The “debt-ceiling crisis” provided the pretext for the rolling back environmental, economic and social policies, while corporations and the rich benefitted the most from the deal struck between the Democrats and Republicans, reports Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
This week’s News on China video, presented by Tings Chak.
• US calls China “aggressive”
• Suez Canal investments
• Multinational pharmaceuticals in China
• History of bicycles in China
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
I could go on for pages about the myriad myths of both U.S. military spending and U.S. military “glory.” In fact, I’ve written two books about it — plus hundreds of articles.
For the sake of this post, I’ll share just one example of our [sic] beloved and expensive armed forces in action:
During the 78-day U.S./NATO bombing campaign (read: war crimes) over Yugoslavia in 1999, U.S. Defense Secretary William Cohen declared: “We severely crippled the Serbian military forces in Kosovo by destroying more than 50 percent of the artillery and one-third of the armored vehicles.”
One year later, a U.S. Air Force report revealed a different story:
Original Claim
120 tanks destroyed
220 armored personnel carriers destroyed 20
450 artillery pieces destroyed
744 confirmed strikes by NATO pilots 58
The report also found that the Serbian military fooled cutting-edge U.S. technology with simple tactics like constructing fake artillery pieces out of black logs and old truck wheels.
One vital bridge avoided destruction from above when, 300 yards upriver, a phony bridge was erected out of polyethylene sheeting. Vaunted U.S. pilots bombed the fake bridge several times.
Confronted with this evidence, Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon went into spin mode: “We obviously hit enough tanks and other targets to win.”
Keep in mind that Bacon is talking about an intervention that was a violation of the United Nations Charter and labeled as a war crime by Amnesty International.
If Putin does something like this, he’s the “next Hitler.”
When Bill Clinton does it, well… chalk another one up for the Home of the Brave
.
Reminder to the “right”: The propaganda and deception didn’t start in March 2020.
Reminder to the “left”: The propaganda and deception didn’t end in March 2020.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Yayoi Kusama (Japan), Infinity Mirrored Room – The Souls of Millions of Light Years Away, 2013.
At the close of the May 2023 Group of Seven (G7) summit in Hiroshima (Japan), the foreign ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States and the High Representative of the European Union (EU) released a long and informative statement. In a section titled ‘China’, the eight officials wrote that they ‘recognise the importance of engaging candidly with and expressing our concerns directly to China’ and that they ‘acknowledge the need to work together with China on global challenges as well as areas of common interest, including on climate change, biodiversity, global health security, and gender equality’. The diplomatic tone of the statement stands out in comparison to the heated rhetoric that these countries have adopted in recent years and is much softer than the language used at the G7 meeting itself, where the heads of government bandied about the phrase ‘economic coercion’, indirectly aimed at China.
A close reading of the speeches at the meeting suggests that there are differences of opinion amongst the leaders of the G7 countries, particularly when it comes to China and their own domestic industrial policies. Certainly, several European states are uneasy about the domestic economic consequences of prolonging the war in Ukraine and of a possible military conflict over Taiwan. It is perhaps this uneasiness that prompted US President Joe Biden to say, ‘We’re not looking to decouple from China, we’re looking to de-risk and diversify our relationship with China’.
For Europe, the notion of decoupling from China is inconceivable. In 2022, EU figures show that China was the third largest partner for goods exported from the region and the largest partner for good imported to the region, with most of the goods imported by China being high-end, value-added manufactured goods. Europe’s domestic economies have already been grievously injured by the West’s refusal to negotiate a peace agreement in Ukraine; being cut-off from the burgeoning Chinese market would be a fatal blow.
Georg Baselitz (Germany), The Brücke Chorus, 1983.
The G7 meeting reveals the gaps between the United States and its allies (Europe and Japan), but these differences of interest and opinion should not be overestimated. As part of our work at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, we have been researching and analysing the nature of the cooperation between the United States, Europe, and Japan – the ‘Triad’, as Samir Amin called them; while our research is still ongoing, we present some of the data in this newsletter.
Following the end of the Second World War, the United States built an international system that was premised on the subordination and integration of Japan and Europe. This process of subordination and integration was evident in the military apparatus constructed by the United States, with the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) established in 1949 and US-Japan Security Treaty of 1951 being the lynchpins. Establishing a system of US military bases in the defeated powers – Germany, Italy, and Japan – allowed Washington to set aside any talk of a sovereign military or diplomatic project for either Europe or Japan (tantrums from France, inspired by Charles De Gaulle’s grand sense of French destiny, led not to a withdrawal from NATO but only to a removal of French forces from the alliance’s military command in 1966).
There are currently 408 known US military bases in the Five Eyes countries (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and – because they share intelligence with each other – Israel), in Europe, and in Japan. Stunningly, Japan alone has 120 US military bases, while Germany hosts 119 of them. It is important to understand that these bases are not merely instruments of military power, but also political power. In 1965, Thomas Hughes of the US State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research authored an important memorandum, ‘The Significance of NATO – Present and Future’. NATO, Hughes wrote, ‘remains essential to the US as a well-established and easily available instrument for exercising American political influence in Europe’ and ultimately ‘it is important for the protection of American interests in Europe’. Such a system had already been put in place in Japan, as detailed in this US military memorandum from 1962. The network of US military bases in Europe and Japan are the symbol of their political subordination to Washington.
Yinka Shonibare (Nigeria), Scramble for Africa, 2003.
With the signing of the US-Japan Security Treaty in 1951, Japan’s Prime Minister Shigeru Yoshida accepted the dominance of the US military over his country but hoped that the Japanese state would be able to focus on economic development. Similar doctrines were articulated in Europe.
In the post-war era, an economic bloc began to form between the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 1966, Raymond Vernon published a significant journal article, ‘International Investment and International Trade in the Product Cycle’, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in which he showed how the large international corporations built a sequential structure: goods would be first produced and sold in the United States, then in Europe, and afterwards in Japan, after which they would finally be sold in other parts of the world. In 1985, Kenichi Ohmae, managing director of the global consulting firm McKinsey’s Tokyo office, shed further light on this arrangement in his book Triad Power: The Coming Shape of Global Competition. Ohmae illustrated how international corporations had to operate simultaneously in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan; increasing capital intensity, high research and development costs, a convergence of consumer taste, and the rise of protectionism made it essential for international corporations to work in these countries, which Ohmae collectively called the Triad, and then seek markets and opportunities elsewhere (where seven-tenths of the world lived).
André Pierre (Haiti), Ceremony with Issa and Suz, ca. late 1960s/early 1970s.
Samir Amin used that term – Triad – for a very different purpose. In 1980, he wrote of the ‘gradual consolidation of the central zone of the world capitalist system (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia)’, and soon thereafter began to refer to this ‘central zone’ as the Triad. The elites in Europe and Japan subordinated their own national self-interest to what the US government had begun to call their ‘common interests’. New institutions and terms emerged in the 1970s, giving shape to these ‘common interests’, including the Trilateral Commission (set up by David Rockefeller in 1973 with headquarters in Paris, Tokyo, and Washington) and the concept of ‘trilateral diplomacy’ (which brought together Western Europe, Japan, and the United States under one unified diplomatic worldview).
Intellectuals in these trilateral circles saw the United States as the central power with its vassal states (Europe and Japan) empowered to maintain control over the tributary states (such as South Korea) in order to keep the rest of the world stable. Much harsher language was used by Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the architects of the Trilateral Commission and National Security Advisor to US President Jimmy Carter. In The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997), Brzezinski wrote, ‘To put it in terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together’. You can guess who the barbarians are in Brzezinski’s imagination.
Dan Mills (USA), Current Wars & Conflicts… (with, by continent, Belligerent and Supporter groups marked with black and red circles respectively, and Asylum Seekers, Internally Displaced, Refugees, and Stateless marked with a letter for every million, and killed marked with a letter for every 250k), 2017.
In recent years, the concept of the Triad has largely fallen out of favour. But there is a need to recover this term to better understand the actual world order. The imperialist camp is not solely geographically defined; both the older term, Triad, and the more currently used term, Global North, are geopolitical concepts. The majority of the world – the Global South – now faces a US-led and dominated imperialist system that is rooted in an integrated military structure. This system is composed of three groups: (1) the United States, the United Kingdom, and other Anglo-American white settler states; (2) Europe; and (3) Japan. The Global North is home to a minority of the world’s population (14.2%) but is responsible for a clear majority of global military spending (66.0%). According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, total world military spending reached $2.2 trillion in 2022, with the Triad and its close partners responsible for $1.46 trillion of that amount (China’s military spending is $292 billion, while Russia spends $86 billion). It is this immense military power that allows the Triad to continue to assert itself over the world’s peoples, despite its weakening hold on the world economy.
In recent years, the United States has encouraged a Japanese rearmament and a German military build-up, both of which were discouraged after the Second World War, so that these ‘vassals’ can strengthen Washington’s parochial New Cold War against Russia and China as well as the newly assertive states of the Global South. Although some elites in Europe and Japan are able to see the domestic crises in their countries that are being accelerated by the US foreign policy agenda, they lack the cultural and political confidence to stand on their own two feet.
In 2016, the European Union’s High Representative Federica Mogherini laid out the concept of Europe’s ‘strategic autonomy’ from the United States in the EU Global Strategy. Three years later, France’s Emmanuel Macron said that NATO was suffering ‘brain death’ and that ‘Europe has the capacity to defend itself’. Today, it is clear that neither assertion – Europe’s strategic autonomy nor its capacity to defend itself – holds any water. Modest returns of Gaullism in France do not offer the kind of courage required by European and Japanese leaders to break with the trilateral bargains that were set up seventy-eight years ago. Until that courage arrives, Europe and Japan will remain entrenched in their conditions of vassalage, and the Triad will remain alive and well.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Secret United States government documents leaked onto social media platform Discord reveal how the US and its military is striving to reestablish hegemony — targeting adversaries and pressuring allies, report Malik Miah and Barry Sheppard.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Bereft of an economic program, Republicans turn to social values, beliefs, and prejudices to gain votes and turn the clock back on the change that accompanies society’s development. The GOP can no longer convince a majority of voters to support tax cuts for the rich, eliminating government regulations and cutting programs for the poor. In desperation, they are conducting a war on changing American values.
Powerful and wealthy interests discovered that rural people fear the social changes that replace the white Christian power structure with more open, inclusionary, equal, and forward-looking values that attempt to fulfill American ideals. A new set of values accepts gays, different ethnicities, business regulations to protect our health and environment, food, education, housing assistance, and the equal distribution of our economic surplus.
The world changes as America’s great melting pot absorbs immigrants, young people, women, and tries to prevent discrimination based on skin color. They reject being ruled by a closed white, male power infrastructure. People no longer accept being dictated to by the color of their skin, sexual preference, cultural choice, or other incidental characteristics—and demand to share power.
When GOP billionaires, the Koch network, Fox News, and smaller state and local elites began to lose power, they pandered to traditional religious, business, and rural prejudices to gain support. Politicians like Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, Marco Rubio, and Marjorie Taylor Greene cashed in. They exemplify politics that clings to the past and resist change. They cherry-pick the most radical, out-of-the-mainstream behavior and language for campaigns that promote elite corporate and business interests to amass power and take a larger share of national wealth.
Their made-up “culture war” focuses on changing values and diverts attention from everyday concerns about medical care, paychecks, and standard of living. Instead of asking why the government doesn’t guarantee education and health care, they conceal how, sometimes in concert with Democrats, they distribute economic surplus into their own pockets. A perfect illustration is the 470 state anti-gay bills the GOP is trying to pass, which diverts attention away from GOP demands to cut aid for education, housing, and environmental protection. They increase military spending and ignore the GOP gift to the rich when they passed Trump’s tax cuts.
This strategy shifts focus from worker rights, pay increases, housing costs, and medical care to disguise their efforts to keep profits high and shrink government power to allow the wealthy to control the country. They use language such as “woke” to label anything threatening their power and authority. By connecting cultural changes to gay marriage and teaching the American history of institutional racism, they shift emphasis away from issues such as Trump’s rapes and molestation of women, stiffing contractors, lying about his taxes, demonizing minorities, and promoting violence and insurrection. It likewise obscures their continual demands to cut taxes, deregulate, and shrink government.
