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Category: United States

  • The Rise of the Prison State: Trump’s Push for Megaprisons Could Lock Us All Up

    America is rapidly becoming a nation of prisons.

    Having figured out how to parlay presidential authority in foreign affairs in order to sidestep the Constitution, President Trump is using his immigration enforcement powers to lock up—and lock down—the nation.

    Under the guise of national security and public safety, the Trump administration is engineering the largest federal expansion of incarceration and detention powers in U.S. history.

    At the center of this campaign is Alligator Alcatraz, a federal detention facility built in the Florida Everglades and hailed by the White House as a model for the future of federal incarceration. But this is more than a new prison—it is the architectural symbol of a carceral state being quietly constructed in plain sight.

    With over $170 billion allocated through Trump’s megabill, we are witnessing the creation of a vast, permanent enforcement infrastructure aimed at turning the American police state into a prison state.

    The scope of this expansion is staggering.

    The bill allocates $45 billion just to expand immigrant detention—making ICE the best-funded federal law enforcement agency in American history.

    Yet be warned: what begins with ICE rarely ends with ICE.

    Trump’s initial promise to crack down on “violent illegal criminals” has evolved into a sweeping mandate: a mass, quota-driven roundup campaign that detains anyone the administration deems a threat, regardless of legal status and at significant expense to the American taxpayer.

    Tellingly, the vast majority of those being detained have no criminal record. And like so many of the Trump administration’s grandiose plans, the math doesn’t add up.

    Just as Trump’s tariffs have failed to revive American manufacturing and instead raised consumer prices, this detention-state spending spree will cost taxpayers far more than it saves. It’s estimated that undocumented workers contribute an estimated $96 billion in federal, state and local taxes each year, and billions more in Social Security and Medicare taxes that they can never claim.

    Making matters worse, many of these detained immigrants are then exploited as a pool of cheap labor inside the very facilities where they’re held.

    The implications for Trump’s detention empire are chilling.

    At a time when the administration is promising mass deportations to appease anti-immigrant hardliners, it is simultaneously constructing a parallel economy in which detained migrants can be pressed into near-free labor to satisfy the needs of industries that depend on migrant work.

    What Trump is building isn’t just a prison state—it’s a forced labor regime, where confinement and exploitation go hand in hand. And it’s a high price to pay for a policy that creates more problems than it solves.

    As the enforcement dragnet expands, so does the definition of who qualifies as an enemy of the state—including legal U.S. residents arrested for their political views.

    The Trump administration is now pushing to review and revoke the citizenship of Americans it deems national security risks—targeting them for arrest, detention, and deportation.

    Unfortunately, the government’s definition of “national security threat” is so broad, vague, and unconstitutional that it could encompass anyone engaged in peaceful, nonviolent, constitutionally protected activities—including criticism of government policy or the policies of allied governments like Israel.

    In Trump’s prison state, no one is beyond the government’s reach.

    Critics of the post-9/11 security state—left, right, and libertarian alike—have long warned that the powers granted to fight terrorism and control immigration would eventually be turned inward, used against dissidents, protestors, and ordinary citizens.

    That moment has arrived.

    Yet Trump’s most vocal supporters remain dangerously convinced they have nothing to fear from this expanding enforcement machine. But history—and the Constitution—say otherwise.

    Our founders understood that unchecked government power, particularly in the name of public safety, poses the most significant threat to liberty. That’s why they enshrined rights like due process, trial by jury, and protection from unreasonable searches.

    Those safeguards are now being hollowed out.

    Trump’s detention expansion—like the mass surveillance programs before it—is not about making America safe. It’s about following the blueprints for authoritarian control in order to lock down the country.

    The government’s targets may be the vulnerable today—but the infrastructure is built for everyone: Trump’s administration is laying the legal groundwork for indefinite detention of citizens and noncitizens alike.

    This is not just about building prisons. It’s about dismantling the constitutional protections that make us free.

    A nation cannot remain free while operating as a security state. And a government that treats liberty as a threat will soon treat the people as enemies.

    This is not a partisan warning. It is a constitutional one.

    We are dangerously close to losing the constitutional guardrails that keep power in check.

    The very people who once warned against Big Government—the ones who decried the surveillance state, the IRS, and federal overreach—are now cheering for the most dangerous part of it: the unchecked power to surveil, detain, and disappear citizens without full due process.

    Limited government, not mass incarceration, is the backbone of liberty.

    The Founders warned that the greatest threat to liberty was not a foreign enemy, but domestic power left unchecked. That’s exactly what we’re up against now. A nation cannot claim to defend freedom while building a surveillance-fueled, prison-industrial empire.

    Trump’s prison state is not a defense of America. It’s the destruction of everything America was meant to defend.

    We can pursue justice without abandoning the Constitution. We can secure our borders and our communities without turning every American into a suspect and building a federal gulag.

    But we must act now.

    History has shown us where this road leads. As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, once the machinery of tyranny is built, it rarely stays idle.

    If we continue down this path, cheering on bigger prisons, broader police powers, and unchecked executive authority—if we fail to reject the dangerous notion that more prisons, more power, and fewer rights will somehow make us safer—if we fail to restore the foundational limits that protect us from government overreach before those limits are gone for good—we may wake up to find that the prisons and concentration camps the police state is building won’t just hold others.

    One day, they may hold us all.

    The post The Rise of the Prison State: Trump’s Push for Megaprisons Could Lock Us All Up first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Fueling Genocide: Inside the Global Supply Chain that Delivers Jet Fuel to Israel’s Military

    Israel’s genocidal bombing campaign in Gaza has been fueled by a surge in deliveries of military-grade jet fuel from U.S. providers. In this visual, we expose the companies and governments complicit in this supply chain, while highlighting grassroots efforts to track and disrupt this deadly cargo through direct action, boycott campaigns, and community resistance.

    The post Fueling Genocide: Inside the Global Supply Chain that Delivers Jet Fuel to Israel’s Military first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Greed: The Survival of a Primitive Emotion

    Congressional passage of Donald Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Bill” provides the latest evidence that human greed, despite its primitive nature, remains alive and well.

    Perhaps most noticeably, the legislation provides for over $3 trillion in tax cuts that disproportionately help the wealthy and their corporations. This largesse is facilitated by slashing over $1.4 trillion in healthcare and food assistance for low-income Americans and increasing the national debt by $3.3 trillion. Estimates reveal that at least 16 million Americans will lose health care coverage and 7 million people (including 2 million children) will lose food aid or have their food aid cut significantly. Meanwhile, according to the Yale Budget Lab, the nation’s top 0.1 percent―people with an annual income over $3.3 million―will receive tax cuts of $103,500 on average. Condemning the legislation, the president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops declared simply that it “takes from the poor to give to the wealthy.”

    Other measures in the legislation supporting the wealthy and their businesses at public expense include financial subsidies for coal, oil, and gas companies, the opening of opportunities for oil and gas corporations to drill on public lands (including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the National Petroleum Reserve), and the reduction of royalty fees for such fossil fuel drilling.

    Of course, this kind of class legislation and the greed that inspires it are nothing new. Throughout history, some people have amassed great fortunes, often with the assistance of governments and other powerful entities. Kings, princes, and their courtiers provided themselves with castles, vast landed estates, and other perquisites of wealth, while millions of their subjects lived in miserable huts and dug a few potatoes out of their fields in a desperate effort to survive. In later years, this situation was replicated to some extent as business titans garnered great wealth by exploiting workers in factories, mines, and fields.

    Although this pattern of economic inequality was viewed as immoral by every great religious and ethical system, it did have a brutal logic to it. After all, in these situations of overall scarcity, some people would be poor and some would surely die. By contrast, growing rich helped guarantee survival for oneself and one’s family.

    But with the advent of the industrial revolution, these tragic circumstances began to dissipate, for human beings increasingly possessed the knowledge, skills, and resources that had the potential to produce decent lives for everyone. Indeed, as science, technology, and factory output advanced and produced unprecedented abundance, there was no longer any morally justifiable basis for the existence of hunger, homelessness, and mass sickness.

    In these altered conditions, avarice has become increasingly irrational―the driving force behind irrational men like Donald Trump and his billionaire friends, who, even as millions of people live and die in poverty and misery, seek to wallow in great wealth.

    Gandhi put it concisely when he declared, decades ago: “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”

    Fortunately, over the course of human history, humane thinkers, social movements, and political parties have worked to rein in untrammeled greed in the interest of a better life for all humanity. In recent centuries, they have recognized the fact that sharing the wealth is not only a moral stance, but a feasible one.

    Let’s hope, then, that despite this brazen and regressive move by the Trump administration to bolster economic privilege at the expense of human needs, the forces favoring human equality and compassion will ultimately prevail.

    The post Greed: The Survival of a Primitive Emotion first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • FIFA And IOC Must Ban The US And Israel From International Sporting Events

    The United States has become dangerous for members of the global community, and specifically for non-white/non-European people. The world is witnessing massive violations of human rights and the Constitution of the United States as masked agents using unmarked vehicles raid work places, homes, and places of public assembly to incarcerate and disappear Black, Brown, and Indigenous people and, in too many cases, denying them legal representation and basic information as to their whereabouts and wellbeing to their families and attorneys.

    Under the current U.S administration anyone suspected of residing in and/or visiting the United States with or without “proper” documentation, including U.S. citizens, are being harassed, questioned about their political beliefs and even detained without due process.

    The post FIFA And IOC Must Ban The US And Israel From International Sporting Events appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Faramarz Farbod in Conversation with Yves Engler on Canada, the US, and Imperialism

    Faramarz Farbod speaks with Yves Engler, a Canadian activist and author of 13 books, including most recently Canada’s Long Fight Against Democracy and Stand on Guard for Whom? (A People’s History of Canadian Military). The conversation explores Canada’s role in the world, its relationship with US capitalism and imperialism, Canada’s policies toward Iran and Cuba, misperceptions of Canada in the US, and the concept of Canadianism.

    The post Faramarz Farbod in Conversation with Yves Engler on Canada, the US, and Imperialism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Inalienable Rights in an Age of Tyranny

    When a long train of abuses and usurpations… evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government.

    —Declaration of Independence (1776)

    We are now struggling to emerge from the wreckage of a constitutional republic, transformed into a kleptocracy (government by thieves), collapsing into kakistocracy (government by the worst), and enforced by a police state algogracy (rule by algorithm).

    This week alone, the Trump administration is reportedly erecting protest barricades around the White House, Congress is advancing legislation that favors the wealthy, and President Trump is grandstanding at the opening of a detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.”

    Against such a backdrop of government-sponsored cruelty, corruption and shameless profiteering at taxpayer expense, what, to the average American, is freedom in an age when the government plays god—determining who is worthy of rights, who qualifies as a citizen, and who can be discarded without consequence?

    What are inalienable rights worth if they can be redefined, delayed, or revoked by executive order?

    Frederick Douglass posed a similar challenge more than 170 years ago when he asked, “What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?”

    His question was a searing indictment not just of slavery but of a government that proclaimed liberty while denying it to millions—a hypocrisy that persists in a system still governed by institutions more committed to power than principle.

    Every branch of government—executive, legislative, and judicial—has, in one way or another, abandoned its duty to uphold the Constitution. And both parties have prioritized profit and political theater over justice and the rights of the governed.

    The founders of this nation believed our rights come from God, not government. That we are born free, not made free by bureaucrats or judges. That among these rights—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—none can be taken away without destroying the very idea of government by consent.

    And yet that is precisely what’s happening.

    We now live under a government that has become judge, jury, and executioner—writing its own laws, policing its own limits, and punishing those who object.

    This is not what it means to be free.

    When presidents rule by fiat, when agencies strip citizenship from naturalized Americans, when police act as both enforcers and executioners, and when courts rubber-stamp the erosion of basic protections, the distinction between a citizen and a subject begins to collapse.

    What do inalienable rights mean in a country where:

    • Your citizenship can be revoked based solely on the government’s say-so?
    • Your freedom can be extinguished by surveillance, asset seizure, or indefinite detention?
    • Your property can be taken, your speech censored, and your life extinguished without due process?
    • Your life can be ended without a trial, a warning, or a second thought, because the government views you as expendable?

    The answer is stark: they mean nothing—unless we defend them.

    When the government—whether president, Congress, court, or local bureaucrat—claims the right to determine who does and doesn’t deserve rights, then no one is safe. Individuals become faceless numbers. Human beings become statistics. Lives become expendable. Dignity becomes disposable.

    It is a slippery slope—justified in the name of national security, public safety, and the so-called greater good—that leads inevitably to totalitarianism.

    Unfortunately, we have been dancing with this devil for far too long, and now, the mask has come off.

    This is what authoritarianism looks like in America today.

    Imagine living in a country where government agents crash through doors to arrest citizens merely for criticizing government officials. Where police stop and search you on a whim. Where carrying anything that resembles a firearm might get you arrested—or killed. Where surveillance is constant, dissent is criminalized, and loyalty is enforced through fear.

    If you’re thinking this sounds like America today, you wouldn’t be far wrong.

    But this scenario isn’t new. It’s the same kind of tyranny that drove American colonists to sever ties with Great Britain nearly 250 years ago.

    Back then, American colonists lived under the shadow of an imperial power and an early police state that censored their speech, surveilled their movements, taxed their livelihoods, searched their homes without cause, quartered troops in their towns, and punished them for daring to demand liberty.

    It was only when the colonists finally got fed up with being silenced, censored, searched, frisked, threatened, and arrested that they finally revolted against the tyrant’s fetters.

    The Declaration of Independence—drafted by Thomas Jefferson and signed on July 4, 1776, by 56 men who risked everything—was their response. It was more than a list of grievances. It was a document seething with outrage over a government which had betrayed its citizens, a call to arms against a system that had ceased to represent the people and instead sought to dominate them.

    Labeled traitors, these men were charged with treason, a crime punishable by death, because they believed in a radical idea: that all people are created to be free. For some, their acts of rebellion would cost them their homes and their fortunes. For others, it would be the ultimate price—their lives.

    Yet even knowing the heavy price they might have to pay, these men dared to speak up. They understood that silence in the face of tyranny is complicity. So they stood together, pledging “our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor” to the cause of freedom.

    Even after they had won their independence from Great Britain, these new Americans worked to ensure that the rights they had risked their lives to secure would remain secure for future generations.

    The result: our Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

    The Constitution and Bill of Rights were meant to enshrine the liberties they fought for: due process, privacy, free speech, the right to bear arms, and limits on government power.

    Now, nearly two and a half centuries later, those freedoms hang by a thread.

    Imagine the shock and outrage these 56 men would feel were they to discover that almost 250 years later, the government they had risked their lives to create has been transformed into a militaristic police state in which exercising one’s freedoms—at a minimum, merely questioning a government agent—is often viewed as a flagrant act of defiance.

    In fact, had Jefferson and his compatriots written the Declaration of Independence today, they would almost certainly be labeled extremists, placed on government watchlists, targeted by surveillance, and prosecuted as domestic threats.

    Read the Declaration of Independence again, and you’ll see the grievances they laid at the feet of King George—unjust laws, militarized policing, surveillance, censorship, and the denial of due process—are the very abuses “we the people” suffer under today.

    Had Jefferson written the Declaration about the American police state in 2025, it might have read like a criminal indictment of the crimes perpetrated by a government that:

    Polices by fear and violence:

    Surveils and represses dissent:

    Strips away rights:

    Concentrates unchecked power in the executive:

    • bypassing Congress with executive orders, sidelining the courts, and ruling by decree;
    • weaponizing federal agencies to suppress opposition and silence critics;
    • treating constitutional limits as optional and the presidency as a personal fiefdom.

    These are not isolated abuses.

    They are the logical outcomes of a government that has turned against its people.

    They reveal a government that has claimed the god-like power to decide who gets rights—and who doesn’t. Who counts as a citizen—and who doesn’t. Who gets to live—and who becomes expendable.

    All along the spectrum of life—from the unborn child to the elderly—the government continues to treat individuals endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights as if they are criminals, subhumans, or enemies of the state.

    That is not freedom. It is tyranny.

    And it must be called by its true name.

    The truth is hard, but it must be said: the American police state has grown drunk on power, money, and its own authority.

    The irony is almost too painful to articulate.

