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Category: United States

  • Ukraine Is a Problem Only as Long as the West Makes It One

    Ukrainian servicemen take part in a drill of the airborne troops taking place in Zhytomyr region on November 21, 2018. (photo: AFP)

    Since the fall of the Soviet Union thirty years ago, US policy on Ukraine has been an ugly mix of inconsistency, quiet aggression, fear-mongering and stupidity. Now President Biden is recklessly intensifying the same failed tactics while expecting a different outcome and risking a confrontation of the world’s two major nuclear-armed states.

    What could possibly go wrong?

    What passes for conventional wisdom nowadays is expressed by the cover headline of the November 29 issue of The Nation magazine, of all places:

    Ukraine: The Most Dangerous Problem in the World

    That is such hogwash. The Nation knows better. But the fear-mongering leads, even though the magazine’s sub-head is: “But there’s already a solution.” Author Anatol Lieven argues persuasively that the essence of a solution for Ukraine issues have already been outlined in the so-called “Minsk II” agreement of 2015, reached by leaders of France, Germany, Russia, and Ukraine. The agreement was endorsed unanimously by the United Nations Security Council. Despite their formal assent to Minsk II, three US administrations have supported Ukraine in refusing to implement the agreement. Nor have they proposed any better idea. This is an example of foreign policy guided by denial of reality.

    Ukraine remains a “dangerous problem” only as long as the US and Ukraine insist on making it one. (It’s hardly “the most dangerous,” given climate change, or US provocation of China, or the US-led nuclear arms race, or the self-gutting of US democracy.)

    With the Soviet Union gone in 1991, US President Bush assured Russian leaders that NATO would not expand to include former Soviet states. Whether this was a lie or a broken promise hardly matters. NATO expanded. Russia was confronted with the prospect of an avowedly hostile military alliance approaching its borders along the same invasion route followed by Napoleon and Hitler. As long as Ukraine remained unaligned, Russian historical memory could rest quietly. Ukraine puts almost 1,000 miles between Russia and NATO member Poland. Ukraine’s population of about 45 million ranges from very pro-western to virtually Russian. The country has long been deeply corrupt with a quasi-functional democracy (an opportunistic playground for the likes of Paul Manafort and Hunter Biden). All in all, from a geopolitical perspective, Ukraine was (and still is) a combustible potential best left undisturbed.

    In 2013, Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych put NATO and European Union membership in play, then reversed course under Russian pressure. In November 2013, he cancelled an EU association agreement just days before it was to take effect. With US connivance, pro-western Ukrainian forces launched the Maidan Revolution that lasted into the spring of 2014. Elected president Yanukovich was forced out of office (shades of Iran 1953) and the country entered a period of chaos. Russia took advantage of this to walk into Crimea unopposed and to annex it, as voted by the Crimean parliament, despite objections from the West. These objections have continued to the present, together with economic sanctions and military provocations from the Black Sea.

    The US and NATO have justified their hostile actions by claiming Russia was also about to invade eastern Ukraine, which still hasn’t happened. Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas, has been a war zone since March 2014 when separatist Ukrainian forces in Donetsk and Luhansk started fighting for independence from the central government in Kiev. This is a civil war between the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk against the Ukraine government. The People’s Republics comprise about 6,200 square miles (bigger than Connecticut) with almost 4 million people, mostly Russian-speaking, whose currency is the ruble. Russia has supported the People’s Republics, but short of introducing its own troops. Likewise, the US and NATO have supported Kiev, but short of introducing their own troops into the Donbas. The fighting has been intense in the past, with some 10,000 killed on both sides, but the conflict in recent years has been limited to trench warfare along a 400-mile front, with most casualties coming from sniper fire. Neither side has made significant advances in years.

    In 2014, Russia and Ukraine met under the auspices of the European Union and signed the first Minsk Protocol in an ultimately ineffective effort to reach a ceasefire. The following year, five parties signed a second Minsk Protocol – Ukraine, Ukraine Separatists, Russia, France, and Germany – which led to reduced fighting but no lasting solution. Through all of this, the US under President Obama, played no useful role in resolving the issues or assuring anything like a stable peace.

    The US remains gripped, apparently, by a reflexive Cold War rigidity which requires that Russia be to blame for anything we don’t like, such as the results of the US-sponsored coup in Ukraine in 2014. The new Cold War is manifested by the expansion of NATO, needlessly threatening Russia on the basis of a paranoid Western sense of threat.

    Another manifestation of Cold War thinking is Biden’s choice of Victoria Nuland as his current special ambassador to Russia to discuss Ukraine. Nuland was notoriously involved in efforts to manipulate the 2013 Madan uprising and supporting the coup against Yanukovich. When apprised of European desires to proceed cautiously, Nuland was recorded on cell phone saying, “Fuck the EU.” Such assertions of American exceptionalism continue to make the world a more dangerous place.

    What could Biden do now to make the world a safer place?

    Biden could ease sanctions over Crimea, acknowledging that its return to Russia is a done deal with strong historic and geo-political justifications. Biden could also stop US nuclear-capable bombers from probing Russia in the Black Sea region. It’s hard to see how continuing such provocative flights can have a calming effect.

    Most importantly, Biden could assure Russia (as the US did once before in 1992) that NATO would not expand to include Ukraine. In his recent conversation with Putin, Biden did the opposite, making it all but non-negotiable. That has the obvious effect of continuing the conflict, asserting the right to hold a knife to another’s throat.

    This particular knife was forced into NATO’s hands in April 2008 by the illegitimate President Bush against the will of the majority of NATO members. The issue came up at NATO’s North Atlantic Council meeting in Bucharest. NATO members easily accepted the future membership of Albania and Croatia, but balked at approving Ukraine or Georgia. Instead, in the Bucharest Summit Declaration, members approved a compromise article drafted by the British with intentional imprecision, paragraph 23 of 50, that began:

    NATO welcomes Ukraine’s and Georgia’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations for

    membership in NATO. We agreed today that these countries will become

    members of NATO….

    The paragraph continues with generalizations about the countries’ contributions to the war in Afghanistan, their promised democratic reforms, and so on. But there is no date for membership, no process for achieving membership (as distinct from Albania and Croatia), and actual approval is only anticipated at some unknown future date. This paragraph in the Bucharest Declaration is essentially a throwaway line, putting off to an indeterminate future the clearly divisive and dangerous issue of relating to Russian border states.

    Elsewhere, the Bucharest Declaration discusses a variety of practical matters with consistent self-confidence and expressions of peaceful cooperation:

    … we stand ready to continue working with Russia as equal partners in areas of common concern…. [paragraph 28]

    We remain committed to substantive political discussions and effective cooperation…. [paragraph 32]

    The Alliance will continue to support, as appropriate, these efforts as guided by regional priorities and based on transparency, complementarity and inclusiveness, in order to develop dialogue and cooperation among the Black Sea states and with the Alliance. [paragraph 36]

    The Bucharest Declaration does not express an alliance seeking confrontation with Russia, for all that George W. Bush wanted it.

    The Bucharest Declaration treats NATO’s war in Afghanistan as a success and expresses the need for possible future military actions against Iran and North Korea (but no mention of China). There is no hint of anyone wondering why something called the North Atlantic Treaty Organization thinks it has any legitimate business operating in landlocked Afghanistan.

    More than a decade later, four American presidents have turned Afghanistan into a world class disaster. America has turned its back on mass starvation there. And still there is no sense of national responsibility or shame as Biden and the US governing elite stumble provocatively toward new looming catastrophes with Iran, China, climate change, public health, and functioning democracy itself.

    Ukraine is a wholly American-made pseudo crisis in which the US national interest is close to zero. The US forced NATO to put Ukraine in play in 2008 by breaking the earlier US pledge not to put Ukraine in play. Now our obtuse leadership poses as acting on principle by refusing to break the pledge that broke the first pledge, even though that is the most obvious, effective de-escalation available: guarantee Russia a border with no more NATO threats and negotiate (as others have done) in good faith to defuse the rest of the Ukrainian mishmash.

    When Secretary of State Anthony Blinken says that “one country trying to tell another what its choices should be, including with whom it associates, that’s not an acceptable proposition,…” what we’re hearing is a US official ignoring reality and denying what the US does every day. And when former US ambassador Michael McFaul tweets: “Putin invented this ‘crisis’ single-handedly. Nothing changed in Ukraine. Nothing changed regarding NATO policy” – he’s just lying.

    Worse, the blind rigidity of the likes of Blinken and McFaul serves to enable the truly mindless warmongers like US Senator Roger Wicker, R-MS, who doesn’t have the sense not to invite nuclear war when he tells Fox News:

    Military action could mean that we stand off with our ships in the Black Sea, and we rain destruction on Russian military capability. It could mean that. It could mean that we participate, and I would not rule that out, I would not rule out American troops on the ground. We don’t rule out first use nuclear action.

    President Biden has the opportunity to re-direct US policy on Ukraine in a peaceful direction,

    But it will take serious, steadfast courage. We don’t know how compromised he is by his previous dealing in Ukraine, or his son’s. We don’t know if he has the clarity of mind to see the obvious. And we don’t know if he has the strength to wage peace.

    The post Ukraine Is a Problem Only as Long as the West Makes It One first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Journalism, Assange and Reversal in the High Court

    British justice is advertised by its proponents as upright, historically different to the savages upon which it sought to civilise, and apparently fair.  Such outrages as the unjust convictions of the Guilford Four and Maguire Seven, both having served time in prison for terrorist offences they did not commit, are treated as blemishes.

    In recent memory, fewer blemishes can be more profound and disturbing to a legal system than the treatment of Australian citizen and WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange.  The British legal system has been so conspicuously outsourced to the wishes of the US Department of Justice and the military-industrial complex Assange did so much to expose.  The decision of the UK High Court, handed down on December 10, will go down in the annals of law as a particularly disgraceful instance of this.

    From the outset, extradition proceedings utilising a First World War US statute – the Espionage Act of 1917 – should have sent legal eagles in the UK swooping with alarm.  17 of the 18 charges Assange is accused of have been drawn from it.  It criminalises the receipt, dissemination and publication of national security information.  It attacks the very foundations of the Fourth Estate’s pursuit of accountability and subverts the protections of the First Amendment in the US constitution.  It invalidates motive and purpose.  And, were this to be successful – and here, the British justices seem willing to ensure that it is – the United States will be able to globally target any publisher of its dirty trove of classified material using an archaic, barbaric law.

    It should also have occurred to the good members of the English legal profession that these lamentable proceedings have always been political.  Extraditions are generally not awarded on such grounds.  But this entire affair reeks of it.  The US security establishment wants their man, desperately.   With the coming to power of President Donald Trump, one counterintelligence officer, reflecting on Assange’s plight, made the pertinent observation that, “Nobody in that crew was going to be too broken up about the First Amendment issues.”

    The original decision by District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser was hardly grand.  It was chastising and vicious to journalism, cruel to those revealing information that might expose state abuses and an offense to the sensibility of democratic minded persons.  The point was made that security and intelligence experts, however morally inclined or principled, were best suited to assessing the merits of releasing classified information.  Journalists should never be involved in publishing such material.  Besides, thought the Judge, Assange was not a true journalist.  Such people did not purposely go out to disclose the identities of informants or propagandise their cause.

    The only thing going for that otherwise woeful judgment was its acceptance that Assange would well perish in the US legal system.  Noting such cases as Laurie Love, Baraitser accepted that the prosecution had failed to show that Assange would not be placed in a position where he could be prevented from taking his own life.  Should he be sent across the Atlantic, he would face Special Administrative Measures and conclude his life in the wretched cul-de-sac of the ADX Florence supermax.  Any extradition to such conditions of sheer baroque cruelty would be “oppressive” given “his mental condition”.

    The prosecution had no qualms trying to appeal and broaden the arguments, citing several propositions.  Contemptibly, these focused on Assange the pretender (suicidal autistics cannot give conference plenaries or host television programs), expert witnesses as deceivers (neuropsychiatrist Michael Kopelman, for initially “concealing” evidence from the court of Assange’s relationship with Stella Moris and their children), and the merits of the US prison system: matronly, saintly, and filled with soft beds and tender shrinks.  Why, scolded the prosecutor James Lewis QC in October, had the good judge not asked the US Department of Justice for reassurances?  Assange would not face the brutal end of special administrative measures.  He would not be sent to decline and moulder in ADX Florence.  He could also serve his sentence in Australia, provided, of course, the Department of Justice approved.

    In reversing the decision to discharge Assange, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Ian Burnett, and Lord Justice Timothy Holroyde were persuaded by two of the five grounds submitted by the prosecutors.  Sounding astonishingly naïve (or possibly disingenuous) at points, the justices accepted the prosecution’s argument that undertakings or assurances could be made at a later stage, even during an appeal.  Delays by a requesting state to make such assurances might be tactical and stem from bad faith, but not entertaining such assurances, even if made later, might also result in “a windfall to an alleged or convicted criminal, which would defeat the public interest in extradition.”

    Judge Baraitser should have also been mindful of seeking the assurances in the first place, given how vital the issue of Assange’s suicide risk and future treatment in US prisons was in making her decision against extradition.

    It followed that the justices did “not accept that the USA refrained for tactical reasons from offering assurances at an earlier stage, or acted in bad faith in choosing only to offer them at the appeal stage.”  Diplomatic Note no. 74 contained “solemn undertakings, offered by one government to another, which will bind all officials and prosecutors who will deal with the relevant aspects of Mr Assange’s case now and in the future.”

    This meant that Assange would not be subjected to SAMs, or sent to ADX Florence, and that he would receive appropriate medical treatment to mitigate the risk of suicide.  (The justices erred in not understanding that the assurance to not detain Assange ADX “pre-trial” was irrelevant as ADX is a post-conviction establishment.)  He could also serve his post-trial and post-appeal sentence in Australia, though that would be at the mercy of DOJ approval.  All undertakings were naturally provisional on the conduct of the accused.

    As the original judgment was premised upon Assange being subjected to the “harshest SAMs regime”, and given the significance of the evidence submitted by Kopelman and Dr Quinton Deeley on Assange’s suicide risk in “being held under such harsh conditions of isolation”, the justices were “unable to accept the submission that the judge’s conclusion would have been the same if she had not found a real risk of detention in those conditions.”

    Such narrow reasoning served to ignore the ample evidence that such diplomatic assurances are unreliable, mutable and without legal standing.  In terms of solitary confinement, the US legal system is filled with euphemistic designations that all amount to aspects of the same thing.  If it is not SAMs, it is certainly something amounting to it, such as Administrative Segregation.

    Previous diplomatic assurances given by US authorities have also been found wanting.  The fate of Spanish drug trafficker David Mendoza Herrarte stands out.  In that case, a Spanish court was given an assurance that Mendoza, if extradited to the US to face trial, could serve any subsequent prison sentence in Spain.  When the application to the US Department of Justice was made to make good that undertaking, the transfer application was refused.  The pledge only applied, it was claimed, to allow Mendoza to apply for a transfer; it never meant that the DOJ had to agree to it.  A diplomatic wrangle between Madrid and Washington ensued for six years before the decision was altered.

    And just to make such undertakings all the more implausible, the “solemn assurances” were coming from, as Craig Murray pointedly remarked, “a state whose war crimes and murder of civilians were exposed by Julian Assange.”

    The justices also failed to consider the murderous elephant in the room, one that had been submitted by the defence at both the extradition hearing and the appeal: that US government officials had contemplated abducting and assassinating the very individual whose extradition they were seeking.  This was a view that held sway with former US Secretary of State and CIA chief Mike Pompeo.

    In the United States, talking heads expressed their satisfaction about the glories of the US justice and prison system.  Former Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill told MSNBC that, “This was really a guy who just violated the law”.  Concerns by Assange’s defence team that his “safety in [US] prison” would be compromised showed that “they really don’t have perspective on this”.

    It is fittingly monstrous that this decision should be handed down the same day the Nobel Peace Prize was being awarded to two journalists, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov.  Or that it should happen on Human Rights Day, which saw US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s boast that “we will continue to promote accountability for human rights violators.”  Except one’s own.