Consider how gender is one focus of their culture war campaign. Transgender people hardly affect our personal lives, despite the Republican campaigns to make it a voting issue. In America, only 1.3 million adults and 300,000 children identify as transgender out of a population of 332 million. Only 36 transgender athletes compete in college sports that include over half a million participants. Yet the Republican legislature in Kansas recently banned transgender girls from female high school sports, despite having only three transgender girls out of 41,00 competing in the state. Indeed, they should be respected and accommodated in some way. Yet, GOP legislators are considering a flood of bills to restrict transgender behavior, flooding email boxes with requests for donations, blasting isolated events on Fox News, and making them campaign issues.
The GOP’s phony culture war is a temper tantrum orchestrated to blame everything on Biden and the Democrats, a simple hate campaign that reminds us of playground rivalries and dictatorships like the USSR and Nazi Germany. At the same time, these attempts are real and divert people’s attention from the everyday issues and reforms that affect our lives. As for culture: It’s changing—religion, ethnicity, immigrants, sexuality, age, and attitudes. The GOP cannot stop change.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Don Monkerud.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
The Tennessee Republican Party waited less than 24 hours to start fundraising off the expulsion of two progressive lawmakers from the state House—openly bragging Friday about what critics have called a blatantly anti-democratic move that shows the party’s growing authoritarianism.
State Reps. Justin Jones (D-52) and Justin Pearson (D-86) are two of three Democrats who joined protesters in interrupting a floor session on March 30 to demand gun control in the wake of last week’s deadly school shooting in Nashville. Tennessee House Republicans on Thursday voted to expel both Black men from the chamber while a vote to expel their colleague Rep. Gloria Johnson (D-13), who is white, fell short.
In a Friday fundraising email, the Tennessee GOP said: “Their adolescence and immature behavior brought dishonor to the Tennessee General Assembly as they admitted to knowingly breaking the rules. Actions have consequences, and we applaud House Republicans for having the conviction to protect the rules, the laws, and the prestige of the State of Tennessee.”
“Our fight is just beginning,” the email concludes.
\u201cNow, @TNGOP is fundraising off of yesterday’s expulsion votes in the Tennessee House: “We must stand strong… our fight is just beginning.”\u201d— Phil Williams (@Phil Williams) 1680886343
Progressives members of Congress had already denounced Tennessee Republicans for engaging in what U.S. Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) called “straight-up fascism in its ugliest, most racist form” before the fundraising email emerged.
Now, the Tennessee GOP is portraying the state’s first partisan expulsion since the Civil War era as upholding “the rule of law” and is trying to capitalize on it.
Slate‘s Alexander Sammon warned that Thursday’s vote “is a chilling portent of the future of Republican governance and the state of democracy nationwide.”
“While Republicans have focused on gerrymandering and voter suppression as the primary prongs of their assault on democracy (as well as the occasional insurrection attempt),” he noted, “the willingness to expel democratically elected Democrats for minor-verging-on-made-up infractions portends a terrifying new development.”
In a Friday statement, Public Citizen president Robert Weissman condemned Tennessee House Republicans for “summarily ending” the current terms of Jones and Pearson and “depriving their constituents of duly elected representation.”
“This was a racist and disproportionate act of retaliation against legislators who had joined demonstrators chanting in the chamber, in protest of Republican refusal to adopt commonsense gun control measures in the wake of the March 27 school shooting in Nashville,” said Weissman, who called Tennessee Republicans’ move “flagrantly anti-democratic.”
“American democracy is in a profound crisis… What just happened in Tennessee is yet another reminder of the perilous state of our country.”
“In modern American history, expulsion of state legislators is very rare—not just in Tennessee but throughout the United States, and rightfully so. Legislators should expel elected officials only in extreme circumstances, not over policy differences or impingements on decorum,” he continued. “Legislative supermajorities already have enormous power; when they wield that power to strip away even the offices of the minority, they are treading on very dangerous ground.”
As Weissman pointed out, “Some Tennessee legislators—and a lot of MAGA commentary online—are un-ironically calling the state representatives’ chanting an ‘insurrection.’”
“Of course, the United States did witness a real insurrection on January 6, 2021,” said Weissman. “Not one member of Congress was expelled for promoting [former President] Donald Trump’s patently false claims that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’ from him or for supporting the attempted coup carried out at Trump’s behest. Only 10 Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives would vote to impeach Trump in the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, and only two of them were able to get re-elected.”
“American democracy is in a profound crisis, riven by lies, right-wing extremism, conspiratorial thinking, and subservience to corporate and special interests, and racism,” Weissman stressed. “What just happened in Tennessee is yet another reminder of the perilous state of our country.”
Nevertheless, he continued, “a hopeful future is also a visible feature of our nation, demonstrated in the courage and principle of the targeted representatives… and the energy and commitment of the protesters—overwhelmingly young people—demanding justice and commonsense gun regulation.”
“This is a powerful reminder that democracy does not die easily,” Weissman added. “Indeed, the energy in Tennessee will help inspire and power the nationwide movement not just to defend but to expand and deepen our democracy, and we are committed to rising to the occasion, and being part of this movement to make our country a more just and equitable place for all.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Democratic Congressperson Rashida Tlaib has urged fellow Congress members to sign a letter to US Attorney-General Merrick Garland urging him to drop the charges against Julian Assange, reports Binoy Kampmark.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Major League Baseball and recently unionized minor league players working for MLB team affiliates reached a tentative deal Wednesday on a historic first collective bargaining agreement.
The pending five-year contract is set to more than double the pay of athletes who currently receive poverty wages even though the average MLB team is worth more than $2 billion. It comes just months after the MLB Players Association, the union representing major leaguers, successfully organized highly exploited minor leaguers who are striving to join their ranks into a new collective bargaining unit.
“Nearly a decade of fighting has led to this, and players have achieved what was once thought undoable.”
MLB recognized the union’s minor league unit in September, paving the way for negotiations that wrapped up on the eve of opening day in the majors and two days before opening day in the minors.
Citing unnamed sources, ESPN‘s Jeff Passan reported Wednesday night:
After years of disillusionment among future major leaguers about paltry salaries forcing them to work offseason jobs—and coincidentally on the day a judge approved a $185 million settlement the league will pay players who accused it of violating minimum wage laws—the parties agreed on a deal that went out to a vote among the union’s rank and file and that will need to be approved by owners, as well, before it is formalized. The agreement could be announced officially as early as Friday, the first day of games in the minor leagues.
The deal was confirmed by numerous other reports citing league and union sources.
Unlike now, minor leaguers are set to be paid “for most of the offseason as well as spring training, including back pay for this season,” according to Passan. He detailed the annual pay increases on social media.
\u201cBREAKING: Minor league baseball players\u2014among the lowest earning workers in America, who are paid as little as $7/hour by billionaire MLB owners\u2014have reached a first union contract that would more than double the pay of all players.\u201d— More Perfect Union (@More Perfect Union) 1680143267
In addition to pay hikes, players “emphasized better housing and transportation as a matter of import,” Passan reported. “Starting in 2024, those at Triple-A and Double-A will receive their own bedroom, and players with spouses and children will receive special accommodations. In rookie ball, Single-A, and High-A, teams will provide transportation to stadiums, where they’ll eat meals provided under rules negotiated by a joint clubhouse nutrition committee.”
As More Perfect Union detailed on social media, harsh living conditions on the road between games prompted players to organize for better accommodations and nutrition. Thanks to this effort, MLB began requiring its minor league teams to provide housing to players in 2022. The pending agreement seeks to secure additional improvements.
\u201cIn 2021, a courageous campaign by former and current players forced the league to start offering housing.\n\nhttps://t.co/Yqu2NIK8MR\u201d— More Perfect Union (@More Perfect Union) 1680143267
While name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights are currently controlled by MLB, the pending agreement grants full NIL rights to the union, which can use them to strengthen group licensing deals. In addition, it expands players’ medical rights, including covering post-injury health expenses for a longer period of time.
“Among those not included in the deal are players at teams’ complexes in the Dominican Republic,” Passan reported. “The minor league unit of the MLBPA includes only players on teams’ domestic rosters—and players from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and other foreign countries will still reap the benefits when stateside.”
In a concession to owners, “the deal includes the reduction of the maximum Domestic Reserve List, which governs the number of players a team can roster outside of its Dominican Republic complexes, from 180 to 165 starting in 2024,” Passan noted. “The union had previously fought MLB’s efforts during the lockout last year to reduce the reserve list, which teams had identified as a priority.”
Nathan Kalman-Lamb, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, wrote on social media that “Minor League Baseball players were perhaps the single most exploited group of men’s athletes in North America other than college basketball and football players.”
“Now they have a new (good!) collective agreement,” he added. “No better evidence of why college athletes need unions.”
“For the those who passed a hat around for diaper money for newborns… This is for you.”
Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league pitcher who spearheaded early organizing efforts, celebrated on Twitter.
“This is big,” Broshuis wrote. “Nearly a decade of fighting has led to this, and players have achieved what was once thought undoable.”
“Is the deal perfect? No, but every negotiation ends in compromise,” he continued. “This will truly better the lives of thousands of players and their families. And that is what this fight has always been about.”
Broshuis concluded: “For the those who passed a hat around for diaper money for newborns. For those who grinded away at two or even three offseason jobs. For those who skipped breakfast or even lunch to pinch pennies. For those who have [given] up the game not for a lack of talent but for a lack of funds. This is for you.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The United States is hoping to stave off a general collapse of the currency system, writes Barry Sheppard. This threat gives the capitalist class extortion power to insist the government bail out big banks.
On Monday morning, The Washington Post published a series of 3D animations to show “how bullets from an AR-15 blow the body apart.”
A few hours later, a 28-year-old shooter armed with two assault rifles and a handgun killed six people at a private Christian school in Nashville.
In the wake of that massacre—the 129th mass shooting in the United States in 2023—the Post‘s exposé has received sustained attention, with one person calling it “the most powerful article you will read this week” and another characterizing it as “one of the most important pieces of journalism ever produced.”
Noting that the lethal wounds caused by AR-15s “are rarely seen” by the public, the newspaper demonstrated “the trajectory of two different hypothetical gunshots to the chest—one from an AR-15 and another from a typical handgun—to explain the greater severity of the damage caused by the AR-15.”
Then, after obtaining permission from the parents of two school shooting victims, a team of visual reporters created 3D models to depict how bullets fired from “many mass killers’ weapon of choice” obliterated their children’s bodies.
None— (@)
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Noah Ponzer was one of the 26 people who were killed by an AR-15-wielding gunman at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut on December 14, 2012. The 6-year-old was shot three times.
“Noah’s wounds were not survivable,” the Post reported, citing 2019 court testimony from Wayne Carver, who was the state’s chief medical examiner at the time.
Peter Wang was one of 17 people murdered when an attacker armed with an AR-15 opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida on February 14, 2018. The 15-year-old was shot 13 times.
As the Post reported: “The combined energy of those bullets created exit wounds so ‘gaping’ that the autopsy described his head as ‘deformed.’ Blood and brain splatter were found on his upper body and the walls. That degree of destruction, according to medical experts, is possible only with a high-velocity weapon.”
“This is the trauma witnessed by first responders—but rarely, if ever, seen by the public or the policymakers who write gun laws,” the newspaper noted.
Instead, many GOP lawmakers glorify assault rifles, including U.S. Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), whose congressional district is home to the Nashville school where Monday’s deadly shooting took place.
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Another right-wing member of Tennessee’s congressional delegation—Republican Rep. Tim Burchett—baldly stated that “we’re not gonna fix it” just hours after the shooting.
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There are more guns than people in the United States. Due to National Rifle Association-bankrolled Republicans’ opposition to meaningful gun safety laws—bolstered by a 2022 ruling handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reactionary majority—it is relatively easy for people to purchase firearms in many states.
Two years ago, Tennessee became one of several states that allow most adults to carry handguns without a permit.
There have been thousands of mass shootings since Noah and more than two dozen other individuals suffered gruesome deaths at Sandy Hook, including last year’s slaughter at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, among hundreds of others. Research shows that U.S. states with weaker gun control laws and higher rates of gun ownership have higher rates of mass shootings.
