in a volume called Malibongwe (‘Be Praised’), which referred to the 1956 Women’s March in Pretoria. In her introductory essay, Mabuza (1938–2021) wrote that in struggle ‘there is no romance’; there is ‘only pounding reality’. That phrase, ‘pounding reality’, merits reflection today. Nothing comes from nothing. You have to pound reality to make something, whether a new political opening in places such as India and South Africa or a new financial architecture beyond the Dollar-Wall Street regime.

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  • Mission Creep: How the Police State Acclimates Us to Being Modern-Day Slaves

    Like the proverbial boiling frogs, the government has been gradually acclimating us to the specter of a police state for years now: Militarized police. Riot squads. Camouflage gear. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Mass arrests. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Batons. Strip searches. Surveillance cameras. Kevlar vests. Drones. Lethal weapons. Less-than-lethal weapons unleashed with deadly force. Rubber bullets. Water cannons. Stun grenades. Arrests of journalists. Crowd control tactics. Intimidation tactics. Brutality.

    This is how you prepare a populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

    You don’t scare them by making dramatic changes. Rather, you acclimate them slowly to their prison walls. Persuade the citizenry that their prison walls are merely intended to keep them safe and danger out. Desensitize them to violence, acclimate them to a military presence in their communities, and persuade them that only a militarized government can alter the seemingly hopeless trajectory of the nation.

    It’s happening already.

    Yet we’re not just being acclimated to the trappings of a police state. We’re also being bullied into silence and subservience in the face of outright injustice and heavy-handed political correctness, while simultaneously being groomed into accepting government tyranny, corruption and bureaucratic ineptitude as societal norms.

    What exactly is going on?

    Whatever it is, this—the racial hypersensitivity without racial justice, the kowtowing to politically correct bullies with no regard for anyone else’s free speech rights, the violent blowback after years of government-sanctioned brutality, the mob mindset that is overwhelming the rights of the individual, the oppressive glowering of the Nanny State, the seemingly righteous indignation full of sound and fury that in the end signifies nothing, the partisan divide that grows more impassable with every passing day—is not leading us anywhere good.

    Certainly, it’s not leading to more freedom.

    This draconian exercise in how to divide, conquer and subdue a nation is succeeding.

    It must be said: the various protests from both the Right and the Left in recent years have not helped. Inadvertently or intentionally, these protests have politicized what should never have been politicized: police brutality and the government’s ongoing assaults on our freedoms.

    We may be worse off now than we were before.

    Suddenly, no one seems to be talking about any of the egregious governmental abuses that are still wreaking havoc on our freedoms: police shootings of unarmed individuals, invasive surveillance, roadside blood draws, roadside strip searches, SWAT team raids gone awry, the military industrial complex’s costly wars, pork barrel spending, pre-crime laws, civil asset forfeiture, fusion centers, militarization, armed drones, smart policing carried out by AI robots, courts that march in lockstep with the police state, schools that function as indoctrination centers, bureaucrats that keep the Deep State in power.

    The more things change, the more they stay the same.

    How do you persuade a populace to embrace totalitarianism, that goose-stepping form of tyranny in which the government has all of the power and “we the people” have none?

    You persuade the people that the menace they 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.

    This is how you use the politics of fear to persuade a freedom-endowed people to shackle themselves to a dictatorship.

    It works the same way every time.

    Strangely enough, in the face of outright corruption and incompetency on the part of our elected officials, Americans in general remain relatively gullible, eager to be persuaded that the government headed up by their particular brand of political savior can solve the problems that plague us.

    We have relinquished control over the most intimate aspects of our lives to government officials who, while they may occupy seats of authority, are neither wiser, smarter, more in tune with our needs, more knowledgeable about our problems, nor more aware of what is really in our best interests.

    Yet having bought into the false notion that the government does indeed know what’s best for us and can ensure not only our safety but our happiness and will take care of us from cradle to grave—that is, from daycare centers to nursing homes—we have in actuality allowed ourselves to be bridled and turned into slaves at the bidding of a government that cares little for our freedoms or our happiness.

    The lesson is this: once a free people allows the government inroads into their freedoms or uses those same freedoms as bargaining chips for security, it quickly becomes a slippery slope to outright tyranny.

    Nor does it seem to matter whether it’s a Democrat or a Republican at the helm anymore. Indeed, the bureaucratic mindset on both sides of the aisle now seems to embody the same philosophy of authoritarian government, whose priorities are to milk “we the people” of our hard-earned money (by way of taxes, fines and fees) and remain in control and in power.

    Modern government in general—ranging from the militarized police in SWAT team gear crashing through our doors to the rash of innocent citizens being gunned down by police to the invasive spying on everything we do—is acting illogically, even psychopathically. (The characteristics of a psychopath include a “lack of remorse and empathy, a sense of grandiosity, superficial charm, conning and manipulative behavior, and refusal to take responsibility for one’s actions, among others.”)

    Indeed, we are no longer operating under a constitutional republic. Instead, what we are experiencing is a pathocracy: tyranny at the hands of a psychopathic government, which “operates against the interests of its own people except for favoring certain groups.”

    We are walking a dangerous path right now.

    No matter who wins the presidential election come November, it’s a sure bet that the losers will be the American people.