    On the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence—a document that rebuked government corruption, tyranny, and injustice—we find ourselves surrounded by its modern-day equivalents.

    This week’s spectacle—protest barricades, legislation to benefit the rich, and Trump’s appearance at Alligator Alcatraz, a.k.a. “Gator Gitmo”—shows how completely we have inverted the spirit of 1776.

    That a president would celebrate the Fourth of July while inaugurating a modern-day internment camp—far from the reach of the courts or the Constitution—speaks volumes about the state of our nation and the extent to which those in power now glorify the very forms of tyranny the Founders once rose up against.

    This is not law and order.

    This is political theater, carceral cruelty, and authoritarianism in plain sight.

    It is what happens when a nation that once prided itself on liberty now builds monuments to its own fear and domination.

    The spectacle doesn’t end with detention camps and barricades. It extends into commerce, corruption, and self-enrichment at the highest levels of power.

    President Trump is now marketing his own line of fragrances—a branding exercise so absurd it would be laughable if it weren’t a flagrant violation of the Constitution’s Emoluments Clause. His investments are booming. And all across his administration, top officials are shamelessly using public office to line their pockets, even as they push legislation to strip working-class Americans of the most basic benefits and protections, while claiming to be rooting out corruption and inefficiency.

    This is not governance. This is kleptocracy—and it is happening in plain sight.

    In the nearly 250 years since early Americans declared their independence from Great Britain, “we the people” have worked ourselves back under the tyrant’s thumb—only this time, the tyrant is one of our own making.

    The abuses they once suffered under an imperial power haven’t disappeared. They’ve evolved.

    We are being robbed blind by political grifters and corporate profiteers. We are being silenced by bureaucrats and blacklists. We are being watched by data miners and digital spies. We are being caged by militarized enforcers with no regard for the Constitution. And we are being ruled by presidents who govern not by law, but by executive decree.

    Given the fact that we are a relatively young nation, it hasn’t taken very long for an authoritarian regime to creep into power.

    Unfortunately, the bipartisan coup that laid siege to our nation did not happen overnight.

    The architecture of oppression—surveillance, militarism, censorship, propaganda—was built slowly, brick by brick, law by law, war by war.

    It snuck in under our radar, hiding behind the guise of national security, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on immigration, political correctness, hate crimes and a host of other official-sounding programs aimed at expanding the government’s power at the expense of individual freedoms.

    The building blocks for the bleak future we’re just now getting a foretaste of—police shootings of unarmed citizens, profit-driven prisons, weapons of compliance, a wall-to-wall surveillance state, pre-crime programs, a suspect society, school-to-prison pipelines, militarized police, overcriminalization, SWAT team raids, endless wars, etc.—were put in place by government officials we trusted to look out for our best interests.

    The result is an empire in decline and a citizenry under siege.

    But if history teaches us anything, it’s that the power of the people—when awakened—is stronger than any empire.

    For decades, the Constitution has been our shield against tyranny.

    But today, it’s under siege. And now we must be the shield.

    Surveillance is expanding. Peaceful dissent is being punished. Judges are being targeted. The presidency is issuing decrees and bypassing the rule of law.

    Every institution meant to check power is being tested—and in some cases, broken.

    This is the moment to stand in front of the Constitution and defend it.

    As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, the fight for freedom is never over. But neither is it lost—so long as we refuse to surrender, refuse to remain silent, and refuse to accept tyranny as the price of safety.

    It is time to remember who we are. To reclaim the Constitution. To resist the march toward authoritarianism. And to reassert—boldly and without apology—that our rights are not up for negotiation.

    The post Inalienable Rights in an Age of Tyranny first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Senate strikes AI regulation ban from Trump mega-bill

    The Republican-led US Senate voted overwhelmingly on Tuesday to remove a 10-year federal moratorium on state regulation of artificial intelligence from President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax-cut and spending bill. Lawmakers voted 99-1 to strike the ban from the bill by adopting an amendment offered by Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn. The action came during a marathon…

    The post US Senate strikes AI regulation ban from Trump mega-bill appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Iran, Zionism, and the Limits of US Control: An Interview with Faramarz Farbod

    The post Iran, Zionism, and the Limits of US Control: An Interview with Faramarz Farbod first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • What July 5th Taught Me that July 4th Never Did

    Growing up in Venezuela and now living in the United States, I’ve always felt caught between two independence days: July 4th and July 5th. Two celebrations. Two flags. Two very different ideas of what it means to be free.

    In the U.S., the Fourth of July comes with fireworks, parades, and an almost unquestioned belief in the righteousness of the revolution it commemorates. However, in Venezuela, July 5th evokes different thoughts. It is not just a break from colonial rule but the beginning of a long, unfinished struggle to define freedom on our own terms. It’s not something we inherited. It’s something we’re still fighting for.

    And now, from where I stand, I can’t help but see the contradictions. One country celebrates independence while denying it to others. The other fights for sovereignty while being punished for it.

    The story of Venezuela’s independence is part of a much longer, bloodier history. The entire region of Latin America and the Caribbean erupted into revolutionary movements more than two centuries ago, not out of ambition, but as a response to some of the worst atrocities in human history. Colonization, slavery, forced conversions to Catholicism, cultural erasure, and resource extraction didn’t just leave economic scars; they tore at the heart of our collective humanity. As Eduardo Galeano wrote, “Our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others.” Independence wasn’t a beginning; it was a resistance and a demand to reclaim everything that had been stolen, silenced, and buried.

    In Venezuela, the independence process was shaped by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the revolutions in France, the U.S., and Haiti. But Simón Bolívar, our “Liberator,” wanted something more than a flag or a change in rulers. He envisioned a republic built on justice, not just sovereignty. A society where slavery would be abolished, land would be redistributed, and governance would belong to the people. Speaking before the Congress of Angostura in 1819, Bolívar declared: “The most perfect system of government is that which produces the greatest possible amount of happiness, social security, and political stability.” This wasn’t about replacing a crown with a new president. It was about reimagining society itself, building a nation rooted in dignity, equality, and the well-being of all.

    It was a vision far ahead of its time. And it came at a devastating cost. Venezuela lost half of its population during the wars of independence. But as Bolívar said, the other half would have given its life, too, to make freedom real.

    Venezuela became free from Spain, but not from exploitation.

    After the discovery of oil beginning in the 1920s, the country became a new kind of colony, one shaped by foreign corporations and U.S. geopolitical interests. While oil profits filled the pockets of multinational companies and domestic elites, the majority of Venezuelans lived in poverty, with no access to healthcare, education, or housing.

    That began to change in 1998, when Hugo Chávez, invoking the legacy of Bolívar, won the presidency and launched what became known as the Bolivarian Revolution. He called on the people to reclaim democracy, not just through elections, but through participatory structures, economic justice, and sovereignty. For many who had long been shut out of the system, it was the first time they saw themselves reflected in their own government.

    It was transformative. And it was deeply threatening to the powers that had always treated Venezuela as a resource, not a republic.

    The Bolivarian Revolution was perceived as a threat to U.S. imperial interests from the outset. From the moment Hugo Chávez took office in 1999 and began redirecting Venezuela’s oil wealth toward social programs, land reform, and regional integration, the backlash began. He refused to follow the neoliberal script written in Washington, and for that, he was targeted.

    In 2002, the U.S. backed a coup attempt against Chávez, which briefly removed him from power before a massive popular uprising brought him back. But the attacks didn’t stop. Economic sabotage, disinformation campaigns, and diplomatic isolation escalated over the years.

    After he died in 2013, the campaign intensified. Under Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela was hit with the full spectrum of economic warfare: hundreds of unilateral coercive measures, the freezing of billions in international assets, restrictions on food and medicine imports, and open support for regime change—a war without bombs.

    This is daily life for Venezuelans. And yet, we’re told these policies are meant to help us. You don’t help people by starving them. You don’t “defend democracy” by trying to force another country to its knees.

    Here in the U.S., it’s easy to treat independence as something that was achieved once and for all in 1776. But if that were true, why is our country still trying to control the fate of others? Why do we claim to stand for freedom while undermining it abroad through sanctions, coups, and endless wars? And even more urgently: why are so many people in the U.S. still struggling just to survive?

    Empire comes at a cost, not only to the people we target, but to the people right here at home. While the U.S. government spends trillions on foreign wars and military bases, our communities are told there’s “not enough” for universal healthcare, housing, or public education. The same officials who lecture the world about freedom are the ones lining up to vote for the “Big Beautiful Bill,” a package that bankrolls war and delivers massive tax breaks to billionaires while dismantling the programs that keep people housed, fed, and alive.

    We’re told to celebrate freedom while immigrants are deported, unhoused people are criminalized, and Palestinian solidarity is silenced. We’re told we live in the greatest country on Earth, even as life expectancy drops and student debt skyrockets.

    So when I hear U.S. leaders talk about spreading democracy, I can’t help but ask: Whose democracy? Whose freedom?

    You can’t claim to support democracy and starve a population at the same time. You can’t celebrate independence while trying to overthrow other governments. And you can’t speak of justice if your policies enforce inequality on a global scale.

    As a Venezuelan-American, I’m proud of the history that Venezuela has fought for. And I want to be proud of the United States, the country I also call home. But that will only be possible when the U.S. chooses respect over domination, when it ends the sanctions, when it stops weaponizing aid, democracy, and freedom to serve its own economic interests.

    Venezuela’s July 5th is not about fireworks. It’s about survival, resistance, and the ongoing struggle to build a future rooted in dignity.

    So while the U.S. celebrates its independence this week, I hope more people take a moment to ask: What are we really celebrating? And at what cost?

    True independence isn’t about flags or anthems. It’s about the right to choose your own path without being punished for it. If we’re serious about “liberty and justice for all,” then we have to mean it. Not just here, but everywhere.

    Real freedom doesn’t come wrapped in patriotic speeches or military parades; it comes through struggle, sacrifice, and the refusal to bow to empire, no matter what form it takes. Whether in Venezuela or the United States, the fight for dignity continues. Eduardo Blanco captured this truth in Venezuela Heroica, when he wrote: “To restrain the passions of people when they’ve been pushed beyond reason is harder than stopping the sea itself.”

    And that’s exactly what we’re witnessing in every mobilization, every boycott, every refusal to accept injustice as normal.

    Borders, bullets, or decrees can’t contain the tides of liberation. Not in Venezuela. Not in Gaza. Not in the United States. Not anywhere.

    The post What July 5th Taught Me that July 4th Never Did first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • America’s Republicans’ Hatred of the Poor

    The budget-and-tax bill that President Trump has placed before America’s U.S. Senators and Representatives to pass by a majority in each of the two houses of Congress is a total repudiation of the first Republican U.S. President (and the only progressive Republican U.S. President), Abraham Lincoln, as will here be documented.

    The Republican Party was basically started by Lincoln, who (if he had lived) would have repudiated and condemned virtually all of his Republican successors. The assassination that killed him transformed his Party into its exact opposite, in the most important ways.

    Here is Lincoln speaking, so that the transformation wrought by that bullet is made clear by Lincoln himself, in his own time:

    It is not needed nor fitting here that a general argument should be made in favor of popular institutions, but there is one point, with its connections, not so hackneyed as most others, to which I ask a brief attention. It is the effort to place capital on an equal footing with, if not above, labor in the structure of government. It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. This assumed, it is next considered whether it is best that capital shall hire laborers, and thus induce them to work by their own consent, or buy them and drive them to it without their consent. Having proceeded so far, it is naturally concluded that all laborers are either hired laborers or what we call slaves. And further, it is assumed that whoever is once a hired laborer is fixed in that condition for life.

    Now there is no such relation between capital and labor as assumed, nor is there any such thing as a free man being fixed for life in the condition of a hired laborer. Both these assumptions are false, and all inferences from them are groundless.

    Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights. Nor is it denied that there is, and probably always will be, a relation between labor and capital producing mutual benefits. The error is in assuming that the whole labor of community exists within that relation. A few men own capital, and that few avoid labor themselves, and with their capital hire or buy another few to labor for them. A large majority belong to neither class — neither work for others nor have others working for them.

    Lincoln was profoundly opposed to coerced labor, and he recognized that it can take many forms — not ONLY the form called ”slavery.” He also recognized that the few individuals who, as a group, own the most wealth and consequently hire a substantial percentage of the U.S. population, will possess, by their ability to hire and fire, enormous power, which might enable them to coerce their employees to accept unjustifiably low wages for their work. On this basis, he spoke publicly on the record as siding with the oppressed against their oppressors — even outside the context of merely slavery.

    The poor are the lowest class of workers, and Lincoln there was making explicitly clear that — directly opposed to today’s Republican Party, which makes policy on the basis of the principle that a person is worth only whatever his/her net worth is, and so a billionaire is worth as much as a thousand millionaires — a person’s worth has no necessary relationship to his/her wealth — none.

    Polling proves that vast majorities of the U.S. public detest Trump’s budget-and-tax priorities. Furthermore, an extraordinarily extensive Yale poll of nearly 5,000 Americans, published on June 27th, found that when respondents are informed of what is in Trump’s budget-and-tax bill, only 11% approve, 78% disapprove of it. Would it become law in a democracy? Of course not!

    Today’s Republican Party — this Party that Lincoln would consider an abomination — is the exact opposite of anything that would become law in any democracy. If Trump’s bill, or anything like it, becomes law in America, this will be announcing to the entire world that America is a dictatorship by its super-rich. Such a Government used to be called an “aristocracy.” At every election-time, America’s public are being asked to side with one group of billionaires (the Republicann ones) against another group of billionaires (the Democratic ones), instead of to side with themselves and the rest of the public, against all billionaires — the remarkably few individuals who actually control the U.S. Government. This applies both in national U.S. politics and in state U.S. politics, so that the billionaires have veto-power to prevent ANY candidate they don’t control, from even getting their Party’s nomination (much less winning the final campaign). It is the aristocratic type of dictatorship — and Lincoln condemned it.

    The post America’s Republicans’ Hatred of the Poor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Operation Midnight Hammer: Were Iran’s Nuclear Facilities Damaged?

    The aftermath of Operation Midnight Hammer, a strike by the US Air Force on three nuclear facilities in Iran authorized by President Donald Trump on June 22, was raucous and triumphant. But that depended on what company you were keeping. The mission involved the bombing of the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant, the uranium-enrichment facility at Natanz, and the uranium-conversion facility in Isfahan.  The Israeli Air Force had already attacked the last two facilities, sparing Fordow for the singular weaponry available for the USAF.

    The Fordow site was of particular interest, located some eighty to a hundred metres underground and cocooned by protective concrete. For its purported destruction, B-2 Spirit stealth bombers were used to drop GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator “bunker buster” bombs. All in all, approximately 75 precision-guided weapons were used in the operation, along with 125 aircraft and a guided missile submarine.

    Trump was never going to be anything other than optimistic about the result. “Monumental Damage was done to all Nuclear sites in Iran, as shown by satellite images,” he blustered. “Obliteration is an accurate term!”

    At the Pentagon press conference following the attack, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth bubbled with enthusiasm. “The order we received from our commander in chief was focused, it was powerful, and it was clear. We devastated the Iranian nuclear program.” The US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, was confident that the facilities had been subjected to severe punishment. “Initial battle damage assessments indicate that all three sites sustained extremely severe damage and destruction.” Adding to Caine’s remarks, Hegseth stated that, “The battle damage assessment is ongoing, but our initial assessment, as the Chairman said, is that all of our precision munitions struck where we wanted them to strike and had the desired effect.”

    Resort to satellite imagery was always going to take place, and Maxar Technologies willingly supplied the material. “A layer of grey-blue ash caused by the airstrikes [on Fordow] is seen across a large swathe of the area,” the company noted in a statement. “Additionally, several of the tunnel entrances that lead into the underground facility are blocked with dirt following the airstrikes.”

    The director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John Ratcliffe, also added his voice to the merry chorus that the damage had been significant. “CIA can confirm that a body of credible intelligence indicates Iran’s Nuclear Program has been severely damaged by the recent, targeted airstrikes.” The assessment included “new intelligence from a historically reliable and accurate source/method that several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”

    Israeli sources were also quick to stroke Trump’s already outsized ego. The Israel Atomic Energy Commission opined that the strikes, combined with Israel’s own efforts, had “set back Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons by many years.” IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir’s view was that the damage to the nuclear program was sufficient to have “set it back by years, I repeat, years.”