Research also shows that gun regulations with high levels of public support, including bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, help reduce the number and severity of fatal mass shootings.
Guns recently became the leading cause of death among children and teens in the United States. A study published last year found that roughly 26,000 kids could still be alive today if the U.S. had the same gun mortality rate as Canada.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Relations between the United States and China are spiraling dangerously downward, and neither side seems able to reverse the trend. Yet it is imperative that the world’s two biggest economies find a modus vivendi if the peace of the planet is to be preserved.
Consider the recent contretemps between the U.S. and China over a Chinese balloon that drifted over the United States. The rift caused acrimonious accusations by both sides and a cancellation of the Secretary of State’s visit to China, which had been designed to tamp down tensions.
China’s first reaction was a public regret, only later to be followed by more belligerent language. Wouldn’t it have been better if President Biden had taken China’s expression of regret and ignored the later, harsher responses? Wouldn’t it have been better if the secretary of state’s visits had gone forward?
That’s what President Kennedy did during the Cuban Missile Crisis six decades ago when the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev sent an emotional message suggesting that, rather than “doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war…let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let’s take measures to untie the knot.” The very next day, Russia upped the ante with a much harsher message demanding that American missiles in Turkey be removed.
Kennedy ignored the second message and replied to the first. In due course, the Soviet missiles were removed from Cuba and the American missiles from Turkey, although the latter was not officially part of the deal.
How much better it would have been if the Secretary of State Blinken had gone ahead with his mission, met with his counterpart in China, and made an effort to reduce the tensions between China and the United States instead of accelerating them.
When I looked up the purpose of the new House of Representatives’ Select Committee on the Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party, I found the following:
The Select Committee “is committed to working on a bipartisan basis to build a consensus on the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party and develop a plan of action to defend the American people, our economy and our values.”
No one is denying that there is serious competition between the United States and China, but does it justify such a defensive crouch? Wouldn’t it have been better to form a committee that would also develop a plan of action so that the two major competing powers can avoid conflict?
Although the growing antagonism between the United States and China has not grown to the level of the Cuban Missile Crisis, nevertheless it presents the greatest danger to the world today. Much has been written about the “Thucydides Trap,” Graham Allison’s warning that all too often in history the tension between a rising power and an established power results in war, as it did between Sparta and Athens in 431 BC, and German and Great Britain in the early 21th Century.
It is imperative that cooler heads in China and the United States work to defuse tensions. The prospect of nuclear war that so terrified the world in the fifties and sixties has lost some of its emotional punch. The historian Christopher Clark writes that Europe’s leaders in 1914 knew that a general European war would be massively destructive, but did they really feel it? He posits that in the 1950s and 60s decision makers and the general public not only understood the dangers of nuclear war, but viscerally felt it. Today that visceral fear has fallen away among younger generations.
China is not without blame for the growing confrontation between the United States and China. Under President Xi Jinping, the Communist Party has reasserted its dominant role over the economy and returned China to a more Maoist centralized state with aggressive and at times bullying diplomacy and military actions in the South China Sea and in the Himalayas. But that said, a drumbeat of anti-Chinese rhetoric from the Western powers only enables China’s hardliners and handicaps those in China who would seek a less belligerent accommodation with the West.
After all, China does not seek to overthrow our system of government. The Chinese Communist Party does not seek to export revolution as did the old Soviet Union. It is hard to imagine Cambridge University students becoming traitors as did Kim Philby, Guy Burgess, and Donald Maclean in the 1930s for the sake of the Chinese Communist Party.
As Singapore’s Bilahari Kausikan has pointed out: “Competition within a system cannot by definition be existential because the survival of the system is not at stake. China is the principal beneficiary of the existing system and has no strong incentive to kick over the table and change it in any fundamental way because its own economy rests on the foundation of that system.”
Americans have always suffered under the delusion that China should become more like the United States. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, American missionaries fanned out across China in an effort to convert the Chinese to Christianity. President Woodrow Wilson was delighted when he discovered that Sun Yat-sen, the father of modern China, had become a Christian. More recently, when Deng Xiaoping abandoned Maoism for a market economy, Americans concluded that a political liberalization was sure to follow, that China would become more like the United States. It didn’t happen, but is China responsible for this miscalculation and disappointment, or are we?
It is one thing to deny China technology that could be used militarily, but the bipartisan inflammatory language emanating from the United States is counter- productive to America’s interests and the preservation of peace. China and the United States are drifting, like sleepwalkers, toward confrontation much as Europe did in 1914 which of course resulted in a devastating war nobody wanted.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 23: TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew prepares to testify before the House Energy and Commerce Committee in the Rayburn House Office Building on Capitol Hill on March 23, 2023 in Washington, DC. The hearing was a rare opportunity for lawmakers to question the leader of the short-form social media video app about the company’s relationship with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, and how they handle users’ sensitive personal data. Some local, state and federal government agencies have been banning use of TikTok by employees, citing concerns about national security (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)
The US’ TikTok hearing is politically manipulated to cover its real purpose of robbing the profitable firm from China, which reflects the US’ mounting hegemony and bullying against firms with Chinese background, experts said on Friday, noting the US witch-hunting against TikTok portends US’ technological innovation is going downhill and the political farce against a tiny app has seriously shattered the US values of fair competition and its credibility.
The US House Energy and Commerce Committee held a hearing on Thursday (US time) titled, “TikTok: How Congress can safeguard American data privacy and protect children from online harms.”
While US lawmakers acted like they are pursuing a solution on how to ensure data security, the hearing turned out to be a political show that was designed to smear an international firm that has Chinese background and cover up its real purpose of stealing the firm from its Chinese parent, experts said.
Whether it ends up “killing” TikTok or forcibly taking the child out of its parent ByteDance’s arms, it is one of the ugliest scenes of the 21st century in high-tech competition, they said. “Your platform should be banned,” House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers said as she started the hearing, claiming that the app has ties with Chinese government.
During the roughly five-hour hearing, CEO Shou Zi Chew’s attempts to illustrate TikTok’s business operations were frequently interrupted. His requests to elaborate on concerns of members of US Congress were also blocked.
Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning denounced the US’ move on Friday, saying the US is adopting the presumption of guilt and engaging in an unreasonable crackdown against TikTok without any proof.
“We noted that some US lawmaker has said that to seek a TikTok ban is a ‘xenophobic witch hunt’,” she said, urging the US to respect the market economy and fair competition rules, stop the unreasonable crackdown on foreign firms and provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory environment for other countries’ firms in the US.
The Chinese government places high importance on protecting data privacy and security according to laws. China has never and will never ask firms or individuals to violate local laws to collect or provide data and information stored within other countries’ borders, Mao stressed.
The latest hearing followed reports that the Biden administration has threatened to ban TikTok if its China-based parent company ByteDance doesn’t divest its stakes in the popular video app.
It is another dark scene in Washington’s struggle for US supremacy, the US’ barbaric act only underscores that US values of fair competition, freedom of speech and inclusiveness are gradually disappearing and instead xenophobia is rising, experts said, noting that the US government lacks confidence in competing with China.
Even more ironic is that rather than finding a solution to problems brought about by the negative impact of US social problems on children such as suicide, self-harm and drug abuse, US lawmakers are instead faulting the company, Li Yong, deputy chairman of the Expert Committee of the China Association of International Trade, told the Global Times on Friday.
“The hearing was hegemonic and bullying against a private firm,” Li said, noting that it’s common for American politicians to put unwarranted labels on entities with Chinese background by fabricating excuses.
“While the US has always paraded itself as a rules-based market economy, they don’t really have any objective rules. All the rules are selected and serve American political elites’ interests and US hegemony,” Li said.
The US’ forced sale of TikTok is shameless robbery of a profitable firm from China, he said, noting that the US is increasingly politicizing an innovative app that has enriched the digital life of American people and benefited a lot of micro businesses in the US.
“TikTok itself is not available in the Chinese mainland, we’re headquartered in Los Angeles and Singapore, and we have 7,000 employees in the US today,” Chew said in his opening remarks.
Dismissing Chew’s testimony, US officials have stepped up their fight against TikTok. Speaking at a separate House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Thursday TikTok should be “ended one way or another,” adding that he did not know if it would be sufficient for TikTok to be divested from its Chinese parent company, CNN reported.
The high-profile hearing also attracted wide attention from netizens who called US Congress members arrogant, ridiculous and ignorant.
“Not a single one of them has made an argument that makes a lick of sense,” an American net user posted on Twitter. “By his logic every other social media app should be banned,” posted another netizen.
The topic “TikTok CEO attending US hearing” became trending on China’s Twitter-like social media Sina Weibo, generating nearly 5 million views.
“I feel sorry for what Chew endured at the hearing. American politicians weren’t so arrogant and aggressive at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook hearing. It seems all the lawmakers are bullying Chew,” a Chinese netizen posted on Sina Weibo.
While Chew was grilled in Washington, Apple CEO Tim Cook was met with cheers and applause at an Apple store in Beijing on Friday, prompting Chinese netizens to compare the “so-called free market” in the US and “real free market” in China.
The Biden administration’s so-called “national security” narrative has also caused widespread speculation among TikTok users, scholars and researchers.
A TikTok sale would be “completely irrelevant to any of the alleged ‘national security’ threats” and go against “every free market principle and norm” of the state department’s internet freedom principles, the Guardian reported, citing Karim Farhat, a researcher with the Internet Governance Project at Georgia Tech.
NBC News reported on Thursday that a 19-year-old Harvard freshman named Aidan Kohn-Murphy, who used TikTok to rally support for Biden in 2020, is now trying to use the app to stop Biden from killing the platform.
“If they went ahead with banning TikTok, it would feel like a slap in the face to a lot of young Americans,” he said. “Democrats don’t understand the political consequences this would have.”
Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
Sinister move doomed
By forcing the sale of TikTok, the Biden administration is aiming to repeat its takeover of French power company Alstom and its torment on Japanese chip firm Toshiba, but the US’ sinister move is doomed to meet challenges, given similar roadblocks faced by Trump three years ago, experts said.
“The Biden administration will find it hard to completely ban TikTok, as the app has a large user base of more than 150 million in the US,” Xiang Ligang, director-general of the Beijing-based Information Consumption Alliance, told the Global Times.
It’s an even more complicated issue for the US to take over TikTok, as a possible deal should also be in compliance with Chinese laws, he said. Experts said the Chinese government may step in to block the sale of TikTok.
“The Chinese side is firmly opposed to the forced sale or divestiture of TikTok,” Chinese Commerce Ministry spokesperson Shu Jueting said on Thursday.
Exports of Chinese technology must be subject to administrative licensing procedures in accordance with Chinese laws, and the Chinese government is legally bound to make a decision, she reiterated.
In August 2020, China’s Ministry of Commerce revised its restrictions on technology exports, including personalized content recommendations based on data analysis and a number of other technologies such as AI algorithms, which is widely considered as China’s countermeasures against US’ forced sale of TikTok then.
Back in 2020, then president Donald Trump and his administration sought to remove TikTok from app stores and force ByteDance to sell off its US assets. US courts blocked the order, concluding that banning the app would likely restrict the “personal communications” and sharing of “informational materials” by TikTok users.
In addition, the Washington Post reportedly worked with a privacy researcher to look under the hood at TikTok in 2020, concluding that the app does not appear to collect any more data than typical mainstream social network platforms in the US.
“From the US’ groundless crackdown on Huawei to targeting TikTok citing the so-called ‘national security,’ American politicians have not had a comprehensive ‘blueprint’ for their moves, it’s all politically motivated,” Xiang said, referring to reports saying Biden is seeking a second presidential term.
On Thursday, the US put an additional 14 Chinese companies to a red flag list, forcing US exporters to conduct greater due diligence before shipping goods to them, mainly technology and solar firms.
Xiang said the US’ unabated crackdowns on international firms including those from China violate international rules, disrupt global industrial and supply chains and harm both sides’ interests and the global economy as a whole.
