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Category: United States

  • Adelaide manufacturer taps into US nuclear subs supply chain

    Adelaide-based additive manufacturer AML3D has delivered 3D-printed parts for a US nuclear-powered Virginia-Class submarine, capitalising on the fledgling AUKUS supply chain. The prototype copper-nickel tailpiece components are valued at $156,000 and will be installed later this year. The components must first undergo testing and in-service trials on a nuclear submarine under the US Navy’s Maritime…

    The post Adelaide manufacturer taps into US nuclear subs supply chain appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Is Public, Quality Healthcare Possible In The United States?

    People in the US pay billions towards the health insurance industry, yet many in the healthcare field believe that this industry does little to ensure quality care to patients. While US healthcare spending is by far the highest of any country in the world, the country has the lowest life expectancy among other nations with a similar GDP.

    In recent weeks, the rage against the for-profit healthcare industry in the United States has intensified. The reality faced by many in the US, of avoiding seeking medical care in an emergency for fear of costs, or having health insurance claims repeatedly denied despite paying thousands to private insurers, has become too much to bear.

    The post Is Public, Quality Healthcare Possible In The United States? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Many Wealthy Members Of Congress Are Descendants Of Rich Slaveholders

    The legacy of slavery in America remains a divisive issue, with sharp political divides.

    Some argue that slavery still contributes to modern economic inequalities. Others believe its effects have largely faded.

    One way to measure the legacy of slavery is to determine whether the disproportionate riches of slaveholders have been passed down to their present-day descendants.

    Connecting the wealth of a slaveholder in the 1860s to today’s economic conditions is not easy. Doing so requires unearthing data for a large number of people on slaveholder ancestry, current wealth and other factors such as age and education.

    The post Many Wealthy Members Of Congress Are Descendants Of Rich Slaveholders appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • America’s Gangster-Empire Destroying the U.N.

    Virtually all of the U.S. Government’s economic sanctions violate the U.N.’s Charter — and do it with impunity.

    No legal case exists justifying America’s hundreds of economic sanctions laws that have been passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by the U.S. President but not authorized by the U.N. — which latter entity is the sole organization that writes and issues international laws. The U.S. International Trade Commission’s August 1998 “Overview and Analysis of Current U.S. Unilateral Economic Sanctions” lists, on its “Table ES-1” 51 such sanctions-laws imposed by the U.S. Government during 1987-1998, which legally have validity only in the United States but which that Government enforces as-if these are international laws, though its doing so constitutes international aggression, which likewise violates international law — from the U.N. (which has no enforcement-power; Harry Truman made it that way). Among the countries that are named there to be controlled or punished are Palestine, Burma (Myanmar), Cuba, Afghanistan, Cambodia, India, Laos, North Korea, Pakistan, Tibet, China, Serbia, Montenegro, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and others. Russia wasn’t added to the list until 2012, but, after that time, there have been so many anti-Russia sanctions laws passed by the U.S. Government so that when the Global Investigations Review issued on 13 November 2024 a study “Sanctions: the US Perspective”, they ignored the 2012 one, the Magnitsky Act, and started their list against Russia with Exec. Order 13662 issued by Obama on 20 March 2014, just a month after the U.S. coup that had installed a rabidly anti-Russian government in Ukraine, which started the long list of anti-Russia U.S. sanctions laws since.

    On December 16th, RT News headlined “Serbia announces talks with US and Russia on sanctions against oil major: The country’s president says the key goal of the upcoming talks will be to ensure energy security for his people”, and reported that,

    Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic has announced plans to hold talks with the US and Russia this week to dispute Washington’s proposed sanctions against his country’s main oil and gas company, Naftne Industrije Srbije (NIS).

    NIS is predominantly owned by Russian state energy major Gazprom. In an interview with Serbian broadcaster Informer TV on Saturday, Vucic revealed that the US was set to slap sanctions on NIS due to its Russian ownership. He said Belgrade had received confirmation of these plans from Washington, and that the measures could take effect as of January 1, 2025.

    In a video address posted on Instagram on Sunday, Vucic reiterated that such plans exist, and said the matter had already been discussed with BIA, Serbia’s national security service.

    “We discussed what we managed to obtain as official information that sanctions will be imposed on NIS by the US and some other countries. We discussed how to act in this situation, how to react, and how to ensure the safety of Serbian citizens,” he stated, adding that the Serbian authorities plan to “initiate negotiations with the Americans, Russians and everyone else” as early as Monday. …

    This is typical of the aggressions that the U.S. Government carries out by means of illegal international sanctions instead of by illegal coups or by illegal invasions — all of which this regime does with impunity. This means that the U.N. — the only legitimate source of international war — is publicly exposed as being merely a talking-forum, no government at all that’s behind its ‘laws’ (which are meaningless as regards being applied to the U.S. Government). This is a gangster world-order now.

    The 271-page academic book Economic Sanctions in International Law and Practice, published in 2020, opens with a Preface, which says

    Part I is focused on generic legal considerations. Chapter 1 (Masahiko Asada) discusses the definition and legal justifications of economic sanctions. As exemplified by the ICJ suit recently brought by Iran against the United States, economic sanctions may possibly “violate” rules of international law applicable to their authors and targets. The chapter examines how the authors can legally justify their per se illegal sanctions. … Chapter 4 (Mirko Sossai) discusses the difficult question of legality of extraterritorial application of sanctions. Unlike UN sanctions, the imposition of autonomous

    sanctions may cause legal problems not only between the author and the target

    States but also between the author and third States. Controversy has centered on

    the legality of secondary sanctions applied by the United States on entities in

    other counties that have transactions with the entities under primary sanctions.

    The Introduction to Chapter 4 says:

    The application of secondary sanctions, targeting activities of non-US persons with no connection to the US, has proven highly controversial. Insofar as they constitute exercise of jurisdiction on an extraterritorial basis, they raise concerns from the viewpoint of international law, as they may violate, inter alia, the principle of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other States.6

    The European refusal to recognize the effects of this type of sanction is not a new phenomenon: the Blocking Regulation was originally approved in 1996-7 to counteract the effects of certain extraterritorial sanctions adopted by the US vis-à-vis Cuba, Libya, and Iran. At that time, similar initiatives were undertaken by Canada and Mexico.8 The purpose of this chapter is to offer an overview of the different generations of the US “extraterritorial sanctions,” with a focus on the different positions concerning their legality from an international law viewpoint.

    The Chapter proper says:

    If autonomous sanctions – either adopted by individual states or by regional organizations – coexist with UN sanctions, then a key question arises as to whether the former should be qualified as enforcement measures on the basis of UN sanctions or, rather, as additional measures, whose legality needs to be appreciated under general international law. In this second scenario, autonomous sanctions may be regarded as acts of retorsion if they constitute “unfriendly” conduct not inconsistent with any international obligation; if unlawful, they can be justified as countermeasures.

    Notice that it doesn’t place that word “justified” in skeptical form, as ‘justified’, but instead it presumes that the U.S. Government definitely ISN’T violating international law with these “autonomous [i.e., NOT authorized in international law] sanctions.” (This DESPITE the book’s Preface’s having acknowledged that these are “per se illegal sanctions”.) (FURTHERMORE, if “The chapter examines how the authors can legally justify their per se illegal sanctions,” then where does it do that? It doesn’t — it doesn’t even TRY to.)

    The Chapter focuses not on the U.S. Government’s sanctions against Russia, but mainly on President Trump’s withdrawal from Obama’s Iran nuclear deal or  JCPOA and his re-institution of anti-Iran sanctions, and it never gets around to, as the book’s Preface promised that it would, “discusses the difficult question of legality of extraterritorial application of sanctions. Unlike UN sanctions, …” The entire 271-page book ignores that question (‘the difficult question of legality of extraterritorial application of sanctions’). (And what’s ‘diffiicult’ about it is that since these are NOT U.N.-authorized sanctions they’re referring to, they’re per se illegal; and, so, this task isn’t “difficult” — it is logically IMPOSSIBLE.)

    They don’t want to deal with it, because they serve the U.S. regime. However, when the book uses in its Preface the phrase, referring to Chapter 1, “The chapter examines how the authors can legally justify their per se illegal sanctions,” it is already acknowledging that America’s sanctions that DON’T have U.N. authorization ARE, in fact (they call it “per se,” meaning, “in themselves”) ILLEGAL under international law. It’s the unspoken — and unspeakable — reality. Why does the book ignore this? For the same reason why the U.S. regime gets away with doing it: this is a mono-polar world order, NOT under the U.N. as being that “pole” (as FDR had been planning for the U.N. to be) but instead under the U.S. regime as being that “pole” (as Truman made it to be). And, so, of course, it is actually a world in which the enemy is, from the U.S. standpoint, the entire rest of the world, and, from the rest of the world’s standpoint, it is the U.S. Government itself. Every other Government must accommodate itself to the demands that are being made by the U.S. Government. The ones that don’t, become thereby targeted for “regime-change.” This is an international-gangster regime. It insists upon making every other country “a deal it cannot refuse.”

    The post America’s Gangster-Empire Destroying the U.N. first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • A Gift America Can’t Return

    The American police state has become America’s new crime boss.

    Thirty years after then-President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act into law, its legacy of mass incarceration, police militarization, and over-criminalization continues to haunt us.

    It has become the gift that America can’t seem to return.

    We are now suffering the blowback from the triple threats of the Crime Bill: police militarization, a warrior mindset that has police viewing the rest of the citizenry as enemy combatants, and law enforcement training that teaches cops to shoot first and ask questions later.

    Too often, that “triple threat” also manifests itself in deadly traffic stops, the use of excessive force against unarmed individuals, and welfare checks turned fatal.

    The Crime Bill fueled the rise of the police state by pouring funding into law enforcement agencies, particularly for military-grade weaponry and the expansion of police forces. It also laid the groundwork for mass incarceration by incentivizing the construction of more prisons and enacting harsh “three strikes” laws that mandated lengthy sentences for repeat offenders.

    Most critically, the Crime Bill led to the explosive growth of SWAT teams across the country.

    It’s estimated that more than 80,000 SWAT raids are carried out every year. That translates to over 200 every single day in the U.S.

    Among the tens of thousands of raids that leave in their wake the wreckage of lives, homes and trust in the nation’s so-called peacekeepers, some are so egregious as to cut through the apathy and desensitization that has settled over the nation regarding police violence.

    Such tragedies are not isolated incidents.

    They are the direct result of a system built on policies like the 1994 Crime Bill.

    The unfortunate reality we must come to terms with is that America is overrun with militarized cops—vigilantes with a badge—who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.”

    It doesn’t matter where you live—big city or small town—it’s the same scenario being played out over and over again in which government agents, hyped up on their own authority and the power of their uniform, ride roughshod over the rights of the citizenry.

    These warrior cops, who have been trained to act as judge, jury and executioner in their interactions with the public and believe the lives (and rights) of police should be valued more than citizens, are increasingly outnumbering the good cops, who take seriously their oath of office to serve and protect their fellow citizens, uphold the Constitution, and maintain the peace.

    In this way, the old police motto to “protect and serve” has become “comply or die.”

    This is the unfortunate, misguided, perverse message that has been beaten, shot, tasered and slammed into our collective consciousness over the past few decades, and it has taken root.

    This is how we have gone from a nation of laws—where the least among us had just as much right to be treated with dignity and respect as the next person (in principle, at least)—to a nation of law enforcers (revenue collectors with weapons) who treat “we the people” like suspects and criminals.

    As a result, Americans of every age and skin color are continuing to die at the hands of a government that sees itself as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence.

    The problem, as one reporter rightly concluded, is “not that life has gotten that much more dangerous, it’s that authorities have chosen to respond to even innocent situations as if they were in a warzone.”

    Warrior cops—trained in the worst-case scenario and thus ready to shoot first and ask questions later—are definitely not making us or themselves any safer.

    Worse, militarized police increasingly pose a risk to anyone undergoing a mental health crisis or with special needs whose disabilities may not be immediately apparent or require more finesse than the typical freeze-or-I’ll-shoot tactics employed by America’s police forces.

    Indeed, disabled individuals make up a third to half of all people killed by law enforcement officers. (People of color are three times more likely to be killed by police than their white counterparts.)

    If you’re black and disabled, you’re even more vulnerable.

    This is America’s new normal.

    Like the Ghost of Christmas Past, the 1994 Crime Bill haunts us with its legacy of injustice. Its Ghost of Christmas Present shows us the ongoing struggles with police brutality and mass incarceration. And its Ghost of Christmas Future warns us of a society where over-policing and surveillance become the norm.

    So how do we counter the triple threats posed by the Crime Bill?

    Despite the outcry from those on the left, the answer is not to de-fund the police, although it wouldn’t hurt to loosen the military industrial complex’s chokehold on America.

    What we really need to do is de-fang the police: de-militarize (reduce the reliance on military-grade equipment and tactics), de-weaponize, and focus on de-escalation tactics (prioritizing communication and conflict resolution skills over the use of force), a shift in mindset (moving away from the “warrior” mentality towards a guardian or community policing model), and better accountability.

    As with all things, change must start locally, in your hometown.

    Remember, a police state does not come about overnight. It starts small, perhaps with a revenue-generating red light camera at an intersection. When that is implemented without opposition, perhaps next will be surveillance cameras on public streets. License plate readers on police cruisers. More police officers on the beat. Free military equipment from the federal government. Free speech zones and zero tolerance policies and curfews. SWAT team raids. Drones flying overhead.

    No matter how it starts, however, as I make clear in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, it always ends the same.

    The post A Gift America Can’t Return first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Fall of the Keystone in the Axis of Resistance

    For most of the time since its 1946 independence from France, Syria has resisted all attempts to make it a vassal state. It has paid dearly, as a target of subversion, war, occupation and the most onerous economic sanctions in the world, for its anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, its support for resistance to the occupation of Palestine and its participation in the Axis of Resistance, consisting of the Palestinian resistance groups, Hezbollah, Syria, the Iraqi resistance, Iran, and Yemen (Ansarallah), as well as allied countries and movements in the Arab, Muslim and anti-imperialist world. In this axis, Syria has been a keystone, both geographically and strategically. Removal of this keystone will mean a withering and weakening of the axis to the east and west of Syria, most dramatically in the case of Hezbollah, which loses its most essential lifeline for supplies and support, chiefly from Iran. And it is also why this loss becomes a life preserver thrown to an otherwise floundering state of Israel.

    Until November 26, 2024, Israel was failing in almost every way. Even after enduring more than a year of genocide against the civilian population of Gaza, Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza remained as effective a force as ever, despite its reliance on weapons made in its own underground workshops from recycled and captured Israeli ordnance and other materials. In fact, the genocide assured a constant flow of volunteers to its doors, a supply of materials for its workshops, and a network of eyes and ears throughout Gaza.

    The result was a guerrilla war of attrition for which the Israeli military, built and structured to deliver rapid, overwhelming blows to destroy its adversaries, was not prepared, nor to which it adapted. Losses were not huge, but they were more than Israel had previously suffered, and it seemed without end, including both soldiers and major ground equipment, such as tanks, armored personnel carriers and lightly armored bulldozers. Furthermore, Israel was simultaneously engaged in a second protracted armed conflict with a well-armed, well-trained and battled-hardened (in Syria) Hezbollah force in Lebanon, which had driven out the Jewish settler population in the north of Israel and had struck numerous military and intelligence gathering targets in the same area and beyond, with considerable effect.

    In the meantime, Yemeni Ansarallah “Houthi” forces interdicted shipping from Asia through the Red Sea to the Israeli port of Eilat, and attacked the port with missiles, forcing it to close, and the ships to go around Africa and back through the Mediterranean, restricting and delaying the supply of goods and spare parts and making them more costly – or making them unprofitable to ship at all.

    Much of the rest of the world also lost its taste for trade with Israel due to the stigma of its genocide in Gaza. The relatively important tourist industry dried up, as did investment. Even the arms industry slackened. A blank check from the US allowed Israel to keep its citizens supplied with paychecks and with sufficient products and services to buy, but at least 48,000 businesses closed, including agriculture in the north and in the Gaza “envelope”.

    The toll on Israel was the greatest and longest in its history of warfare. Israel keeps most of its casualty figures hidden, but it admits to more than 27,000 removed from combat due to wounds suffered. Including deaths on all fronts, the casualty total is, therefore, necessarily above 30,000, almost all military, while Israel’s targets in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are overwhelmingly civilian and more than half women and children. The Israeli military has complained that it is 20% short of the number of combat troops needed, and increasing numbers of exhausted reservists are refusing to serve. Although Gaza has lost an estimated 10% of its population to genocide, Israel has lost a similar proportion to emigration since October 8, 2023.

    This was the state of Israel on November 25, 2024. Would Israel still exist after another year of this? There was reason to doubt its stamina. But the following day a truce was declared with Lebanon. There is no doubt that both Hezbollah and the Israeli military were exhausted and heavily damaged. The truce was not directly with Hezbollah but rather with the Lebanese government, because Hezbollah, in addition to its role as a defender against its aggressive neighbor to the south, participates in what is in practice a loosely consensus government, and it wants to be seen as respecting the will of all the parties.

    Initially, the truce only stanched the blood on both sides of the border, and allowed both sides to halt their losses. Unfortunately, its true purpose had been determined months and even years earlier, by Turkiye, the US, Israel and their mercenary and mostly takfiri proxies in Syria. It was to make way for resumption of the war against the Syrian government, which started in 2011 but had been largely on hold since 2020. As we know now, the takfiri mercenaries, backed by Turkiye, US/NATO and Israel and furnished with the latest electronic and drone technology, quickly overwhelmed the Syrian forces, which had been weakened by years of debilitating economic sanctions and the flight of largely economic refugees, such that only half of its original population of 23 million remained. There are some reports that the operation was planned for the spring of 2025 but had been moved forward because of the losses being suffered by Israel, both economically and on the battlefield, and its internal political turmoil, as well as abandonment by a significant proportion of Zionist supporters, both through departure from Israel and from the international Jewish community.

    Each of the participants in the plan had its own objectives, which are now coming to fruition in greater or lesser measure. For the takfiri forces, subsidized, trained and armed by Turkiye, the CIA, the Pentagon, and to a lesser extent Ukrainian military advisors, the Israeli military, Mossad, and radical Islamist groups in the Arabian and other countries, the objective was to conquer Syria and create a regime based on a radical and racist version of Islam shunned by most of the Muslim world. They had been recruited from at least 82 countries around the world, with the largest number from central Asia and the Arab world, including Syria, where they and their families formed a radical militant minority of 5-10% of the Syrian population allied with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda and its affiliates and offshoots, such as ISIS/ISIL, that had been attempting for decades to establish a regime in Damascus that would enforce its Draconian laws on the rest of the population. In the areas of Syria that they had captured off and on since 2011, they showed what such rule might be like, by slaughtering and enslaving much of the non-Muslim, non-Sunni and more secularized Muslim population. Some of that has recommenced in the newly “liberated” territory during the last two weeks, despite attempts in the Western media to make them appear more tolerant. It remains to be seen how useful their sponsors will consider them to be now that their main role has been completed.

    In the case of Turkiye, one of the major sponsors, the goals are to resettle its 3.5 million Syrian refugee population back in Syria, to capture the northern portion of Syrian territory for itself, and to reward the Turkmen and Uyghur fighters, which it recruited from central Asia, with land inside Syria, displacing the existing population with one loyal to Turkiye. In addition, Turkiye seeks to crush and displace the Syrian Kurdish population along the northern and northeastern Syrian frontier, which it considers to be terrorists in league with Turkiye’s own suppressed Kurdish population. Turkiye already is calling Aleppo its 82nd province and taking military action against the Syrian Kurds, especially in the western Kurdish communities.

    Syria’s Kurdish population is itself a complex participant in the fighting. Although it has maintained a largely autonomous enclave in the northeast portion of Syria under the protection of US occupying forces, it has had nonbelligerent relations with the Assad government, which asked the Kurds to help defend Syria in the early years, and on at least one occasion offered to defend them against Turkish and takfiri forces that were invading Kurdish areas. The aim of the US sponsors of the Kurds, on the other hand, was to deny Syria sovereignty over its petroleum fields and wheat production area, in order to destroy the economy and ultimately replace the government with a compliant puppet regime. In their otherwise desperate situation, the Kurds could hardly turn away the US offer of support. The US has tried to restrain the Kurds from attacks against Turkiye, a NATO ally, but not entirely successfully, and the Kurdish leaders are drawn more from the recent immigrants/refugees from Turkiye rather than the more established population, which had stronger ties to the Assad government. Unfortunately for the Kurds, the US government now has somewhat less reason to support them after the fall of the Assad government, since that was the main reason was for their backing. Nevertheless, the larger neighboring Kurdish community in Iraq is a strong ally of the US and NATO, which may be reason enough for the US to continue support. In addition, the US may consider the Syrian Kurds to be a useful tool in restraining Turkiye’s obvious regional ambitions under Erdogan.

    There is no doubt that Israel and its US patron gained the most from the fall of Syria, which had been an objective for many decades, and which was a very high priority for Israel, as described at the beginning of this piece. It arguably rescued Israel from total collapse. Besides removing the major remaining frontline belligerent state with Israel, the loss of Syria severed the supply line between Iran and Iraq on the east from Lebanon and the Mediterranean on the west. This means that troops and supplies can no longer easily pass from Iran to Hezbollah. Although Hezbollah retains much of its still unused formidable capability for the time being, it is likely to degrade over time, enabling Israel to reinstate the security of its border with Lebanon and making it safe for the refugees from the northern settlements, currently living in temporary housing, mostly in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to return to their homes, as soon as they are repaired and rebuilt.

    The takfiri seizure of Syria has also enabled Israel to destroy most of Syria’s stored weaponry and munitions in a massive aerial bombing campaign, using the vast quantity of bunker-buster and other bombs and missiles supplied by the US during the last 14 months. The Syrian stores are not only a supply that Hezbollah might have been able to use, but also one that the unpredictable takfiris might eventually decide to use against Israeli forces, should they be so inclined. It has also been an opportunity for Israel to capture additional territory, including the “disputed” Lebanese Shebaa farms region along the border of Lebanon, as well as much of the hitherto unoccupied portion of the Golan Heights, with strategic Mt. Hermon (Jabal al-Sheikh), the highest peak in the region, that has remained under Syrian control until now.

    From Israel’s point of view, the disappearance of a very strategic member of the Axis of Resistance and the weakening of Hezbollah also means that Israel regains control of its northern border and will not have to devote as many troops to its defense. This in turn means that the refugee Israeli population that had to abandon its homes along the frontier can now return, although many of them will have to be repaired or rebuilt.