    Inevitably, these cruel, gradually lethal proceedings move to the next stage: an appeal to the Supreme Court.  As the paperwork is gathered, Assange will muse, grimly, that the entire period of his discharge never saw him leave Belmarsh Prison.

    The post Journalism, Assange and Reversal in the High Court first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Assange ruling a dangerous precedent for journalists and British justice

    On Friday, the English High Court paved the way for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to be extradited to the United States and tried over the publication of hundreds of thousands of documents, some of which contained evidence of US and British war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

    The decision reversed a ruling in January by a lower court that had blocked the extradition, but only on humanitarian grounds: that Assange would be put at severe risk of suicide by the oppressive conditions of his detention in the US.

    The 50-year old Australian faces a sentence of up to 175 years in prison if found guilty.

    Amnesty International described the ruling as a “travesty of justice”, while Rebecca Vincent of Reporters Without Borders tweeted that it was an “appalling” decision that “marks a bleak moment for journalists and journalism around the world”.

    Assange’s lawyers said they will appeal the ruling at the supreme court. But the fight to free Assange – even if ultimately successful – is certain to drag on for many more years.

    The WikiLeaks founder has already spent more than a decade in various forms of incarceration: house arrest, political asylum and, since early 2019, solitary confinement in Belmarsh high-security prison in London.

    The toll this has taken is immense, according to Nils Melzer, a law professor and the United Nations’ expert on torture. He has repeatedly warned that Assange is suffering the effects of “prolonged exposure to psychological torture”.

    Family and friends warn that he is regularly confused about basic facts. At one hearing, he visibly struggled even to recall his name and age.

    War crimes

    The reasons for Assange’s detention have shifted a number of times over the years: from an initial investigation of alleged sex crimes in Sweden, to a bail violation in the UK, and more recently espionage.

    But the presence of the US national security state has never been far away. Assange’s supporters say Washington has been quietly influencing events, only showing its hand directly when it launched the extradition claim in 2019.

    It was clear from the outset that the arguments made by the US could have huge implications for the future of journalism and its ability to hold powerful states to account. And yet the hearings have been given only cursory coverage, especially by the British media.

    The case for extradition rests on a US claim that Assange carried out espionage in publishing hundreds of thousands of leaked materials in 2010 and 2011 with high-profile partners such as the New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, El Pais and Der Spiegel. Called the Iraq and Afghan war logs, the documents show that the US army committed war crimes in those countries, killed non-combatants and carried out torture.

    The United States clearly wanted to make sure there would be no recurrence of such a leak.

    The problem was, if Assange could be jailed for doing journalism, why not also the editors of the papers he published with? Locking up the senior staff of the New York Times, Guardian and Der Spiegel was never going to be a good look.

    This very difficulty stayed the hand of officials in Barack Obama’s administration. They felt cornered by the First Amendment.

    But under Donald Trump the reticence quickly lifted. His justice department officials argued that Assange was a hacker, not a journalist.

    With this as their premise, they felt free to redefine the new, digitally based national security journalism Assange and WikiLeaks pioneered as “espionage”.

    To do so, they turned to the 1917 Espionage Act, a draconian piece of First World War legislation that gave the government powers to jail critics.

    It was a move with serious implications. Trump’s justice officials were effectively claiming a new kind of universal jurisdiction: the right to put Assange on trial, even though he was not a US citizen and was not accused of carrying out any of the acts in question on US soil.

    The English courts have now attracted rancor by seemingly giving their assent to political persecution. Critics fear the precedent means any journalist in the UK could now be dragged to the US for prosecution should they cause Washington sufficient embarrassment.

    Raising suspicions

    Assange and his supporters say the legal arguments of the extradition process were never more than a facade. They say there were plenty of clues that the US was seeking vengeance against Assange, not justice.

    A decade ago, long before the US was openly battling to get hold of Assange, he was facing another extradition battle – this time with a Swedish prosecutor – as part of an investigation into allegations of sexual assault. It was around that time that Assange fled to Ecuador’s embassy in London seeking political asylum.

    The disappearance of email chains between Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Sweden from that time have raised suspicions that all was not as it seemed.

    A few survive, and suggest that extra pressure was being applied.

    A CPS lawyer wrote to a Swedish counterpart in 2011: “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition.” The following year, as Sweden appeared to be preparing to drop the investigation against Assange, the same UK lawyer replied: “Don’t you dare get cold feet!!!”

    Moves were afoot against Assange in the US too. In 2011, a grand jury was convened in the Eastern District of Virginia behind closed doors to draft an indictment. The location was no accident. That district of Virginia is where most of the US intelligence agencies are headquartered.

    Pursued by Washington

    But the gloves really came off after Trump entered the White House. The CIA stepped into the fray, with its then director Mike Pompeo characterising WikiLeaks as “a non-state hostile intelligence service”.

    In fact, in 2017 the CIA launched a “secret war” against Assange, according to an investigation by Yahoo News published in September. The agency variously plotted to poison Assange and kidnap him while he was holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy. According to the report, the CIA proposed to seize the Australian and smuggle him to the US in an echo of the “extraordinary rendition” programmes the agency used in the “war on terror”.

    The kidnap operation reportedly included plans for a potential gun battle on the streets of London.

    Separately, it was reported that the CIA had also bugged the embassy while Assange was there through a Spanish firm hired by Ecuador to provide security. This was apparently done without Ecuador’s knowledge.

    Such an operation violated Ecuador’s territorial sovereignty. But worse, by listening in to Assange’s privileged conversations with his lawyers, as he prepared for the highly politicised extradition battle he knew was coming, the CIA polluted the legality of that very process.

    In fact, a strong argument can be made that the UK courts should have thrown out the extradition case on those grounds alone.

    And yet despite all this, the English High Court ruled on Friday that it was satisfied with “assurances” that Assange’s wellbeing would be protected were he extradited to the US.

    British judges may be persuaded by those assurances. Many others, including Assange, will not be.

    •  First published in Middle East Eye

    The post Assange ruling a dangerous precedent for journalists and British justice first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • China Winter Olympics: US Boycott

    President Biden, in full mood of marking “red lines” against Russia and Ukraine in a virtual meeting with Vladimir Putin, does not forget the importance of boycotting China’s Winter Olympic Games. It’s a diplomatic boycott only, so says Madame Jen Psaki, White House press secretary. Nevertheless, she and Biden are wishing the US sport-participants best of luck and they will support them throughout. So, they say. US athletes are allowed to part-take in the games. It’s the US diplomacy that is held back. It’s a hypocrisy that only Washington – and perhaps Brussels as EU and NATO headquarters – can muster. Now Australia has also joined the nefarious club.

    Do they seriously hope the rest of the world will follow suit, because they want to be “with” the US and not be perceived as “against” the Big Empire? – Perhaps some will, indeed, be copy-cats. Fear is the name of the game, be it for covid or political sanctions. Western humanity is trembling from fear. So much fear, that the thought process has literally stopped functioning according to logic, even by the tyrants themselves.

    Ms. Psaki explained the boycott as a response to “Beijing’s human rights violations”, adding what she calls “genocide and crimes against humanity”. She was, of course, referring to the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), a landlocked autonomous region of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), by surface the largest single territory of China, located in the northwest of the country, close to Central Asia.

    It is well possible that the Press Secretary doesn’t know what she is talking about, but is just repeating the current narrative. There is a set of standard accusations that are regularly being launched against China, with no substance at all. This is one of them. See “Xinjiang in My Eyes”: Debunking the Lies and Anti-China Propaganda Focusing on China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region“.  Suffice it to say that the Xinjiang region is a pivotal point for the famous Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), connecting China with Europe via Central Asia, as well as with the Indian Ocean.

    Washington sees China, and especially the BRI, as an economic threat on their perceived supremacy, therefore does everything to denigrate China, and especially the Xinjiang region, where about 12 million Uyghurs live, mostly Muslims, out of a total population of 26 million. What is not said by Washington, is that the CIA and other US secret services recruit Uyghur Muslims, train them and send them to the Middle East to fight the Jihad, mostly in Syria, but also in Iraq. If, and when, they return, they were trained to create havoc and instability in Xinjiang. The Chinese Government is re-educating them for reintegration in the Uyghur society of the Xinjiang region.

    The other area of China on which Washington and its western allies like to attack Beijing, is Taiwan, a Chinese territory. When the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, lost the civil war against Chairman Mao’s Communist Party in 1949, they fled to the island of Taiwan which they occupied ever since. However, Taiwan is part of China. In October 1971, the UN General Assembly passed a Resolution, that stopped recognizing Taiwan as China and, instead, decided the PRC would represent China, implying that Taiwan was part of the Peoples Republic of China. It looks like the US have stayed back in history, still looking at Taiwan as an independent country and their ally.

    As President Chi has mentioned on several occasions, Taiwan will be integrated into the PRC in a peaceful way. Outside interferences, like by the United States and some of their European allies, have no place in these negotiations.  It is a Chinese internal affair. Just imagine, China getting involved and taking sides in US internal affairs. Unimaginable!

    What also seems to escape most western powers — still fond of the “freedom seeking” US of A — is the Unites States abysmal human rights record. It is so unabashed and shameful.  The Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, as well as Guantanamo in Cuba, are well known as America’s torture chambers, where human rights do not exist. And these are just two out of some 100-plus US prison camps where human rights are not only trampled by military boots, but where in most cases they are openly abolished. Torture is the name of the game. Only an extreme hypocrite could accuse any other country of human rights abuse.

    Earlier this week, Beijing announced stern counter measures, in case the US will indeed implement their “diplomatic” boycott of the Chinese Olympic Winter Games.

    The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, said that China would see such a move as outright political provocation. However, he did not offer any details as to how China might respond to the “diplomatic boycott”. He also said that after the virtual summit last month between Presidents Xi and Biden, no American diplomats, nor the President, were invited to the Olympic Games. This means, without saying so, the “boycott” is a mere US public relations farce.

    Western supporters of the move hope to draw falsely negative attention to China’s human rights record. Even American athletes may be “trained” to openly accuse the Chinese human rights record, reproaching them of Uyghur tortures, although they have no clue what they are talking about, because they would simply parrot messages, without knowing what they are actually saying.

    In fact, most countries expected to toe the line given by Biden, don’t know the truth, or they do know the truth, but are keen to stick to their hypocrite master’s lies.

    So, Beijing has a number of avenues to “boycott” the US back – as in “Build Back Better”. For example, by trade sanctions. Mainland China and Taiwan are the largest producers of semi-conductors used in modern cars. If China holds back on producing and/or supplying semi-conductors, the entire western car industry comes to a halt. Supply shortages, due to covid-caused delivery-chain interruptions, are already affecting the Japanese and South Korean car industry. Currently, the Toyota car production is basically at a standstill.

    The west also depends 70% to 90% on medical equipment (70%) and medication (up to 90%) on China. With a ferocious pandemic being sold to the people in the west, a pandemic that by reducing the human immune system will create all kinds of diseases that require regular medication, shortages of medication may be problematic. A supply chain interruption may trigger not only consternation, but outright disaster.

    Is it possible that Biden and his top advisors do not understand what China’s counter-measures could mean to a US car industry that is already largely outsourced? Let alone to the health sector, plagued by a western manufactured disease that is currently “ravaging the west”, and is depending badly on Chinese made medication.

    The post China Winter Olympics: US Boycott first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Biden’s Empty Warning Over Putin’s Straw Man “Invasion”

    © Sputnik / Sergey Guneev

    As we enter the Christmas season that’s just pantomime on Pennsylvania Avenue.

    The private video call which lasted two hours on Tuesday was eagerly anticipated around the world amid mounting tensions and fears of a military confrontation over Ukraine.

    The next day headlines in Western media outlets were laden with dramatic “warnings” reportedly given by Biden to Putin, telling the Russian leader to abandon nefarious plans for a military invasion of Ukraine.

    America’s NPR reported: “In a two-hour-long call with Putin, President Biden warned that the U.S. was prepared to make Moscow pay if an invasion should occur.”

    ABC headlined: “Biden confronts Putin over Ukraine in high stakes meeting”.

    The New York Times billed the big moment thus: “Biden delivers a warning to Putin over Ukraine”. While the US establishment’s favourite think-tank, the Council on Foreign Relations, briefed its readers: “Biden warns Putin of consequences if Russia invades Ukraine”.

    So, just in case you didn’t get the message yet: Biden read the riot act to Putin about invading Ukraine, or so we are led to believe.

    The thing is though it is only an assertion by the Biden administration that Russia is planning to launch an offensive against Ukraine. That assertion has been predictably and dubiously amplified by the Western media as well as by the NATO-backed Kiev regime. The 2014 CIA-installed Neo-fascist regime has been claiming for nearly seven years that Russia is threatening an invasion and that it is standing alone to defend the rest of Europe from being overrun by Russian tanks.

    Over the past month, Moscow has repeatedly dismissed a deluge of Western media claims that Russian troops are building up near Ukraine’s border for an incursion. The U.S. and Ukrainian military intelligence can’t seem to agree on a figure for the alleged buildup. Some reports say 90,000, others say 175,000. In any case, whatever the number, the troops are on Russian soil. Where does the West want them to go? To Russia’s Far East and Vladivostok? Oh no, then Russia will be accused of plotting to invade Alaska?

    Senior U.S. officials like Secretary of State Antony Blinken even admit to their own absurd vacuity, saying, “We don’t know what Putin’s intentions really are.”

    The optics of the Biden-Putin video call say a lot too. Biden was seated in the Situation Room at the White House for the meeting. That conjures an atmosphere of crisis and showdown reminiscent of the 1962 Cuban missile confrontation between Kennedy and Khrushchev.

    For his part, Putin took the call while at his residence in Sochi on the Black Sea where he goes for relaxation.

    It was notable too that Putin was photographed seated at a table on his own to engage with the U.S. president while Biden was accompanied in the Situation Room with four aides, including Antony Blinken, who were obviously present to support or prompt the titular commander-in-chief. The TV monitors appeared to show the two presidents in a face-to-face encounter, but out of the screen view were the four aides to Biden.

    The main conversation was behind closed doors, but from the initial publicly broadcasted greetings, the atmosphere was civil, cordial and relaxed. Biden was not in the slightest reproaching his Russian counterpart, as media reports claimed.

    Following the discussions, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan told media there was a lot of give and take between the two leaders but there was “no finger-wagging”.

    Sullivan said Biden informed Putin that there would be serious economic consequences if Russia invaded Ukraine – again an invasion that Moscow has repeatedly dismissed as baseless hysteria. Sullivan indicated that the leverage could be exerted through the U.S. and European Union cancelling the Nord Stream 2 gas export pipeline from Russia.

    Sullivan also suggested that Washington would cut off Russia from the U.S.-controlled international banking system known as SWIFT which would impact Russia’s export earnings. Sullivan said another leverage point would be for the U.S. to increase military aid to Ukraine, the Baltic states and other eastern European countries. But it is unlikely that the United States would become directly involved in a confrontation with Russia.

    This all has a certain logical traction but it is divorced from reality. Russia is supposedly warned not to invade Ukraine. Putin is supposedly warned about severe economic consequences if he orders an invasion. Then there is no invasion, and it all looks as if Biden, the noble leader of the free world, bravely faced down the Russian “autocrat”.

    But hold on a moment. That only holds if we believe in the dubious claims that Russia is planning an imminent invasion of Ukraine.

    If there is no invasion that’s because there wasn’t a plan in the first place. It has nothing to do with purported warnings from Biden. It is due simply to the fact that, as Russia has maintained all along, it is not threatening anyone.

    Biden’s threats of “consequences” are therefore empty and directed at a straw man of Western propaganda invention.

    So what did take place? The White House readout of the conversation was brief and bereft of any detail. The Kremlin version of the conversation said that both sides agreed to discuss further Russia’s concerns about national security posed by the U.S.-led NATO military alliance building up on Russia’s borders.

    Sullivan claimed that Biden laid out an “alternative path” for Putin involving diplomacy and peaceful negotiation. “I will say that formal agreements or formal treaties were not on the table in the conversation today,” the national security advisor said. He added: “But the straightforward notion that the United States flanked by our European allies and partners would be prepared to talk to Russia, about the strategic issues in the European theatre — that was on the table.”