Ghost of McCarthyism haunts TikTok Hearing. Cartoon: Carlos Latuff
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
“The hypocrisy in … the Bush administration’s overall national security strategy – is monumental. If having weapons of mass destruction and a history of using them is a criteria, then surely the United States must pose the greatest threat to humanity that has ever existed … While the U.S. is massively expanding its biological weapons research capabilities – for example by upgrading its bioresearch facilities at the Livermore and Los Alamos nuclear weapons labs to aerosolize live anthrax and genetically modify bio-organisms – it is blocking a protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention that would allow international inspectors into U.S. facilities.”
— Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation
“There are well over 90 UN Security Council resolutions that are currently being violated by countries other than Iraq. The vast majority of these resolutions are being violated by allies of the United States that receive U.S. military, economic, and diplomatic support. Indeed, the U.S. has effectively blocked the UN Security Council from enforcing these resolutions against its allies.”
— Stephen Zunes, Associate Professor of Politics, University of San Francisco
“In his [President Bush’s] speech to the nation on Oct. 7, he said ‘America is a friend of the people of Iraq.’ Try telling that to a friend of mine in Baghdad who walked out of his house following a U.S. bomb attack to find his neighbor’s head rolling down the street; or to a taxi driver I met whose four-year-old child shook uncontrollably for three days following Clinton’s 1998 ‘Monicagate’ bombing diversion. Try telling it to the mother of Omran ibn Jwair, whom I met in the village of Toq al-Ghazzalat after a U.S. missile killed her 13-year-old son while he was tending sheep in the field. Try telling it to the hundreds of mothers I have seen crying over their dying babies in Iraqi hospitals, and to the hundreds of thousands of parents who have actually lost their infant children due to the cruel U.S. blockade, euphemistically called ‘sanctions.’”
— James Jennings, President, Conscience International
“…the establishment of the ‘no-fly zones’ violated Iraq’s sovereignty, something explicitly guaranteed by every Security Council resolution on Iraq. The infiltration of spies into Unscom … was a further violation of the inspections process – and among the information they collected was anything that could help target Saddam Hussein for assassination, in violation of both international law and domestic executive order …. the U.S. used (weapons) inspections explicitly to provoke crises …”
— Rahul Mahajan, author, The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism
“… a unilateral attack by the United States and the United Kingdom against Iraq without further authorization from the Security Council would still remain illegal and therefore constitute aggression. In recognition of this fact, British government officials are already reportedly fearful of prosecution by the International Criminal Court. And the Bush Jr. administration is doing everything humanly possible to sabotage the ICC in order to avoid any prospect of ICC prosecution of high-level U.S. government officials over a war against Iraq. Lawyers call this ‘consciousness of guilt.’”
— Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law, University of Illinois, College of Law
“Claims of a threat posed by Iraq to international peace and security are entirely untenable. Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet refuted Bush’s claims in a letter to the Senate, where he said clearly the threat of an Iraqi WMD attack was virtually nonexistent, except possibly in the eventuality of a U.S. war for ‘regime change.’ Nobody claims Iraq has nuclear weapons, nobody has produced any evidence that Iraq is capable of weaponizing biological agents, and it’s quite clear that Iraq can have no more than a nominal chemical weapons capability.”
— Rahul Mahajan, author, The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism
“… the U.S. government has repeatedly stated that it would continue the economic sanctions even if Iraq were to fully comply with the weapons inspectors. This means the U.S. policy over the last decade gave a disincentive for Iraqi compliance with the weapons inspectors and ensured an indefinite continuation of the devastating economic sanctions with no legitimate cause.”
— -Sam Husseini, Communications Director, Institute For Public Accuracy
“Although it’s true that Iraq has repeatedly restricted access, its degree of compliance is very high – far higher than the compliance of most nations with regard to binding decisions like Security Council resolutions or judgments of the International Court of Justice. Israel, for example, is in violation of numerous Security Council resolutions with no attempt at progress toward compliance. The United States vetoes Security Council resolutions directed against it, as it did with a resolution against its invasion of Panama, and it completely ignored a ruling by the International Court of Justice to cease its terrorist operations against Nicaragua and to pay $17 billion in restitution.”
— Rahul Mahajan, author, The New Crusade: America’s War on Terrorism
“Language finding Iraq already in ‘material breach’ and being given ‘a final opportunity’ to come clean is a rather ominous way of predetermining the outcome …”
— James Jennings, President, Conscience International
“We must not forget what this [UN Security Council Resolution 1441] does not do. It does not authorize the United States to go to war against Iraq. Despite claims to the contrary by the United States, that can only happen by means of a second resolution. The UN Charter requires specific and unambiguous authorization for the use of force; it is for the Security Council and not the United States to decide the consequences of any failure to implement resolutions.”
— Michael Ratner, President, Center For Constitutional Rights
“Since Bush came to office, the United States government has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world has in twenty years. It has scuppered the biological weapons convention while experimenting, illegally, with biological weapons of its own. It has refused to grant chemical weapons inspectors full access to its laboratories, and has destroyed attempts to launch chemical inspections in Iraq. It has ripped up the antiballistic missile treaty, and appears to be ready to violate the nuclear test ban treaty. It has permitted CIA hit squads, to recommence covert operations of the kind that included, in the past, the assassination of foreign heads of state. It has sabotaged the small arms treaty, undermined the international criminal court, refused to sign the climate change protocol and, last month, sought to immobilize the UN convention against torture.”
— George Monbiot, The Guardian
“All he [UN weapons inspector Hans Blix] can know is the results (sic) of his own investigations. And that does not prove Saddam does not have weapons of mass destruction.”
— Richard Perle, Chairman, Defense Policy Board
“What it would prove would be that the inspection process had been successfully defeated by the Iraqis.”
— Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on what a lack of evidence of Iraqi WMDs would prove
“If they [the Iraqis] turn on their radars we’re going to blow up their goddamn SAMs. They know we own their country. We own their airspace …. We dictate the way they live and talk. And that’s what’s great about America right now. It’s a good thing, especially when there’s a lot of oil out there we need.”
— U.S. Brigadier General William Looney, 1996
“Fuck Saddam. We’re taking him out.”
— President George Bush to Condoleezza Rice
Sources:
General Looney quote: William Blum, Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, (Common Courage, 2000) p. 159
Zunes quotes from Stephen Zunes, Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism, (Common Courage, 2003)
GW Bush quote: Time magazine, May 13, 2002, “We’re Taking Him Out”
Remaining quotes from Norman Solomon and Reese Erlich, Target Iraq: What the News Media Don’t Tell You, (Context Books, 2003) p. 5, 51, 54, 71, 97-8, 142-86 passim.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama met privately in the White House with the newly elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to get him to end Ukraine’s neutralist position ever since 1991 and join the U.S. Government’s EU and NATO alliances against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Russia, but Yanukovych said no. And, then, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled in 2010 to Kiev to give this another try, and again Yanukovych said no. By the time of June 2011, the Obama Administration started planning the coup to replace Ukraine’s Government with one that the U.S. would select. This plan started being implemented by no later than 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy in Ukraine, to train Ukraine’s racist-fascist, or ideologically Nazi, haters of Russians, how to use the internet in order to organize ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations against — and to overthrow and replace — the neutralist Yanukovych by a Ukrainian regime that would be committed against Russia. On 27 January 2014, Obama’s agent overseeing the U.S. coup told the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev that Arseniy Yatsenyuk should be placed in charge when the coup would be completed, and this was done on 27 February 2014. Obama’s plan to turn Ukraine rabidly anti-Russia succeeded. (The only part of it that failed was Obama’s plan to grab Russia’s largest naval base, in Crimea, and turn that into yet another U.S. naval base.) It also succeeded in turning Ukrainian public opinion vastly more against Russia than it had been before.
The objective of all this was ultimately to achieve a 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse, by which the U.S. will ultimately place at least one nuclear missile only about 300 miles away from Moscow and then demand Russia’s capitulation. If Russia says no, then within only five minutes from America’s firing its knockout missile, Moscow can be annihilated, Russia’s central command beheaded, and that is too fast for Russia to be able to recognize that it had been done and then to launch its retaliatory weapons against America. So, there might be a reasonable chance for America to eliminate Russia by a blitz-nuclear attack from Ukraine — or at least there are influential people in the U.S. Government and academe who think so (including virtually the entire Biden Administration, just like in Obama’s and Trump’s).
Ever since at least 2006, the idea had become mainstream in American geostrategic planning circles for America to abandon the prior nuclear meta-strategy — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD — of using nuclear weapons in order to avert a nuclear war, to becoming instead “Nuclear Primacy,” to use nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. Biden pushed it almost beyond the point of no return until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 so as to push back Ukraine’s nearest border from its present roughly 300 miles away from Moscow to perhaps a thousand miles away. However, even that would be nearer to Moscow than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis standard, which was Cuba being 1,331 miles away from Washington DC. And now Finland, which aims to join NATO, might move that to only 507 miles; so, America’s goal of conquering Russia is still very much a national-security threat to the people in Russia. In fact, by 2017, America already had become frighteningly near to being able to perpetrate a ‘victorious’ blitz-nuclear attack against Russia.
By contrast, Russia has never tried to place its ground-based nuclear missiles that near to Washington DC. Cuba was the last opportunity to do that, and it was during the time of the Soviet Union, and it was instead 1,331 miles away from DC. Russia, today — now that NATO has grown to surround it (especially in Ukraine, which has the nearest border to Moscow) — is in enormous danger from this. On 17 December 2021, Russia formally presented separately to America, and to NATO, Russia’s fundamental national-security concerns, and on 7 January 2022 both America and its NATO said no to all of them — not even for negotiation. Russia’s only remaining option then was to invade and conquer Ukraine. America has no national-security interest in Russia’s nearest neighbor, Ukraine, but Russia certainly does and must win this war or else capitulate to the U.S. regime. Russia doesn’t have the option of allowing this Ukraine to serve as an American nuclear launching-pad against The Kremlin. Whether it will allow Finland (the second-nearest) to become that is not yet clear.
If Russia’s Government were like America’s Government, then Russia might now be considering to turn Mexico against America like America has turned Ukraine against Russia. On March 21st, Ben Norton headlined “‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium” and quoted from recent speeches by Mexico’s President, who has made clear the depths of the mutual hostility on both sides of that border. The current Mexican President has transformed his country’s international policies into a clear condemnation of the arrogance and psychopathic greed of America’s billionaires and their Government. What is remarkable is that Russia has given no sign of trying to turn Mexico into a Russian launching-pad against America as America is now straining to bring to culmination Obama’s plan for Ukraine to become America’s launching-pad against Russia.
Clearly, Russia’s Government is fundamentally different from America’s, vastly less aggressive. It’s obvious to any rational person. For Russia to lose the war in Ukraine would be disastrous, whereas for America to lose it would be just another defeat for America, like Vietnam was, and Afghanistan was, and Iraq was, and Syria was, and Libya was, and so many others have been — and none of those defeats after 1945 has even nicked the U.S. regime’s ability to dictate to the rest of the world like it demands to do. Maybe this one would, but that would be all to the good, for the entire world — if America doesn’t resort to nuclear war in order to try to assert its supremacy. What’s at stake for Russia in this matter is its very existence as an independent country. What’s at stake for America in it — this war on Russia’s border, not on ours — is whatever America’s billionaires will choose it to be. And if they choose to lose, then everyone (including especially in Europe) will be better off as a result. But if America’s billionaires choose to ‘win’ (if they’re that power-crazed), then the world won’t survive this. So, yes: since 1945, there’s a huge difference between Russia’s Government, and ours.
The post A Huge Difference Between America’s and Russia’s Governments first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
In 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama met privately in the White House with the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, to get him to end Ukraine’s neutralist position ever since 1991 and join the U.S. Government’s EU and NATO alliances against Ukraine’s next-door neighbor Russia, but Yanukovych said no. And, then, Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton travelled in 2010 to Kiev to give this another try, and again Yanukovych said no. By the time of June 2011, the Obama Administration started planning the coup to replace Ukraine’s Government with one that the U.S. would select. This plan started being implemented by no later than 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy in Ukraine, to train Ukraine’s racist-fascist, or ideologically Nazi, haters of Russians, how to use the internet in order to organize ‘anti-corruption’ demonstrations against — and to overthrow and replace — the neutralist Yanukovych by a Ukrainian regime that would be committed against Russia. On 27 January 2014, Obama’s agent overseeing the U.S. coup told the U.S. Ambassador in Kiev that Arseniy Yatsenyuk should be placed in charge when the coup would be completed, and this was done on 27 February 2014. Obama’s plan to turn Ukraine rabidly anti-Russia succeeded. (The only part of it that failed was Obama’s plan to grab Russia’s largest naval base, in Crimea, and turn that into yet another U.S. naval base.) It also succeeded in turning Ukrainian public opinion vastly more against Russia than it had been before.