    These developments are also likely to reduce or stop the flight from Israel, and perhaps restore confidence in Israel’s leadership and its aims. Foremost among these is the depopulation of the Gaza Strip, using some of the military forces released from the northern frontier, and its repopulation with Israeli settlers. Although Israel’s genocidal policies have alienated much of the world, as well as a growing portion of the Jewish diaspora, Israel retains a hardcore Zionist faithful who encourage and approve of its actions, and its network of sayanim and influencers in the US and other societies and governments, coordinated by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, continues to be enormously effective in delivering to Israel whatever it may need to accomplish its goals, regardless of the views of the electorate in these countries, which are in any case heavily influenced by pro-Zionist media and censorship.

    There is, finally, yet another potential benefit to Israel in the not-so-distant future. In 1967, General Moshe Dayan proclaimed at the end of the June war that Israel had achieved all of its [immediate] territorial aims – except in Lebanon. This objective, and especially southern Lebanon, had been a coveted Zionist territory since before the founding of Israel in 1948, not least because of its access to the Litani river, the largest in the eastern Mediterranean. At least four times since then, Israel has invaded the region, emptying it of most of its population of more than a million inhabitants. Each time, the resistance in Lebanon eventually repelled and defeated the incursion. With the fall of Syria, however, and the probable reduction of strength of Hezbollah, this objective now becomes more realistic and more likely in the coming years.

    For the United States, the fall of Syria means a major realignment of power in West Asia, a highly important part of the globe, both strategically and for its energy production. It empowers Turkiye, Israel and other US allies in the region. It disempowers Russia, Hezbollah and Iran, and it opens the possibility of assuring that the Gulf monarchies remain in its stable, while discouraging resistance. It also potentially allows the US to reduce its forces in the region and to send them to East Asia, where it has been postponing its planned confrontation with China. For Yemen and the Ansarallah movement, little changes immediately. Its partnership with Iran will undoubtedly remain, but over time its support of the Palestinian resistance may be affected if and when that resistance weakens.

    The loss of Syria is therefore a major victory for Zionism and imperialism in West Asia, and a major defeat for the Axis of Resistance and the independence, self-determination and sovereignty of nation states, both in the region and potentially across the globe.

    The post The Fall of the Keystone in the Axis of Resistance first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Joe Biden Is an Accomplice to the Slaughter of Thousands of Palestinian Children

    Joe Biden should be tried and convicted of illegally providing American bombs and planes for genocide, but not before being forced to watch videos of some of the thousands of Palestinian kids murdered or maimed by Biden’s bombs and warplanes. Let Biden see the blank look of horror of a temporarily surviving Palestinian child alongside the bloodied dead body of its mother, father, brother, sister, playmate, auntie, uncle, grandad, grandma, or as often enough all of them killed by the same blockbuster bomb.

    Let the condemnable President of the United States of American brutality be seen on the cover of Time magazine as ‘Man of the Year.’ Let Americans become aware of the reality of their government’s horrific crime against humanity. Though there is currently an international arrest warrant for Biden’s partner in the crime of genocide, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the International Criminal Court lets Biden off the hook.                    

    Also let the rest of the world know the truth that the TV entertainment/news conglomerates under U.S.-CIA control, by their world wide audience via satellites, make every effort to obscure the mass murderous nature of the U.S. government.

    Currently criminal Western media keeps focusing their tele-broadcasting time on the hostages held by Palestinian freedom fighters for a second exchange for some more of Israel’s thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons.                    

    While the world watched and students protested as Israel committed genocide with American bombs turning the cities of Gaza into rubble, the Biden presidency vetoed ceasefires in Gaza commanded by the United Nations Security Council last year on October 18, October 25, November 8, November 20, and November 28.

    On November 22 of this year, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accusing him of crimes that include “starvation as a method of warfare,” Just two days later the Biden administration again vetoed the latest UN Security Council resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza that even France and Britain voted in favour of.

    China’s senior envoy, Fu Cong, asked: “Do Palestinian lives mean nothing?”

    For Biden and his cohorts, the Israeli users of the lethal American weapons provided, Palestinian lives must mean less than nothing. Some Israeli soldiers’ social media have shown soldiers laughing like hyenas in videos of themselves cheering the genocidal destruction on. More than 50 thousand Palestinians under illegal militarily occupation, mostly women and children have already been put to death, while another 11 thousand or more lie buried beneath the ruins of their homes, and hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza suffer the life endangering pangs of hunger that bring disease, dysentery, and fatal results of starvation and malnutrition.

    The Face of Good ol’ Joe Biden

    What does this caricature of a human being see when it looks in a mirror? This monster of pitiless death and destruction sees not the creature thrown up from Hell that seeks to help Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu annihilate all Palestinian life in Gaza and the West Bank, but rather the jovial face of a human being deceptively presenting himself as a likeable father figure.

    Don’t be fooled! Joe Biden is a serial destroyer of human life on Earth, and Biden didn’t start in October of last year.

    Previously Joe Biden as Senator Made War on Iraq Possible

    We knew Joe Biden as a super ‘yes man’ of the war and weapons investors complex deep state already when as Senator and Chair of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden vociferously called for the invasion of Iraq, even though it would be a war of the opposing party Republican President George Bush Junior. Senator Biden embraced an ultrahawkish position on Iraq, already in March 2000, Joe Biden said at a Senate hearing that if Iraq refused weapons inspections, he “would introduce a resolution calling for the use of force by the United States of America, if we have to do it alone, to go after Saddam Hussein.” (Congressional Quarterly,March 2000)

    In October 2002, he voted in favor of the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq, approving the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

    In September 2004, then-United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan stated, “I have indicated that it is not in accordance with the UN charter. From our point of view and the UN Charter point of view, it [the war] was illegal.”

    Fast forward

    “Iraq conflict has killed a million”, says survey

    By Reuters, January 30, 2008 (Updated 17 years ago)

    LONDON, Jan 30 (Reuters) – More than one million Iraqis died as a result of the conflict in their country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, according to research conducted by one of Britain’s leading polling groups, (The survey was conducted by Opinion Research Business ORB), but Biden’s Gaza genocide, so widely and graphically tele-broadcasted all around the world makes him someone to be remembered for representing the intensive cruelty of the American government and the deadly indifference of the American public.

    America’s most famous critic, 96-year-old Noam Chomsky, has said repeatedly that all the U.S. presidents after Franklin Roosevelt would have been hanged if tried under the same laws the Nazis were tried under. With his Palestinian Gaza genocide Joe Biden seems to have outdone all of them in extreme mortal cruelty, except possibly Harry Truman, who had atomic bombs dropped on two cities. But Biden has the distinction of having been able to watch his provisioned genocidal  daily and nightly horror go on for 14 months.

    May Joe Biden Be Condemned To Watch Videos of the Thousands of Adorable Palestinian Children He Has Had Murdered.

    May Americans be made aware of the genocide of their president.

    May the Global South be empowered to stop it and learn from it.

    On January 20, another president might continue to provide for the inhuman mass butchery of women and children. Trump has warned of consequences if the hostages are not released, but tellingly made no mention of the more than 50 thousand dead Palestinians.

    Let’s hope and agitate for a termination of the Gaza genocide and the usurping of Palestinian land.

    The post Joe Biden Is an Accomplice to the Slaughter of Thousands of Palestinian Children first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Pete Hegseth Is a Terrible Choice for Defense Chief

    The national organization Veterans For Peace, with chapters in over 100 US cities, is calling on US Senators to vote NO on Pete Hegseth for US Defense Secretary, should President-elect nominate him.
    Veterans For Peace is astounded that someone with the track record of Pete Hegseth would seriously be considered for the critically important role of US Secretary of Defense. His dubious and questionable qualifications are far overshadowed by the many reasons that should disqualify him. These include a well-documented record of misogyny, sexual assault, white supremacy, Islamophobia, financial malfeasance, alcoholism, and opposition to VA healthcare. Are these the qualities we want in our Secretary of Defense?
    Misogyny
    Hegseth’s long-running abusive behavior toward women – even decried by his own mother – should be more than enough to disqualify him.  His stated intention to reverse progress for women and gays in the military was only reversed by him in recent days, after pressure from key women Senators whose votes he needs if he is to be confirmed as Defense Secretary.  Can he be trusted to defend the rights of women and LGBTQ+ people in the military? Would he challenge the rampant sexual abuse within the military today?
    White Supremacy / Islamophobia
    Pete Hegseth sports tattoos on his body that are associated with White Supremacy.  In January 2021, Hegseth was one of 12 national guardsmen flagged as potential insider threats and removed from a group providing security for the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden, after a fellow Guard member reported he had a tattoo on his biceps reading “Deus Vult,” a phrase associated with the Crusades and, in the 21st century, with white supremacists. Hegseth has said that his National Guard superiors removed him because of his Jerusalem Cross tattoo, a Christian symbol which they determined was connected to extremism.
    Post Traumatic Stress / Alcoholism
    Pete Hegseth’s bouts with binge drinking and public drunkenness at formal organizational events have been widely reported. On one such occasion, he was heard shouting “Kill All Muslims.”  Was it the alcohol talking?  Islamophobia?  Or both? As a national guardsman, Hegseth served at Guantanamo Bay and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Veterans For Peace recognizes that many veterans who experience Post Traumatic Stress, Traumatic Brain Injury, or Moral Injury have difficulty returning to civilian life, and have problems with alcohol and antisocial behavior. They need professional help, not the additional stress associated with US war-making.
    A Voice of Restraint? Or Nuclear War?
    Pete Hegseth should not be making critical defense decisions for the largest military in the world, particularly at this dangerous moment of superpower confrontation and nuclear brinksmanship. The very existence of human civilization is imperiled. Would Pete Hegseth be able to provide the president with wise counsel regarding ending the war in Ukraine? Could he stop sending US weapons to fuel the horrific genocide in Gaza? Would he put a brake on the Neocon drive for wars against China and Iran? Could he be a responsible check on a president’s decision to use nuclear weapons?  We fear that the answer to these questions is No.
    Financial Mismanagement
    Pete Hegseth has a track record of “failing upward.” He has been demoted and forced to resign from several veterans organization and PAC’s, after failing to raise funds, and spending as much as half of the organizations’ funds on Christmas parties for families and friends. Arguably, the stupendous and ever-growing Pentagon budget, which just failed its 7th audit in a row, and for which there is remarkably little accountability, might be the perfect piggy bank for Pete Hegseth.
    Hegseth Threatens VA Healthcare
    Of particular concern to many veterans is Hegseth’s opposition to VA healthcare. He supports “outsourcing” – or privatizing VA healthcare – a concerted goal of the Koch brothers-funded Concerned Veterans of America, which Hegseth headed up from 2013-16.  For all its shortcomings, the Veterans Administration continues to provide excellent healthcare to millions of veterans, who rely on it and greatly appreciate it.  Undermining, defunding and privatizing healthcare is an attack on all veterans, as well as an attack on the healthcare system, for which the VA provides one of the very best models. Senators who are interviewing Pete Hegseth should ask him why he would dismantle VA healthcare in favor of the failing private healthcare model.
    Poll: Pete Hegseth should not be Secretary of Defense
    Veterans For Peace’s opposition to confirming Pete Hegseth as US Defense Secretary is shared by most Americans, only 20% of whom approve, according to a recent poll.  Will our Senators get the message?  We should make sure that they do.
    The post Pete Hegseth Is a Terrible Choice for Defense Chief first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • While The US Provokes Chaos, China Promotes Economic Development

    While the United States provokes conflicts across the world, China has promoted economic development, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, building infrastructure, and encouraging win-win cooperation. Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by Beijing-based scholar Mick Dunford to discuss the significance of the 75th anniversary of the Chinese revolution.

    In this episode of Geopolitical Economy Hour, Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson are joined by Beijing-based scholar Mick Dunford to discuss the significance of the 75th anniversary of the Chinese revolution.

    The post While The US Provokes Chaos, China Promotes Economic Development appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • From Relative “Peace” to Chaos

    Liberals and their Western allies, among the social-imperialist left in the U.S. and Europe, are celebrating the end of the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria after the stunning sweep across the country by so-called “rebels” led by the Al-Qaeda offshoot, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS).  Their celebratory mood is informed by a tragic misunderstanding of what appears to be more of a coup d’etat in Syria than a military defeat. This was a coup orchestrated to replace the Syrian government with this coalition of Jihadists, which included the Turkish-supported Syrian National Army (SNA) and a coterie of depoliticized religious and gangster elements from the country’s Southeast. Instead of a new era of peace, stability and prosperity for the Syrian people, now that the “dictator” is gone, the opposite will be true.  Just ask the people of Libya who were also “liberated” by NATO and Western-backed forces.

    This is not to suggest that the events that unfolded since the HTS captured the city of Aleppo during this new phase of the war on Syria can be completely explained by the machinations of external forces. We are very much aware of the complex internal politics of Syria and the contradictory and outright reactionary, politics of the Syrian state at different points, such as the invasion of Beirut and persecution of leftists in Syria and Lebanon.

    However, we must also remember that this set of events in Syria was sparked by the clumsy and predictable interventions of the U.S. to foment a new front through  the Western media-created  “Arab Spring.” The real character of the “Arab Spring” was revealed when it became clear that many of the activists were embracing, as a model of progress, the historically moribund forms of liberal capitalist democracy.

    It must be noted that pro-democracy agitation and rebellion within Syria against the corruption of Ba’athism – the right-wing movement, constructed to counter authentic leftism in the Arab world – created conditions in which organized left resistance was making progress in challenging Assad’s rule.  And despite calls from his more aggressive advisors and local political authorities to crack down in the style of his father, Assad actually started to provide some limited political space for opposition forces and the beginnings of a dialog on much needed reforms.

    Unfortunately, the potential of the moment to expand more democratic space and alter the correlations of power inside the country was destroyed when the “revolutionary” romantics, the Syrian petit-bourgeoisie opposition, guided by idealistic and subjectivist notions of how revolution is made, decided to accelerate the historical process and support a premature and, ultimately, disastrous call to move from non-violent opposition to armed struggle against the state. Only the most naive or dishonest actors will argue that the abandonment of the political struggle for democratic reform in favor of a U.S-sponsored  armed revolt did not play right into the subversive plans of the U.S. and Israel to, at minimum, weaken the Syrian state and, ultimately effect regime change.  Despite the confusion and contradictions marking what has unfolded over the past few days in Syria, he bloody and destructive goal is clear: war has been imposed on the people of Syria. This war began a long time ago, as  U.S. and Gulf State intelligence agencies armed and trained various elements within Syrian society, including militant Islamicists, to foment sectarian violence. Consequently, the  forces that received the lion’s share of the external military support were groups such as the  Al-Nusra Front (connected to al-Qaeda) in the Western part of the country, ISIS in the East, with the democratic and more moderate elements of the opposition groups being marginalized. But this was all according to plan. After all, Obama, in initiating the war on Syria, argued that the opposition, “made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth,” could not take on Assad alone. And, per the revelations from Obama’s Director of Intelligence General Michael Flynn, there was a willful decision to enhance the capabilities of various brutal Islamic forces in Syria.

    The objective fact that HTS is essentially the rebranded al-Nusra front is one of those unpleasant realities that the anti-anti-imperialist “left” celebrating the fall of Assad tries to either skip over. It’s just as insidious as how these same unprincipled and performative “leftists”  continue to whitewash the literal Nazi and extreme right-wing forces that U.S. intelligence agencies engineered into to power in Ukraine in 2014, who, in turn,i mmediately launched a genocidal attack on their own Russian speaking Ukrainian citizens.

    The Syrian “civil war” was frozen by an agreement negotiated by the Russians in 2020 that allowed for the oppositional forces to retreat into the Iblid province in Northwest Syria and live in relative peace with the Syrian army. But what happened instead was the rearming of the opposition to be used at the moment most propitious to advance the interests of their paymasters.

    Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, stated that the jihadist offensive in Syria was coordinated by the US and Israel. According to the diplomat, it is no coincidence that these jihadists attacked northern Syria right after Israel struck a ceasefire deal with Hezbollah.

    Yet, “leftists” celebrating in the West, do not believe this reality and instead dismiss this analysis as a construction by the “campists” and the mindless Assadists. They refuse to recognize that the Jihadist “rebels” were outfitted with shiny new weapons and equipment to attack at the moment when the Russians are focused on Ukraine, and when Hezbollah is in need of weapons resupply across Syria from Iran. For these “leftists,” the success of the Jihadists only reflects the brilliance of the leadership or, as it were, the miracle of their new heroes in HTS.

    The Western White Left Continues to Play the Role of Unwanted Junior Partners to U.S. Imperialism

    Operating within the liberal idealist theoretical framework and with an unconscious propensity toward Eurocentrism, large sectors of the white left are completely unable to really grasp the “national question.” They certainly lack the ideological fitness to grasp Stalin’s materialist assertion that anti-colonialist, national liberation movements, even bourgeois ones, shifted the global balance of power away from Western capitalism. This ideological, and even cognitive, affliction renders most of the white left unable to ask the very simple question as to why, from Bolivia to Nicaragua, Peru, Ethiopia, Iran, and on to Ukraine, they always end up holding the same positions as U.S. and Western imperialism. This same white left is also unable to understand and, therefore, articulate the obvious when it comes to how members of their families, friends and colleagues can rationalize support for the genocide in Gaza:  it is the entrenched but invisiblized inculcation of white supremacist ideology that explains how Palestinians can be “othered” into oblivion, which is to say that Palestinians just do not really count as human beings.

    The fascists in Israel will continue their devastating genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the Occupied West Bank, and the white “left” will find ways to justify supporting the  Democratic party which has been enabling the genocide for over a year. This “left”  cries “Palestine must be free,” cheers the destruction of the only “Arab” state that has consistently stood with the Palestinians, but fall silent as Israeli tanks approach Damascus.

    Reports are emerging that the so-called glorious “liberators” are rounding up and murdering Syrian soldiers and officials. This is just the beginning. The blood of Syrians will flow along the Jordan River and the blood of Palestinians will continue to flow in tandem with the blood of Russians and Ukrainians. And many around the world will continue to suffer from the source of these red rivers:  the axis of imperialism formed by criminals from Western colonial nations.

    These myopic celebrations will continue in the U.S. and throughout the West among the so-called left every time another “enemy” of the U.S. falls – until the tanks and “liberators” show up on their own streets painted in red, white, and blue.

    The post From Relative “Peace” to Chaos first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • US Healthcare Corporations Reap Profit From Human Misery

    The assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on December 4 has sparked a reaction that few may have suspected. The perpetrator has received an outpouring of popular support, and a profound debate on the brutality of the US for-profit healthcare system has been sparked, with many accusing healthcare corporations of reaping their profits directly from human misery.

    Thompson was shot and killed while heading to an investors meeting in Midtown Manhattan on December 4. Police have arrested 26-year-old Luigi Mangione in connection with the crime, who quickly has become a working class hero in the eyes of many in the US public, especially after his alleged manifesto revealed that he was motivated by outrage towards healthcare corporations.

    The post US Healthcare Corporations Reap Profit From Human Misery appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Incomplete Coverage of an Ominous Syrian Situation

    When Japan, already considered an enemy of the United States, sent its air force to U.S. territory and bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, the same date on the calendar that former opposition forces of the Iraq government entered Damascus, the U.S. government and media emphasized the more serious situation ─ the U.S. was at war with Japan. Press coverage and U.S. government response to the “fall” of the Assad government distracted from the serious situation ─ Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), successor to former Al-Qaeda affiliate, Al-Nusra Front, which the U.S. labelled a terrorist organization and enemy of the United States and previously fought to prevent gaining control of Syria, sent its forces to seize control of Syria.

    The conventional U.S. media treated the ominous events as a tale of the daily lives of two individuals — Abu Mohammad al-Jolani and Bashar al-Assad — Jesse James vs the evil banks. Amidst their entertaining stories are misinterpretations, lack of depth in analysis, and inattention to details. More valid discussion of a momentous event and where the United States is centered in the crisis are helpful.

    Bashar Assad had already fallen.
    With half the population displaced or out of the country, with sanctions depriving the people of energy, and with foreign forces wandering at will throughout the countryside, Syria navigated on fumes. Its government hardly breathed. Assad had already fallen. Considering the coming winter chill, he decided to change residences.

    The U.S. had no fingers in the cookie jar.
    What a whopper.

    • Is it a coincidence that the U.S. supported Syrian Democratic Forces launched an attack on villages in the northern countryside of Deir Al Zor province on Tuesday, December 3?
    • Is it a coincidence that, on Nov 12, U.S. Central Command in Eastern Syria said, “it had carried out attacks against ‘Iranian backed groups’ in Syria, hitting nine targets at two separate locations in the country over the previous 24-hour period.”
    • Didn’t the U.S. air force bomb, strafe, and repulse militias from the Iraq Popular Mobilization Forces, who tried to enter Iraq and assist the Syrian military?
    • Why did the “US A-10s, B-52s, target dozens of ISIS sites in Syria? Air Force planes dropped roughly 140 munitions on a ‘very broad’ gathering of ISIS fighters early Sunday morning (December 8).” Why weren’t the attacks done before the walkover? Obvious answer ─ previously the U.S. encouraged ISIS’ needling the Syrians. Now, Uncle Sam did not favor ISIS needling the new favorites in the neocon world.

    Another U.S. counterproductive and foreign policy failure.
    U.S. foreign policy initiatives have one common thread ─ counterproductive and homicidal.

    • Calculated to prevent North Vietnam from obtaining control of all of Vietnam, 10 years of war resulted in 1-2 million Vietnamese casualties and North Vietnam obtaining control of Vietnam.
    • Fifty years of a Cold War struggle, in which the United States inflicted casualties on millions around the world, designed to prevent the Soviet Union from extending its hammer and sickle and challenge U.S. hegemony, resulted in a Russia that extends its territory and vigorously challenges U.S. hegemony.
    • U.S. troops, sent on a mission to feed and stabilize Somalia, shot up the place, paved the road for al-Shabaab, a Salafi terrorist organization, and scurried out of an anarchic Somalia.
    • The U.S. fought twenty years in Afghanistan to replace the Taliban with…..the Taliban.
    • The U.S. invasion of a moribund Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, alleged as an opportunity to remove an international threat, triggered the emergence of a parade of international threats, which terrorized the Fertile Crescent, and solidified the Iraq Popular Mobilization Forces that challenge the U.S. in Iraq. These forces ally with Iran, which the U.S. State Department considers an international threat. The Iraq Body Count project documents 186,901 – 210,296 violent civilian deaths during the Iraq war. In 2007, due to sectarian violence that emerged from the U.S. invasion, Iraq had about 4 million displaced persons. Between January 2014 and August 2015, 2.9 million persons fled their homes in three new mass waves of displacement following offensives by ISIL.
    • Together with NATO, the U.S. replaced Muammar Gaddafi, who suppressed al-Qaeda terrorists, with the same terrorists, and engineered the creation and arming of several terrorists groups in North Africa.
    • After sending its military into Syria’s civil war, a war that estimated deaths at about 600 thousand, more than six million internally displaced, and around five million refugees, with defined purpose of preventing ISSIS from seizing control of Syria, the U.S. enabled Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the successor to al-Qaeda’s previous partner, Al-Nusra Front, to seize control of Syria.

