US director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said on Monday the UK had agreed to drop its mandate for iPhone maker Apple to provide a “backdoor” that would have enabled access to the protected encrypted data of American citizens. Gabbard issued the statement on X, saying she had worked for months with Britain, along with…
The post UK agrees to drop ‘backdoor’ mandate for Apple appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
Healthy societies revel in who they are. Unhealthy societies view themselves in terms of either an ignominious past, current enemies who endanger them, or internal elements degrading the true, virtuous nature of the commune and sapping its strength. The United States through most of its history was in the first category. Today, it is clearly in the second. Therein lies our national tragedy – and our precipitous slide into Fascism American style.
This historic shift – with profound implications – has not been driven by tangible factors, originating within itself or externally, but strikingly by intangibles. The country has not experienced any traumatic shocks. No ruinous, humiliating wartime defeat and occupation. No economic crash. No civil war. No deeply rooted conflicts between Church and secular forces. Think of inter-war Europe: by comparison, the United States has been living in a benign environment. American exceptionalism. Stresses and strains, yes – nothing, though, of the magnitude that could explain so drastic a transformation.
YET, there is a pervasive feeling that things are not quite right, vague feelings of dread hover, that something awful may happen that we can neither anticipate, avert nor cope with, that America is ‘losing it.’ Free floating unease and apprehension. A United States that senses it is losing control, losing mastery of its environment and of itself, naturally will look for scapegoats. Why? Corrective action to straighten out what’s gone wrong requires constructive ideas, rigorous thinking, self-confidence. They don’t exist. Little is positive or constructive. Tearing down, destruction, perverting, corrupting predominate instead.1 The negative prevails. Let’s look at current scene – at public discourse, politics, the dominant themes, the level and type of citizen engagement.
What marks the landscape are: emotions eclipsing thought, intellectual aridity, the erasure of all boundaries to words or actions, the triumph of crude willpower. The rapid success of the Trump-led MAGA movement in putting in place the building blocks for a quasi-fascist regime is stunning testimony to how potent are the forces of negativity, to how pathetically weak the resistance of institutions, of organized political opposition, of civil society.
Instead of deliberate reflection, we round on “enemies” – abroad and at home.
Abroad
Today, there is near unanimity in the vilification of Russia cast as a reincarnate Soviet Union, in portraying China as a menace bent on supplanting the U.S. as a global hegemon by foul and illicit means, in denouncing Iran as fanatically dedicated in its attacks on American interests. Then, there are the Arab terrorists – an all-purpose label to be stuck on whichever groups in the Greater Middle East fight against American/Israeli domination and defy American dictation: inter alia Hezbollah, Hamas, ISIS, the Houthis, al-Shabab. Al-Qaeda, which authored the trauma and humiliation of 9/11, has lost its pride of place on the enemies list now that Washington has joined with its Syrian branch to topple Assad, head of Syria’s anti-Israel Arab nationalist government.
They are the hostiles who we say are conniving to bring America low. They represent an unprecedentedly multi-pronged threat to the national interest, to American self-esteem. They are assailing us ruthlessly in ever domain – military security, commerce and finance, our moral authority, even the political integrity of our impeccably democratic system by campaigns to disrupt and manipulate its workings.
These propositions enjoy the allegiance of almost the entire American political class. Nary a single influential member of the Congress (Sanders, Yes; AOC, No) disputes them – as evinced by endorsement of Trump’s arbitrary sanctions warfare despite a Constitutional stipulation that only Congress has the authority to impose sanctions, by drastic boosts in the Pentagon/Intelligence budgets, by sustained applause for the homicidal fanatic who has lured us into a genocidal campaign against Palestine’s Muslim Arabs, and by blanket support for war preparations against the PRC. Not a single MSM outlet submits this hard core of the nation’s foreign policy precepts to skeptical examination. The major think tanks supply endless justifications. The only debates focus on tactics and priorities. Moral considerations are banned by common – silent – consent.
[Stroll along Washington’s think tank rows of Massachusetts Avenue and ‘K’ Street and an attentive ear hears one uninterrupted declamation issuing from the minds that shape and propel American thinking about the world.]
Noticeably absent is the ideological component. In the Cold War, the historic contest between democratic capitalism and Communism overshadowed all else. In its place, we have the contrived effort to promote a specious – and mortal – combat between Democracy vs Autocracy. In the American camp are such paragons of democracy as Netanyahu, Bolsonaro, Zelensky, Bukele (el Salvador), Mohammed bin-Salman, the Gulf sheikhs, and Abu Mohammad al-Jalani – ex-al-Qaeda emir installed as President of Syria. Democrat Netanyahu bombed Democrat Jalani’s capital Damascus a week ago. If Washington does anything to calm that intramural ruckus, Trump no doubt would cite it as the capstone to his fabulous record as peacemaker to claim the Nobel Prize. Donald Trump is the lodestar for all of these faux democrats, the cynosure of Democratic values.
American elites and the citizenry overall seem to have no inkling as how far the country’s standing in the world has fallen – that we are seen as moral hypocrites and bullies everywhere outside the Collective West (its political class, anyway). That our reputation as a model of enlightened government and generator of public goods is shattered beyond restoration.
We are living in a fantasy world of our own imaginings that is only tenuously connected to reality. In that fictitious domain, fixed consensus exists in believing the most outlandish – and reckless – notions. So, we are mistreated to an extraordinary array of misconceptions about declared foes and what we can do to subdue them. Most dangerous of these unsupportable propositions are those that vastly exaggerate – indeed, misrepresent – the threat that they pose. Those articles of faith, in turn, evoke extraordinarily extreme actions and plans for war. In the former category, we find these gems: Putin’s ambition is to wash his boots in the English Channel; Russia will crumble under the stress of sanctions and defeat by Ukraine’s ‘liberation’ forces; Putin’s regime will be replaced by a West-friendly, oligarch-led sober version of the Yeltsin-era set-up; Russian weaponry is significantly inferior to American weaponry; Russia can be split away from China and/or China split away from Russia. China is weaker than it looks; Beijing can be coerced into yielding its claim to Taiwan as an integral part of China – an agreed principle dating back 50 years, abrogated unilaterally by Washington; the U.S. has the upper hand in any economic duel with the PRC; therefore, we can impose a Maginot line of technological deprivation that will put an end to China’s challenge to American global dominance. A prideful India will hamstring its growing economy by boycotting Russian energy supplies at Washington’s command; prideful Indians eagerly will sign up as Sepoy auxiliaries in the American campaign to yolk China. Unlimited, unqualified backing for Israel’s imperial ambitions serves American national interests; there is no reason to modify that judgment in the face of its genocide of the Palestinians – nor should it be modified in the face of its military aggressions in Lebanon, Syria and its unrelenting (successful) attempt to embroil the U.S. in an all-out war with Iran. The answer to Iran’s resistance to Israeli-American hegemony in the Middle East is regime change in Tehran. Airborne attacks will trigger a popular uprising. American precision weapons can destroy Iran’s enriched uranium stockpiles, its centrifuges and related nuclear facilities. {They have not. They never reached the inner chamber where the centrifuges were located – according to the most astute, neutral scientific assessment. Anyway, the High Enriched Uranium (HEU) and most of the centrifuges probably had been removed beforehand. Claims to the contrary emanating from the White House, the National Intelligence Agency (Tulsi Gabbard) and the Pentagon (Pete Hegseth) are outright lies referencing no pertinent data. Closer to home, there is the convenient belief that America’s drug addiction problem will disappear if we could dam the flow of narcotics from Mexico.
Our faith-based supposition is that the outcome of these intertwined projects will be a stronger, more secure United States; elimination or grave weakening of our enemies; and enhanced respect/influence round the world. The exact opposite has occurred.
Actions to achieve that outcome match the extremity of ambition. Policy elites are monolingual – they know only the lexicon of coercion, especially military coercion. Diplomacy is a dirty word, negotiations abhorrent. We dictate, we make demands, we intimidate, we set deadlines – we don’t discuss. We envision the outcome of a successful negotiation as resembling the Japanese surrender on the deck of the Missouri in Tokyo Bay. An unwitting parody of Tom Lehrer’s “Send In The Marines.” Failure – repeated, ignominious failure – is filtered out.
The consequences have been dire: costly for American well-being, murderously destructive out there, disintegrating of those international institutions and accords, arduously accomplished, that have lent a modicum of order and stability to inter-state dealings, and portents of nuclear war.
Let’s turn our attention to the last mentioned. Over the post-war years, the great powers came to the common conclusion that there was no such thing as victory in a nuclear war. Therefore, they bent to the task of controlling “The Bomb,” i.e. taking concrete measures to ensure that there could be no activation of nuclear weapons by miscalculation, technical error, or accident. Stability and control were the aims codified in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTB), the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT) and the follow-on Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty – all now abandoned or ignored by Washington.
They were complemented by clear understanding that the ‘rules of the road” governing their rivalry called for extreme caution in avoiding conflictual situations involving the U.S., the USSR or – later – China. Proxy wars, yes, but with restrictions. There was only one episode of Russian and American forces exchanging fire. That occurred in occasional dog fights between jets over the Yalu River separating Korea and the PRC. (A famous participant was Ted Williams of baseball legend).
Today, Washington leaders – civilian and military – have deviated from the path of prudence. Senior officials speak openly about the inevitability of a Sino-American war over a Taiwan Straits crisis. That scenario tops the list of the Pentagon’s strategic planning aims and purposes. Military budgets and force structures reflect it. A slew of articles and documents are emerging from government security bodies, affiliated think tanks (e.g. the Hudson Institute), institutes and Establishment journals like Foreign Affairs that analyze in minute details how that war could be conducted under diverse circumstances. Most often, the prospect of it escalating to the level of strategic nuclear exchanges is minimized. Some even talk about which side would have an advantage in the event.
The hard truth is that any conflict that entails American munitions hitting China proper has something like a 90% chance of escalating to nuclear war; 95% if the scatterbrained psychopath is in the Oval Office.2 That should be the premise incorporated in any plan for war against China. The casual way that these ‘strategists’ contemplate great power combat testifies to the fact that once minds, and emotions, take up residence in a fanciful universe of their imagining the prospect grows of their divorcing totally from reality.
[“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; if the bomb blast don’t get you, the fallout must” – pithy words of a renowned nuclear strategist]
In regard to Iran, the United States has markedly increased the likelihood of its building a nuclear capability by giving up the international controls incorporated in the JPOA, by our implacable hostility and sanctions, and now by the heavy attack on Iran itself, an attack that has done little damage to Tehran’s nuclear capabilities while vastly strengthening incentives for it to go nuclear.
Most alarming are the unprecedented American strikes against Russia proper. At this moment, and as has been the case for two years at least, serving officers physically in Ukraine play the critical role in the launching of a variety of missiles supplied by the U.S.: HIMARs, (High Mobility Artillery Rocket System) and ATACMS (Army Tactical Missile System). They provide the critical targeting Intelligence, they insert the codes that activate the weapons, and initiate the firing. Ukrainian military men do nothing more than “press the button.” In short, we are waging war against Russia – carrying out direct attacks. on Russian soil. Moreover, we have encouraged the British, the French and the Germans to do exactly the same – some employing American provided weapons whose use requires explicit approval from Washington. It is the Kremlin’s restraint that has prevented this provocation from leading to dangerous escalation – up until now.
Set in this context, it should have been apparent that the Trump administration could not accept the humiliating defeat represented by a Ukraine settlement on any terms that met Russia’s core demands; nor could it engage seriously with Iran; nor could it consider reining in Israel; nor could it address China as an equal. No more than Biden or Trump in his first term.
At Home
The domestic scene offers a variation of this dismal reality. The Trump-led corps of suited militants and disciples are using coercive force of various kinds in random acts of destruction propelled by emotional drives for unfettered power, control and domination. The United States is being pushed down the path of Fascism American-style with stunning rapidity. Already, in critical respects we have ceased to be a Constitutional democracy.
Daily, the Trump Falange takes truthless, arbitrary actions that defy the law and the Constitution, that shut down entire departments of government duly established by Congress, that suppress programs dedicated to preserve public health and other citizens’ services, that reject guarantees of due process at every level of government. The Bill of Rights is being gutted – the 1st and 4th Amendments already are null and void. Trump cavalierly uses the Department of Justice as a weapon in vendettas against whomever he dislikes.
These literally mindless assaults on state infrastructure put in place over more than a century are accompanied by attacks on scientific knowledge, on our most notable research institutions, on our universities. Trump and his henchman are literal “know-nothings” who indeed know nothing, and don’t want to know since knowledge is a constraint on the destructive impulse and the lust for absolute ‘freedom’ to do as they please. It follows that there is no tolerance for an official who speaks factual truth without first checking that it conforms to whatever wavelength the boss is on that day. Thus, Tulsi Gabbard is admonished that she will walk the plank unless she immediately contradicts herself on the “obliteration” of Iranian nuclear facilities. She, another D.C. careerist, obliges without hesitation. Both parties are pleased by the outcome. Thus, Erika McEntarfer – the poor woman who directed the Bureau of Labor Statistics – is kicked out unceremoniously because she innocently believed that arithmetic is politically uncontroversial. One party is pleased by the outcome.
This rampage subjugates one institution after another like the German blitzkrieg overrunning hapless cities. In Congress, the Republicans are cowed into regimented automatons who resemble Prussian infantry or deputies to the old Supreme Soviet; the Democrats have reached the terminal point of their passive political suicide – comatose for so long that one barely notices their vanishing act; Barack Obama, who was the nation’s leader for 8 years, amuses himself producing documentaries for Netflix while the country descends into perdition; the Supreme Court majority under John Roberts are a tacit, yet vital accomplice – rewriting the Constitution as suits them; the economic powerhouses – financial barons, business moguls, Silicon Valley buccaneers – are licking their chops at the feast spread before them by the Trump-Musk-Bessent pillage of the national economy; the MSM are shills or neutered; church denominations and civic society play mute or mumble sotto voce; Trump’s lucrative extortion-protection racket targeting blue chip law firms and Ivy League schools would make Vito Genovese blush; universities in particular are disgracing themselves in their abject surrender. The great debates at the highest reaches of our elite universities appear to be on whether to deal with Trump from a kneeling position or a supine position.
A striking feature of this descent into unbridled autocracy, is that there is no ideological passion fueling it, no doctrine, no philosophy, no religious zeal. It is all about discharging emotions spawned in the depths of their roiled psyches. Just raw, crude tantrums committing flagrant acts of destruction and hurt. We must keep in mind that it is not only Trump. He has ignited and assembled a crew of wackos and misfits such a Robert Kennedy jr. who seemingly spends his waking hours devising ways to impair the health of Americans: cannibalizing the Center for Disease Control, slashing the National Institute of Health, restricting development and distribution of vaccines, suppressing scientific research at universities, demeaning those who actually know what they are talking about. Not surprisingly, this is someone who was diagnosed with worms in his brain and whose previous acts of civic behavior include strewing parts of a dismembered bear around Central Park in NYC Civilization has experienced nothing like this since the Dark Ages dropped the curtain on classical learning in the 6th and 7th centuries.
[The Democrats, for their part, are equally non-ideological. They offer no coherent refutation of Trump’s amputations of the national government or his recission of every enlightened federal program initiated over the past 90 years. This tragic turn was foreshadowed by Bill Clinton’s public declaration in 1997 that “the era of big government is over,” and his promotion of the Bowles-Simpson Commission’s plan to cut deeply into Social Security and Medicare in his 2012 speech at the Democratic Convention renominating Barack Obama. Today, their message in opposition is nothing more than an anti-Trump screed.]
Instead of ideology or doctrine we have a perverted Americanism. An artless blend of myth, doctored history and chauvinism, it has been inflated into an encompassing revelation that explains all, inspires all, justifies all. A one-size-fits-all creed cum faith that embraces every person, every circumstance, every act. Americanism acts as a Unified Field Theory of self-identity, collective enterprise, and the Republic’s enduring meaning. When one element is felt to be jeopardy, the integrity of the whole edifice becomes vulnerable. The drama of the American experience, our collective pageant of progress, used to be the great booster of morale and imparter of meaning. That tonic has lost much of its potency- in good part because it’s not the same country, and we no longer reign supreme in the world. So, crude attempts at restoration become the imperative for a shaky collective identity and impoverished individual self-esteem. In the past, American mythology energized the country in ways that helped it to thrive. Today, it is a dangerous hallucinogen that traps Americans in a time warp more and more distant from reality.
[At the psychological level, this approach is understandable since it plays to the United States’ strength: overweening self-confidence coupled to military power – thereby perpetuating the national myths of being destined to remain the world’s No. 1 forever, and of being in a position to shape the world system according to American principles and interests. The tension for a nation so constituted encountering objective reality does not favor heightened self-awareness or a change in behavior. Today, there is no foreign policy debate whatsoever. In addition, our vassal governments in Europe and elsewhere either have a national interest in preserving the warped American view of the world (Israel, Poland) or have been so denatured over the decades that they are incapable 0f doing other than to follow Washington obediently – despite already having tumbled over a number of cliffs and staring at a potentially fatal abyss re. China and Russia]
MAGA Dynamics
To understand what forces are turbocharging the MAGA war on pre-Trump America, one must face squarely the abnormal elements in the movement’s make-up.