    In other words, after the American pretensions are discarded, this is the “alternative path” of diplomacy and negotiation that Russia has been consistently calling for but which the United States, NATO and their sponsored Russophobic Kiev regime have all been avoiding up to now. It wasn’t Putin that took an off-ramp. It was Biden.

    Biden’s “warning” is just theatrics to conceal a crisis that Washington has created in the first place. Moscow wasn’t “told” anything. It is Washington that needs to stop playing geopolitical mind-games and get down to earnest dialogue – if, that is, it genuinely wants to avoid confrontation.

    • First published in Sputnik International

    The post Biden’s Empty Warning Over Putin’s Straw Man “Invasion” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Governments Buy More Weapons In First Year Of COVID-19

    In 2020, when the global economy contracted over 3.1% due to the COVID-19 pandemic, global arms trade recorded an increase of 1.3%, as per latest data released by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on Monday, December 6. The growth in arms trade, both domestic and international, reveals how governments worldwide chose to maintain or increase their spending on arms despite the economic hardships caused by the pandemic. 

    According to SIPRI, arms trade by the world’s top 100 companies in the sector touched USD 531 billion in 2020, making it the sixth consecutive year of growth since 2015.

    According to Alexander Marksteiner, a researcher with SIPRI, the main reason for the growth in arms trade in spite of the global economic slump was “sustained government demand for military goods and services.”

    The post Governments Buy More Weapons In First Year Of COVID-19 appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • United States: Relief after white men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery

    Black people in the United States felt a great sense of relief when a jury of eleven white people and one Black person voted to convict three white men on November 24 in Brunswick, Georgia, writes Malik Miah.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • United States: Organisers of the 2017 attacks in Charlottesville go on trial

    The civil trial of the organisers of the racist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, where counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed and 19 others seriously injured, resulted in a partial victory, writes Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Solomon Islands: China mouthpiece blames Australia for ‘fomenting riots’

    Asia Pacific Report newsdesk

    An editorial in the Chinese English-language mouthpiece Global Times has accused Australia — and the United States — of “conniv[ing] with and even encourag[ing] the unrest” in the Solomon Islands after three days of rioting last week destroyed much of Chinatown in the capital Honiara.

    “Even though [100] Australian troops and police were sent to keep order in the Solomon Islands,” said the tabloid newspaper at the weekend.

    “What is right and what is not is obvious. Hence, aren’t [Prime Minister Scott] Morrison’s remarks of ‘not indicat[ing] any position’ actually a support for the evil doings?“

    The editorial was headlined “Australia has fomented riots in Solomon Island”.

    The Global Times is published under the umbrella of the Chinese Communist Party’s official flagship publication People’s Daily and is viewed by critics as often publishing disinformation.

    “Defending against China’s influence into the South Pacific has been an outstanding geopolitical consideration of the US and Australia, which has been welcomed and longed [for] by the Taiwan authorities, because four of the remaining 15 countries that keep ‘diplomatic ties’ with Taiwan are in the South Pacific — and the future to consolidate such ties is uncertain.”

    The editorial said:

    Rioters ‘stormed Parliament’
    “The capital city of the Solomon Islands has been under riots for days. The rioters have stormed the Parliament, set fire to a police station, and attacked Chinatown and other businesses there.

    “Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare on Friday blamed foreign interference for instigating the anti-government protests over his government’s decision to cut ‘diplomatic ties’ with the island of Taiwan and establish diplomatic ties with the Chinese mainland. Though, he didn’t specify who is among the ‘other powers’ that fomented the violence.

    “Sogavare emphasised that the choice to establish diplomatic ties with Beijing conforms to the trend of the times and international laws.

    “The Solomon Islands is a country with nearly 690,000 people in the South Pacific region. After Sogavare assumed office in 2019, his administration made a choice to set up diplomatic ties with Beijing. However, the island of Malaita [in] the country, where most of the rioters are reportedly from, has maintained its relations with the island of Taiwan.

    “The New York Times said the Solomon Islands has been in a ‘heightened political tug of war’, citing a former Australian diplomat stationed in the Solomon Islands saying that the US has been providing Malaita with direct foreign aid. Such analysis is representative of the US and Australia.

    “Defending against China’s influence into the South Pacific has been an outstanding geopolitical consideration of the US and Australia, which has been welcomed and longed by the Taiwan authorities, because four of the remaining 15 countries that keep ‘diplomatic ties’ with Taiwan are in the South Pacific — and the future to consolidate such ties is uncertain.

    “The South Pacific countries and the Chinese mainland have a strong capacity to cooperate under the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative. Over the years, many small nations have, on their own, chosen to have closer ties with Beijing.

    ‘Dollar diplomacy, coercion’
    “The measures taken to prevent these small countries from establishing diplomatic ties with China have included ‘dollar diplomacy’, coercion, and inciting unrest within these countries to topple local governments.

    “Australia has been offered a hand to maintain security in the Solomon Islands. Recently, Canberra has again deployed more than 100 police and defense force personnel to the country. Against this backdrop, it is not hard to imagine how easy it will be for an external force to wreak havoc there.

    “Australia, the US, or the Taiwan authorities haven’t admitted to being behind the ‘foreign interference’ condemned by Sogavare. Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison insisted that Australia’s ‘presence there does not indicate any position on the internal issues of the Solomon Islands’. Canberra even alleged the move was in response to a request from Sogavare.

    “Nonetheless, the Associated Press cited observers as saying that ‘Australia intervened quickly to avoid Chinese security forces moving in to restore order’. More importantly, neither Canberra nor Washington has condemned the riots in the Solomon Islands so far, despite the fact that the unrest has violated the basic spirit of democracy and the rule of law.

    “Media coverage of the riots in the US and Australia was ‘matter-of-fact’ and highlighted the rioters’ political opposition to diplomatic relations with China.

    “It is clear that Australia’s overall attitude, and that of the US, is to connive with and even encourage the unrest, even though the Australian troops and police were sent to keep order in the Solomon Islands. What is right and what is not is obvious. Hence, aren’t Morrison’s remarks of ‘not indicate any position’ actually a support for the evil doings?

    “The government of the Solomon Islands and their people know what is really going on there. It is also not hard for the outside world to know. Prime Minister Sogavare noted there were other powers fomenting the riots, shouldn’t the international community believe the words of this legitimate leader of the Solomon Islands?”

    Fires in Chinatown
    According to the Global Times, “this handout image taken and received on 25 November 2021 from ZFM Radio shows parts of the Chinatown district on fire in Honiara on Solomon Islands, as rioters torched buildings in the capital in a second day of anti-government protests.” Image: Global Times/VCG

     

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • United States: John Deere workers win

    In the United States, John Deere workers began militant strike action in the country’s mid-west in October, reports Malik Miah. They stood up against a powerful employer — and, when necessary, their own national union leadership — and won.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • United States: Exonerations reveal FBI’s leading role in Malcolm X assassination

    A federal judge exonerated Muhammad Aziz and fellow accused, Khalil Islam, for the assassination of revolutionary Black rights leader Malcolm X, reports Malik Miah.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Raids, Arrests and Death Threats: Israel’s Strategy of Silencing Human Rights Defenders 

    On October 21, Israeli Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced the issuance of a military order designating six prominent Palestinian human rights groups as ‘terrorist organizations’. Gantz claimed that they are secretly linked to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a socialist political group that Israel considers, along with most Palestinian political parties, ‘a terrorist organization.’

    The Palestinian organizations included in the Israeli order are Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights, Al-Haq, the Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children Palestine, Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) and the Union of Palestinian Women’s Committees.

    Considering the significance of these organizations in Palestine and their global networks among like-minded civil society organizations, the Israeli decision provoked a public outcry. One of the many statements of condemnation was a joint statement by rights groups, Amnesty International (AI) and Human Rights Watch (HRW), in which they called Gantz’s move an “appalling and unjust decision”, which represents “an attack by the Israeli government on the international human rights movement.”

    Strong Words, but No Actions

    AI and HRW, which have documented Israeli human rights violations of Palestinians for many years, fully understand that the ‘terrorist’ designation is consistent with a long trajectory of such unlawful moves:

    “For decades, Israeli authorities have systematically sought to muzzle human rights monitoring and punish those who criticize its repressive rule over Palestinians. While staff members of our organizations have faced deportation and travel bans, Palestinian human rights defenders have always borne the brunt of the repression. This decision is an alarming escalation that threatens to shut down the work of Palestine’s most prominent civil society organizations.”

    Equally important in the world’s leading rights groups’ statement is that it did not fail to highlight that the “decades-long failure of the international community to challenge grave Israeli human rights abuses and impose meaningful consequences for them has emboldened Israeli authorities to act in this brazen manner.”

    True to form, the international community did react to Gantz’s decision, albeit it was the kind of ineffectual reaction, which persisted in the realm of rhetoric that is rarely followed by substantive action.

    A joint statement by UN experts called the Israeli decision “a frontal attack on the Palestinian human rights movement, and on human rights everywhere”.

    Michelle Bachelet, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, criticized the “arbitrary” decision by Israel and warned of the “far-reaching consequences as a result,” in terms of work, funding and support for the targeted organizations.

    Many governments around the world also condemned the Israeli move and echoed the sentiment conveyed by UN experts. Even the US expressed its ‘concern’, though, using the same typically cautious and non-committal language.

    US State Department spokesman, Ned Price, told reporters on October 23, in Washington, that his country “believe(s) respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and a strong civil society are critically important to responsible and responsive governance.” Instead of an outright condemnation, however, Price said that the US will “be engaging our Israeli partners for more information regarding the basis for these designations.”

    However, like other governments, and certainly unlike AI and HRW, Price made no link between the Israeli decision of October 21 and numerous other past practices targeting human rights and civil society groups in Palestine and, more recently, in Israel as well. Also worth noting is that the supposed link between such organizations and the socialist PFLP is not new.

    The following are a few examples of how Israel has attempted to silence some of these organizations, which, eventually were declared to be ‘terrorist.’

    Raids, Arrests and Death Threats

    Addameer – In December 2012, the Israeli army raided the headquarters of Addamer in Ramallah, confiscating laptops and a video camera. The offices of the Union of Palestinian Women Committees were also raided by Israeli occupation forces on the same day. The organization is one of the six now designated by Israel as ‘terrorist.’

    In September 2019, Addameer’s offices were raided, once again. The Israeli military raid at the time, however, did not generate as much attention or outrage, despite the accompanying violence, let alone the blatant violation of human rights. Then, Al-Haq – also one of the other six effectively banned Palestinian groups – issued a statement warning that “the private property of human rights organizations in occupied territory is especially protected under Article 46 of the Hague Regulations (1907).”

    Expectedly, such legal constraints mattered little to Israel.

    Al-Haq – Al-Haq’s staff have faced many restrictions throughout the years. Shawan Jabarin, the General Director of Al-Haq, has been banned from travel on various occasions, starting in 2006.

    In March 2009, Jabarin was prevented by Israel from traveling to the Netherlands to receive an award on behalf of his organization. Again, in November 2011, this time, Jabarin was now allowed to travel to Denmark.

    The Israeli obstacles began taking even more sinister turns when, in March 2016, Jabarin began receiving death threats over the phone. These anonymous calls began arriving “in the context of increasing harassment of Al-Haq and its members, amid their recent work at the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking justice for human rights violations being committed in the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” the Front Line Defenders website reported.

    Defense for Children International-Palestine – In July, and again August 2021, Israeli forces raided Defense for Children International – Palestine (DCIP) offices in Al-Bireh, in the occupied West Bank. They seized computers, hard drives and other material, alleging a link between the organization and the PFLP.

    This allegation had already been advanced in 2018, when UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI) persuaded Citibank and the Arab Bank PLC to stop providing banking services to DCIP, providing what they defined as “evidence of the close ties” to the PFLP.

    While it is true that the recent Israeli measures against Palestinian NGOs are a continuation of an old policy, there are fundamental differences between the growing perception of Israel, now, as an apartheid state and the misconstrued perception of the past, namely Israel as an oasis of democracy.

    Even international entities and groups that are yet to brand Israel an apartheid state are becoming familiar with the Israeli government’s undemocratic nature.

    A ‘Tectonic Shift’

    In December 2019, and after years of haggling, the ICC resolved that “there is a reasonable basis to proceed with an investigation into the situation in Palestine, pursuant to Article 53(1) of the (Rome) Statute.” Despite intense Israeli and western pressure, the last hurdle in the way of the investigation was removed last February, as the ICC has finally approved the Prosecutor’s request to open legal proceedings regarding war crimes in the occupied Palestinian territories, including Gaza.

    This legal milestone was cemented by major declarations, one made by Israel’s own rights group, B’tselem, in January, and another by HRW in April, both slamming Israeli policies in Palestine – not just the occupied territories – as ‘apartheid’.

    This critical change in the international legal position regarding Israel’s new, unflattering status, was boosted by Israel’s own violent actions in East Jerusalem, Gaza and throughout Palestine in May. Unlike previous wars, the May events have shifted sympathy mostly towards Palestinians, who are fighting for their freedom, homes and other basic human rights.

    The change was also notable within the US government itself, which is unprecedented by any account. An increasing number of US lawmakers are now openly critical of the State of Israel, due to a radical change in the US public opinion and, again, unprecedently, they are not paying a heavy price for it as was often the case in the past due to the great influence of the Zionist lobby in Washington.

    “The shift is dramatic; it’s tectonic,” the BBC, on May 21, quoted US pollster, John Zogby, as saying. “In particular, younger generations are considerably more sympathetic to the Palestinians – and that age gap has been on full display with the Democratic Party,” the BBC noted.

    Israel’s losses are not just sentimental or political, but economic as well. Last July, the international ice cream giant Ben & Jerry’s decided to stop selling its products in illegal Jewish settlements while pinpointedly condemning Israeli occupation, a move that was described by Amnesty as “legitimate and necessary”. A few months later, the sports clothing manufacturer, Nike, followed suit, announcing that it will end the sale of its products in Israeli stores starting May 2022, although it did not justify its decision based on political reasoning.

    While Israel continues to lash out at its critics, it no longer seems to behave according to a centralized strategy.

    Lacking a strong leadership after the dethroning of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the formation of a diverse ‘unity government’, the new Israeli government does not seem capable of holding back international criticism of its conduct in occupied Palestine. The notion that everything that Israel does is justifiable as a form of ‘self-defense’ is simply no longer a strong selling point. The May war is the perfect example of this assertion.

    In the case of the banned NGOs, for example, aside from sending a representative from the Israeli intelligence agency, Shin Bet, and another from the Israeli Foreign Ministry to Washington on October 25 with “relevant intelligence” to justify its decision, Tel Aviv continued to carry out the same policies that further exposes its apartheid in the eyes of the international community.

    Indeed, on October 27, Israel announced the construction of thousands of new housing units in illegal Jewish settlements, in its first such move during the presidency of Joe Biden.

    A perfect illustration of the frantic nature of the Israeli response came on October 29, when the Israeli envoy to the United Nations, Gilad Erdan, during his speech at the General Assembly, tore into pieces a report issued by the UN Human Rights Council illustrating Israeli ongoing violations of international law.

    “The Human Rights Council attacked and condemned Israel in 95 resolutions compared to 142 resolutions against the rest of the world,” Erdan said. “This distorted and one-sided report’s place is in the dustbin of anti-Semitism,” he ranted.

    Branding Israeli Apartheid 

    We may be at the cusp of a fundamental change in terms of Israel’s relationship with the international community. While Tel Aviv continues to heavily invest in its apartheid infrastructure, the international community is slowly, but clearly, becoming aware that Israel’s apartheid status is a permanent one. The successive statements by B’Tselem, HRW, the joint HRW-Amnesty statement condemning the de facto outlawing of the Palestinian NGOs and, again, the ICC investigation are all indicative of this growing awareness.

    The question remains – will Israel be able to use its power, influence and leverage in Western societies to force the world to accept and co-exist with a full-fledged apartheid regime in Palestine? And if yes, then, for how long?

    The South African apartheid example showed that, despite decades of apartheid and initial acceptance, if not support, by western societies of legalized racial separation in South Africa, the pendulum eventually turned. Even before the formal end of apartheid in that country in 1994, it was becoming clear that the days of the racist regime of Pretoria were numbered. That realization was possible because of the growing international awareness, especially at grassroot, civil society level, of the evil of apartheid.