    The release of dissidents from prisons was an incomplete story.
    Media attention to Saydnaya prison, “which had become synonymous with arbitrary detention, torture and murder,” would have been genuine if the same attention had been given to similar prisons in Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. The horrific incarcerations of dissidents in the three mentioned countries cannot be adequately described in less than a 1000 page book. Here are some details.

    Israel has, by magnitudes, exceeded Syria in the number of detainees of Palestinian dissidents.

    On 11 December 2012, the office of then-Prime Minister Salam Fayyad stated that since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians, or roughly 20% of the total population and 40% of the male population, had been imprisoned by Israel at one point in time. According to Palestinian estimates, 70% of Palestinian families have had one or more family members sentenced to jail terms in Israeli prisons as a result of activities against the occupation.

    From the New Yorker magazine, March 21, 2024, “The Brutal Conditions Facing Palestinian Prisoners”:

    Israel has also detained thousands of Palestinians from Gaza; prisoners who have described extensive physical abuse from Israeli forces, and, already, at least twenty-seven detainees from Gaza have died in military custody. At the same time, Israeli forces have arrested thousands more Palestinians, mostly from the West Bank, at least ten of whom have reportedly died in Israel prisons.

    The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (P.C.A.T.I.), a non-governmental organization, established in 1990, represents Palestinians and Israelis who claim to have been tortured by Israeli authorities. In the New Yorker article, they claim,

    We’re currently looking at almost ten thousand Palestinian detainees from the West Bank and Gaza…We know that the International Committee of the Red Cross (I.C.R.C.) has been banned from visiting all Israeli prisons since October 7th. We also know—through evidence that P.C.A.T.I. and other N.G.O.s have collected—of what we view as systemic abuse and violence by prison guards toward Palestinian detainees since October 7th. We’ve documented nineteen different incidents of torture and abuse in seven different Israel Prison Service (I.P.S.) facilities by different I.P.S. units, all of which have led us to believe that we’re looking at a policy rather than just isolated incidents.

    Although the number of arbitrary executions in Saydnaya prison is not known, much mention is made of the executions. Passing mention is made of the hundreds of arbitrary executions of Palestinians in the West Bank, shot while escaping Israeli military, and the tens of thousands murdered in Gaza.

    Where are investigations into the number of dissidents held in Saudi and Egypt jails. We read of constant executions in Saudi Arabia and pay no attention to the reports. No execution has matched the grisly slicing and dicing of Saudi journalist, Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi, “who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018 by agents of the Saudi government.”

    We now have good terrorists.
    Questioned, in a CNN interview, as to why the U.S. accepts HTS, designated a terrorist organization by the U.S. and with a $10m bounty on its leader, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan replied, “The group at the vanguard of this rebel advance, HTS, is actually a terrorist organization designated by the United States. So we have real concerns about the designs and objectives of that organization. At the same time, of course, we don’t cry over the fact that the Assad government, backed by Russia, Iran and Hezbollah, are facing certain kinds of pressure. So it’s a complicated situation.”

    Placed in words often described to the hypocritical U.S. government, “Yes, they are bad guys and they are a terrorist organization, but they are our bad guys and they are our terrorist organization.”

    We know where Assad is; where is the United States?
    Uncle Sam’s voices to the world give their usual empty and meaningless words to a packed and meaningful event — closely monitoring, historic opportunity, a moment of risk and uncertainty, work together with allies and partners to urge de-escalation and protect U.S. personnel and military positions, and strongly support a peaceful transition of power.

    The U.S. should be forced to answer why it did not use its power to prevent a Civil War that caused an estimated deaths of about 600 thousand, more than six million internally displaced, and around five million refugees, and why it has not used its power to insist that the more democratically inclined opposition in Syria be immediately given leading roles in the new Syrian government. Isn’t it dangerous to have Mohammed al-Bashir, a deputy in Abu Mohammad al-Jolani’s National Salvation Front, serve as “acting” prime minister for Syria’s transitional government. Will Mohammed al-Bashir “act” for one month, one year, or one decade?

    Israel has spoken forcefully; its terrorist country smells and recognizes another terrorist country. The U.S. has spoken by not speaking; it now has the clout of Albania in Middle East affairs.

    It’s becoming shameful to be a U.S. citizen.

    The post Incomplete Coverage of an Ominous Syrian Situation first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • PsiQuantum says Brisbane site on track as Chicago races ahead

    PsiQuantum says it is on track to break ground on the mammoth manufacturing and production facility for its attempts to build the world’s first utility- scale, fault-tolerant quantum computer in Australia. As work on a sister project in Chicago also races ahead, the Californian-based startup on Thursday said it had secured the Brisbane Airport site,…

    The post PsiQuantum says Brisbane site on track as Chicago races ahead appeared first on InnovationAus.com.

    This post was originally published on InnovationAus.com.

  • Who Should Get a Presidential Pardon but Won’t!

    President Joe Biden has pardoned his son, Hunter, after having repeatedly promised that he would not.  Biden justifies this act based upon his presumption (likely accurate) that Hunter’s denial of a plea deal was on account of political opposition from Trump Republicans.  Nevertheless, Hunter’s consideration for a lenient plea deal was undoubtedly influenced by his status (white privileged son of a prominent politician), whereas such leniency would be far less likely to be considered for a poor racial minority person guilty of similar crimes likewise motivated by the stresses of drug addiction.  Similar favoritism for family members manifested: with Bill Clinton’s pardon for his half-brother’s drug-crime conviction, and Donald Trump’s pardon for his son-in-law’s father’s conviction of tax evasion and witness-tampering.  Both Presidents Bush gave pardons to close political associates.  In fact, who does or does not receive leniency (including pardons) is determined almost entirely by class privilege or lack thereof.

    Abuse and impunity.

    Especially concerning, in the Hunter Biden case, is that said pardon preemptively covers all possible federal crimes with which Hunter could possibly be charged, if committed at any time during the past 11 years.  And there are unresolved questions concerning his shady business dealings during Joe Biden’s Vice-Presidency.  Moreover, unlike Biden, previous Presidents (including Trump) had (with the exception of the political crimes of one ex-President) always followed precedent by limiting their pardons to crimes for which the accused had been actually prosecuted.  Biden now sets a corrupt example which Trump will almost certainly copy as he (Trump) pardons those whose yet-to-be-charged crimes (including violent ones) were perpetrated by his supporters.

    Meanwhile, crimes perpetrated by Joe Biden and other US government decision-makers against people of color in other countries get, not lenient treatment, but absolute impunity.  Among their never-to-be-prosecuted crimes, Biden (and Harris) are full participants with the fascist settler-colonialist state in its genocidal mass murder, rooted in their de facto embrace of the proposition that Zionists are entitled to treat the resistant indigenous population of Palestine as white American expansionists had treated the indigenous nations of this continent.

    As for the liberal left, they (being more concerned over possibly somewhat increased repression of liberal dissent in the US than over actual US-backed fascist repression and mass murder elsewhere) shelved their anti-racism and anti-imperialism as they campaigned for the center right Harris-Walz-Cheney-Bolton ticket.  Left liberal fervor to elect the Democrat ticket was despite: Biden-Harris and other centrist Democrat politicians’ complicity in the existing domestic repression of pro-Palestine and other anti-imperialist dissent, as well as their decision to obstruct access to due process for most migrant and asylum-seeking people of color.  Thusly the liberal left has given its allegiance to centrist Democrat politicians, whose opposition to racism and repression is, like that of Trump, entirely expedient and selective.

    Will Biden provide clemency for US prisoners who are not of the privileged class?  Consider the US political prisoners, unjustly convicted in rigged political trials, victims who have languished for decades in US prisons!  As these were prosecuted on account of their having acted in opposition to the regime to which Biden et al are committed, it is very unlikely that Biden will pardon them.  Three current examples follow.

    [1] Extraordinary prosecution: Ricardo Palmera

    Context.  Colombia has been almost continuously torn apart by civil war since 1948 when Jorge Eliécer Gaitán (the populist Liberal Party candidate for President) was assassinated by a lone gunman.  As a proponent of land reform and with a history of advocacy for workers’ rights, Gaitán had incurred the enmity of the ruling elites and of US-based transnational capital.  At the time of his assassination, he was opposing the US project for the formation of the Organization of American States which would be a tool for facilitating US domination and for suppressing “Communist” influence in Latin America.  The assassination provoked armed civil conflict among political factions.  Eventually, rightwing forces gained control of the Liberal Party which then entered into a ruling coalition with the Conservative Party.  The conflict then evolved into one between:

    • the central government (controlled by the oligarch-dominated ruling coalition and relying upon police, armed forces, and right-wing paramilitaries); and
    • leftist guerrilla armies.

    The latter eventually consisted mainly of:

    • the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] which had begun as an offshoot of the Colombian Communist Party, and
    • the National Liberation Army [ELN].

    Both sides in this civil war had engaged in practices which were widely condemned as human rights violations: the FARC for ransom kidnappings and extortions; the government (and its rightwing paramilitary death squads) for brutal repression, torture, and assassinations of peasant and labor leaders and other noncombatant left-leaning activists.  The two sides had sometimes engaged in peace talks.  While a negotiated truce was in effect from 1984 until 1987, leftist groups (including the FARC) formed the Patriotic Union [UP] to seek social and political reforms thru peaceful political processes.  In the 1986 elections UP candidates achieved victories in many of the local contests.  The ruling oligarchs became alarmed, and over the following years some 4,000 to 6,000 UP members (including its 1986 and 1990 Presidential candidates) were murdered (with near-universal impunity) by rightwing paramilitaries backed by oligarchs.  The US has actively intervened (since 1964) with material assistance to the armed forces of the central government.  In 2004 the US targeted FARC negotiator Ricardo Palmera.

    Ricardo Palmera (a.k.a. Simón Trinidad) had worked as a professor of economic history and had participated in the 1986 UP election campaign.  As the death squads assassinated leftist leaders and activists with impunity, Palmera decided (in 1987) to join the FARC.  He rose to a position of leadership and served as a negotiator for the FARC during the 1998 to 2002 peace process.  He went to Quito, Ecuador (in 2004 January) to meet with James Lemoyne, a United Nations special advisor on peace processes to facilitate a prisoner exchange.  At the behest of the CIA, the Ecuadoran government arrested Palmera and turned him over to the Colombian government, which then conspired with the US (which had no charges against him at the time) to invent a case for his extradition for trial in the US.

    The case.  The US DoJ [Dept of Justice] then subjected Palmera to four illegitimate trials on inappropriate charges.  Specifics follow.

    (1) The US misclassified FARC revolutionaries as “terrorists”; but, under international law captured participants in a revolutionary civil war are entitled to prisoner-of-war [POW] status.  By prosecuting Palmera for participation in the armed conflict, the US has violated his right to POW status.

    (2) The prosecution charged complicity in hostage-taking based on the FARC’s shoot-down and capture of three US contractors on a reconnaissance mission over FARC-held territory in 2003.  Thus, the prosecution misrepresented a legitimate act of war as being a crime.

    (3) Even if the capture and detention of the contractors were a crime, the US had no jurisdiction over the area where the event occurred.  Moreover, Palmera had no command authority over the relevant FARC forces or advance knowledge of their operations.

    (4) The prosecution charged complicity in “narco-trafficking”, but US government sources had determined: that, although it taxed operators profiting from cocaine production, the FARC did not engage in or control Colombian drug trafficking; and that, meanwhile, many of the rightwing paramilitaries opposed to the FARC were employed by the drug traffickers.  In four trials the DoJ was unable to get a conviction on this accusation.

    (5) In the first trial (2006) the jury deadlocked on all charges.  At its conclusion the judge illicitly questioned the jurors in order to obtain information to help the prosecution obtain convictions in the next trial.  Consequently, a new judge had to be found for the subsequent trials.

    (6) In the second trial the jury told the judge that they were at an impasse and unable to agree upon a verdict.  The judge required them to continue deliberations until, after another four days, they consented to a guilty verdict on one of five counts – conspiracy to hold three US citizens hostage.  However, there was no evidence of any act by Palmera that involved the capture or detention of the three US citizens.  Consequently, this conviction could only be a verdict of guilt-by-association.

    (7) The third and fourth trials on narco-trafficking charges ended with deadlocked juries, and the prosecution then dismissed those charges.

    (8) In 2008 Palmera was sentenced to 60 years in prison.  He has been held in solitary confinement with very limited access to his lawyer for nearly all of his 20 years in US detention.

    [2] Repressing resistance in the First Nations: Leonard Peltier

     Historical context.  The US government has a long history of atrocious abuse of the indigenous nations and their peoples throughout its territory.  These abuses include: genocidal wars, ethnic cleansings, coerced assimilation with suppression of the native languages and cultures, forcing their peoples into conditions of degrading poverty, imposition of fraudulent and inequitable treaties, subjugation as subordinate nations, routine violations of treaty rights, corrupt governance, theft of their land and resources thru outright seizures and thru imposition of inequitable leases to US capitalists, and so forth.

    In mid-20th century, Amerindian resistance grew and produced a number of activist organizations.  The American Indian Movement [AIM] (founded in 1968) adopted a militant posture and gained nationwide prominence.  The poverty and lack of opportunity on reservations had induced many Amerindians to move to urban areas where they concentrated in urban slums and suffered the afflictions common to other disadvantaged racial minorities.  AIM responded by starting remedial projects: health programs, education and job training programs, legal rights centers, and so forth.  In 1969 AIM joined Fred Hampton’s original revolutionary Rainbow Coalition.  During the next few years AIM brought public attention to Amerindian grievances thru participation in a series of militant protest actions including: the occupation of Alcatraz (1969—71), the Thanksgiving Day occupation of the replica Mayflower (1970), the occupation of Mount Rushmore (1971), a brief occupation of US Bureau of Indian Affairs [BIA] headquarters (1971), the “Trail of Broken Treaties” cross-country caravan and protest which included the occupation of the BIA offices (1972).  The US Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] and DoJ decided that AIM was a “threat to national security” and set out to destroy it.

    Repression on the Pine Ridge Reservation.  Tribal members on the (Oglala Lakota) Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota had formed the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization [OSCRO]:

    • to seek justice for Oglala victims of racist attacks in neighboring off-reservation communities where the white perpetrators were routinely given impunity or biased leniency, even in murder cases; and
    • to seek reform of tribal government then ruled by a corrupt and autocratic tribal Chairman, Dick Wilson, who engaged in blatant favoritism, with respect to jobs and other benefits, for his relatives and cronies.

    In 1973 some tribal councilors brought misconduct charges against Wilson (who held the chairmanship from 1972 until 1976), and the tribal council then voted 11 to 7 to suspend him, but he managed to have his impeachment trial stopped.  Wilson had already organized his own private militia, Guardians of the Oglala Nation [GOONs], which he illegally paid with tribal funds and used to suppress his political opponents.  When several hundred Oglala gathered to protest the quashing of the impeachment trial, the BIA sent in a force of the US Marshals Service [USMS] to sustain Wilson’s position.

    A few days after the foiled impeachment trial, some 200 local protestors and AIM activists occupied the remote Reservation village of Wounded Knee (site of the 1890 massacre of over 200 Lakota men, women, and children by a trigger-happy US Cavalry Regiment).  Using the action to publicize Amerindian grievances, the occupiers demanded: the removal of Wilson, and negotiations to address US violation of its treaty obligations.  USMS, FBI, and other police cordoned the area thereby creating a standoff with frequent shooting from both sides.  After 71 days the occupiers ended the occupation and withdrew.  One FBI agent, two occupiers, and one visitor had been killed; and 13 individuals wounded.

    During and after the Wounded Knee siege, the Wilson regime and his GOONs intensified repression of his political opponents of whom more than 60 were killed during the following 3 years, while the Reservation’s homicide rate grew to 17 times the US average.  Meanwhile, the DoJ indicted 185 individuals for alleged crimes involving their actions in occupying Wounded Knee; these included: arson, theft, assault, and interfering with federal officers.  Numerous trials followed, the most prominent being the government’s 1974 show trial of AIM leaders, Dennis Banks and Russell Means.  This (8 ½ month) trial ended when the judge ruled that the prosecution had committed such egregious misconduct, including withholding of evidence and use of perjured witness testimony, that dismissal was the only appropriate outcome.  Nevertheless, the DoJ persisted in its persecution of AIM leaders.

    From the start of the conflict between Dick Wilson with his supporters and his opponents (including OSCRO and AIM), the federal agencies (BIA, FBI, USMS, and DoJ) naturally sided with the Wilson regime which leased tribal lands to nearby white ranchers and politically influential American capitalists under inequitable contracts deemed unfair to reservation residents.  The FBI provided Wilson’s GOONs with intelligence on AIM activists and other opponents of the Wilson regime and looked away while the GOONs assaulted, terrorized, and murdered Wilson’s critics.  The FBI also perpetrated warrantless no-knock assaults on homes as it used the Pine Ridge Reservation to train its first militarized commando (i.e. SWAT) teams.  Meanwhile, the FBI and DoJ targeted AIM members and supporters for prosecution on any and every possible charge.  This hostile environment created the tension which eventually erupted into the shootout at the Jumping Bull Ranch.  The DoJ ultimately obtained a fraudulent murder conviction against Leonard Peltier.

    Subject events.  In 1975 June 26, two FBI agents, Jack Coler and Ronald Williams, in unmarked cars were following a red pickup truck which they believed belonged to an Oglala alleged to have stolen a pair of cowboy boots.  As they entered the Jumping Bull Ranch (where several AIM members were camped) shots were fired, and a shootout then ensued between the feds and the AIM activists.  There were more than 30 people at the ranch including women, children, and other non-belligerents.  By the end of the confrontation, the ranch was surrounded by some 150 armed agents (FBI, BIA, local police, and GOONs).  Which side fired first is in dispute.  Casualties: the two FBI men were wounded by fire from the AIM side and then killed execution-style by person unknown; AIM member, Joe Stuntz, was killed by a government sniper.

    FBI investigators and DoJ prosecutors, embarrassed by their failures to obtain convictions of AIM leaders involved in the Wounded Knee occupation, responded by pursuing only prominent AIM members, the objective being to convict some AIM leaders on charges of having murdered the two FBI men.  For this purpose, they indicted three prominent AIM members who had participated in the shootout, namely: Leonard Peltier, Robert Robideau, and Darrelle Butler.

    Trials.  In September Butler and Robideau were arrested.  Peltier fled to Canada, where he was arrested and extradited to the US (1976 December).  While Peltier was not yet in custody, Robideau and Butler were tried and acquitted (1976 July, with Judge McManus presiding) when their jury concluded that, with the level of violence and government intimidation on the Reservation, they could plausibly claim to have acted in self-defense during the exchange of gunfire.

    Peltier was extradited and subjected to a rigged trial (in Fargo, ND in 1977) before an all-white jury which convicted him on two counts of first-degree murder.  The judge then sentenced him to two consecutive terms of life imprisonment.  The improprieties in the legal proceedings were as follows.

    (1) The FBI coerced one, Myrtle Poor Bear, to allege in a signed affidavit that she had been Peltier’s girlfriend and had seen him kill the two FBI men.  In fact, she had never met Peltier and was not present at the shootout.  The FBI then used this false affidavit to obtain Peltier’s extradition from Canada.

    (2) Ms Poor Bear recanted her allegations against Peltier, but the judge refused to permit the defense to present her as a witness (claiming: that she was too mentally unstable to provide competent testimony, and that exposure of the FBI’s extradition fraud would prejudice the jury against the prosecution).  The judge also refused to allow the defense to present evidence of other cases where the FBI had been rebuked for tampering with evidence and witnesses.

    (3) An FBI agent changed his story by testifying at trial that the vehicle, which the two agents had pursued and whose occupant had fired at them, was Peltier’s red and white van.  In fact, the two FBI agents had identified the pursued vehicle as a red pickup truck, and it was red pickup trucks which the FBI first sought and searched after the shootout.

    (4) The prosecution alleged at trial that the two FBI agents had been killed by Peltier’s AR-15 rifle.  The prosecution also asserted that Peltier’s AR-15 was the only one present, but it was later compelled to admit to the appellate judge that several other AR-15 rifles were present in the area and possibly present at the shootout.  An FBI ballistics expert testified that extractor marks on a shell casing found at the scene matched Peltier’s rifle; he also testified that a more accurate firing pin test had not been performed because of damage to Peltier’s gun.  Some years after Peltier’s conviction, a FOIA request produced documentation of a pre-trial FBI ballistics test on the firing pin which proved that the shell casing had not been fired by Peltier’s AR-15.  The DoJ had withheld this crucial exculpatory evidence from the defense during trial.

    (5) No trial witness identified Peltier as the person who killed the FBI men.  And during Peltier’s appeal (in 1986), the prosecution admitted that it had no real evidence to establish who fired the fatal shots.  Nevertheless, the appellate court refused to overturn the conviction based on the prosecutor’s new assertion that the jury had found Peltier guilty of “aiding and abetting” the murders, notwithstanding that the prosecution had never actually pursued that issue at trial.  Moreover, this allegation would have applied equally to Robideau and Butler, whose jury (having heard all of the defense case) had acquitted them.

    (6) Other apparent violations of Peltier’s rights to a fair trial include: the arbitrary and never-explained replacement of the originally assigned judge (McManus) by another judge (Benson) more disposed to exclude evidence favorable to the defendant, an undisclosed FBI pre-trial meeting with trial judge Benson, infiltration of FBI informants into the defense team, the presentation of coerced testimony by juvenile witnesses who had been intimidated by the FBI, and the DoJ use of tactics to frighten and bias the jury by always transporting them to and from court under escort by a SWAT team.