A. A cult-like movement such as MAGA can do without a god “but never without a devil.”3 For the neo-Fascist, the devil(s) on whom you focus your wrath is far more important than a prophet who offers a vision of a New Jerusalem or some other utopia. Just as the gratification of destruction eclipses any impulse to construct – other than restoration of some starry-eyed vision of an America that never existed.
B. There are Devils galore. Enemy states, clandestine networks of evil-doers at home and abroad, the racial “them,” and all who manipulate or facilitate them by not joining the paranoid crusade to purge those malignant forces. In a bizarre way so it is with the Palestinians whose tragic fate is to become the surrogate for all the above objects of scorn – permitting our complicity in their inhumane treatment. They are stand-ins for every social grouping that we – or some segment of us – hate, fear, despise, scapegoat. At once Islamo-terrorists, the Iranian mullahs, Russian saboteurs, Commies, drug cartels, illegal immigrants from inter alia Mexico, South America, Haiti, Afghanistan, Somalia, blacks, gays & transgenders, liberal elitists, abrasive feminists etc. etc. etc. All loom behind the Palestinian face in the mind’s eye of those in thrall to the demons of violent prejudice. When the mix of inchoate emotions reaches a critical mass, and demands discharge, they find a substitute for whatever fixates them. The unrecognized Palestinian becomes a blank canvas on which to paint the bête noir that obsesses you. In a bitter coda to this tale of depraved humanity, might there be vestigial bigots – in Europe and America – who in their twisted psyche project onto the anonymous Palestinian an image of “The Jew” – getting his comeuppance? For most, it is remarkable good fortune that the murderers and torturers are Jews – thus shielding them from stray pangs of conscience since we can congratulate ourselves on making up for the 2,000-years persecution of them.
C. Displays of belligerence in word and deed tug on the emotional strings of those in the movement – even those who themselves lack the courage to act. Hence, the heroic savior is encouraged to raise the level of hostility and castigation of enemies in the rhetoric. He knows that “violence breeds fanaticism begets violence.”4
D. The unspeakable has become the vernacular for Trump, his henchmen, his shock troops. Aggressive, hostile words – like violent deeds – nourish the lusts of the initiates while emboldening their prophet. Blind trust in the demagogic leader requires no collateral.
E. In the light of the above, a fanatical mass movement can only intensify and reach new heights of extremity. It can be suppressed – but it cannot moderate. Once it reaches a certain threshold its own momentum will propel it to a climax of one sort or another – invariably a destructive climax.
Conclusion
Fascism or neo-Fascism does not emerge spontaneously from the depths like The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Conditions must be ripe, the ground prepared: combustible militants nursing their resentments must reach a critical mass, an inert populace must be numbed, a political class turned in on themselves, innate moral instincts sublimated, conventional norms of decency discredited. In this sense, Trump’s MAGA is the culmination of a degenerative process – not its cause.5
We seem to have experienced a unique case of an auto-immune political cataclysm. The body politics’s instinctive mechanisms for reacting against (false) signs of a (fictitious) threatening invader become disoriented and begin to attack the host itself. A case of self-generated – if unintended – iatrogenic suicide. What was the perceived/felt threat catalyzing this process? 9/11 twenty-four years ago? There’s the puzzle.
In truth, there are no tangible, overt threats to the American body politic which, by any reasonable measure, should cause such an extreme reaction. We must look elsewhere – into the minds and emotions of a disturbed society. One with a defective gyroscope. One where nihilism has blurred cultural and social reference marks, fostering a cult of selfishness – one of whose manifestations is the fashioning of fantasy worlds wherein delusional imaginings have no consequences – backing Trump as a sort of projected wish fulfillment – just as millions embark on a project of self -reinvention or play games of make-believe like ‘Fantasy Football.’ Those are the conditions that have generated the perversions, and the infirmities, that have led to the present perilous state-of-affairs.
To be clear, we are not dealing with flaws of structure or procedure that could be remedied, mistaken policies that could be corrected, or sins that could be atoned. Rather, it is a pervasive corruption of our country’s societal software.
If this interpretation is correct, there is little chance of a reversal or of rectifying the situation. Societies are incapable of close critical self-examination except, with great rarity, under the most extreme circumstances. A complete breakdown as Germany and Japan experienced in WW II. In those cases, it was made possible by the guiding hand of a relatively benevolent external party. We Americans are on our own – tragically, we are lacking the self-awareness to ward off disaster and to regenerate a measure of collective construction.
Endnotes:
The post America Meets Its Hidden Destiny first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Donald Trump came into office promising to end the war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Now, six months later, his high stakes meeting with Vladimir Putin in Alaska may have put the United States and Russia on a new path toward peace, or, if this initiative fails, could trigger an even more dangerous escalation, with warhawks in Congress already pushing for another $54.6 billion in weapons for Ukraine.
After emerging from the meeting, Putin correctly framed the historical moment: “This was a very hard time for bilateral relations and, let’s be frank, they’ve fallen to the lowest point since the Cold War. I think that’s not benefiting our countries and the world as a whole. Sooner or later, we have to amend the situation to move on from confrontation to dialogue.”
Trump said he will follow up by talking to NATO leaders and Zelenskyy, as if the U.S. is simply an innocent bystander trying to help. But in Ukraine, as in Palestine, Washington plays the “mediator” while pouring weapons, intelligence, and political cover into one side of the war. In Gaza, that has enabled genocide. In Ukraine, it could lead to nuclear war.
Despite protests from Zelenskyy and European leaders, Trump was right to meet with Putin, not because they are friends, but because the United States and Russia are enemies, and because the war they are fighting to the last Ukrainian is the front line of a global conflict between the United States, Russia and China.
In our book, War In Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, which we have now updated and revised to cover three years of war in Ukraine, we have detailed the U.S. role in expanding NATO up to Russia’s borders, its support for the violent overthrow of Ukraine’s elected government in 2014, its undermining of the Minsk II peace accord, and its rejection of a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine after only two months of war in 2022.
We doubt that Donald Trump fully grasps this history. Are his simplistic statements alternately blaming Russia and Ukraine, but never the United States, just a public façade for domestic consumption, or does he really believe America’s hands are clean?
At their first meeting in Saudi Arabia on February 18, senior U.S. and Russian negotiators agreed on a three-step plan: first to restore U.S.-Russian diplomatic relations; then to negotiate peace in Ukraine; and finally to work on resolving the broader, underlying breakdown in relations between the United States and Russia. Trump and Putin’s decision to meet now was a recognition that they must address the deeper rift before they can achieve a stable and lasting peace in Ukraine.
The stakes are high. Russia has been waging a war of attrition, concentrating on destroying Ukrainian forces and military equipment rather than on advancing quickly and seizing a lot more territory. It has still not occupied all of Donetsk province, which unilaterally declared independence from Ukraine in May 2014, and which Russia officially annexed before its invasion in February 2022.
The failure of peace negotiations could lead to a more aggressive Russian war plan to seize territory much faster. Ukrainian forces are thinly spread out along much of its 700 mile front line, with as few as 100 soldiers often manning several miles of defenses. A major Russian offensive could lead to the collapse of the Ukrainian military or the fall of the Zelenskyy government.
How would the U.S. and its Western allies respond to such major changes in the strategic picture? Zelenskyy’s European allies talk tough, but have always rejected sending their own troops to Ukraine, apart from small numbers of special operations forces and mercenaries.
Putin addressed the Europeans in his remarks after the Summit:
We expect that Kyiv and the European capitals will perceive [the negotiations] constructively, and that they won’t throw a wrench in the works, will not make any attempts to use some backroom dealings to conduct provocations to torpedo the nascent progress.
Meanwhile, more U.S. and NATO troops are fighting from the relative safety of the joint Ukraine-NATO war headquarters at the U.S. military base in Wiesbaden in Germany, where they work with Ukrainian forces to plan operations, coordinate intelligence and target missile and drone strikes. If the war escalates further, Wiesbaden could become a target for Russian missile strikes, just as NATO missiles already target bases in Russia. How would the United States and Germany respond to Russian missile strikes on Wiesbaden?
The U.S. and NATO’s official policy has always been to keep Ukraine fighting until it is in a stronger position to negotiate with Russia, as Joe Biden wrote in the New York Times in June 2022. But every time the U.S. and NATO prolong or escalate the war, they leave Ukraine in a weaker position, not a stronger one. The neutrality agreement that the U.S. and U.K. rejected in April 2022 included a Russian withdrawal from all the territory it had just occupied. But that was not good enough for Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, who instead promised a long war to weaken Russia.
NATO military leaders believed that Ukraine’s counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 achieved the stronger position they were looking for, and General Milley went out on a limb to say publicly that Ukraine should “seize the moment” to negotiate. But Biden and Zelenskyy rejected his advice, and Ukraine’s failed offensive in 2023 squandered the moment they had failed to seize. No amount of deceptive propaganda can hide the reality that it has been downhill since then, and 69% of Ukrainians now want a negotiated peace, before their position gets even worse.
So Trump went to Alaska with a weak hand, but one that will get weaker still if the war goes on. The European politicians urging Zelenskyy to cling to his maximalist demands want to look tough to their own people, but the keys to a stable and lasting peace are still Ukrainian neutrality, self determination for the people of all regions of Ukraine, and a genuine peace process that finally lays to rest the zombification of the Cold War.
The whole world celebrated the end of the Cold War in 1991, but the people of the world are still waiting for the long-promised peace dividend that a generation of corrupt, war-mongering leaders have stolen from us.
As negotiations progress, U.S. officials must be honest about the U.S. role in provoking this crisis. They must demonstrate that they are ready to listen to Russia’s concerns, take them seriously, and negotiate in good faith to achieve a stable and lasting agreement that delivers peace and security to all parties in the Ukraine war, and in the wider Cold War it is part of.
The post US-Russia Talks: the Choice Between Peace and Escalation first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
As if President Trump intended to meet professional US mercenary Erik Prince halfway, US Attorney General Pam Bondi increased the existing US bounty on President Maduro—originally set at $15 million—from $25 million to $50 million for anyone providing “information leading to his arrest or conviction.”
In late 2024, Prince, a professional mercenary, alongside Venezuela’s far right, promoted a plan to deploy a private army to Venezuela. He suggested that if the US raised the bounty on Maduro’s head to $100 million, targeting not only the president but also Diosdado Cabello and the entire government, they could “just sit back and wait for the magic to happen.” Prince and Venezuela’s far right even launched a crowdfunding campaign, Ya Casi Venezuela (“Almost There, Venezuela”), to collect the $100 million.
In November 2024, Prince declared that after 10 January 2025 (Maduro’s inauguration day), key figures—including Diosdado Cabello (Interior Minister), Jorge Rodríguez (National Assembly President), Delcy Rodríguez (Vice President), Vladimir Padrino López (Defence Minister), Tarek William Saab (Attorney General), Cilia Flores (Maduro’s wife), and Nicolás Maduro himself—would become “criminal objectives” with no diplomatic protection. On 12 January 2025, Prince sent a message of support to opposition leader María Corina Machado, urging her to “Stay resolute.”
Prince had pushed for the bounty to be raised to $100 million, but when the Biden administration ignored him, he secured backing from Senators Marco Rubio and Rick Scott, who share his objectives. On 20 September 2024, Scott and Rubio introduced the Securing Timely Opportunities for Payment and Maximizing Awards for Detaining Unlawful Regime Officials Act of 2024 (the STOP Maduro Act), allocating $100 million—taken from seized Venezuelan assets—to fund Prince’s efforts to depose Maduro.
The US charges against President Maduro are not only preposterous but entirely false and slanderous. He is accused of being one of the world’s largest drug traffickers, a threat to US national security, and the leader of the Cartel de los Soles, allegedly responsible for shipping hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US while collaborating with “narco-terrorists,” the Tren de Aragua gang, and Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Yván Gil, dismissed Bondi’s “pathetic” bounty as “the most ridiculous smokescreen we have ever seen.”
Despite persistent propaganda about the Cartel de los Soles, drug trafficking, and “narco-terrorism”—used to justify labelling Venezuela a “narco-state”—the US has never provided credible evidence to support these claims. The DEA itself reports that over 80% of cocaine entering the US comes via the Pacific, with only 7% passing through the Eastern Caribbean (see DEA maps; notably, Venezuela has no Pacific coastline). This confirms Colombia as the region’s true narco-state, while Venezuela is, at worst, a transit route. The US also falsely accuses Venezuela of money laundering, despite the country being almost entirely cut off from the international financial system. And Mexico’s President, Claudia Sheinbaum, has just declared that Mexico has no evidence linking Venezuela’s Maduro to the Sinaloa cartel.
Bondi’s bounty against Venezuela’s democratically elected president is part of a broader US strategy targeting Latin America, ostensibly centred on combating drug cartels but threatening far more drastic measures. The New York Times (08/08/25) revealed that Trump “secretly signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to use military force against certain Latin American drug cartels designated as terrorist organisations by his administration.” Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum responded unequivocally: “The US will not send its military into Mexico. That is ruled out, absolutely ruled out.”
This outrageous US aggression against a Latin American head of state must be condemned unreservedly. The “pathetic” $50 million bounty consciously incentivises unsavoury actors to launch militaristic, murderous ventures—such as the 2020 mercenary incursion into Venezuela contracted by Guaidó. It marks an escalation in US efforts to overthrow a democratically elected leader, weaponizing bounties to force regime change.
Trump’s secret directive authorising military force against cartels—effectively threatening unilateral intervention in Latin America—must also be unequivocally rejected. While ostensibly targeting Mexico, the policy could easily be weaponised against governments the US seeks to topple, such as Venezuela, Cuba, or Nicaragua (or any other nation, for that matter).
The Trump administration is clearly intent on intimidating—and, given the opportunity, militarily intervening against—Latin American governments it opposes, using the “war on drugs” as a pretext. Worse, Bondi could issue similar bounties against other regional leaders. The US mercenary industry is well-developed, and such bounties would inevitably attract takers, further destabilising the region.
When we consider the US’s highly aggressive tariffs against Brazil alongside its hundreds of sanctions targeting Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, it becomes clear that Washington is testing a new cocktail of threats designed to force nations south of the Río Bravo into submission to US geopolitical demands. This is classic US behaviour—with one key difference under Trump: the abandonment of any pretence behind hollow justifications like ‘democracy’ or ‘human rights’, though such rhetoric still features in official statements.
The true objective is to stifle multipolarity and prevent Latin America from participating in it, all while reinforcing US hegemony in the Western Hemisphere under the guise of Make America Great Again. In reality, this is simply the Monroe Doctrine repackaged—an attempt to sever Latin America’s trade and exchanges with China, or more precisely, to expel Chinese influence from the region entirely. The abject capitulation of Panama’s President José Raúl Mulino, who withdrew from the Belt and Road Initiative under Trump’s threats of a US military takeover of the Canal—despite the economic costs to his nation—stands as stark confirmation of this strategy.
Trump’s objectives stand in direct opposition to what progressive movements and governments across Latin America have sought to build: a fairer world without social exclusion, with reduced inequality and poverty, where policies prioritise people over private interests, and where universal rights to education, healthcare, and housing are upheld—all within a framework of strong national sovereignty that has enabled the region to resist US imperialist bullying.
This vision entails:
· An end to US lawfare against President Maduro and all aggression toward Venezuela or any regional government;
· No arbitrary US tariffs against Brazil or any other Latin American nation;
· The cessation of US military threats—let alone interventions—in Mexico, Venezuela, or elsewhere in the region;
· A Latin America free from US meddling in its internal affairs.
The struggle, then, is not merely about resisting individual policies but defending the very principle of self-determination against a US administration intent on rolling back decades of regional progress.
The post What Lies Behind Trump’s Attacks Against Venezuela? first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
For anyone who still thinks Donald Trump does not represent the interests of what is called “the deep state” but is actually the shallow or official U.S. state, it is time to think again. If he is not a figurehead for those alleged hidden forces, then he will agree to a Russia-Ukraine settlement on Russia’s fundamental terms – that is, a mutual security agreement that stipulates the pulling back of U.S./NATO forces encircling Russia, etc. – when he meets with Putin in Alaska this Friday. There will be no further delay.
This, however, is extremely unlikely. Trump knows little but bullying and the use of the English language as a hammer. “I’m very highly educated,” he has said, without a scintilla of irony, “I know words, I know the best words. But there’s no better word than stupid.”
On the latter assertion he is right: there is no better word than stupid when it’s applied correctly.