The objective of all this was ultimately to achieve a 1962 Cuban-Missile-Crisis in reverse, by which the U.S. will ultimately place at least one nuclear missile only about 300 miles away from Moscow and then demand Russia’s capitulation. If Russia says no, then within only five minutes from America’s firing its knockout missile, Moscow can be annihilated, Russia’s central command beheaded, and that is too fast for Russia to be able to recognize that it had been done and then to launch its retaliatory weapons against America. So, there might be a reasonable chance for America to eliminate Russia by a blitz-nuclear attack from Ukraine — or at least there are influential people in the U.S. Government and academe who think so (including virtually the entire Biden Administration, just like in Obama’s and Trump’s).
Ever since at least 2006, the idea had become mainstream in American geostrategic planning circles for America to abandon the prior nuclear meta-strategy — “Mutually Assured Destruction” or MAD — of using nuclear weapons in order to avert a nuclear war, to becoming instead “Nuclear Primacy,” to use nuclear weapons in order to win a nuclear war. Biden pushed it almost beyond the point of no return until Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February 2022 so as to push back Ukraine’s nearest border from its present roughly 300 miles away from Moscow to perhaps a thousand miles away. However, even that would be nearer to Moscow than the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis standard, which was Cuba being 1,331 miles away from Washington DC. And now Finland, which aims to join NATO, might move that to only 507 miles; so, America’s goal of conquering Russia is still very much a national-security threat to the people in Russia. In fact, by 2017, America already had become frighteningly near to being able to perpetrate a ‘victorious’ blitz-nuclear attack against Russia.
By contrast, Russia has never tried to place its ground-based nuclear missiles that near to Washington DC. Cuba was the last opportunity to do that, and it was during the time of the Soviet Union, and it was instead 1,331 miles away from DC. Russia, today — now that NATO has grown to surround it (especially in Ukraine, which has the nearest border to Moscow) — is in enormous danger from this. On 17 December 2021, Russia formally presented separately to America, and to NATO, Russia’s fundamental national-security concerns, and on 7 January 2022 both America and its NATO said no to all of them — not even for negotiation. Russia’s only remaining option then was to invade and conquer Ukraine. America has no national-security interest in Russia’s nearest neighbor, Ukraine, but Russia certainly does and must win this war or else capitulate to the U.S. regime. Russia doesn’t have the option of allowing this Ukraine to serve as an American nuclear launching-pad against The Kremlin. Whether it will allow Finland (the second-nearest) to become that is not yet clear.
If Russia’s Government were like America’s Government, then Russia might now be considering to turn Mexico against America like America has turned Ukraine against Russia. On March 21st, Ben Norton headlined “‘Mexico is not a US colony!’: AMLO condemns invasion threats, celebrates nationalization of oil, lithium” and quoted from recent speeches by Mexico’s President, who has made clear the depths of the mutual hostility on both sides of that border. The current Mexican President has transformed his country’s international policies into a clear condemnation of the arrogance and psychopathic greed of America’s billionaires and their Government. What is remarkable is that Russia has given no sign of trying to turn Mexico into a Russian launching-pad against America as America is now straining to bring to culmination Obama’s plan for Ukraine to become America’s launching-pad against Russia.
Clearly, Russia’s Government is fundamentally different from America’s, vastly less aggressive. It’s obvious to any rational person. For Russia to lose the war in Ukraine would be disastrous, whereas for America to lose it would be just another defeat for America, like Vietnam was, and Afghanistan was, and Iraq was, and Syria was, and Libya was, and so many others have been — and none of those defeats after 1945 has even nicked the U.S. regime’s ability to dictate to the rest of the world like it demands to do. Maybe this one would, but that would be all to the good, for the entire world — if America doesn’t resort to nuclear war in order to try to assert its supremacy. What’s at stake for Russia in this matter is its very existence as an independent country. What’s at stake for America in it — this war on Russia’s border, not on ours — is whatever America’s billionaires will choose it to be. And if they choose to lose, then everyone (including especially in Europe) will be better off as a result. But if America’s billionaires choose to ‘win’ (if they’re that power-crazed), then the world won’t survive this. So, yes: since 1945, there’s a huge difference between Russia’s Government, and ours.
The International Criminal Court should uphold an objective and impartial stance, respect the jurisdictional immunity enjoyed by the head of state in accordance with international law, exercise its functions and powers prudently by the law, interpret and apply international law in good faith, and avoid politicization and double standards.
— Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin
This commentary really should be part two from the piece I wrote last week in the run-up to the anti-war mobilization that took place March 18 which commemorated the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. In that article I made a similar argument about why the U.S. should be seen as the greatest threat to the survival of collective humanity on our planet.
That point, however, needs to be reinforced because in typical arrogance, on the eve of that mobilization and the official March 20th date of the U.S. invasion, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issues an arrest warrant for Russia President Vladimir Putin while Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Barack Obama, responsible for horrific crimes against humanity and literally millions of deaths combined in Serbia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria, walk around as free individuals.
It would be comical if it was not so deadly serious and absurd. Just a couple of years ago when the ICC signaled under the leadership of the Chief Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda that it wanted to conduct an investigation into possible crimes in Afghanistan by the U.S. state, the Trump Administration told the court in no uncertain terms that the Court would be subjected to the full wrath of the U.S. government and the Court quietly demurred in favor of a national probe that everyone knew was a sham.
This is just part of the infuriating double standards that Chinese spokesperson Wang Wenbin refers to. For many in the global South, the “neutral” international mechanisms and structures created to uphold international law have lost significant credibility.
The politicization of the ICC on the Ukrainian war and the unprincipled participation of the United Nations that provided political cover for the invasion and occupation of Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010 are just two examples of how international structures ostensibly committed to upholding international law and the UN Charter are now seen as corrupt instruments of a dying U.S. and Western colonial empire.
How did we get here?
It is not a mere historical coincidence that the world became a much more dangerous place with the escalation of conflicts that threatened international peace in the 1990s. Without the countervailing force of the Soviet Union, the delusional white supremacists making U.S. policy believed that the next century was going to be a century of unrestrained U.S. domination.
And who would be dominated? Largely the nations of the global South but also Europe with an accelerated integration plan in 1993 that the U.S. supported because it was seen as a more efficient mechanism for deploying U.S. capital and further solidifying trade relations with the huge and lucrative European Market.
Central to the assertion of U.S. global power, however, was the judicious use of military force. “Full Spectrum Dominance” was the strategic objective that would ensure the realization of the “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC). There was just one challenge that had to be overcome. The U.S. population still suffered from the affliction labeled the “Vietnam syndrome.” Traumatized by the defeat in Vietnam the population was still reticent about giving its full support to foreign engagements that could develop into possible military confrontations.
How was this challenge overcome? Human rights.
“Humanitarian interventionism,” with its corollary the “responsibility to protect” would emerge in the late 90s as one of the most innovative propaganda tools ever created. Produced by Western human rights community and championed by psychopaths like Samantha Power, the humanitarianism of the benevolent empire became the ideological instrument that allowed the U.S. to fully commit itself to military options to advance the interests of U.S. corporate and financial interests globally while being fully supported by the U.S. population.
With this new ideological tool, the Clinton Administration bombed Serbia for 78 days in 1999 without any legal basis but with the moral imperative of the “responsibility to protect.” By the early 2000s it was obvious that the U.S. was not going to be bound by international law. Operating through NATO and with the formulation of a “rules-based order” in which the U.S. and its Western European allies would make the rules and enforce the order, the world has been plunged into unending wars, illegal sanctions, political subversion and the corruption of international structures that were supposed to instrumentalize the legal, liberal international order.
But white supremacist colonial hubris resulted in the empire overextending itself.
Twenty years after the illegal and immoral attack on Iraq where it is estimated that over a million people perished and twelve years after the racist attack on Libya where NATO dropped over 26,000 bombs and murdered up to 50,000 people, the U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination is in irreversible decline but the U.S. hegemon, like a wounded wild beast is still dangerous and is proving to be even more reckless then just a few years ago.
The disastrous decision to provoke what the U.S. thought would be a limited proxy war with Russia that would allow it to impose sanctions on the Russian Federation will be recorded in history, along with the invasion of Iraq, as the two pivotal decisions that greatly precipitated the decline of the U.S. empire.
However, with over eight hundred U.S. bases globally, a military budget close to a trillion dollars and a doctrine that prioritizes a “military-first strategy,” the coming defeat in Ukraine might translate into even more irresponsible and counterproductive moves against the Chinese over Taiwan in the Pacific and more aggressive actions to maintain U.S. hegemony in the Americas through SOUTHCOM and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Global polls of international opinion continue to reflect that the peoples’ of our planet see the U.S. as the greatest threat to international peace. They are correct.
The commemoration of the attacks on the peoples of Iraq and Libya is an act of solidarity not only with the peoples of those nations, but with the peoples and nations suffering from the malign policies of this dying empire today. It is a time of rededication to peace and to justice, two elements that are inextricable. In the Black Alliance for Peace, we say that peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.
This understanding is the foundation for why we are launching with our partners, an effort to revive the call to make the Americas a Zone of Peace on April the 4th, the day the state murdered Dr. King and the date that the Black Alliance for Peace was launched in 2017.
For Africans and other colonized peoples, the task is clear. The U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination embodies the anti-life structures of colonial/capitalist oppression and must be seen as the primary contradiction facing global humanity. We recognize that other contradictions exist. We are not naive. But for the exploited and colonized peoples of this planet, until there is a shift in the international balance of forces away from the maniacs in the “collective West,” the future of our planet and collective humanity remains imperiled.
The post Commemorations of the Attack on Iraq March 20 and Libya March 19 Reaffirms that the U.S.-EU-NATO Axis of Domination Remains the Greatest Threat to International Peace on our Planet first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Rohima Miah reports from Washington DC that on the 20th anniversary of the United States invasion of Iraq, thousands of peace and antiwar activists rallied in the nation’s capital under the banner Fund People’s Needs, Not the War Machine!
This post was originally published on Green Left.
Just watching the two major parties ruthlessly claw at and attempt to malign and delegitimize each other, then seeing people now excitedly lining up on one side or the other like opposing Ninja turtle teams is both amusing and frightening. We can count on the talking heads and modern media to regurgitate a story line familiar to devotees of Saturday morning cartoon shows to give substance to our political competitions and aspirations. Unfortunately, the narrative is insultingly simple-minded and mostly a distraction.
With the nation divided into red and blue states, the news robots now have the solemn and putatively critical duty to keep us up to date on any shifting of allegiances and rebalancing of the color scheme, milking any incremental addition of a splotch of blue or dash of red for whatever drama they can generate, before cutting to a commercial break.
What has this got to do with the mounting crises we find ourselves in?
Here is a short list of profound challenges confronting the world:
Here is a short list of critical challenges just to our nation:
Pundits and politicos in service to their oligarchic masters can generate all the wonderful spin they can. But America’s economy has been hollowed out from the inside, and due to a fanatic allegiance to a defective and extremely destructive ideology, the vital needs of everyday citizens have been ignored. Anger and frustration mount. Signs of decline and decay are all around us, behind the glitter and the glitz. Worst of all, the U.S. as a world power is losing the mantle of leadership. Its policies have inflicted so much chaos, destruction and death on the rest of the planet, the U.S. is losing its legitimacy and is successfully being challenged by Russia, China, and the non-aligned countries of the South. Of course, with the myopia and desperation that characterizes a dying empire, what’s America’s answer? More chaos, destruction and death. We are involved in a very serious war right now and the specter of World War III looms frighteningly on the horizon.