    A similar scenario seems to be evolving in the case of Israeli apartheid in Palestine as well. A critical mass of support for Palestinian rights is being constructed around the world, thanks to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and hundreds of pro-Palestine civil society groups all around the globe.

    For years, Israel seemed keen on countering the influence of Palestine’s solidarity around the world using a centralized strategy. Large sums of money were dedicated, or pledged, towards that end, and a partly government-controlled company was even established, in 2017, to guide the Israeli global campaign. Much of this has amounted to very little, however, as BDS continues to grow, and the conversation on Palestine and Israel is gradually changing from that of a political ‘conflict’ into recognition of Israeli racism, apartheid and utter disregard of international law.

    Of course, it will take more time, more decided effort and, certainly, more sacrifices on the part of Palestinians and their supporters to expose Israeli apartheid to the rest of the world. Now that Israel seems to have accepted that there is little it can do to reverse this brand, it is accelerating its colonial efforts, while hunkering down for a long fight ahead.

    The onus is now on the international community to force Israel into dismantling its apartheid regime. Though it is ultimately the people who liberate themselves, international solidarity is essential to the process of national liberation. This was the case in South Africa and will surely be the case in Palestine, as well.

    The post Raids, Arrests and Death Threats: Israel’s Strategy of Silencing Human Rights Defenders  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Past and Present

    Recently there has been much discussion about the teaching of US history. In the past and perhaps slightly less so in the present, the full story of our history and of the founding fathers hasn’t been presented. The founders’ inspirational and impressive accomplishments have been highlighted. The fact that many of the founders were slave owners was downplayed or ignored. In addition, the truly horrific evils of slavery and the mistreatment of Blacks under Jim Crow laws received very limited coverage. Moreover, the genocide of Native Americans received little mention. This biased presentation of US history set the stage for white supremacy ideas to grow and thrive and for the continued shameful abuse of minorities.

    Of late, criticism of many founders over their being slave owners has attracted widespread attention and created controversy. Some believe that pointing out this fact is unfair to the founders. Many who believe this way think the founders are being judged by standards of today instead of those of their time.

    I believe that the founding fathers, particularly Jefferson with his words in the Declaration of Independence, inspired people the world over and across time. Despite the founders establishing a new country where some people had a voice in government, they were human beings with their own failings. These failings, including continuing the practice of slavery and the slave trade, don’t mean that their accomplishments didn’t occur. However, the results of their failings must also be recognized and corrected.

    I dispute that the founders are being held to the standards of today instead of those of their time. I believe that this claim is an insult to the founders’ intelligence. For example, this claim implies the founders and their society didn’t know that slavery was wrong. I think that the support for slavery was due to political expediency of keeping the colonies/states together and to putting profit over human rights. Slavery allowed the economy to grow and for the country to thrive economically while condemning about 18% of the population and their offspring to a brutal form of slavery and the killing of the nation’s soul.

    The compromises necessary for the Constitution to be approved show that many opposed slavery. In addition, the opposition of many well known individuals during the 18th century is on record. This site is the source for most of the following material.

    One of the most ardent opponents of slavery was Abigail Adams, supported by her husband, the second US President, John Adams. For example, in a 1774 letter to John she wrote: “I wish most sincerely there was not a slave in this province. It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme to me — to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.” She considered slavery a sin and an evil. Although her husband privately agreed, he was more cautious politically as he feared the results of complete abolition would lead to a division of the new country. Sam Adams was another Adams who was also a staunch opponent of slavery.

    Others who were against slavery included Benjamin Franklin who became a public abolitionist in 1787 and President of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery. John Jay, the first Chief Justice, and Marquis de Lafayette were also committed opponents of the brutal US form of slavery.

    John Laurens, a close friend of George Washington, Marquis de Lafayette and Alexander Hamilton, also was an ardent public advocate for ending slavery. In a letter to a friend in 1776 he wrote: “I think we Americans at least in the Southern Colonies, cannot contend with a good Grace, for Liberty, until we shall have enfranchised our Slaves. How can we whose Jealousy has been alarm’d more at the Name of Oppression sometimes than at the Reality, reconcile to our spirited Assertions of the Rights of Mankind, the galling abject Slavery of our negroes…If as some pretend, but I am persuaded more thro’ intrested, than from Conviction, the Culture of the Ground with us cannot be carried on without African Slaves, Let us fly it as a hateful Country, and say ubi Libertas ibi Patria [where Liberty is there is my Country].”

    An outstanding article, “African Slavery in America”, was published in March, 1775 in the Pennsylvania Journal by a contributor signed Justice and Humanity. The article begins: “TO Americans: That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of justice and humanity, and even good policy…”

    This whitewashing of US history has downplayed the genocide of Native Americans and the brutal US form of slavery. As a result, it has created a badly misinformed population. Many of our population don’t understand the terrible crimes against humanity the US has committed that are part and parcel of our history. Many also don’t realize how much we owe to those we have horrifically mistreated. If we don’t begin teaching our real history, the idea of white supremacy will continue to strengthen and that does not bode well for our future.

    The post US Past and Present first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The High Stakes of the U.S.-Russia Confrontation Over Ukraine

    The border between post-coup Ukraine and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, based on the Minsk Agreements. Map credit: Wikipedia

    The People’s Republics of  Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), which declared independence in response to the U.S.-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, have once again become flashpoints in the intensifying Cold War between the United States and Russia. The U.S. and NATO appear to be fully supporting a new government offensive against these Russian-backed enclaves, which could quickly escalate into a full-blown international military conflict.

    The last time this area became an international tinderbox was in April, when the anti-Russian government of Ukraine threatened an offensive against Donetsk and Luhansk, and Russia assembled thousands of troops along Ukraine’s eastern border.

    On that occasion, Ukraine and NATO blinked and called off the offensive. This time around, Russia has again assembled an estimated 90,000 troops near its border with Ukraine. Will Russia once more deter an escalation of the war, or are Ukraine, the United States and NATO seriously preparing to press ahead at the risk of war with Russia?

    Since April, the U.S. and its allies have been stepping up their military support for Ukraine. After a March announcement of $125 million in military aid, including armed coastal patrol boats and radar equipment, the U.S. then gave Ukraine another $150 million package in June. This included radar, communications and electronic warfare equipment for the Ukrainian Air Force, bringing total military aid to Ukraine since the U.S.-backed coup in 2014 to $2.5 billion. This latest package appears to include deploying U.S. training personnel to Ukrainian air bases.

    Turkey is supplying Ukraine with the same drones it provided to Azerbaijan for its war with Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020. That war killed at least 6,000 people and has recently flared up again, one year after a Russian-brokered ceasefire. Turkish drones wreaked havoc on Armenian troops and civilians alike in Nagorno-Karabakh, and their use in Ukraine would be a horrific escalation of violence against the people of Donetsk and Luhansk.

    The ratcheting up of U.S. and NATO support for government forces in Ukraine’s civil war is having ever-worsening diplomatic consequences. At the beginning of October, NATO expelled eight Russian liaison officers from NATO Headquarters in Brussels, accusing them of spying. Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, the manager of the 2014 coup in Ukraine, was dispatched to Moscow in October, ostensibly to calm tensions. Nuland failed so spectacularly that, only a week later, Russia ended 30 years of engagement with NATO, and ordered NATO’s office in Moscow closed.

    Nuland reportedly tried to reassure Moscow that the United States and NATO were still committed to the 2014 and 2015 Minsk Accords on Ukraine, which include a ban on offensive military operations and a promise of greater autonomy for Donetsk and Luhansk within Ukraine. But her assurances were belied by Defense Secretary Austin when he met with Ukraine’s President Zelensky in Kiev on October 18, reiterating U.S. support for Ukraine’s future membership in NATO, promising further military support and blaming Russia for “perpetuating the war in Eastern Ukraine.”

    More extraordinary, but hopefully more successful, was CIA Director William Burns’s visit to Moscow on November 2nd and 3rd, during which he met with senior Russian military and intelligence officials and spoke by phone with President Putin.

    A mission like this is not usually part of the CIA Director’s duties. But after Biden promised a new era of American diplomacy, his foreign policy team is now widely acknowledged to have instead brought U.S. relations with Russia and China to all-time lows.

    Judging from the March meeting of Secretary of State Blinken and National Security Advisor Sullivan with Chinese officials in Alaska, Biden’s meeting with Putin in Vienna in June, and Under Secretary Nuland’s recent visit to Moscow, U.S. officials have reduced their encounters with Russian and Chinese officials to mutual recriminations designed for domestic consumption instead of seriously trying to resolve policy differences. In Nuland’s case, she also misled the Russians about the U.S. commitment, or lack of it, to the Minsk Accords. So who could Biden send to Moscow for a serious diplomatic dialogue with the Russians about Ukraine?

    In 2002, as Under Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, William Burns wrote a prescient but unheeded 10-page memo to Secretary of State Powell, warning him of the many ways that a U.S. invasion of Iraq could “unravel” and create a “perfect storm” for American interests. Burns is a career diplomat and a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, and may be the only member of this administration with the diplomatic skills and experience to actually listen to the Russians and engage seriously with them.

    The Russians presumably told Burns what they have said in public: that U.S. policy is in danger of crossing “red lines” that would trigger decisive and irrevocable Russian responses. Russia has long warned that one red line would be NATO membership for Ukraine and/or Georgia.

    But there are clearly other red lines in the creeping U.S. and NATO military presence in and around Ukraine and in the increasing U.S. military support for the Ukrainian government forces assaulting Donetsk and Luhansk. Putin has warned against the build-up of NATO’s military infrastructure in Ukraine and has accused both Ukraine and NATO of destabilizing actions, including in the Black Sea.

    With Russian troops amassed at Ukraine’s border for a second time this year, a new Ukrainian offensive that threatens the existence of the DPR and LPR would surely cross another red line, while increasing U.S. and NATO military support for Ukraine may be dangerously close to crossing yet another one.

    So did Burns come back from Moscow with a clearer picture of exactly what Russia’s red lines are? We had better hope so. Even U.S. military websites acknowledge that U.S. policy in Ukraine is “backfiring.”

    Russia expert Andrew Weiss, who worked under William Burns at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, acknowledged to Michael Crowley of The New York Times that Russia has “escalation dominance” in Ukraine and that, if push comes to shove, Ukraine is simply more important to Russia than to the United States. It therefore makes no sense for the United States to risk triggering World War III over Ukraine, unless it actually wants to trigger World War III.

    During the Cold War, both sides developed clear understandings of each other’s “red lines.” Along with a large helping of dumb luck, we can thank those understandings for our continued existence. What makes today’s world even more dangerous than the world of the 1950s or the 1980s is that recent U.S. leaders have cavalierly jettisoned the bilateral nuclear treaties and vital diplomatic relationships that their grandparents forged to stop the Cold War from turning into a hot one.

    Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, with the help of Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and others, conducted negotiations that spanned two administrations, between 1958 and 1963, to achieve a partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty that was the first of a series of bilateral arms control treaties. By contrast, all that Trump, Biden and Under Secretary Victoria Nuland seem to have in common is a startling lack of imagination that blinds them to any possible future beyond a zero-sum, non-negotiable, and yet still unattainable “U.S. Uber Alles” global hegemony.

    But Americans should beware of romanticizing the “old” Cold War as a time of peace, simply because we somehow managed to dodge a world-ending nuclear holocaust. U.S. Korean and Vietnam War veterans know better, as do the people in countries across the global South that became bloody battlefields in the ideological struggle between the United States and the U.S.S.R.

    Three decades after declaring victory in the Cold War, and after the self-inflicted chaos of the U.S. “Global War on Terror,” U.S. military planners have settled on a new Cold War as the most persuasive pretext to perpetuate their trillion dollar war machine and their unattainable ambition to dominate the entire planet. Instead of asking the U.S. military to adapt to more new challenges it is clearly not up for, U.S. leaders decided to revert to their old conflict with Russia and China to justify the existence and ridiculous expense of their ineffective but profitable war machine.

    But the very nature of a Cold War is that it involves the threat and use of force, overt and covert, to contest the political allegiances and economic structures of countries across the world. In our relief at the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, which both Trump and Biden have used to symbolize the “end of endless war,” we should have no illusions that either of them is offering us a new age of peace.

    Quite the contrary. What we are watching in Ukraine, Syria, Taiwan and the South China Sea are the opening salvos of an age of more ideological wars that may well be just as futile, deadly and self-defeating as the “war on terror,” and much more dangerous to the United States.

    A war with Russia or China would risk escalating into World War III. As Andrew Weiss told the Times on Ukraine, Russia and China would have conventional “escalation dominance,” as well as simply more at stake in wars on their own borders than the United States does.

    So what would the United States do if it were losing a major war with Russia or China? U.S. nuclear weapons policy has always kept a “first strike” option open in case of precisely this scenario.

    The current U.S. $1.7 trillion plan for a whole range of new nuclear weapons therefore seems to be a response to the reality that the United States cannot expect to defeat Russia and China in conventional wars on their own borders.

    But the paradox of nuclear weapons is that the most powerful weapons ever created have no practical value as actual weapons of war, since there can be no winner in a war that kills everybody. Any use of nuclear weapons would quickly trigger a massive use of them by one side or the other, and the war would soon be over for all of us. The only winners would be a few species of radiation-resistant insects and other very small creatures.

    Neither Obama, Trump nor Biden has dared to present their reasons for risking World War III over Ukraine or Taiwan to the American public, because there is no good reason. Risking a nuclear holocaust to appease the military-industrial complex is as insane as destroying the climate and the natural world to appease the fossil fuel industry.

    So we had better hope that CIA DIrector Burns not only came back from Moscow with a clear picture of Russia’s “red lines,” but that President Biden and his colleagues understand what Burns told them and what is at stake in Ukraine. They must step back from the brink of a U.S.-Russia war, and then from the larger Cold War with China and Russia that they have so blindly and foolishly stumbled into.

     

    The post The High Stakes of the U.S.-Russia Confrontation Over Ukraine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Citing Attempt to Overturn 2020 Election, Org Calls US a “Backsliding Democracy”

    A recent report has listed the United States as a “backsliding” democracy, noting a “visible deterioration to democratic ideals that began back in 2019.”

    The assessment was made by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA). This is the first time the U.S. has been labeled a “backsliding” democracy since the organization’s founding in 1995.

    Although a number of factors led to IDEA placing the U.S. in that classification, the report notes that a “historic turning point came in 2020-21” after former President Donald Trump refused to accept his election loss to now-President Joe Biden.

    “The visible deterioration of democracy in the United States, as seen in the increasing tendency to contest credible election results, the efforts to suppress participation (in elections), and the runaway polarisation … is one of the most concerning developments,” the report added.

    The report also referenced government crackdowns on uprisings in response to the police killing of George Floyd, citing a “decline in the quality of freedom of association and assembly during the summer of protests in 2020.”

    The United States is not a member state of the Stockholm-based organization.

    Overall, IDEA identified just 98 democracies around the world, the lowest number the group has counted in several years. Forty-seven governments were authoritarian regimes, while 20 governments were hybrids of the two categories.

    The organization said that the pandemic played a role in eroding democracy around the world.

    “Many democratic governments are increasingly adopting authoritarian tactics, accentuated by the Covid-19 pandemic, while autocratic regimes are consolidating their power,” the group said.

    “The number of backsliding democracies has doubled in the past decade, now accounting for a quarter of the world’s population,” IDEA added. “This includes established democracies such as the United States, but also EU Member States such as Hungary, Poland and Slovenia. More than two-thirds of the world’s population now live in backsliding democracies or autocratic regimes.”

    The organization also noted that the number of countries moving in an authoritarian direction in 2020 outnumbered those going in a democratic direction.

    Some Biden administration officials have also recognized that democracy around the world has taken backward steps in recent years. Just last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggested that there has been a “democratic recession,” candidly admitting to a group of human rights activists in Nairobi, Kenya, that the U.S. “is hardly immune from this challenge.”