During his campaign for the presidency, Trump used words more than fifty times to say that he would end the war in Ukraine “within twenty-four hours” of assuming the presidency. He could have accomplished this on day one by issuing an executive order (besides all those he did issue), stopping all military aide to Ukraine, but he didn’t. Seven months of game-playing have elapsed and the war goes on with Trump’s backing laced with doubletalk about how he is seeking peace in Ukraine, is a man of peace, is bringing all American troops back home, and of course he gave a grateful ah-shucks when his brother-in-genocide, Benjamin Netanyahu, showed him a letter nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
He fully supports the destabilization of Russia, overtly or covertly, as have his predecessors, and this in incompatible with any deal Russia can agree to when he meets with Putin in Alaska.
This past weekend, and starting up again late Tuesday in the more conservative corporate media, August 12 as I write, CNN, the NY Times, and the Washington Post, three prominent establishment media (organs of propaganda) published their usual reminders to all presidents that they are watching:
CNN: “Trump-Putin summit in Alaska resembles a slow defeat for Ukraine”
The New York Times: “After Almost Losing Trump, Putin Gets His Ideal Summit”
Max Boot op ed, the Washington Post: “Putin is setting up Trump for another Munich”
For these media know that the Russians are coming still, as they have been for nearly a century, so don’t swim too far out into the Atlantic or Pacific, for they are waiting with Jaws to seize you. They are red and ravenous and have huge teeth.
Some claim these articles, and many more to come, are an example of how the “deep state” is pressuring Trump to continue to encircle Russia and degrade its military and economic strength (even try to oust Putin, as Biden said) despite Trump’s sincere desire to end the U.S./NATO war against Russia as a means to peaceful cooperation. This would assume Trump is radically different from every U.S. president in the last eighty years (with the exception of JFK in the last year of his presidency) whose policies were all malignantly opposed to the USSR and then Russia.
In one respective way Trump is different, for he has stepped straight out of an updated version of a Twain bitter satire or Melville’s Confidence Man, a dangerous ignorant liar whose mask hides yet reveals the agenda he serves so faithfully. The man, after all, was a reality-television star and has long reveled in radical reversals of previous statements and intentions.
For example, in his first term, he often talked of withdrawing from NATO but never did; NATO, in fact, expanded under his watch. He talked about ending the U.S./NATO support for Ukraine’s bombing of Russian-speaking areas of eastern Ukraine, only to withdraw from the Minsk Accords and send military equipment to Ukraine to bomb those areas. A mimic of the severest neurotic, he reverses himself so often that it is obvious that it is a part of the strategic script he is performing. Confuse, confound, keep the audience is constant anticipation of the switch-back.
It assumes as well that Trump’s support for Israel and its genocide of the Palestinians is somehow divorced from the U.S.’s overall geopolitical strategy throughout the Middle East, West Asia, Eastern Europe, Russia, and its desperate efforts throughout the world to counter the ascendancy of the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates) as the U.S. debt skyrockets and its world dominance diminishes.
Trump’s recent flim-flam plan is to pull a Richard Nixon Vietnamization hoax with NATOization of the war against Russia through Ukraine. I am convinced that the US/NATO war against Russia will not be ending unless NATO is dissolved, which Trump is not proposing. He only wishes to strengthen NATO with European money, not that of the US. NATO’s only current raison d’être is to destroy Russia as an independent country and create regime change there through multiple means. This has long been so. It is why the Obama administration engineered a coup d’ état in Ukraine in 2014. It is why NATO has existed for so long and has expanded. Open warfare in Ukraine is just one means among many they have used over the years. You can even “end” the overt war and continue the covert.
If NATO is not dissolved, the undermining of Russia will continue under Trump, who may – I emphasize “may” – recognize that the proxy war is lost on the battlefield, a fact obvious for years despite U.S. government and mainstream media propaganda to the contrary – propaganda so blatantly false that it raises questions about people’s gullibility, but not about the mainstream media’s lies. How many foreign leaders does such media need to call the new Hitler before people wise up?
As the man said, “There’s no better word than stupid.”
The post Trump Said It: “There’s No Better Word Than Stupid.” first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Unbeknownst to much of the public, Big Tech exacts heavy tolls on public health, the environment, and democracy. The detrimental combination of an unregulated tech sector, pronounced rise in cyberattacks and data theft, and widespread digital and media illiteracy—as noted in my previous Dispatch on Big Data’s surveillance complex—is exacerbated by legacy media’s failure to inform the public of these risks. While establishment news outlets cover major security breaches in Big Tech’s troves of personal identifiable information (PII) and their costs to individuals, businesses, and national security, this coverage fails to address the negative impacts of Big Tech on the full health of our political system, civic engagement, and ecosystems.
Marietje Schaake, an AI Policy fellow at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI Policy, argues that Big Tech’s unrestrained hand in all three branches of the government, the military, local and national elections, policing, workplace monitoring, and surveillance capitalism undermine American society in ways the public has failed to grasp. Indeed, little in the corporate press helps the public understand exactly how data centers—the facilities that process and store vast amounts of data—do more than endanger PII. Greenlit by the Trump administration, data centers accelerate ecosystem harms through their unmitigated appropriation of natural resources, including water, and the subsequent greenhouse gas emissions that increase ambient pollution and its attendant diseases.
Adding insult to the public’s right to be informed, corporate news rarely sheds light on how an ethical, independent press serves the public good and functions to balance power in a democracy. A 2023 civics poll by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School found that only a quarter of respondents knew that press freedom is a constitutional right and a counterbalance to the powers of government and capitalism. The gutting of local news in favor of commercial interests has only accelerated this knowledge blackout.
The demand for AI by corporatists, military AI venture capitalists, and consumers—and resultant demand for data centers—is outpacing utilities infrastructure, traditional power grid capabilities, and the renewable energy sector. Big Tech companies, such as Amazon and Meta, strain municipal water systems and regional power grids, reducing the capacity to operate all things residential and local. In Newton County, Georgia, for example, Meta’s $750 million data center, which sucks up approximately 500,000 gallons of water a day, has contaminated local groundwater and caused taps in nearby homes to run dry. What’s more, the AI boom comes at a time when hot wars are flaring and global temperatures are soaring faster than scientists once predicted.
Constant connectivity, algorithms, and AI-generated content delude individual internet and device users into believing that they’re well informed. However, the decline of civics awareness in the United States—compounded by rampant digital and media illiteracy, ubiquitous state and corporate surveillance, and lax news reporting—makes for an easily manipulated citizenry, asserts attorney and privacy expert, Heidi Boghosian. This is especially disconcerting given the creeping spread of authoritarianism, smackdown on civil liberties, and surging demand for AI everything.
Open [but not transparent] AI
While the companies that develop and deploy popular AI-powered tools lionize the wonders of their products and services, they keep hidden the unsustainable impacts on our world. To borrow from Cory Doctorow, the “enshittification” of the online economy traps consumers, vendors, and advertisers in “the organizing principle of US statecraft,” as well as by more mundane capitalist surveillance. Without government oversight or a Fourth Estate to compel these tech corporations to reveal their shadow side, much of the public is not only in the dark but in harm’s way.
At the most basic level, consumers should know that OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, collects private data and chat inputs, regardless of whether users are logged in or not. Any time users visit or interact with ChatGPT, their log data (the Internet Protocol address, browser type and settings, date and time of the site visit, and interaction with the service), usage data (time zone, country, and type of device used), device details (device name and identifiers, operating system, and browser used), location information from the device’s GPS, and cookies, which store the user’s personal information, are saved. Most users have no idea that they can opt out.
OpenAI claims it saves data only for “fine-tuning,” a process of enhancing the performance and capabilities of AI models, and for human review “to identify biases or harmful outputs.” OpenAI also claims not to use data for marketing and advertising purposes or to sell information to third parties without prior consent. Most users, however, are as oblivious to the means of consent as to the means of opting out. This is by design.
In July, the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit vacated the Federal Trade Commission’s “click-to-cancel” rule, which would have made online unsubscribing easier. The ruling would have covered all forms of negative option marketing—programs that give sellers free rein to interpret customer inaction as “opting in,” consenting to subscriptions and unwittingly accruing charges. Director of litigation at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, John Davisson, commented that the court’s decision was poorly reasoned, and only those with financial or career advancement motives would argue in favor of subscription traps.
Even if OpenAI is actually protective of the private data it stores, it is not above disclosing user data to affiliates, law enforcement, and the government. Moreover, ChatGPT practices are noncompliant with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the global gold standard of data privacy protection. Although OpenAI says it strips PII and anonymizes data, its practice of “indefinite retention” does not comply with the GDPR’s stipulation for data storage limitations, nor does OpenAI sufficiently guarantee irreversible data de-identification.
As science and tech reporter Will Knight wrote for Wired, “Once data is baked into an AI model today, extracting it from that model is a bit like trying to recover the eggs from a finished cake.” Whenever a tech company collects and keeps PII, there are security risks. The more data captured and stored by a company, the more likely it will be exposed to a system bug, hack, or breach, such as the ChatGPT breach in March 2023.
OpenAI has said it will comply with the EU’s AI Code of Practice for General-Purpose AI, which aims to foster transparency, information sharing, and best practices for model and risk assessment among tech companies. Microsoft has said that it will likely sign on to compliance, too; while Meta, on the other hand, flatly refuses to comply, much like it refuses to abide by environmental regulations.
To no one’s surprise, the EU code has already become politicized, and the White House has issued its own AI Action Plan to “remove red tape.” The plan also purports to remove “woke Marxist lunacy in the AI models,” eliminating such topics as diversity, equity, and inclusion and climate change. As Trump crusades against regulation and “bias,” the White House-allied Meta decries political concerns over compliance with the EU’s AI code. Meta’s claim is coincidental; British Courts, based on the United Kingdom’s GDPR obligations, ruled that anyone in a country covered by the GDPR has the right to request Meta to stop using their personal data for targeted advertising.
Big Tech’s open secrets
Information on the tech industry’s environmental and health impacts exists, attests artificial intelligence researcher Sasha Luccioni. The public is simply not being informed. This lack of transparency, warns Luccioni, portends significant environmental and health consequences. Too often, industry opaqueness is excused by insiders as “competition” to which they feel entitled, or blamed on the broad scope of artificial intelligence products and services—smart devices, recommender systems, internet searches, autonomous vehicles, machine learning, the list goes on. Allegedly, there’s too much variety to reasonably quantify consequences.
Those consequences are quantifiable, though. While numbers vary and are on the ascent, there are at least 3,900 data centers in the United States and 10,000 worldwide. An average data center houses complex networking equipment, servers, and systems for cooling systems, lighting, security, and storage, all requiring copious rare earth minerals, water, and electricity to operate.
The densest data center area exists in Northern Virginia, just outside the nation’s capital. “Data Center Alley,” also known as the “Data Center Capital of the World,” has the highest concentration of data centers not only in the United States but in the entire world, consuming millions of gallons of water every day. International hydrologist Newsha Ajami has documented how water shortages around the world are being worsened by Big Data. For tech companies, “water is an afterthought.”
Powered by fossil fuels, these data centers pose serious public health implications. According to research in 2024, training one large language model (LLM) with 213 million parameters produced 626,155 pounds of CO2 emissions, “equivalent to the lifetime emissions of five cars, including fuel.” Stated another way, such AI training “can produce air pollutants equivalent to more than 10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and New York City.”
Reasoning models generate more “thinking tokens” and use as much as 50 percent more energy than other AI models. Google and Microsoft search features purportedly use smaller models when possible, which, theoretically, can provide quick responses with less energy. It’s unclear when or if smaller models are actually invoked, and the bottom line, explained climate reporter Molly Taft, is that model providers are not informing consumers that speedier AI response times almost always equate to higher energy usage.
Profits over people
AI is rapidly becoming a public utility, profoundly shaping society, surmise Caltech’s Adam Wierman and Shaolei Ren of the University of California, Riverside. In the last few years, AI has outgrown its niche in the tech sector to become integral to digital economies, government, and security. AI has merged more closely with daily life, replacing human jobs and decision-making, and has thus created a reliance on services currently controlled by private corporations. Because other essential services such as water, electricity, and communications are treated as public utilities, there’s growing discussion about whether AI should be regulated under a similar public utility model.
That said, data centers need power grids, most of which depend on fossil fuel-generated electricity that stresses national and global energy stores. Data centers also need backup generators for brownout and blackout periods. With limited clean, reliable backup options, despite the known environmental and health consequences of burning diesel, diesel generators remain the industry’s go-to.
Whether the public realizes it or not, the environment and citizens are being polluted by the actions of private tech firms. Outputs from data centers inject dangerous fine particulate matter and nitrogen oxides (NOx) into the air, immediately worsening cardiovascular conditions, asthma, cancer, and even cognitive decline, caution Wierman and Ren. Contrary to popular belief, air pollutants are not localized to their emission sources. And, although chemically different, carbon (CO2) is not contained by location either.
Of great concern is that in “World Data Capital Virginia,” data centers are incentivized with tax breaks. Worse still, the (misleadingly named) Environmental Protection Agency plans to remove all limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, according to documents obtained by the New York Times. Thus, treating AI and data centers as public utilities presents a double-edged sword. Can a government that slashes regulations to provide more profit to industry while destroying its citizens’ health along with the natural world be trusted to fairly price and equitably distribute access to all? Would said government suddenly start protecting citizens’ privacy and sensitive data?
The larger question, perhaps, asks if the US is truly a democracy. Or is it a technogarchy, or an AI-tocracy? The 2024 AI Global Surveillance (AIGS) Index ranked the United States first for its deployment of advanced AI surveillance tools that “monitor, track, and surveil citizens to accomplish a range of objectives— some lawful, others that violate human rights, and many of which fall into a murky middle ground,” the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace reported.
Surveillance has long been the purview of authoritarian regimes, but in so-called democracies such as the United States, the scale and intensity of AI use is leveraged both globally through military operations and domestically to target and surveil civilians. In cities such as Scarsdale, New York, and Norfolk, Virginia, citizens are beginning to speak out against the systems that are “immensely popular with politicians and law enforcement, even though they do real and palpable damage to the citizenry.”
Furthermore, tracking civilians to “deter civil disobedience” has never been easier, evidenced in June by the rapid mobilization of boots on the ground amid the peaceful protests of ICE raids in Los Angeles. AI-powered surveillance acts as the government’s “digital scarecrow,” chilling the American tradition and First Amendment right to protest and the Fourth Estate’s right to report.
The public is only just starting to become aware of algorithmic biases in AI training datasets and their prejudicial impact on predictive policing, or profiling, algorithms, and other analytic tools used by law enforcement. City street lights and traffic light cameras, facial recognition systems, video monitoring in and around business and government buildings, as well as smart speakers, smart toys, keyless entry locks, automobile intelligent dash displays, and insurance antitheft tracking systems are all embedded with algorithmic biases.
Checking Big Tech’s unchecked power
Given the level and surreptitiousness of surveillance, the media are doubly tasked with treading carefully to avoid being targeted and accurately informing the public’s perception of data collection and data centers. Reporting that glorifies techbros and AI is unscrupulous and antithetical to democracy: In an era where billionaire techbros and wanna-be-kings are wielding every available apparatus of government and capitalism to gatekeep information, the public needs an ethical press committed to seeking truth, reporting it, and critically covering how AI is shifting power.
If people comprehend what’s at stake—their personal privacy and health, the environment, and democracy itself—they may be more inclined to make different decisions about their AI engagement and media consumption. An independent press that prioritizes public enlightenment means that citizens and consumers still have choices, starting with basic data privacy self-controls that resist AI surveillance and stand up for democratic self-governance.
Just as a healthy environment, replete with clean air and water, has been declared a human right by the United Nations, privacy is enshrined in Article 12 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Although human rights are subject to national laws, water, air, and the internet know no national borders. It is, therefore, incumbent upon communities and the press to uphold these rights and to hold power to account.
This spring, residents of Pittsylvania County, Virginia, did just that. Thanks to independent journalism and civic participation, residents pushed back against the corporate advertising meant to convince the county that the fossil fuels powering the region’s data centers are “clean.” Propagandistic campaigns were similarly applied in Memphis, Tennessee, where proponents of Elon Musk’s data center—which has the footprint of thirteen football fields—circulated fliers to residents of nearby, historically Black neighborhoods, proclaiming the super-polluting xAI has low emissions. “Colossus,” Musk’s name for what’s slated to be the world’s biggest supercomputer, powers xAI’s Hitler-loving chatbot Grok.
The Southern Environmental Law Center exposed with satellite and thermal imagery how xAI, which neglected to obtain legally required air permits, brought in at least 35 portable methane gas turbines to help power Colossus. Tennessee reporter Ren Brabenec said that Memphis has become a sacrifice zone and expects the communities there to push back.
Meanwhile, in Pittsylvania, Virginia, residents succeeded in halting the proposed expansion of data centers that would damage the region’s environment and public health. Elizabeth Putfark, attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, affirmed that communities, including local journalists, are a formidable force when acting in solidarity for the public welfare.