    We have been saddled with a two-party system and fooled into believing that there’s a difference between the Republicans and Democrats, when, in fact, the two parties are exactly the same. As one commentator noted, both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.

    Never forget, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, that the lesser of two evils is still evil.

    The post Mission Creep: How the Police State Acclimates Us to Being Modern-Day Slaves first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times: Biden and U.S. Establishment Getting Desperate Over Election?

    With the U.S. presidential election only four months away, the incumbent Joe Biden White House and the Democrat Party are getting desperate. They can’t seem to close the gap in poll numbers showing Republican rival Donald Trump having a strong chance of regaining the presidency.

    Such is the political crisis in the United States from voter indifference to both candidates that anything could happen. With Trump threatening a “bloodbath” if he loses in November, the prospect of national chaos either way is looming.

    An increasingly frail Biden is calling on Hollywood A-listers to boost his flagging campaign. A recent $30 million fundraiser by Tinseltown big names including Julia Roberts and George Clooney warned of the “scariest” outcome if Trump were returned to the White House.

    What’s of concern to the political and media establishment – which largely votes Democrat – is that Trump’s popularity seems immune to damage from scandal and legal prosecutions for financial corruption. His fundraising is also set to grow more robustly after the Republican Congressional leaders put aside any misgivings to bless his campaign.

    The high stakes may explain the “big news” crackdown on alleged corruption by the chief financial executive at the conservative news outlet, The Epoch Times.

    Its Chief Financial Officer Weidong “Bill” Guan is in court this week facing federal charges for money laundering and bank fraud to the tune of $67 million. Guan denies the charges but if convicted he is facing a 20-30 year stretch in jail.

    The Epoch Times is a major supporter of “The Donald”. The weekly newspaper is published in 35 countries and 22 languages. It was founded 25 years ago and is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement, a secretive quasi-Buddhist religion that claims to have millions of followers in the U.S. and worldwide. The spiritual leader is China-born multimillionaire Li Hongzhi who lives in exile. Falun Gong is banned in China by the Chinese government which accuses it of cult practices and extortion of followers.

    Following the arrest of Bill Guan by U.S. authorities earlier this month, the Falun Gong leader wrote two articles for Epoch Times, denouncing shady practices and partisan politics. The newspaper has denied any wrongdoing and has suspended its chief financial officer pending the outcome of the fraud trial.

    The New York-based Epoch Times has been a useful proxy for U.S. governments since its foundation in 2000 following the exile of Li Hongzhi from China to the United States where “he found his American Dream”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apart from its zany content which borders on superstition and sensationalism, the upside for the U.S. establishment is the publication is vehemently hostile towards the People’s Republic of China in its editorial line. It reflects the “anti-communist” views of the Falun Gong leader and in that way can be seen as a useful propaganda tool for Washington to drum up “anti-China” sentiments.

    However, during the last Trump administration, The Epoch Times adopted a stridently pro-Trump line. It ran stories popular among the MAGA movement such as the Covid-19 virus being a plot by the Chinese Communist Party to destroy the United States, as well as QAnon conspiracy claims about Satanic corruption among the U.S. establishment.

    When Trump lost in 2020 to Biden, the paper promoted the false claims that the election was “stolen” by Democrat-orchestrated voter fraud. Many Republican voters still believe that their man was cheated out of a second consecutive term by the deep state.

    Nailing its editorial colors to the Trump electoral mast was a profitable move for The Epoch Times. Under the stewardship of Bill Guan – a protégé of Falun Gong guru Li Hongzhi – the media group’s revenues skyrocketed from $4 million a year to over $120 million. The Department of Justice indictment alleges that Guan raked in the proceeds through fundraising online scams using cryptocurrency and personal identity theft.

    The association of Trump’s campaign with an alleged massive fraud operation run by a media group that can be easily painted as a weird cultist whack job seems to be the latest effort by the Democrat-supporting political establishment to tip the scales in favor of Biden.

    There has been widespread American corporate media coverage of the fraud scandal implicating The Epoch Times and its Falun Gong network. The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and CNBC, among others, have been having a field day on the subject.

    It appears odd that the U.S. establishment, which has indulged the Falun Gong movement and its anti-China news outlet for so many years, should abruptly ramp up negative coverage.

    But bear in mind that Biden’s campaign is in deep trouble. His administration’s embroilment in the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime has earned bitter recrimination from Democrat voters and students who would have normally voted for Biden.

    Another worry for the Democrat Party is Biden’s increasingly obvious physical and mental frailty. Even pro-Democrat media are openly commenting on how Biden’s mental health is failing as he stumbles from one public gaff or misstep to another. There is a sense of dread that when Trump and Biden go head to head in a live TV debate later this month, the incumbent president will be made look decrepit and unfit for office.

    The Democrat campaign is amplifying attention on Trump’s conviction for fraud over hush payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and his other forthcoming court trial over abuse of classified documents. It’s also talking up Trump’s dodgy financial accounts and business dealings as a former real estate magnate.

    The scandal at The Epoch Times and allegations of defrauding millions of Americans through money laundering comes at a time when the Biden campaign needs all the help it can get to pile the dirt on Trump.