    “We’ve seen how fragile our own democracy can be,” Blinken said, referencing attempts to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • United States: Rittenhouse verdict gives vigilantes green light to kill

    Twelve jurors found teenage vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse not guilty for the deaths of Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber and for wounding Gaige Grosskreutz at a Black Lives Matter protest last year, reports Malik Miah.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Organising to defeat union busting

    Alex Salmon reviews an inspiring memoir of the fight against union busting inside a North Carolina carpet mill.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Digging for Peace:  Resisting Nuclear Weapons

    On Wednesday, October 20, I joined “Vrede Scheppen,” “Create Peace,” about 25 peace activists from the Netherlands, Germany and Austria at the airbase at Volkel, Netherlands, making a plea for an end to nuclear weapons. This base is home to two Dutch F16 fighter wings and the United States Air Force 703rd Munitions Support Squadron. In violation of international and Dutch law and part of a “sharing agreement,” the U.S. Air Force maintains 15-20 B61 nuclear bombs there and in violation of the same laws, the Dutch military stands ready for the order to deliver those bombs.

    Besides our small multinational protest, on that same day the Dutch and U.S. militaries at Volkel were participating in another international collaboration, this one for a different purpose than ours, the annual NATO exercise “Steadfast Noon,” literally a rehearsal for the extinction of humanity.

    As we gathered at a wayside near the base with F16 fighters roaring over us, a few of the local police watched from a distance. We greeted old and new friends, sang, prayed, shared food and distributed pink shovels and conspired to dig our way into the base, onto the runway and disrupt the practice. Hardly a clandestine plot, this “digging for peace” was organized openly and local authorities were informed. Our purpose was get into the base, “to advocate that the old nuclear bombs be removed and the CO2 emissions of the armed forces be counted in the climate targets and to protest against the arrival of new nuclear bombs,” but our expectation was to be stopped while trying.

    As our shovels pierced the sod along the fence that was the first line of defense for some of the most deadly weapons on earth, we looked over our shoulders expecting any moment to have our good work interrupted by a warning, at least, if not by arrest. To our surprise, the police only passively looked on as we dug. Our apprehension turned to elation as it became clear that no one was going to stop us. We began to dig in earnest.

    On the inside of the fence more police gathered along with a squad of soldiers but except for a carefully restrained dog snarling and pulling on a leash, none of them seemed upset by the scene they were witnessing. Our hole soon became a tunnel and it was not until eight of us, one at a time, crawled through under the fence and climbed up the other side that we were addressed by the authorities. A soldier spoke to me in Dutch and then in English, asking “do you understand that you are under arrest?”

    Days before, home on our farm in Iowa, I had dug up our crop of sweet potatoes, enough to feed us through the winter and it was with similar satisfaction that I pulled myself out of the hole I had helped dig and approached the runway, so close to the bombs and the planes that could bring death to millions. At this time and place, nuclear destruction was not an abstraction, nor was our resistance to it. Coming up from that hole felt like coming up out of the grave.

    “The Royal Netherlands Military Constabulary arrested eight people Wednesday afternoon when they entered unauthorized military grounds,” it was reported in the local news. “We already suspected that a number of people would try to get on the premises. They made a hole under the fence, and once at the airport we stopped them. They didn’t resist. It all went off peacefully,” said a police spokesperson.

    The prosecutors interrogating us later seemed incredulous as we were that not one of the police or military ever warned that we might be trespassing or tried to stop us in the commission of what they interpreted as our crime. I was the only foreigner arrested along with seven others, ranging in age from their 20s to their 80s. Saved for last, I tried to redirect the questions asked by my interrogators about my previous involvement in such protest in other countries to the real crime, the B61 nuclear warheads that my government is hiding in plain sight in Volkel. I refused to answer questions about the several visas to Afghanistan in my passport, not fearful for myself, but recognizing at that moment the enormity of my privilege as a white man carrying a U.S. passport. After being shuttled for five hours or so between the base and the local police station, we were all released with a warning that criminal charges are pending.

    After many such protests in many places, I never experienced so relaxed a response from the authorities as we were met with at Volkel. No one in uniform expressed anger or even mild impatience with us and our antics. At bases that house nuclear weapons in the Unites States, signs on the fences carry warnings of lethal force. Even touching such a fence can trigger an armed response. Break-ins like ours on October 20 when they happen in the U.S. almost always merit prosecution and sometimes years in prison. On several occasions, I have spent up to six months in U.S. prisons for even attempting to enter a military base through its public main gate with a petition.

    Whether the level of security at a facility with nuclear weapons is as casual as it is at Volkel or the very highest, as at the fortress-like Y-12 facility at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where in 2012, three Christian pacifists gained access to the world’s largest depot of plutonium, such actions prove that the concept of nuclear security is a myth. Far from keeping a nation secure, the weapons themselves need more protection than any nation can give them. There is no safety in nuclear weapons.

    The context of our protest, “Steadfast Noon,” is explained in classical double-speak in a brief NATO press release on October 18: “The exercise is a routine, recurring training activity and it is not linked to any current world events,” but at the same time it cites the Allied Heads of State and Government, who at the NATO Summit in June, declared that “given the deteriorating security environment in Europe, a credible and united nuclear Alliance is essential.”

    Along with the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, and Germany also have bases housing U.S. nuclear weapons under similar sharing agreements. These nuclear sharings are not agreements between the various civilian governments, but between the U.S. military and the militaries of those countries. Officially, these agreements are secrets kept even from the parliaments of the sharing states. These secrets are poorly kept, but the effect is that these five nations have nuclear bombs without the oversight or consent of their elected governments or their people. By foisting weapons of mass destructions on nations that don’t want them, the United States undermines the democracies of its own purported allies, just as its nuclear posture undermines democracy at home. Far from protecting the host countries from aggression, “given the deteriorating security environment in Europe,” the presence of U.S. nuclear weapons makes those bases potential targets for preemptive first strikes.

    Along with the U.S., the five countries “sharing” U.S. nuclear bombs are signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In addition to provisions that call for keeping nuclear weapons technology from spreading to other nations that all six governments violate, the United States also ignores Article VI of the treaty, which requires “all Parties undertake to pursue good-faith negotiations on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race, to nuclear disarmament, and to general and complete disarmament.”

    Far from making good faith measures for general and complete disarmament, the United States is pursuing a trillion dollar program of modernizing and “life extension” of its ageing nuclear arsenal. As a part of this program, the B61 free-fall bombs currently at Volkel and the other nuclear sharing bases in Europe are scheduled over the next months to be replaced with a new model, the B61-12, with steerable tail fins intended to make them much more precise and deployable. The new bombs also have a facility with which the explosive force can be set from 1 to 50 kilotons, more than three times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

    More “deployable” is another way of saying more likely to be used, and with these new, more flexible weapons on hand, U.S. war planners are thinking up more ways to use them. In a June, 2019, report by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, “Nuclear Operations,” it is suggested that “using nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability…Specifically, the use of a nuclear weapon will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and create conditions that affect how commanders will prevail in conflict.” If the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the knowledge that the devastation wrought by a nuclear exchange would leave no winner, would be total and horrible beyond imagination is what helped prevent a nuclear war over the last decades, then the growing delusion among U.S. war planners that a nuclear war can be won puts the world at unprecedented peril.

    NATO boasts of “Steadfast Noon,” betraying the arrogant conviction of the Allied Heads of State and Government that despite a “deteriorating security environment,” through annual displays of brute force and profligate waste of fossil fuel, the darkness can be held at bay forever and the exploiters of the earth and its people will bask in the everlasting light of noon. The scholars at The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists who have kept a “Doomsday Clock” since 1947, propose instead that the planet is actually closer to midnight, the hypothetical global catastrophe. The Bulletin’s Clock is now at 100 seconds before midnight and humanity is closer to its destruction than ever before, because “the dangerous rivalry and hostility among the superpowers increases the likelihood of nuclear blunder… Climate change just compounds the crisis.”

    It was a pleasure and honor to dig with my European friends at Volkel in October, as it was to be at Buechel, the German nuclear sharing base in July. My first trip overseas was in 1983, joining with millions of Europeans in the streets protesting the deployment of Pershing II nuclear missiles, starting an insufficient but dramatic reduction of nuclear weapons that is tragically being reversed today. The new B61-12 bombs slated for Volkel and Buechel, like the B61s and Pershings, before them, are made and paid for in the United States and as U.S. citizens, we are responsible to be in solidarity with those in Europe who are resisting them.

    I returned home to Iowa to find a letter waiting for me from the Kansas City Municipal Court, ordering me to appear on February 18th to answer to a charge of trespass last May at the National Security Campus there, where the nonnuclear parts of the new improved B61-12 bombs and the rest of the U.S. nuclear arsenal are produced. My conviction for cutting a fence at Buechel in 2019 is under appeal in a German court. I wait expectantly for a royal invitation to offer my defense to similar charges in the courts of the Netherlands.

    Volkel, Netherlands, (Photo by BNNVARA)

    The author, left, doing research for this article. (Photo by Susan van der Hijden)

    “At this time and place, nuclear destruction was not an abstraction, nor was our resistance to it”.  (Photo by Susan van der Hijden)

    The post Digging for Peace:  Resisting Nuclear Weapons first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians

    An “honest mistake” is buying your partner the wrong perfume or copying someone into an email chain by accident. It is not firing a drone missile at a car, killing 10 civilians – and doing so when a small child was clearly visible moments earlier.

    And yet, a supposedly “independent” Pentagon inquiry this month claimed just such a good-faith mistake after US commanders authorised a drone strike in late August that killed an Afghan family, including seven children. A US air force general concluded that there was no negligence or misconduct, and that no disciplinary action should be taken.

    At the weekend, the Pentagon exonerated itself again. It called a 2019 air strike on Baghuz in Syria that killed dozens of women and children “justified”. It did so even after an investigation by the New York Times showed that the group of civilians who were bombed had already been identified as fleeing fighting between US-backed militias and the Islamic State group.

    A US military lawyer, Dean Korsak, flagged the incident at the time as a potential war crime but the Pentagon never carried out an investigation. It came to public attention only because Korsak sent details to a Senate oversight committee.

    In announcing the conclusions of its Afghanistan inquiry, the Pentagon made clear what its true priorities are in the wake of its hurried, Saigon-style exit from Afghanistan following two decades of failed occupation. It cares about image management, not accountability.

    Contrast its refusal to take action against the drone operators and commanders who fired on a civilian vehicle with the Pentagon’s immediate crackdown on one of its soldiers who criticised the handling of the withdrawal. Veteran marine Stuart Scheller was court-martialled last month after he used social media to publicly berate his bosses.

    Which of the two – Scheller’s comment or the impunity of those who killed an innocent family – is likely to do more to discredit the role of the US military, in Afghanistan or in other theatres around the globe in which it operates?

    Colonial narrative

    The Pentagon is far from alone in expecting to be exempted from scrutiny for its war crimes.

    The “honest mistake” is a continuing colonial narrative western nations tell themselves, and the rest of us, when they kill civilians. When western troops invade and occupy other people’s lands – and maybe help themselves to some of the resources they find along the way – it is done in the name of bringing security or spreading democracy. We are always the Good Guys, they are the Evil Ones. We make mistakes, they commit crimes.

    This self-righteousness is the source of western indignation at any suggestion that the International Criminal Court at The Hague should investigate, let alone prosecute, US, European and Israeli commanders or politicians for carrying out or overseeing war crimes.

    It is only African leaders or enemies of Nato who need to be dragged before tribunals and made to pay a price. But nothing in the latest Pentagon inquiry confirms the narrative of an “honest mistake”, despite indulgent coverage in western media referring to the drone strike as “botched”.

    Even the establishment of the inquiry was not honest. How is it “independent” for a Pentagon general to investigate an incident involving US troops?

    The drone operators who killed the family of Zemerai Ahmadi, an employee of a US aid organisation, were authorised to do so because his white Toyota Corolla was mistaken for a similar vehicle reported as belonging to the local franchise of Islamic State. But that make is one of the most common vehicles in Afghanistan.

    The head of the aid organisation where he worked told reporters pointedly: “I do not understand how the most powerful military in the world could follow [Mr Ahmadi], an aid worker, in a commonly used car for eight hours, and not figure out who he was, and why he was at a US aid organisation’s headquarters.”

    The decision was, at best, recklessly indifferent as to whether Ahmadi was a genuine target and whether children would die as a result. But more likely, when it attacked Ahmadi’s vehicle, the entire US military system was in the grip of a blinding thirst for revenge. Three days earlier, 13 American soldiers and 169 Afghan civilians had been killed when a bomb exploded close to Kabul airport, as Afghans massed there in the hope of gaining a place on one of the last evacuation flights.

    That airport explosion was the final military humiliation – this one inflicted by Islamic State – after the Taliban effectively chased American troops out of Afghanistan. Revenge – even when it is dressed up as restoring “deterrence” or “military honour” – is not an “honest mistake”.

    Pattern of behaviour

    But there is an even deeper reason to be sceptical of the Pentagon inquiry. There is no “honest mistake” defence when the same mistakes keep happening. “Honest mistakes” can’t be a pattern of behaviour.

    And yet the long years of US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq, and meddling in Syria, have been pockmarked with air strikes that obliterated families or slammed into wedding parties. That information rarely makes headlines, eclipsed by the Pentagon’s earlier, faulty claims of the successful “neutralisation of terrorists”.

    But just such “mistakes” were the reason why the US occupation of Afghanistan ultimately imploded. The Pentagon’s scatter-gun killing of Afghans created so many enemies among the local population that US-backed local rulers lost all legitimacy.

    Something similar happened during the US and UK’s occupation of Iraq. Anyone who believes the Pentagon commits “honest mistakes” when it kills civilians needs to watch the video, Collateral Murder, issued by WikiLeaks in 2012.

    It shows the aerial view of helicopter pilots in 2007 as they discuss with a mix of technical indifference and gruesome glee their missile strikes on a crowd of Iraqis, including two Reuters journalists, moving about on the streets of Baghdad below.

    When a passing van tries to come to the aid of one of wounded, the pilots fire again, even though a child is visible in the front seat. In fact, two children were found inside the van. US soldiers arriving at the scene made the decision to deny both treatment from US physicians.

    As the pilots were told of the casualties, one commented: “Well, it’s their fault for bringing their kids into a battle.” The other responded: “That’s right.”

    Before the video was leaked, the military claimed that the civilians killed that day had been caught in the crossfire of a gun battle. “There is no question that coalition forces were clearly engaged in combat operations against a hostile force,” a statement read.

    The video, however, shows that there was nothing honest or mistaken about the way those Iraqis died, even if there was no specific intention to kill civilians. They were killed because US commanders were uninterested in the safety of those it occupied, because they were indifferent to whether Iraqis, even Iraqi children, lived or died.

    Killing innocents

    The states that cry loudest that they kill innocents “by accident” or “unintentionally” or because “the terrorists shield behind them” are also the ones that keep killing innocents.

    Israel’s version of this is the “tragic mistake” – the excuse it used in 2014 when its navy fired two precision missiles at a beach in Gaza at exactly the spot where four boys were playing football. They were killed instantly. In seven weeks of pummelling Gaza in 2014, Israel killed more than 500 Palestinian children and more than 850 adult civilians. And yet all were apparently “honest mistakes” because no soldiers, commanders or politicians were ever held to account for those deaths.

    Palestinian civilians keep dying year after year, decade after decade, and yet they are always killed by an “honest mistake”. Israel’s excuses are entirely unconvincing for the same reason the Pentagon’s carry no weight.

    Both have committed their crimes in another people’s territory to which they have not been invited. Both militaries rule over those people without good cause, treating the local population as “hostiles”. And both act in the knowledge that their soldiers enjoy absolute impunity.

    In reaching its decision on the killing of the Afghan family this month, the Pentagon stated that it had not “broken the law“. That verdict too is not honest. What the US military means is that it did not break its own self-serving rules of engagement, rules that permit anything the US military decides it wants to do. It behaves as if no laws apply to it when it invades others’ lands, not even the laws of the territories it occupies.

    That argument is dishonest too. There are the laws of war and the laws of occupation. There is international law. The US has broken those laws over and over again in Afghanistan and Iraq, as has Israel in ruling over the Palestinians for more than five decades and blockading parts of their territory.