Best practices
Because AI surveillance is a threat to democracies everywhere, we must each take measures to counter “government use of AI for social control,” contends Abi Olvera, senior fellow with the Council on Strategic Risks. Harlo Holmes, director of digital security at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told Wired that consumers must make technology choices under the premise that they’re our “last line of defense.” Steps to building that last line of defense include digital and media literacies and digital hygiene, and at least a cursory understanding of how data is stored and its far-reaching impacts.
Best defensive practices employed by media professionals can also serve as best practices for individuals. This means becoming familiar with laws and regulations, taking every precaution to protect personal information on the internet and during online communications, and engaging in responsible civic discourse. A free and democratic society is only as strong as its citizens’ abilities to make informed decisions, which, in turn, are only as strong as their media and digital literacy skills and the quality of information they consume.
This essay first published here: https://www.projectcensored.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A memo written by the US Defense Department’s policy chief will allow US weapons and equipment earmarked for Ukraine to be diverted back into US stockpiles, CNN reported on 8 August.
According to four people who have read the memo, the policy represents “a dramatic shift” that could see billions of dollars of weapons redirected to shore up dwindling US supplies.
The memo was written last month by US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Elbridge Colby, but has become public ahead of US President Donald Trump’s planned meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The meeting is tentatively scheduled for next week.
Items desired by Ukraine’s military that are in short supply in the US include interceptor missiles, Patriot air defense systems, and artillery ammunition.
The post Pentagon Paves Way To Reclaim Ukraine-Bound Arms To US Stockpiles appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
President Donald Trump answers questions from reporters after signing an executive order about the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House campus, August 5, 2025
Trump’s threat of imposing a crippling 50 per cent tariff on all Brazilian imports to the United States took everyone by surprise, especially, considering the US enjoys a trade surplus with the South American giant (surplus it has enjoyed since 2007). Lula made it clear that Brazil would reciprocate in kind.
Trump tariffs against Brazil are in line with his overall policy of applying tariffs on all countries in the world. Under Trump US imperialism seeks to establish a global system that it suits itself such that it can impose or change any rule any time it wants and attack any country it dislikes.
As with many other global institutions, Trump, following in the footsteps of previous US administrations, is prepared to run roughshod over World Trade Organisation rules that US imperialism itself was central in establishing in 1995.
Thus, his attack on Mexico is not surprising either, country with which it has a substantial trade deficit caused by its southern neighbour’s incorporation into US supply chain arrangements ever since the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).
The US has had a trade deficit with Mexico ever since 1995, exactly one year after Nafta.
To Trump’s chagrin, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has vigorously defended her country’s sovereignty and has skilfully navigated US provocations.
To the charge of Mexico being a drug-trafficking hub, she has pointed out to US negotiators that the “the US itself harbours cartels, is the largest narcotic consumer market, exports the majority of armaments used by drug barons and hosts money-laundering banks.” She has also resolutely refused the deployment of US troops on Mexican soil.
Back in January 2025, Trump threatened Colombia with sanctions and 25 per cent tariffs on all its exports to the US. When Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro did not allow US planes carrying deported Colombians in, refusing to receive them in military aircraft and handcuffed, Trump threatened to make the tariffs “extendable to 50 per cent [plus] exhaustive inspections of Colombian citizens and merchandise, and visa sanctions for Colombian officials” plus “sanctions on banking and other areas.”
In response, Petro announced he would impose 50 per cent tariffs on US products entering the Colombian market. Furthermore, Petro, condemning the war on Gaza, argued that Colombia should break from Nato to avoid alliances involving militaries that “drop bombs on children.”
By the end of July Trump announced 50 per cent tariffs on imports of copper but when he realised it would substantially increase costs for US manufacturers — making its price nose-dive by 22 points with US traders facing heavy losses — he was forced to abandon it. He amended the tariff to apply only on semi-manufactured products such as wire and tube, excluding refined copper (until January 2027). In 2024, Chile, Canada and Peru accounted for more than 90 per cent of US refined copper imports.
On July 7, in a tweet Trump declared that Jair Bolsonaro was being witch-hunted by the Brazilian authorities. Bolsonaro is being tried for insurrection, coup plotting and his involvement in staging a January 6 Capitol assault-style riot against parliament and the judiciary buildings in Brasilia. Trump claimed Bolsonaro “is not guilty of anything, except having fought for the people.” Trump’s message sought to depict Bolsonaro as a political leader being politically persecuted, but nothing could, of course, be further from the truth.
Lula’s immediate response was that the US president’s statements were an interference in Brazil’s internal affairs and demanded respect for Brazilian sovereignty: “The defence of democracy in Brazil is a matter for Brazilians.” And in a sharp barb, Lula added: “We do not accept interference or tutelage from anyone. We have solid and independent institutions. No-one is above the law. Especially those who attack freedom and the rule of law.”
Trump’s attacks against Latin America are part and parcel of US imperialism’s efforts to destabilise governments it doesn’t like.
Adding to the comprehensively tight sanctions regime being applied to Cuba and Venezuela and to a lesser extent to Nicaragua, Trump is now targeting Cuban and especially Venezuelan migrants, falsely presenting them as members of criminal organisations.
And, in a human-trafficking operation run with far-right El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, Trump is sending hundreds of them to CECOT, El Salvador’s concentration camp.
Reversing decades of US encouragement of migration aimed at weakening their governments, Trump has terminated the Temporary Protection Status (TPS) of hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans, Cubans and Venezuelans, a key component of the ICE campaign of terror against Latinos.
The Trump administration, following from his Democrat and Republican predecessors, is seeking to expand its military presence in Latin America as much and as quickly as possible. It has deployed troops on Mexico’s southern border; Ecuador’s President Daniel Noboa has succeeded in getting the constitution amended to allow the US to have military bases on the Galapagos islands; the US holds regular and massive joint military manoeuvres in Guyana (where it has at least one military base); and the US also has a number of military bases in Central America, Colombia, the Caribbean, Peru, and a new military base in Argentina.
Though Trump’s tariffs on Latin America are chaotic and simplistic, they have a strategic objective: to slow down, reduce and if possible, eliminate altogether the drive to a multipolar world.
In short, to stop China’s drive to foster a new geopolitics not determined by the weaponisation of the dollar, economic sanctions or military aggression. One in which relations are not dictated by coercive zero-sum games but by voluntary collaboration in mutually beneficial economic relationships.
US imperialism (and the Trump government) find the ever-closer relationship and collaboration between the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Celac) and China simply intolerable. US officials repeatedly argue that China’s trade relations and co-operation with Latin America represent an existential threat to the US.
Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua have forged strong links with China and so has Brazil. Lula was presiding over the Brics summit in Rio de Janeiro when Trump launched the dig about fascist Bolsonaro.
Claudia Sheinbaum attended as an observer and Mexico is rapidly developing links with China. In Peru China has built the port of Chancay (a Belt and Road initiative) — the largest deepwater port on the western coast of South America.
Honduras has cut ties with Taiwan and recognised the People’s Republic of China and Colombia has joined the Brics.
Furthermore, China is the main trading partner of South America and the second-largest trading partner of Central America. Trump has threatened all Brics countries with 100 per cent tariffs.
The US Southern Command recognises that China’s trade with Latin America has gone “beyond raw materials and commodities to include traditional infrastructure (road, bridges, ports) and ‘new infrastructure’: electric vehicles, telecommunication, and renewable energy.”
Benefits never offered by the US to countries in its “backyard.” This ever-closer relationship explains Trump’s aggression towards the countries mentioned, to browbeat them economically and politically into drawing away from China.
A US success story is Panama, where President Jose Mulino’s capitulation to Trump’s threats to retake the Panama Canal by military means led him to accept Washington’s pressure to exit China’s Belt and Road Initiative, “one of the most ambitious infrastructure projects ever conceived.”
These contradictions are as a matter of course presented as the outcome of US-China rivalry, inevitable between these superpowers.
However, such a framework is deceptive since the nature of the contradictions stems from two conceptions of how to organise the global economy.
The US considers itself the “indispensable nation” which has always engaged in zero-sum games whose outcome produces winners (the US and its economically developed accomplices) and losers (the vast majority of humanity who reside in the global South).
Trump’s tariffs intend to keep it that way, while Latin America’s orientation towards Asia, China and the Brics is correctly pushing in the opposite direction: to a fairer, multipolar world.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Black Alliance for Peace North South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights delivered a message to FIFA’s President and Head of Human Rights regarding the ongoing and rapidly deteriorating human rights conditions in Palestine, as well as current conditions in the United States that BAP believes makes the United States a dangerous nation for citizens and residents of foreign nations to visit.
In that communication we made the argument that because of the ongoing genocide and the role of the U.S. as a facilitator of that genocide, as well as the unsafe and hostile conditions in the U.S. that has compelled a number of nations to issue advisories against travel to the U.S., we called on FIFA to ban the United States and Israel from hosting and participating in international competition, and to relocate the 2025 World Cup from the United States.
The post FIFA: The Beautiful Game Cannot Support Genocide And Repression appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
The Black Alliance for Peace North South Project for People(s)-Centered Human Rights delivered a message to FIFA’s President and Head of Human Rights regarding the ongoing and rapidly deteriorating human rights conditions in Palestine, as well as current conditions in the United States that BAP believes makes the United States a dangerous nation for citizens and residents of foreign nations to visit.
In that communication we made the argument that because of the ongoing genocide and the role of the U.S. as a facilitator of that genocide, as well as the unsafe and hostile conditions in the U.S. that has compelled a number of nations to issue advisories against travel to the U.S., we called on FIFA to ban the United States and Israel from hosting and participating in international competition, and to relocate the 2025 World Cup from the United States.
The post FIFA: The Beautiful Game Cannot Support Genocide And Repression appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
The headline read, “Trump tells Israel to ‘finish the job’ against Hamas.” Unexplained by Triumphant is why the United States is involved with determining the fate of Hamas. Has Hamas injured any American or threatened U.S. hegemony? Does Hamas have long-range ballistic missiles, tipped with nuclear weapons, that can reach the U.S. mainland? Does Hamas have submarines that can move close to shore? They don’t even have rowboats. Outside Israel, Hamas is not a threat to anyone.
Israel has murdered many Americans, including naval forces on the U.S.S. Liberty, has submarines that contain missiles tipped with nuclear weapons, and is a threat to everyone. Isn’t it clear that U.S. administrations have confused the issue and its contestants and behaved detrimental to American interests?
Trump’s pronouncement, “Finish them off, ‘Big Tuna,’ and we’ll take their territory,” emanates from a Godfather mentality. The inhuman is trying to convince the world that he is in control of the gruesome operation and Israel operates under his command. Already classified as the worst U.S. president and as the tenth most worst person in history, Mr. Evil has now leaped to numero uno in the latter category, displacing Adolph Hitler to the 2nd spot. What is left for him to accomplish?
U.S. authorities’ explain the unusual arrangement, where the U.S. supplies the arms and funds and Israel commits the mass murders, by declaring the two nations have shared values ─ an odd reason to conduct foreign relations. Odder is that Israel is fervently a Jewish nation, the United States is mostly a Christian nation, and Jews and Christians have several different values. The “values” are vaguely defined and are more appropriately defined by the shared joy both nations get from subduing and strangling defenseless peoples.
Another reason, given by foreign policy experts, has genocidal Israel serving as the U.S. “attack dog,” keeping in check the Middle East nations, and assuring all are aligned with U.S. interests. History does not validate the thesis. Except for rare occasions, Israel has operated independently of U.S. interests, created difficulties for Uncle Sam with several Arab nations, drawn the U.S. into wars, and produced enemies for the “Red, White, and Blue.” Kept from public view is Israel’s role in constructing the number one enemy of the U.S. ─ Osama bin Laden.
The arch-terrorist clarified his position in the infamous Osama bin Laden “Letter to the American people,” which has been conveniently sidetracked to ensure Americans do not get infected with terrorist germs. It is difficult to agree with bin Laden but his statements are not easily contended.
Thus the American people have chosen, consented to, and affirmed their support for the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, the occupation and usurpation of their land, and its continuous killing, torture, punishment and expulsion of the Palestinians. The American people have the ability and choice to refuse the policies of their Government and even to change it if they want.
If “shared values” and foreign policy decisions that favor Israel are no benefit to U.S. interests, what drives support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people? Common factors appearing in the U.S. and other nations are the myriad of pro-Israel Jewish groups who exercise media control, political funding, dual citizenship, promote the concept of a “special relationship,” and influence the cultural, social, educational, and political systems in all of the countries.
Commentators go to great lengths to explain the “special relationship” between Israel and the United States, treating it as a unique affair, in which both benefit. This slogan is a hoax, which originated during World War II as a description of the relationship between embattled Great Britain and a still neutral United States. Somehow and somewhere, a clever someone adapted the World War II slogan, applied it to Israel, and managed to insert it in the everyday lexicon of several nations. Some examples:
“The Netherlands maintains excellent relations with the Palestinian Authority (PA) and a constructive partnership through our development cooperation programme, while the special relationship with Israel allows for political openings.”
“The minister met with Israeli Minister of Military Affairs Moshe Ya’alon in Berlin on Thursday. Ya’alon is on a two-day visit to Germany. ‘This is the first foreign guest I have the pleasure of welcoming here in my function as defense minister. It shows the special relationship between Germany and Israel,’ the German defense minister stated.”
“Some members of the EU were against the deepening of relations with Israel without the progress in the Peace Process. The Czech plan did not materialize, yet, the ‘special relationship’ between the Czech Republic and the Jewish state remains strong.”
Placing the words “special relationship” in government conversations, speeches, reports, articles, and documents so they become part of the everyday vocabulary of Europeans is a significant thrust of Israel’s public relations effort. The words seem harmless but they have a psychological impact.
The “special relationship” that the U.S. has with Israel is lightly treated, exhibiting more humor than seriousness. The District of Columbia is “Israeli occupied territory” and “Israel is the U.S. 51st state.” Tine to get seriously serious. Examine one GIANT FACT ─ Israel’s supporters have key government officials in their pockets. Check two.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
Norman Braman, billionaire car dealer and former owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, is an ardent supporter of Israel and an ardent backer of Marco Rubio. Born to immigrant parents and becoming a billionaire in his native country didn’t interfere with Mr. Braman displaying first loyalty to Israel in a 2011 interview.
We have to bring more – more American Jews to Israel. We don’t do a good enough job with that…. I’ve been a supporter of Birthright. It’s more than just taking Jews to Israel. We have to get back to what we said at the beginning of the program. We can’t ask someone what they can do for Israel. We have to explain to them what Israel has done for them. And if we are able to achieve that, then we will be successful in reversing this trend.
From the New York Times, by Michael Barbaro and Steve Eder, May 9, 2015, “Billionaire Lifts Marco Rubio, Politically and Personally,”
As Mr. Rubio has ascended in the ranks of Republican politics, Mr. Braman has emerged as a remarkable and unique patron. He has bankrolled Mr. Rubio’s campaigns. He has financed Mr. Rubio’s legislative agenda. And, at the same time, he has subsidized Mr. Rubio’s personal finances, as the rising politician and his wife grappled with heavy debt and big swings in their income.
From 2019-2024, the American Israel Public Affairs (AIPAC) contributed $109,800 to Rubio’s campaigns.
Elise Stefanik Representative (R – NY)
From 2023-2024, AIPAC contributed a whopping $359,494 to Ms. Stefanik’s campaign.
Additional major donors are:
Neither Ms. Stefanik nor Mr. Rubio have strong personal reasons to aggressively favor Israel. Elise Stefanik’s district is rural and has a slim number of Zionists. Marco Rubio’s Florida has a contingent of Zionist Jews, but Rubio’s public life was molded by his ties with Norman Braman before he entered statewide politics. These politicos have not received funds because they are pro-Israel, they have become pro-Israel in order to receive the funds. The arrangements have the smell of bribes for services rendered. Multiply the “bribes” by several hundred bribe masters and institutions and calculate the manipulation of the American political system by Israel’s supporters.
The U.S. went bonkers over the revelation that, according to New York Magazine, about 3,000 ads were purchased by a Russian agency during the 2016 election at a cost of around $100,000. There are no investigations concerning Israeli massive interference in all U.S. elections from here to eternity.
The Nation, in an article, “The Trump Campaign’s Collusion With Israel,” April 3/10, 2023
While US media fixated on Russian interference in the 2016 election, an Israeli secret agent’s campaign to influence the outcome went unreported.
…a recent multinational journalistic investigation revealed that Israel has become a world center for the export of election fraud, fake news, hacking of private e-mails, and disinformation. Connections were discovered between private intelligence firms and both Israel’s Ministry of Defense and the firm Cambridge Analytica, which illegally collected data from more than 87 million Facebook users for use in the 2016 presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
Another revealing article in Jacobin, “Israel’s Meddling in US Politics Is Aggressive and Unceasing,” by Branko Marcetic 03.23.2024
The real story of foreign election interference and a ‘quid pro quo’ in 2016 was about Israel…Two separate firms staffed by former Israeli Defense Forces officers — Psy-Group and Inspiration, the latter actually employed by a Trump-supporting Super PAC — presented candidate Trump with proposals for voter manipulation in swing states. One of Netanyahu’s political allies, billionaire Sheldon Adelson, poured more than $400 million into Trump’s campaign and those of his GOP allies before his death.