    Evaluation.  Many organizations and individuals have examined the case and concluded: that the DoJ and federal courts violated Peltier’s right to a fair trial, that he was targeted and convicted for his political associations, that the government has no evidence that he committed the murders for which he was convicted, and that he should be immediately released from prison.  These include: Amnesty International, the UN Commissioner for Human Rights, Robert F Kennedy Memorial Center for Human Rights, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Lawyers Guild, Center for Constitutional Rights, European parliament, Belgian parliament, Italian parliament, several Nobel Prize winners, and many other well-known advocates for human rights.

    Frame-up in Milwaukee.  2 ½ years prior to the 1975 shoot-out, AIM activist Leonard Peltier, was sitting in a Milwaukee restaurant where 2 off duty cops (in 1972 November) picked a quarrel with him.  Then, as he was leaving, the same 2 cops jumped and beat Peltier.  They then arrested Peltier on a charge of attempted murder (of themselves) with what was later shown to be a nonfunctional gun.  Fearing that he would be killed or railroaded to prison on perjured police testimony, Peltier obtained release on bond and then fled.  In 1978, while in prison following his frame-up conviction for the premeditated murders of the two FBI agents, he was finally brought to trial on this “attempted murder” charge.  At trial the girlfriend of one of the two cops testified that her cop friend had shown her a photo of Peltier prior to the incident and had told her that “he was going to help the FBI get a big one”.  Thus, it became clear that the entire incident had been a set-up and fraud.  The prosecution’s case then collapsed, and the jury acquitted this “notorious AIM felon”.

    Sources

    [1] Wagner & Lynch PLLC: Wounded Knee – the Massacre, the Incident, & the Radical Lawyer (© 2023).

    [2] International Leonard Peltier Defense Committee: Facts (accessed 2024 Dec).

    [3] FOIA Documents – U.S. v Leonard Peltier (CR NO. C77-3003): Post-Trial Actions – Criminal (© 2015 Dec).

     [3] Criminalizing Muslim charities

    The Holy Land Foundation [HLF] was the largest Islamic charity in the US in 2000.  It distributed charity (food, clothing, healthcare services, et cetera) thru established local zakat [charity] committees in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine.  Because it provided charitable relief to victims of Israeli persecution, HLF was targeted first by American Zionists and then, at their behest, by the US government.

    Islam in Palestine.  90% of Palestinian Arabs are Muslim.  Naturally, they vary widely in their devotion to religious prescriptions.  Until the PLO’s capitulation and corruption cost it most of its popular sympathy, Hamas had the allegiance of only a small minority of Palestinian Muslims.  Hamas, which is a political and social force within Palestinian Muslim communities, was founded in 1987 as an offshoot of the (Islamist Egyptian) Muslim Brotherhood [MB].  Until 1987, MB in Palestine maintained peaceful relations with the Zionist state, and its leaders had met regularly with Israeli officials.  Because said MB was hostile to the secular and leftist Palestine Liberation Organization [PLO], the Israeli state: had happily encouraged the former as a potential alternative Palestinian leadership to that of the PLO, and had refrained from interfering when MB Islamists perpetrated violent attacks against secular groups aligned with the PLO.  However, violent Israeli repression impacted all Palestinians (including MB adherents) in the occupied territories; and overwhelming Palestinian support for the First Intifada (1987—93 civil disobedience campaign) finally induced Palestinian MB, reconstituted as Hamas, to embrace the resistance to Israeli occupation.  When Hamas responded to Israeli violence by forming a military arm to retaliate with its own violent counterattacks upon Israelis, the Zionist state branded it as a “terrorist” organization.  In 1995 the US accommodated its Israeli ally by also branding Hamas as a “terrorist” organization.

    Target.  Although a Hamas fundraiser, Musa Abu-Marzuk, had provided financial support at its founding (in 1989), HLF was not an affiliate of Hamas, and its actual activities had nothing to do with violent resistance to Zionist oppressions.  Nevertheless, Zionist groups targeted HLF with smears and demands for revocation of its tax-exemption.  HLF continued its charitable work until 2001, when the US government used the 9-11 Al-Qaeda attacks as pretext for a so-called “war on terror” which became largely an attack upon civil liberties with widespread targeting of (mostly innocent) Arab-American activists and US-based Islamic institutions.  One such target was HLF.  The federal government (in 2001 December): seized its assets, shut down its operations, and branded it as a “terrorist” organization.

    Prosecution.  In 2007 the DoJ brought the HLF and five of its principal officers (now known as the Holy Land Five) to trial on allegations of providing material support to a designated terrorist organization (meaning Hamas).  In this trial (which included violations of the defendants’ due process rights), the jury acquitted on some counts and deadlocked on the others.  A more egregiously rigged retrial in 2008 resulted in convictions on all remaining counts.  Specific violations of due process follow.

    (1) The prosecution contended that, by providing charity to needy Palestinians thru the local charity committees which the prosecution alleged were controlled by Hamas, HLF was bolstering Hamas’ popularity and thereby providing material support for “terrorism”.  Thus, the prosecution sought conviction of the accused based upon guilt-by-association.

    (2) The prosecution’s classification of the local charities as agents of “terrorism” was baseless.  The relevant facts: (1st) the local committees were independent entities devoted to charitable purposes, and their leaders included individuals with no ties to Hamas as well as those who were members or sympathizers with Hamas; (2nd) immediately after the US had listed Hamas as “terrorist”, HLF had sought advice from the federal government as to which, if any, of the charities were deemed unacceptable; (3rd) none of the charity committees was listed by the US as a terrorist organization; (4th) the US (thru its USAID program) had provided funding for many of the same local charity committees until 2006 (for five years after the HLF had been shut down); and (5th) the prosecution acknowledged that none of the funding of the charities was used for acts which the US deemed to be “terrorist”.

    (3) The prosecution was permitted, over defense objections, to present two unidentified Israeli state security agents as “expert” witnesses for the purpose of tying the charity committees to Hamas.  The anonymity of these “experts” prevented effective defense cross-examination to challenge their credentials and the validity of their assertions thereby violating the defendants’ 6th Amendment rights to confront and rebut their accusers.

    (4) In the retrial the only significant change in the prosecution’s presentation was its move to bolster its case by introducing additional “evidence” which consisted of untestable assertions, hearsay, and irrelevant material, all of which served only to prejudice the jury against the defendants.  The appeals court (in 2011): ruled this additional “evidence” inadmissible, then astonishingly asserted that its use did not affect the outcome, and finally refused to overturn the convictions.

    (Ω) The Holy Land Five are: Ghassan Elashi, Shukri Abu-Baker, Mufid Abdulqader, Abdulrahman Odeh, and Mohammad El-Mezain.  Their prison sentences were: 65 years for each of the first two, 20 years for the third, and 15 years for the remaining two.

    Source

    For more on Hamas, see Pierce, Charles: Gaza War: Palestine, Zionism, imperialism, Hamas, previous wars, atrocities. What are the relevant actual facts?.

     Conclusion

    For 3 reasons (their liberal capitalist indoctrination, their attachment to their own privileges and entitlements, and their dependency upon their capitalist campaign funders), governing centrist Democrat politicians are incapable of providing: equal justice in law enforcement, or consistent enforcement of the civil rights of opponents of their imperial and capital-serving policies.  Moreover, any concessions (reforms) which they offer, in support of greater social justice, will always be limited to what does not seriously impinge against the interests of powerful factions of the ruling class.

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  • U.S. Imperialism and Ukraine

    In mid-November, the Biden administration (given his diminished mental capacity, whoever is now in charge) authorized the Kyiv regime to launch Lockheed Martin produced Army Tactical Missile Systems or ATACMS to hit targets 190 miles inside Russia. In response, an ICBM was fired in wartime for the first time when the Oreshnik (“Hazelnut Tree), an intermdiate range, nuclear capable missile, took only 5 minutes to hit Dinipro, Ukraine. The Kremlin gave Washington a 30 minute warning before the launch. Putin called the U.S./NATO bluff and he promised that future retaliation could target “decision making centers” in Kyiv.

    This new Russian weapon can reach Warsaw in 1 minute 1 second; Berlin, 2 minutes 55 seconds; and London 6 minutes 56 seconds. Europe has no defence system that can intercept it. Putin said recently that when several Oreshniks are used simutaneously, “the resulting impact is comparable in power to that of a nuclear weapon.” Despite Russian warnings about escalating the conflict, the U.S. continues to blow past all red lines and on November 23 and 25, the Kiev regime fired a dozen more ATACMS into Russian territory.

    Here it’s imperative to briefly recall how the US imperialist strategy toward Russia got us into this dire situation. Contrary to the official narrative, the war in Ukraine did not begin with an “unprovoked” Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 27, 2022. Rather, as Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University wrote, “In fact the war was provoked by the United States in ways that leading U.S. diplomats had anticipated for decades leading up to the war, which means that the war could have been avoided and should be stopped through negotiations.” (Common Dreams, 5/23/23). VIrtually all policy experts and Russian leaders warned that NATO expansion was, in the words of CIA Director William Burns, the “brightest of all red lines for the Russian elites (not just Putin) of whom would see it as a direct challenge to Russian interests.” George Kennan, architect of U.S. containment policy, called it “a tragic mistake.”

    In spite of these warnings, at the June 2008 Bucharest Summit, NATO leaders pronounced that “Ukraine will become a NATO member” and at the Brussels meeting on June 14, 2021, NATO reiterated that “Ukraine will be a member of NATO.” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov countered, “The key to everything is that NATO will not expand eastward.” In truth, given all the U.S./NATO arms and military training flowing to the Kyiv regime it’s apparent that Ukraine was already a de facto NATO member.

    Anyone with a scintllla of working brain matter understood that no government in Moscow would tolerate the decision to bring Ukraine into NATO. Russia viewed NATO expansion on its border as an existential threat and legitimately feared that the US, under the giuise of NATO, would place missiles 317 miles or 5 minutes flying time from decapitating the Kremlin. What would Washington’s response be if Russia or China struck a “defensive” alliance with Canada or Mexico and began placing missiles on the U.S. border? Or, think of the Monroe Doctrine.

    In short, the war hawk neocons who prevail in Washington were fully aware of the above but wanted to provoke a proxy war to be fought to the last Ukrainian. They expected the conflict would depower Russia — and perhaps even precipitate a regime change — so the US could move along to the Strait of Taiwan and a likely confrontation with China, the primary peer challenger to US global domination.

    Since 2002, the U.S. has squandered $174 billion of aid and military assistance on Ukraine, money that’s desperately needed for addressing the cost of living, health care, housing, education and health care for the working class here at home. Further, there have been more than half a million Ukrainian and Russians killed on the battlefield in a war that that could have been avoided had the U.S. given up the idea of Ukraine joining NATO.

    According to the AP (11/29/2024), as many 200,000 soldiers may have deserted from the Ukrainian army. In response, Blinken is pressuring Ukraine to lower the conscription age to 18 which could add 350,000 in meat for the grinder. My sense is that Blinken & Co. are attempting to prolong the war as long as possible so that when the inevitable defeat does occur, we will hear the refrain, “Trump lost Ukraine.”

    In spite of all the official disinformation and propaganda on behalf of the war, a majority of Ukrainians no longer support it (Gallup,19 November 2024) and Americans now oppose more military aid for Ukraine. In our recent presidential election voters registered a strong mandate to end the “endless wars.” Here in Pennsylvania, a majority believe the US is “too involved” in foreign affairs. (CATO/YouGov/9/9/24).Over the past three years, Trump has promised to end the war in Ukraine and during his debate with Kamala Harris, he said “I want this war to stop.” In his November 5 victory speech, Trump declared “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to end them.” We’ll soon see if the unpredictable and erratic Trump adheres to his promise. Given Deep State opposition and some of Trump’s appointees, I’m not optimistic.

    In the meantime, no sane person can wish the current situation to unfold into a global thermonuclear exchange and the annihilation of the earth’s people. I’m old enough to recall how the U.S. responded when Russia attempted to put missiles in Cuba and I suspect we are now closer to World War III than we were during those 13 fateful days in October 1962.

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  • American Voters: Ignorant, Insouciant, or Both?

    In the US presidential election on 5 November 2024, American voters provided people in the United States and elsewhere a stupendous gift: the ouster of the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris administration. Simultaneously, the voters bequeathed fellow Americans and people of the world the nightmare of four more years of Donald Trump.

    Prior to the election, I asked whether Americans would vote for genocide? Clearly, if a voter was paying attention, which is, arguably, a sine qua non for a person about to responsibly cast a vote, then a voter would have been aware that a genocide was (and still is) being perpetrated by the Jewish State against Palestinians, and that this genocide was (and still is) being abetted by the US government. The Democratic administration headed by proud Zionist Joe Biden (aka Genocide Joe) and his partner in genocide, Kamala Harris, have been integral to the carrying out of the genocide. The main opponent, or the only opponent as the US monopoly media portrays it, was another arch Zionist, Donald Trump of the Republican Party who pledged to support Israeli war aims.

    Was it damned if you do and damned if you don’t?

    No. As pointed out previously, a voter could have selected a candidate opposed to horrific Israeli war crimes against Palestinians; for example, Cornel West, Libertarian Chase Oliver, and candidate Jill Stein.

    So, Americans did not have to cast a vote for a candidate who backs genocide.

    Given the overwhelming casting of votes for the genocide-abetting Harris and Trump, one possible conclusion is that Americans were ignorant of the consequences of what their vote would support. More sinister is that Americans knew that their vote would further the Jewish Israeli genocide of Palestinians. If so, this would, arguably, signify that Americans voters have a lack of compassion for other humans, insouciance for the Other, or a hatred of the Other. It might be argued that Americans merely voted for the candidate who they considered would be best for the economy and a better life at home in the US. However, were that so, it would still be damning, as it would indicate their personal economic fortunes take precedence over their country destroying the lives and economy of other human beings.

    The US election produced a damning result. And with Trump loading his incoming cabinet with Zionists this augurs poorly for a peaceful and loving world.

    Given the composition of many western governments which are indifferent to the plight of Palestinians, it can be surmised that the voting class of such countries display likewise, a lamentable ignorance or insouciance.

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  • Trump Heads for War Against Some Nations, Alienation Against Others

    U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump is heading America towards very hot wars against China, Russia, and Iran, and for rather cold wars against Mexico, Canada, Europe, and Japan. The difference from Biden-Harris is unclear with regard to the hot wars — Trump has picked a team who overall are as neoconservative as the existing team — but is clearly turning America’s colonies and former colonies (the group that collectively together is commonly refered to as ‘allies’) hostile, because of Trump’s demands regarding tariffs and regarding immigration.

    For example, on November 28, CNN headlined “Mexico’s president denies Trump’s claim that she agreed to shut down the US-Mexico border,” and reported that though Trump had said on November 27, that he:

    Just had a wonderful conversation with the new President of Mexico, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo. She has agreed to stop Migration through Mexico, and into the United States, effectively closing our Southern Border. We also talked about what can be done to stop the massive drug inflow into the United States, and also, U.S. consumption of these drugs. It was a very productive conversation!

    Sheinbaum promptly responded that same day,

    In our conversation with President Trump, I explained to him the comprehensive strategy that Mexico has followed to address the migration phenomenon, respecting human rights. … Thanks to this, migrants and caravans are assisted before they arrive at the border. We reiterate that Mexico’s position is not to close borders but to build bridges between governments and between peoples.

    So: Trump had lied. And Mexico’s President went public about it, because for her not to have done so would have elicited contempt from Mexico’s own voters, who would have been outraged at Trump’s dictatorial position regarding their country. So, Sheinbaum was doing what she had to do.

    Trump’s dictatorial attitude toward other countries contrasts with Biden’s, which (like Obama’s) had been entirely private — far more ‘diplomatic’ and dishonest (not like Trump’s, playing to only the stupidest of his own voters, his “voting base”, without the sugar-coating of hypocrisy that’s popularly called “liberalism”).

    This replay of The Trump Show could get even lower ratings by foreign countries than his first Administration did.

    For example, yesterday, on November 30, Trump appointed his brother-in-law, who is a major Trump campaign donor, Charles Kushner, a convicted felon, to be America’s next Ambassador to France. Irrespective of anything else, this appointment will be negatively viewed by, and perceived as an insult to, the French people, and will therefore make even harder than would otherwise have been the case, for Trump to win his way with the French Government.

    This doesn’t necessarily mean that Trump will be even worse a President than Biden-Harris, or Obama-Biden, or Bush-Cheney, were, but only that the billionaires who have placed Trump into office, and who are approving his nominees for federal offices, take a more simplistic approach toward their governing, than do the Democratic Party’s billionaires. Whereas the latter group rely far more upon deception-about-deception — or “hypocrisy” — in order to rule, the former group rely more upon brute force, as “Might makes right” dictatorships typically do. The American tradition, ever since whatever democracy there was in America, became ended here, and America became a Two-Party dictatorship by the billionaires, in 1968 — consisting 100% of representatives of billionaires occupying the U.S. White House — has been, in both Parties, ‘justified’ by ideological fraud, instead of by “Might makes right” rule.

    The best example of this brute-force ethic on display by our rulers, was on 24 July 2020, when Tesla corporation’s founder, Elon Musk, tweeted back in response to a tweet from “Armani” which criticized “the U.S. government organizing a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia so you could obtain the lithium there.” Musk replied “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” That’s Trump’s style, too. Naturally, Musk donated at least $118,557,604 to Trump’s campaign. He was the second-largest: the big three were Timothy Mellon $150,000,000; Musk’s Space x $118,557,604; and Miriam Adelson’s Adelson Clinic for Drug Abuse Treatment & Research $100,000,000. The fourth-biggest was only $21,256,643, but all of the major donors to his campaign have fascist if not outright racist-fascist-imperialistic agendas; and, so, that is what Trump actually represents (just click onto each one of those big-three donors, to find what Trump’s real commitments are), and it is what foreign countries will be dealing with in his second term.

    Like I said, the Democratic Party’s billionaires aren’t any better. According to opensecrets, no individual who was responsible for having donated $100 million or more to Kamala Harris’s campaign is publicly known, but “Future Forward USA Action” is listed for $136,459,651. According to InfluenceWatch, in 2023, “several nonprofit organizations managed by billionaire and foreign national Hansjorg Wyss had donated roughly $475 million to several left-leaning nonprofit organizations,” and the affiliated Future Forward PAC (FF PAC) “has been criticized by the left-leaning Center for Responsive Politics for being funded by ‘dark money.’2’,” so that there is a possibility for individual billionaires to have gotten control of the White House on the Democratic Party side if Trump had lost. It’s not that one Party is controlled by billionaires and the other isn’t. So, the problem in today’s America isn’t only that individual billionaires, even foreign ones such as Wyss (who has relocated to Wyoming), control this Government far more than the mere voters (who become fooled by them) do, but that the very idea (touted in their propaganda) that a multi-Party Government is more democratic than a single-Party one is, is false if all of the major Parties are controlled by the billionaires, which is the case in this country — and is so now in the transition to Trump2 just as it has been ever since at least 1980. So, the only way to rectify such a situation would be a Second American Revolution. Nothing short of that will have any possibility to succeed.

    Since the disappointment that will set in — not only within the United States but globally — regarding Trump’s second term, will almost certainly be even more intense than has been the case regarding the other American Presidents so far this Century, the likelihood of success for a Second American Revolution will probably be significantly higher than it has ever been before, but it will need to be appropriately organized in order for it to have a chance to succeed, against the billionaires and their agencies, who control this country now. It needs to be done, and it needs to be done right — like the First American Revolution was.

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  • Ungrateful Lying Upstarts

    Orientation
    Situating my article

    Often the rise of China and the Middle East appears to many Westerners as something recent, maybe 30 years old. Before that? Is Western dominance beginning with the Greeks and Romans – right? Wrong, not even close! The rise of the East and the South has roughly a 1,300 year history of dominance from 500 CE to 1800 CE. What is happening in the East today is no “Eurasian Miracle”. With the wind of 1,300 years at its back, it is returning to its long historical prominence today.

    In two my recent articles, Neocon Realists and Global Neoliberals Dead on Arrival and The Myopia of Anglo Saxons Rulers, I attempted to show how narrow International Relations Theory is in its systematic exclusion of the Eastern and Southern parts of the world from its theoretical history. In his book The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, John Hobson rightfully accuses the West of Eurocentrism, paternalism, and imperialism. But in an earlier book, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization, he methodically shows how the West first depended on and then denied that Eastern and Southern civilizations were a source of most of their technological, scientific and cultural breakthroughs. This article is based on The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization.

     Western claims about their place in world history

    • Charles Martel’s victory over the Saracens at the battle of Tours and Poitiers 732 CE
    • Europe pioneers the medieval agricultural revolution 600-1000 CE
    • Italian pioneers long-distance trade and early capitalism. Italy the leading global power 1000 CE
    • European crusaders assert control over the Islamic Middle East Post 1095 CE
    • Italian Renaissance and scientific revolution 1400-1650 CE
    • China withdraws from the world, leaving a vacuum filled by Europeans 1434 CE
    • Guttenberg invents the movable metal-type printing press 1455 CE
    • Bartolomeu Diaz is the first to reach the Cape of Good Hope 1487-88 CE
    • European Age of Discovery and the emergence of early Western globalization Post 1492 CE
    • The Spanish plunder the gold and silver bullion of Indigenous Turtle Islanders post 1492 CE
    • Da Gama makes its first contact with “primitives” and isolate Indigenous people 1498 CE
    • The Europeans defeat the Asians and monopolize world trade 1498-1800 CE
    • European military revolution 1550-1660 CE
    • First industrial miracle happens in Britain 1700-1850 CE
    • British industrialization is the triumph of domestic or self-generated change 1700-1850 CE
    • Commodore Perry opens up isolated Tokugawa Japan 1853 CE
    • Meiji Japan industrializes by copying the West 1853 CE
    • Britain reverses its trade deficit with China in the 1820s CE
    • Opium wars and unequal treaties force open and rescue China’s “backward” economy 1839-1858 CE

    Stopping Eurocentric thinking in its tracks
    You might not suspect that European goods were considered inferior both in terms of quality and price by Easterners. Public health and clean water were more advanced in China than in Europe. By 1800, as much as 22% of the Japanese population were living in towns, a figure that exceeds Europe. Even as late as 1850, the Japanese standard of living was higher than that of the British. In conclusion,  Europe invented very little for themselves. The only genuine innovations that they made before the 18th century were the Archimedean screw, the crankshaft or camshaft and alcoholic distillation process.