    A legal crackdown on the newspaper’s financial dealings seems long overdue. Banks and tax authorities were flagging suspicious accounts from at least 2021, according to reports. Former employers of The Epoch Times have also commented publicly on the surprising delay in investigating the media outlet and its fundraising operations.

    It seems strange that federal indictments are being brought now with much-hyped media coverage if the case were assessed merely on legal concerns about finances.

    If the intensity of politics is factored though and the U.S. establishment’s fears that Trump might just pull off a spectacular reelection – with all the chaos that such a return to the White House will elicit – then digging up dirt using a money-laundering scandal makes perfect sense. Muzzling a pro-Trump media outlet is a bonus too.

    • First published in Strategic Culture Foundation

    The post Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times: Biden and U.S. Establishment Getting Desperate Over Election? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times: Biden and U.S. Establishment Getting Desperate Over Election?

    With the U.S. presidential election only four months away, the incumbent Joe Biden White House and the Democrat Party are getting desperate. They can’t seem to close the gap in poll numbers showing Republican rival Donald Trump having a strong chance of regaining the presidency.

    Such is the political crisis in the United States from voter indifference to both candidates that anything could happen. With Trump threatening a “bloodbath” if he loses in November, the prospect of national chaos either way is looming.

    An increasingly frail Biden is calling on Hollywood A-listers to boost his flagging campaign. A recent $30 million fundraiser by Tinseltown big names including Julia Roberts and George Clooney warned of the “scariest” outcome if Trump were returned to the White House.

    What’s of concern to the political and media establishment – which largely votes Democrat – is that Trump’s popularity seems immune to damage from scandal and legal prosecutions for financial corruption. His fundraising is also set to grow more robustly after the Republican Congressional leaders put aside any misgivings to bless his campaign.

    The high stakes may explain the “big news” crackdown on alleged corruption by the chief financial executive at the conservative news outlet, The Epoch Times.

    Its Chief Financial Officer Weidong “Bill” Guan is in court this week facing federal charges for money laundering and bank fraud to the tune of $67 million. Guan denies the charges but if convicted he is facing a 20-30 year stretch in jail.

    The Epoch Times is a major supporter of “The Donald”. The weekly newspaper is published in 35 countries and 22 languages. It was founded 25 years ago and is affiliated with the Falun Gong movement, a secretive quasi-Buddhist religion that claims to have millions of followers in the U.S. and worldwide. The spiritual leader is China-born multimillionaire Li Hongzhi who lives in exile. Falun Gong is banned in China by the Chinese government which accuses it of cult practices and extortion of followers.

    Following the arrest of Bill Guan by U.S. authorities earlier this month, the Falun Gong leader wrote two articles for Epoch Times, denouncing shady practices and partisan politics. The newspaper has denied any wrongdoing and has suspended its chief financial officer pending the outcome of the fraud trial.

    The New York-based Epoch Times has been a useful proxy for U.S. governments since its foundation in 2000 following the exile of Li Hongzhi from China to the United States where “he found his American Dream”, according to the Wall Street Journal. Apart from its zany content which borders on superstition and sensationalism, the upside for the U.S. establishment is the publication is vehemently hostile towards the People’s Republic of China in its editorial line. It reflects the “anti-communist” views of the Falun Gong leader and in that way can be seen as a useful propaganda tool for Washington to drum up “anti-China” sentiments.

    However, during the last Trump administration, The Epoch Times adopted a stridently pro-Trump line. It ran stories popular among the MAGA movement such as the Covid-19 virus being a plot by the Chinese Communist Party to destroy the United States, as well as QAnon conspiracy claims about Satanic corruption among the U.S. establishment.

    When Trump lost in 2020 to Biden, the paper promoted the false claims that the election was “stolen” by Democrat-orchestrated voter fraud. Many Republican voters still believe that their man was cheated out of a second consecutive term by the deep state.

    Nailing its editorial colors to the Trump electoral mast was a profitable move for The Epoch Times. Under the stewardship of Bill Guan – a protégé of Falun Gong guru Li Hongzhi – the media group’s revenues skyrocketed from $4 million a year to over $120 million. The Department of Justice indictment alleges that Guan raked in the proceeds through fundraising online scams using cryptocurrency and personal identity theft.

    The association of Trump’s campaign with an alleged massive fraud operation run by a media group that can be easily painted as a weird cultist whack job seems to be the latest effort by the Democrat-supporting political establishment to tip the scales in favor of Biden.

    There has been widespread American corporate media coverage of the fraud scandal implicating The Epoch Times and its Falun Gong network. The Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, and CNBC, among others, have been having a field day on the subject.

    It appears odd that the U.S. establishment, which has indulged the Falun Gong movement and its anti-China news outlet for so many years, should abruptly ramp up negative coverage.

    But bear in mind that Biden’s campaign is in deep trouble. His administration’s embroilment in the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli regime has earned bitter recrimination from Democrat voters and students who would have normally voted for Biden.

    Another worry for the Democrat Party is Biden’s increasingly obvious physical and mental frailty. Even pro-Democrat media are openly commenting on how Biden’s mental health is failing as he stumbles from one public gaff or misstep to another. There is a sense of dread that when Trump and Biden go head to head in a live TV debate later this month, the incumbent president will be made look decrepit and unfit for office.