Everything comes back to what we as a people do to reverse this disastrous course.
Isn’t it time to put away the gang colors and actually begin to solve some problems?
Is it possible? I don’t know.
I do know it’s absolutely necessary.
Our survival as a country and even as a species depends on it.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
For some time, Washington has been losing its spunk in the Pacific. When it comes to the Pacific Islands, a number have not fallen – at least entirely – for the rhetoric that Beijing is there to take, consume, and dominate all. Nor have such countries been entirely blind to their own sharpened interests. This largely aqueous region, which promises to submerge them in the rising waters of climate change, has become furiously busy.
A number of officials are keen to push the line that Washington’s policy towards the Pacific is clearly back where it should be. It’s all part of the warming strategy adopted by the Biden administration, typified by the US-Pacific Island Country summit held last September. In remarks made during the summit, President Joe Biden stated that “the security of America, quite frankly, and the world, depends on your security and the security of the Pacific Islands. And I really mean that.”
Not once was China mentioned, but its ghostly presence stalked Biden’s words. A new Pacific Partnership Strategy was announced, “the first national US strategy for [the] Pacific Islands”. Then came the promised cash: some $810 million in expanded US programs including more than $130 million in new investments to support, among other things, climate resilience, buffer the states against the impact of climate change and improve food security.
The Pacific Islands have also seen a flurry of recent visits. In January this year, US Indo-Pacific military commander Admiral John Aquilino popped into Papua New Guinea to remind the good citizens of Port Moresby that the eyes of the US were gazing benignly upon them. It was his first visit to the country, and the public affairs unit of the US Indo-Pacific Command stated that it underscored “the importance of the US-Papua New Guinea relationship” and showed US resolve “toward building a more peaceful, stable, and prosperous Indo-Pacific region.”
In February, a rather obvious strategic point was made in the reopening of the US embassy in the Solomon Islands. Little interest had been shown towards the island state for some three decades (the embassy had been closed in 1993). But then came Beijing doing, at least from Washington’s perspective, the unpardonable thing of poking around and seeking influence.
Now, Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare finds himself at the centre of much interest, at least till he falls out of favour in the airconditioned corridors of Washington. His policy – “friends to all, enemy to none” – has become a mantra. That much was clear in a May 2022 statement. “My government welcomes all high-level visits from our key development partners. We will always stand true to our policy of ‘Friends to All and Enemies to None’ as we look forward to continuing productive relations with all our development partners.”
For the moment, the US interim representative, Russell Corneau, was satisfied in noting that the embassy would “serve as a key platform” between Washington and the Solomon Islands. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, in fairly torturous language, declared that the reopening “builds on our efforts to place more diplomatic personnel throughout the region and engage further with our Pacific neighbours, connect United States programs and resources with needs on the ground, and build people-to-people ties.” Sogavare, adopting his hard-to-get pose, absented himself from the ceremony.
This month, the Deputy Assistant to the US President and Coordinator for the Indo-Pacific National Security Council Kurt Campbell has been particularly busy doing his rounds. The Solomon Islands has been of particular interest, given its security pact with Beijing. No sooner had Sogavare had time to compose himself after two high profile visits from Japan and China, there was Campbell and his eight-member delegation.
“We realise that we have to overcome in certain areas some amounts of distrust and uncertainty about follow through,” Campbell explained in his usual middle-management speak to reporters in Wellington. “We’re seeking to gain that trust and confidence as we go forward. Much of what we are doing has been initiated by the president, but I want to underscore that it’s quite bipartisan.”
In Honiara, Campbell was forward in admitting that the US had not done “enough before” and had to be “big enough to admit that we need to do more, and we need to do better.” Doing more and doing better clearly entailed dragging out from Sogavare a promise that his country would not create a military facility “that would support power projection capabilities” for Beijing.
Earlier in the month, Qian Bo, China’s Pacific Island envoy, was also doing his bit to win support for the cause. His Vanuatu sojourn was a wooing effort directed at the Melanesian Spearhead Group, comprising Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and the Kanak independence movement in New Caledonia. But as with any muscle-bound hegemon seeking to impress, the crumbs left were treated with some circumspection.
A leaked letter from Micronesia’s President David Panuelo took a more dim view of China’s offerings. In the March 9 document, the cogs and wheels of calculation were busy, taking into account the US proposal of US$50 million into Micronesia’s national trust fund and annual financial assistance of US$15 million. “All of this assistance, of course, would be on top of the greatly added layers of security and protection that come from our country distancing itself from the PRC.” Micronesian officials, he charged, had been the targets of bribes and offers of bribes from the Chinese embassy.
Not all his colleagues in the Pacific are in accord with Panuelo, though the view suggests that both Beijing and Washington are finding, in these small countries, political figures more than willing to exploit the rivalry. To that end lie riches.
The post Imperial Visits: US Emissaries in the Pacific first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
The Future Battery Industries Cooperative Research Centre has more than doubled its 2030 forecast for the value of a diversified battery industry to the Australian economy to $16.9 billion, but argues stronger economic alliances will be needed to realise it. A 2021 report commissioned by the Future Batteries Industries Cooperative Research Centre (FBICRC) had initially…
The post Batteries now worth $17bn to the economy by 2030: FBICRC appeared first on InnovationAus.com.
This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
March 19–20 marked 20 years since United States forces invaded Iraq. A new report documents the ongoing human, social, economic and environmental toll, reports Brett Wilkins.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
There is nothing more dangerous than a government of the many controlled by the few.
— Lawrence Lessig, Harvard law professor
It is easy to be distracted right now by the bread and circus politics that have dominated the news headlines lately, but don’t be distracted.
Don’t be fooled, not even a little.
We’re being subjected to the oldest con game in the books, the magician’s sleight of hand that keeps you focused on the shell game in front of you while your wallet is being picked clean by ruffians in your midst.
This is how tyranny rises and freedom falls.
What characterizes American government today is not so much dysfunctional politics as it is ruthlessly contrived governance carried out behind the entertaining, distracting and disingenuous curtain of political theater. And what political theater it is, diabolically Shakespearean at times, full of sound and fury, yet in the end, signifying nothing.
We are being ruled by a government of scoundrels, spies, thugs, thieves, gangsters, ruffians, rapists, extortionists, bounty hunters, battle-ready warriors and cold-blooded killers who communicate using a language of force and oppression.
The U.S. government now poses the greatest threat to our freedoms.
More than terrorism, more than domestic extremism, more than gun violence and organized crime, even more than the perceived threat posed by any single politician, the U.S. government remains a greater menace to the life, liberty and property of its citizens than any of the so-called dangers from which the government claims to protect us.
No matter who has occupied the White House in recent years, the Deep State has succeeded in keeping the citizenry divided and at each other’s throats.
After all, as long as we’re busy fighting each other, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny in any form.
Unfortunately, what we are facing is tyranny in every form.
The facts speak for themselves.
We’re being robbed blind by a government of thieves. Americans no longer have any real protection against government agents empowered to seize private property at will. For instance, police agencies under the guise of asset forfeiture laws are taking Americans’ personal property based on little more than a suspicion of criminal activity and keeping it for their own profit and gain. In one case, police seized more than $17,000 in cash from two sisters who were trying to start a dog breeding business. Despite finding no evidence of wrongdoing, police held onto the money for months. Homeowners are losing their homes over unpaid property taxes (as little as $2300 owed) that amount to a fraction of what they have invested in their homes. And then there’s the Drug Enforcement Agency, which has been searching train and airline passengers and pocketing their cash, without ever charging them with a crime.
We’re being taken advantage of by a government of scoundrels, idiots and cowards. Journalist H.L. Mencken calculated that “Congress consists of one-third, more or less, scoundrels; two-thirds, more or less, idiots; and three-thirds, more or less, poltroons.” By and large, Americans seem to agree. When you’ve got government representatives who spend a large chunk of their work hours fundraising, being feted by lobbyists, shuffling through a lucrative revolving door between public service and lobbying, and making themselves available to anyone with enough money to secure access to a congressional office, you’re in the clutches of a corrupt oligarchy. Mind you, these same elected officials rarely read the legislation they’re enacting, nor do they seem capable of enacting much legislation that actually helps the plight of the American citizen. More often than not, the legislation lands the citizenry in worse straits.
We’re being locked up by a government of greedy jailers. We have become a carceral state, spending three times more on our prisons than on our schools and imprisoning close to a quarter of the world’s prisoners, despite the fact that crime is at an all-time low and the U.S. makes up only 5% of the world’s population. The rise of overcriminalization and profit-driven private prisons provides even greater incentives for locking up American citizens for such non-violent “crimes” as having an overgrown lawn. As the Boston Review points out, “America’s contemporary system of policing, courts, imprisonment, and parole … makes money through asset forfeiture, lucrative public contracts from private service providers, and by directly extracting revenue and unpaid labor from populations of color and the poor. In states and municipalities throughout the country, the criminal justice system defrays costs by forcing prisoners and their families to pay for punishment. It also allows private service providers to charge outrageous fees for everyday needs such as telephone calls. As a result people facing even minor criminal charges can easily find themselves trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of debt, criminalization, and incarceration.”
We’re being spied on by a government of Peeping Toms. The government, along with its corporate partners, is watching everything you do, reading everything you write, listening to everything you say, and monitoring everything you spend. Omnipresent surveillance is paving the way for government programs that profile citizens, document their behavior and attempt to predict what they might do in the future, whether it’s what they might buy, what politician they might support, or what kinds of crimes they might commit. The impact of this far-reaching surveillance, according to Psychology Today, is “reduced trust, increased conformity, and even diminished civic participation.” As technology analyst Jillian C. York concludes, “Mass surveillance without due process—whether undertaken by the government of Bahrain, Russia, the US, or anywhere in between—threatens to stifle and smother that dissent, leaving in its wake a populace cowed by fear.”
We’re being ravaged by a government of ruffians, rapists and killers. It’s not just the police shootings of unarmed citizens that are worrisome. It’s the SWAT team raids gone wrong—more than 80,000 annually—that are leaving innocent citizens wounded, children terrorized and family pets killed. It’s the roadside strip searches—in some cases, cavity searches of men and women alike carried out in full view of the public—in pursuit of drugs that are never found. It’s the potentially lethal—and unwarranted—use of so-called “nonlethal” weapons such as tasers on children for “mouthing off to a police officer. For trying to run from the principal’s office. For, at the age of 12, getting into a fight with another girl.”
We’re being forced to surrender our freedoms—and those of our children—to a government of extortionists, money launderers and professional pirates. The American people have repeatedly been sold a bill of goods about how the government needs more money, more expansive powers, and more secrecy (secret courts, secret budgets, secret military campaigns, secret surveillance) in order to keep us safe. Under the guise of fighting its wars on terror, drugs and now domestic extremism, the government has spent billions in taxpayer dollars on endless wars that have not ended terrorism but merely sown the seeds of blowback, surveillance programs that have caught few terrorists while subjecting all Americans to a surveillance society, and militarized police that have done little to decrease crime while turning communities into warzones. Not surprisingly, the primary ones to benefit from these government exercises in legal money laundering have been the corporations, lobbyists and politicians who inflict them on a trusting public.
We’re being held at gunpoint by a government of soldiers: a standing army. As if it weren’t enough that the American military empire stretches around the globe (and continues to leech much-needed resources from the American economy), the U.S. government is creating its own standing army of militarized police and teams of weaponized, federal bureaucrats. These civilian employees are being armed to the hilt with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; authorized to make arrests; and trained in military tactics. Among the agencies being supplied with night-vision equipment, body armor, hollow-point bullets, shotguns, drones, assault rifles and LP gas cannons are the Smithsonian, U.S. Mint, Health and Human Services, IRS, FDA, Small Business Administration, Social Security Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Education Department, Energy Department, Bureau of Engraving and Printing and an assortment of public universities. There are now reportedly more bureaucratic (non-military) government civilians armed with high-tech, deadly weapons than U.S. Marines. That doesn’t even begin to touch on the government’s arsenal, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, and the speed with which the nation could be locked down under martial law depending on the circumstances.
Whatever else it may be—a danger, a menace, a threat—the U.S. government is certainly no friend to freedom.