    Countering the Eurocentric Myth of the Pristine West
    John M. Hobsons claims in his book The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation are:

    • The West and the East have been fundamentally and consistently interlinked through globalization ever since 500 CE.
    • The East was more advanced than the West between 500-1800 CE. It wasn’t until 1800 that the West first caught up with and then surpassed China.
    • The East and South were not only not passive bystanders, but in the overwhelming number of cases, they were the initiator of technological, economic and even cultural change.
    • The West did initiate new inventions and ways of life but only beginning in the 19th century.
    • It was also in the 19th century that the West began its denial of Eastern and Southern influence.
    • This denial of pioneering role of  Western leadership in world history requires a revisionist history of virtually the whole world of the last 1500 years.

    Eurocentric Propaganda Maps
    Eurocentrism has multiple sides to its denial, neglect and outright lying about its place in world history. One piece of black propaganda can be seen is in the ways its maps are constructed. Hobson points out that on the realistic map, the actual landmass of the southern hemisphere is exactly twice that of the Northern hemisphere. And yet in the Mercator map the landmass of the North occupiers 2/3 of the landmass. Secondly, while Scandinavia is about a third of the size of India, they are accorded the same amount of space on a map. Lastly, Greenland appears almost twice the size of China even though the latter is almost four times the size of Greenland.

    Placement of National and Regional Formations in World History Textbooks
    I remember my textbooks on world history. While they might start with Africa and Asia, the chapters were relatively short. But as soon as we got to Europe there are long chapters on technology, economics, politics and philosophy. It might not be until the end of the book than the rest of the world is reintroduced again. It’s as if there was no interaction going on between the West and the rest of the world between the time of the Greeks and the 20th century.

    Orientalist and Patriarchal Construction of the West vs the East
    The West is presented as a dynamic, ingenious, proactive, rational, scientific disciplined, ordered, self-controlled, sensible, mind-oriented, scientific, paternal, independent, functional, free, democratic, tolerant, honest, civilized morally and economically progressive (capitalist), parsimonious, and individualistic.

    On the other hand, the East (China, India and the Middle East) and the South (mostly Africa) is conceived of as unchanging, imitative, ignorant, passive, irrational superstitiously ritualistic, lazy, chaotic, erratic, spontaneous, emotional, body-oriented, exotic, alluring and childlike. Furthermore they are dependent, dysfunctional, enslaved, despotic, and intolerant. They are presented as corrupt, barbaric, savages, who are morally regressive economically stagnant, indolent, cruel and collectivist. Ten Western social scientists from the 19th century down to the present have accepted these dualistic stereotypes. It is out of these extremely unjust characterizations that the myth of the pristine Western development was born.

    Hobson writes that there is no dualist more extreme in categorizing the East and West than Max Weber. See Table 1 below.

    Table 1  Max Weber’s Orientalist View of the East and the West

    Occident Modernity Orient tradition
    Rational public law Ad hoc private law
    Double entry bookkeeping Lack of rational accounting
    Free and independent cities Political/Administrative camps
    Independent urban bourgeoise State controlled merchants
    Rational bureaucracy Patrimonial despotic state
    Rational science Mysticism
    Protestant ethics and the emergence of the rational individual Repressive religions and the predominance of the collective
    Basic institutional constitutions of the West are fragmented civilizations with balance of social power between all groups and institutions Basic institutional constitution of the East is a unified civilization with no social balance between groups and institutions
    Multi-state system of nation-states Single state system – empires
    Separation of the public and private Fusion of public and private


    The Western Falsification of the World Before 1500 CE

    Furthermore, standard picture of the world before 1500 is presented by Eurocentrism as:

    • the world mired in stagnant tradition;
    • a fragmented world divided between insulated and backward regional and; civilizations governed by a despotic states, mainly of the East.

    This concept was consciously reconstructed by Eurocentric intellectuals in the 19th century so that first Venice and later Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands and Britain were represented as the leading global powers in the post 1000 period. Please see Table 2 for Hobson’s rebuttals

    Table 2 The Status of World Civilizations before 1500

    Eurocentric Myths Hobson’s Rebuttals
    Major regional civilizations were insulated from each other Persians, Arabs, Africans Jews, Indians and Chinese created and maintained a global economy
    Political costs were too high to allow global trade Globalization in the East was a midwife if not the mother of the Medieval and Modern West
    There was an absence of capitalist institutions
    credit, money changes, banks, contract laws    		 There was plenty of commercial activity among Muslims and Chinese before 1500
    Transport technologies were too crude to be effective Use of camels 300-500 was more cost effective than horses
    Trade in the East was only in luxury goods Mass consumer products in China and the Middle East. Africans imported beads cowries, copper and copper goods, grain, fruits and raisons, wheat and later on, textiles which were mass-based goods, not luxuries
    Global flows were too slow to be of consequence Transcontinental trade pioneered by Islamic merchants reached from China to the Mediterranean
    Global processes were not robust enough to have a major reorganizational impact The rise of Tang China (618-907), the Islamic empire (661-1258) and North Africa 909-1171) were plenty robust
    There was no iron production in the world prior to the British Muslims dominate the Europeans in iron production and in steel production until the 18th century. China as well

    The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization
    Middle Ages and the Islamic state
    We are now in a position to compare the Western claims of civilization and what happened when the East and South are given their due. First, much greater than the victory of Charles Martel, between 751-1453 there was the Arab victory in the Battle of Talas which established Islamic domination in West Central Asia. In addition, the Ottoman Turks took over Constantinople in 1453. Nine hundred years before the Europeans developed an agricultural revolution, the Chinese pioneered many technologies that enabled the European agricultural revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries.

    There was no comparison between the primitive and hopeless agriculture of Europe before the 18th century and the advanced agriculture of China after the 4th century BCE (57)

    Technology of the agricultural revolution

    The basic technological ingredients of the medieval agricultural revolution were:

    • watermills;
    • windmills;
    • heavy moldboard plough which created drainage furrows;
    • new animal harnesses; and
    • iron horseshoes.

    Contrary to Eurocentric historians, none of these technological innovations were pioneered by Europeans. Either it was diffused to the West by the East, or Westerners innovated after the Eastern raw materials made them available. For example, Hobson tells us the plough entered Eastern Europe through the East from Siberia in the 9th century. The collar harness was clearly pioneered by the Chinese in the 3rd century CE. The invention of the stirrup really came from India in the late 2nd century and the Chinese bronze and cast-iron stirrup in the 3rd century. Other inventions adapted from China included the rotary winnowing machine and seed drills. Some of the revolutionary rotational crops used by the British in the 18th century were being used by the Chinese some 12 centuries earlier.

    Italian Trade
    Hobson’s central claim is that virtually all the major innovations that lay behind the development of Italian capitalism were derived from the more advanced East, especially the Middle East and China. The Italians might have been pioneers of long-distance trade that established merchant capitalism in Europe, but not on a world scale. The Italians were late arrivals to an Afro-Asian led global economy. The globalization enabled the diffusion of Eastern inventions to enable the development of a backward West. Neither did the European Crusades assert control over the Islamic Middle East. They remained dependent on the Islamic Middle East as well as Egypt. One last point about the Italians. Six-hundred years before the Italian Renaissance of 1400-1650 there was an Eastern and Islamic Renaissance which was the foundation for not only the Western Renaissance, but the scientific revolution of the 17th century.

    Eastern origins of the financial revolution
    Italians did not invent the bills of exchange, credit institutions, insurance and banking. Sumerians and Sassanids were using banks, bills of exchange and checks before the advent of Islam, although it was the Muslims who took these early beginnings the furthest. In the West, single entry bookkeeping was the most widespread use right down to the end of the 19th century. The Italian traders only began to use mathematics to replace the old abacus system once the Pisan merchant Fibonacci relayed eastern knowledge in 1202.

    The Eastern Renaissance
    Arab scholars drew heavily on Persian and Indian as well as Chinese sources on medicine, mathematics philosophy theology, literature, and poetry that lay the foundation for the Italian Renaissance. It’s true that Leonardo Fibonacci, wrote a book rejecting the old abacus system in favor of the new Hindu-Arabic system. However, by the beginning of the 10th century all six of the classical trigonometric functions had been defined and tabulated by Muslim mathematicians. Ibn al-Shatir of the Maragha school develop a series of mathematical models which were almost the same as those developed 150 years later by Copernicus in his heliocentric theory of the heavens.

    The Eastern origins of the navigational revolution
    The foundation of the navigational revolution was the astrolabe and mariners’ compass. The compass could be used even in cloudy weather when the stars were covered. These breakthroughs allowed Europeans to take to the oceans. However, most of them were invented and all were refined in the East. It was the Muslims who undertook all the major innovations.

    Qualification about Italy
    This is not to say that Italy was unimportant to the fortunes of European commerce. However, Venice prevailed over its rival Genoa not because of its so-called ingenuity but because of its lucrative access to the East via Egypt and the Middle East. Italians played a vitally important role in spreading commercialization through Christendom (not the world). According to Hobson, the belief that Italy was important or the development of Europe in the medieval period seems reasonable. But the notion that Italians pioneered these inventions is a myth

    The myth of the European Age of Discovery
    When we examine the so-called European Age of Discovery we find that  that over 1,000 years before Bartolomeu Diaz circled the Cape of Good Hope the Arabs sailed around the Cape and into Europe. The Chinese did so in the 9th century and in the third century the “primitive” Polynesians and Indians sailed to the Cape and the East Coast of Africa.

    Chinese ships were striking in both their size and quantity. In the 8th century some 2,000 ships were working on the Yangtze.  It can be safely said that the Chinese were the greatest sailors in history. For nearly two millennium they had ships and sailing techniques far in advance of the rest of the world that comparisons are embarrassing. (58)

    As for the Portuguese, they borrowed Islamic innovations in mathematics in order to work out latitude, a longitude relying on the Islamic tables developed by an 11th century Muslim astronomer. The European age or the “Vasco da Gama epoch of Asia” turns out to be retrospective Eurocentric wishful thinking

    The myth of Spanish gold ruling the world
    As for the globalization of the economy in the 15th century, one thousand years ago, the Afro-Asian age expanded to a globalized market while not choosing to initiate imperialism. In the late 15th century, the Spanish plundered New World civilizations for their gold and silver. But 40 years before this, the Chinese initiated a silver currency and provided a strong demand for European silver.

    India was not isolated
    It is said that Vasco Da Gama made the first contact with Indian civilization which is presented as isolated. However, John Hobson tells us India was not isolated but had trading contact with the rest of Eurasia. In fact, Indians were economically superior to their Portuguese discoverers. Furthermore, the Chinese, Indian, Islamic and maybe Black African science and technology provided the basis for Portuguese ships and navigation.

    China and the Ming Dynasty

    When we turn to China, we hear the common claim that China withdrew in 1434, inexplicitly renouncing an opportunity to compete with Western imperialism. Supposedly they left a gap which the West filled.  But the truth is China maintained its power as a world trader all the way from 1434 to well into the 19th century (1840). Hobson tells us that:

     The original documents were distorted by the Chinese state in an attempt at being seen as maintaining a Confucius-like isolationist ideal. It was clear that one way or another Chinese merchants continued their extremely lucrative trading with or without official sanctioning. Many European scholars had been therefore easily seduced by the rhetoric of the Chinese state. (63,70)

    One typical myth of Chinese  state was that in true oriental despotic form, they crushed all capitalist activities. The reality is that the system was simply too large and the state too weak to be able to set up a command economy. The second myth is that the Ming state only dealt with luxury commodities. The truth, according to Hobson is that the majority of textiles produced in India were aimed at mass markets.

    Hobson says half the world was in China’s grip. China could have had the greatest colonial power 100 years before the great age of European exploration. They simply were not interested in imperialism (nor are they today). China was the most powerful economy between 1100 to 1800/1840.  Even as late as roughly 1800-1850, Chinese population growth rates increased at a phenomenal rate and would only be matched by Britain after its industrialization.

    China and the printing press
    As for the Gutenberg printing press and the movable mental type printing press, the Chinese had this by 1095. In addition, the Koreans invented the first metal type thirty years before the Guttenberg press. By the end of the 15th century, the Chinese published more books than all the other countries combined. Even as early as 978, one of the Chinese libraries contained 80,000 volumes. It was exceeded by the holdings of some of the major Islamic libraries. It was only in the 19th century that the European printing press became faster than its Asian counterparts.

    Myth of European pioneering of a military revolution
    Before the military revolution, swords, lances, mace and cross-bows were used in warfare. These were replaced by gunpowder, guns and cannons. Much has been made about the European military revolution between 1550 and 1660. But at most, 700 years before this between 850-1290, the Chinese developed all three that underly that military revolution. While the Europeans eventually took these military technologies further, (certainly by the 19th century) the fact remains that without the available advances from the East, there would have been nothing to have been taken further. It was the Jesuits who persuaded Europeans to face the fact that gunpowder, the compass, paper and printing all were invented in China.

    England drug-dealing opium
    Lastly we turn to the relationship between the British and the Chinese. Up until 1820, the Chinese matched the British industrially and it was the British who had a trade deficit. Eurocentric historians congratulate the British in reversing its trade imbalance, not bothering to mention the way they did that was by pushing opium. Even radicals like Marx and Engels looked the other way when the British “opened up” China, rescuing it, according to Marx and Engels, from Oriental despotism. There is a slight problem according to Hobson. Since as far back as 850 China has been open to world trade and achieved great economic progress long before the British had any industrialization of comparative commercial relations.

    Respect for China until the 19th century
    Many Enlightenment thinkers positively associated with China and its ideas including Montaigne, Leibniz, Voltaire, Wolf, Quesnay, Hume and Adam Smith. Voltaire’s book in 1756 has been described as the perfect compendium of all the positive feeling of the time in Europe about the Far East. Martin Bernal reminds us that no European of the 18th century (before 1780) could claim that Europe had created itself.

    Britain as a late developer of the industrial revolution
    For Eurocentric historians, the British genius was responsible for the industrial revolution unaided by anyone else, non-Europeans especially. But almost 2,000 years earlier, the Chinese had developed industry.

    The first cast-iron object dated from 513 BCE. Steel was being produced by the 2nd century BCE. China produced 13,500 tons of iron in 806, some 90,400 tons by 1064 and as many as 125,000 by 1078. Even as late as 1788 Britain was producing only 76,000. Chinese iron was not confined to weapons and decorative art but to tools and production. All this was made possible by the breakthroughs in smelting… and the use of blast furnaces. It was the assimilation of what the Chinese had built that made possible  the industrial revolution in Britain. Further, the industrialization process was made possible not by some independent British know-how but through the exploitation of multiple African resources. (51-53)

    The steam engine, pride of the British industrial revolution, was antedated by the Chinese as early as 1313 CE. The cotton industry, Hobson says, was the pacemaker of British industrialization. But here too, the cotton industry first found its home in both China and India centuries earlier.

    Japan industrialized before England
    When we turn to Japan, we find that Eurocentric historians agree that the Meiji empire underwent a powerful industrialization process, but they imagine that the process happened late, after 1853. Furthermore, it was only through Commodore Perry “opening up” the isolated Tokugawa Japan that industrialization began. But little did they know that Tokugawa Japan was tied to the global economy ever since 1603! Independent Tokugawa development provided a starting point for the subsequent Meiji industrialization. In other words, Japan was an early developer of industry, even before the industrial revolution in Britain.

    English Racist Identity in Justifying Imperialism

    In my article The Myopia of Anglo-American Rulers I went into great detail about the Eurocentrism, paternalism and racism that is involved in Western international relations theory. This described how Westerners convinced themselves of their superiority over the East and South. I will just briefly add George Fredrickson’s two kinds of racism, implicit and explicit in the eightieth and 19th centuries. Implicit racism occurs in the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries. Its foundation was cultural, institutional and environmental. People were not conscious of practicing it and their way of expressing imperialism was to imagine they were on a civilizing mission. They had a “Peter Pan” theory of East as childlike, alluring and exotic.

    In Britain after 1840 there was a new kind of racism which Fredrickson called explicit. Here the criteria for this “scientific” racism was genetic or physical characteristics of the Easterners and Southern civilizations. This racism was overt and conscious, and the superiority of the West was understood as permanent. Their ways of justifying imperialism were a mixture of optimism and pessimism. It was optimistic in its Social Darwinist mentality of subjugation at the hands of the superior British. However, it was also pessimistic because the English feared contact with other races might contaminate the Westerners.

    Evolution of Western Identity 500 CE to 1900 CE
    Westerners also divided societies into civilized (British, Germany) barbaric (China, India, Japan) and  savage (Africa). Each type had a skin color, temperament, religion, climatic character, type of government, self, manner of thinking, ontogenesis, social and political legitimizing and social pathology.

    Table 3  The Construction and Consequences of Western Identity

    Time period Western Identity Eastern and Southern Projections Western Appropriation Strategies
    500-1453 Constructed as Christendom Hostile and evil threat
    Islamic Middle East and Persia    		 Attacking Islam through the first round of the Crusades
    1453- 1780 Increasingly as the
    advanced West    		 Ottoman Turk as hostile and barbaric threat Attacking Islam through the second Crusades initiated by da Gama, Columbus
    Africans and indigenous Americans considered as pagans or savages ripe for exploitation and repression Appropriating bullion and circulating through global silver recycling process
    Slave trading and commodification of labor
    1780- 1900 Superior and carrier of advanced civilization Either inferior or evil savages or barbarians Slave trading in Britain and US
    Appropriation of Asian and African land, labor and markets through formal and informal imperialism

    How Than Did Contingency Enable The Rise of the Oriental West?
    The prominent anti-Eurocentric scholars Kenneth Pomeranz and James Blaut emphasize contingency (the fortuitous accident) as the critical factor in the rise of the West. The West was lucky that:

    • The more powerful Eastern societies did not seek to colonize Europe.
    • The Mongols turned to China – not Europe.
    • Mongols delivered both goods and Eastern resources.
    • The Muslims were not interested in conquering Western Europe.
    • The Spanish stumbled on the Americas where gold and silver lay in abundance.
    • The Native Americans had inadequate immune systems.
    • African slaves had adequate immune systems.
    • The East Indian company happened to be in India at a time when the Mughal polity began to disintegrate of its own accord

    Conclusion
    I began this article by situating it within two previous articles I wrote showing how narrow International Relations Theory is cross-culturally in the exclusion of the Eastern and Southern civilizations from its theoretical understanding of world events. Embedded in this theory was Eurocentrism, paternalism, racism and imperialism. In this article, thanks to John M. Hobson’s book Eastern Origins of Western Civilization I show how in 19 areas of its history Western claims to superiority and leadership in relationship to science, technology, world trade, military weaponry, industry the West was dependent on the East from the 5th to the 19th centuries. It only clearly took the lead around 1840.

    So how did the West first deny its dependency and then insist on its superiority over the civilizations it once depended on? I begin by pointing out how on a microlevel its propaganda can be experienced in the areas of map-making and textbook construction. I name Max Weber as the historian with the most extreme hostility to the East and South in his study of Eastern and Western civilizations. I identify eight European myths about the status of world civilizations at the dawn of the modern West, 1500 CE. I then comb through the West’s dependency on Islamic, Chinese, Indian and African civilizations from 500 to 1900 BCE. I close my article by showing the extent to which the West did become more powerful was based on luck more than skill.

    So what does this have to do with the world today? It has been clear to me through my study of political economists and world historians that the West has been in decline since the mid 1970s and as China, Russia and Iran are rising along with BRICS. My article attempts to show that the rise of the West has not been a glorious 500 year trek, beginning with the Renaissance or two thousand year triumph beginning with Greeks. It has been a short 130-year history which is ending. The rise of the East and the South has roughly a 1,300 year history with the wind at its back and is returning to its long historical prominence today.

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  • Dilemmas

    We are experiencing times of global transition. Where we have been is self-evident. Where the world is headed remains obscure. Some states are implacably resisting that transition; others strive to foster a modified international system that conforms to emerging realities. The actions of governments in the two categories are reinforcing each other’s commitments to pursuing these incompatible tacks. There’s the rub.

    This is the context for the major crises over Ukraine, in the Middle East, and over Taiwan. Ongoing war in the first two carries the potential for escalation with dire, far-reaching consequences. Each is at once symptomatic of the systemic changes occurring in world affairs and the cause for a raising of the stakes in how that transition is handled or mishandled.

    Dilemma 1 USA

    There is a lot of talk about how Donald Trump will move quickly to resolve the Ukraine conflict. Maybe not within the advertised 24 hours – but supposedly he sees the pointlessness of an open-ended war with Russia. So, he is expected to get in touch with Putin, personally and/or via a designated envoy, to make a deal. We have heard hints of what the ingredients could be: a ceasefire, the lure of reduced sanctions, some recognition of a special Russian association with the four oblasts Moscow has annexed, Crimea ceded, the remainder of Ukraine autonomous with links to the EU if not NATO. The sequencing, the specifics, ancillary trade-offs are cloudy. To the minds of the more optimistic commentators, an eventual agreement is likely since Trump wants to be unburdened of the Ukraine albatross, since he is not a fan of NATO expansion or NATO itself, since he wants to concentrate on dismantling the federal government while pressing ahead with the rest of the MAGA agenda. Relations with Russia, as with every other foreign power, will be treated in terms of bilateral dealing wherein the U.S, focuses on the trade-offs, i.e. how much it gains as opposed to how much it gives.

    It is by no means clear that this approach could achieve the stated goal of ending the war in Ukraine and easing the tense confrontation with Russia. For the Kremlin has set stipulations for a peaceful resolution that could only be met by a broader accord than is visualized in the horse trading anticipated by the Trump entourage and like-minded think tankers. Russia will not stop the fighting until a firm agreement has been reached. That is one. It will not accept any ambiguity as to the future status of the Russophile territories in question. That’s two. It will not tolerate leaving in place a Kiev government controlled by the rabid anti-Russian nationalists who have run it since 2014. That’s three. It will demand a treaty that formally neutralizes Ukraine on the model of post-war Austria. That’s four. It will press hard for the constitution of a pan-European security architecture which accords Russia a legitimate place. That’s five.1

    The implication is that the prospects are dim for a quick, short-term deal that leaves these sensitive issues indeterminate and open to the vagaries of politics in Washington and European capitals. It appears unrealistic that Trump will have the discretionary power, the political will or the strategic vision to design and to implement a multifaceted plan as required to weave together the varied strands of the European security fabric. It is one thing to intimidate the Europeans into taking on a fuller responsibility for their own security by threatening to leave them to their own devices. It is something far more demanding to recast the American relationship with its European allies, with Russia, with other interested, neighboring parties. For meeting that wider challenge has as its precondition a comprehensive redrawing by the United States of the imprinted mental map of the world system. For it is being transformed in basic ways which are at variance with the deep-seated American presumptions of dominance, control and privilege.