If Israel’s supporters play key roles in subverting the interests of the Western nations and cajoling them into the unbelievable — aiding and abetting what has become the worst genocide in modern history, where induced suffering, deprivation, starvation, child killing are exercised with glee — then a plausible solution enters the cerebrum — contend the myriad of Jewish groups, expose and combat the media control, outdo the political funding, do away with dual citizenship, and halt the “special relationship.”
Start with having anyone who favors Israel labelled a traitor to his/her native country, continue with having no relationship with any person, company, institution, and political figure who does not recognize the genocide, extend to mass protests of political officials and media who support Israel, propose legislation that denies dual citizenship, and expose the common factors that appear in several nations, including the “special relationship.”
Ask church officials why they are not explosively active in condemning Israel and arousing their flocks to take action when Palestinian Christian communities face systemic violence and oppression at the hands of the Israeli government. The Denver Guardian reports,
Christian clergy in Jerusalem are regularly spat on, harassed, and assaulted by right-wing Israelis, often under the watchful eye—and sometimes direct participation—of Israeli police. Church properties are vandalized with little, if any, consequences. Violent Israeli settlers, backed by the police, have illegally occupied church properties in the Old City and evicted the Palestinian Christian tenants. Palestinian Christian homes outside of the Old City are often bulldozed, without due process, to make way for excavations designed to draw in tourists, and Palestinian Christians living in the West Bank are often prevented from visiting Bethlehem due to Israeli-imposed military checkpoints and road closures. Attacks on Palestinian Christians and churches in the West Bank are also common.
Trump has gone too far for too long in his brazen neglect for truth and reality, and for enabling apartheid Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. The American people have gone too far for too long in permitting their nation to be coopted by a foreign power and used for the benefit of that foreign power. Israel’s supporters are a fifth column, a clandestine subversive organization working to further another nation’s military and political aims, destroying America’s constitutional values, and replacing them with Zionist criminal values. Criminals belong in jail and that is the proper place for Trump and all Zionists.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The tariff truce between China and the United States is set to end in August. What do you forecast will happen after that? And what will happen to trade relations between China and the US for the rest of US President Donald Trump’s second term?
The United States learned that it can’t impose its will on China. The rare earths threat by itself was enough to cause the US to reconsider. So, almost immediately after putting on the high tariffs, the US backed down. And both sides know that each has some chokeholds on the other. For that reason, we might expect the two sides to maintain certain limits on the trade frictions in the years ahead. There will be, therefore, some kind of agreement, but it won’t stick in the details, and frictions will continue to wax and wane, with neither side definitively imposing its will on the other. The basic reason is that both sides have a mutual gain from continued trade. I’m hopeful that a measure of rationality will therefore prevail.
The biggest challenge, of course, is the behaviour of the US. The US started this trade war. This is not two sides fighting each other, but rather the US fighting China. We should remember that. The US needs to show some prudence at this point. I do suspect that there is a chastened view among many senior US officials. Trump himself is unpredictable. He has a very short attention span. Agreements with Trump don’t stick. So, I don’t foresee a quiet period, but I do foresee some limits to the competition because each side can do damage to the other and both sides have a strong reason to achieve some cooperation.
Let me add one more point. From a long-term point of view, China certainly should not regard the US as a growth market for its exports. The US is going to restrict China’s exports to the US one way or another. The relationship will not be harmonious. The US will not be friendly to China, or trustworthy. China should just take care that it’s expanding its exports to other markets, and should not be overly focused on trying to break through to the US market, or even to Europe for that matter. The rapid growth of China’s exports will be with Africa, Southeast Asia, South Asia, west Asia, Central Asia, Latin America – not with the US and western Europe.
What is your forecast for the US midterm elections, and will it be a tough battle for Trump? Can you comment on how divided the US is compared to before the election of Trump last year?
I think that the Democrats will likely regain control of one or both houses of Congress, because in midterm elections that is generally the pattern.
Even without getting deeply specific about the current context, the prevailing party that holds the White House almost always loses ground in the midterms, and the Republican majority in both houses of Congress is very small. Having said this, we should also understand that Trump is ruling mainly by executive decree, not by legislation. Even if the Democrats regain one or both houses of Congress, Trump will continue with his decrees.
The US currently does not have a functioning constitutional system in my view. It is one-person rule by declarations of emergencies by Trump. The orders generally start with the statement: “By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered”. This is a kind of soft dictatorship, not a constitutional system. The lower courts object, but the Supreme Court lets Trump have his way. The Congress is nearly moribund.
Even if the Democrats regain some control of the House or the Senate, it won’t stop a lot of what Trump is doing. I should also add that while Americans are polarised, they generally dislike both political parties. Most Americans are unhappy about the direction of the country. They’re distrustful of the politicians. Our political institutions are not functioning properly and that’s why there’s a high level of distrust.
Another point that I think is important to understand is that the swings between the Democrats and the Republicans do not change US foreign policy. [Former president Barack] Obama started the anti-China policies in his term. Then came Trump’s tariffs in his first term. Biden kept those Trump tariffs and had a hostile policy towards China. Now Trump is picking up where Biden left off. The deep state drives foreign policy, not public opinion or presidents.
In sum, I don’t have much hope that some change in the midterm elections will change the direction of US politics very much. Even a change in the White House in four years is not likely to change US politics very much. Our problems are deep seated. Our institutional failings are deep. It’s going to take perhaps 20 years to work through this. This is not a Trump phenomenon by itself.
What effect will the One Big Beautiful Bill have on the US economy?
The One Big Beautiful Bill weakens the US in two ways. First, it adds to the already large budget deficits by making additional tax cuts that mainly benefit rich Americans and the corporate class. These tax cuts raise the budget deficit substantially and are partially offset by cuts in healthcare benefits for the poorest Americans. The bill, therefore, is dramatically unfair and unwise in its impacts on the deficit and inequality.
Second, the legislation phases out some of the modest earlier US efforts towards low-carbon energy and modernisation of infrastructure. So, the legislation marks a US retreat from leadership on 21st-century technologies. Basically, the Trump administration is a gift to China, with Trump’s policies saying to China, “China should lead the way on climate safety, low-carbon energy, electric vehicles and all of the green and digital technologies that the world needs, while the US will ignore the future”.
So, none of this is a big, beautiful bill. It is a mess that reflects the failures of the American political system.
What are the implications of the fallout between billionaire Elon Musk and Trump?
Trump doesn’t have long-term relations with any individual other than his immediate family. Trump falls out with everybody. Remember Steve Bannon? He was once Trump’s closest adviser. That came to an end quickly. Almost all Trump advisers get fired at one point or another. Trump is not a person with long-term loyalties to anybody.
The individual feuds don’t mean very much. Breaking with Musk does not mean breaking with Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley put Trump back into the White House with enormous financial backing for Trump’s campaign. There are still tens of billions of dollars of government contracts going also to Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other Big Tech operators.
The basic relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington remains intact because the Pentagon believes that it needs AI and can’t pursue AI on its own. While Trump has cut support for EVs, including Tesla, the Pentagon will continue to rely on Musk’s SpaceX for many years to come. And the same is true of the Pentagon’s reliance on Big Tech’s AI capacities generally.
You have mentioned in other interviews that Trump lacked a coherent strategy in foreign policy, including his handling of China. Why do you think this? And what do you see ahead for China-US relations?
The most fundamental trend in the world economy is the rapid rise of the non-Western economies, led by China and including Russia, India, Southeast Asia and, in future decades, Africa. The US is flailing about trying to maintain its dominance in a world in which the emerging economies are rising rapidly. The US will not be able to prevent the emergence of multipolarity, but it will try. Trump will try one thing or another, but without success or coherence. Multipolarity has already arrived.
The broad pattern of economic convergence – in which the emerging economies narrow or close the income gap with the high-income countries of the West – means that Western hegemony is over. This is leading to deep frustration, not only in the US political class but in Europe as well.
China vastly outproduces the United States in advanced industrial goods, such as EVs, solar power, wind power, advanced nuclear power, batteries, low-cost 5G and many other key technologies. China incorporates AI into advanced manufacturing processes more than the US.
Many European leaders feel that if they stick with the US against China and Russia, then maybe the Western hegemony will continue. This is delusional in my view, but nonetheless creates a lot of noise, friction and risks of conflict. None of it is a coherent strategy, however.
The US has no strategy to stay ahead of China. In fact, the US can’t succeed in that. We hear a lot of US sabre-rattling against China, Russia and the BRICS countries. This is all dangerous. I think the heated rhetoric by itself can become a self-fulfilling prophecy of war. There are a lot of ignorant people in the US political leadership, and I worry very much about their naivety and delusions.
This, in my view, is essentially the origin of the “trade war”. The US decided during 2010-2015 that China is now a threat to US primacy. The US has tried a lot of things to block China’s continued rise, including: a military build-up in East Asia; export restrictions on hi-tech goods, especially advanced chips; economic sanctions on key Chinese companies; investment restrictions by US companies, and ownership restrictions on Chinese companies in the US; high tariffs against China’s exports; and others. But none of this stops China’s rise. China’s development results from hard work, ingenuity, high rates of saving, high rates of investment, very effective long-term planning and a very skilled, very entrepreneurial generation of business leaders, especially young business leaders. Those fundamental strengths continue despite America’s anti-China policies.
Trump’s policies are accelerating the move of top scientists to China. My overall view is that Trump is creating a lot of noise and some real dangers, but with no real strategy and no likelihood of success in holding back China’s rise. That’s a good thing. The rest of the world benefits from China’s economic success, including the US.
In your last Open Questions interview, you talked about “the deep state”, a complex vested interest group in industry, the military and other spheres. Does the deep state want military conflict with China? And do foreign governments – such as China and Russia – believe in the existence of a deep state, which many dismiss as a conspiracy theory?
The deep state means the permanent security system of the United States and its partners in Europe and in East Asia, including Japan, Korea and other places where the US has military bases and other security institutions. It includes the military, the CIA, the military contractors and the politicians who serve the military-industrial complex.
Does such a deep state exist? Yes. The US has around 750 overseas military bases and many of them are in East Asia. The US has many major military contractors with hundreds of billions of dollars of annual business with the US government. The US fights overt and covert wars pretty much non-stop, some of which are proxy wars (in which the US arms and funds Ukraine to fight Russia), and sometimes open conflicts with heavy US involvement, as in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US has the extensive global networks of the CIA and other intelligence and covert institutions. All of this constitutes the deep state. Presidents come and go but the underlying foreign policy is consistent and set largely out of view of the public, and without any reference to public opinion.
When Obama replaced [US president George] Bush Jr, and Trump replaced Obama, and Biden replaced Trump, and Trump replaced Biden, on the PR level there was alleged to be change, but in fact very little policy change occurred. For example, how much foreign policy change was there when Obama succeeded Bush Jr? Very little. Obama launched many wars, just as Bush had done. Obama’s team actively participated in the coup in Ukraine in 2014 that set the path for the Ukraine war. Obama went to war against Libya. Obama gave the CIA the order to overthrow the Syrian government. All of this was a continuation of the policies of the Bush period.
Trump continued most of the same policies. Trump continued to build up the Ukraine military. The Trump administration dismissed the Minsk 2 agreement that could have prevented the escalation of the Ukraine war. There was not any major change between Obama and Trump.
When Biden came in, their claim again was that there would be a new foreign policy, but it didn’t happen. What did Biden do with China? He continued Trump’s tariffs. He continued Trump’s hardline rhetoric. Biden absurdly divided the world between the so-called democracies and autocracies, which was an incredibly naive approach, as I said from the beginning.
Biden escalated the Ukraine war. He rejected all attempts at peace negotiations, including the Istanbul process that could have ended the Ukraine war in 2022. When it came to the Middle East, Biden was complicit in Israel’s ongoing genocide. So, Biden did very little different from Bush Jr, Obama and Trump before him.
Now, Trump has returned. What’s the real difference? Trump is different in style, in his unpredictability, nastiness, self-dealing and endless flip-flops. Yet, in terms of basic foreign policy, Trump is not very different from his predecessors.
This is the sense in which deep state means an ongoing consistency of the US security institutions that run American foreign policy. American foreign policy is not determined by public opinion, or Congress, or even the president in large part. Look instead to the CIA, the Pentagon and the other parts of the deep state.
The deep state also determines the politics of US vassal states. Many observers consider Japan to be a US-occupied country, with Japan’s foreign policy basically subservient to the US. One can say the same about many other countries. Where the US has military bases, the host countries tend to act like occupied countries, bending their own foreign policy to that of the US.
The US deep state is profoundly arrogant, thinking that it can have its way around the world. The US deep state thinks that it can dominate not only US allies, which is typically true, but also China, Russia, Iran, Brazil and others. When US arrogance becomes too strong, we face the danger of disaster. That’s what happened in Ukraine. The US thought that it could push Russia around to its will. It could not. The attempt to assert US power in Ukraine led to war.
US arrogance deeply worries me. Trump certainly is not a strategist. There’s no long-term plan. The US is playing poker, but not very well or wisely. It often bluffs. The whole approach can lead to war.
China is now drafting its economic policies for the next five years. You have advised many countries before. What is your advice to China in the face of this tension and the global tariff war?
My main advice to China is look to the non-Western world for the strongest partnerships in trade, investment and diplomacy, at least for a while. The US-led alliance (US, Canada, Britain, EU, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand) is around 13 per cent of the world population. China is another 17 per cent. The remaining 70 per cent of the world – in Asia, Africa and Latin America – wants good and strong economic and diplomatic relations with China. That 70 per cent of the world population wants to modernise, and China provides the means for those countries to achieve rapid growth and modernisation. China is key to the global energy transition to zero-carbon energy, especially in the markets outside the US and Europe.
The emerging and developing economies of Asia, Africa and Latin America will be the markets for China’s rapid export growth in the years ahead. China will play a vital global role in these economies in building advanced green and digital economies, using Chinese cutting-edge technologies.
This will be a great win-win for the world because China will continue to grow rapidly while also empowering rapid growth throughout the emerging and developing nations. Sadly, in my view, the US will not play much of a role in that modernisation in the next generation. The US under Trump is withdrawing from green technologies, and from global responsibility.
The US cannot compete with China for the global renewable energy market. The US can’t compete with China for the global digital connectivity market. The US can’t compete with China in fast rail or low-carbon ocean shipping. In all these sectors, Trump is handing world trade and leadership over to China.
Regarding the US markets, China should certainly attempt to make a suitable trade deal with the US but China should not fret too much either way. The US is already a small part of China’s exports – perhaps around 10-12 per cent. That share of China’s exports will most likely decline further.
I hope that I’m wrong and that the US regains some sense and rejoins the global effort for green transformation and re-establishes normal trade with China. Yet, I don’t think that’s going to happen for many years, and I don’t think that China can, or should, base its policies on a return to normal trade with the US.
More specifically, I advocate expanding [China’s] Belt and Road Initiative. I advocate that China should deal with regional groups, including ASEAN, the African Union, the Arab League and the Community of Latin America and Caribbean States (CELAC). China’s relations with these regional groups can be very strategic, as the regional groups can, and should, spur the interconnectivity of infrastructure among all the members of the group. For China, it will be easier to interact with regional plans rather than one country at a time.
In fact, no individual state in ASEAN, or the Middle East, or Latin America can modernise on its own without strong links with its neighbours through trade, finance and infrastructure. With ASEAN, for example, there really is the need for an ASEAN-wide energy system, not separate energy systems for Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia etc. These countries need an interconnected power grid, and China will play a key role in achieving an ASEAN-wide grid. Therefore, China-ASEAN diplomacy is strongly win-win.
I also believe that Hong Kong will have a huge and indeed unique leadership role in the global transformation. Hong Kong is vital for China’s growing links with ASEAN, the African Union, and beyond. The Greater Bay Area (GBA) combines Hong Kong’s world-class leadership in international finance, higher education and global management, with Shenzhen’s leadership in cutting-edge technologies, and the advanced manufacturing of Dongguan, Guangzhou and other GBA cities.
Put these strengths together, and the GBA becomes the beating heart of the global green transformation, in zero-carbon energy, robotics, AI-based manufacturing, digital connectivity and much more. All of this will help to fuel China’s – and Hong Kong’s – rapid growth for the next generation.
This year marks the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. How is the post-war world order changing and what will the new world order look like?
There are three scenarios.
One is that we create a truly multilateral world. For that, we need a United Nations 2.0. We need an upgraded international system in which all the major powers agree to invest in the international rule of law and peaceful resolution of conflicts. This will require an upgrade of the UN Security Council, and UN institutions more generally.
I’d love to see a major UN campus in China, to help lead the green and digital transformation worldwide. I’d love to see China and India working together closely at the UN, including towards India’s seat in the UN Security Council. I’d like China to support the African Union to play a much larger role in global governance. I’d like to see China, Japan and Korea end the geopolitical divisions and form a strong alliance in northeast Asia. Most importantly in this scenario, the US and Europe accept the rising role of China, India and the rest of the non-Western world.