To our detriment, the criminal class that Mark Twain mockingly referred to as Congress has since expanded to include every government agency that feeds off the carcass of our once-constitutional republic.
The government and its cohorts have conspired to ensure that the only real recourse the American people have to hold the government accountable or express their displeasure with the government is through voting, which is no real recourse at all.
Consider it: the penalties for civil disobedience, whistleblowing and rebellion are severe. If you refuse to pay taxes for government programs you believe to be immoral or illegal, you will go to jail. If you attempt to overthrow the government—or any agency thereof—because you believe it has overstepped its reach, you will go to jail. If you attempt to blow the whistle on government misconduct, you will go to jail. In some circumstances, if you even attempt to approach your elected representative to voice your discontent, you can be arrested and jailed.
You cannot have a republican form of government—nor a democratic one, for that matter—when the government views itself as superior to the citizenry, when it no longer operates for the benefit of the people, when the people are no longer able to peacefully reform their government, when government officials cease to act like public servants, when elected officials no longer represent the will of the people, when the government routinely violates the rights of the people and perpetrates more violence against the citizenry than the criminal class, when government spending is unaccountable and unaccounted for, when the judiciary act as courts of order rather than justice, and when the government is no longer bound by the laws of the Constitution.
We no longer have a government “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
Rather, what we have is a government of wolves.
For too long, the American people have obeyed the government’s dictates, no matter now unjust.
We have paid its taxes, penalties and fines, no matter how outrageous. We have tolerated its indignities, insults and abuses, no matter how egregious. We have turned a blind eye to its indiscretions and incompetence, no matter how imprudent. We have held our silence in the face of its lawlessness, licentiousness and corruption, no matter how illicit.
How long we will continue to suffer depends on how much we’re willing to give up for the sake of freedom.
For the moment, the American people seem content to sit back and watch the reality TV programming that passes for politics today. It’s the modern-day equivalent of bread and circuses, a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.
As French philosopher Etienne de La Boétie observed half a millennium ago:
“Plays, farces, spectacles, gladiators, strange beasts, medals, pictures, and other such opiates, these were for ancient peoples the bait toward slavery, the price of their liberty, the instruments of tyranny. By these practices and enticements the ancient dictators so successfully lulled their subjects under the yoke, that the stupefied peoples, fascinated by the pastimes and vain pleasures flashed before their eyes, learned subservience as naively, but not so creditably, as little children learn to read by looking at bright picture books.”
The bait towards slavery. The price of liberty. The instruments of tyranny.
Yes, that sounds about right.
As I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, “We the people” have learned only too well how to be slaves.
The post Circus Politics Are Intended to Distract Us first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
A NASA internship for First Nations Australian university students has been launched with funding support from the Australian Space Agency. The National Indigenous Space Academy (NISA) will enable five university students who identify as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander to undertake a 10-week summer internship program at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. This…
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This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.
People such as former US military men like Scott Ritter and Douglas MacGregor provide excellent analysis on the geopolitics and warring in Ukraine. Ritter and McGregor are two Americans apparently able to relay a perspective based on their own take of a situation, a take independent of government pronouncements and home media reports. Nonetheless, despite reporting their government’s involvement in a proxy war and being well aware of US imperialism and war crimes, these men feel the need to profess their love of country. This is despite their country stirring up wars abroad; stealing oil and wheat in Syria; withholding money that belongs to the poor people of Afghanistan; having overthrown or trying to overthrow governments in Ukraine, Venezuela, Iran, Bolivia, Peru, Russia, etc.; leaving Americans without healthcare to fend for themselves as well as the homeless and destitute; carrying out a slow-motion assassination of Julian Assange; forcing Edward Snowden to live in exile; and a war against several other whistleblowers, Chelsea Manning, John Kiriakou, to name a few. So why the need to express an undying love for country?
One must not be harsh, as one can assume that to not declare an unwavering patriotism would put these independent speakers at risk of a harsh backlash.
I admire Ritter and MacGregor for their independent streak. (I also appreciate the analysis of former US marine Brian Berletic who does not engage in rah-rah for the United States, but then he is an ex-pat).
Of course, that an ex-military man can provide excellent military analysis does not mean that views expressed outside one’s bailiwick are equally profound. Such views may even be deserving of criticism or censure.
In a recent video, MacGregor is interviewed by Stephen Gardner (who displays a large Star and Stripes in the background). MacGregor imparts a perspective that is at odds with that trotted out by his government and the US monopoly media concerning warring in Ukraine.
However, a final question that Gardner posed to MacGregor was rather revealing in a very negative light.
Gardner tendentiously asks (around 29:25), “You mentioned that the humane thing would be for the United States to step in and say this war is over; let’s be done. Don’t you feel like China is trying to fill that vacuum, where they are now saying, ‘Oh Saudi Arabia and Iran, there’s a lot of money to be made, let’s broker peace. Russia, Ukraine, hey, the United States is not going to step in; we are going to step in and broker peace.’ Is this one more way for China to try to eclipse the United States on the world stage?”
What basis does Garner have for posing such a loaded question? Gardner ascribes selfish motives to China’s seeking to broker peace. One assumes that making war is preferable in Garner’s estimation. When has China ever boasted that it aspires to eclipse any country or be top dog? China eschews hegemony, and it consistently states its preference for a multipolar world, a world of peace, and developing win-win relationships with countries. Africans, long pillaged by Europeans and the Anglo diaspora, know this well.
MacGregor responded well, at first, “Well, first of all, I do not subscribe to the view that China wants to eclipse us.” Fine, but this was immediately and emphatically followed by: “They know they can’t.” This comes across as chest thumping, USA, USA, USA, from a former military man.
This is followed by a several assertions: “They [China] have serious problems internally, as well.” He opines that China “is too big to do more than it has already done.” He asserts that China’s chairman Xi Jinping wakes everyday wondering how to hold the country together. He does not cite one example to substantiate what he says. Under Xi, China eliminated extreme poverty and it is on the path to moderate prosperity. If only the US could come close to such monumental achievements for its citizenry. China is forging ties with nations from around the world with its Belt and Road initiative. This is what Xi thinks about each day – not the nonsense MacGregor espouses.
Most disturbingly, MacGregor reveals himself in the video to be a Sinophobe by making all kinds of wild racist assertions; e.g., (at 32:14) “No one in central Asia trusts the Chinese; no one in Asia beyond the China’s borders trusts the Chinese [followed by snickering].”
“People… are all very concerned about the Chinese… the Chinese do what they have always done, if you leave it on the table, they’ll steal it. That’s what they do; they’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”
Now replace the word “Chinese” with “Jews” and imagine the torrent of outrage that would flow in the West.
The post Patriotism and Sinophobia first appeared on Dissident Voice.
The arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for Russian President Vladimir Putin came at an opportune moment. It was, if nothing else, a feeble distraction over the misdeeds and crimes of other leaders current and former. Russia, not being an ICC member country, does not acknowledge that court’s jurisdiction. Nor, for that matter, does the United States, despite the evident chortling from US President Joe Biden.
Twenty years on, former US President George W. Bush, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Australia’s own John Howard, the troika most to blame for not just the criminal invasion of a foreign country but the regional and global cataclysm consequential to it, remain at large. Since then, Bush has taken to painting; Blair and Howard have preferred to sell gobbets of alleged wisdom on the lecture circuit.
The 2003 invasion of Iraq by the US-led Coalition of the Willing was a model exercise of maligning the very international system of rules Washington, London and Canberra speak of when condemning their latest assortment of international villains. It recalled those sombre words of the International Military Tribunal, delivered at the Nuremberg war crimes trials in 1946: “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone but affect the whole world. To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”
The invasion of Iraq defied the UN Security Council as the sole arbiter on whether the use of force would be necessary to combat a genuine threat to international peace and security. It breached the UN Charter. It encouraged instances of horrendous mendacity (those stubbornly spectral weapons of mass destruction) and the inflation of threats supposedly posed by the regime of Saddam Hussein.
This included the unforgettable British contribution about Saddam’s alleged ability to launch chemical and biological weapons in 45 minutes. As Blair declared to MPs in September 2002: “It [the intelligence service] concludes that Iraq has chemical and biological weapons, that Saddam has continued to produce them, that he has existing and active military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons, which could be activated within 45 minutes.”
Putin, not one to suffer amnesia on this point, also noted this fact in his speech made announcing Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Iraq, he noted, had been invaded “without any legal grounds.” Lies, he said, were witnessed “at the highest state level and voiced from the high UN rostrum. As a result, we see a tremendous loss of human life, damage, destruction, and a colossal upsurge of terrorism.”
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, the infrastructure of the country was ruined, its army and public service disbanded, leaving rich pools of disaffected recruits for the insurgency that followed. The country, torn between Shia, Sunni and Kurd and governed by an occupation force of colossal ineptitude, suffered an effective collapse, leaving a vacuum exploited by jihadis and, in time, Islamic State.
Since the invasion, a number of civil society efforts have been undertaken against the dubious triumvirate of evangelist warmongers. The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal, convened over four days in November 2011, invoked universal jurisdiction in finding Bush, Blair and their accomplices guilty of the act of aggression.
Despite its unmistakable political flavour – the original body had been unilaterally established by former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad – its reasoning was sound enough. The invasion of Iraq could not “be justified under any reasonable interpretation of international law” and threatened “to return us to a world in which the law of the jungle prevails over the rule of law, with potentially disastrous consequences for the human rights not only of the Iraqis but of the people throughout the region and the world”.
The Sydney-based SEARCH Foundation also resolved to submit a complaint to the ICC in 2012, hoping that the body would conduct an investigation and issue a warrant for Howard’s arrest. In September 2013, a complaint was filed by Peter Murphy, Secretary of the Foundation, alleging, among a range of offences, the commission of acts of aggression, breaches of international humanitarian law and human rights, and crimes against peace. The effort failed, leaving Howard irritatingly free.
In two decades, the United States still finds itself embroiled in Iraq, with 2,500 troops stationed in a capacity that is unlikely to stop anytime too soon. That said, the parallels with Afghanistan are already being drawn. In 2022, the outgoing head of US Central Command, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, trotted out his dream about what would happen. “You want to get to the state where nations, and security elements in those nations, can deal with a violent extremist threat without direct support from us.”
Ironically enough, such violent extremist threats had more than a little help in their creation from Washington’s own disastrous intervention. Eventually, the Iraqis would simply have to accept “to take a larger share of all the enabling that we’re doing now.”
The calamity of Iraq is also a salutary warning to countries willing to join any US-led effort, or rely on the good grace of Washington’s power. To be an enemy of the United States might be dangerous, but as Henry Kissinger reminds us, to be a friend might prove fatal.
The post Criminals at Large: The Iraq War Twenty Years On first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
On 10 March, Canada’s National Post headlined “Regime change in Moscow ‘definitely’ the goal, Joly says,” and reported that “Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly raises the possibility of regime change in Moscow. … ‘The goal is definitely to do that, is to weaken Russia’s ability to launch very difficult attacks against Ukraine. We want also to make sure that Putin and his enablers are held to account,’ she said. ‘I always make a difference between the regime and the people of a given country, which is fundamental.’”
On 26 March 2022, Bloomberg News bannered “Joe Biden Calls for Regime Change in Moscow as He Likens Invasion to Ww2 Horrors,” and reported that, “Joe Biden directly appealed to the Russian people with comparisons between the invasion of Ukraine and the horrors of the Second World War as he called for Vladimir Putin to go. ‘For God’s sake this man cannot remain in power,’ the US president said, calling for regime change in Moscow during a speech from Poland on Saturday. He told Russians they are not ‘our enemy’.”
Why were there not calls, within the United States and its allies, for “regime-change in America” when U.S. President George W. Bush blatantly lied Americans into invading and destroyed a country that posed no threat to America, Iraq (which — by contrast — Ukraine definitely did and does constitute to Russia)?
Contrary to U.S.-and-allied propagandists, that war in Ukraine wasn’t started on 24 February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine, but back in February 2014 when U.S. President Barack Obama’s Administration had started by no later than June of 2011 to plan, and by no later than 1 March 2013 inside the U.S.’s Ukrainian Embassy to execute the plan, and then on 20 February 2014 to culminate the U.S. coup that overthrew and replaced Ukraine’s democratically elected neutralist President, and replaced him and his Government with the U.S. selected leaders of the new, and rabidly Russia-hating, U.S.-controlled, Ukrainian regime.