    The chief of the increasingly discredited International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, flirted with some initial speculation, but was mindful of necessary caveats. In a statement to an emergency meeting of the IAEA’s 35-nation Board of Governors, he warned that, “At this time, no one, including the IAEA, is in a position to have fully assessed the underground damage at Fordow.” Cue the speculation: “Given the explosive payload utilised and extreme(ly) vibration-sensitive nature of centrifuges, very significant damage is expected to have occurred.”

    This was a parade begging to be rained on. CNN and The New York Times supplied it. Referring to preliminary classified findings in a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment running for five pages, the paper reported that the bombing of the three sites had “set back the country’s nuclear program by only a few months”. The strikes had sealed off the entrances to two of the facilities, but they were not successful in precipitating a collapse of the underground buildings. Sceptical expertise murmured through the report: to destroy the facility at Fordow would require “waves of airstrikes, with days or even weeks of pounding the same spots.”

    Then came the issue of the nuclear material in question, which Iran still retained control over. The fate of over 400 kg of uranium, which had been enriched to 60% purity, is unclear, as is the number of surviving or hidden centrifuges. Iran had already informed the IAEA on June 13 that “special measures” would be taken to protect nuclear materials and equipment under IAEA safeguards, a feature provided under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Any transfer of nuclear material from a safeguarded facility to another location, however, would have to be declared to the agency, something bound to be increasingly unlikely given the proposed suspension of cooperation with the IAEA by Iran’s parliament.

    After mulling over the attacks for a week, Grossi revisited the matter. The attacks on the facilities had caused severe, though “not total” damage. “Frankly speaking, one cannot claim that everything has disappeared and there is nothing there.” Tehran could, “in a matter of months,” have “a few cascades of centrifuges spinning and producing enriched uranium.” Iran still had the “industrial and technological” means to recommence the process.

    Efforts to question the thoroughness of Operation Midnight Hammer did not sit well with the Trump administration. White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt worked herself into a state on any cautionary reporting, treating it as a libellous blemish. “The leaking of this alleged report is a clear attempt to demean President Trump and discredit the brave fighter pilots who conducted a perfectly executed mission to obliterate Iran’s nuclear program,” she fumed in a statement. “Everyone knows what happens when you drop 14 30,000-pound bombs perfectly on their targets.”

    Hegseth similarly raged against the importance placed on the DIA report. In a press conference on June 26, he bemoaned the tendency of the press corps to “cheer against Trump so hard, it’s like in your DNA and in your blood”. The scribblers had to “cheer against the efficacy of these strikes” with “half-truths, spun information, leaked information”. Trump, for his part, returned to familiar ground, attacking any questioning narrative as “Fake News”. CNN, he seethed, had some of the dumbest anchors in the business. With malicious glee, he claimed knowledge of rumours that reporters from both CNN and The New York Times were going to be sacked for making up those “FAKE stories on the Iran Nuclear sites because they got it so wrong.”

    A postmodern nonsense has descended on the damage assessments regarding Iran’s nuclear program, leaving the way clear for overremunerated soothsayers. But there was nothing postmodern in the incalculable damage done to the law of nations, a body of acknowledged rules rendered brittle and breakable before the rapacious legislators of the jungle.

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  • What Comes Next Following The US-Israeli War On Iran?

    The fighting between Israel and Iran, sparked by an illegal and entirely unprovoked attack by Israel, has abated for the moment. After the United States did what Israeli Prime Minister hoped it would do and bombed Iran’s underground nuclear facilities, including the one at Fordow with bunker buster weapons, U.S. President Donald Trump told Israel to stop its attacks and reinforced that order when Israel sent dozens of bombers toward Iran shortly after the ceasefire was enacted, claiming a response to two Iranian missiles.

    The entire battle, fought on the basis of a fictional threat of Iran being close to acquiring a nuclear weapon, demonstrated how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can manipulate intelligence, politics, and ignorance in the U.S. to provoke American action.

    The post What Comes Next Following The US-Israeli War On Iran? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Mamdani’s Win in NYC Transforms America’s Mid-Term Political Contests

    A typical initial take on the totally unexpected landslide win, by the self-declared socialist Zohran Mamdani, of the Democratic nomination for (and thus almost certainly) the Mayoralty of NYC, was Eric Levitz’s June 25 Vox News article “What Democrats can (and can’t) learn from Zohran Mamdani’s triumph,” which said that

    Some on the left have suggested that Mamdani’s victory proves Democrats do not need to moderate their party’s image to compete for national power. This argument does not make much sense. To secure a Senate majority in 2026, Democrats will need to win multiple states that backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by double digits. And even if Democrats give up on winning Senate control next year and shoot for doing so in 2028, they will still need to win in states that voted for Trump all three times he was on the ballot.

    According to some political scientists, pollsters, and pundits, doing this will require Democrats to moderate their national reputation, since modern voters tend to judge candidates less by their own idiosyncratic positions than by their party’s general image. In this analysis, acquiring the power necessary for advancing even incremental progressive change federally requires the Democratic leadership to observe strict ideological discipline. So long as the party’s brand is toxic to the median voter in Ohio — who backed Trump every single time he’s been on the ballot — Democrats will have no prayer of passing ambitious federal legislation or confirming liberal Supreme Court justices.

    This theory could very well be wrong. But a socialist winning 43.5 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary in New York City does not tell us much about its validity one way or another.

    However, that was 43.5% of the voters in a four-candidate race, in which 36.4% went to the overwhelming favorite by ‘the experts’, Andrew Cuomo, 11.3% went to another candidate, and 4.3% went to the corruption-scandal-plagued current incumbent Mr. Adrienne Adams. So, even if Mr. Mamdani won’t receive the donations or endorsements of ANY of NYC’s billionaires and their media, New York City is going to have its first socialist and anti-Wall-Street Mayor in 2025, and all of those “political scientists,  pollsters,  and pundits” will be proven wrong; and here is why:

    All indicators are that currently Americans are very dissatisfied with both Parties; the public sentiment in favor of a new Third political Party to become formed is at an all-time-high; and the public’s polled trust in America’s institutions and especially in its governmental and media institutions is at an all-time low.

    Nonetheless the ‘experts’ overwhelmingly predict upon the basis of the assumptions that worked for them in the past. When voters have been asked by pollsters what their POLICY-preferences are, their answers are remarkably as they were in the past. However, this does NOT say anything about the public’s policy-PRIORITIES, which have recently changed RADICALLY. I have several times stated this, but it is the most-meaningful polling result so far this year, and is extremely relevant to the Mayoralty contest in NYC, so I shall repeat it again:

    On February 14, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling,” and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (those latter five being the functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut — but those 5 were the most-favored by the American public). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds. Furthermore, the U.S. Defense Department is the only Department of the federal Government so corrupt, so intensely corrupt, that it has never been audited.

    Trump is increasing the military and border security, and decreasing education, assistance to the poor, Medicaid, federal law enforcement, and even Social Security and Medicare (the latter two by laying off many of the people who staff those bureaucracies). This Government’s policy-priorities are like the public’s turned upside-down — in other words: are the REVERSE of the public’s — and therefore the U.S. Government right now is a perfect example of a dictatorship. One might say that this is so in only the Executive branch, but it’s not necessarily true: As always when one political faction (regardless whether it it is one Party or a coalition of Parties) has control over both the Executive and the Legislative branches of the Government — as now the case in the U.S. — these two branches (Executive and Legislative) function as one, and there then will even be a totalitarian dictatorship if they can get the Judicial branch or Supreme Court to call it “Constitutional.” Currently, the U.S. is slipping from a dictatorship towards a totalitarian dictatorship; but America has been a dictatorship ever since at least 1980. And that is a dictatorship by the super-rich.

    As the liberal (Democratic Party) wing of America’s aristocracy said, in the person of its Warren Buffett, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” (He told this to the conservative Ben Stein, reporting in the aristocracy’s New York Times, under the headline “In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning”.)

    To see the empirical evidences proving that there IS class-warfare in America, and that the billionaire-class is ruling this country and (behind the scenes) writing and executing its laws, click here. That’s the situation as it had been since at least 1980, but the current trend away from that is toward even more of a dictatorship (by the super-rich) in America.

    Between now and November 4 — the upcoming NYC Mayoralty election — there is plenty of time for a rip-roaring campaign that will either rip the Democrat to pieces, or else rip the Republican nominee to pieces. The likelihood that Mamdani will get ripped to pieces by the Republicans seems low to me because he is the son of academic Mahmood Mamdani and filmmaker Mira Nair. Click on those and you will see a personal background that explains his politics; and, so, the likelihood of scandal being found by Republican opposition researchers against him is just about as low as it can go, though freakish exceptions do exist to contradict any generality.

    The BIG issue in politics, which will be coming increasingly to the fore during all of the political contests throughout Trump’s second term, will be TRUST (honesty). Levitz’s article misses this fact entirely when he says “4) The odds of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning in 2028 look higher. Finally, it is easier to picture Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential nomination today than it was yesterday.” She has been enough of a disappointment to progressive voters (such as on the the U.S.-funded Israeli genocide against Gazans, regarding which, she has continued to speak only in platitudes, knowing that she can climb her way up ONLY if she can get the Party’s billionaires to back her), as to make Levitz’s analogy of Cortez to Mamdani an unintended and false insult to Mamadani. So, Levitz’s comparing her to Mamdani is so very far off-base that Levitz’s throw there might as well have been into the stands, as to the baseman, trying to stop the base-runner.

    Mamdani’s win of the Democratic nomination will probably turn out to have been a major turning-point in American politics. The Democratic Party’s billionaires will have lots of difficulty dealing with it, and might even lose their grip-hold of the Party. All of them turning toward the Republican Party would end the hoax of their saying we have a democracy because we give you the choice: it’s between arsenic and cyanide. That’s what they’ve done to our ‘democracy’.

    The post Mamdani’s Win in NYC Transforms America’s Mid-Term Political Contests first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • NATO’s 5% Pledge: An Obscene Betrayal of Global Needs

    No to NATO protest at The Hague, June 22, 2025. Photo credit: Xinhua News

    At this week’s NATO summit in The Hague, leaders announced an alarming new goal: push military spending to 5% of nations’ GDP by 2035. Framed as a response to rising global threats, particularly from Russia and terrorism, the declaration was hailed as a historic step. But in truth, it represents a major step backward—away from addressing the urgent needs of people and the planet, and toward an arms race that will impoverish societies while enriching weapons contractors.

    This outrageous 5% spending target didn’t come out of nowhere—it’s the direct result of years of bullying by Donald Trump. During his first term, Trump repeatedly berated NATO members for not spending enough on their militaries, pressuring them to meet a 2% GDP threshold that was already controversial and so excessive that nine NATO countries still fall below that “target”.

    Now, with Trump back in the White House, NATO leaders are falling in line, setting a staggering 5% target that even the United States—already spending over $1 trillion a year on its military—doesn’t reach. This is not defense; it’s extortion on a global scale, pushed by a president who views diplomacy as a shakedown and war as good business.

    Countries across Europe and North America are already slashing public services, yet they are now expected to divert even more taxpayer money into war preparations. Currently, no NATO country spends more on the military than on health or education. But if they all meet the new 5% military spending goal, 21 of them would spend more on weapons than on schools.

    Spain was one of the few to reject this escalation, with Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez making clear that his government would not sacrifice pensions and social programs to meet a militarized spending target. Other governments, including those of Belgium and Slovakia, quietly pushed back as well.

    Still, NATO leaders pressed on, cheered by Secretary-General Mark Rutte, who fawned over Donald Trump’s demand that Europe boost defense spending. Rutte even referred to Trump as “Daddy,” a comment that—while dismissed as a joke—spoke volumes about NATO’s subservience to U.S. militarism. Under Trump’s influence, the alliance is shedding even the pretense of being a defensive pact, embracing instead the language and logic of perpetual war.

    Just before NATO leaders were gathering at the Hague, protesters took to the streets under the banner “No to NATO.” And back in their home countries, civic groups are demanding a redirection of resources toward climate justice, healthcare, and peace. Polls show that majorities in the U.S. oppose increased military spending, but NATO is not accountable to the people. It’s accountable to political elites, arms manufacturers, and a Cold War logic that sees every global development through the lens of threat and domination.

    NATO’s expansion, both in terms of war spending and size (it has grown from 12 founding members to 32 countries today), has not brought peace. On the contrary. The alliance’s promise that Ukraine would one day join its ranks was one of the triggers for Russia’s brutal war, and instead of de-escalating, the alliance has doubled down with weapons, not diplomacy. In Gaza, Israel continues its U.S.-backed war with impunity, while NATO nations send more arms and offer no serious push for peace. Now the alliance wants to drain public coffers to sustain these wars indefinitely. NATO is also surrounding its adversaries, particularly Russia, with ever more bases and troops.

    All of this demands a radical rethink. As the world burns—literally—NATO is stocking up on kindling. When healthcare systems are crumbling, schools are underfunded, and blazing temperatures are making large swaths of the planet uninhabitable, the idea that governments should commit billions more to weapons and war is obscene. Real security doesn’t come from tanks and missiles—it comes from strong communities, global cooperation, and urgent action on our shared crises.

    We need to flip the script. That means cutting military budgets, withdrawing from endless wars, and beginning a serious conversation about dismantling NATO. The alliance, born of the Cold War, is now a stumbling block to global peace and an active participant in war-making. Its latest summit only reinforces that reality.

    This is not just about NATO’s budget—it’s about our future. Every euro or dollar spent on weapons is one not spent on confronting the climate crisis, lifting people out of poverty, or building a peaceful world. For the future of our planet, we must reject NATO and the war economy.

    The post NATO’s 5% Pledge: An Obscene Betrayal of Global Needs first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Ruling from Houses of Clay: Regime Change for Washington and Tel Aviv

    “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.” — The Book Of Proverbs, 16:18

    “CEASEFIRE IS IN EFFECT!” Trump shouts in upper case impotent rage into the pixel abyss.

    To bring about and sustain peace, the leaders of empires must surrender the illusion that they can maintain control of people and events in far-flung places. It is imperative, an empire’s elites let go of their domination compulsions and live by the principles inherent to compassion. Hopeless and risible fantasy, huh?

    Trump, who cannot quote a single line of scripture, hero to Christian evangelicals, might fall from his golf cart, stricken by a Paul On The Road to Damascus experience, and renounce his past behavior, defined by cruelty and greed, then call Bibi Netanyahu, and advise him to fall to his knees, as did King David, and repent and beg for forgiveness to The Creator for the massive amount of blood he has been responsible for spilling.

    According to scripture (hello, Ted Cruz): Jesus posited regarding John the Baptist: “For I say unto you, Among those that are born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist: but he that is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he?” – Luke 7:28

    What is meant by the word, “least”?

    In Matthew 25:40: “The ‘least’ among us” is clarified: To wit, Jesus proclaims, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

    One must be willfully deaf and blind to not grasp that to avoid earthly life becoming Hell on Earth: empathy must reign; the outsider must be bestowed with kindness; the poor must be lifted up; the sick must be attended to; and those imprisoned should be granted compassion.

    Does any of the above sound like the policies of the current administration – whose most loyal supporters claim to be Christians? Yes, the mindset of Trump et al. is so at odds with the Gospel Of Jesus that a pentecost of derisive laughter should descend from Heaven that would shake the Earth and awaken the dead who would rise due to an apocalypse of hilarity.

    No photo description available.
    King David On His Knees: “Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God” — Psalm 51-14

    Yet another image arises: In Death’s Grand ballroom: The War Party’s dance of death with Christian Zionists proceeds as the capitalist media plays on.

    In 1 Samuel 15, the God of Israel orders the first King of Israel, Saul, to carry out a genocidal rampage on the Amalekites (a semi-nomadic people inhabiting the edges of southern Canaan).