    The Democrat campaign is amplifying attention on Trump’s conviction for fraud over hush payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels and his other forthcoming court trial over abuse of classified documents. It’s also talking up Trump’s dodgy financial accounts and business dealings as a former real estate magnate.

    The scandal at The Epoch Times and allegations of defrauding millions of Americans through money laundering comes at a time when the Biden campaign needs all the help it can get to pile the dirt on Trump.

    A legal crackdown on the newspaper’s financial dealings seems long overdue. Banks and tax authorities were flagging suspicious accounts from at least 2021, according to reports. Former employers of The Epoch Times have also commented publicly on the surprising delay in investigating the media outlet and its fundraising operations.

    It seems strange that federal indictments are being brought now with much-hyped media coverage if the case were assessed merely on legal concerns about finances.

    If the intensity of politics is factored though and the U.S. establishment’s fears that Trump might just pull off a spectacular reelection – with all the chaos that such a return to the White House will elicit – then digging up dirt using a money-laundering scandal makes perfect sense. Muzzling a pro-Trump media outlet is a bonus too.

    • First published in Strategic Culture Foundation

    The post Scandal at Trump-backer Epoch Times: Biden and U.S. Establishment Getting Desperate Over Election? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Call for Alarm

    The unique post-World War II economic and military power of the United States prevented military and foreign policy errors from becoming overpowering disasters. Military adventures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq upended America’s political system and wounded its psyche. Other than the 2001 attacks on American soil, physical destruction was foreign, appearing as images on television screens. Oil price rises, inflation, increasing debt to finance military costs, and social upheavals temporarily perturbed the US socioeconomic system. A powerful America overcame the impediments and continually extended its power until the Asian Tigers, a rejuvenated China, and progressive Latin leaders appeared on the global stage. America’s hegemony declined and the decline became confirmed by the Russian/Ukraine conflagration, Israel’s invasion of Gaza, and a subsequent attack on protesting students at the UCLA campus. No nation with unique power and in control of that power would have permitted these horrific happenings.

    The US is sliding into a mediocre existence. Heard that before? Hear it again. Four words describe those who have brought the United States to a sorrowful state ─ treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitor ─ harsh words that will be met with smiles, sneers, and derisions. They are correct words and backed by a long list of treacherous, treasonous, tyrannical, and traitorous actors in the American public. The description of the “tyranny in America” is not a repetitious overkill; it is a necessary refrain that punctuates the alarm ─ America is led by pseudo patriots who have betrayed its ideals and Americans must regain its inspiring freedom, liberty-loving, and peaceful aspirations.

    Domestic treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors

    Running for president of the USA are two traitors ─ Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

    Donald Trump is accused of provoking and aiding the Jan 6, 2021 attack on the US capitol and pursuing an insurrection against the US government. Treason.

    Donald Trump is accused of keeping US government top secrets in his home in locations where they could be revealed to others. He is guilty of violating US espionage laws. Treason.

    Donald Trump solicits Evangelical vote and financial assistance by supporting Israel, a foreign nation, in its genocide of the Palestinian people. Treachery.

    Joe Biden said, “Because even where we have some differences, my commitment to Israel, as you know, is ironclad. I think without Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who’s secure. I think Israel is essential.” Besides the nonsensical statement that condemns Biden for not knowing that Israel is the only country in the world where Jews have continually suffered from fatal attacks, claim insecurity that seeks security, and exhibit excessive prejudice toward one another — Ashkenazi against Mizrahi, both against Yemeni and Falasha, and secular against ultra-orthodox — Biden admits he has failed to protect the most well-off Americans ─ Jewish citizens (from what??). Treachery.

    By having said, “My commitment to Israel, as you know, is ironclad,” Joe Biden betrayed US interests, which should have a flexible foreign policy. He has allied the US people with genocide. Traitor.

    Hunter Biden had financial dealings with adversaries of the US government. Joe Biden should have known his son’s arrangements and prevented accusations of influence peddling. Joe Biden is guilty of violating his oath of office. Treachery.
    Biden, similar to Trump, brought classified documents to his home and left them scattered in places open to revelation. Despite the Justice Department not pressing charges, Biden is guilty of violating US espionage laws. Treason.

    The US Justice Department (DOJ) indicted several Russians and Chinese who infiltrated America, gathered information, and lobbied for a foreign nation. The US Justice Department has not indicted one of tens of thousands of Israelis (could be one of hundreds of thousands), who have performed similar duties for Israel. Lobbying is only a small part of the damage to Americans done by these miscreant infiltrators, sent by Israel to foreign shores to do their mischief. From the almost one million Israelis living in the United States, hundreds of thousands may have become citizens, voted, and changed a highly contested election. In a coming election in Westchester, New York, Westchester Unites urged Jewish voters in the district  (not non-Jewish voters??) to request ballots so they could vote before the June 25 Democratic primary battle between New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman, who criticizes Israel, and challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, an avid supporter of apartheid Israel’s genocide. Campaign organizers say they will spend up to $1 million to boost voter turnout.

    I’m not privy to the manipulations of the American public performed by the mass of Israeli infiltrators. One example is the declarations by Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, the senior rabbi of Manhattan’s Stephen Wise Free Synagogue. His contrived Amplify Israel Initiative “aims to breathe new life into the principles we’ve been committed to for decades, with an array of programs aimed at bolstering support for Israel and aligning Zionism with liberal ideology.” In clearer words, “influence every man, woman, and child that nationalist, militarist, oppressive, and apartheid Israel is a benevolent country.”