    Trump is not the man to man to replace the prevailing strategic vision and America’s paramount position in the world with something more refined and in correspondence to the emerging multi-nodule system. Although instinctively he is more of an America firster than a hegemonic imperialist, his actions will be piecemeal and disjointed rather than pieces of an artful new pattern. Even in regard to specific matters like Ukraine or Taiwan it is impossible simply to snap one’s fingers and on impulse shift course. A carefully thought through design and the crafting of a subtle diplomacy is the prerequisite. Donald Trump, incontrovertibly, has no plan, no strategy, no design for any area of public policy. He is incapable of doing so; for he lacks the necessary mental concentration and organized knowledge. The same holds for dealing with China.

    [The focal shift from Russia in Europe to China in Asia is less a mechanism for coping with defeat in Ukraine than the pathological reaction of a country that, feeling a gnawing sense of diminishing prowess, can manage to do nothing more than try one final throw of the dice in a vain attempt at proving to itself that it still has the right stuff – since living without that exalted sense of self is intolerable.]

    Were Trump to take a series of purely tactical actions that have the net effect of lowering American presence globally, he would be running against the grain of fundamental national beliefs. Belief in the country’s birth under a Providential star to lead the world along the path of enlightenment, belief in American exceptionalism, belief in American superiority (the last jeopardized by signs of losing a battle with a superior armed Russia, by signs of losing an economic battle with a technologically superior China). Moreover, many Americans’ faith in these national myths is bound closely to their own individual sense of self-esteem that already is felt to be under threat in this age of anxiety. Trump is hardly the one to guide them to a mature appreciation of what America is and who they are.2

    Dilemma 2 Russia & China

    These two great powers, who are the principal obstacles to the United States’ retention of its dominant global position, face a quite different dilemma. Put simply, it is how to deal with an America that remains blind in vision and impervious in policy to the epochal changes reshaping the configuration of the world system. To the extent that Washington does feel the vibrations from this tectonic shift, political leaders are seen as reacting impulsively to deny its practical consequences in striving to assert an endangered supremacy. That compulsion leads American policymakers to set ever more arduous challenges to prove that nothing fundamental has changed. Hence, the drive to overturn a strategic commitment made half a century ago by pressing by every means for Taiwan’s autonomy. Hence, its strenuous efforts to prevent Russia from assuming a place in European (and Middle Eastern) affairs commensurate with its national interests, its strength and its geography.

    [The minimalist aim has been to sever its ties to the Europe of the EU – thereby marginalizing it as a peripheral, inconsequential state. The maximalist aim has been to provoke regime change producing of a weaker, Western-friendly provider of cheap natural resources and open to predatory Western finance. A sharecropper on the West’s global plantation – as one Russian diplomatic bluntly put it. Project Ukraine was to be the spearhead].

    From this perspective, Moscow and Beijing face a dilemma of a singular nature. They must devise elaborate strategies to stymie American plans to perpetuate its dominance by undermining the growing political, economic and – derivatively diplomatic – strength of these perceived rivals. Containment both in broadly security terms and in terms of their impressive national achievements – the latter that diminishes the American (Western) claim to representing to representing the one true path to political stability and economic sell-being. Resistance to those plans by the Russians and Chinese has become the overriding strategic imperative in both capitals as manifest in their intensifying collaboration in all spheres. As they see the situation, that momentous move is dictated by the reckless conduct of a fading, flailing superpower still in possession of an enormous strength to disrupt and to destroy.

    Still, when it comes to direct confrontations with Washington over Ukraine or Taiwan, they are obliged to temper their actions so as to avoid provoking an unwanted crisis with an America they view as unpredictable and unstable. That concern applies to a Trump presidency as much as it does to the outgoing Biden presidency. Striking the correct balance is a daunting challenge.

    The upshot is that Putin and Xi tread carefully in treating with their feckless Western counterparts who disregard the elementary precepts of diplomacy. We are fortunate in the temper of Chinese and Russian leadership. Xi and Putin are rare leaders. They are sober, rational, intelligent, very well informed, capable of broad vision, they do not harbor imperial ambitions, and while dedicated to securing their national interests are not bellicose. Moreover, they have long tenures as heads of state and are secure in power. They have the political capital to invest in projects of magnitude whose prospective payoffs will be well into the future.

    Dilemma 3. THE EUROPEANS

    European political and foreign policy elites are even less self-aware of their untenable circumstances than the Americans. The latter are as one in their blunt conviction that the United States could and should continue to play the dominant role in world affairs. The former have made no considered judgment of their own other than it is imperative to frame their conceptions and strategies to accord with what their superior partner thinks and does. Therein lies the heart of their dilemma.

    For the past 75 years, the Europeans have lived in a state of near total strategic dependence on the United States. That has had profound lasting effects. They extend beyond practical calculations of security needs. Now, more than 30 years after European leaders were relieved from any meaningful military threat, they remain politically and psychologically unable to exercise the prerogatives and responsibility of sovereignty – individually or collectively. They are locked into a classic dominant-subordination relationship with America. So deeply rooted, is has become second nature to political elites.

    [The extremity of the prerogatives granted the United States to act in disregard for European autonomy and interests was demonstrated in Washington’s destruction of the Baltic gas pipeline. That extraordinary episode punctuated the unqualified Europeans’ commitment to serve as an America satrap in its all-out campaign to prevent China as well Russia from challenging its hegemony. Securing the obedience of the European economic power bloc undeniability represents a major strategic success for the United States. So does cutting off Russia’s access to capital investment, technology and rich markets to the West. The heaviest costs are being paid, though, by the Europeans. In effect, they have mortgaged their economic future for the sake of participating in the ill-thought through severing all connection with what now is an implacably antagonist Russia whose abundant energy and agricultural resources have been a prime element in their prosperity and political stability.]

    Under that unnatural condition, European governments have inflicted serious damage on themselves. Moreover, they have jeopardized their strategic and economic future. By following Washington’s lead in the campaign to neutralize Russia as a presence in continental affairs – dating from 2008, they have cut themselves off from their natural partner in natural resource trade, technological development and investment. They have institutionalized a hostile relationship with a neighbor who is a major world power. They have made themselves the residual custodians of a bankrupt, corrupt Ukrainian rump state which carries heavy financial cost. Furthermore, in the process they have undermined the legitimacy of their democratic institutions in ways that open the door to radical Far Right movements. These deleterious consequences are reinforced by the Europeans signing on to the no-holds-barred American economic cum political war against China. This latter misguided action reverses the EU’s eminently sensible prior policy of deepening economic ties with the world’s rising superpower.

    The net effect of this unthinking relegation of European countries to becoming a de facto American vassals is a distancing themselves from the world beyond the trans-Atlantic community. When we add to the tilting scales the alienation of global opinion disgusted by Western enthusiastic support for the Palestinian genocide, we discern an historic retrenchment. The once proud rulers of the globe are circling-the-wagons in a defensive posture against forces they barely understand and have no plan for engaging.

    Europe’s feeble response to this formidable challenge is a series of schematic plans that are little more than placebos mislabeled as potent medication. The EU’s proposed answer to its acute energy predicament is a vaguely sketched strategy whose central element is a diversification of suppliers alongside acceleration of green energy projects. Various initiatives in this direction taken over the past two years give reason for skepticism. The main substitute for Russian natural gas has been LNG from the United States; attempts to form preferential arrangements with other suppliers (like Qatar) have come up short. Relying on the U.S. has its drawbacks. American LNG is 3 to 4 times more costly than pipeline Russian gas. Trump’s declaration that limiting exports will dampen inflationary pressures raises doubts about that supposed reliability. Most telling is the disconcerting fact that European countries clandestinely have somewhat eased their energy penury by buying Russian oil and gas on the very large grey market. Indeed, there is statistical data indicating that the EU states, at one point this year, were importing more Russian sourced LNG than American LNG!

    In the security realm, there is much talk in Brussels about building a purely European security apparatus – linked to NATO while capable of acting independently of the United States. This is an updated and upgraded revival of an idea from the late 1990s that birthed the now moribund Common Security and Defense Policy. This commotion could be taken as just play-acting given that there is no concrete threat to European security outside the fevered imaginations of a political class inflamed by loud American alarums that Putin is bent on restoring the Soviet Empire and dreams of washing his boots in the English channel – if not the Irish Sea. Moreover, there are the provocative Russian actions in relentlessly moving its border closer to NATO military installations.

    The likelihood of the current blue-skying will produce anything substantial is slim. Europe lacks the money in its current stressed financial condition, it lacks the industrial base to equip modern armed forces, and it most certainly lacks the political will. Yes, we hear a lot of bombast issuing from Ursula von der Leyen, Emmanuel Macron, Mark Rutte and their fellow dreamers of a federal European Union. The truth is captured in a saying that we have here in Texas: “All hat and no cattle!”

    The glaring omission is any cogent, realistic diplomatic strategy that corresponds to the present configuration of forces in the world. Instead, we see a heightening of anti-Russian rhetoric, solemn pledges to accompany Ukraine on its path to ultimate victory, and joining Washington in ever harsher measures against China cast as an economic predator and security threat.

    ENDNOTES:

    The post Dilemmas first appeared on Dissident Voice.
    1    President Trump’s policies toward Russia were no different in nature than Bush/Obama/Biden’s: sanctions, arming Ukraine. The seeming difference in attitude toward Putin the man derives from Trump’s abiding faith in and relishing of deal-making. To do so with somebody as formidable as Putin serves his voracious narcissistic ego.
    2    There is one trait in Trump’s malign make-up that offers some small consolation. He is a coward – a blustering bully who evades any direct encounter with an opponent who will stand up to him (even running away from a second debate with Kamala Harris who roughed him up in the first one). Trump has neither the stomach nor the mental strength for a serious brawl/war. Small blessing!


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Michael Brenner.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Is Trump “the only hope we have”?

    RT ran a headline: “Putin must be ‘adult in the room’ on Ukraine conflict.” This is according to left-leaning comedian and political commentator Jimmy Dore.

    “Joe Biden and the neo-cons in his administration have been constantly escalating war… What they’re trying to do is start a war that Donald Trump can’t stop,” warns Dore about a potential WWIII.

    “The only hope we have is that Putin shows restraint, that he is the only adult in the room and that he can hold off somehow until Donald Trump becomes president,” Dore opined in an interview with Going Underground host Afshin Rattansi.

    Is that the only hope? One can certainly come up with many other hopes. For example, a mass mobilization by US citizenry in Washington, DC. A general strike carried out by Americans, Canadians, and Europeans repulsed by their neocon-affiliated politicians. Or that Pentagon generals speak out vociferously and publicly against such dangerous provocations against Russia. Or that people charged with inputting the coordinates for missiles targeting Russia refuse to do so.

    Far-fetched? Maybe so, but isn’t that what a hope is — something far outside of the realm of a certainty?

    Or is Trump the only feasible hope? And can Trump be trusted? How many promises did he fail to come through on during his first term as president?

    Dore asserts that “Trump is not a warmonger” and that he “got elected on ending our foreign regime-change interventionist wars.”

    Trump may very well have been elected on the basis of ending foreign interventions by the US. However, that does not excuse him from being a warmonger.

    Early in the first Trump presidency, he sent in US fighters who killed dozens of Yemeni civilians, including children. Trump was now a war criminal.

    Did Trump end the US war on Afghanistan? No, he sent more American troops to Afghanistan.

    Did Trump end the US war on Syria? No. In fact, Trump said the troops would remain because “We’re keeping the [Syrian] oil.”

    Did Trump seek peaceful relations with Iran? No. In fact, Trump pulled the US out of the JCPOA which was designed to halt Iran’s potential for becoming a nuclear-armed state. Trump’s strategy has set the stage for further nuclear proliferation. And if that was not enough, Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani.

    However woeful the Biden presidency has been, one ought not to forget the first Trump presidency. Trump has a track record. It seems prudent to remove the rose-colored glasses and take into consideration that track record.

    But Trump was pressured by those around him. Trump had mistakenly saddled himself with warmongering neocons in his previous administration like Nikki Haley, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, etc. But is he different now?

    Trump’s new for Director of national security policy in the White House, Sebastian Gorka, exhibited his diplomatic decorum by referring to Russian president Vladimir Putin as a “murderous former KGB colonel, that thug.” According to Gorka, Trump is going to threaten Putin by telling him: “You will negotiate now or the aid that we have given to Ukraine thus far will look like peanuts.” Which serious-minded observers believe that Putin is now shaking in his pants?

    Does this inspire hope in Trump?

    Finally, does anyone have an iota of hope that Trump will do right in the Middle East when it comes to Israel?

    The post Is Trump “the only hope we have”? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Ukraine War after the Penny Has Dropped Make that the Oreshnik

    President Vladimir Putin has announced that serial production of the new Oreshnik hypersonic, intermediate range, 36-warhead missile has commenced. He made this announcement at a special public meeting with Defense Ministry officials in the Kremlin on Friday, November 22.

    “There are no means of countering such a missile; no means of intercepting it exist in the world today,” Putin said. “We need to launch its serial production. Let us assume that the decision on the serial production of this system has been made. As a matter of fact, it has already been essentially organised.”

    This means there are already, or will shortly be deployed, dozens of Oreshniki missiles for firing at targets in the Ukraine west of the Dnieper River and as far west as the Polish and Hungarian borders.

    This also means that no American, no NATO staff group, no Anglo-American target intelligence unit in bunkers in Kiev or Lvov are safe any longer. Nor are Vladimir Zelensky and his advisors. To escape Israeli-precedent decapitation, they must all decamp to the Ukrainian war operations  mock-up already prepared on the Polish side of the border.

    Ukrainian military intelligence head, Kirill Budanov, has claimed that the Oreshnik strike on the Yuzhmash (Pivdenmash) plant in Dniepropetrovsk  is “just a cipher…We know for sure that as of October they were supposed to make two research samples, maybe they made a little bit more, but believe me, this is a research sample, but not yet serial production, thank God.”

    “Wishful thinking,” a NATO military source comments. “He’ll get the chance to find out first- hand.”

    Russian military sources add that, following disclosure of the Kremlin’s back-channel talks with Donald Trump and his advisors on terms for an end-of-war settlement, the Oreshnik is the signal that the “General Staff are  talking directly to Trump & Co.”  Putin was explicit in his first announcement of the Oreshnik firing: “We believe that the United States [President Trump] made a mistake by unilaterally destroying the INF Treaty in 2019 under a far-fetched pretext.”

    Dmitry Rogozin — formerly Russian NATO ambassador, then deputy prime minister in charge of the Russian military industrial complex,  now senator for Zaporozhye  – carefully identified the credit for the Oreshnik: “Today, everyone who fought for the creation of this missile system, who overcame what we may call scepticism,  should congratulate each other. And I join those congratulations. Good for you!…Thank you to the Supreme [Command, Верховному] for supporting the work! Thank you to the Academy for not backing away!”

    A Russian source, who does not believe Putin ordered the General Staff to suspend its electric war campaign between August and this month, believes Russian strategy now is “a thousand cuts. The Oreshnik is a particularly deep one but I don’t believe that the Kremlin and General Staff have decided to use it to hit Bankova [street address in Kiev of the presidential offices and living quarters ]. The decapitation threat is real enough though to impel Zelensky to exit, or maybe for the Ukrainian military to get rid of him on their own initiative.”

    “Just as important,” the source says, “the Russian ground offensive in the east will remain slow, patient, maybe for two years more. The priority is on preventing Russian casualties, conserving Russian lives. This is essential once you realize that the [Putin] presidential succession also depends, not only on winning the war on Russian terms, but ensuring the protection of Russian lives.”

    Oreshnik in Russian means, literally, hazel nut or the wood of the hazelnut tree. In Siberia, the cognate expression “to give nuts” has the metaphorical meaning of inflicting punishment.


    Watch and listen to this video recording of the sequence of warhead strikes on November 21.  In this second videoclip,  the unique funnel of light is displayed six times as the warheads land on target.

    As Putin pointed out in his national address on the evening after the Oreshnik strike, it had been then-President Trump’s “mistake” in 2019 to unilaterally withdraw from the 1987 Soviet-American treaty on intermediate range nuclear forces (INF). Oreshnik is both the Russian reply  and also a warning to Trump to correct his mistake.

    For the time being, the Financial Times, a Japanese propaganda outlet in London, reported a Norwegian graduate student as claiming “there certainly was no military value to it.”

    In Moscow, Izvestia, on which the BBC has relied for republication, reported “it is likely that we are dealing with a new generation of Russian intermediate-range missiles [with a range of] 2,500-3,000km (1,550-1,860 miles) and potentially extending to 5,000km (3,100 miles), but not intercontinental. It is obviously equipped with a separating warhead with individual guidance units.”

    This means the missile is MIRV, comprising multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles. Close observation of the strike videoclips shows six of these releasing six munitions capable of penetrating deep underground bunkers. A salvo of thirty-six warhead detonations, altogether.

    Missile speed is reported to be between Mach 10 and Mach 11.


    The Militarist military blog of Moscow reports this image of the  predecessor RSD-10 Pioneer missile “can give a definite idea of the appearance of the Oreshnik.”

    Although satellite images of the plant after Thursday’s attack have not been declassified or published in the open, what is likely is that the bunker stocks of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles being prepared at the plant for launching against Russia were destroyed, along with the factory-floor and machine capacities of the plant to service HIMARS, other rocket and missile firing equipment delivered by the US and NATO states to the Zelensky regime.

    Russian military sources have been discussing Ukrainian target options since the Putin Pause ended on November 17,  and the electric war recommenced with the General Staff’s 120-missile, 90-drone raid against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure across the country. For more on the Putin Pause, click to read this  and this.


    Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

    The sources differ on whether the military initiative has now been delegated by Putin to the General Staff without the autumn restrictions, and whether the President has decided the Biden Administration’s escalation has Trump’s tacit endorsement in a calculated “escalate-to-deescalate” plan.

    A Russian military source cautions against confusing Russia’s operational priorities now that Oreshnik has been unleashed, and the strategic priorities which haven’t changed. “Will the generals go for Zelensky and take out the whole illegitimate regime if another ATAMCS hits deep Russia? You bet. The Israelis have made it very easy for Putin. But I do not think the generals or the Security Council or all of the Duma care so much at the moment. Zelensky isn’t a priority because his own soldiers will do him in.”

    “I also see there is no pause for Trump. No deference, no hidden messages, and no respite irrespective of what talks might or not be going on behind the scenes. This is a signal that the trust in Trump is near zero, and even less so for [Elon] Musk and the love fest the two of them have been displaying. There’s only one message Trump can give now to show his intention for an end of the war, and that’s to get Zelensky to announce elections by next March. That would signal the end of the neo-Nazi regime, and of course, the end of Zelensky too.”

    The military sources also emphasize the warnings to the US, its European and Asian allies in the small print of the new nuclear doctrine signed by Putin on November 19.


    Source: https://rg.ru/documents/
    Sputnik has published this “unofficial” translation into English.

    The sources note that Paragraph 9   warns that nuclear deterrence is “directed against states that provide their controlled territory, airspace and/or maritime space and resources for the preparation and implementation of aggression against the Russian Federation.” Paragraph 11 then goes on to link nuclear with non-nuclear states in the NATO treaty, as well as the AUKUS  and G7 blocs; in Asia these include Japan and Australia. “Aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies by any non-nuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state is considered as their joint attack.”

    This is once again Putin’s cross-hairs warning to Poland and Romania for their US nuclear-capable Tomahawk missile bases at Redzikowo and Deveselu.  The cross-hairs warning was first given by Putin in Greece in 2016.  Now that the Greek government itself has agreed to secretly hosting US nuclear weapons at the Souda Bay base in Crete, the warning applies to Greece itself.

    “Nuclear deterrence,” as Paragraph 12 of the Doctrine says, “is aimed at ensuring that a potential adversary understands the inevitability of retaliation in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies.” Greece, Spain,  and Germany are also now targeted according to Paragraph 15(e) because they allow “the deployment of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery on the territories of non-nuclear states”; and according to Paragraph 15(g) because of the “actions of a potential enemy aimed at isolating part of the territory of the Russian Federation, including blocking access to vital transport communications”. In Europe this expands Russia’s targets to the Baltic states around Kaliningrad, as well as to the North Sea states  Sweden, Norway  and Denmark which participated in the Nord Stream-2 sabotage and now threaten Russian maritime movement through the Danish Straits.

    Map of European Capitals within Range of  Oreshnik (Kalingrad launch)


    Source: https://t.me/readovkanews/89690
    With an estimated 1,500 kgs of combat payload, lifting to a maximum height of 12 km and moving at a speed of Mach 10,  the Oreshnik launched from Kaliningrad  would strike Warsaw in 1 minute 21 seconds; Berlin, 2 min 35 sec; Paris, 6 min 52 sec; London, 6 min 56 sec.

    Of direct impact for Russian strategy on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Doctrine provisions mean that Odessa will, in the words of a Moscow source, “never again be allowed to be a base against Russia.”

    The Oreshnik strike of November 21, the military sources in Moscow believe, demonstrates the military capacity to strike with either conventional or nuclear warheads at targets throughout Europe which none of the available US Patriot or other western air defence systems can defend against. It creates a conventional alternative to nuclear retaliation if, as Paragraph 19(d) of the Doctrine says, there is “aggression against the Russian Federation and/or the Republic of Belarus as members of the Union State with the use of conventional weapons, creating a critical threat to their sovereignty and/or territorial integrity” (emphasis added).

    Before Oreshnik, the Russians point out, Washington was saying there was nothing new in Putin’s nuclear doctrine paper. “Observing no changes to Russia’s nuclear posture, we have not seen any reason to adjust our own nuclear posture or doctrine in response to Russia’s statements today,” Reuters reported the National Security Council as saying on November 19.

    After Oreshnik, in presentations at a Washington think tank on November 21, Pentagon officials announced: “adjustments to the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review may be required to sustain the ability to achieve nuclear deterrence, in light of enhanced nuclear capabilities of China and Russia and possible lack of nuclear arms control agreements after February.”


    The President with the Defense Minister and other officials at the Kremlin on November 22.
    Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/

    Look carefully again at what Putin has announced for Oreshnik. By saying on November 21 “we also carried out tests of one of Russia’s latest medium-range missile systems,” he implied that the Yuzhmash strike may be a one-off. That depends, he added: “our decision on further deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles will depend on the actions of the United States and its satellites. We will determine the targets during further tests of our advanced missile systems based on the threats to the security of the Russian Federation.”