    Old Testament Samuel said unto Saul, (1) “I am the one the Lord sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the Lord. (2) This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. (3) Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”

    The unforgivable trespass committed by the Amalekites: A number of generations back, their ancestors had refused to be in alliance with the Israelites in their land-seizing, atrocity-inflicting wars to establish nationhood. Yet, later, King Saul was condemned by God, The Lord Of Hosts, for not slaughtering every person and all of the creatures within reach of his sword dwelling in Amalek. (Saul had spared The Amalekites’ King, Agag and a smattering of the land’s most valuable livestock.) Hence, Samuel, the prophet, channeling the command of the God Of Israelites, reported to Saul, due to his disobedience to a divine command, he must be dethroned.

    Let’s think this through, Samuel hears voices in his head insisting on mass murder. King Saul, unquestioningly, follows the directions proffered by the prophecy – but not to the very blood-drench letter, thus he is disgraced and loses his kingship.

    To say the least, this is a parcel of problematic mythos … if taken literally. And many in the present day Zionist state, evidence suggests, have done just that.

    George W. Bush also heard the voice of The Lord Of Host (FYI: Lord Of Hosts (Geta Yeserawit) translates from the original biblical era Amharic as: “Lord of Armies” thus places emphasis on the God of Israel’s role as a warrior).

    Donald Trump believes he was spared from assassination by a divine intervention and, thereby, has been called to fulfill a destiny of biblical scale.

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    John 1:29, where John the Baptist proclaims, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who [bombs] away the sin of the world!”

    Therefore, The Sermon On Mar Largo follows verily:

    The Sermon On Mar-a-Lago follows verily:

    Beat farm equipment into the weapons of war. Blessed are the war machine propagandists. The grifters will inherit the (nuclear-scorched) earth.

    Blessed are the sycophants who kiss The Donald’s Most High’s ass and call it holy communion. Blessed are those who pursue and prosecute powerless outsiders, for bullies are made in the image of dear leader, The Lord Of The Downward Punch.

    Blessed are the pussy-grabbers for they will sojourn into the Land Of Epstein and be granted earthly immunity. Blessed are the on-bended knee media for they will inherit a diminishing viewer share yet be not cursed with self-awareness.

    Blessed are those who hunger for the Holy Emperor Don’s approval and crave more and more for they will be seated at The Table Of Mendacity and eat and eat more of their own corruption and call it manna. Rejoice and revel in your spite, blood-lust, and war propaganda because your prophecy will be rewarded by high-dollar, donor-class funded think tanks.

    Do not think that Donald J. Christ has come to abolish the Law Of Profiteers. He has not come to abolish human folly but to bloat it into such grotesque form that those possessed of a mustard seed-size of righteousness will finally and at long last rise up and whose cry of outrage will shake the unholy air and restore the land to sanity.

    Speaking of the insanity of leadership:

    In the Book Of Daniel, the prophet Daniel, during a period of exile and Jewish captivity in Babylon interpreted a dream for Babylon’s King, Nebuchadnezzar, involving a tall, magnificent tree, its expansive bough capable of bestowing succor to man and beast. But a messenger from Heaven commands the tree cut down to a stump. Daniel, going all Jungian on Nebuchadnezzar’s royal ass, interprets the dream thus: The tree is a representation of Nebuchadnezzar insofar as both the reach of his kingdom and the massive extent of his pridefulness. The Angel Of God commands, Nebuchadnezzar will fall prey to madness.

    “He was driven away from people and ate grass like an ox. His body was drenched with the dew of heaven until this hair grew like the feathers of an eagle and his nails like the claws of a bird” –Daniel 4:33.

    The symbol of the stump represents: The mad king will only recover when his humiliation, delivered by a power greater than his pride, causes him to repent thus cease attacking neighboring lands and slaughtering, deporting, imprisoning the inhabitant of the lands he occupies. The story goes, Nebuchadnezzar’s madness lasted seven years during which time he walked on all fours like a wild animal and grazed on grass in the manner of a bovine in the field.


    William Blake, Nebuchadnezzar, 1795

    It follows, only by their fall can the pride-bloated be lifted up. The splendor of empire will be reduced to a stump when it is built on the backs of the poor and watered in the blood of the innocent.

    The present day embodiment of power-maddened, pride-bloated leadership struts, preens and boasts his bombing campaign was a thing of glory to behold under heaven. One does not require an Old Testament seer nor angel dispatched from a wrath-gripped God to apprehend the astounding degree of folly evinced by Trump and the parallels to the hubristic actions of the Zionist state.

    In closing and in stark contrast, from The Book Of Proverbs:

    16:7: When a man’s ways please the Lord, he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him:

    8 Better is a little with righteousness than great revenues without right.

    9 A man’s heart deviseth his way: but the Lord directeth his steps.

    10 A divine sentence is in the lips of the king: his mouth transgresseth not in judgment.

    11 A just weight and balance are the Lord’s: all the weights of the bag are his work.

    12 It is an abomination to kings to commit wickedness: for the throne is established by righteousness.

    13 Righteous lips are the delight of kings; and they love him that speaketh right.

    14 The wrath of a king is as messengers of death: but a wise man will pacify it.

    15 In the light of the king’s countenance is life; and his favour is as a cloud of the latter rain.

    16 How much better is it to get wisdom than gold! and to get understanding rather to be chosen than silver!

    17 The highway of the upright is to depart from evil: he that keepeth his way preserveth his soul.

    18 Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

    19 Better it is to be of an humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud.

    If the verses above were taken to heart, regime change of the mind would come to be, and, in Washington and Tel Aviv, the political ground would shake, its corrupt leadership would be deposed in disgrace and relegated to crawl on their bellies through the dust of history, and peace might become a possibility.

    O’ Ye of little faith…you have been proven right all too many times for your jaundiced opinion to be healed by a laying on the hands of faith alone. Yet, history reveals, overreaching tyrants find they are grasping a handful of dust.

    “How much more those who dwell in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed like the moth.” — Job 4:19

    Marc Chagall Daniel, 1956
    Marc Chagall, Daniel, 1956

    The post Ruling from Houses of Clay: Regime Change for Washington and Tel Aviv first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Ceasefire With Iran Reveals The Limits Of Israel’s Power

    Much of the current crop of commentary on Israel’s war of aggression on Iran has adopted the familiar tone of breathless admiration: praise for its targeting precision, the elegance of its intelligence-gathering, the almost clinical efficiency with which it eliminates not only combatants but scientists, technicians, and — under the now-naturalized euphemism — “sites and infrastructure.”

    Israel’s opening salvo in the war was, by most conventional metrics, effective. The Iranians, caught off guard, scrambled to recalibrate. Though they gradually recovered some measure of initiative, their response bore the marks of persistence and attrition rather than dominance.

    The post The Ceasefire With Iran Reveals The Limits Of Israel’s Power appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Tulsi Gabbard: Another Lesser Evilist Offering

    On 20 June 2025, Galloway spoke about his dream team for the next presidential race: “Tulsi Gabbard, Tucker Carlson, president and vice president of the United States of America.”

    He advised Gabbard to “resign if Trump joins the war and should make plain that she intends to run for president.” She hasn’t.

    Given the public rebukes of her by Donald Trump, speculation had emerged of her doing just that: resigning. However, Gabbard has instead attempted to win her way back into Trump’s good book.

    Two years ago, George Galloway, who served five-terms as a UK MP, and now hosts the popular Mother of all Talk Shows came across as a Gabbard fanboy,

    I have come to the view that the best possible president for the United States in 2024 is Tulsi Gabbard. I think she’s got the looks. I think she’s got style. I think she’s got the eloquence. And most of her politics, but by no means all, are as good as you’re going to get from anyone with a chance of winning the presidency of the United states. So there’s quite a few hedges and qualifications in there, but I have come to the view that Tulsi Gabbard for president is our best bet.

    Horrors that looks, sartorial, and eloquence should be enounced as foremost considerations — or even being considerations at all — for a political leader. A consideration not mentioned by Galloway was intelligence.

    When one scrutinizes Gabbard on her record, support for her would again be an appeal to lesser evilism. She may, however, be one of the best among so many regressivist politicians.

    Gabbard, in particular, comes to the fore on militarism and foreign affairs. What is part of her record here?

    Gabbard is regressivist on Palestine and Israel

    Gabbard seems not to realize that Palestine is state, unrecognized as such by the United States, that is under siege, occupation, theft of resources, and an ongoing genocide (sped up greatly since 7 October 2023). Moreover, Gabbard does not call what Israel has been carrying out since 7 October as a genocide.

    She focuses her ire on Hamas’s “evil” actions. In a 10 October 2023 interview on Fox News Tonight (hosted by Brian Kilmeade filling in for Tucker Carlson), Gabbard stated: “Israel has not only the right but the responsibility to defend itself against these terrorists who slaughtered innocent civilians.”

    On 10 October 2023, Gabbard posted on X: “Hamas is responsible for this war. They could end it now by surrendering, releasing hostages, and laying down their arms.” In other words, Gabbard denies Palestinians the inalienable right to resist occupation, an occupation that is rooted in killing, racism, humiliation, and brutality.

    Gabbard also rejected calls for a ceasefire, implying that she backs the continued Israeli military operations in Gaza. (The Tulsi Gabbard Show, Ep. 45)

    While Gabbard has never referred to Israel’s genocidal actions, she does make this accusation of Hamas. In an X post on 10 October 2023, she stated: “Hamas is a genocidal terrorist group. They must be defeated.”

    Gabbard took aim at those Democrats who are

    accusing Israel of committing a genocide. It it is the height of hypocrisy because they’re apologists and supporters of these Islamist Hamas terrorists who are calling for a genocide the extermination of all Jews not just in Israel but around the world and we’re seeing this being carried out by these violent mobs and threats and other things that are happening against Jewish people literally uh around the world.

    By Gabbard’s logic, she could be criticized as an apologist and supporter of these Israeli Zionist terrorists.

    Gabbard also opines, “This is not a ‘resistance’ movement. Hamas is a jihadist terrorist group funded by Iran, whose goal is the destruction of Israel.” (The Tulsi Gabbard Show, Ep. 45)

    She accuses Hamas of using human shields, but she does not criticize Israel using Palestinian children as human shields. Even the Zionist friendly BBC reports this.(“Hamas uses Palestinian civilians as human shields, knowing Israel will retaliate. They provoke war, then exploit the suffering for propaganda.” Cited by Deepseek as “Tulsi Gabbard on Israel-Palestine Conflict,” CNN, 7 May 2019.)

    Gabbard criticizes the ICERD Genocide Case (2024): “South Africa’s case at the ICJ is a propaganda stunt. Hamas is the real war criminal here.” (Twitter/X)

    Gabbard is regressivist on Iran

    Gabbard has called for regime change in Iran: “The Iranian people deserve freedom from this oppressive, theocratic dictatorship.” (Fox News, 2023)

    She was also against Barack Obama’s Iran nuclear deal: “The JCPOA gave Iran billions while allowing them to keep terror networks intact.” (CNN, 2019)

    Of course, all the talk about Iran and its purported nuclear weapons program has now had a wrench thrown into the works as the US launched an illegal and unannounced war on Iran. Gabbard fell into line behind Trump on this illegal attack (contrary to the UN Charter and without Congressional approval). The repercussions from that US attack will become clearer as time passes.

    Galloway’s Lesser Evilism

    Back to Galloway. Is this really, as Galloway claims about a future Tulsi Gabbard presidential candidacy: “As good as it is going to get”? Have pity on the world, if that is true.

    Can Gabbard represent the conscience of a nation? Surely there are better progressivist choices.

    Right away a courageous woman of integrity such as Medea Benjamin comes to mind.

    The post Tulsi Gabbard: Another Lesser Evilist Offering first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Unrelenting Bolivarian Resistance against Stubborn US Aggression


    On the eve of Venezuela’s presidential election on 29 July 2024, Guardian correspondents, Tiago Rogero (based in Rio de Janeiro) and Sam Jones (based in Madrid) predicted the vote “could end 25 years of socialist rule.” It did not. The following, 30 July, another group of Guardian correspondents gave prominent coverage to far-right wing Venezuelan politician Maria Corina Machado, quoting her claim that “Maduro’s exit was inevitable.” Yet, Nicolas Maduro was inaugurated as the re-elected president for the 2025-2031 term on 10 January 2025.

    The July 2024 presidential election was followed by the election for National Assembly deputies and all 24 governorships of Venezuela’s federal structure on 25 May 2025. Venezuela’s US-funded far-right opposition, led by Machado boycotted the vote. Corporate media outlets –including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Le Monde, El País, the BBC, and others – framed their coverage by labelling the election “divisive” and extensively quoting Machado’s claim that “85% of the electorate did not obey the regime and said no.” In reality, she falsely portrayed the opposition’s boycott as a political victory, implying widespread voter rejection.

    Unlike the July 2024 presidential election –when the far-right factions instigated street violence resulting in 27 deaths at the hands of armed thugs, including two armed attacks on the presidential palace –, the 25 May 2025 legislative and gubernatorial elections (Venezuela’s 32nd electoral process), proceeded calmly and peacefully. However, the far-right’s boycott was never merely a peaceful protest against an election organized by a government they refuse to recognise. Their actions went far beyond that.

    On 28 May, Venezuela’s Interior Minister, Diosdado Cabello, reported the arrest of over 70 individuals of various nationalities (Venezuelan, Colombian, American, Argentine, Spanish, Ecuadorian, Serbian, Albanian and others). Several foreign-funded ‘NGOs’ appeared implicated in the plot. Authorities seized explosives, assault rifles, and other military equipment intended for attacks on foreign embassies, hospitals, emergency services, electricity substations, police stations, and high-profile political figures – particularly those from the opposition who participated in the election. The suspects had entered Venezuela via Colombia. Cabello also revealed that Venezuela’s armed forces had thwarted nearly 60 attacks on oil installations in the preceding ten days. Evidence indicated the terrorist group was led by Venezuela’s far-right leaders.

    This was not their first attempt. The government has also reported the arrest of mercenaries coming from Trinidad and Tobago with ties to a broader network trained in Ecuador – a country now reportedly a hub of cocaine exports. A glance at a map reveals Venezuela’s encirclement by US-aligned hostile forces: Guyana, Ecuador, Colombian narcotraffickers, and SOUTHCOM to its north and beyond.

    Machado’s boycott strategy backfired, fracturing her already divided coalition further when several former boycotters decided to stand as candidates and urged their supporters to vote. The result? Chavismo secured 253 of 285 for the National Assembly and 23 of 24 governorships, including the election of a governor for Guayana Esequiba –a territory Venezuela claims. The sole governorship not won by Chavismo, Cojedes, went to Alberto Galíndez, an opposition politician who recognises Maduro’s legitimacy and accepted the overall results. Moreover, Chavismo gained 1.3 million more votes than in the 2021 elections, demonstrating growing support. With this victory, President Maduro and the Bolivarian Revolution now hold not only the presidency until 2031, but also commanding majorities in the National Assembly and among governorships.

    The May 2025 election results marked a resounding triumph for the Bolivarian government and a stinging defeat for the Trump administration –particularly with the election of Chavista, Admiral Neil Villamizar as governor for Guayana Esequiba. On 23 May, the Guardian quoted Guyana’s president Irfaan Ali,  who denounced the election in this state as an “assault on Guyana’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.” Yet, the report conveniently omitted any mention of the 1966 Geneva Agreement, which underpins Venezuela’s claim.[2]

    In collusion with Guyana, the US has transformed Guyana into a military enclave, using it as a base for regular military provocations against Venezuela since 2021. Strangely, just one day after the election, on 26 May 2025, the Guardian wrote an exhaustively researched feature with stunning photographs –not on Venezuela’s election, but on…the Orinoco crocodile.

    Beyond their self-defeating abstentionism, Machado and the far-right further eroded their credibility by enthusiastically endorsing U.S. sanctions –effectively advocating for Venezuela’s economic strangulation – and cheering Trump’s brutal deportation policies targeting Latin Americans, especially Venezuelans whom he falsely labels as “government-controlled criminals.

    When asked whether she supported Trump’s deeply unpopular policy of deporting Latino and Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador’s CECOT prison –a facility notorious for torture– Machado replied “Absolutely!” –uncritically parroting Trump’s baseless claims.