    The problem is that there is no appetite to enforce international law against the planet’s sole military superpower and its allies. Instead it is allowed to claim the role of benevolent global policeman.

    No scrutiny

    Both the US and Israel declined to ratify the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court (ICC) that judges war crimes. That refusal was no “honest mistake” either. Each expected to avoid the court’s scrutiny.

    US and Israeli leaders know their soldiers commit war crimes, and that they themselves commit war crimes by approving either the wars of aggression these soldiers are expected to wage or the messy, long-term belligerent occupations they are supposed to enforce.  But whatever they hope, the failure to ratify the statute does not serve as a stay-out-of-jail card. US and Israeli leaders still risk falling under the ICC’s jurisdiction if the countries they invade or occupy have ratified the statute, as is the case with Afghanistan and Palestine.

    The catch is that the Hague court can be used only as a last resort – in other words, it has to be shown first that any country accused of war crimes failed to seriously investigate those crimes itself.

    The chorus from the US and Israel of “honest mistake” every time they kill civilians is just such proof. It demonstrates that the US and Israeli legal systems are entirely incapable of upholding the laws of war, or holding their own political and military officials to account. That must be the job of the ICC instead.

    But the court is fearful. The Trump administration launched a mafia-style campaign against it last year to stop its officials investigating US war crimes in Afghanistan. The assets of the court’s officials were blocked and they were denied the right to enter the US.

    That is the reason why the court keeps failing to stand up for the victims of western war crimes like Zemerai Ahmadi and his children. The ICC had spent 15 years dragging its feet before it finally announced last year that it would investigate allegations of US war crimes in Afghanistan. That resolve quickly dissolved under the subsequent campaign of pressure.

    In September, shortly after Ahmadi’s family was killed by US drone operators, the court’s chief prosecutor declared that investigations into US actions in Afghanistan, including widespread claims of torture of Afghans, would be “deprioritised.” The investigation would focus instead on the Taliban and Islamic State.

    Once again, enemies of the US, but not the US itself, will be called to account. That too is no “honest mistake”.

    • First published in Middle East Eye

    The post “Honest mistakes”: How the US and Israel justify the targeting and killing of civilians first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • COP26: The climate cost of war

    Military carbon emissions have largely been exempted from international climate treaties, dating back to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, reports Barry Sheppard.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Blacklisting the merchants of spyware

    The US Department of Commerce revealed on November 3 that it would be adding Israeli-based spyware developers NSO Group and Candiru to its blacklist “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, businesspeople, activists, academics and embassy workers”, reports Binoy Kampmark.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Blacklisting the Merchants of Spyware

    In a modest effort to disrupt the global spyware market, the United States announced last week that four entities had been added to its blacklist.  On November 3, the US Department of Commerce revealed that it would be adding Israel-based companies NSO Group and Candiru to its entity list “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”

    Russian company Positive Technologies and the Singapore-based Computer Security Initiative Consultancy also made the list “based on a determination that they traffic in cyber tools used to gain unauthorized access to information systems, threatening the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide.”

    The move had a measure of approval in Congress. “The entity listing signals that the US government is ready to take strong action to stop US exports and investors from engaging with such companies,” came the approving remarks in a joint statement from Democrat House Representatives Tom Malinowski, Anna Eshoo and Joaquin Castro.

    This offers mild comfort to students of the private surveillance industry, who have shown it to be governed by traditional capitalist incentive rather than firm political ideology.  Steven Feldstein of the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program observes how such entities have actually thrived in liberal democratic states.  “Relevant companies, such as Cellebrite, FinFisher, Blue Coat, Hacking Team, Cyberpoint, L3 Technologies, Verint, and NSO group, are headquartered in the most democratic countries in the world, including the United States, Italy, France, Germany, and Israel.”

    The relationship between Digital China and Austin-based Oracle shows how talk about democracy and such ideals are fairly meaningless in such transactions.  Digital China is credited with aiding the PRC develop a surveillance state; software and data analytics company Oracle, despite pledging to “uphold and respect human rights for all people” was still happy to count Digital China a global “partner of the year” in 2018.  Its software products have been used to aid police in Liaoning province to do, among other things, gather details on financial records, travel information, social media and surveillance camera footage.  What’s bad for human rights is very good for business.

    In its indignant response to the Commerce Department’s blacklisting, NSO wished to point out to US authorities how its own “technologies support US national security interests and policies by preventing terrorism and crime, and thus we will advocate for this decision to be reversed.”  Portraying itself as a card-carrying member of the human rights fraternity, the company claimed to have “the world’s most rigorous compliance and human rights programs that are based [on] the American values we deeply share”.  Previous contracts with governments had been terminated because they had “misused our products.”

    As NSO has shown on numerous previous occasions, such strident assertions rarely match the record.  In July, an investigation known as the Pegasus Project, an initiative of 17 media organisations and groups, reported how 50,000 phone numbers had appeared on a list of hackable targets that had interested a number of governments.  The spyware used in question was Pegasus, that most disturbingly appealing of creations by NSO designed to infect the phone in question and turn it into a surveillance tool for the relevant user.

    The range of targets was skin crawlingly impressive: human rights activists, business executives, journalists, politicians and government officials.  None of this was new to those who have kept an eye on the exploits of the Israeli concern. Its sale of Pegasus has seen it feature in lawsuits from private citizens and companies such as WhatsApp keen to rein in its insidious practices.

    Despite denying any connection, the company will be forever associated with providing the tools to one of its clients, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to monitor calls made by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a fellow dissident scribbler, Omar Abdulaziz.  In October 2018, Khashoggi was carved to oblivion on the premises of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a hit squad with prints stretching back to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.  In a legal suit against NSO, lawyers for Abdulaziz argue that the hacking of his phone “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr Khashoggi.”  To date, the vicious, petulant modernist royal remains at large, feted by governments the world over as a reformer.

    While NSO has hogged the rude limelight on the international spyware market, that other Israeli-based concern, Candiru, has been a rolling hit with government clients.  Their products are also tailored to infecting and monitoring iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, and, discomfortingly enough, cloud accounts.

    Those behind this company evidently have a distasteful sense of humour; the original candiru of Amazon River fame is, goes one account in the Journal of Travel Medicine, “known as a little fish keen on entering the nether regions of people urinating in the Amazon River.”  Equipped with spikes, the fish invades and fastens itself within penis, vagina or rectum, making it a gruesome challenge to remove.  However colourful the imaginative accounts of the Candiru’s exploits are – William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is merely one – the Israeli version is far more sinister and deserves consternated worry.

    In July this year, the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto identified over 750 websites that had been influenced by the use of Candiru spyware.  “We found many domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as media companies, and other civil-society themed entities.”  The company, founded in 2014, maintains an opaque operations and recruitment structure, reputedly drawing expertise from the Israeli Defence Forces Unit 8200, responsible for code encryption and gathering signals intelligence.

    Within two years of its founding, the company had raked in $30 million in sales, establishing a slew of clients across Europe, states across the former Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf, Asia and Latin America.  A labour dispute between a former senior employee and the company shed some light on the company’s activities, with one document, signed by an unnamed vice president, noting the offering of a “high-end cyber intelligence platform dedicated to infiltrate PC computers, networks, mobile handsets, by using explosions and disseminations operations.”

    NSO Group’s reputation, and credentials, are now impossible to ignore.  The Israeli government, which grants the export licenses that enable the likes of NSO and Candiru to operate, is splitting hairs.  “NSO is a private company,” insists Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, “it is not a governmental project and therefore even if it is designated, it has nothing to do with the policies of the Israeli government.”  In his view, no other country had “such strict rules according to cyber warfare” and “imposing those rules more than Israel and we will continue to do so.”

    No Israeli government is likely to entirely abandon companies that make annual sales of $1 billion in the business of offensive cyber.  The efforts by governments the world over to attack encrypted communications while trampling human rights on route have become unrelenting.  In that quest, it matters little whether you are a citizen journalist, a master criminal, or a terrorist.  Those deploying the spyware rarely make such distinctions.

    The post Blacklisting the Merchants of Spyware first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Blacklisting the Merchants of Spyware

    In a modest effort to disrupt the global spyware market, the United States announced last week that four entities had been added to its blacklist.  On November 3, the US Department of Commerce revealed that it would be adding Israel-based companies NSO Group and Candiru to its entity list “based on evidence that these entities developed and supplied spyware to foreign governments that used these tools to maliciously target government officials, journalists, business people, activists, academics, and embassy workers.”

    Russian company Positive Technologies and the Singapore-based Computer Security Initiative Consultancy also made the list “based on a determination that they traffic in cyber tools used to gain unauthorized access to information systems, threatening the privacy and security of individuals and organizations worldwide.”

    The move had a measure of approval in Congress. “The entity listing signals that the US government is ready to take strong action to stop US exports and investors from engaging with such companies,” came the approving remarks in a joint statement from Democrat House Representatives Tom Malinowski, Anna Eshoo and Joaquin Castro.

    This offers mild comfort to students of the private surveillance industry, who have shown it to be governed by traditional capitalist incentive rather than firm political ideology.  Steven Feldstein of the Carnegie Endowment’s Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program observes how such entities have actually thrived in liberal democratic states.  “Relevant companies, such as Cellebrite, FinFisher, Blue Coat, Hacking Team, Cyberpoint, L3 Technologies, Verint, and NSO group, are headquartered in the most democratic countries in the world, including the United States, Italy, France, Germany, and Israel.”

    The relationship between Digital China and Austin-based Oracle shows how talk about democracy and such ideals are fairly meaningless in such transactions.  Digital China is credited with aiding the PRC develop a surveillance state; software and data analytics company Oracle, despite pledging to “uphold and respect human rights for all people” was still happy to count Digital China a global “partner of the year” in 2018.  Its software products have been used to aid police in Liaoning province to do, among other things, gather details on financial records, travel information, social media and surveillance camera footage.  What’s bad for human rights is very good for business.

    In its indignant response to the Commerce Department’s blacklisting, NSO wished to point out to US authorities how its own “technologies support US national security interests and policies by preventing terrorism and crime, and thus we will advocate for this decision to be reversed.”  Portraying itself as a card-carrying member of the human rights fraternity, the company claimed to have “the world’s most rigorous compliance and human rights programs that are based [on] the American values we deeply share”.  Previous contracts with governments had been terminated because they had “misused our products.”

    As NSO has shown on numerous previous occasions, such strident assertions rarely match the record.  In July, an investigation known as the Pegasus Project, an initiative of 17 media organisations and groups, reported how 50,000 phone numbers had appeared on a list of hackable targets that had interested a number of governments.  The spyware used in question was Pegasus, that most disturbingly appealing of creations by NSO designed to infect the phone in question and turn it into a surveillance tool for the relevant user.

    The range of targets was skin crawlingly impressive: human rights activists, business executives, journalists, politicians and government officials.  None of this was new to those who have kept an eye on the exploits of the Israeli concern. Its sale of Pegasus has seen it feature in lawsuits from private citizens and companies such as WhatsApp keen to rein in its insidious practices.

    Despite denying any connection, the company will be forever associated with providing the tools to one of its clients, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to monitor calls made by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and a fellow dissident scribbler, Omar Abdulaziz.  In October 2018, Khashoggi was carved to oblivion on the premises of the Saudi consulate in Istanbul by a hit squad with prints stretching back to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.  In a legal suit against NSO, lawyers for Abdulaziz argue that the hacking of his phone “contributed in a significant manner to the decision to murder Mr Khashoggi.”  To date, the vicious, petulant modernist royal remains at large, feted by governments the world over as a reformer.

    While NSO has hogged the rude limelight on the international spyware market, that other Israeli-based concern, Candiru, has been a rolling hit with government clients.  Their products are also tailored to infecting and monitoring iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs, and, discomfortingly enough, cloud accounts.

    Those behind this company evidently have a distasteful sense of humour; the original candiru of Amazon River fame is, goes one account in the Journal of Travel Medicine, “known as a little fish keen on entering the nether regions of people urinating in the Amazon River.”  Equipped with spikes, the fish invades and fastens itself within penis, vagina or rectum, making it a gruesome challenge to remove.  However colourful the imaginative accounts of the Candiru’s exploits are – William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch is merely one – the Israeli version is far more sinister and deserves consternated worry.

    In July this year, the Citizen Lab based at the University of Toronto identified over 750 websites that had been influenced by the use of Candiru spyware.  “We found many domains masquerading as advocacy organizations such as Amnesty International, the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as media companies, and other civil-society themed entities.”  The company, founded in 2014, maintains an opaque operations and recruitment structure, reputedly drawing expertise from the Israeli Defence Forces Unit 8200, responsible for code encryption and gathering signals intelligence.

    Within two years of its founding, the company had raked in $30 million in sales, establishing a slew of clients across Europe, states across the former Soviet Union, the Persian Gulf, Asia and Latin America.  A labour dispute between a former senior employee and the company shed some light on the company’s activities, with one document, signed by an unnamed vice president, noting the offering of a “high-end cyber intelligence platform dedicated to infiltrate PC computers, networks, mobile handsets, by using explosions and disseminations operations.”

    NSO Group’s reputation, and credentials, are now impossible to ignore.  The Israeli government, which grants the export licenses that enable the likes of NSO and Candiru to operate, is splitting hairs.  “NSO is a private company,” insists Israel’s Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, “it is not a governmental project and therefore even if it is designated, it has nothing to do with the policies of the Israeli government.”  In his view, no other country had “such strict rules according to cyber warfare” and “imposing those rules more than Israel and we will continue to do so.”

    No Israeli government is likely to entirely abandon companies that make annual sales of $1 billion in the business of offensive cyber.  The efforts by governments the world over to attack encrypted communications while trampling human rights on route have become unrelenting.  In that quest, it matters little whether you are a citizen journalist, a master criminal, or a terrorist.  Those deploying the spyware rarely make such distinctions.

    The post Blacklisting the Merchants of Spyware first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hypersonic Panic and Competitive Terror

    During his eventful time in office, US President Donald Trump took much delight in reflecting about the lethal toys of his country’s military, actual or hypothetical.  These included a hypersonic capability which, his military advisors had warned, was being mastered by adversaries.  Such devices, comprising hypersonic cruise missiles and hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, have been touted as opening a new arms race, given their ability not merely to travel at five times the speed of sound – as a general rule – but also show deft manoeuvrability to evade defences.

    Undeterred by any rival capability, Trump claimed in May 2020 that the US military had come up with a  “super duper” weapon that could travel at 17 times the speed of sound. “We are building, right now, incredible military equipment at a level that nobody has ever seen before.”  Ever adolescent in poking fun at his rivals, Trump also claimed that the missile dwarfed Russian and Chinese equivalents.  Russia, he claimed, had one travelling at five times the speed of sound; China was working on a device that could move at the same speed, if not at six times.  Pentagon officials were not exactly forthcoming about the details, leaving the fantasists to speculate.

    In 2019, Russia deployed its own intercontinental hypersonic missile, the Avangard strategic system, featuring a hypersonic glide vehicle astride an intercontinental ballistic missile. “It’s a weapon of the future, capable of penetrating both existing and prospective missile defence systems,” claimed Russian President Vladimir Putin at the time.  The President claimed to have reason to crow.  “Today, we have a unique situation in our new and recent history.  They (other countries) are trying to catch up with us. Not a single country possesses hypersonic weapons, let alone continental-range hypersonic weapons.”

    For all of this claimed prowess, nothing quite creased the brows of Pentagon officials quite as China’s July 27 hypersonic missile test.  General Mark  Milley, chairman of the Joint of Chief of Staff, said in a Bloomberg interview this October that it was “a very significant event” and was “very concerning”.  The test was first reported by the Financial Times on October 16, which also noted, without additional detail, a second hypersonic systems test on August 13.

    The People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force had already caught the attention of US military planners in the last decade with advances in the field.  The Dongfeng-17 (D-17) hypersonic boost-glide missile, for instance, made its appearance in 2014 and was found to be dismayingly accurate, striking their targets within metres.