And, now, on 17 March 2023, NBC News headlines “International Criminal Court issues arrest warrant for Putin over alleged Ukraine war crimes” and reports that the U.S.-and-allied regimes are starting a case in the International Criminal Court — which has no jurisdiction over Russia and over Ukraine and over the United States, all three of which nations refused to ratify and therefore are not subject to that Court’s jurisdiction (since it’s not a “Universal” court like the U.N.’s International Court of Justice is) — initiating this purely propaganda case against Russia. Why did they not do that against America and the UK, when those regimes invaded and destroyed Iraq on the basis only of lies (which Russia certainly did not do in the case of the now U.S.-controlled Ukraine)?
Wikipedia makes this elementary fact about that Court quite clear, by saying:
It lacks universal territorial jurisdiction and may only investigate and prosecute crimes committed within member states, crimes committed by nationals of member states, or crimes in situations referred to the Court by the United Nations Security Council.
The U.S. and its allies are bringing this case as a propaganda-vehicle, but the Court itself, by ‘investigating’ this case that falls outside its jurisdiction, is destroying whatever pitiful international credibility that it had. Any court that ever serves a purely-propaganda function cannot ever again be taken seriously by any serious person. It is groveling to someone. It is simply embarrassing itself. The U.S. and its allies are contemptuous not only of the public but of this Court, to do this.
Furthermore: the U.S.-and-allied allegations that regime-change is being sought only against a country’s leadership, and not against the country’s people, is ludicrous, because those aggressor-countries’ long histories of imposed regime-changes against Governments they wanted to topple — such as Chile, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and all the rest — have always been from bad to worse against the targeted countries’ publics. Moreover, the U.S. regime has repeatedly made explicitly clear that, though all of the devastation that its invasion and continued occupation and massive thefts from Syria have brought hell upon its people, the U.S. Government absolutely refuses to allow any reconstruction to occur in Syria unless the U.S. is controlling that country.
Although the U.S. and its allies demand regime-change in both Russia and China, the leaders of those two countries have long had far higher approval-ratings by their citizens than the leaders in U.S.-and allied countries have by theirs; the regime-changes should rather be done in the U.S.-and-allied countries than in their targeted countries.
The U.S., and its allies, lie pathologically, such as they do as NATO:
“NATO is not a threat to Russia.”
“NATO is not at war with Russia.”
How can anyone respect such Governments?
The post U.S. and Allies Seek Regime-Change in Russia first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
“We weren’t there to kill human beings, really. We were there to kill ideology.” (Lt. William Calley)
Officially termed an “incident” (as opposed to a “massacre”), the events of March 16, 1968, at My Lai — a hamlet in South Vietnam — are widely portrayed and accepted to this day as an aberration. While the catalog of U.S. war crimes in Southeast Asia is far too sordid and lengthy to detail here, it’s painfully clear this was not the case.
In fact, on the very same day that Lt. William Calley entered into infamy, another U.S. company entered My Khe, a sister sub hamlet of My Lai. That visit has been described as such:
“In this ‘other massacre,’ members of this separate company piled up a body count of perhaps a hundred peasants — My Khe was smaller than My Lai — ’flattened the village’ by dynamite and fire, and then threw handfuls of straw on corpses. The next morning, this company moved on down the Batangan Peninsula by the South China Sea, burning every hamlet they came to, killing water buffalo, pigs, chickens, and ducks, and destroying crops. As one of the My Khe veterans said later, ‘what we were doing was being done all over.’ Said another: ‘We were out there having a good time. It was sort of like being in a shooting gallery.’
Colonel Oran Henderson, charged with covering up the My Lai killings, put it succinctly in 1971: “Every unit of brigade size has its My Lai hidden someplace.”
Of the 26 U.S. soldiers brought up on charges related to My Lai, only Calley was convicted. However, his life sentence was later reduced to three and a half years under house arrest.
Never forget, my friends: This is what we’re up against.
But let’s also never forget the actions of a man named Hugh Thompson.
Hugh Clowers Thompson, Jr. wanted to fly choppers so badly that after a four-year stint in the Navy, he left his wife and two sons behind to re-up into the Army and train as a helicopter pilot. Thompson arrived in Vietnam on December 27, 1967, and quickly earned a reputation as “an exceptional pilot who took danger in his stride.”
In their book, Four Hours at My Lai, Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim also describe Hugh Thompson as a “very moral man. He was absolutely strict about opening fire only on clearly defined targets.”
On the morning of March 16, 1968, Thompson’s sense of virtue would be put to the test.
Flying in his H-23 observation chopper, the 25-year-old Thompson used green smoke to mark wounded people on the ground in and around My Lai. Upon returning a short while later after refueling, he found that the wounded he saw earlier were now dead.
Thompson’s gunner, Lawrence Colburn, averted his gaze from the gruesome sight.
After bringing the chopper down to a standstill hover, Thompson and his crew came upon a young woman they had previously marked with smoke. As they watched, a U.S. soldier, wearing captain’s bars, “prodded her with his foot, and then killed her.”
What Thompson didn’t know was that by that point, Lt. Calley’s Charlie Company had already slaughtered more than 560 Vietnamese—primarily women, children, infants, and elderly people. Many of the women had been gang-raped and mutilated.
All Thompson knew for sure was that the U.S. troops he saw pursuing civilians had to be stopped.
Bravely landing his helicopter between the charging GIs and the fleeing villagers, Thompson ordered Colburn to turn his machine gun on the American soldiers if they tried to shoot the unarmed men, women, and children.
Thompson then stepped out of the chopper into the combat zone and coaxed the frightened civilians from the bunker they were hiding in.
With tears streaming down his face, he evacuated them to safety on his H-23.
Never forget, my friends: This is how we can choose to live.
The post My Lai, “Killing Ideology,” and Disobeying Orders first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
U.S. soldiers breaking into a home in Baquba, Iraq, in 2008 Photo: Reuters
March 19 marks the 20th anniversary of the U.S. and British invasion of Iraq. This seminal event in the short history of the 21st century not only continues to plague Iraqi society to this day, but it also looms large over the current crisis in Ukraine, making it impossible for most of the Global South to see the war in Ukraine through the same prism as U.S. and Western politicians.
While the U.S. was able to strong-arm 49 countries, including many in the Global South, to join its “coalition of the willing” to support invading the sovereign nation of Iraq, only the U.K., Australia, Denmark and Poland actually contributed troops to the invasion force, and the past 20 years of disastrous interventions have taught many nations not to hitch their wagons to the faltering U.S. empire.
Today, nations in the Global South have overwhelmingly refused U.S. entreaties to send weapons to Ukraine and are reluctant to comply with Western sanctions on Russia. Instead, they are urgently calling for diplomacy to end the war before it escalates into a full-scale conflict between Russia and the United States, with the existential danger of a world-ending nuclear war.
The architects of the U.S. invasion of Iraq were the neoconservative founders of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), who believed that the United States could use the unchallenged military superiority that it achieved at the end of the Cold War to perpetuate American global power into the 21st century.
The invasion of Iraq would demonstrate U.S. “full spectrum dominance” to the world, based on what the late Senator Edward Kennedy condemned as “a call for 21st century American imperialism that no other country can or should accept.”
Kennedy was right, and the neocons were utterly wrong. U.S. military aggression succeeded in overthrowing Saddam Hussein, but it failed to impose a stable new order, leaving only chaos, death and violence in its wake. The same was true of U.S. interventions in Afghanistan, Libya and other countries.
For the rest of the world, the peaceful economic rise of China and the Global South has created an alternative path for economic development that is replacing the U.S. neocolonial model. While the United States has squandered its unipolar moment on trillion-dollar military spending, illegal wars and militarism, other countries are quietly building a more peaceful, multipolar world.
And yet, ironically, there is one country where the neocons’ “regime-change” strategy succeeded, and where they doggedly cling to power: the United States itself. Even as most of the world recoiled in horror at the results of U.S. aggression, the neocons consolidated their control over U.S. foreign policy, infecting and poisoning Democratic and Republican administrations alike with their exceptionalist snake oil.
Corporate politicians and media like to airbrush out the neocons’ takeover and continuing domination of U.S. foreign policy, but the neocons are hidden in plain sight in the upper echelons of the U.S. State Department, the National Security Council, the White House, Congress and influential corporate-funded think tanks.
PNAC co-founder Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and was a key supporter of Hillary Clinton. President Biden appointed Kagan’s wife, Victoria Nuland, a former foreign policy adviser to Dick Cheney, as his Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, the fourth most senior position in the State Department. That was after she played the lead U.S. role in the 2014 coup in Ukraine, which caused its national disintegration, the return of Crimea to Russia and a civil war in Donbas that killed at least 14,000 people.
Nuland’s nominal boss, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, was the staff director of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2002, during its debates over the impending U.S. assault on Iraq. Blinken helped the committee chairman, Senator Joe Biden, choreograph hearings that guaranteed the committee’s support for the war, excluding any witnesses who did not fully support the neocons’ war plan.
It is not clear who is really calling the foreign policy shots in Biden’s administration as it barrels toward World War III with Russia and provokes conflict with China, riding roughshod over Biden’s campaign promise to “elevate diplomacy as the primary tool of our global engagement.” Nuland appears to have influence far beyond her rank in the shaping of U.S. (and thus Ukrainian) war policy.
What is clear is that most of the world has seen through the lies and hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy, and that the United States is finally reaping the result of its actions in the refusal of the Global South to keep dancing to the tune of the American pied piper.
At the UN General Assembly in September 2022, the leaders of 66 countries, representing a majority of the world’s population, pleaded for diplomacy and peace in Ukraine. And yet Western leaders still ignore their pleas, claiming a monopoly on moral leadership that they decisively lost on March 19, 2003, when the United States and the United Kingdom tore up the UN Charter and invaded Iraq.
In a panel discussion on “Defending the UN Charter and the Rules-Based International Order” at the recent Munich Security Conference, three of the panelists–from Brazil, Colombia and Namibia–explicitly rejected Western demands for their countries to break off relations with Russia, and instead spoke out for peace in Ukraine.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Mauro Vieira called on all the warring parties to “build the possibility of a solution. We cannot keep on talking only of war.” Vice President Francia Márquez of Colombia elaborated, “We don’t want to go on discussing who will be the winner or the loser of a war. We are all losers and, in the end, it is humankind that loses everything.”
Prime Minister Saara Kuugongelwa-Amadhila of Namibia summed up the views of Global South leaders and their people: “Our focus is on solving the problem…not on shifting blame,” she said. “We are promoting a peaceful resolution of that conflict, so that the entire world and all the resources of the world can be focused on improving the conditions of people around the world instead of being spent on acquiring weapons, killing people, and actually creating hostilities.”
So how do the American neocons and their European vassals respond to these eminently sensible and very popular leaders from the Global South? In a frightening, warlike speech, European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told the Munich conference that the way for the West to “rebuild trust and cooperation with many in the so-called Global South” is to “debunk… this false narrative… of a double standard.”
But the double standard between the West’s responses to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and decades of Western aggression is not a false narrative. In previous articles, we have documented how the United States and its allies dropped more than 337,000 bombs and missiles on other countries between 2001 and 2020. That is an average of 46 per day, day in day out, for 20 years.
The U.S. record easily matches, or arguably far outstrips, the illegality and brutality of Russia’s crimes in Ukraine. Yet the U.S. never faces economic sanctions from the global community. It has never been forced to pay war reparations to its victims. It supplies weapons to the aggressors instead of to the victims of aggression in Palestine, Yemen and elsewhere. And U.S. leaders–including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden—have never been prosecuted for the international crime of aggression, war crimes or crimes against humanity.
As we mark the 20th anniversary of the devastating Iraq invasion, let us join with Global South leaders and the majority of our neighbors around the world, not only in calling for immediate peace negotiations to end the brutal Ukraine war, but also in building a genuine rules-based international order, where the same rules—and the same consequences and punishments for breaking those rules—apply to all nations, including our own.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