    The record of Venezuela’s far-right opposition is simply appalling. Not only have they been heavily involved with Colombian narco-traffickers to carry out terrorist acts against their own country, but their leader, Juan Guaidó, even proclaimed himself “interim president” on a Caracas street in 2019. Worse still, this claim was recognized by the U.S.-led Collective West. They colluded with Western powers to facilitate the confiscation of Venezuelan assets—including gold, bank accounts, and property—in actions that amount to nothing less than high treason.

    With the backing of the Collective West, they prolonged the farce of the 2015 National Assembly’s legitimacy—where they once held a majority—long after its mandate expired in 2020. In fact, they still falsely claim legitimacy in 2025, five years after the end of their constitutional term, while continuing to pay monthly U.S. dollar “emoluments” to their obsolete lawmakers.

    Under the guise of a humanitarian effort to bring food by force across the Colombian border, they even attempted a military incursion with Colombian paramilitaries, aiming to seize control of a Venezuelan city and install a “provisional government” to be recognized by the U.S. and the Collective West.

    The Venezuelan opposition’s actions are indefensible. They have been linked to multiple assassination attempts against President Maduro, including plots to decapitate Venezuela’s political and military leadership using explosives. They organized a mercenary incursion aimed at violently overthrowing the Bolivarian government, with the explicit goal of assassinating Maduro and as many Bolivarian leaders as possible. They have enthusiastically supported the U.S. blockade’s economic asphyxiation—which remains in place—while sabotaging every election since 2013 through violent disruptions.

    Repeatedly, they have called on the military to revolt, urging the overthrow of Venezuela’s democratically elected governments (under both Chávez and Maduro). Their tactics include systematic infrastructure sabotage, consistently timed to coincide with elections. They have exacerbated U.S. sanctions by promoting hoarding, artificially inflating prices, and engineering shortages of basic goods—deliberately inflicting severe hardship on the population. Even worse, they manipulated Venezuela’s currency crisis through DolarToday, a platform that daily published inflated exchange rates to fuel hyperinflation.

    The opposition’s transgressions go even further. On multiple occasions they have enlisted the services of mercenary Erik Prince, even launching a crowdfunding campaign (Ya Casi Venezuela) to finance his proposed violent overthrow of President Maduro’s government. They are currently under FBI investigation for large-scale corruption, accused of embezzling nearly US$1 billion in humanitarian aid meant for Venezuelans abroad – of which mere 2% as properly allocated). Worse still, they have fraudulently managed over US$40 billion in Venezuelan assets through shady contracts with Miami-based firms, exchanging national resources for personal bribes. Their attempt to replicate the DolarToday scheme was swiftly  crushed by the government, which acted decisively to shut it down.

    This brazen subversion aligns with broader U.S. imperial ambitions. In a blatant reaffirmation of the Monroe Doctrine, SOUTHCOM commander Admiral Alvin Holsey declared before the Senate Armed Services Committee (13 February 2025) that the U.S. must prevail in the “strategic competition with China in the Western Hemisphere” and counter “Russia’s malign agenda” – naming Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua as their conduits. Thus Washington now openly frames its assault on Bolivarian Revolution as part of its geopolitical competition with China and Russia. US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth underscored this stance on 6 June 2025, bluntly stating “We are preparing for war with China.”

    Yet, despite 12 years of relentless aggression since Comandante Chávez’s passing, the Venezuelan people have shown extraordinary resilience, defying predictions of inevitable collapse. The government’s response? Deepening democracy. Ahead of upcoming municipal and mayoral elections (27 July 2025), Venezuela is intensifying its participatory democracy model, empowering the comunas –grassroots, self-managed councils where communities directly decide and implement projects to improve their living standards: direct democracy.

    President Maduro has announced the “creation of the Communal Portfolio Fund of the national budget” that will directly allocate resources to projects developed by local communities. These funds will be managed through communal circuits, with spending priorities democratically decided by commune inhabitants themselves.

    In revealing interview (7 June 2025), Jesús Faría, PSUV Vice Minister of Productive Economy of the PSUV, emphasized the urgent need to accelerate the expansion of Communal direct democracy and consolidate people’s power. Faría made a critical observation: the PSUV must take the lead in advancing the commune system. With tens of thousands of grassroots organizations across Venezuela, the PSUV maintains a Gramscian hegemony –not by imposition but by organically articulating this vibrant social ecosystem into a cohesive for socialism. Its structural bonds with them enable it to harmonize and mobilize this rich social universe towards socialist construction.

    Thus, even as U.S. imperialism doubles down on its fanatical crusade to destroy the Bolivarian Revolution, Venezuela is fortifying its socialist foundations. By empowering communes, deepening participatory democracy, and strengthening the PSUV’s vanguard role, the revolution is building unshakable resilience—proving that people’s power, not imperial aggression, will shape Venezuela’s future.

    ENDNOTES:

    [1] If we take December 1999 as the start, of the Bolivarian Revolution is 25 years old; the Venezuela Solidarity Campaign was founded on 25 May 2005, thus making 20 years old. We pay homage to the Bolivarian process for keeping alive and fulfilling humanity’s dream of a better world.

    [2] On the details of the Venezuela-Guyana dispute.

    The post Unrelenting Bolivarian Resistance against Stubborn US Aggression first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Bombs Away

    “Iran, the bully of the Middle East, must now make peace. If they do not, future attacks will be far greater and a lot easier,” said President Trump as he addressed the American people shortly after announcing he was bombing Iran. I was too young to watch my political leaders spiral themselves into the war in Iraq – I was only old enough to be able to comprehend the final toll: one million Iraqis died because my country couldn’t help itself from another power grab in the Middle East. I can’t help but feel that the same thing is happening all over again.

    Myself, and countless other Americans, are ashamed at how many people have been killed in our name or with our tax dollars. The comfy politicians in Washington condescend to us — that our concern for human life actually goes against our own interests — as if Palestinians and Iranians do more to hurt Americans than the politicians and billionaires who gutted out industry, automated our jobs, privatized education, and cut social services. In our daily life, the people who actually hate us only become more obvious.

    Last week before it was absolutely clear that the US would formally enter the war, public opinion polls came out that a vast majority of Americans did not want the US to go to war. This was not the case in the lead up to the war in Iraq. Times and opinions have changed amongst the masses, but that didn’t seem to matter to anyone in the White House yesterday.

    In the aftermath of 9/11, our leaders were awfully good at convincing Americans that they needed revenge for what happened. Even if it wasn’t logical, even if it didn’t make sense — we invaded two countries that had nothing to do with 9/11. Revenge is often carried out in a blind rage, and I would say that characterized US actions in Iraq, given the barbaric nature of how the war was carried out, how many civilians died, and with a fallout that’s done very little for “strategic security interests”. I would say that it was a “blind rage” if its violence wasn’t so calculated — specifically to enrich a handful of Americans. It did succeed in that endeavor, and American families had their sons and daughters sent home in body bags so Haliburton’s stock could skyrocket. The Iraqi people, with unsolicited promises to be “liberated” from Saddam, got nothing but grief and trauma that continues twenty years later. It was perhaps hard to justify all of that to the public; American public opinion has changed a lot, and so has US-led warfare as a result of that shift.

    So, Donald Trump has made it obvious (in case it wasn’t before) that the consent of the governed doesn’t hold any weight in the United States of America. However, it’s still an interesting thing to examine in our current context. Despite a barrage of lies about nuclear weapons (like Saddam’s WMDs) and images of scary, oppressive mullahs (like the ‘dictator Saddam’) Americans still opposed a US war on Iran. If Americans were to leverage this public opinion against war in a meaningful way, by taking some sort of step past having a stance in their heads, what would it challenge? What would it look like? Will Americans oppose – at a large enough scale, US warfare that looks slightly different than it did in 2003?

    US warmaking is more subtle to the American public, but not less deadly to the countries we impose it on. Trump insisted in his address to the nation that he has no plans to keep attacking Iran as long as they “negotiate”. This is after Israel killed Iranian negotiators with US approval, and after Iran had made clear their terms of negotiating that the US just couldn’t accept. There’s no definition about what Iranian compliance would look like, setting the stage for further bombing campaigns whenever Trump decides. There might not be troops on the ground or a US military occupation, but a war they refuse to call one is still functionally a war. It still kills people. It still destabilizes countries.

    The US fights wars with money, private contractors, and “offensive support”. Only pouring into the streets to oppose sending troops to fight on behalf of Israel against Iran might not be the demand that becomes most pressing in the coming days and weeks. For example, will Americans oppose a war with Iran if it’s primarily conducted from the air?

    There’s also a large sector of the American public that still morally supports Israel’s military in one way or another, whether it be overtly or with silence on the subject. Some of them might also make up the large portion of society that opposes the US going to war. For the last two years, as Israel has carried out its genocide campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, the US has been building up Israel’s military, sending off billions of our tax dollars to make sure Israel was perfectly poised for the moment it decided to kill Iranians. Whether the public who opposes war with Iran likes it or not, their support for Israel as a military ally will directly contradict their opinion opposing war with Iran. You can’t have your cake and eat it too, if we want to put it simply.

    On the other side, Israel’s war crimes in Gaza also might have something to do with why opposition to the war on Iran is so prevalent. Because the back-up justification for attacking Iran, made by the ruling class, in case the nuke lies didn’t work, was portraying Iran’s leaders as scary, irrational, and evil boogeymen. The ruling class, decrying an evil Hitler-esque foreign leader in Iran, is now the boy crying wolf. We were told the same things about the leaders in Libya and Iraq to justify our country bombing of theirs. The result was Libyan, Iraqi, and to a lesser extent, American blood pooling in the streets. On top of that collective memory, we’ve seen our government entrench itself with Netanyahu — a commander of a military that’s killed countless Palestinians and a handful of Americans without any condemnation from our government. If there are murderous and unjust dictators in the Middle East, one of them is named Benjamin Netanyahu, and we are told he’s our greatest ally, and acting on behalf of Israel is acting in the best interest of Americans. Now, even if the US wanted the war on Iran all along, it appears to the world that Israel pulled us into the war – people do not like that, rightfully so.

    If Americans who are against the war can reject these new forms of hybrid warfare as much as they reject the traditional forms of warfare, and the sectors of the public still sympathetic to Israel see the blatant contradictions in front of their eyes — then perhaps this public opinion could mean something real. Furthermore, it’s been made clear that the American ruling class will not change course solely because the people they “serve” oppose what they are doing. They’ve also demonstrated that they are willing to jail and deport people who disagree with them and their foreign policy escapades. The genocide in Gaza has made it clear that Americans standing against the actions of their government do so at great personal risk. Do Americans disagree with US involvement in the war enough? Do they disagree to the point where they are willing to experience threats, jail time, repression, physical harm, or other forms of violence? In the case of a war that could turn nuclear with an untethered Israel and Trump Administration at the helm, I sincerely hope so. 

    The post Bombs Away first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The Century of the Jew is Hot Hot Wars

    Binoy Kampmark | The Mandarin

    Dr Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He writes extensively for various publications, including CounterPunch, Dissident Voice, and Eureka Street. He is currently lecturing at the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University.

    I just interviewed Binoy two hours ago, USA time, 3 PM PST, Sunday, 8 am Australia time.

    It’s extraordinary. The reasoning that led up to the attack on Iran was remarkable because the language and the terminology used is very creepily reminiscent, in fact,of the kind of language that was used in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq by the US-led so-called Coalition of the Willing. And it featured for example uh the reasoning that supposedly a country has a certain capacity — either has the capacity or has the inventory —  of weapons of mass destruction um is an imminent threat let’s not forget the sexed up dossier as it was called then uh supposedly showing that Saddam Hussein’s army have the capacity to, building up this case, padding it up, and making the case that a preemptive attack was necessary, which, of course, is totally ludicrous. Article 2, paragraph 4, makes it very clear in the UN Charter that the use of force is really strictly rationed.

    You know, you cannot violate the sovereignty of states willy-nilly. There is, of course, that self-defense proviso in Article 51 and so on. But to preempt this in this way is remarkable because you have to demonstrate sovereignty. .. that there is this imminent sense of destruction, irreparable damage and so on, and Israel in no way managed in any of its assessments to demonstrate that to be the case.

    We talked about the growing Jewish Semitism, this attack on all humanity, and the disgusting lack of values Western Media have displayed, and Binoy attributes much of that lack of concern for Gazan Humanity, or Iranian Humanity, or Lebanese Humanity, to the GUILT of that so-called Holocaust.

    Using words like Israel + Rogue Nation; Israel + Genocide; Jewish State of Israel + Mass Murder; Judaism a la Israel + White Supremacy; Jews in Israel + Psychopaths; Judaism Now + DIseased — all those combinations and MORE will get your ass in jail or worse.

    But he and I talked for an hour, and that was before I scoured the mainstream news and Telegram channels to see the latest in the President of the USA’s declarations of murdering Iranians, in a much more overtly direct way, though everything about West Asia, the wars, the Jewish Supremacist State, all of the trillions given to Jews in Israel and all the other trillions extracted by Jews in and out of Israel from the global economies, it’s still directed by the Jewish State of Our White Man’s House.

    Here’s our Interview on a Podcast-Substack — Paulo’s.

    So Adolph Bibi and Himmler Trump, working on the Greater Israel.

    Patrick Henningsen sums up the Trump regime,

    His entire cabinet has been bought by a foreign lobby. This is a low point in American history, and this is probably the weakest president politically […] The irony of this is it’s a billionaire Donald Trump, supposedly a genius of business. He doesn’t need the money […] He just doesn’t have the courage to basically be America first. He’s stuck being Israel first.

    Fun stuff over at Postcards from the End:

    Jews funding Trump are Americans, though, so it’s misleading to call them a “foreign lobby.” Like everybody else, Henningsen can’t say “his entire cabinet has been bought by Jews.” Trump is not getting billions from Israel. Bought and blackmailed by domestic Jews, he’s sending tons of American taxpayers’ money to foreign Jews. These righteous genociders are getting a fantastic return, plus countless laughs, on their investment.

    Trump’s enabling of Albert Bourla’s Jewjabs was cheered by all prominent Jews, plus gadfly Ron Unz.

    Binoy and I didn’t get deep into the dementia of the West, of Australia, NZ, the other QueenDumb colonies, and especially the lobotomized AmeriKKKa, but in Australia, it’s the same playbook of PR spin, a la Hasbara, a la Edward Bernays on Growth Hormones and Steroids.

    Binoy is articulate and was willing to go into my house to discuss things, with my bombast and all: We attempted to humanize the suffering, the mass murdering, the maiming, but alas, historians and journalists and political scientists have to keep on keeping on.

    Unlike the New York Times:

    The criminality is advanced in its cancerous stage:

    Donald Trump has carried out direct US air strikes on Iran, bombing what he said were three major nuclear sites.

    “We have completed our very successful attack on the three Nuclear sites in Iran, including Fordow, Natanz, and Esfahan”, Trump boasted, in a post on his website Truth Social on 21 June.

    “A full payload of BOMBS was dropped on the primary site, Fordow”, he wrote.

    I am sure the Aussies like the Brits like the EuroTrashLandians are all celebrating:

    We are all stuck with this VP Vance and the Jews Running the Minyan in Trump’s Cabal:

    An hour after announcing that he had directly bombed Iran, Trump posted a jpeg of a US flag.

    So, Binoy and I talked about Iran and the Illegal invasion of Iran by the Dirty Demented Sicarios of Isra-Hell, but this was barely on our tongue tips before the 60 minute interview stopped:

    Greater Psychopathic Israel, and so, this sort of Substack will soon get me disappeared or violently handcuffed into the night:

    Facts:

    This strategy was itself based on Israel’s 1996 policy document A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. In this document Israel’s strategy for regional security included destabilizing and weakening key nations seen as threats. The document explicitly called for efforts to undermine and topple the regimes in Iraq and Syria. It proposed supporting internal opposition within Iraq to weaken Saddam Hussein’s regime, particularly due to concerns over Iraq’s military capabilities and potential weapons of mass destruction, while Syria was viewed as a major regional threat because of its alliance with Iran and its support for Hezbollah. Although not directly calling for military action, the strategy also outlined efforts to counter Iran’s growing regional influence, especially its nuclear ambitions. The overarching aim was to reshape the Middle East by destabilizing these nations to reduce the perceived threats to Israel’s security.