A second scenario is that the Western world hunkers down. It goes protectionist and the US tries to divide the world into camps. This is perhaps the likely US strategy, but I think it is significantly worse for the US and the rest of the world than the first scenario. I think the US absolutely should abandon the idea of building competing camps.
The third scenario is that we don’t have a global system at all, but rather increasing chaos from climate change, wars and geopolitical conflicts. This dire scenario is a real possibility.
Any of these three trajectories is possible. We should be aiming for the first. The United States and Europe should take a deep breath, sigh and welcome the non-Western world into a shared global leadership. The major powers – the US, Europe, Russia, China, India – should agree to prevent confrontations.
The US should stop NATO enlargement and should stop providing armaments to Taiwan. Such actions are provocative and lead to great-power conflicts that threaten the safety and security of the whole world.
In short, the West should stop asking “Who is Number One?” and instead ask, “How can the whole world work together for the global common good?” In my experience, China, Russia and other nations would enthusiastically back such a global, cooperative effort that is based on mutual respect and mutual security.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The flag of Israel represents the greatest human rights disaster in modern history, yet has flown proudly at the Broome County Correctional Facility by order of Sheriff Akshar. His dedication to Trump’s unconstitutional actions has also made Broome County one of the leading penal camps for immigrants in New York State.
For over 600 days the Israeli flag flew over our county jail. It was a flagrant display of a Sheriff knowingly engaging in a divisive, illegal act in violation of New York State Public Building Law.
New York State Law forbids a foreign flag from flying over public property. The actual wording of the law states, “It shall not be lawful to display the flag or emblem of any foreign country upon any state, county or municipal building; provided, however, that whenever any foreigner shall become the guest of the United States, the state or any city, upon public proclamation by the governor or mayor of such city, the flag of the country of which such public guest shall be a citizen may be displayed upon such public buildings.”
Veterans For Peace notified Sheriff Akshar on July 29 that it would file a lawsuit if the Israeli flag was not taken down within 10 days. After 6 days he relented.
Now that the flag is down, Sheriff Akshar and county officials need to apologize to the general public. The leader of the institution that is supposed to uphold the law and claim their jail is a “correctional facility” has demonstrated the opposite by making a mockery of the law and betraying the public trust. Sheriff Akshar, with the permission of the Broome County Legislature, has turned citizens’ property into a shameful display of acceptance of an Israeli-United States genocide in Gaza.
The Sheriff, with Broome County officials standing by, has also made the Broome County jail a gulag, a black hole for immigrant workers wanting to be part of the “American Dream”.
Sheriff Akshar, the leading law enforcer in the county, has lost credibility by knowingly engaging in divisive, illegal conduct. Given his partnership with ICE, an agency that willfully violates US Constitutional rights, Akshar has demonstrated his personal politics are more important than public service. He should be ashamed of his conduct and admonished for his actions.
The first words of Sheriff Akshar in his media release following the removal of the Israeli flag showed the depth of his ignorance.
The Sheriff said the attack of October 7, 2023 was “unprovoked”. He seems unaware that the people of Palestine have been murdered by the Israelis by the thousands for 77 years prior to October 7, 2023. Palestinian homes have been bulldozed, their olive trees cut down, their land given to Israeli immigrant settlers, their children sent to prison for years for throwing rocks at Israeli tanks. Israel’s system of apartheid has tormented the people of Palestine for decades. The “unprovoked” lie has been repeated over and over in the Western media. The Sheriff has been taught to believe as true the blatant lie of Israeli Zionists–and spread by “Christian” Zionists.
Sheriff Fred Akshar needs to apologize to the people of Broome for 600 plus days of flying the flag of unspeakable human rights violations, the slaughter of tens of thousands of people–all celebrated with the flag of Israel.
Might does not make right. Right makes might–the people of Broome County are right.
*****
Editor’s note: Gilroy and other activists spent weeks consulting with attorneys, finding plaintiffs for the suit and organizing demonstrations at the county jail before the flag came down.
The post Veterans Force NY County Sheriff to Take Down Israeli Flag first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Apocalyptic visions are no longer confined to conferences of far-right organizations, End Times novels, small fringe obscure churches, and on movie theater and television screens. These days they are finding a home embedded in the War Room at Donald Trump’s White House.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 “calls for establishing a government that would be imbued with ‘biblical principles’ and run by a president who holds sweeping executive powers,” the Charles F. Kettering Foundation’s Maura Casey pointed out in an August 19, 2024 piece, headlined “Project 2025: The Blueprint for Christian Nationalist Regime Change.”
Casey added: “Christian nationalism believes that the Christian Bible, as God’s infallible law, should be the basis of government and have primacy over public and private institutions. Its patriarchal view does not recognize gender equality or gay rights and sanctions discrimination based on religious beliefs.
“Christian nationalist ideas are woven through the plans of Project 2025 and the pages of Mandate for Leadership. Its thousands of recommendations include specific executive orders to be repealed or implemented. Laws, regulations, departments, and whole agencies would be abolished. It portrays anyone who opposes its sweeping ambitions as being enemies of our republic.”
The current administration is operationalizing Project 2025’s Christian nationalist agenda—not just planning it. Through executive orders, targeted staffing, institutional purges of diversity and transgender inclusion, and the formal elevation of faith into governance, policy is explicitly being shaped “along far-right theological lines.”
A prime example is Mike Huckabee, tapped by Trump to be the U.S. Ambassador to Israel. Critics have labeled Huckabee’s rhetoric as extreme due to his references to apocalyptic prophecy.
Prominent figures in the White House Faith Office, such as Paula White, also frame Trump’s presidency in divine terms—calling it “God-ordained” and tying it to a biblical mission of moral revival.
Russell Vought, Project 2025 architect and OMB Director, comes from Wheaton College and openly supports Christian nationalist beliefs. While not explicitly apocalyptic, he asserts that America’s laws should flow from “God” and maintains that the U.S. is under divine mandate—a perspective common in End Times theology.
While not every Trump appointee is an End‑Times literalist, those with close evangelical ties and roots, frame their public roles through an apocalyptic lens. This worldview doesn’t just inform their religious beliefs; it shapes policy urgency, moral absolutism, and a sense of divine sanction behind governance—hallmarks of the Christian nationalist agenda embedded in Project 2025.
The post Trump’s Christian Nationalists’ Apocalyptic Dreams, Are America’s Nightmares first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
August 4, 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of Operation Storm. Little known outside the former Yugoslavia, the military campaign unleashed a genocidal cataclysm that violently expelled Croatia’s entire Serb population. Dubbed “the most efficient ethnic cleansing we’ve seen in the Balkans” by Swedish politician Carl Bildt, Croat forces rampaged UN-protected areas of the self-declared Serb Republic of Krajina, looting, burning, raping and murdering their way across the province. Up to 350,000 locals fled, many on foot, never to return. Meanwhile, thousands were summarily executed.
As these hideous scenes unfolded, UN peacekeepers charged with protecting Krajina watched without intervening. Meanwhile, US officials strenuously denied the horrifying massacres and mass displacement amounted to ethnic cleansing, let alone war crimes.
The post United States Backed Ethnic Cleansing Of Serbs appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv is a well-respected holy man in Israel with some devoted followers. He is a dayan, a judge in the rabbinical courts of Tel Aviv, dispensing wisdom in matters of religion and Jewish law. He’s also a reservist in the Sayeret Givati brigade of the IDF and is currently serving in Gaza. There, he has earned a degree of fame for his skills as an operator of the Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer, the IDF’s tool of choice for the erasure of Palestinian homes. He claims to average more than 50 demolitions a week. According to Zarbiv, his unit has learned to ‘play the D9’ like a musical instrument.
Rabbi Zarbiv is part of the wider effort to lay waste to Gaza and render it uninhabitable for Palestinians. His stated motives are religious; war, for him, is a harbinger of the coming of the messiah. But he is one of many directly or indirectly employed to demolish buildings in Gaza. The motivation for others is more straightforward: money, revenge, or, in a context where the demolition of Palestinians’ homes is seen as a service to one’s country, patriotic duty.
Domicide is a key aspect of the genocide in Gaza. According to recent reports, around 92% of homes and 70% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been severely damaged or destroyed. Gaza has a population of over 2 million, and from the scale of the destruction, it appears that all houses are considered bases of resistance. If we put morality aside, as the IDF seems to have done, the scale of the flattening of Gaza is an impressive achievement, considered as an initial stage of population transfer. There is no access given to foreign journalists for a reason – Gaza is unrecognizable, and the destruction is wholesale. So, how do you transform such a vast area into a moonscape of concrete and ashes in under two years? Overwhelming air power certainly helps, but on the ground, two things have been particularly important: willing personnel, such as the good rabbi, and the right equipment.
It takes certain modifications for a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer manufactured in the US to become an armored D9. Israel Aerospace Industries [IAI], which offers an ‘extensive range of innovative solutions’ in ground combat situations, is responsible for these. The Israeli armored version of the Cat D9 has a mounted machine gun, grenade launcher, and smoke projector. It is armoured to protect the operator and has, of course, been battle-tested over years of occupation. So familiar an asset is it that the D9 has its own affectionate nickname in IDF slang: the ‘Doobie’, or Teddy Bear in English. Rachel Corrie died underneath one. Together with excavators, wheel loaders, and other heavy machinery, it has been used for years in West Bank house demolitions. The D9 can not only demolish buildings but also create the new ‘corridors’ of Gaza and clear border security zones. It has hardly been reported in the West, but with the aid of such equipment, whole villages in southern Lebanon along the international border have recently been erased, Gaza style.
In wartime, the Israeli economy has been strikingly robust. The assault on Gaza has been a boost to certain sectors, and it has been especially profitable for those with initiative who can hire or invest in large machinery. As well as utilizing its personnel for demolitions, the IDF has been shown to be outsourcing the destruction in Gaza. Lucrative work has been available for equipment operators. Owners of excavators can earn 5,000 shekels a day. Those who work as contractors with the Ministry of Defence are paid based on the number of houses demolished. This is war as a continuation of business by other means, as Brecht might have observed. Rabbi Zarbiv is merely the celebrity face of patriotic demolition. So many are working on the razing of Gaza that infrastructure projects in Israel are facing significant delays due to shortages of operators and equipment.
But Zarbiv’s days could be numbered as a D9 specialist. Quite apart from the complaint lodged against him with the ICC for alleged war crimes, he could soon be redundant as a result of the recent introduction of the ‘Robdozer’, developed by IAI. This is a destroyer of homes that is unmanned and can be remotely operated, like a drone, from the air-conditioned comfort of an office. Future versions are envisioned to be fully autonomous. Genocide and destruction will be even easier than they are now. If pilots who drop bombs indiscriminately can be considered heroes in Israel’s militarized culture, so too can those who operate drones or bulldozers remotely, or those who program an autonomous D9 – no doubt according to the values of the ‘most moral army in the world.’ These advancements in remote-controlled technology represent another contribution to the ongoing disconnection of Israelis from the consequences of their wartime actions.
The IDF has recently received another shipment of D9s after the Biden administration delayed delivery. Israelis take pride in their myth of the start-up nation. But besides having a thriving software and high-tech sector, Israel has invested significantly in heavy machinery, appropriately enough for an apartheid state that wants to control and shape the land it occupies. But it needs external help. In UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s recent report on Israel’s ‘economy of genocide’, Caterpillar Inc. is allocated its own paragraph. This year, the company signed a further multi-million-dollar contract with Israel.
Punitive demolition has long been a part of the history of this conflict. As the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd put it, bulldozers have been ‘undoing God’ for some time. What is new is the prominence of their role in this unprecedented destruction. New, too, is the amount of money being made in the process, not just by Israelis, but by international firms producing heavy machinery like Caterpillar and JCB. We are witnesses to the razing of entire cities, towns, and villages, to lives being shovelled aside like rubble, all to clear the way for the next phase of Zionism. Western companies and governments are providing the wherewithal.
The post The Rabbi and the Robdozers – Heavy Machinery and Patriotic Demolition in the Service of Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv is a well-respected holy man in Israel with some devoted followers. He is a dayan, a judge in the rabbinical courts of Tel Aviv, dispensing wisdom in matters of religion and Jewish law. He’s also a reservist in the Sayeret Givati brigade of the IDF and is currently serving in Gaza. There, he has earned a degree of fame for his skills as an operator of the Caterpillar D9 armored bulldozer, the IDF’s tool of choice for the erasure of Palestinian homes. He claims to average more than 50 demolitions a week. According to Zarbiv, his unit has learned to ‘play the D9’ like a musical instrument.
Rabbi Zarbiv is part of the wider effort to lay waste to Gaza and render it uninhabitable for Palestinians. His stated motives are religious; war, for him, is a harbinger of the coming of the messiah. But he is one of many directly or indirectly employed to demolish buildings in Gaza. The motivation for others is more straightforward: money, revenge, or, in a context where the demolition of Palestinians’ homes is seen as a service to one’s country, patriotic duty.
Domicide is a key aspect of the genocide in Gaza. According to recent reports, around 92% of homes and 70% of all buildings in the Gaza Strip have been severely damaged or destroyed. Gaza has a population of over 2 million, and from the scale of the destruction, it appears that all houses are considered bases of resistance. If we put morality aside, as the IDF seems to have done, the scale of the flattening of Gaza is an impressive achievement, considered as an initial stage of population transfer. There is no access given to foreign journalists for a reason – Gaza is unrecognizable, and the destruction is wholesale. So, how do you transform such a vast area into a moonscape of concrete and ashes in under two years? Overwhelming air power certainly helps, but on the ground, two things have been particularly important: willing personnel, such as the good rabbi, and the right equipment.
It takes certain modifications for a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer manufactured in the US to become an armored D9. Israel Aerospace Industries [IAI], which offers an ‘extensive range of innovative solutions’ in ground combat situations, is responsible for these. The Israeli armored version of the Cat D9 has a mounted machine gun, grenade launcher, and smoke projector. It is armoured to protect the operator and has, of course, been battle-tested over years of occupation. So familiar an asset is it that the D9 has its own affectionate nickname in IDF slang: the ‘Doobie’, or Teddy Bear in English. Rachel Corrie died underneath one. Together with excavators, wheel loaders, and other heavy machinery, it has been used for years in West Bank house demolitions. The D9 can not only demolish buildings but also create the new ‘corridors’ of Gaza and clear border security zones. It has hardly been reported in the West, but with the aid of such equipment, whole villages in southern Lebanon along the international border have recently been erased, Gaza style.
In wartime, the Israeli economy has been strikingly robust. The assault on Gaza has been a boost to certain sectors, and it has been especially profitable for those with initiative who can hire or invest in large machinery. As well as utilizing its personnel for demolitions, the IDF has been shown to be outsourcing the destruction in Gaza. Lucrative work has been available for equipment operators. Owners of excavators can earn 5,000 shekels a day. Those who work as contractors with the Ministry of Defence are paid based on the number of houses demolished. This is war as a continuation of business by other means, as Brecht might have observed. Rabbi Zarbiv is merely the celebrity face of patriotic demolition. So many are working on the razing of Gaza that infrastructure projects in Israel are facing significant delays due to shortages of operators and equipment.
But Zarbiv’s days could be numbered as a D9 specialist. Quite apart from the complaint lodged against him with the ICC for alleged war crimes, he could soon be redundant as a result of the recent introduction of the ‘Robdozer’, developed by IAI. This is a destroyer of homes that is unmanned and can be remotely operated, like a drone, from the air-conditioned comfort of an office. Future versions are envisioned to be fully autonomous. Genocide and destruction will be even easier than they are now. If pilots who drop bombs indiscriminately can be considered heroes in Israel’s militarized culture, so too can those who operate drones or bulldozers remotely, or those who program an autonomous D9 – no doubt according to the values of the ‘most moral army in the world.’ These advancements in remote-controlled technology represent another contribution to the ongoing disconnection of Israelis from the consequences of their wartime actions.
The IDF has recently received another shipment of D9s after the Biden administration delayed delivery. Israelis take pride in their myth of the start-up nation. But besides having a thriving software and high-tech sector, Israel has invested significantly in heavy machinery, appropriately enough for an apartheid state that wants to control and shape the land it occupies. But it needs external help. In UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s recent report on Israel’s ‘economy of genocide’, Caterpillar Inc. is allocated its own paragraph. This year, the company signed a further multi-million-dollar contract with Israel.
Punitive demolition has long been a part of the history of this conflict. As the Palestinian poet Mohammed El-Kurd put it, bulldozers have been ‘undoing God’ for some time. What is new is the prominence of their role in this unprecedented destruction. New, too, is the amount of money being made in the process, not just by Israelis, but by international firms producing heavy machinery like Caterpillar and JCB. We are witnesses to the razing of entire cities, towns, and villages, to lives being shovelled aside like rubble, all to clear the way for the next phase of Zionism. Western companies and governments are providing the wherewithal.