    If the US adds to or refills the Kiev regime’s stocks of ATACMS; if the Starmer Government authorizes a new Storm Shadow firing across the border; likewise for President Emmanuel Macron for the SCALP missile, and for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for the supply of Taurus missiles, then Putin’s warning on November 22 of serial production of Oreshniki has confirmed “inevitable retaliation”.

    “As I have already said, we will continue these tests, including in combat conditions, depending on the situation and the nature of the security threats posed to Russia. All the more so as we have a stockpile of such products, a reserve of such systems ready for use.”

    The post The Ukraine War after the Penny Has Dropped Make that the Oreshnik first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Ukraine War after the Penny Has Dropped Make that the Oreshnik

    President Vladimir Putin has announced that serial production of the new Oreshnik hypersonic, intermediate range, 36-warhead missile has commenced. He made this announcement at a special public meeting with Defense Ministry officials in the Kremlin on Friday, November 22.

    “There are no means of countering such a missile; no means of intercepting it exist in the world today,” Putin said. “We need to launch its serial production. Let us assume that the decision on the serial production of this system has been made. As a matter of fact, it has already been essentially organised.”

    This means there are already, or will shortly be deployed, dozens of Oreshniki missiles for firing at targets in the Ukraine west of the Dnieper River and as far west as the Polish and Hungarian borders.

    This also means that no American, no NATO staff group, no Anglo-American target intelligence unit in bunkers in Kiev or Lvov are safe any longer. Nor are Vladimir Zelensky and his advisors. To escape Israeli-precedent decapitation, they must all decamp to the Ukrainian war operations  mock-up already prepared on the Polish side of the border.

    Ukrainian military intelligence head, Kirill Budanov, has claimed that the Oreshnik strike on the Yuzhmash (Pivdenmash) plant in Dniepropetrovsk  is “just a cipher…We know for sure that as of October they were supposed to make two research samples, maybe they made a little bit more, but believe me, this is a research sample, but not yet serial production, thank God.”

    “Wishful thinking,” a NATO military source comments. “He’ll get the chance to find out first- hand.”

    Russian military sources add that, following disclosure of the Kremlin’s back-channel talks with Donald Trump and his advisors on terms for an end-of-war settlement, the Oreshnik is the signal that the “General Staff are  talking directly to Trump & Co.”  Putin was explicit in his first announcement of the Oreshnik firing: “We believe that the United States [President Trump] made a mistake by unilaterally destroying the INF Treaty in 2019 under a far-fetched pretext.”

    Dmitry Rogozin — formerly Russian NATO ambassador, then deputy prime minister in charge of the Russian military industrial complex,  now senator for Zaporozhye  – carefully identified the credit for the Oreshnik: “Today, everyone who fought for the creation of this missile system, who overcame what we may call scepticism,  should congratulate each other. And I join those congratulations. Good for you!…Thank you to the Supreme [Command, Верховному] for supporting the work! Thank you to the Academy for not backing away!”

    A Russian source, who does not believe Putin ordered the General Staff to suspend its electric war campaign between August and this month, believes Russian strategy now is “a thousand cuts. The Oreshnik is a particularly deep one but I don’t believe that the Kremlin and General Staff have decided to use it to hit Bankova [street address in Kiev of the presidential offices and living quarters ]. The decapitation threat is real enough though to impel Zelensky to exit, or maybe for the Ukrainian military to get rid of him on their own initiative.”

    “Just as important,” the source says, “the Russian ground offensive in the east will remain slow, patient, maybe for two years more. The priority is on preventing Russian casualties, conserving Russian lives. This is essential once you realize that the [Putin] presidential succession also depends, not only on winning the war on Russian terms, but ensuring the protection of Russian lives.”

    Oreshnik in Russian means, literally, hazel nut or the wood of the hazelnut tree. In Siberia, the cognate expression “to give nuts” has the metaphorical meaning of inflicting punishment.


    Watch and listen to this video recording of the sequence of warhead strikes on November 21.  In this second videoclip,  the unique funnel of light is displayed six times as the warheads land on target.

    As Putin pointed out in his national address on the evening after the Oreshnik strike, it had been then-President Trump’s “mistake” in 2019 to unilaterally withdraw from the 1987 Soviet-American treaty on intermediate range nuclear forces (INF). Oreshnik is both the Russian reply  and also a warning to Trump to correct his mistake.

    For the time being, the Financial Times, a Japanese propaganda outlet in London, reported a Norwegian graduate student as claiming “there certainly was no military value to it.”

    In Moscow, Izvestia, on which the BBC has relied for republication, reported “it is likely that we are dealing with a new generation of Russian intermediate-range missiles [with a range of] 2,500-3,000km (1,550-1,860 miles) and potentially extending to 5,000km (3,100 miles), but not intercontinental. It is obviously equipped with a separating warhead with individual guidance units.”

    This means the missile is MIRV, comprising multiple independently targeted re-entry vehicles. Close observation of the strike videoclips shows six of these releasing six munitions capable of penetrating deep underground bunkers. A salvo of thirty-six warhead detonations, altogether.

    Missile speed is reported to be between Mach 10 and Mach 11.


    The Militarist military blog of Moscow reports this image of the  predecessor RSD-10 Pioneer missile “can give a definite idea of the appearance of the Oreshnik.”

    Although satellite images of the plant after Thursday’s attack have not been declassified or published in the open, what is likely is that the bunker stocks of ATACMS and Storm Shadow missiles being prepared at the plant for launching against Russia were destroyed, along with the factory-floor and machine capacities of the plant to service HIMARS, other rocket and missile firing equipment delivered by the US and NATO states to the Zelensky regime.

    Russian military sources have been discussing Ukrainian target options since the Putin Pause ended on November 17,  and the electric war recommenced with the General Staff’s 120-missile, 90-drone raid against Ukraine’s energy infrastructure across the country. For more on the Putin Pause, click to read this  and this.


    Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

    The sources differ on whether the military initiative has now been delegated by Putin to the General Staff without the autumn restrictions, and whether the President has decided the Biden Administration’s escalation has Trump’s tacit endorsement in a calculated “escalate-to-deescalate” plan.

    A Russian military source cautions against confusing Russia’s operational priorities now that Oreshnik has been unleashed, and the strategic priorities which haven’t changed. “Will the generals go for Zelensky and take out the whole illegitimate regime if another ATAMCS hits deep Russia? You bet. The Israelis have made it very easy for Putin. But I do not think the generals or the Security Council or all of the Duma care so much at the moment. Zelensky isn’t a priority because his own soldiers will do him in.”

    “I also see there is no pause for Trump. No deference, no hidden messages, and no respite irrespective of what talks might or not be going on behind the scenes. This is a signal that the trust in Trump is near zero, and even less so for [Elon] Musk and the love fest the two of them have been displaying. There’s only one message Trump can give now to show his intention for an end of the war, and that’s to get Zelensky to announce elections by next March. That would signal the end of the neo-Nazi regime, and of course, the end of Zelensky too.”

    The military sources also emphasize the warnings to the US, its European and Asian allies in the small print of the new nuclear doctrine signed by Putin on November 19.


    Source: https://rg.ru/documents/
    Sputnik has published this “unofficial” translation into English.

    The sources note that Paragraph 9   warns that nuclear deterrence is “directed against states that provide their controlled territory, airspace and/or maritime space and resources for the preparation and implementation of aggression against the Russian Federation.” Paragraph 11 then goes on to link nuclear with non-nuclear states in the NATO treaty, as well as the AUKUS  and G7 blocs; in Asia these include Japan and Australia. “Aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies by any non-nuclear state with the participation or support of a nuclear state is considered as their joint attack.”

    This is once again Putin’s cross-hairs warning to Poland and Romania for their US nuclear-capable Tomahawk missile bases at Redzikowo and Deveselu.  The cross-hairs warning was first given by Putin in Greece in 2016.  Now that the Greek government itself has agreed to secretly hosting US nuclear weapons at the Souda Bay base in Crete, the warning applies to Greece itself.

    “Nuclear deterrence,” as Paragraph 12 of the Doctrine says, “is aimed at ensuring that a potential adversary understands the inevitability of retaliation in the event of aggression against the Russian Federation and/or its allies.” Greece, Spain,  and Germany are also now targeted according to Paragraph 15(e) because they allow “the deployment of nuclear weapons and their means of delivery on the territories of non-nuclear states”; and according to Paragraph 15(g) because of the “actions of a potential enemy aimed at isolating part of the territory of the Russian Federation, including blocking access to vital transport communications”. In Europe this expands Russia’s targets to the Baltic states around Kaliningrad, as well as to the North Sea states  Sweden, Norway  and Denmark which participated in the Nord Stream-2 sabotage and now threaten Russian maritime movement through the Danish Straits.

    Map of European Capitals within Range of  Oreshnik (Kalingrad launch)


    Source: https://t.me/readovkanews/89690
    With an estimated 1,500 kgs of combat payload, lifting to a maximum height of 12 km and moving at a speed of Mach 10,  the Oreshnik launched from Kaliningrad  would strike Warsaw in 1 minute 21 seconds; Berlin, 2 min 35 sec; Paris, 6 min 52 sec; London, 6 min 56 sec.

    Of direct impact for Russian strategy on the Ukrainian battlefield, the Doctrine provisions mean that Odessa will, in the words of a Moscow source, “never again be allowed to be a base against Russia.”

    The Oreshnik strike of November 21, the military sources in Moscow believe, demonstrates the military capacity to strike with either conventional or nuclear warheads at targets throughout Europe which none of the available US Patriot or other western air defence systems can defend against. It creates a conventional alternative to nuclear retaliation if, as Paragraph 19(d) of the Doctrine says, there is “aggression against the Russian Federation and/or the Republic of Belarus as members of the Union State with the use of conventional weapons, creating a critical threat to their sovereignty and/or territorial integrity” (emphasis added).

    Before Oreshnik, the Russians point out, Washington was saying there was nothing new in Putin’s nuclear doctrine paper. “Observing no changes to Russia’s nuclear posture, we have not seen any reason to adjust our own nuclear posture or doctrine in response to Russia’s statements today,” Reuters reported the National Security Council as saying on November 19.

    After Oreshnik, in presentations at a Washington think tank on November 21, Pentagon officials announced: “adjustments to the 2022 Nuclear Posture Review may be required to sustain the ability to achieve nuclear deterrence, in light of enhanced nuclear capabilities of China and Russia and possible lack of nuclear arms control agreements after February.”


    The President with the Defense Minister and other officials at the Kremlin on November 22.
    Source: http://en.kremlin.ru/

    Look carefully again at what Putin has announced for Oreshnik. By saying on November 21 “we also carried out tests of one of Russia’s latest medium-range missile systems,” he implied that the Yuzhmash strike may be a one-off. That depends, he added: “our decision on further deployment of intermediate-range and shorter-range missiles will depend on the actions of the United States and its satellites. We will determine the targets during further tests of our advanced missile systems based on the threats to the security of the Russian Federation.”

    If the US adds to or refills the Kiev regime’s stocks of ATACMS; if the Starmer Government authorizes a new Storm Shadow firing across the border; likewise for President Emmanuel Macron for the SCALP missile, and for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz for the supply of Taurus missiles, then Putin’s warning on November 22 of serial production of Oreshniki has confirmed “inevitable retaliation”.

    “As I have already said, we will continue these tests, including in combat conditions, depending on the situation and the nature of the security threats posed to Russia. All the more so as we have a stockpile of such products, a reserve of such systems ready for use.”

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  • Lucid Summations of Fundamental Issues

    In his 1959 classic book, The Sociological Imagination, the American sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote that ordinary people are often reduced to moral stasis and feel trapped and overwhelmed by the glut of information that is available to them. They have great difficulty in an age of fact to make sense of the connections between their personal lives and society, to see the links between biography and history, self and world. They can’t assimilate all the information and need a “new” way of thinking that he called “the sociological imagination” that would allow them to connect history and biography, to see the connections between society and its structures. He wrote:

    What they need, and what they feel they need, is a quality of mind that will help them to use information and to develop reason in order to achieve lucid summation of what is going on in the world and what may be happening within themselves.

    That was long ago and is obviously much truer today when the Internet and digital media, not the slow reading of books and even paper newspapers and magazines, are the norm, with words scurrying past glazed eyes on cell phones and computers like constantly changing marquees announcing that the clowns have arrived.

    In an era of soundbites and paragraphs that have been reduced to one sentences in a long campaign of dumbing down the public, it may seem counterintuitive to heed Mills’ advice and offer summations. However, as one who has written long articles on many issues, I think it is a good practice to do so once in a while, not just to distill conclusions one has arrived at for oneself, but also to provoke readers into thinking about conclusions that they may question but may feel compelled to reconsider for themselves.  For I have reached them assiduously, not lightly, honestly, not guilefully.

    With that in mind, what follows are some summations.

    • With the musical chair exchanges between Democratic and Republican administrations, now from Biden to Trump and previously the reverse, we are simply seeing an exchange of methods of elite control from repressive tolerance (tolerant in the cultural realm with “wokeness” under the Democrats) to tolerant (“promotion” of free speech, no censorship) repression under the Republicans. Under conditions of advanced technological global capitalism and oligarchy, only the methods of control change, not the reality of repression. Free elections of masters.

    • The exertion of power and control always revolves around methods of manipulating people’s fear of death, whether that is through authority, propaganda, or coercion. It takes many forms – war, weapons, money, police, disease (Covid-19), etc. Threats explicit and implicit.

    • Contrary to much reporting that Israel is the tail wagging the U.S. dog, it is the U.S. dog that wags Israel as its client state, doing what is best for both – control of the Middle East.  Control of the Middle East’s oil supplies and travel routes has been key to American foreign policy for a very long time.

    • There is no deep state unless one understands that the U.S. government, which is an obvious and open warfare state, is the “deep” state in all its shallowness and serves the interests of those who own the country.

    • The CIA’s public assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963, sixty-one years ago to the day as I write, is the paradigmatic example of how the power elite uses its ultimate weapon of coercion. Death in the public square for everybody to see together with the spreading of fear with all its real and symbolic repercussions.

    • The mass acceptance and use of the cell phone by the public has exponentially facilitated the national security state’s surveillance and mind control. People now carry unfreedom in their pockets as “the land of the free” has become a portable cage with solitude and privacy banished. What evil lurks in the hearts of men? the 1930s popular radio show’s “Shadow” once asked – now the phone knows and it is shadowing those who carry it.

    • The power of art and the artist to counter and refuse the prevailing power structure has been radically compromised as alienation has been swallowed by technology and dissent neutralized as both have become normalized. The rebel has become the robot, giving what the system’s programmers want – one dimensional happy talk.

    • Silence has been banished as ears have been stuffed with what Ray Bradbury in Fahrenheit 451 called seashells (earbuds). Perpetual noise and screen-watching and being watched have replaced thought in a technopoly. Musing as you walk and dawdle is an antique practice now. Smile for the camera.

    • The U.S. wars against Russia, China, and the Palestinians have been waged for more than a century. Like the slaughtered native peoples, American black slaves, the Vietnamese, Iraqis, and so many others around the world, these people have been considered less than human and in need of elimination. There is no end in sight for any of this to change. It is the American Way.

    • The pathology of technophilia is connected to the quantification of everything and the transhumanist goal of making people into dead and inert things like the consumer products that are constantly dangled before their eyes as the next best secret to happiness. I have asked myself if this is true and the answer that came back is that it is a moot point with the margin of error being +/- 11.000461 %.

    • Then there is the fundamental matter of consciousness in a materialist society. When people are conditioned into a collective mental habit of seeing the outside world as a collection of things, all outsides and no insides, contrary to seeing images with interiors, as Owen Barfield has written in History, Guilt and Habit, they are worshiping idols and feel imprisoned but don’t know why. This is our spiritual crisis today. What William Blake called the mind-forg’d manacles. Those manacles have primarily been imposed on people through a vast tapestry of lies and propaganda directed by the oligarchs through their mass media mouthpieces. Jim Garrison, the former District Attorney of New Orleans who brought the only trial in JFK’s assassination, called it “the doll’s house” in which most Americans live and “into which America gradually has been converted, [where] a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory.” There are signs that some people are awakening to this fact, with the emphasis on “some.” It will take the use of all the sociological and spiritual imagination we can muster to get most people of all political persuasions to recognize the trap they are in. Barfield writes: “It sounds as if it ought to be easy enough, where the prison in question is not made of steel and concrete, but only a mental habit. But it is not. Remember it is not just my mental habit, or your mental habit. It is our mental habit. . . . [a] collective mental habit, which is a very different matter.”

    But I am getting wordy and drifting from Mills’ advice to create lucid summations, some of which I have listed above.

    So let me just quote a few true words from Pete Seeger:

    We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
    And the big fool says to push on

    Bad advice.

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  • MIGA or MAGA

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  • Hands Off Haiti

    Uncaptured Media founder Dan Cohen spoke at a Nov. 20 UN Security Council meeting on a U.S. proposal for a UN military intervention in Haiti.

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  • The Possible Beginning of The End

    Proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only thing intellectually lower than Trump is his opposition, he was re-elected by a more solid margin than last time. After one of the dumbest and most slanted hit jobs on American consciousness, with tens of thousands of photos of Harris beaming as in contemplation of dinner dishes filled with food instead of animal waste, and Trump in an equal number looking as though he has not had a comfortable bowel movement in thirty or forty years, the public was expected to react as their keepers, in their incredibly bigoted stupidity, expected. The most dreadful outcome for the owners and operators of market democracy is that actual working people may be closer to some power than ever since the new deal, though one should hardly expect anything nearly that good since there were socialists and communists in the government back in those days and now we’re lucky to have a handful of “progressive” reps left of the American Nazi party. At least slightly.

    As further proof of complete failure for privileged class expressions of our great democracy Trump was even outspent in the electoral market which is where Americans shop for the illusion of some constitutional or biblical expression of a supposed gift to the world brought by Europeans who savagely attacked indigenous people here hundreds of years ago and transformed earth into real estate while introducing freedom and other good stuff even before Israelis thought of it hundreds of years later in Palestine. Rejoice, be glad and continue taking drugs, spending trillions to brutalize humanity and destroy nature while the ruling class continues teaching us that swallowing sewage is a form of healthy dining and having our heads filled with mental puss makes us worthy of therapy.

    While the USA sinks more deeply in a global political economic cesspool and the rest of the world rises and moves in the direction of a global and cooperative real democracy, a relative handful of capitalist commissars here and in colonial corporations desperately try to hang on to power and in so doing threaten the entire human race and not just their tiny if incredibly wealthy ruling class and are bringing us closer to ruin. The professional servant class which has served as supporting capital in its fading time now assumes even more desperate behavior and the media air contaminated by consciousness controllers becoming more dimwitted and murderous with each passing second threaten to speed up messages of blatant idiocy that may serve to make Trump look less ignorant if that is possible.

    Those who speak of losing something that has never existed since euros got here – democracy – strengthen the foolish idea that voting assures the existence of majority rule no matter the fact that in America and as in most other market electoral arenas those with the most heavily financed products/candidates usually win though this case was a slight blip on the blurred screen of a degenerate form of democracy to make the one by which Nazis took power in Germany look close to ideal. While a popular comic-book formed conception might be that evil Germans took control of the country by marching in with guns and taking over that is fiction. They were elected to power in a more democratic, though hardly ideal, form of elections in which achieving a minority vote got you at least some power while here in narcoleptic-inspired America less than 50 percent gets you booted out with nothing.

    But lest we become more deeply submerged in oceans of blather about fascism and not notice that millions of us live under it without it being given that name we might consider that millions of Americans are poor, without health care and hundreds of thousands of us have no place to live. This while we spend trillions on war and mass murder and tens of billions on the health and well being of our pets with many of us sleeping in their warm embrace due to lack of any human intimacy in our lives. Meanwhile Trump and many of his innocent supporters speak of Democratic Party members as Marxists thereby proving that he and they have no idea of Grouch’s thoughts on humor let alone Karl’s on political economics. But whether motivated by biblical tales of chosen people and virgin births or modern and less believable nonsense about celebrities and other influencers who make Trump seem almost thoughtful by comparison, news from the material world is that capitalist economics are destroying nature in all its forms and while the obliteration of air, water and other stuff in existence from long before we came along, the threat of nuclear destruction of all of us all at once grows with each new expression of mindless private profit seeking with more murderous policies and weapons that bring billions of dollars to some while offering to destroy billions of lives among the enormous majority of humanity made to absorb the murderous bill until such time as we create real global democracy and end the system before it destroys all of us.

    Most recently the outgoing president, who has long left any hint of intelligence for the dung heap, warmly offered Ukraine the use of weapons to attack Russia and now, as often, we have to rely on Putin’s humanity and intelligence not to unleash nuclear weapons on the USA when such weapons are used on Russia. But, of course, good and decent Americans are reduced to claiming Putin is horny for world domination while the U.S. has hundreds of military bases surrounding Russia, China and much of the world but these are all about democracy and peace. Of course, and rapists are only concerned that their victims not be sexually frustrated. Trump’s election may well be another sign of the end of American imperial domination of the planet and whether his blatant ignorance and honesty assure positive or negative result, America and the planet will possibly benefit much more than great masses of us were lead to believe.

    Meanwhile the usual suspects will fill the air with mental smog accusing any and all of fascism, genocide and even newer synonyms for whatever has been going on before our eyes while they learned memes and performed mimes and qualified as capital’s professional class of well paid servants whose checks may begin bouncing sooner than 2025 gets old.

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  • Trump, AUKUS, and Australia’s Dim Servitors

    There is something enormously satisfying about seeing those in the war racket worry that their assumptions on conflict have been upended.  There they were, happily funding, planning and preparing to battle against threats imagined or otherwise, and there comes Donald Trump, malice and petulance combined, to pull the rug from under them again.

    What is fascinating about the return of Trump to the White House is that critics think his next round of potentially rowdy occupancy is going to encourage, rather than discourage war.  Conflict may be the inadvertent consequence of any number of unilateral policies Trump might pursue, but they do not tally with his anti-war platform.  Whatever can be said about his adolescent demagogic tendencies, a love of war is curiously absent from the complement.  A tendency to predictable unpredictability, however, is.

    The whole assessment also utterly misunderstands the premise that the foolishly menacing trilateral alliance of AUKUS is, by its nature, a pact for the making of war.  This agreement between Australia, the UK and the US can hardly be dignified as some peaceful, unprovocative enterprise fashioned to preserve security.  To that end, President Joe Biden should shoulder a considerable amount of the blame for destabilising the region.  But instead, we are getting some rather streaky commentary from the security wonks in Australia.  Trump spells, in the pessimistic words of Nick Bisley from La Trobe University, “uncertainty about just what direction the US will go”.  His policies might, for instance, “badly destabilise Asia” and imperil the AUKUS, specifically on the provision of nuclear-powered submarines to the Royal Australian Navy.  On the last point, we can only hope.