    Who is Rabbi Hirsch? Ammiel Hirsch went to high school in Israel, served as a tank commander in the IDF, and was formerly the director of the Association of Reform Zionists of America, the Israeli arm of the North American Reform movement. In a response to a letter, in which 93 rabbinical and cantorial students harshly criticized Israeli actions in the hostilities between Israel and Hamas, Rabbi Hirsch wrote:

    For the record, the Reform movement is a Zionist movement. Every single branch of our movement — the synagogue arm (Union for Reform Judaism), the rabbinic union (Central Conference of American Rabbis), and our seminary (HUC-JIR) — every organization separately, and all together, are Zionist and committed ideologically and theologically to Israel.

    Why did Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, after receiving training in Israel, come to the United States to guide the Reform movement, which, in previous decades, had been against Zionism, and define it in Israel’s image? By not investigating the actions of multitudes of Israelis residing, the US Justice Department betrays the US people.

    In an espionage scandal involving Lawrence Franklin, a former United States Department of Defense employee, who passed classified documents to AIPAC officials, which disclosed secret United States policy towards Iran, Franklin pleaded guilty and, in January 2006, was sentenced to nearly 13 years of prison. He served ten months of house arrest. The DOJ dropped espionage charges against the AIPAC officials — Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman. Reason (which was treason) — the Department claimed court rulings had made the case unwinnable and the trial would disclose classified information (which can apply to almost every trial for treason). Despite the previous espionage charges and knowledge that un-American AIPAC is a lobby for apartheid Israel, the DOJ has not indicted AIPAC for being an unregistered lobby and has permitted its cadre of Israel firsters to wander the halls of Congress and shake palms with dollar bills. Traitors.

    US representatives know that AIPAC lobbies for an apartheid Israel that is committing genocide and drags US citizens into accusations of aiding the genocide. Politicians accept contributions from individuals allied with AIPAC and vote in accordance with AIPAC’s preferences. The power of the contributions and fear that disregarding AIPAC poses a danger to remaining in office was highlighted in 1984. For voting to permit Boeing to sell AWACS aircraft to Saudi Arabia and for suggesting there were Palestinians and they had “rights,” AIPAC marked as undesirable the popular Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, Charles Percy, who had always favored Israel. Paul Simon wrote in his autobiography that Bob Asher, an AIPAC board member, called him to run for Senator from Illinois. Simon unseated the admired and respected Charles Percy who was only 98% pure in his support for Israel. Treachery.

    The US government and local governments favor laws, such as the Antisemitism Awareness Act, which can suppress free speech and free actions that contend Israel’s genocidal policies, and H.R. 3016, Anti-Boycott Act, which “bars U.S. citizens from participating in boycotts of U.S. allies if those boycotts are promoted or imposed by foreign countries.” Federal and local governments tyrannize the US people. Tyranny.

    The Los Angeles (LA) Police Department stood by for hours before halting attacks on peaceful UCLA students and then arrested dozens of student protesters and not any of the vigilantes who represented a foreign power and attacked the students. The LA Police Department supported a group representing a foreign government and failed to protect American citizens. Treason.

    The House of Representatives has had numerous one-sided hearings on campus anti-Semitism that feature callous remarks against Jews from relatively few of the protestors. In none of the hearings has a Committee invited the student protestors to testify; maybe, because they might say, “These students do not represent the protestors. They are angry and frustrated individuals who see Israel identify itself as a Jewish state and note that a great number of American Jews approve of Israel and its genocide of the Palestinian people. They realistically equate Jews with the genocide.” The truth of these hearings is they are more concerned with fictional Jewish feelings than factual Palestinian lives. Let’s face it, these hearings are organized by Israel’s advocates who seek to prevent the US public from gaining awareness of the genocide and shift the protest arguments to a spurious charge of anti-Semitism in America. Elected officials adhere to a foreign nation’s request to stifle American citizens from exercising their right to protest and move dialogue from the horrific victimization of Gazans to an artificially created Jewish victimhood. College presidents committed a huge error by not responding to the committees’ fabricated charges of campus anti-Semitism with a simple statement, “There is no campus anti-Semitism and you are attempting to divert the impact of these demonstrations that criticize Israel policies into a false charge that indirectly enhances Israel’s image.” By representing a foreign power and censoring American students from their right to protest, these elected officials are guilty. Treason.

    Foreign policies exhibit the same treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors.

    North Vietnam
    President Lyndon Johnson’s reciting a dubious attack by North Vietnamese patrol boats on the USS Maddox in international waters cajoled Americans into accepting an increased US military involvement in the Vietnamese civil war. Global strategists also mentioned the Domino Theory, where if one country falls to communism, then adjacent nations also become communist. A non-functioning Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty (SEATO) tied these fabrications into a call for action. Result was 58,148 uniformed Americans killed, 200,000 wounded, and 75,000 severely wounded. Ho Chi Minh’s followers won the war and none of the neighboring SEATO nations became communist. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the leading prophet of the Domino Theory, confessed, “I think we were wrong. I do not believe that Vietnam was that important to the communists. I don’t believe that its loss would have led – it didn’t lead – to Communist control of Asia.” Treachery.