    Jews: [Former United States Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle was the “Study Group Leader,” but the final report included ideas from Douglas Feith, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., Jonathan Torop, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, and IASPS president Robert Loewenberg.]

    *****

    I’ll let the interview stand here, and I’ll be interviewing Binoy with a more traditional Q & A format.

    Cheers, to Binoy, in his land’s dead of Winter.

  • How the US and Israel Used Rafael Grossi to Hijack the IAEA and Start a War on Iran

    IAEA Director General Grossi discusses Iran with former Israeli PM Bennett, June 3, 2022  (GPO)

    Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), allowed the IAEA to be used by the United States and Israel—an undeclared nuclear weapons state in long-term violation of IAEA rules—to manufacture a pretext for war on Iran, despite his agency’s own conclusion that Iran had no nuclear weapons program.

    On June 12, based on a damning report by Grossi, a slim majority of the IAEA Board of Governors voted to find Iran in non-compliance with its obligations as an IAEA member. Of the 35 countries represented on the Board, only 19 voted for the resolution, while 3 voted against it, 11 abstained and 2 did not vote.

    The United States contacted eight board member governments on June 10 to persuade them to either vote for the resolution or not to vote. Israeli officials said they saw the U.S. arm-twisting for the IAEA resolution as a significant signal of U.S. support for Israel’s war plans, revealing how much Israel valued the IAEA resolution as diplomatic cover for the war.

    The IAEA board meeting was timed for the final day of President Trump’s 60-day ultimatum to Iran to negotiate a new nuclear agreement. Even as the IAEA board voted, Israel was loading weapons, fuel and drop-tanks on its warplanes for the long flight to Iran and briefing its aircrews on their targets. The first Israeli air strikes hit Iran at 3 a.m. that night.

    On June 20, Iran filed a formal complaint against Director General Grossi with the UN Secretary General and the UN Security Council for undermining his agency’s impartiality, both by his failure to mention the illegality of Israel’s threats and uses of force against Iran in his public statements and by his singular focus on Iran’s alleged violations.

    The source of the IAEA investigation that led to this resolution was a 2018 Israeli intelligence report that its agents had identified three previously undisclosed sites in Iran where Iran had conducted uranium enrichment prior to 2003. In 2019, Grossi opened an investigation, and the IAEA eventually gained access to the sites and detected traces of enriched uranium.

    Despite the fateful consequences of his actions, Grossi has never explained publicly how the IAEA can be sure that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency or its Iranian collaborators, such as the Mojahedin-e-Khalq (or MEK), did not put the enriched uranium in those sites themselves, as Iranian officials have suggested.

    While the IAEA resolution that triggered this war dealt only with Iran’s enrichment activities prior to 2003, U.S. and Israeli politicians quickly pivoted to unsubstantiated claims that Iran was on the verge of making a nuclear weapon. U.S. intelligence agencies had previously reported that such a complex process would take up to three years, even before Israel and the United States began bombing and degrading Iran’s existing civilian nuclear facilities.

    The IAEA’s previous investigations into unreported nuclear activities in Iran were officially completed in December 2015, when IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano published its “Final Assessment on Past and Present Outstanding Issues regarding Iran’s Nuclear Program.”

    The IAEA assessed that, while some of Iran’s past activities might have been relevant to nuclear weapons, they “did not advance beyond feasibility and scientific studies, and the acquisition of certain relevant technical competences and capabilities.” The IAEA “found no credible indications of the diversion of nuclear material in connection with the possible military dimensions to Iran’s nuclear program.”

    When Yukiya Amano died before the end of his term in 2019, Argentinian diplomat Rafael Grossi was appointed IAEA Director General. Grossi had served as Deputy Director General under Amano and, before that, as Chief of Staff under Director General Mohamed ElBaradei.

    The Israelis have a long record of fabricating false evidence about Iran’s nuclear activities, like the notorious “laptop documents” given to the CIA by the MEK in 2004 and believed to have been created by the Mossad. Douglas Frantz, who wrote a report on Iran’s nuclear program for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, revealed that the Mossad created a special unit in 2003 to provide secret briefings on Iran’s nuclear program, using “documents from inside Iran and elsewhere.”

    And yet Grossi collaborated with Israel to pursue its latest allegations. After several years of meetings in Israel and negotiations and inspections in Iran, he wrote his report to the IAEA Board of Governors and scheduled a board meeting to coincide with the planned start date for Israel’s war.

    Israel made its final war preparations in full view of the satellites and intelligence agencies of the western countries that drafted and voted for the resolution. It is no wonder that 13 countries abstained or did not vote, but it is tragic that more neutral countries could not find the wisdom and courage to vote against this insidious resolution.

    The official purpose of the International Atomic Energy Agency, or IAEA, is “to promote the safe, secure and peaceful use of nuclear technologies.” Since 1965, all of its 180 member countries have been subject to IAEA safeguards to ensure that their nuclear programs are “not used in such a way as to further any military purpose.”

    The IAEA’s work is obviously compromised in dealing with countries that already have nuclear weapons. North Korea withdrew from the IAEA in 1994, and from all safeguards in 2009. The United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, France and China have IAEA safeguard agreements that are based only on “voluntary offers” for “selected” non-military sites. India has a 2009 safeguard agreement that requires it to keep its military and civilian nuclear programs separate, and Pakistan has 10 separate safeguard agreements, but only for civilian nuclear projects, the latest being from 2017 to cover two Chinese-built power stations.

    Israel, however, has only a limited 1975 safeguards agreement for a 1955 civilian nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States. An addendum in 1977 extended the IAEA safeguards agreement indefinitely, even though the cooperation agreement with the U.S. that it covered expired four days later. So, by a parody of compliance that the United States and the IAEA have played along with for half a century, Israel has escaped the scrutiny of IAEA safeguards just as effectively as North Korea.

    Israel began working on a nuclear weapon in the 1950s, with substantial help from Western countries, including France, Britain and Argentina, and made its first weapons in 1966 or 1967. By 2015, when Iran signed the JCPOA nuclear agreement, former Secretary of State Colin Powell wrote in a leaked email that a nuclear weapon would be useless to Iran because “Israel has 200, all targeted on Tehran.” Powell quoted former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad asking, “What would we do with a nuclear weapon? Polish it?”

    In 2003, while Powell tried but failed to make a case for war on Iraq to the UN Security Council, President Bush smeared Iran, Iraq and North Korea as an “axis of evil,” based on their alleged pursuit of “weapons of mass destruction.” The Egyptian IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei, repeatedly assured the Security Council that the IAEA could find no evidence that Iraq was developing a nuclear weapon.

    When the CIA produced a document that showed Iraq importing yellowcake uranium from Niger, just as Israel had secretly imported it from Argentina in the 1960s, the IAEA only took a few hours to recognize the document as a forgery, which ElBaradei immediately reported to the Security Council.

    Bush kept repeating the lie about yellowcake from Niger, and other flagrant lies about Iraq, and the United States invaded and destroyed Iraq based on his lies, a war crime of historic proportions. Most of the world knew that ElBaradei and the IAEA were right all along, and, in 2005, they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, for exposing Bush’s lies, speaking truth to power and strengthening nuclear non-proliferation.

    In 2007, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) by all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies agreed with the IAEA’s finding that Iran, like Iraq, had no nuclear weapons program. As Bush wrote in his memoirs, “…after the NIE, how could I possibly explain using the military to destroy the nuclear facilities of a country the intelligence community said had no active nuclear weapons program?” Even Bush couldn’t believe he would get away with recycling the same lies to destroy Iran as well as Iraq, and Trump is playing with fire by doing so now.

    ElBaradei wrote in his own memoir, The Age of Deception: Nuclear Diplomacy in Treacherous Times, that if Iran did do some preliminary research on nuclear weapons, it probably began during the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, after the US and its allies helped Iraq to manufacture chemical weapons that killed up to 100,000 Iranians.

    The neocons who dominate U.S. post-Cold War foreign policy viewed the Nobel Prize winner ElBaradei as an obstacle to their regime change ambitions around the world, and conducted a covert campaign to find a more compliant new IAEA Director General when his term expired in 2009.

    After Japanese diplomat Yukiya Amano was appointed as the new Director General, U.S. diplomatic cables published by WikiLeaks revealed details of his extensive vetting by U.S. diplomats, who reported back to Washington that Amano “was solidly in the U.S. court on every key strategic decision, from high-level personnel appointments to the handling of Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program.”

    After becoming IAEA Director General in 2019, Rafael Grossi not only continued the IAEA’s subservience to U.S. and Western interests and its practice of turning a blind eye to Israel’s nuclear weapons, but also ensured that the IAEA played a critical role in Israel’s march to war on Iran.

    Even as he publicly acknowledged that Iran had no nuclear weapons program and that diplomacy was the only way to resolve the West’s concerns about Iran, Grossi helped Israel to set the stage for war by reopening the IAEA’s investigation into Iran’s past activities. Then, on the very day that Israeli warplanes were being loaded with weapons to bomb Iran, he made sure that the IAEA Board of Governors passed a resolution to give Israel and the U.S. the pretext for war that they wanted.

    In his last year as IAEA Director, Mohamed ElBaradei faced a similar dilemma to the one that Grossi has faced since 2019. In 2008, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies gave the IAEA copies of documents that appeared to show Iran conducting four distinct types of nuclear weapons research.

    Whereas, in 2003, Bush’s yellowcake document from Niger was clearly a forgery, the IAEA could not establish whether the Israeli documents were authentic or not. So ElBaradei refused to act on them or to make them public, despite considerable political pressure, because, as he wrote in The Age of Deception, he knew the U.S. and Israel “wanted to create the impression that Iran presented an imminent threat, perhaps preparing the grounds for the use of force.” ElBaradei retired in 2009, and those allegations were among the “outstanding issues” that he left to be resolved by Yukiya Amano in 2015.

    If Rafael Grossi had exercised the same caution, impartiality and wisdom as Mohamed ElBaradei did in 2009, it is very possible that the United States and Israel would not be at war with Iran today.

    Mohamed ElBaradei wrote in a tweet on June 17, 2025, “To rely on force and not negotiations is a sure way to destroy the NPT and the nuclear non-proliferation regime (imperfect as it is), and sends a clear message to many countries that their “ultimate security” is to develop nuclear weapons!!!”

    Despite Grossi’s role in U.S.-Israeli war plans as IAEA Director General, or maybe because of it, he has been touted as a Western-backed candidate to succeed Antonio Guterres as UN Secretary General in 2026. That would be a disaster for the world. Fortunately, there are many more qualified candidates to lead the world out of the crisis that Rafael Grossi has helped the U.S. and Israel to plunge it into.

    Rafael Grossi should resign as IAEA Director before he further undermines nuclear non-proliferation and drags the world any closer to nuclear war. And he should also withdraw his name from consideration as a candidate for UN Secretary General.

    The post How the US and Israel Used Rafael Grossi to Hijack the IAEA and Start a War on Iran first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Lessons from Vieques: Resisting U.S. Militarism, Building Unity


    Around two years ago, I watched a puppet show, created by a group of eight to 16-year-olds at the summer camp where I worked, about the eviction of the U.S. Navy from the island of Vieques. After I conducted a few brief workshops reviewing the island’s history of military occupation and contamination, the campers immediately grasped the importance of the decades long struggle to evict the U.S. Navy, which they represented with a puppet of a venomous snake; on the other hand, they used the iconic native Puerto Rican frog, the coquí, to depict participants in the popular uprising against the U.S. military.

    This May marked 22 years since the US Navy was evicted from the island of Vieques. The story of Vieques should be understood by us organizers, just as it was by these campers through their puppet show, as we seek to build an anti-militarist climate movement that breaks down silos between supposedly separate organizing spaces. As we seek to build an anti-militarist climate movement and shape the global narratives in upcoming events, looking at Vieques’ past and present history is crucial.

    Vieques is an island off the coast of mainland Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony since 1898, in a state of limbo where Boricuas (Puerto Ricans) have U.S. citizenship but cannot vote, and at the same time, are unable to pursue self-determination through independence. Vieques was long exploited by wealthy landowners and the U.S. mainland’s economy for sugar production. In 1941, the Navy seized Vieques, with the goal of creating a colonial outpost in the Atlantic Ocean to mirror its base occupying Hawai’i, Pearl Harbor, in the Pacific. The island’s population of 10,000 was then forced to relocate to a small area of the island. Some wealthy landowners sold their land, while the U.S. government confiscated other plots of land for “public” use.

    For over 60 years, the U.S. Navy used Vieques as a bomb testing site, scorching the crust of the island by dropping around three million pounds of napalm, depleted uranium, and other toxic chemicals onto the land. Many of these bombs would then go on to be used on the people and soil of Palestine, itself a deadly testing ground for the U.S. war machine. Despite the extraordinary levels of chemical pollution, there was no hospital on the island. Additionally, the 1920 Jones Act restricted Puerto Rico to importing only U.S.-built, U.S.-owned, U.S.-operated, and U.S.-crewed cargo. This stranglehold continues to make any resources for the island extremely expensive.

    These were clear-cut conditions. The U.S. empire was poisoning the island and cutting it off from necessary goods, demonstrating Puerto Rico’s broader colonial status. In 1999, Daniel Sanes Rodriguez, a civilian employee of the naval base, was killed by an accidental off-target bomb. This was the spark of a protest movement made up of tens of thousands of people demanding the U.S. military leave the island. Protest tactics included encampments in the bomb range, graffiti, destruction of military property, and marches that included every sector of society, including religious leaders, fishers, environmental activists, students, and labor leaders. It also included leaders who were independence activists, statehood advocates, and advocates for commonwealth status.

    In 2001, President George Bush announced that the naval base would be closed. In May 2003, the U.S. Navy left the island and, ironically, converted the former base into a nature reserve. While the U.S. government has stalled for two decades in its promises of clean-up, this was a moment of victory. This monumental achievement was brought about by as wide an array of groups as the base impacted. By uniting in a popular struggle against U.S. militarism, the people of Vieques showed the world that the naval base had absolutely no business continuing to occupy their land. This moment was also considered a massive touchstone in the fight for a free and independent Puerto Rico.

    This isn’t to say that these tactics, this moment, or this rubric for what constitutes victory can be applied to every situation. But we can learn a lot about movement building and breaking out of what can appear to be separate organizing spaces. This was a win for independence, environmentalists, survival, and sovereignty. It’s pretty simple: wherever the U.S. war machine is active, the fight against it and for sovereignty is the fight for the land.

    So why isn’t this mirrored within the belly of the beast? Sometimes it is, in the examples of protests to stop the building of Cop City in Atlanta and in protests against the construction of new prisons. But when we discuss “the climate movement” and “the anti-war movement,” we must address why they’re institutionally separated through organizations, slogans, and targets. It’s no mystery – we can go down the list: funding, “pragmatism,” societal conditioning, greenwashing, internalized racism.

    With COP, the U.N. Climate Conference, less than six months away, it’s time to clarify our targets and identify the flashpoints of struggle. However toothless, co-opted, and irredeemable the annual “diplomatic” event is, with countries around the world cyclically refusing to take any meaningful action to address the climate crisis, it is also an event where the world’s climate movement plays a large role in shaping narratives, either in the conference itself or in people’s counter-conferences.

    We must call attention to  Puerto Rico – how it has been used for NATO training to continue escalation in the environmentally catastrophic Ukraine war, and how it has served the U.S.’s claim of Latin America and the Caribbean as its so-called backyard through its role in the U.S. Southern Command. Just as U.S. militarism in Hawai’i and the Philippines has been used to claim the Asia-Pacific in its escalation against China. We must trace the deadly supply chain of the bombs tested on Vieques, which have since been used to decimate entire communities in  Palestine, destroying the local and global environment. And we must highlight the poisoning of the soil in Vieques, where residents are 27% more likely to be fighting cancer than the rest of Puerto Rico, and 280% more likely to be fighting lung cancer specifically. The same empire that poisoned Vieques now strangles Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela with sanctions, blocking their ability to address the climate crisis effectively. These sites of struggle for national sovereignty are just as much about our collective survival.