    The July test, however, was another matter, even if it missed its target by 19 miles and had been described by Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian as a “routine test” of space vehicle technology.  It had used, for instance, a variant of the Fractional Orbital Bombardment System, a low-orbit missile delivery method pioneered by the Soviets to frustrate detection.  It got the drummers from the military-industrial complex all riled up, despite the US having been actively involved in the development of hypersonic weapons since the early 2000s.  In the imperial mindset, any seemingly successful experiment by the military of another power, notably an adversary, is bound to cause a titter of panic.  Pin pricks can be treated as grave threats, even to a power that outspends the combined military budgets of the next seven states.

    When it comes to the perceived advances of Beijing and Moscow, Alexander Fedorov of the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology offers a mild corrective.  Russia had “experience without money, China has money without much experience, and the United States has both, although it revived its efforts later than did Russia or China and is now playing catch-up.”

    The US military establishment prefers a gloomier reading, a point they can then sell to Congress that Freedom’s Land is being somehow outpaced by upstarts and usurpers.  George Hayes, chief executive at defence contractor Raytheon, spoke disapprovingly of the US as being a laggard in the hypersonic field, being “years behind” China.  Michael Griffin, former undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, told NPR that “it is an arms race” which “we didn’t start”, thereby providing moral reassurance for future additions to it. Milley was also not averse to inflating the significance of the July test.  “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that.  It has all of our attention.”

    USA Today certainly wished its readers to give it all their attention.  “That method of delivery also means the US could be attacked by flights over the South Pole.  American defense systems concentrate on missile attacks from the north.”

    The Biden administration has already requested $3.8 billion for hypersonic research for the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2022 budget.  This is a sharp increase from the previous total of $3.2 billion, which was itself an inflation from the $2.6 billion figure the year before that.  In June, Vice Admiral Jon Hill, director of the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), warned the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on strategic forces of current and impending risks, thereby making the case for more cash to be thrown at the enterprise.  As things stood, “US aircraft carriers are already facing risks from hypersonic weapons that are now entering the inventory of American adversaries and the Navy has developed early defences for the threat.”

    The prospect of yet another arms race (do they ever learn?) can only cause the sane to be worried.  Zhao Tong, senior fellow with the nuclear policy program of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, notes that such weapons “introduce more technological uncertainties and ambiguities compared with traditional ballistic missiles, which will increase the possibility of misjudgement and overreaction during military conflicts”.  Just the sort of thing a planet troubled by climate change and pandemics needs.

    Hypersonic panic is here to stay, and defence contractors are rubbing their hands and hoping to grease a few palms.  Hayes is one of them, expecting that the US would “have weapons to challenge the adversaries but most importantly, I think our focus is how do we develop counter-hypersonics.  That’s where the challenge will be.”  The National Review is in full agreement, encouraging the US to “deploy missile-defense interceptors in Australia and more sensors in space, as well as work toward directed-energy weapons that would be the best counter to hypersonic missiles.”  Yet another competitive front for military lunacy is in the offing, even before it has begun.

    The post Hypersonic Panic and Competitive Terror first appeared on Dissident Voice.


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

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • United States: Workers rise up in strike wave

    Thousands of workers are on strike right now in the United States, in what is being dubbed “Striketober”, reports Malik Miah.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Lies, Lies and Nuclear Submarines

    It looked like something of an ambush, but a coterie of Australian journalists had their man where they wanted him.  Between sessions at the G20 Summit in Rome, and French President Emmanuel Macron found himself blunter than usual.  The sundering of the relationship between Australia and France over the new trilateral security relationship between Canberra, Washington and London, and, more importantly, the rescinding of the submarine contract with Australia, was playing on his mind.  Did he think, came the question, whether he had been lied to by the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, about the intended scrapping of the Franco-Australian submarine deal with the creation of AUKUS?  “I don’t think, I know,” came the definitive answer.

    The response from Morrison was one of shameless dissembling.  Making sure that Australian audiences and the news waves would only pick up select gobbets, he told the press that the French president had attacked, or “sledged” Australia and its good burghers.  He expressed concern about “the statements that were made questioning Australia’s integrity and the slurs that have been placed on Australia”.  He was “not going to cop sledging at Australia.”

    A full reading of Macron’s words in the brief encounter suggests nothing of the sort.  Australia and France were bound up in history and blood enriched ties going back to two world wars.  “Your country was shoulder to shoulder with us during the wars.  You had fighters with us when our freedom was at stake.  We have, we do have the same values.”  He respected “sovereign choices” but it was also vital to “respect allies and partners.”  It was the conduct of the Australian government he had issue with, something that Macron thought “detrimental to the reputation of your country and your Prime Minister.”

    Morrison’s defence proved shoddy, confusing the issue of having difficulties with the contractual relationship with France to build twelve diesel electric submarines with the issue of announcing an intended divorce.  As with lovers who read off different relationship scripts, the Australian Prime Minister is convinced that Macron must have known when they met in June that something had soured.  He had “made it very clear that a conventional diesel-powered submarine was not going to meet Australia’s strategic requirements. We discussed that candidly.”  He did, however, say that alternatives were not discussed, they being “in confidence”.

    The strategic environment, claimed Morrison with tediousness, had changed.  There were also issues specific to the contract with the French defence firm Naval, including “following through with commitments on Australian industry content.”  There were issues with delays; issues with cost.  “These were matters that we raised quite regularly and indeed I raised with President Macron at each opportunity when we either spoke over the phone or we had our bilateral meetings going on for a number of years.”

    Morrison’s mendacity is also pronounced in how he justifies pursuing the nuclear submarine option with the United States.  Wishing to cuckold France, the Australian prime minister began to look around, with eyes firmly fastened on Washington’s formidable hardware.  But, using the reasoning of any adulterer who is found out, it wasn’t a true relationship at that point; Washington and Canberra were dealing with “the nuclear stewardship issues”.  “At the same time, we were working through in good faith with Naval to address the problems that we had in the contract.”  Such a marriage; such a commitment.

    In the Scotty from Advertising appraisal of the world, dissatisfaction can be retooled and packaged as separation and nullification.  What Macron thought he heard or understood is less relevant than what Morrison thought he said.  He might even believe it.

    The Biden administration has also done its fair share of dissimulative manoeuvring in this affair.  In his meeting with Macron at the Villa Bonaparte in Rome on October 29, President Joe Biden was fluffy and buttery.  France, he assured the French President, was “the reason, in part, why we became an independent country.”  Asked on whether the relationship between France and the US had been “repaired”, Biden was apologetic: “Well, the answer is: I think what happened [over the announcement of the submarines] – to use an English phrase, what we did was ‘clumsy’.  It was not done with a lot of grace.”

    This gave Biden the cue to place Morrison before an oncoming truck.  “I was under the impression certain things had happened that hadn’t happened.”  To clarify, he was “under the impression that France had been informed long before that the [French-Australian submarine] deal was not going through.  I, honest to God, did not know you had not been.”

    What, then, had Morrison told Biden he was doing about the French and ending the conventional submarine affair?  The Australian, equipped with a confidential document detailing a communications timeline on the new submarine nuclear announcement, suggests that Biden’s full grasp of the verity should also be questioned.  The 15-page document, approved by officials of Biden’s National Security Council, makes the point that France would only be informed of the new arrangements on September 16.

    Time was also spent in the Eisenhower Executive Office building pondering how Australia might best calm an indignant France.  There was also concern expressed on how other powers might react.  Little consideration was given to the fact that any anger might be directed against the US, least of all from France.  Perhaps, suggests Greg Sheridan of the same newspaper with some charity, Biden has reached a point in his life where he can’t remember what he can’t remember.

    The Morrison government has also taken to the distasteful practice of selective leaking in bolstering its quicksand position, a tactic which further suggests a diminution of an already less than impressive political office. A prodding text from Macron to Morrison, sent two days prior to the AUKUS announcement and the cancellation of the contract, involved a query as to whether good or bad news could be expected about the French submarines.  The vulgar insinuation here is that Macron supposedly had an inkling that something was afoot from the Australian side, which hardly counts as fully informed awareness.  Naturally, Morrison’s response is not noted.  The Elysée further denies suggestions that Canberra made several warning efforts regarding the AUKUS announcement.

    An Elysée official expressed bafflement at the tactic.  “Disclosing a text message exchange between heads of state or government is a pretty crude and unconventional tactic.”  It may be crude, and it may be unconventional, but this furnishes an apt summation of the Australian Prime Minister’s view of diplomacy.

    The post Lies, Lies and Nuclear Submarines first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Who Will Pay For The Damage From Climate Change?

    To people in developing countries, it seems clear, the wealthy countries that caused most of the problem of climate change should pay the most to adapt to it and to solve the problem.  But instead, countries like the United States lecture low low-emitting countries to do more while they extract their resources and destroy their forests.

    For example, Nicaragua was an outspoken critic of the Paris climate talks because they did not go far enough. It is one of the countries most impacted by climate change, yet its own greenhouse gas footprint is one of the smallest.  Nicaragua initially insisted that the Paris Accord did not reduce emissions enough (a position that was later adopted by a majority of countries and the IPCC).  Dr. Paul Oquist, Nicaraguan Minister and envoy to the talks, insisted in Paris that developing countries should receive the billions of dollars promised by the big greenhouse gas emitters to pay for greenhouse gas mitigation programs. 

    The post Who Will Pay For The Damage From Climate Change? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Dog Food for Homo Sapiens: Rendered Road Kill for All

    The they, of course, are the capitalists. The bankers. The mortgage companies. The housing agencies. The alphabet soup of agencies which will squeeze blood from turnips and your progeny’s progeny.

    The media is the medium for their poison, all those tricks of the mind, subliminal and overt, messages that cause chaos, the mass hysteria, the constant fear, the rage against the ‘other.’ And, the other are our fellow citizens, victims, most of us, sliding and slipping and slurrying down the proverbial drain.

    Housing management companies; i.e., apartment management companies, now property management companies. We are talking about putting people out on the streets management companies. Black Rock or Black Stone, or the top (largest) property management companies in USA are evil doers, in the words of the criminal, George W. Bush. Terrorists in our own land.

    Here, The 7 Deadly Sins of Rental Property Management, all in black and white and color a la PDF.

    Take a look at the number of “units” these thieves “own,”; i.e., manage! National Multifamily Housing Council — 50 Largest Apartment Managers

    Again, the ‘they’ in the subheading are those who look at citizens as, well, semi-useless renters, eaters, drivers, patients, breathers, breeders. UNITS as in a person’s home, shelter, abode, gathering place, roof-running water-place-to-raise-a-life-or-a-family. In the hands of management companies, who are in Gucci suits and are beholding to the devils of capitalism: money schemers, bond holders, the top echelon of this Ponzi scheme. No national red alert state by state around eviction moratorium running out, or the exorbitant rents and sickening inflated cost of houses, new or preowned? Instead, this Tweedle-dee and Tweedledum Administration is saber-nuke rattling with China and Russia. Instead, this Brokeback Administration is pushing Jab of the Month on every living mammal in the USA. But real change, real safety, real social contracts? Never in the Art of the Deal shit-hole that is the Democratic and Republican mentality, which is for us, useful idiots, mental disease!

    I have dealt with some of these property management (killer) outfits. Recently, with one of my clients — homeless veteran, diabetes, amputated leg from the knee down, other chronic illnesses — I went through email-telephone-snail mail hell. Zero response about his one apartment we landed that needed some ADA addition so he could get out of the bloody apartment in his wheelchair. I’ve written about Pinnacle (number three on that list above with 172,000 ‘units’). My client had a Rotary Club and Boy Scout unit and a construction company ready to put in a sound, safe, nice pathway so he could exit and enter his apartment.

    Read: “Once a US Soldier, Always Wounded, Always Losing!”

    I Began My Career Working with Homeless Veterans. Here's What I Learned | Inc.com

    Nothing from Pinnacle after hours spent attempting a two-way communication with them. I did get an apartment manager, in the Portland apartment complex office, who was from Ukraine, and who was, again, in this shit-hole country, afraid of rocking the boat, afraid of really helping me get to the top brass. Even the top brass, via email and snail mail, did not respond. You can’t even pull the old wounded military veteran with chronic illness card to get to their heart-strings, because, they have no heart — just a big set of investment-banking-real estate accounts.

    What do nations care about the cost of war, if by spending a few hundred millions in steel and gunpowder they can gain a thousand millions in diamonds and cocoa?
    ― W.E.B. DuBois

    Michael Hudson, again, explains how messed up we are in USA with this rentier system. This system of penury, three steps to poverty hustle. And Corporate/Mainstream Media are in with this scam. Don’t get confused with the title, Super-imperialism, Michael Hudson’s book. He goes to the heart of this USA scam:

    So, I am talking about even redneck Texas, Dallas, where working class folk are seeing that $1,100 a month one bedroom apartment rent jump to $1,800 in November. Just like that, oh, that Lone Star Shit Hole State. But wait, that jump is happening all over the land. Every rotten governor who dares go on TV to express their Jab-Jab-Jabberwocky and their Unvaccinated-Going-to-get-sacked-turned-away-from-everywhere-no-medical-help-no-entitlements-no schooling sick fascist soft-shoe Vaudeville Big Pharma Blue Face bullshit, well, they are the Paper-Pharma Tigers, with state legislatures as pimped out by corporations and US Chamber of Commerce shits to the point of massive infrastructure failure, pot holes as big as DMZ craters, dirty water, dirty air, zero housing for the 80 percent, no bus drivers for the kiddos. This is America, the land of the Survival of the Fittest, of Richest, or Most Connected, or Most Sociopathic!

    They are real overtly slimly too tall De Blasio’s! “Droves of city government retirees are preparing to pay thousands annually to keep their existing health insurance rather than taking a chance on a new cost-cutting plan.”

    Mayor Bill de Blasio and DC37 Announce Tentative Contract Agreement on Wednesday, July 2, 2014.

    This is what these whippersnappers in the Blue States and Red States do — privatize EVERYTHING, since we are almost useless eaters and useless breathers. Useful, to them, as they call us their “useful idiots.” Title any way you want to: “Retirees Flee City Medicare Program as Deadline Looms for Move to Private Health Plan” or, “New York City Retirees Refusing to Eat the Medicare Advantage Dogfood“

    So, no rent control, no national housing plan, no holding the US Chamber of Commerce and the other 10,000 thuggery lobbying groups for the building and paving and clear-cutting industries to the people’s standards. And, yes, a few brethren send me link and story after story and link. It’s what I have been feeling and seeing since age 13. Yes, the ugly reality of kill squads, School of the Americas, in Central America. Yes, in Arizona, age 13, after years overseas, seeing the government, the administrations, and their policy of undocumented folk from US-spit upon countries and their death squads coming over the borderline, illegally. Imagine that, people as illegals, and worse, as aliens, from another planet! Media and the newspapers I worked for, I fought those terms — illegal alien. Sick sick roots of this slaver country. Look at this, 15 years ago, with the old web site, Dissident Voice: “This Land is Their Land, and We Are the Illegal Aliens.”

    Here, Ferlinghetti — from that little book, Poetry as Insurgent Art!

    What are poets for, in such an age?

    What is the use of poetry?

    The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it. (A voice in the wilderness!)

    If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this means sounding apocalyptic.

    You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or a non-American, you can conquer the conquerors with words.

    — Lawrence Ferlinghetti,  pp.2-3

    This headline, in the context of housing crisis, job crisis and, well, the supply chain made up crisis, which Michael Hudson talks about above with Blumenthal and Norton. “Biden says US will go to war with China to defend Taiwan”!

    US President Biden bluntly declared at a Town Hall meeting on Thursday that the US was committed to going to war against China in defense of Taiwan. The statement is another provocative step that undermines the basis of US-China diplomatic relations and intensifies the already acute tensions between the two countries. (source)

    These are not normal human beings, any of them in these dastardly administrations — Nixon-Ford-Carter-Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama-Trump-Biden. Oh, historically, it gets much much worse. Just the health care crises after crises, and get some slice of the National Health Services in Britain which my aunts and cousins and uncles in the old days used as ways to be treated with dignity for medical ailments. It’s all gone the way of dog food, Reagan/Thatcher, on down the line, Blair/Clinton, Obama/Trump/Biden. More news and analyses coming from a hip-hop guy, than anything from the Fox-MSNBC-CNN-Et Al crap:

    Speaking of those great health authorities, those alphabet soup acronym junk science folk from our own FDA, get a grip on this during the planned pandemic:

    Young man vaping by a wall

    That FDA, even reported on brokeback NBC: ‘Even the website of the approved product, R.J. Reynolds’ Vuse, which offers “7 Bold Colors, 3 Premium Flavors, 3 Nicotine Levels” along with sleek accessories like pretty “racing wraps” and holsters, says on top: “WARNING: This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical.” But the FDA claimed that with vaping, “the potential benefit to smokers who switch completely or significantly reduce their cigarette use, would outweigh the risk to youth.” Apparently the argument is: It’s OK if young people get addicted to vaping nicotine because they will now be able to buy e-cigarettes to later quit.’