    Six-day war
    During the 1967 war between Israel and its neighbors, Israeli torpedo boats and airplanes attacked the intelligence ship USS Liberty in international waters, killed 34, and wounded 171 American service personnel. President Johnson refused to respond to this assault, an insult to all Americans. Treason.

    Yom Kippur war
    In the 1973 Yom Kippur War, President Nixon’s administration supplied arms to Israel and reversed the course of the war. Arab nations responded with an oil embargo that caused huge inflation in the United States, punished the American consumer, and harmed the American economy. Treachery.

    Afghanistan-1980s
    President Ronald Reagan’s CIA covertly assisted Pakistan intelligence in providing financial and military assistance to Osama bin Laden during the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. In effect, the US played an essential role in creating the al-Qaeda network. Treason.

    International Terrorism and 911
    After Ronald Reagan helped create and popularize Osama bin Laden, later presidents did not heed Osama bin Laden’s warnings. The arch-terrorist clarified his position in the infamous  Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to the American people,” which has been conveniently sidetracked to ensure Americans do not get infected with terrorism germs. It should be titled, “How the United States made me a terrorist.” It is difficult to agree with bin Laden but his statements are not easily contended.

    You have starved the Muslims of Iraq, where children die every day. It is a wonder that more than 1.5 million Iraqi children have died as a result of your sanctions, and you did not show concern.

    Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.

    You have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history. Despite this, you refuse to sign the Kyoto agreement so that you can secure the profit of your greedy companies and industries.

    William J. Clinton was president during the period that Bin Laden raged his fury at the United States. If Bill Clinton had considered some of bin Laden’s grievances his considerations might have prevented the later 9/11 attack on American soil. Treason.

    George W. Bush and American security officials permitted 19 co-conspirators to enter the country and take preparatory flying lessons in full view of authorities. His DOJ did not pursue information that connected the Saudi royal family with the bombers. Treason.

    Afghanistan-2001
    Without exhausting all means to have Osama bin Laden extradited from Afghanistan and knowing that the Taliban was not directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush invaded Afghanistan in a military adventure that had no defined purpose and accomplished nothing. In a war that lasted 20 years, the United States had 2,459 military deaths and 20,769 American service members wounded in action. Twenty years of a useless war that only brought the Taliban back to power. Treachery.

    Iraq
    George W. Bush’s uncalled-for war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Operation Iraqi Freedom) is the best example of sacrificing U.S. lives to advance Israel’s interests. The cited reason ─ destroying Hussein’s weapons of destruction ─ whose evidence of developments the U.S. based on spurious intelligence and was a farce that no sensible person could believe. This “made for consumption” and fabricated story detracted from the real reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq — to prevent Iraq from becoming the central power in the Middle East and able to threaten Israel. Neocons succeeded in pressuring President George W. Bush to sacrifice American lives and, by military action, remove Saddam Hussein from power. Discarding the nonsensical assertion that Saddam Hussein, who had no nuclear material, no technology to develop a nuclear weapon, and no ICBMs to deliver a bomb, threatened the United States, and needed to be immediately stopped from turning bubble gum into a mighty weapon solicits a more acceptable reason for the U.S. attack on Iraq. The U.S. Department of Defense casualty website has the US military suffering 4,418 deaths and 31,994 wounded in action during the Iraq War. No coincidence that Iraq was a long-time adversary of Israel and it was in Israel’s interests to have Iraq become militarily impotent. Treason.

    Libya
    NATO declared it intervened in the 2011 Libyan Civil War “to protect civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack.” President Barack Obama remarked, “Gaddafi declared that he would show ‘no mercy’ to his own people. He compared them to rats, and threatened to go door to door to inflict punishment.”

    Reuters report demonstrated significant differences between Gaddafi’s remarks and President Obama’s rendition: Gaddafi Tells Rebel City, Benghazi, ‘We Will Show No Mercy,’ March 17, 2011.

    Muammar Gaddafi told Libyan rebels on Thursday his armed forces were coming to their capital Benghazi tonight and would not show any mercy to fighters who resisted them. In a radio address, he told Benghazi residents that soldiers would search every house in the city and people who had no arms had no reason to fear. He also told his troops not to pursue any rebels who drop their guns and flee when government forces reach the city.

    Logic tells us that few Benghazi residents could even have guns to hide, and Gadhafi’s forces were too limited to carry out any large-scale purge.

    The U.S. vacillated, and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, convinced President Obama to join NATO in removing Gaddafi. NATO eliminated Gaddafi, Islamic extremists gained partial power, discarded armaments were shipped to al-Qaeda “look-alikes” throughout North Africa and soon the Jama’at Nusrat al Islam wal Muslimin (JNIM) coalition, Boko Haram, and Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA) were creating havoc throughout North Africa. The US gained nothing in removing Gaddafi and created more Islamic extremist organizations with which to contend. Treachery.

    UN Vetoes

    As of December 18, 2023, the U.S. vetoed resolutions critical of Israel 45 times. Each time, the Secretary of State offered the excuse that the resolution would not advance the cause of peace, and each time vetoing the resolution did not advance the cause for peace. Why do Americans give deference to Israelis when Israel insults American leaders, uses Americans to die in wars that advance Israel’s interests, causes havoc that brings injury to U.S. relations with other nations,  and sucks money ($3.1 billion annually) from U.S. taxpayers to support its apartheid and oppressive policies?