    This year, at COP and in every climate space, our only hope is to learn from and center the past and present struggle in Vieques and everywhere else bearing the brunt of U.S. militarism, to clearly understand where our enemies converge, and to act accordingly because one thing that we can learn from Vieques and from the eight to 16-year-old campers telling Vieques’ story is that it’s clear when something is a venomous snake.

    The post Lessons from Vieques: Resisting U.S. Militarism, Building Unity first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Thanksgiving Challenge

    Sooner or later, all of us will have to face this question from a young child over Thanksgiving dinner:
    “Dad, Mom, Grandpa, Grandma – why did we have all those fights with other countries back then?”

    VIETNAM? “We fought them there so that we didn’t have to fight them on Wiltshire Boulevard!”

    CAMBODIA: “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Saigon!”

    LAOS? “So we that we didn’t have to fight them in Danang!”

    GRANADA? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Saint Thomas!”

    NICARAGUA? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in El Paso!”

    EL SALVADOR? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Nogales!”

    GAUTEMALA? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Yuma!”

    HONDURAS? “So that St. Louis wouldn’t be ranked as the Murder Capital of North America!”

    All of CENTRAL AMERICA? “So that the indigenes are kept in peonage – providing law-abiding, tax-paying, God-fearing Americans with an abundance of nutritious bananas at a price they can afford!”

    COLOMBIA? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Peru or Ecuador!”

    LEBANON? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Dearborn!”

    IRAQ in 1990? “So that we wouldn’t have to walk to work or to school!”

    KOSOVO? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Albania!”

    AFGHANISTAN? “So that we didn’t have to fight them in Washington, New York or MacLean!”

    WHY for 20 YEARS? “So that our generals could fight for honors over in Bagram rather than in the Pentagon!”

    IRAQ – the second time? “So that George W. Bush would stop fighting with his father!”

    LIBYA? “So that Barack Obama wouldn’t have to fight with Hillary!”

    SYRIA? “So that Barack Obama wouldn’t have to fight with Bibi Netanyahu!”

    SOMALIA? “So that we didn’t risk running out of places to train our soldiers and hone their counter-insurgency techniques in order to protect us from them!”

    YEMEN? “So that Crown Prince Mohammed bin-SALMAN would remain our loyal partner and keep inviting our Presidents to bashes in Riyadh with those terrific sword dances!”

    CONGO? “Because Barack Obama was enthralled by Conrad’s Heart of Darkness!”

    MALI? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight then in Niger!”

    NIGER? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Chad!”

    CHAD? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight then again in Burkina-Faso!”

    BURKINO-FASO? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them again back in MALI!”

    TUNISIA? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Algeria!”

    PANAMA? “So that we wouldn’t have to collar Noriega in South Beach!”

    CUBA: “AULD LANG SYNE!”

    VENEZUELA? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in CITGO gas stations!”

    IRAN: “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in Tel Aviv!”

    RUSSIA – in Ukraine? “So that we wouldn’t have to fight them in the Fulda Gap!”

    NORDSTROM II PIPELINE?: “So that we wouldn’t be haunted by nightmares of Vladimir Putin and Olaf Schulz having a friendly plaudern in Deutsch in Kaliningrad over a beer at the Kropotkin on Teatralnaya!”

    CHINA? “So that we could twirl our index finger in the air shouting – USA! USA!!”

    Dad/Mom: Who is ‘THEM’? “I see that the pumpkin pie is ready. Let’s talk some more after dessert!”

    The post Thanksgiving Challenge first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Bombs Have Impacted Foundation of Global Security Order

    Destroying peace. Illustration: Liu Rui/GTDestroying peace. Illustration: Liu Rui/GT

    On Saturday local time, the US announced that it had launched airstrikes on three nuclear facilities in Iran. This marks the first time the US has officially intervened militarily in this round of the Iran-Israel conflict, drawing widespread shock from the international community. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said on social media that the move was “a dangerous escalation in a region already on the edge – and a direct threat to international peace and security.” China’s Foreign Ministry also strongly condemned the US attacks on Iran. US action, which seriously violates the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and international law, not only heightens tensions in the Middle East but also risks triggering a wider crisis.

    Attacking nuclear facilities is extremely dangerous. Due to their unique nature, damage to such sites could lead to severe nuclear leaks, potentially resulting in humanitarian disasters and posing grave risks to regional safety. The tragic past lessons of the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear accidents already showed that the consequences of nuclear leaks don’t pose a threat to a single country – they impact neighboring nations and the global security environment.

    By using “bunker-buster” bombs to “accomplish what Israel could not,” the US has deliberately escalated the level of weaponry used, pouring fuel on the flames of war and pushing the Iran-Israel conflict closer toward an uncontrollable state.

    What the US bombs have impacted is the foundation of the international security order. By attacking nuclear facilities under the safeguards of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Washington has set a dangerous precedent. This action, in essence, bypasses both the UN Security Council and the IAEA framework, attempting to unilaterally “resolve” the Iranian nuclear issue through force. This is a serious violation of the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and international law, as well as a rejection of the principled position of the international community, including China and the European Union, which has dealt with the Iranian nuclear issue through multilateral negotiations for many years. Washington’s boast of close cooperation with Israel “as a team” confirms its nature of dragging its ally against international morality and multilateralism.

    For Iran, the strike is a blatant provocation. After responding that it “reserves all options to defend its sovereignty, interests and people,” Tehran on Sunday launched the powerful Kheibar Shekan missile targeting Israel for the first time. According to media reports, Ismail Kowsari, a member of the National Security Commission of the Parliament in Iran, said the country’s parliament voted to approve the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council is expected to weigh in and make a final decision on the matter. Iran is located in the choke point of the Strait of Hormuz, which around one-fifth of the world’s total oil and gas consumption transits through. Once this channel is blocked by the war, international oil prices are bound to fluctuate dramatically, while global shipping security and economic stability will face serious challenges.

    The US military’s “direct involvement” has further complicated and destabilized the Middle East situation, drawing more countries and innocent civilians into the conflict and forcing them to face a loss. Even the Associated Press called the airstrikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities a “perilous decision,” while the New York Times warned that US military action against Iran would “bring risks at every turn.” What is also receiving a lot of attention is that due to US strike on Iran, Yemen’s Houthis announced it would resume attacks on US ships in the Red Sea. The region is already entangled in a complex web of sectarian divisions, proxy wars and external interventions. The facts show that US involvement is causing the Iran-Israel conflict to spill over. Within just one day, international investors rushed to sell off risk assets, and discussions of a “sixth Middle East war” surged across media platforms, reflecting the global community’s growing anxiety over the region’s spiraling instability.

    China has consistently opposed the threat and abuse of using force. It advocates resolving crises through political and diplomatic means. In a recent phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping put forward a “four-point proposal” regarding the Middle East situation: promoting a cease-fire and ending the hostilities is an urgent priority; ensuring the safety of civilians is of paramount importance; opening dialogue and negotiation is the fundamental way forward; and efforts by the international community to promote peace are indispensable. This proposal reflects China’s long-standing and farsighted security vision. History in the Middle East has repeatedly shown that external military intervention never brings peace – it only deepens regional hatred and trauma. The false logic behind US coercion by force runs counter to peace. Hopefully, the parties involved, especially Israel, will implement an immediate cease-fire, ensure the safety of civilians and open dialogue and negotiation to restore peace and stability in the region.

    The post US Bombs Have Impacted Foundation of Global Security Order first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Directive to Iran: Retaliation Bad; De-Escalation Good

    De-escalation has become one of those coarse words in severe need of banishment, best kept in an index used by unredeemable hypocrites. It is used by the living dead in human resources, management worthies and war criminals. It’s almost always used to target the person or entity that exerts retribution or seeks to avenge (dramatic) or merely overcome (mildly) a state of affairs imposed upon them.

    You might be bullied in the workplace for being fastidious and conscientious, showing up your daft colleagues, or reputationally attacked by a member of the establishment keen to conceal his corrupt practices. When contemplating retaliation, the self-appointed middle ground types will call upon you to “de-escalate” the situation, insisting that you appeal to the better side of your bruised nature. After all, you know it was your fault.

    The joining of the United States in the war against Iran made Washington a co-conspirator to soiling international law and profaning its salient provisions. The US was in no immediate danger, nor was there any imminent threat, existential or otherwise, to its interests vis-à-vis Tehran. Yet President Donald Trump, having had the poison of persuasion poured into his ear by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had succumbed. His will annexed to that of the Israeli premier, Trump ordered the US Air Force on June 22 to conduct bombing raids on three Iranian nuclear facilities: Isfahan, Natanz and Fordow. They were recipients of that hefty example of phallocratic lethality known as the bunker buster, the GBU-57A Massive Ordnance Penetrator. With his usual unwavering confidence, Trump declared in an address to the nation that all the country’s “nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”

    In violating international law and desecrating that important canon injuncting states from committing crimes against peace, Israel and the United States are not the ones being told to restrain their violence and acknowledge breaching the United Nations Charter, risking yet another conflagration in the Middle East. It is their targeted state, the Republic of Iran, whose officials must “de-escalate” and play nice before the diplomatic table, abandoning a nuclear program, civil or military. “Iran, the bully of the Middle East,” Trump directs, “must now make peace.”

    With suddenness, the advocates and publicists for international law vanished across the broadly described West. In Europe, Canada, the US and Australia, the mores and customs observed by states could be conveniently forgotten and retired. In its place reigned the logic of brute force and unquestioned violence. Provided such violence is exercised by that rogue combine of Amerisrael, deference and dispensation will be afforded. The same could never be said for such countries as China and Russia, abominated for not accepting the “rules-based order” imposed by Western weaponry and force.

    The lamentable, plaintiff responses from Brussels to Canberra tell a sorry tale: pre-emptive war waged against a country’s nuclear and oil facilities is just the sort of thing that one is allowed to do, since the rotter in question is a theocratic state of haughty disposition and regional ambition. You can get away with murdering scientists in their sleep, along with their families, liquidating the upper echelons of their military leadership and killing journalists along the way.

    The approved formula behind these responses is as follows. From the outset, mention that Iran must never acquire a nuclear weapon. If possible, underline any relevant qualities that render it ineligible to any other state that has nuclear weapons. Instruct Tehran that diplomacy is imperative, and retaliation terrible. Behave and exercise restraint.

    Here is Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer of the UK, speaking from his Chequers country retreat: it was “clear Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon”, which was “why our focus has been on de-escalating, getting people back around to negotiate what is a very real threat in relation to the nuclear program.” If one was left in any doubt who the guilty party was, UK Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds helped dispel it, calling Iran “a threat to this country, not in an abstract way, not in a speculative way”.

    The German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, after convening his security cabinet on the morning of June 22, conveyed his views through German government spokesperson Stefan Kornelius: “Friedrich Merz reiterated his call for Iran to immediately begin negotiations with the US and Israel and to find a diplomatic solution to the conflict.”

    French President Emmanuel Macron similarly got on the de-escalation bandwagon with gusto, giving a teacherly warning to Iran to “exercise the greatest restraint” and dedicate itself to renouncing nuclear weapons. It was the only credible path to peace and security for all. The president conveniently skipped past the huge elephant in the room: Israel’s illicit possession of nuclear weapons, undeclared, unmonitored and extra-legal, as a factor that severely compromises the issue of stability in the Middle East.

    From the European Union, the attackers and the attacked were given equal billing. “I urge all sides to step back, return to the negotiating table and prevent further escalation,” urged Kaja Kallas, Vice-President of the European Commission. The obligatory “Iran must never be allowed to develop a nuclear weapon, as it would be a threat to international security” followed. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen also thought it perfectly sensible to matronly instruct the Iranians on the next step: “Now is the moment for Iran to engage in a credible diplomatic solution. The negotiating table is the only way to end this crisis.”

    All these comments are deliciously rich given that Israel has never entertained negotiations on any level with Iran, dismissive of its nuclear energy needs, while the first Trump administration sabotaged the diplomatically brokered Joint Plan of Comprehensive Action that successfully diverted Tehran away from a military nuclear program in favour of a lifting of sanctions. Talk from Amerisrael and their allies would seem to be heavily discounted, if not counterfeit. The glaring, coruscating message to Iran: retaliation bad; de-escalation good.

    The post Directive to Iran: Retaliation Bad; De-Escalation Good first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Skewed Diplomacy: Europe, Iran and Unhelpful Nuclear Nonsense

    Farce is a regular feature of international relations. It can be gaudy and lurid, dressed up in all manner of outfits. It can adopt an absurd visage that renders the subject comical and lacking in credibility. That subject is the European Union, that curious collective of cobbled, sometimes erratic nation states that has pretensions of having a foreign policy, hints at having a security policy and yearns for a cohering enemy.

    With its pre-emptive attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and much civilian infrastructure besides, Israel is being treated as a delicate matter. Condemnation of its attacks as a violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, which prohibits the threat or use of force against independent, sovereign states, should have been a formality. Likewise, the violation of the various protocols dealing with the protection of civilian infrastructure and nuclear facilities.

    Rather than chastise Israel for committing a crime against peace, Iran was chided for exercising a retaliatory right that arose the moment Israeli weaponry started striking targets across the country on June 12. A villain had been identified, but it was not Israel.

    With this skewed and absurd assessment of self-defence, notably by the Europeans and the US, French President Emmanuel Macron could only weakly declare that it was “essential to urgently bring these military operations to an end, as they pose serious threats to regional security.” On June 18, he gave his foreign minister Jean-Nöel Barrott the task of launching an “initiative, with close European partners, to propose a […] negotiated settlement, designed to end the conflict.” The initiative, to commence as talks on June 20 in Geneva, would involve the foreign ministers of France and Germany, along with Iran’s own Abbas Araghchi and relevant officials from the European Union.

    Not much in terms of detail has emerged from that gathering, though Macron was confident, after holding phone talks with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, of a “path” that would “end war and avoid even greater dangers”. To attain that goal, “we will accelerate the negotiations led by France and its European partners with Iran.”

    It has been reported that the E3 countries (France, Germany and the UK) felt that Israel would refuse to accept a ceasefire as things stood, while the resumption of negotiations between Tehran and Washington seemed unlikely. With these factors in mind, the proposal entailed conducting a parallel process of negotiations that would – again, a force of parochial habit – focus on Iranian conduct rather than Israeli aggression. Iran would have to submit to more intrusive inspections, not merely regarding its nuclear program but its ballistic missile arsenal, albeit permitting Tehran a certain uranium enrichment capacity.

    It was clear, in short, who was to wear the dunce’s hat. As Macron reiterated, Tehran could never acquire nuclear weapons. “It is up to Iran to provide full guarantees that its intentions are peaceful.”

    A senior Iranian official, speaking to Reuters on condition of anonymity, saw little to impress him. “The discussions and proposals made by the Europeans in Geneva were unrealistic. Insisting on these positions will not bring Iran and Europe closer to an agreement.” Having given the proposals a cold shower, the official nonetheless conceded that “Iran will review the European proposals in Tehran and present its responses in the next meeting.”

    The European proposals were more than unrealistic. They did nothing to compel Israel to stop its campaign, effectively making the Iranians concede surrender and return to negotiations even as their state is being destabilised. While their command structure and nuclear scientific establishment face liquidation, their civilian infrastructure malicious destruction, they are to be the stoic ones of the show, turning the other cheek. With this, Israel can operate outside the regulatory frameworks of nuclear non-proliferation, being an undeclared nuclear weapons state that also refuses to submit to inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

    The European proposition would also do nothing to stop what are effectively war crimes happening, and being planned, in real time. The EU states have made little of the dangers associated with Israel’s striking of nuclear facilities, something they were most willing to do when Russia seized the Zaporizhzhia plant from Ukraine in March 2022. During capture, the plant was shelled, while the ongoing conflict continues to risk the safety of the facility.

    The International Committee for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) has also drawn attention to the critical risks associated with attacking nuclear facilities. “The use of force against nuclear facilities,” it stated in a media release, “violates international law and risks radioactive contamination with long-term consequences for human health and environment.” That same point has been made by the director general of the IAEA, Rafael Marino Grossi. “Military escalation,” stated Grossi on June 16, “threatens lives, increases the chance of radiological release with serious consequences for people and the environment and delays indispensable work towards a diplomatic solution for the long-term assurance that Iran does not acquire a nuclear weapon.”