    You know, the FDA in cahoots with the other great Pharma Folk, the self reporting Jewish Family, a la Sackler/Purdue:

    Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America

    Oh, it’s on Hulu, and it is a protracted, goofy drama of the St. Elsewhere kind. SO protracted, so long, but from Macy’s book. Oxycontin. Man, that dope in the white-blue-yellow-pink pill. Talk about emblematic of Pfizer/Merck/GSK/The Lot of them!

    Curtis Wright was the FDA’s deputy director overseeing anesthetics and addiction products during the time OxyContin was being approved. In this position, Wright played a key role in allowing the deceptive marketing that suggested OxyContin was non-addictive. Particular focus has fallen on a special label issued by the FDA specifically for OxyContin which read “Delayed absorption as provided by OxyContin tablets is believed to reduce the abuse liability of a drug.” As depicted in Dopesick, this label was used by sales representatives to sell OxyContin as a treatment for moderate pain to skeptical doctors like the one played by former Batman star Michael Keaton. However, Purdue had conducted no actual studies to support this claim and Wright knew it. In Dopesick, FDA employees also confirm the person who approved of this label was Curtis Wright. (source)

    Nah, we can’t call these people evil. We can’t call their business dealings illegal. We can’t call into question their ethics. We can’t question where they developed such sick marketing. We can’t look at their origins, their friends, their rabbis, their associations with family lines that go way back. That, my kind reader, would be, well, in the words of racists and fascists, anti-Semitic?

    Sackler Family Exits Bankruptcy Trial Over Purdue Pharma's OxyContin - Bloomberg

    Well, I guess I can leave the origins stories up to the, well,

    “How the Sackler family built a pharma dynasty and fueled an American calamity”

    In ‘Empire of Pain,’ Patrick Radden Keefe details the humble Jewish immigrant roots of Purdue Pharmaceuticals, and how it is evading justice despite being behind the opioid crisis

    In the 1960s, esteemed psychiatrist/genius ad man Dr. Arthur Sackler cemented his family’s massive fortune when his marketing strategy transformed diazepam, better known as Valium, from just another drug produced by his client Hoffman-La Roche into the top-selling “wonder” drug in the United States between 1968 and 1982.

    Though the Jewish-American Sackler, whose parents immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe, initially encountered antisemitism, the wealth that he brought his family helped change all that.

    Along with his psychiatrist brothers Mortimer and Raymond, Sackler would see enormous success marketing pharmaceuticals directly to doctors. The family delved into philanthropy in addition to pharma, and the name once snubbed by antisemites soon adorned prestigious educational and cultural institutions, from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Louvre.

    Yet more stories coming from friends that define CAPITALISM, and that is the C which is the big Corrupt, Colluding, Conspiratorial, Contagious, Calamitous, Corrosive, Cancerous. That is the soft shoe here — the C-C-C-C-C-C-C of Capitalism, with those Seven Deadly Sinful C’s! And just to make a quick aside, sort of the Robin Leech, The Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous detour, get a load of this set of seven deadly sinful C’s: Living: “The Super-Rich Are Forming a New Exclusive Club. For $180,000, a three-year membership includes investment opportunities, access to West Point generals, confidential support groups and private getaways.” (source, again, the 7 Sinful C’s Bloomberg News [sic])

    Nah, never off with their heads!

    Richard Branson, from left, during an R360 networking tennis match with Michael Cole and Christopher Ryan, a former Tiger 21 chair in Texas and Puerto Rico and chief executive officer of GoBundance, a professional networking group.

    [Tag: Richard Branson, from left, during an R360 networking tennis match with Michael Cole and Christopher Ryan, a former Tiger 21 chair in Texas and Puerto Rico and chief executive officer of GoBundance, a professional networking group. Courtesy of R360]

    And these fella’s are controlling the narrative around 5/6G, Fake Green Capitalism, World Economic Forum’s “The Deplorables/Barely Useful Idiots Will Be Soylent Green” project of massive anal and biometric and cellular surveillance, and, then this bizarrely vapid story about “the only way to save the earth — read, saving/protecting/growing the billionaires’ and millionaires’ wealth, power, ego, land, families — is with, err, the billionaires’ and millionaires’ great know-how and techie future.”

    An aerial view of the an expansive reef with clouds in the sky.

    Oh, Canada, the tail and hind teat of USA: “Why we must embrace geoengineering and other technologies to stop the climate crisis” by Jaqueline McLeod Rogers, University of Winnipeg. I’ll quote her, and just the two paragraphs say it all for me, and alas, while I do come from academia, albeit remedial college courses, writing courses, a la adjunct/freeway flyer, I have to say that my dealings with sustainability and green pornography/greenwashing experts over the years (yes, I ‘graduated’ from the University of British Columbia’s Green/Sustainability Summer Institute mumbo-jumbo course) has pretty much gelled the reality: most academicians are very-very much corruptible and corrupting, back to the 7 Very Sinful C’s of Capitalism:

    Diplomacy aside, it’s time to do more than agree to cut emissions. Some scientists say an engineered climate recovery must be taken seriously, with aggressive and deliberate management strategies put in place. We need to cultivate citizen interest and government support for research into the development of large-scale geoengineering projects.

    As a media and communications scholar, I cannot argue that one science is superior to another. My research examines how Marshall McLuhan’s thinking about technology relates to the current climate crisis. Drawing on the work of McLuhan and others, I believe there are emerging technological options of urgent interest to citizens committed to a sustainable future, and we need to pursue these rather than holding onto remnants of a new normal. (source)

    It all comes down to reset after reset, the great openly brazen and powerful Very Seven Very Deadly Very Sinfully C ‘s of the Worst System for Humanity and Earth Ever Devised, Capitalism! Corrupt, Colluding, Conspiratorial, Contagious, Calamitous, Corrosive, Cancerous

    GMO53423

    So many truths, so many millions of stories, so many people dazed and confused. This is the trickster veil that the overlords of capitalism have dished out for the planet. The USA has taken it hook, line and sinker:

    No one group has done more to damage our global agriculture and food quality than the Rockefeller Foundation. They began in the early 1950s after the War to fund two Harvard Business School professors to develop vertical integration which they named “Agribusiness.” The farmer became the least important. They then created the fraudulent Green Revolution in Mexico and India in the 1960s and later the pro-GMO Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa since 2006. Money from the Rockefeller Foundation literally created the disastrous GMO genetically altered plants with their toxic glyphosate pesticides. Now again, the foundation is engaged in a major policy change in global food and agriculture and it’s not good. (source)

    There you have it, way before 10 a.m. PST, October 23, eight days before the CDC-Fauci-FDA approved Halloween, this blog to never end all blogs. Blots on us all, and, Plague Upon All Their Houses. Just reread, scroll back up, and you get the idea as to whose heads must roll. And it is just a short list. You’ve read about other heads that must roll in many other of my diatribes or rants. Righteous indignation? Nah, calm forward thinking starting 51 years ago when I was just a wee one.

    Oh, shoot, back to the future, again:

    Max Blumenthal question: “Are current politicians basing the corona measures on incorrectly established scientific principles?”

    Mattias Desmet: I think so. Here, too, we see a kind of naïve belief in objectivity that turns into its opposite: a serious lack of objectivity with masses of errors and carelessness. Moreover, there is a sinister connection between the emergence of this kind of absolutist science and the process of manipulation and totalitarianisation of society. In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, the German-American political thinker Hannah Arendt brilliantly describes how this process took place in Nazi Germany, among other places. For example, nascent totalitarian regimes typically fall back on a ‘scientific’ discourse. They show a great preference for figures and statistics, which quickly degenerate into pure propaganda, characterized by a radical “disregard for the facts”. For example, Nazism based its ideology on the superiority of the Aryan race. A whole series of so-called scientific data substantiated their theory. Today we know that this theory had no scientific validity, but scientists at the time used the media to defend the regime’s positions. Hannah Arendt describes how these scientists proclaimed questionable scientific credentials, and she uses the word “charlatans” to emphasize this. She also describes how the emergence of this kind of science and its industrial applications was accompanied by an inevitable social change. Classes disappeared and normal social ties deteriorated, with much indefinable fear, anxiety, frustration, and lack of meaning. It is under such circumstances that the masses develop very specific psychological qualities. All fears that haunt society become linked to one ‘object’ – for example, the Jews – so that the masses enter into a kind of energetic struggle with this object. And onto that process of social conditioning of the masses, a completely new political and constitutional organization subsequently grafts itself: the totalitarian state.

    Today, one perceives a similar phenomenon. There is widespread psychological suffering, lack of meaning, and diminished social ties in society. Then a story comes along that points to a fear object, the virus, after which the population strongly links its fear and discomfort to this dreaded object. Meanwhile, there is a constant call in all media to collectively fight the murderous enemy. The scientists who bring the story to the population are rewarded with tremendous social power in return. Their psychological power is so great that, at their suggestion, the whole of society abruptly renounces a host of social customs and reorganises itself in ways that no one at the beginning of 2020 thought possible. (source)

    Oh? So, this discussions can’t happen because the overlords, their masters, the Seven Sinful C’s of Capitalism, the planned resets, all of that trump us barely useful eaters, readers, watchers, walkers, drivers, patients, renters, dreamers, breathers, sleepers, consumers!

    Max Blumenthal, “Foreign Agents #10 – Covid and Mass Hypnosis w/Dr. Mattias Desmet

    See the source image
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  • Jerusalem’s “Liveliest Parties”: Has Biden Proved Different from Trump on Palestine? 

     

    When Joe Biden was declared the winner in the US elections last November, expectations in Ramallah were high. A Biden Administration, compared to the brazenly pro-Israel Trump Administration, would surely be much fairer to Palestinians, was the conventional wisdom at the time. 

     

    Hence, unsurprisingly, Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, was among the first world leaders to most enthusiastically congratulate Biden. “I look forward to working with the President-elect and his administration to strengthen the Palestinian-American relations and to achieve freedom, independence, justice and dignity for our people,” Abbas said immediately after the results were announced. 

     

    Contrastingly, the then-Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, waited for a relatively long time to offer his congratulations, hoping, perhaps, that his close friend and staunch political ally, Trump, would succeed in reversing the outcome of the elections.

     

    Nearly a year later, however, one struggles to understand the Palestinian euphoria of last year, and the absence of criticism of the current US administration for failing to reverse most of the pro-Israel decisions enacted by Trump. The latter’s unwarranted steps included the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and the relocation of the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, all in violation of international law and even the US’ own declared policies. 

     

    Considering all of this, why does the PA leadership remain largely silent regarding the fact that the Biden Administration, despite its rhetoric about peace and dialogue, maintains the same degree of commitment to Israel as Trump’s? The short answer is money. 

     

    Indeed, the only tangible step that the Biden Administration has taken in the last year has been the restoration of funds that Trump had withheld from Palestinians, thus reversing a nearly three-decade US policy of, along with other ‘donor countries’, bankrolling the PA.

     

    In April, the White House declared its intentions to restore some, though not all, funds to the Palestinians. The amount of $235 million was to be paid in the form of $75m in economic and developmental assistance, $10m in ‘peacebuilding’ programs to be provided by the US agency, USAID, and the remaining in humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian refugee agency, UNRWA. 

     

    The latter decision, however, did not come without caveats. On July 14, UNRWA reached an agreement with Washington regarding the use of these funds. The so-called Framework for Cooperation stipulated that “The US will not make any contributions to UNRWA, except on the condition that UNRWA takes all feasible measures to ensure that no part of the US contribution is used to assist any refugee receiving military training,” as part of any Palestinian resistance group. Under the agreement, which was strongly criticized by Palestinians, UNRWA will receive an additional $135 million from the US.

     

    On the political front, however, there is little else to report. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) office in Washington, although expected to be reopened by Biden after its abrupt closure by the Trump Administration in September 2018, remains closed. 

     

    Additionally, the US consulate in occupied Palestinian East Jerusalem, which was also shut down by a Trump decision, remains “a major point of contention” between Israel and the US, according to Axios. 

     

    As soon as the Biden Administration declared its intentions to reopen its mission in Palestine, top Israeli officials have poured into Washington to prevent even this symbolic Palestinian gain from taking place. Israeli Prime Minister, Naftali Bennett, raised the issue with Biden during their White House meeting in August, requesting that he refrain from carrying out such a move, and opening the consulate in Ramallah, instead, the Times of Israel reported. 

     

    In September, Israeli Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, had warned Washington that restating the US mission in East Jerusalem was a “bad idea”, alluding that such a decision could force the collapse of Israel’s fragile coalition.

     

    The subject also topped the agenda of Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Lapid during their meeting in Washington in October. “I don’t know how to hold this coalition together if you reopen the consulate,” Lapid told Blinken, as conveyed by Israeli officials and reported by Axios.

     

    To avoid a confrontation and to buy time for the Israeli government, Blinken proposed a committee made up of US and Israeli officials to “discuss the issue with maximum discretion.” 

     

    The Israeli government is using the current fractious ruling coalition as a pretense to defer the US decision on the consulate, hinting that if the US moves the embassy before the government budget passes in November, the government will dissolve, thus ushering in the ominous possibility of Netanyahu’s return. 

     

    It is expected that the joint US-Israeli committee will not be formed until the budget vote, and even then, it is unclear if Washington will succeed in persuading Israel to respect Biden’s decision. 

     

    Notably, while the matter of the consulate should concern Palestinians most, no Palestinian official will be included in the Blinken-Lapid exclusive and secretive talks. More bizarrely, the PA does not seem to mind, as we are yet to witness a public outcry by Abbas and his officials. This is, of course, typical PA behavior, for as long as US funds are, again, finding their way to PA coffers, all other issues seem of little or no urgency. 

     

    However, even if a political compromise is found, and an American consulate is finally reestablished, how will this alter the reality on the ground? 

     

    Since 1994, the US consulate has served a largely symbolic role, one that mattered most to the PA. It hardly altered the political equation on the ground in favor of Palestinians. In a telling and surreal reference to the consulate, Noga Tarnopolsky wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2019: “The consulate was known for hosting one of the liveliest parties on Jerusalem’s annual schedule, a July 4 gala held on the front lawn.” 

     

    A short distance away from the city’s “liveliest parties”, hundreds of Palestinian families are either being evicted or face the risk of evictions by the US-funded Israeli police and army and a bit further away is Israel’s apartheid wall that continues to segment occupied Palestine based on race, ethnicity and religion. One is justified, then, not to hold much hope that the reopening of the US mission will remotely change this horrific status quo.

     

    The Biden Administration is proving to be but a soft facade to the same policies enacted by the Trump Administration. Only, this time, the Palestinian Authority, for self-serving reasons, does not seem to mind. 

    The post Jerusalem’s “Liveliest Parties”: Has Biden Proved Different from Trump on Palestine?  first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Verdict In The Case Of Black, Brown And Indigenous Peoples

    The fact that the United States has committed an array of human rights abuses against Black, Brown, and Indigenous Peoples should be as uncontroversial as it is incontrovertible. There is widespread agreement that settler colonialists committed genocide and other crimes against the Indigenous populations while taking their lands. No one would disagree that enslaved Africans were forced to work the settler colonial lands for hundreds of years in subhuman conditions.

    The historical record tells the story of additional human rights abuses committed against Mexicans and other groups as the US expanded West and colonized countries like Puerto Rico. No one doubts that Japanese were forced into concentration camps during World War II or that Blacks were lynched and brutalized during Jim Crow.

    The post Verdict In The Case Of Black, Brown And Indigenous Peoples appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

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