    Some mentioned reasons, which have changed during the decades, are:

    • Israel was aligned with the US during the Cold War.
    • The US needs a Western-style pistol-packing mama in the Middle East.
    • Israel has an excellent intelligence-gathering network that shares information.
    • The two countries collaborate on the joint-development of sophisticated technologies.

    Pundits confuse support for Israel with support for this Israel. The United States, for military and geopolitical reasons, can support Israel, as it does Columbia, but there is no reason to support and assist this Israel in the destruction of the Palestinians. The Washington establishment and foreign policymakers have incorrectly calculated the tradeoffs between supporting this Israel in its denial of Palestinian rights and in satisfying the Palestinian cause.

    • Israel is no longer dependent on the United States and seeks its own alliances.
    • Israel will not scratch a finger to help the US in any conflict; just the opposite, it convinces the US to fight for Israel.
    • Israel intelligence provides the CIA with intelligence concerning nations that are adversarial to the US due to its close ties with Israel. No close ties, none of these adversaries, and no need for intelligence.
    • Israel has used US and Russian engineers for its technical achievements. No Israel, and the Russian and American engineers will go to work in Silicon Valley.

    Just for money and votes, U.S. politicians sell out their commitment to the American people, follow the dictates of a foreign nation, and make Americans party to the destruction of innocent people. TREASON!!

    Conclusion

    Americans have, at times echoed grievances against their government’s policies and demonstrated their despair, well, some Americans, a small minority of the US population. The rest of the population has been naïve, complacent, and manipulated. Due to America’s intrinsic wealth — natural resources, abundant farmland, temperate climate, rivers, valleys, streams, hard-working population, ocean barriers to foreign incursions —  the treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors temporarily slowed but did not stop the roaring engine. The roaring engine is beginning to sputter.

    America’s posture as the leading defender of democracy and human rights is hypocritical; its economic system is challenged; its united states are disunited; its pluralistic political system is an epic fantasy; its legislative bodies are divided; and its courts are agenda-seeking rather than law-abiding. Democracy recedes and polarization of citizens widens. Americans are increasingly divided in their aspirations and express increasing fears of one another. An almost self-sufficient economic system proceeds with debt financing imports, trade imbalances, and growth, an unruly situation that can continue until debt hits a financial wall and repaying the debt becomes intolerable.

    Hopefully, more Americans will take cognizance of the failed leadership, meet the challenges they pose, gather the resources, form the organizations, shout much louder, push much stronger, and succeed in disposing of the treachery, treason, tyranny, and traitors that have made the Statue of Liberty weep.

    The words of Patrick Henry, “These are the times that try people’s souls,” are heard again in the cities and villages of a disunited United States of America.

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  • Active Duty, Veterans, G.I. Rights Group Launch Campaign for Military Personnel

    As more members of the military and State Department resign over U.S. funding of the genocide in Gaza, a new campaign was launched this week to allow military personnel to directly contact their congressional representatives.

    Initiated by active-duty military members, veterans and G.I. rights groups, “Appeal for Redress v2,” is modeled after the 2006 Appeal for Redress conducted during the highly unpopular occupation of Iraq, to allow G.I.s to tell their representatives they are opposed to U.S. policy.

    Active duty service members are opposing U.S. funding of Israel’s genocide not only because it is immoral, but also because U.S. government employees violate several federal statutes every time weapons are shipped to Israel, as cited in this letter from Veterans For Peace to the U.S. State Department.

    James M. Branum, an attorney with the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, said, “Too often lawmakers make war policies without hearing from the people who have to implement them.  This is what makes the Appeal for Redress v2 so important.”

    Senior Airman Juan Bettancourt, on active duty while seeking conscientious objector separation, said, “My proudest act of service has been championing Appeal for Redress v2, a campaign to empower fellow service members to securely voice their moral outrage about our government’s complicity in Israeli war crimes and genocidal onslaught in Gaza. Although our rights are limited by our oath, Appeal for Redress v2 allows service members to carve out a modicum of agency and dispel any apprehensions that may impede us from denouncing this unspeakable carnage. Our voice is a powerful instrument, and it is our responsibility to humanity and the principles we hold dear to speak up against these heinous acts and make it known to our elected officials that we will not stand by silently while genocide unfolds. We refuse to be complicit. These are my views, not those of the Department of Defense.”

    Army Sergeant Johnson said, “Throughout my Army career it has been reiterated to me time and time again to live and uphold Army values. I have been taught that honor and integrity are pivotal to being a soldier. It hurts me to my core that the same country that instilled these values in me would proudly support a genocide. It is our duty as service members to uphold Geneva conventions and international law. That is why I am pleading for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and for humanitarian aid to be distributed throughout the entire Gaza Strip. To Ignore these crimes against humanity would be to turn my back on all the values I’ve cultivated as a soldier. It is against my personal beliefs as a man and my obligation as an active duty soldier to be complicit in this genocide. Fellow service members, please join me in calling for an immediate ceasefire and for Israel and the US to adhere to international law. These are my views, not those of the Department of Defense.”