The post The Rabbi and the Robdozers – Heavy Machinery and Patriotic Demolition in the Service of Genocide first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
What follows is a revised and updated version of an essay from my 2020 book, Seeking Truth in a Country of Lies.
“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint…But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice.”
– C. S. Lewis, author’s preface, 1962, The Screwtape Letters
American history can only accurately be described as the story of demonic possession, however you choose to understand that phrase. Maybe radical “evil” will suffice. But right from the start, the American colonizers were involved in massive killing because they considered themselves divinely blessed and guided, a chosen people whose mission would come to be called “manifest destiny.” Nothing stood in the way of this divine calling, which involved the need to enslave and kill millions of innocent people that continues down to today. “Others” have always been expendable since they have stood in the way of the imperial march ordained by the American god. This includes all the wars waged based on lies and false flag operations. It is not a secret, although many Americans, if they are even aware of it, prefer to see it as a series of aberrations carried out by “bad apples.” Or something from the past. Most know nothing about it, for they have never opened a history book.
Our best writers and prophets have told us the truth: Thoreau, Twain, William James, MLK, Fr. Daniel Berrigan, et al.: we are a nation of killers of the innocent. We are conscienceless. We are brutal. We are in the grip of evil forces.
The English writer D. H. Lawrence said it perfectly in 1923, “The American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.” It still hasn’t.
When on August 6 and 9, 1945, the United States killed 200-300 thousand innocent Japanese civilians with atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they did so intentionally. It was an act of sinister state terrorism, unprecedented by the nature of the weapons but not by the slaughter. The American terror bombings of Japanese cities that preceded the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – led by the infamous Major General Curtis LeMay – were also intentionally aimed at Japanese civilians and killed hundreds of thousands of them.
Is there an American artist’s painting of Tokyo destroyed by the firebombing to go next to Picasso’s Guernica, where estimates of the dead range between 800 and 1,600?
In Tokyo alone, more than 100,000 Japanese civilians were burned to death by cluster bombs of napalm. All this killing was intentional. I repeat: Intentional. Is that not radical evil? Demonic? Only five Japanese cities were spared such bombing. Sixty-seven cities were fire-bombed.
As a conclusion to such bombings, in August 1945, the atomic bombings were an intentional holocaust, not to end the war, as the historical record amply demonstrates, but to send a message to the Soviet Union that we could do to them what we did to the residents of Japan. President Truman made certain that the Japanese willingness to surrender in May 1945 was made unacceptable because he and his Secretary of State James Byrnes wanted to use the atomic bombs – “as quickly as possible to ‘show results’” in Byrnes’s words – to send a message to the Soviet Union.
So “the Good War” was ended in the Pacific with the “good guys” killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to make a point to the “bad guys,” who have been demonized ever since. Shortly after, in September 1945, the U.S War Department made plans to wipe out the U.S.’s ally, the Soviet Union, with a massive nuclear strike aimed at 66 major cities. Professor Michel Chossudovsky documents it here.
Satan always wears the other’s face.
Many Baby Boomers like to say they grew up with the bomb. They are lucky. They grew up. They got to be scared. They got to hide under their desks and wax nostalgic about it. Do you remember dog tags? Those 1950s and 1960s? The scary movies?
The children of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who died under our bombs on August 6 and 9, 1945, didn’t get to grow up. They couldn’t hide. They just went under. To be accurate, we put them under. Or they were left to smolder for decades in pain and then die. But that it was necessary to save American lives is the lie. It’s always about American lives, as if the owners of the country actually cared about them. But to tender hearts and innocent minds, it’s a magic incantation. Poor us!
Fat Man, Little Boy – how the names of those atomic bombs echo down the years to the now fat Americans who grew up in the 1950s and who think like little boys and girls about their country’s demonic nature. Innocence – it is wonderful! We are different now. “We are great because we are good,” that’s what Hillary Clinton told us. The Libyans can attest to that. We are exceptional, special. The 2020 election was said to prove that if we can defeat Mr. Pumpkin Head and restore America to its “core values,” all will be well.
Now that they were restored with Biden’s support for the U.S. proxy war against Russia via Ukraine and the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians, delusional Trump 2024 voters might be learning that those core values are bipartisan. “We are great because we are good,” goes the mantra. We kill, therefore we are. There is a straight line from the nuclear bombing of Japan to the arrant U.S. support for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.
Perhaps you think I am cynical. But understanding true evil is not child’s play. It seems beyond the grasp of most Americans who need their illusions. Evil is real. There is simply no way to understand the savage nature of American history without seeing its demonic nature. How else can we redeem ourselves at this late date, possessed as we are by delusions of our own God-blessed goodness?
But so many Americans play at innocence. They excite themselves at the thought that with the next election, the nation will be “restored” to the right course. Of course, there never was a right course, unless might makes right, which has always been the way of America’s rulers. Today, as in 2016, Trump is viewed by so many as an aberration. He is far from it. He’s straight out of a Twain short story. He’s Vaudeville. He’s Melville’s confidence man. He’s us. Did it ever occur to those who are fixated on him that if those who own and run the country wanted him gone, he’d be gone in an instant? He can tweet and tweet idiotically, endlessly send out messages that he will contradict the next day or minute, but as long as he protects the super-rich, accepts Israel’s control of him, and allows the CIA-military-industrial complex to do its world-wide killing and looting of the treasury, he will be allowed to entertain and excite the public – to get them worked up in a lather in pseudo-debates. And to make this more entertaining, he will be opposed by the “sane” Democratic opposition, whose intentions are as benign as an assassin’s smile.
Look back as far as you can to past U.S. presidents, the figureheads who “act under orders” (whose orders?), as did Ahab in his lust to kill the “evil” great white whale, and what do you see? You see servile killers in the grip of a sinister power. You see hyenas with polished faces. You see pasteboard masks. On the one occasion when one of these presidents dared to follow his conscience and rejected the devil’s pact that is the presidency’s killer-in-chief role, he – JFK – had his brains blown out in public view. An evil empire thrives on shedding blood, and it enforces its will through demonic messages.
Resist, and there will be blood on the streets, blood on the tracks, blood in your face.
Despite this, President Kennedy’s witness, his turn from cold warrior to an apostle of peace in the final year of his presidency, remains to inspire a ray of hope in these dark days. As recounted by James Douglass in his masterful JFK and the Unspeakable, Kennedy agreed to a meeting in May 1962 with a group of Quakers who had been demonstrating outside the While House for total disarmament. They urged him to move in that direction. Kennedy was sympathetic to their position. He said he wished it were easy to do so from the top down, but that he was being pressured by the Pentagon and others to never do that, although he had given a speech urging “a peace race” together with the Soviet Union. He told the Quakers it would have to come from below. According to the Quakers, JFK listened intently to their points, and before they left, said with a smile, “You believe in redemption, don’t you?” Soon Kennedy was shaken to his core by the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world teetered on the brink of extinction and his insane military and “intelligence” advisers urged him to wage a nuclear war. Not long after, he took a sharp top-down turn toward peace despite their fierce opposition, a turn so dramatic over the next year that it led to his martyrdom. And he knew it would. He knew it would when he gave his extraordinary American University Commencement Address on June 10, 1963.
So hope is not all lost. There are great souls like JFK to inspire us. Their examples flash here and there. But to even begin to hope to change the future, a confrontation with our demonic past (and present) is first necessary, a descent into the dark truth that is terrifying in its implications. False innocence must be abandoned. Carl Jung, in “On the Psychology of the Unconscious,” addressed this with the words:
It is a frightening thought that man also has a shadow side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses – and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature. Blindly he strives against the salutary dogma of original sin, which is yet so prodigiously true. Yes, he even hesitates to admit the conflict of which he is so painfully aware.
How can one describe men who would intentionally slaughter so many innocent people? American history is rife with such examples up to the present day. The native peoples, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Iran, etc. – the list is very long. Savage wars are carried out by men and women who own and run the country, and who try to buy the souls of regular people to join them in their pact with the devil, to acquiesce to their ongoing wicked deeds. Such monstrous evil was never more evident than on August 6 and 9, 1945.
Unless we enter into deep contemplation of the evil that was released into the world with those bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we are lost in a living hell without escape. And we will pay. Nemesis always demands retribution, as the ancient Greeks said. We have gradually been accepting rule by those for whom the killing of innocents is child’s play, and we have been masquerading as innocent and good children for whom the truth is too much to bear. “Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one,” Screwtape, the devil, tells his nephew, Wormwood, a devil in training, “the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.” That’s the road we’ve been traveling, as Trump’s second term is showing us, as he facilely and recklessly talks of nuclear war and makes moves that make it more likely.
The projection of evil onto others works only so long. We must reclaim our shadows and withdraw our projections. Only the fate of the world depends on it.
The post Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Oh, we did it, via Zoom, from Newport, Oregon, to Toronto, Ontario, Canada. We had to use the free version of Zoom (is anything free with digital gulag tools, since Zoom has our data, our recording, even the stuff we said off the recording mode?) which is 40 minutes max, and then we did another recording, so, that’s 30-30, Parts One and Parts Two. It’s in an MP4 format, which I will convert to an MP3 for the KYAQ FM radio show that will air sometime in October.
Oh, he was daring to come onto my show since he has been so much more dignified in older shows.
My idea of a 30-30 interview? Make that .30-30 caliber.
Go here for a three-part book review, which gets under the chigger-infested skin of a world gone Israel Mad:
(In this three-part series, Canadian author and journalist Eric Walberg reviews Dan Steinbock’s book, The Fall of Israel: The Degradation of Israel’s Politics, Economy & Military, 2025. All three parts are published in this issue to provide continuity.)
Baby steps?
And we talked about this giant step forward FOR all of Jewish-Kind:
Oh, Samson and Hannibal and David’s Sling and Pegasus and Esther Project, and alas, we are seeing a few stories about the 9/11 of Oct. 7:
Reporting on the testimony, Israel’s Channel 7 reported that “At 5:20 a.m.” on October 7th, Shitrit said, “We were playing on the phone and suddenly a strange message came up from my deputy commander, .. and what he says on the radio is something like this: ‘I don’t know why, but an order was given that there would be no patrols in the (Gaza) fence until 9 a.m”.
He went on to say, “And sure enough, an hour later, at 6:30, suddenly sirens”.
The outlet reported that he said, “Every morning the platoon raises alert, and in his estimation, there are no mornings in which there are no patrols on the (Gaza) fence,” quoting him saying, “because you are in an operational battalion and that is part of the matter”.
Eric and I discussed his Dissident Voice pieces, and this one, surely would put him in the dock if he was living in Germany or UK: “Israeli Jews’ Love of Genocide — Review of Peter Beinhart’s Being Jewish after the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning” by Eric Walberg / May 17th, 2025.
I think just saying the word “Jew” will get you in trouble, and saying that the Jews of Israel Love Genocide is certainly a death sentence. For Muslims. Walberg is Muslim.
Reality: Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui,
“I was forced to resign from my role as Senior EDI Advisor (Jan 2024) and then let go from my position as professor (Aug 2024) at Sheridan College for my advocacy on the genocide of Palestinians.
While waiting for the arbitration date, I was advised by the union lawyer to “cool it” on my advocacy if I expect any positive outcome.
I made it clear from the start that my only reason to fight this unfair dismissal was to get a formal apology and public acknowledgement of the college’s bias. I was told an apology would be expecting too much, but compensation a more likely reality.
Over a year later, I’m still waiting for the date of arbitration.
And in this time, the department I worked in has dissolved, the people involved in my case have moved on to better pastures. even the president has left. This institution that I’m waiting to receive accountability from has been totally refaced.
AND the genocide has continued with even greater barbarity.
I was expected to hold my tongue, suppress my conscience, lie in wait, all whilst the institution and people that harmed me not only continued to harm others, but be rewarded for it.
The systems that oppress us are designed to silence us and the systems in place to protect us from them are designed to tire us.
Clearly my advocacy never stopped.
Because my moral conscience was a price I was not willing to pay for my career.
Look, accountability is important, we should take every step to hold these institutions to task, but we must also understand that a fair and just outcome – in my case, being vindicated, compensated or reinstated is rare.
The false hope we are asked to place into the systems that we know so well to be historically discriminating, all at the expense of our silence, is nothing but a tantalizing and delusive dangling carrot.
Don’t fall for it.
Maintain your integrity.
Never stop speaking the truth.”
[Dr. Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui is a globally recognized multiple award-winning public-speaker, media pundit, researcher, and a passionate social justice advocate. As well as being a professor of sociology, criminology, and criminal-psychology, she is currently directing one of Canada’s largest government-funded Equity Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) initiatives at Colleges and Institutes Canada’s National EDI Knowledge Mobilization Centre hosted at Sheridan College. She is also leading a national study with Institute for Social Policy and Understanding in Washington, DC, that both quantifies and analyses in-depth the influence and impact of a right-wing extremist political group on U.S. institutions and American attitudes.
As a postcolonial scholar, her intersectional research concentrates on the impacts of colonialism and imperialism on the lives of diasporic peoples in the West. Focusing in the areas of migration, race/ethnicity and ethno-religio identity, Dr. Ghaffar-Siddiqui’s doctoral research explored the ways in which Muslim communities in the West navigate their social worlds in a post 9/11 climate. Her previous research includes a qualitative analysis of South Asian people’s experiences of discrimination and healthcare seeking behaviours in traditionally colonial healthcare structures and settings in Ontario.]
Eric and I did not get into Sabreena’s dismissal, which is basically hateful and Jewish-Inspired Klanadian version of 1984 a la 2025.
We didn’t get into this blasphemy:
By David Miller
Zionist war criminals are being secretly hosted in Britain, with thousands arriving over the past several years, according to documents in the possession of Press TV.
They are hosted by Zionist families in the UK, taken on tours to popular tourist sites, and welcomed into private homes — as reported on the now-deleted website of the “charity” involved that goes by the name ‘British Friends of Israel War Disabled’ (BFIWD):
We did all the usual things, had an orientation tour of London, went to the theatre, visited Waddesdon Manor, went shopping, had a tour of the Houses of Parliament, visited the RAF museum and went bowling.
Our host families fed and made our guests a part of their families and we all danced the night away at the final thank you and farewell party. No one who met our guests was not moved by their experiences and the atmosphere at the final party was electric. Each and every one of them touched our hearts.
Fawning over genocidaires suggests that the risks to the UK extend beyond the visitors themselves to those who host them. There is something particularly disturbing about Zionists in the UK providing what is, in effect, material support for ongoing genocide in the Gaza Strip.
*****
Eric played good cop to my bad cop, which is funny coming from Walberg:
… all of us pin our hopes on world mass opinion. None of the world leaders, apart from the Axis of Resistance can be counted on. Arab leaders loathe the pesky Palestinians almost as much as US-Israel does. It is only the revolting masses that stand between them and the Palestinians.
He ends the third part of his Crescent International piece/book analysis this way:
The first real sign that South African apartheid would be dismantled was when (Jewish) MP Harry Schwarz met with ANC’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi to sign the Mahlabatini Declaration of Faith in 1974, enshrined the principles of peaceful transition of power and equality for all, the first such agreement by black and white political leaders in South Africa.
But it took another two decades of struggle until de Klerk opened bilateral discussions with Nelson Mandela in 1993 for a transition of policies and government.
It seems we have reached that first stage today. Ehud Olmert, who served as Israel’s prime minister from 2006 to 2009, and Nasser al-Kidwa, the Palestinian foreign minister from 2005 to 2006, met Pope Francis on October 17, 2024, to promote a peace plan that would see a Palestinian state existing alongside the state of Israel ‘on the basis of 1967 borders’ with a few territorial adjustments.
Their plan calls for the city of Jerusalem to be the capital of both Israel and Palestine, with the Old City being ‘administered by a trusteeship of five states of which Israel and Palestine are part.’
Ahh, the reality is that Israel is a necropolitical and necroschizophrenic society — Achille Mbembe: Necropolitics
The economic and political management of human populations through their exposure to death has become a global phenomenon. Wars, genocides, refugee “crisis”, ecocide and contemporary processes of pauperization and precarization reveal how increasing masses of individuals are now governed through their direct and indirect exposure to death. In order to unpack those processes, Achille Mbembe came up with the notion of necropolitics, first in 2003 with an essay bearing the same name, and then in 2016, with the book Politiques de l’inimitié, translated and published in English in 2019, as Necropolitics.1 With this latter notion, Mbembe explores and radicalizes Foucault’s concept of biopolitics.