    US President Donald Trump’s own assessment of the EU’s feeble intervention was self-serving but apposite. “Nah, they didn’t help.” The Iranians did not care much for the Europeans. “They want to speak to us. Europe is not going to be able to help on this one.” In fact, the European effort, led unconvincingly by Macron, is looking most unhelpful.

    The post Skewed Diplomacy: Europe, Iran and Unhelpful Nuclear Nonsense first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • On Being Trump’s Director of National Intelligence

    On 17 June, a member of the media asked Trump: “Tulsi Gabbard testified in March that the intelligence community said that Iran wasn’t building a nuclear weapon.”

    Trump brusquely responded, “I don’t care what she said. I think they are very close to having one.”

    This is just another instance of the rudeness, arrogance, and imbecility of Trump. First, Trump chose Gabbard to be his director of national intelligence.

    Second, the assessment of Iran having a nuclear weapon program or not is not Gabbard’s assessment. It is, as she testified, on the “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community”: “the collective assessment of the 18 U.S. intelligence elements making up the U.S. Intelligence Community and draws on intelligence collection, information available to the IC from open-source and the private sector, and the expertise of our analysts.”

    During the 25 March threat assessment, Gabbard testified:

    The IC continues to assess that Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamanei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in 2003.

    Third, since Gabbard, the messenger, was belittled by Trump as “wrong,” then the U.S. Intelligence Community must likewise be held by Trump to be wrong. People are then left with Trump’s uncertainty, revealed by his “I think…,” as to Iran working on developing nuclear weapons. That begs the question of whether Americans want to see their sons and daughters go to war based on what Trump thinks over the assessment of 18 intelligence agencies?

    Nonetheless, Gabbard has tried to regain Trump’s good graces by, like Trump, discrediting the media. She posted on X.com:

    However, if one watches the linked source above, it corroborates that the media, in this case, accurately reflected the intelligence community’s assessment as related by Gabbard. Thus, Gabbard’s X post makes her come across as sycophantic. Not a good look for a politician or non-politician.

    If the ins and outs of politics is Gabbard’s bag — and it certainly seems to be — then she is in a tough spot. She already was forced, more-or-less, to leave the Democratic Party. And besides the Republican Party, there is no other major party to join in the United States,

    Part 2: Nonetheless, Tulsi Gabbard still has her supporters in some independent media circles.

    The post On Being Trump’s Director of National Intelligence first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Echoing The 2006 ‘Day Without An Immigrant,’ Call For Mass ‘Sickout’

    As the Trump administration continues to ramp up its regime of mass deportations, grassroots organizers are growing the immigrant rights movement in opposition.

    Last week, Trump promised to pause some ICE raids at workplaces over concerns from employers in the farming and hospitality industries. However, this week, Trump’s border czar Tom Homan confirmed that the raids will in fact continue.

    “We’re going to continue to do worksite enforcement operations, even on farms and hotels, but based on a prioritized basis. Criminals come first,” Homan told reporters on June 19.

    The post Echoing The 2006 ‘Day Without An Immigrant,’ Call For Mass ‘Sickout’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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  • Why Do We Hate Iran?

    Because they deserve it? Because we’re told to? Or because, in truth, we play dirty given the slightest excuse.

    Britain and America would like everyone to believe that hostilities with Iran began with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. But you have to go back over 70 years to find the root cause in America’s case, while Iranians have endured more than a century of British exploitation and bullying. The US-UK Axis don’t want this important slice of history resurrected to become part of public discourse. Here’s why.

    William Knox D’Arcy, having obtained a 60-year oil concession to three-quarters of Persia and with financial support from Glasgow-based Burmah Oil, eventually found oil in commercial quantities in 1908.  The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was formed and in 1911 and completed a pipeline from the oilfield to its new refinery at Abadan.

    Just before the outbreak of World War 1 Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted to convert the British fleet from coal. To secure a reliable oil source the British Government took a major shareholding in Anglo-Persian.

    In the 1920s and 1930s, the company profited hugely from paying the Persians a miserly 16% and refusing to renegotiate terms. An angry Persia eventually cancelled the D’Arcy agreement and took the matter to the Court of International Justice in The Hague. A new agreement in 1933 provided Anglo-Persian with a fresh 60-year concession but on a smaller area. The terms were slightly improved but still didn’t amount to a square deal.

    In 1935 Persia became known internationally by its other name, Iran, and the company was re-named Anglo-Iranian Oil. By 1950 Abadan was the biggest oil refinery in the world and the British government, with its 51% holding, had affectively colonized part of southern Iran.

    Iran’s tiny share of the profits had long soured relations and so did the company’s treatment of its oil workers. 6,000 went on strike in 1946 and the dispute was brutally put down with 200 dead or injured. In 1951 while Aramco shared profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis Anglo-Iranian handed Iran a miserable 17.5%.

    Hardly surprising, then, that Iran wanted economic and political independence. Calls to nationalise its oil could no longer be ignored. In March of that year the Majlis and Senate voted to nationalize Anglo-Iranian, which had controlled Iran’s oil industry since 1913 under terms frankly unfavourable to the host country.

    Social reformer Dr Mohammad Mossadeq was named prime minister by a 79 to 12 majority and promptly carried out his government’s wishes, cancelling Anglo-Iranian’s oil concession and expropriating its assets. His explanation was perfectly reasonable:

    Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries… have yielded no results thus far. With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and backwardness among our people.

    Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced…. Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence. (M. Fateh, Panjah Sal-e Naft-e Iran, p. 525)

    Britain, determined to bring about regime change, orchestrated a worldwide boycott of Iranian oil, froze Iran’s sterling assets and threatened legal action against anyone purchasing oil produced in the formerly British-controlled refineries. The Iranian economy was soon in ruins… All sounds very familiar, doesn’t it?

    Churchill (prime minister at the time) let it be known that Mossadeq was turning communist and pushing Iran into the arms of Russia just when Cold War anxiety was high. That was enough to bring America’s new president, Eisenhower, onboard and plotting with Britain to bring Mossadeq down.

    So began a nasty game of provocation, mayhem and deception. Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, in exile, signed two decrees, one dismissing Mossadeq and the other nominating the CIA’s choice, General Fazlollah Zahedi, as prime minister. These decrees were written as dictated by the CIA. The coup by MI6 and the CIA was successful and in August 1953, when it was judged safe for him to do so, the Shah returned to take over.

    For his impudence Mossadeq was arrested, tried, and convicted of treason by the Shah’s military court. He was imprisoned for 3 years then put under house arrest until his death. He remarked: “My greatest sin is that I nationalized Iran’s oil industry and discarded the system of political and economic exploitation by the world’s greatest empire… I am well aware that my fate must serve as an example in the future throughout the Middle East in breaking the chains of slavery and servitude to colonial interests.”

    His supporters were rounded up, imprisoned, tortured or executed. Zahedi’s new government reached an agreement with foreign oil companies to form a consortium to restore the flow of Iranian oil, awarding the US and Great Britain the lion’s share, with 40% going to Anglo-Iranian.

    The consortium agreed to split profits on a 50-50 basis with Iran but refused to open its books to Iranian auditors or allow Iranians to sit on the board.

    The US massively funded the Shah’s government, including his army and his hated secret police force, SAVAK. Anglo-Iranian changed its name to British Petroleum in 1954. Mossadeq died in 1967.

    Smouldering resentment for more than 70 years

    The British-American conspiracy that toppled Mossadeq, reinstated the Shah and let the American oil companies in, was the final straw for the Iranians. It all backfired 25 years later with the Islamic Revolution of 1978-9, the humiliating 444-day hostage crisis in the American embassy and a tragically botched rescue mission.

    If Britain and America had played fair and allowed the Iranians to determine their own future instead of using economic terrorism to bring the country to its knees Iran might today be “the only democracy in the Middle East”, a title falsely claimed by Israel which is actually a repulsive ethnocracy. So never mention the M-word MOSSADEQ – the Iranian who dared to break the chains of slavery and servitude to Western colonial interests.

    Is Britain incapable of playing fair? During the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88) the US, and eventually Britain, leaned strongly towards Saddam and the alliance enabled Saddam to more easily acquire or develop forbidden chemical and biological weapons. At least 100,000 Iranians fell victim to them.

    This is how John King, writing in 2003, summed it up. “The United States used methods both legal and illegal to help build Saddam’s army into the most powerful army in the Mideast outside of Israel. The US supplied chemical and biological agents and technology to Iraq when it knew Iraq was using chemical weapons against the Iranians. The US supplied the materials and technology for these weapons of mass destruction to Iraq at a time when it was known that Saddam was using this technology to kill his Kurdish citizens.

    “The United States supplied intelligence and battle planning information to Iraq when those battle plans included the use of cyanide, mustard gas and nerve agents. The United States blocked the UN censure of Iraq’s use of chemical weapons. The United States did not act alone in this effort. The Soviet Union was the largest weapons supplier, but England, France, and Germany were also involved in the shipment of arms and technology.”

    The company I worked for at that time supplied the Iranian government with electronic components for military equipment and we were mulling an invitation to set up a factory in Tehran when the UK Government announced it was revoking all export licences to Iran. They had decided to back Saddam. Hundreds of British companies were forced to abandon the Iranians at a critical moment.

    Betraying Iran and throwing our weight behind Saddam went well, didn’t it?

    Saddam was overthrown in April 2003 following the US/UK-led invasion of Iraq, and hanged in messy circumstances after a dodgy trial in 2006. The dirty work was left to the Provisional Iraqi Government. At the end of the day, we couldn’t even ensure that Saddam was dealt with fairly. “The trial and execution of Saddam Hussein were tragically missed opportunities to demonstrate that justice can be done, even in the case of one of the greatest crooks of our time”, said the UN Human Rights Council’s expert on extrajudicial executions.

    Philip Alston, a law professor at New York University, pointed to three major flaws leading to Saddam’s execution. “The first was that his trial was marred by serious irregularities denying him a fair hearing and these have been documented very clearly. Second, the Iraqi Government engaged in an unseemly and evidently politically motivated effort to expedite the execution by denying time for a meaningful appeal and by closing off every avenue to review the punishment. Finally, the humiliating manner in which the execution was carried out clearly violated human rights law.”

    In 2022 when Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, a British-Iranian, was freed after five years in a Tehran prison it transpired that the UK had owed around £400m to the Iranian government arising from the non-delivery of Chieftain battle tanks ordered by the Shah of Iran before his overthrow in 1979. Iran had been pursuing the debt for over four decades. In 2009 an international court in the Netherlands ordered Britain to repay the money. Iranian authorities said Nazanin would be released when the UK did so, but she suffered those years of incarceration, missing her children and husband in the UK, while the British government took its own sweet time before finally paying up.

    Now we’re playing dirty yet again, supporting an undemocratic state, Israel, which is run by genocidal maniacs and has for 77 years defied international law and waged a war of massacre, terror and dispossession against the native Palestinians. And we’re even protecting it in its lethal quarrel with Iran.

    It took President Truman only 11 minutes to accept and extend full diplomatic relations to Israel when the Zionist entity declared statehood in 1948 despite the fact that it was still committing massacres and other terrorist atrocities. Israel’s evil ambitions and horrendous tactics were well known and documented right from the start but eagerly backed and facilitated by the US and UK. In the UK’s case betrayal of the Palestinians began in 1915 thanks to Zionist influence. Even Edwin Montagu, the only Jew in the British Cabinet at that time, described Zionism as “a mischievous political creed, untenable by any patriotic citizen of the United Kingdom”.

    Sadly, the Zionist regime’s unspeakable cruelty and inhumanity against unarmed women and children in Gaza and the West Bank — bad enough in the decades before October 2023 but now showing the Israelis as the repulsive criminals they’ve always been — still isn’t enough to end US-UK adoration and support. UK prime minister Starmer much prefers to talk about “the malign influence of Iran”

    The excuse this time is that Iran’s nuclear programme might be about to produce weapons-grade material which is bad news for Israel. There’s a blanket ‘hush’ over Israel’s 200 (or is it 400?) nukes. The US and UK and allies think it’s OK for mad-dog Israel to have nuclear weapons but not Iran which has to live under this horrific Israeli threat. Then there’s America’s QME doctrine which guarantees Israel a ‘Qualitative Military Edge’ over its Middle East neighbours.

    Then consider that Israel is the only state in the region not to have signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. It hasn’t signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention either. It has signed but not ratified the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty, similarly the Chemical Weapons Convention. Yes, it’s quite evident that the Zionist entity, not Iran, is the ultimate “malign influence” in the Middle East.

    The post Why Do We Hate Iran? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Turning Political Repression into Movement Building

    My first years of progressive activism and organizing took place during the presidency of Richard Nixon, who, without a doubt, led one of the most repressive presidential administrations we have experienced in the United States in the modern era, prior to this Trump regime. It was under Nixon that the Republican Party, with its “southern strategy,” began to move toward becoming the kind of regressive entity that allowed pathological liar, racist, and convicted sexual abuser Donald Trump to be elected president in November 2016 and again in 2024.

    During Nixon’s first term, from 1969 to 1973, he oversaw the use of government agencies to attempt to destroy groups like the Black Panther Party, the American Indian Movement and the Young Lords, including armed attacks by police that resulted in deaths. Newly enacted conspiracy laws were used to indict leaders of the peace movement and other movements. An entirely illegal and clandestine apparatus was created to sabotage the campaigns of his political opponents in the Democratic Party, leading to the midnight break-in at the Watergate Hotel that eventually led to the exposure of this apparatus and Nixon’s forced resignation from office in 1974.

    I learned several things during those Nixon years about how to deal with government repression. Unfortunately, given Trump/MAGA’s attempts to replace US democracy with a fascist regime, those are very relevant lessons for today.

    One critical lesson is that there is a disparity in the government treatment of people of color—Black, Latino/a, Indigenous and Asian—compared with the treatment of people of European descent—white people. The historical realities of settler military aggression, broken treaties, slavery, Jim Crow segregation, assumed white dominance, and institutionalized racism continue to have their negative, discriminatory impacts.

    We are seeing this play out right now with the Trumpist arrests of Brown and Black immigrants, over 90% of whom, according to AI, have no criminal record. There can be little doubt that the intention is to use this racist campaign to establish a wholly new “justice” system which will increasingly come after not just immigrants but anyone who is consistently resisting their efforts to overturn democracy and install an authoritarian, repressive regime.

    Those of us of European descent must be conscious of these realities and act accordingly, prioritizing right now the defense of immigrant rights. Very big numbers of us are stepping up, demonstrating and engaging in nonviolent action, risking and getting arrested, in opposition to what is happening with ICE in particular.

    Government repression can’t be allowed to paralyze or divide organizations or movements. This is one of the objectives of an unjust government trying to repress those who challenge its policies and practices. That is one of the reasons why we need to be about the development of a movement culture that is respectful and healthy. Such a supportive cultural environment can help us weather this storm we are in and emerge from it stronger and better both as individual activists and organizers and as a mass progressive movement.

    This is one of the necessary elements for successful resistance to government repression.

    When I say “successful” I don’t mean that there won’t be casualties on our side, people behind bars, some for months or years, or people physically attacked and injured or worse, or deportation, job losses or greater economic hardship. It is clear that under a Trump/MAGA regime this is already happening and will continue and likely get worse, particularly for immigrants, people of color and low-income people generally.

    Other things which can defend our rights and our movements are these:

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

    -broad community support when repression happens. There are instances when ICE has attempted to arrest people and, on the spot, neighbors and others have prevented those arrests or, by their actions, have brought media attention to what is being attempted and, over time, have gotten people released from jail. It is a fact that there is a strong and extensive network of organizations nationally which is having an impact.

    All of this can immediately or over time serve to undercut support for the Trumpists, strengthen our justice movement and hasten the time when the power of the organized people overcomes them on the way to the worldwide social, economic, environmental and cultural changes needed for humanity and all life forms to avoid ecosystem and societal breakdown.

    Ultimately, what I have learned is that government repression can have a disruptive impact on our work, but we can turn a negative into a positive. The extent to which we can creatively, intelligently, and fearlessly demonstrate the truth of what we are about when responding to what they are doing to us is the extent to which we can have confidence that yes, we will win. Si, se puede!

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