    Senior Airman Larry Hebert, also seeking conscientious objector status, said, “It is imperative that we uphold our personal and professional values and beliefs. There is no greater crime against humanity than genocide. No person, country, or institution should be supported unconditionally. This Appeal is within our rights as service members and we have a duty to exercise this right when our leaders commit violations of international and humanitarian law. You need to genuinely consider your actions now and reflect on how you’re contributing to the genocide. Are you helping or hurting the situation? There is no neutrality. By staying neutral, you hurt the oppressed. These are my views, not those of the Dept. of Defense.”

    Bill Galvin, Counseling Coordinator at the Center on Conscience & War, said, “We’ve had an increase in calls from military personnel asking about getting discharged as conscientious objectors. Almost all of them cite the carnage in Gaza as something that their conscience would not allow them to ignore. Some have expressed feeling complicit in the violence.”

    Kathleen Gilberd, executive director of the Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild, said, “Many service members have serious objections to the U.S. support for Israel’s carnage in Gaza. Though their rights are somewhat limited, military personnel can still speak out about their beliefs and  protest the travesty of this war. The Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild stands in support of these military dissenters and resisters.”

    Shiloh Emelein, USMC veteran and Operations Director of About Face: Veterans Against the War, said, “We know many young people join the military out of necessity to get their needs met. But they are not obligated to contribute to genocide and unjust, unlawful wars that go against their conscience.  You do have rights, you do have options to object, and there’s a large community of post-9/11 veterans ready to welcome you.”

    To increase the awareness of this campaign among members of the military, civilian supporters are encouraged to share it on social media and to ask peace and justice organizations to share it with their membership.

    The active-duty members listed in this release are available for comment by calling Bill Galvin, Center on Conscience and War, at  202-446-1461.

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  • We Were Called “Terrorists” and Forcibly Ejected by Police from Congressional Baseball Game

    Palestinian American Moataz with 120+ family members killed in Gaza and other activists surrounded by police before getting ejected with flags at Congressional Baseball game in Washington DC/ Kent Nishimura/Getty Images

    During last week’s Congressional Baseball Game, dozens of us in the crowd conveyed  urgent messages to stop funding Israel’s genocide of Palestinians and to address the escalating climate crisis. We were met by hundreds of police from different jurisdictions who encircled us during the game, and at times followed us around. Activists with Climate Defiance announced their intention to disrupt the event in advance, and, once they stormed the field, they were plowed down by police officers and arrested.

    In our seats, we stood with signs, flags, some just wearing kuffiyehs, chanting “Free Palestine” and “Genocide is not a game.” Despite the legality and common practice of cheering and displaying signs at baseball games, we were swiftly ejected by swarms of police officers.

    The police officers, unsurprisingly, did nothing to address the egregious verbal abuse that was hurled at us. The verbal abuse included blatantly racist taunts and profanities. In one instance, an entire section of the crowd erupted in a “f*** you terrorists” chant and in another a “USA” chant echoed across the field in response. Meanwhile, others in the stadium freely displayed their political messages without facing any consequences.

    Our aim was to deliver a clear message to members of Congress, who were indulging in a game amid multiple crises they are responsible for through funding and inaction.

    Since October, they have allocated billions more to Israel, facilitating the genocide of over 40,000 Palestinians in Gaza while also displacing and starving millions in Gaza.

    The Israeli State has also used white phosphorus and other weapons from the United States to destroy the local environment, facilitating the death of the local habitat. Each U.S. bomb tested, manufactured, transferred, and dropped exacerbates the climate crisis, intertwining Palestine’s plight with climate justice.

    Almost every congressperson who played that night voted to sanction the International Criminal Court after it issued an arrest warrant for Netanyahu.

    The annual Congressional Baseball game is sponsored by a long list of companies profiting off of the Israeli and U.S. atrocities in Palestine, including: Boeing, RTX (formerly Raytheon), Caterpillar, Chevron, Amazon, Google.

    The baseball event is technically a fundraiser for groups like the Boys and Girls Club, Nationals Philanthropies, and the Washington Literacy Center. It is paradoxical that Congress raises trivial amounts for education while channeling billions of tax dollars into weapons shipments used to indiscriminately murder Palestinians.

    Activists across the U.S are demanding an end to all aid to Israel and a reinvestment of those funds into our community needs such as housing, healthcare, and education.

    It’s not a coincidence that while arms dealers are reaping historic highs in stock prices and earnings, members of Congress are lining their pockets with massive blood-soaked checks from Israeli lobbying groups. Particularly AIPAC, the American Israeli Public Affairs Council.

    While the majority of Americans want a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, our representatives use our tax to dollars to fuel their own profiteering from genocide.

    More bombs were dropped in the first 100 days of the US-Israel genocide in Gaza than in all of World War II combined.

    Our actions at the Congressional Baseball Game were driven by a profound sense of urgency and justice.

    The systematic murder and starvation of Palestinians by Israel cannot continue with our silent complicity. We must persist in demanding accountability from our  elected officials.   We demand that  funds from warfare be redirected to vital community needs.

    We stand in solidarity with Palestinians and all others who are  fighting for their lives and dignity. The struggle for justice in Palestine is not just their fight; it is a global cause that calls for our unwavering support and action.

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