In the last lecture of “Society must be Defended” and in the last chapter of The History of Sexuality (Vol.1), Foucault noticed how biopolitics, that is, the positive power over life can become a deadly form of power. It is not only a “calculated management of life” but also a “power to expose a whole population to death”.2 Drawing on the dramatic experiences of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes and on the global nuclear threat, Foucault highlighted how human masses are eliminated in the name of the protection and survival of a nation, a people and/or a class. Besides, he noted how racism has become the political tool that enables the biological division of the human species and the justification of the extermination of those considered inferior. Foucault insisted modern racism has developed with the “colonizing genocide”, so that the right to take life could be justified.3 Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito have explored these foucauldian observations with the notions of “homo saccer” and “thanatopolitics”, insisting respectively on the sovereign right to kill with impunity and the biological/pathological justifications of humans’ exterminations.4 Mbembe’s necropolitics offers a novel approach as it draws both on Foucault and a decolonial approach (often inspired in Frantz Fanon) and conceives of necropolitics as the political making of spaces and subjectivities in an in-between of life and death. The colony in general and the slavery plantation in particular have given birth to those necropolitical practices — fostered by white supremacy — that still continue today.
The third and “key characteristic” of necropolitics is “to produce death in a large scale”. This aspect is developed, in particular, in a subpart untitled “Relation Without Desire” from the First Chapter “Exit From Democracy” of Necropolitics (2019). It is possible to explain this characteristic, highlighting seven traits that, according to my understanding, seem to underpin Mbembe’s account on the issue.
1) State terror: The State persecutes, imprisons and eliminates certain populations so that political and social contestations can be neutralized. Those repressive tactics are operated not only by totalitarian regimes but also by contemporary liberal and illiberal countries.
2) The shared use of violence: In many cases, the State does not have and willingly shares the monopoly of violence with other private actors (i.e., militias, paramilitary), increasing the circulation and use of weapons in society. The latter is therefore divided between “those who are protected (because armed) from those who are not”.7
3) The “link of enmity”: According to Mbembe, in a society where the possession and nonpossessions of weapons define one’s social value, all social bonds are destroyed. The link of enmity normalizes therefore the “idea that power can be acquired and exercised only at the price of another’s life”.8
4) War: “Coercion itself has become a market commodity”.9 Nowadays, war and terror have become modes of production on their own, and as such need to generate new military markets.10
5) The predation of natural resources: In order to exploit valuable natural resources, populations are displaced and eliminated (i.e. indigenous people in the Amazon rain forest) though the active and hidden collaboration of the State, public forces, international corporations and criminal organizations.
6) Different modes of killing: The exposure to death is multiple: tortures, mutilations, mass killings, high-tech elimination through “drone strikes” represent various modalities of necropolitical devices.
7) Different moral justifications: According to Mbembe, atrocities are justified for various reasons such as the eradication of corruption, different types of “therapeutic liturgy”, “the desire for sacrifice”, “messianic eschatologies”, and even “modern discourses of utilitarianism, materialism, and consumerism”.11
Necropolitics implies therefore a closed entrenchment of political, economic and military devices, oriented towards the eliminations of human populations. But along with this aspect, necropolitics is also deployed through “small doses” of death that structure the everyday life of individuals.12
in the power to manufacture an entire crowd of people who specifically live at the edge of life, or even on its outer edge — people for whom living means continually standing up to death …. This life is a superfluous one, therefore, whose price is so meager that it has no equivalence, whether market or — even less — human …. Nobody even bears the slightest feelings of responsibility or justice towards this sort of life or, rather, death. Necropolitical power proceeds by a sort of inversion between life and death, as if life was merely death’s medium.16
Under everyday necropolitics, a mass of populations live under extreme precarious conditions and as such, can be exploited and eliminated “naturally”. Mbembe singles out racism as the main criteria that allow necropolitics to be performed and expand in society. Along with an “hydraulic racism” that defines institutional racism (State, law, administration), Mbembe pays attention to a so-called “nanoracism” that is deployed in everyday social relations, and is designed to stigmatize, to injure and to humiliate “those not considered to be one of us”.17 Taking into account current political, social and symbolic forms of violence that are deployed worldwide, Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics represents a relevant heuristic category for contemporary critical thought.
Antonio Pele is an Associate Professor at the Law School of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro.
*****
Next time I have Eric on we will discuss his books:
He’s got gravitus and gastritis, which he attributes to the on-going genocide and horrific images of children and civilians being gunned down while lining up for so-called food aid.
Canadian Eric Walberg is known worldwide as a journalist specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. A graduate of University of Toronto and Cambridge in economics, he has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s. He has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. Presently a writer for the foremost Cairo newspaper, Al Ahram, he is also a regular contributor to Counterpunch, Dissident Voice, Global Research, Al-Jazeera and Turkish Weekly, and is a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio. His articles appear in Russian, German, Spanish and Arabic and are accessible at his website ericwalberg.com. Walberg was a moderator and speaker at the Leaders for Change Summit in Istanbul in 2011. His book, Postmodern Imperialism, is published in Chinese, Turkish and Russian.
Check out Walberg here, over at Dissident Voice.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
It’s oddly encouraging that the New York Post had to bring up its kookiest right-wing propagandist on Friday to argue that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved lives. It’s almost as if the New York Times’ kookiest right-wing propagandist’s claiming that killing Palestinians is not genocide had to be one-upped by the Post. It’s even more encouraging that the Post felt obliged to expand the usual definition of “lives” to include the lives of Japanese people, claiming that nuking people saved not only U.S. lives but also Japanese lives — an argument it would have been very hard to find even being attempted during the early decades of this myth.
But it isn’t true that claims that nukes saved lives or nukes ended the war are only made by fringe crackpots. Those claims may be fading out among serious historians, but they are basic accepted fact to the general public, even the most educated sections of the general public; so they continue popping up like zombies in books and articles whose authors seem to have no idea they’re even writing anything controversial, much less utterly debunked. (The Post calls it “one of the most controversial historical questions in American history.”)
The argument in the Post (quoting an author named Richard Frank) is this:
“Not only has no relevant document been recovered from the wartime period, but none of them,” he writes of Japan’s top leaders, “even as they faced potential death sentences in war-crimes trials, testified that Japan would have surrendered earlier upon an offer of modified terms, coupled to Soviet intervention or some other combination of events, excluding the use of atomic bombs.”
Well here’s a relevant document. Weeks before the first bomb was dropped, on July 13, 1945, Japan had sent a telegram to the Soviet Union expressing its desire to surrender and end the war. The United States had broken Japan’s codes and read the telegram. Truman referred in his diary to “the telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace.” President Truman had already been informed through Swiss and Portuguese channels of Japanese peace overtures as early as three months before Hiroshima. Japan objected only to surrendering unconditionally and giving up its emperor, but the United States insisted on those terms until after the bombs fell, at which point it allowed Japan to keep its emperor. So, the desire to drop the bombs may have lengthened the war. The bombs did not shorten the war.
It’s odd for the Post to build its case entirely on the absence of a certain type of testimony by proud Japanese defendants facing trials for their lives with zero motivation to admit that the Japanese government had been wanting to surrender, and for the Post to completely omit the testimony of all U.S. authorities.
Defenders of nuking cities may now claim the nukes saved lives, but at the time the bombs were not even intended to do any such thing. The war ended six days after the second nuke, six days into the Russian invasion of Japan. But the war was going to end anyway, without either of those things. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that, “… certainly prior to 31 December, 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November, 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”
One dissenter who had expressed this same view to the Secretary of War and, by his own account, to President Truman, prior to the bombings was General Dwight Eisenhower. Under Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard, prior to the bombings, urged that Japan be given a warning. Lewis Strauss, Advisor to the Secretary of the Navy, also prior to the bombings, recommended blowing up a forest rather than a city. General George Marshall apparently agreed with that idea. Atomic scientist Leo Szilard organized scientists to petition the president against using the bomb. Atomic scientist James Franck organized scientists who advocated treating atomic weapons as a civilian policy issue, not just a military decision. Another scientist, Joseph Rotblat, demanded an end to the Manhattan Project, and resigned when it was not ended. A poll of the U.S. scientists who had developed the bombs, taken prior to their use, found that 83% wanted a nuclear bomb publicly demonstrated prior to dropping one on Japan. The U.S. military kept that poll secret. General Douglas MacArthur held a press conference on August 6, 1945, prior to the bombing of Hiroshima, to announce that Japan was already beaten.
The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral William D. Leahy said angrily in 1949 that Truman had assured him only military targets would be nuked, not civilians. “The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender,” Leahy said. Top military officials who said just after the war that the Japanese would have quickly surrendered without the nuclear bombings included General Douglas MacArthur, General Henry “Hap” Arnold, General Curtis LeMay, General Carl “Tooey” Spaatz, Admiral Ernest King, Admiral Chester Nimitz, Admiral William “Bull” Halsey, and Brigadier General Carter Clarke. As Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick summarize, seven of the United States’ eight five-star officers who received their final star in World War II or just after — Generals MacArthur, Eisenhower, and Arnold, and Admirals Leahy, King, Nimitz, and Halsey — in 1945 rejected the idea that the atomic bombs were needed to end the war. “Sadly, though, there is little evidence that they pressed their case with Truman before the fact.”
On August 6, 1945, President Truman lied on the radio that a nuclear bomb had been dropped on an army base, rather than on a city. And he justified it, not as speeding the end of the war, but as revenge against Japanese offenses. “Mr. Truman was jubilant,” wrote Dorothy Day. We have to remember that in the U.S. media of the time, killing more Japanese people was decidedly preferable to killing fewer, and required no justification of supposedly saving lives or ending wars. Truman, the guy whose action is being defended and whose diary is being carefully ignored, made no such claims, as he was not doing restrospective propaganda.
So, why then were the bombs dropped?
Presidential advisor James Byrnes had told Truman that dropping the bombs would allow the United States to “dictate the terms of ending the war.” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal wrote in his diary that Byrnes was “most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians got in.” Truman wrote in his diary that the Soviets were preparing to march against Japan and “Fini Japs when that comes about.” The Soviet invasion was planned prior to the bombs, not decided by them. The United States had no plans to invade for months, and no plans on the scale to risk the numbers of lives that the Post will tell you were saved.
Truman ordered the bombs dropped, one on Hiroshima on August 6th and another type of bomb, a plutonium bomb, which the military also wanted to test and demonstrate, on Nagasaki on August 9th. The Nagasaki bombing was moved up from the 11th to the 9th to decrease the likelihood of Japan surrendering first. Also on August 9th, the Soviets attacked the Japanese. During the next two weeks, the Soviets killed 84,000 Japanese while losing 12,000 of their own soldiers, and the United States continued bombing Japan with non-nuclear weapons — burning Japanese cities, as it had done to so much of Japan prior to August 6th that, when it had come time to pick two cities to nuke, there hadn’t been many left to choose from.
Here’s what the Post claims was accomplished by killing a couple of hundred thousand people and commencing the age of apocalyptic nuclear danger:
“The end of the war made unnecessary a US invasion that could have meant hundreds of thousands of American casualties; saved millions of Japanese lives that would have been lost in combat on the home islands and to starvation; cut short the brief Soviet invasion (that alone accounted for hundreds of thousands of Japanese deaths); and ended the agony that Imperial Japan brought to the region, especially a China that suffered perhaps 20 million casualties.”
Notice that the Post feels obliged to blame (at the time it would have been credit) the Soviet invasion with killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese people, even while claiming, pace Truman, that it did not influence the Japanese decision to surrender. Notice also that the only alternative to the war ending after the nukes, in this view, would have been the war continuing for a great long time costing millions of Japanese lives. But the facts above do not bear this out. The 2025 propagandist is disagreeing with the consensus of the leaders of his beloved military in 1945.
Why is he doing that?
He concludes with his motivation: “This is why President Donald Trump’s vision of a Golden Dome to protect the U.S. from missile attack is so important, and why we need a robust nuclear force to deter our enemies.”
Here is a different view of what World War II tells us about a Golden Dome.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The 2026 World Cup will be held in Canada, Mexico and the United States. It will feature 48 teams (up from 32) and will consist of 102 matches. As FIFA expands its global footprint with a larger, more lucrative 2026 tournament in North America, the organization’s willingness to placate powerful leaders is raising questions about who really benefits.
Kansas City, Missouri will be hosting six matches at Arrowhead Stadium. The following commentary World Cup is by Randy Gould, editor and chief reporter for the Kansas City-based Oread Daily email newsletter.
“The World Cup is coming to Kansas City next year. It probably shouldn’t. Daytime soccer in Kansas City in the summer won’t be all that much fun.
“The heated world has arrived. We do not have any domed stadiums here, so if we are in the middle of summer heat in this new hot era, maybe the games could be rescheduled for like 3 AM!
“I don’t know if people are noticing that sporting events are more and more often being canceled due to extreme heat. Hmm, what should we take from that in regard to the soccer World Cup?
“We should take from that exactly what Dave Zirin’s article headlined ‘FIFA Is Abusing Its Players to Keep Authoritarians Happy’ makes clear. Gianni Infantino, and the rest of the top FIFA brass simply are unconcerned with the well being of the players. They just do not care, despite the concerns raised by many players and others.”
As Zirin reported, “By holding the Club World Cup in the extreme summer heat—in the offseason for most of the 32 clubs involved—FIFA demonstrated blatant disregard for the health of the players.”
Zirin added: “FIFPRO, the global players union that represents more than 60,000 professional footballers worldwide, has long slammed FIFA for valuing petro-dictators’ bottom lines over the well-being of the athletes. Back in 2023, the union noted that the Club World Cup schedule ‘demonstrates a lack of consideration for the mental and physical health of participating players, as well as a disregard for their personal and family lives.’”
Gould: “Infantino does care about cozying up to the rich and powerful. He enjoys the company of authoritarian dictators. He is more than happy to kiss Donald Trump’s ass time and time again.
“Once again, the spectacle of global sport masks the brutal machinery of power, profit, and authoritarianism. In its relentless drive to court petro-tyrants and authoritarian strongmen, FIFA has once more revealed itself as not merely complicit in oppression — but actively enabling it. Zirin’s piece exposes how football’s global governing body has sacrificed player safety, worker rights, and even basic human dignity on the altar of authoritarian appeasement and corporate greed.
“Why would the world’s best soccer clubs even play in the FIFA Club World Cup? The answer is money.”
Zirin points out that “The tournament total prize money pool has $1 billion in it, with $525 million doled out to clubs simply for participating and another $475 million allocated based on results. …. Manchester City, owned by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan of the Abu Dhabi United Group, reportedly walked off with nearly $52 million just for reaching the final 16 of the tournament. The winner of the tournament will nab a cool $125 million.”
Gould: “Whether it’s the almost slave like conditions for stadium workers in Qatar, the gagging of political expression, or the weaponization of tournaments by regimes like Saudi Arabia, Erdoğan’s Turkey, and Trump’s USA, FIFA continues to function as a de facto propaganda ministry for the world’s most repressive governments. While players are expected to shut up and entertain, their labor—and their bodies—is commoditized in service of soft power and profit, not solidarity or sport.
“This is not just a sports story. It’s another chapter in the global assault on democracy, workers, and dissent — another instance of top-down structures silencing bottom-up voices. There is no area, no space these days that capital has not taken over. The same systems that crush unions, bulldoze Indigenous land, and surveil dissidents in the USA and numerous other States are draped in FIFA banners and presented to us as celebration.
“Oh well, apparently the model of the 1936 Nazi Berlin Olympics has been seized upon by FIFA today.”
The post With 2026 World Cup Coming to US, FIFA Head Gianni Infantino Cozies up to Trump first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
For days, pro-Palestine protesters in the Washington, DC metropolitan area have organized pickets and rallies to “confront” leaders of the now-infamous Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. On July 25, dozens of protesters gathered outside of the home of GHF’s Interim Executive Director John Acree, banging pots and pans, holding signs that read “our tax $$$ could fund UNRWA and end genocide but Joe + Don choose to fund genocide.” Demonstrators wrote a message in chalk on the asphalt: “WAR CRIMINAL LIVES HERE GOOGLE GHF”.
The post Pro-Palestine Activists Target US-Backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
A former contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) says he saw Israeli soldiers commit war crimes at the aid distribution sites being run by the Israeli-backed American agency.
In a series of interviews, former GHF employee and Green Beret Anthony Aguilar alleged that he saw Israeli soldiers use “indiscriminate” force against civilians at various Gaza aid sites.
“My most frank assessment — I would say that they are criminal,” said Aguilar. “In my entire career, I have never witnessed the level of brutality and use of indiscriminate and unnecessary force against a civilian population, an unarmed, starving population.”
The post US Security Contractor: ‘I Saw Israel Commit War Crimes At Gaza Aid Sites’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) has revealed that US and British officials recently held a meeting in the Alps with top Ukrainian officials to discuss “replacing” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
According to a statement made available to TASS, the meeting involved Andrey Yermak, head of the Ukrainian president’s office, Kirill Budanov, chief of the Ukrainian Defense Ministry’s Main Directorate of Intelligence, and Valery Zaluzhny, the country’s ex-commander-in-chief who is now Ukraine’s ambassador to London..
“The Americans and the British announced their decision to propose Zaluzhny to the Ukrainian presidency.
The post US, UK In Secret Talks With Ukrainian Officials To ‘Replace Zelensky’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