    The Australians, being willing and unquestioning satellites of US power, have tried to pretend that a change of the guard in the White House will not doom the pact.  Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong expressed a “great deal of confidence” that things would not change under the new administration, seeing as AUKUS enjoyed bipartisan support.

    Australia’s ambassador to the US, Kevin Rudd, is also of the view that AUKUS will survive into the Trump administration as it “strengthens all three countries’ ability to deter threats, and it grows the defence industrial base and creates jobs in all three countries”.

    Another former ambassador to Washington, Arthur Sinodinos, who also occupies the role of AUKUS forum co-chair, has pitched the viability of the trilateral pact in such a way as to make it more appealing to Trump.  Without any trace of humour, he suggests that tech oligarch Elon Musk oversee matters if needed.  “If Musk can deliver AUKUS, we should put Musk in charge of AUKUS, and I’m not joking, if new thinking is needed to get this done,” advises the deluded Sinodinos.

    The reasoning offered on this is, to put it mildly, peculiar.  As co-head of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, Musk, it is hoped, will apply “business principles” and “new thinking”.  If the Pentagon can “reform supply chains, logistics, procurement rules, in a way that means there’s speed to market, we get minimum viable capability sooner, rather than later”.

    These doltish assessments from Sinodinos are blatantly ignorant of the fact the defence industry is never efficient.  Nor do they detract from the key premise of the arrangements.  Certainly, if an anti-China focus is what you are focusing on – and AUKUS, centrally and evidently, is an anti-China agreement pure and simple – there would be little reason for Trump to tinker with its central tenets.  For one, he is hankering for an even deeper trade war with Beijing. Why not also harry the Chinese with a provocative instrument, daft as it is, that entails militarising Australia and garrisoning it for any future conflict that might arise?

    Whatever the case, AUKUS has always been contingent on the interests of one power.  Congress has long signalled that US defence interests come first, including whether Australia should receive any Virginian class submarines to begin with. Trump would hardly disagree here. “Trump’s decisions at each phase of AUKUS cooperation will be shaped by zero-sum balance sheets of US interest,” suggests Alice Nason of the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre rather tritely.

    If Trump be so transactional, he has an excellent example of a country utterly willing to give everything to US security, thereby improving the deal from the side of Washington’s military-industrial complex.  If there was one lingering, pathological complaint he had about Washington’s NATO allies, it was always that they were not doing enough to ease the burdens of US defence.  They stalled on defence budgets; they quibbled on various targets on recruitment.

    This can hardly be said of Canberra.  Australia’s government has abandoned all pretence of resistance, measure or judgment, outrageously willing to underwrite the US imperium in any of its needs in countering China, raiding the treasury of taxpayer funds to the tune of a figure that will, eventually, exceed A$368 billion.  Rudd openly acknowledges that Australian money is directly “investing into the US submarine industrial base to expand the capacity of their shipyards.”  It would be silly to prevent this continuing windfall. It may well be that aspect that ends up convincing Trump that AUKUS is worth keeping.  Why get rid of willing servitors of such dim tendency when they are so willing to please you with cash and compliments?

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  • US-backed Venezuelan Opposition Never Tried to Win the Presidency

    “On the campaign trail, she [María Corina Machado] was received almost as a religious figure, often wearing white, promising to restore democracy and reunite families torn apart by an economic crisis and mass migration. ‘María!’ her followers shouted, before falling into her arms,” the New York Times reverently reported.

    Indeed, Machado’s personally chosen surrogate to contend in last July’s Venezuelan presidential election, Edmundo González, did fall into her arms. But that was because her infirm disciple had trouble, both literally and figuratively, standing on his own two feet.

    Machado was the main Venezuelan opposition figure backed by the US. Her platform of extreme neoliberal shock therapy was rejected by the electorate. Most Venezuelans oppose her call to privatize nearly all state institutions serving the people – schools, hospitals, public housing, food assistance, and the state oil company, which funds social programs. Nor is there any popular appetite for Machado’s plan to radically reorient foreign policy to subordination to Washington and support of US imperial wars in Ukraine and Palestine.

    A hagiography, such as this one by the Times, includes an investigation into the life and miracles attributed to the would-be saint. The article on Machado, penned by one Julie Turkewitz, does just that and more. The article also unintentionally reveals that the far-right opposition advocates foreign intervention to overthrow the democratic will of the Venezuelan people. Its title clearly states: “Trump to Save Her Country.”

    It took the US until November 19, nearly four months, to declare González as the legitimate president-elect of Venezuela. The recognition likely signals a shift in the lame-duck Biden administration’s policy from negotiation to all-out hostility towards Venezuela, paving the way for a smooth handover to the new Trump team. Previously, Washington simply called for a “peaceful transition.”

    The miraculous opposition primary

    Turkewitz reported that Machado won “an overwhelming victory in a primary race.” She uses the weasel-construction “a primary” rather than “the primary,” because Machado’s “primary” was not one conducted by the official Venezuelan electoral authority, the CNE. Rather, it was a private affair administered by the NGO Súmate. That NGO, as the article admits, is funded by the US.

    Machado prevailed in a crowded field of 13 candidates with a miraculous 92% of the vote. When some of the other candidates called fraud, Machado had the ballots destroyed. She could do so because Súmate is her personal organization.

    The Times intimates that Machado “galvanized a nation” around an opposition agenda. That is something Uncle Sam has so far failed to achieve despite a quarter of a century of meddling in Venezuela’s internal affairs.

    The empire’s newspaper of record reports that Machado is “wildly popular.” But that’s in the halls of the US Congress, where she was vetted and then anointed “leader of the opposition” even before the so-called primary in Venezuela. Unfortunately for Machado that popularity with the Yankee politicos did not travel as well back home. In Venezuela, even within her corner of the far-right, Machado is resented. Far from unified, the opposition in Venezuela is today ever more divided.

    Contested election results

    The official Venezuelan electoral authority (CNE) declared incumbent President Nicolás Maduro the winner with 52% of the vote. That outcome was subsequently audited and confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court (TSJ).

    González, the person whom the Times declared the winner, came in second with 43% of the vote, according to the official count. González claimed that he had evidence that proved he won the presidency, but he refused to show it to the TSJ, even when he was summoned to do so.

    Moreover, the Times reports that the US-backed opposition has tallies from some 80% of the precincts, which were published on a private blog site. Sources supporting the Venezuelan government then published analyses showing that evidence to be bogus, while counter claims from those favoring regime change purport to confirm their validity.

    The problem of privately posting evidence, while refusing to submit it to official channels, is that it leaves the Venezuelan authorities no constitutional path for accepting it even if it were valid. The question ignored by the article is: If “their team collected and published vote-tally receipts” proving its victory, why did they not settle the matter by submitting them?

    The answer, not one that the Times would admit to, is that the far-right opposition and its US handlers never made a good faith attempt to win the election.

    Washington’s strategy was to delegitimize the election, not to win it

    The opposition’s platform could never be a winning ticket, which they knew. The only way to achieve it would be an extra-legal regime-change operation predicated on delegitimizing the democratically-elected government. And that is precisely what is being played out today in Venezuela.

    There were a number of more moderate opposition figures with experience and popular followings. Had the US been interested in simply an electoral defeat of the ruling Socialist Party, they could have backed a less extreme candidate and offered to ease their punishing “sanctions” on Venezuela. Instead, Washington backed the far right, which took the supremely unpopular position of advocating for yet more sanctions on their own country to precipitate regime-change.

    With nine other contenders on the presidential ballot, name recognition was important. Literally nobody had heard of González until Machado personally chose him as her surrogate. She had been disqualified from running back in 2015 for constitutionally mandates offenses.

    Machado’s political party, Vente Venezuela, lacked ballot status because her party had boycotted recent Venezuelan elections in keeping with the far-right’s stance that the Venezuelan state is not legitimate. Once the party decided to again participate in the electoral arena in 2024, she could have petitioned for recognition of her party. But she didn’t bother.

    González, who had been in retirement, had no political following or experience. He had been a Venezuelan diplomat to El Salvador back in the 1980s, where he had been implicated in supporting US-backed death squads.

    Maduro crisscrossed the country in an all-out campaign effort, exhaustingly visiting over 300 municipalities. His ruling Socialist Party, in power since 1999, had cadre in every corner of the country who were mobilized. They didn’t need to be told that an opposition victory could mean not only loss of a job, but they might face retribution from the far right.

    In contrast to Maduro’s strong ground game, the US-backed opposition was weak in the streets. González himself sat out the campaign in Caracas, while Machado barnstormed the hinterlands with a paper poster bearing his visage. Indicative of popular following were the turnouts at political rallies, both during the campaign and after, where Maduro attracted many times more supporters than González.

    Forecast

     The Times not only maintains that González “won the July vote by a wide margin” but he “should be taking office in January.” González, too, claims he’ll be back in Caracas for the inauguration. After the election, he voluntarily left Venezuela for Spain in a transfer negotiated with Caracas and Madrid governments.

    The Times further reports that Machado predicts Maduro will voluntarily “negotiate his own exit.” Even more fantastic, the Times asserts González “garnered almost 70 percent of the vote.”

    In a revealing lapse from her otherwise editorializing, Turkewitz correctly reported that Machado “has spent roughly two decades trying to remove Mr. Maduro and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, from power.” Conveniently omitted is that effort included a number of coup attempts, including the 2002 US-backed coup that temporarily deposed then President Chávez. Machado signed the infamous Carmona Decree then, which voided the constitution and disbanded the courts, the legislature, and executive.

    That 2002 coup lasted less than 48 hours because the people of Venezuela spontaneously rose up and confronted the traitorous military. If Machado indeed had the backing of 7 in 10 Venezuelans, she too could have taken the presidential palace regardless of the official election report.

    The Times calls her Venezuela’s “Iron Lady” for her “steely resolve.” Meanwhile Hinterlaces, reporting from Venezuela, speculates Machado has fled the country:

    The failure of the insurrectionary strategy in the absence of a social explosion or a rupture in the Bolivarian civic-military alliance, the lack of convincing evidence on Edmundo González’s alleged electoral victory, since they do not really have the minutes to demonstrate it, convinced Machado to leave the country.

    Nicolás Maduro will be inaugurated on January 10. As confirmed by the Venezuelan supreme court, the majority voted for him to continue Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution.

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    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Roger D. Harris.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Moral Suicide

    Western societies are committing moral suicide in Palestine. Collective suicide always is an ugly business to observe – especially when it’s your own country debasing itself. Yet, we seem unfazed. Indeed, we redouble our acts of inhumanity as if reiteration somehow normalizes the perversity of what we have done. The systematic insulating of ourselves from the magnitude of our turpitude is all the more remarkable for its requiring the constant filtering of graphic images of odious criminality to which we are accomplices. There may be some faint recognition, subliminally, of our culpability in the diligence with which dissenters and truth-tellers are suppressed and punished. That repression, an insult to our supposedly hallowed civic principles, is the most immediate price Western societies are paying for this depravity.

    Other deleterious consequences will register down the road. For the disconcerting truth is that the majority of the world sees our sins for what they are, and scorns out gross hypocrisy. In America and Europe, we pay scant attention to what the ‘others’ think – out of long habit. They are discounted. Our elites in particular seem to feel that – like the proverbial tree falling in the silent forest – if we don’t hear it, there is no sound made. There is a sound, of course. We soon will learn that the falling tree has brought down power lines and blocked roads. That is to say, the reactions of the ‘others’ – China, Russia, India, Brazil, Indonesia along with the rest of South/Southeast Asia, the greater Middle East, Africa, and most of Latin America – will cause us considerable, tangible harm. The ensuing impact on Western governments’ status and influence in the world is being greatly accentuated by the collapse of their moral authority.

    So, our overall losses will be profound – in practical terms, in the serious degradation in public discourse and civil liberties at home. Any move toward restoration will be retarded by lost self-esteem accompanied by a deep reluctance to face the shame were our deeds exposed and recognized. For once one has demonized Palestinians in general as guilty, thereby justifying gruesome acts, it becomes almost impossible to retreat into a position of condemning those selfsame acts of criminal vengeance that you previously blessed since that means inculpating oneself.

    What this tells us is that the phenomenon that we are describing is most pronounced among Western political elites. There:  mutually reinforcing collective emotion, uniform attitudes and entrenched reference points combine to produce perverse behavior. The extremity of callousness toward the genocide of Palestinians, the enthusiastic cheerleading for the Israeli atrocities, the tangible support for this most grotesque campaign of elimination, the deaf ear to desperate pleas for humanitarian aid, inflicting additional pain by the summary defunding of UNHCR – together form a pattern of behavior that borders on the sadistic. It obliges us to ask a painful question: are we witnessing the final playing out of the West’s long felt (and more recently sublimated) compulsion to abuse ‘other’ peoples in order to affirm their own superiority and prowess? A contemptuous Parthian shot as Westerners sense the turn of the historical wheel of fortune – with the Jews providing the perfect cover?

    Explanations of how we willfully inflicted these wounds upon the body politic, and our moral foundations, without evident cause or interest do not come readily at hand. For the tangled causal threads lie deep within ourselves. Self-reflection is always discomforting, often agonizing, and – in the West these days – simply intolerable.

    As to America, isn’t it fanciful to imagine a society that has selected a freakish Fascist like Trump – for a second time – as its leader (while deluding itself that there is no historic deviation from its honored path of enlightened politics) could have the emotional stability and strength of character to admit its heinous sins committed against the Palestinians?

    One singular feature of the current situation stands out: it is all about Israel and Jews. That evokes a host of deep emotions that shape attitudes and actions. The following essay addresses that topic. It was written a year ago. The first part focuses on Europe. It then expands the analysis to cover the United States in the context of Western societies’ historical condescendence of the non-West.

    I. Europe -Jews-Muslims
    Europe has an obsession about Jews. For nearly 2 millennia, it shunned them, despised them and persecuted them. Now, after a respite of a few decades, it condemns and abuses Muslims in a similar way – all in the name of supporting Jews.  Israel’s inhumane treatment of the Palestinians – culminating in their massacre and mass eviction from Gaza – leaves Europeans unmoved. European political elites above all.  Instead, they cheer on the Israelis, outdo themselves in effusive displays of solidarity, in the quick dispatch of weapons so that the IDF can better carry out their odious campaign, in providing instant validation for the most outrageous lies in the wake of the most outrageous atrocities.  Propinquity has accentuated their moral support. Leaders scurry to Tel Aviv to get as close to the action as possible and to steal a photo of themselves embracing Bibi Netanyahu – a copy for the evening news, a copy for the next campaign brochure, a copy for the eventual memoir.

    The West generally clearly has a big problem with matters of religion, race and ethnicity. It is multiform, it mutates, it waxes and wanes, it shifts focus and fixation – but it remains lodged in the collective psyche. While this obviously is not universal among Europe’s population of 400 million, it is manifestly prevalent and deep-seated. When the stimulus is strong and acute, it flares like a gas field when the drill hits paydirt. The entire panoply of institutions – public and private – rise up as if choreographed to vent the same emotions, make the same harsh, unqualified judgments, use the same crude slogans, drape themselves in the same banners of self-righteousness and self-proclaimed moralism. Government leaders, politicos, media, pundits, make the same cacophonous noises, aggressively impose the same uniformity of opinion, and punish the few dissenters.

    Thus, the exaltation of the Jews of Israel – honored and cosseted – is matched by the dehumanization of Palestine’s Muslims. Of course, it is not just the long-suffering Palestinians who are at once denied – in principle – the right to the privileged status of victimhood and collectively are condemned as guilty of the most heinous crimes committed by al-Qaeda, the Islamic State or Hamas. Men, women, children – without exception. It is all Muslim communities – Islamo-phobia.

    What are the sources of this psychopathology? Some are immediately identifiable. 1) The residual, latent desire to absolve Europe of the sins committed against the Jews ever since they were stigmatized as the killers of the Christians’ Lord & Saviour. It took roughly 1,900 years for the truest Jew-haters to take the final, macabre act of revenge. Volunteers from 16 European countries formed SS divisions that participated – directly or indirectly (the largest contingents made up of Ukrainians). That holocaust had a powerful sobering effect on the contemporary soul of European Christians whether believers, practicing or nominal. The fears, wounds and pangs of conscience associated with it gradually have faded into the background and discrimination of Jews largely has gone away  – despite the attempts in recent years to inflate every minor incident as part of an campaign to conflate criticism of Israel with old-fashioned anti-Semitism. As a consequence of the campaign’s success, antipathy toward Israel aroused by its actions in Gaza, the number of those incidents has risen. The confected identity of Judaism with a rogue Israeli state is a boon for the die-hard anti-Semites.

    The very words ‘Jewish’ and ‘Israel’ have the power to paralyze European minds and consciences. Again, most strikingly among the political class. Hence, Britain’s most erudite commentator renowned for his frankness and rare skill at cutting through official cant and mendacity, declares himself unable to pronounce on who destroyed the hospital in Gaza – hiding behind the weasel words ‘we should await the outcome of an impartial United Nations investigation.’ Who did the evil deed? The people who already had dropped 1,500 bombs on Gaza City or Ali Baba & the 40 Thieves? Make your choice – personal preference. Hence, French President Emmanuel Macron bans all protests that express sympathy for the Palestinians on the grounds that they cause Jews/Israel emotional distress. He then makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to urge the Israelis to pursue Hamas “without mercy” – adding, for the record, “within the law.” (His recent conversion ‘On The Road To Damascus/Berlaymont/Turtle Bay’ lifts the ban only on himself).  One is reminded of Peter O’Toole (aka T.E. Lawrence) shouting the command “no prisoners!” as he drives his Arab army to throw themselves on a retreating Turkish column. Without the hypocrisy of adding “within the law”.

    Hence, German authorities ruthlessly enforce their own ban on Gaza-sympathy protests and threaten criminal prosecution of participants. Foreign Minister Baerbock uses a Tel Aviv platform to inform the world that “Israel cares about the welfare of Gazans.” Hence, the Prime Minister-designate of the U.K., Keir Starmer, conducts Stalinist-style purges from the Labour ranks of anyone who utters a word critical of Israel – that includes Corbyn now obliterated from party annals. No surprise that he now demands explicitly, and in a public interview, that the party’s official position is to give license to the Israelis to continue their bombing; to cut off all food, water, electricity; to expel the Gazans into the Sinai desert where Qatar is pressed to finance a tent city for a million or two.

    Hence, on November 11 2023, the EU Foreign Ministers’ issued an official statement that “[the] EU condemns the use of hospitals and civilians as human shields in Gaza” – in what amounts to an eerie resemblance to the holocaust deniers. Hence, Joe Biden struck the same note in declaring that civilian casualties have been exaggerated by Hamas. This was the starkest evidence at that we had left the realm of reasoned and reasonable discourse for the nether world of psychopathology.

    Second, relations between Europeans and Muslim communities have become increasingly fraught. Above all, the growth of large immigrant communities, settled mainly in Western Europe, has generated a host of social problems arising from the complications of imperfect cultural assimilation and the intrusions of influences from the external Muslim world. They are all too familiar: the rapid spread of intolerant, fundamentalist Islam; the threats posed by violent jihadist groups whose tentacles have reached into European cities; the turbulent state of politics across the Middle East; the periodic oil crises that made the region a tense arena for great power politics; and – by no means least – the lingering effects of Western colonialism that never have been expunged.

    The two most striking features of that 450-year experience are: 1) the profound superior-inferior relationship on which it was grounded and which it entrenched in European minds; and 2) it was the ‘whites’ who were dominant and the ‘colored’ peoples who were subordinate. That too readily devolved into the racist belief that the latter were inherently inferior — somehow not quite fully human. Tho enduring psychic scars never have entirely faded — on both sides. Let’s recall that it is within our lifetime that the imperial dependents liberated themselves from thralldom – with much blood-shedding — in North Africa, Indo-China, Kenya, Angola, Indonesia, Mozambique, Iraq. More recently, wars between the West and Muslim societies have been fought in several places: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, the Sahel. All on Muslim soil. Domestic terrorists across Western Europe cite as their immediate motivation those attacks on Muslims — rather than their devotion to a Quranic jihadist creed per se.

    II.
    That brings our attention to the biggest external factor: the United States. More specifically, Europeans’ enduring dominant/subordinate relationship. European countries have been denatured by America, in the sense that they are shed of sovereign status and its attendant political will. That perverse trans-Atlantic bond has been cultivated by both sides. It’s significance for understanding the European attitude towards Israel/Palestine is two-fold. One, there is an eerie inversion of roles for European polities who participate in dominant-subordinate relations with both America and Arab Muslims. It matches the classic profile of the “Authoritarian Personality.” Toward the superior one is docile, obedient, obsequious; toward the inferior one is arrogant, demanding and patronizing. The latter compensates for the former in terms of maintaining a positive sense of self.

     A variation of this psychological pattern is visible in the attitude of Western government leaders toward their own populace. In effect, they assume the dominant role in treating their citizens as subordinates from whom deference is expected on matters of state. Strikingly, today we see overwhelming and growing popular advocacy of a ceasefire in Gaza while the political elites – those holding official positions, the media and the punditry – vigorously suppress the dissent. Example: London has seen an unprecedented demonstration of half a million, a reflection of public opinion that favors the ceasefire by a 3:1 margin (roughly the same in the U.S.) That in the face of bitter, slanderous denunciation from both Prime Minister Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer who vies to surpass him in passionate embrace of Bibi Netanyahu and who ruthlessly purges anybody who is disobedient to his hard line. Hence, not a single Labour or Tory M.P. joined an historic march on a Saturday at the risk of losing access to the Members’ Bar at Westminister.  [The dramatic event was all but ignored by the Establishment print media. By Sunday, all had airbrushed the story out of existence; no photo showing the massive crowd].

    In more concrete ways, Europe’s vassalage to the United States obliges it to follow Washington down whatever policy road the seigneur takes – however reckless, dangerous, unethical, and counter-productive. In predictable fashion, they have walked (or run) like lemmings over whatever cliff the United States chooses next under its own suicidal impulses. So it’s been in Iraq, in Syria, in Yemen, in Afghanistan, in regard to Iran, in Ukraine, on Taiwan and on all matters involving Israel. The string of painful failures and heavy costs produces no change in loyalty or mindset. It cannot – for the Europeans have asimilated totally the habit of deference, the Americans’ worldview, their skewed interpretation of outcomes, and their shamefully fictious narratives. The Europeans no more can throw this addiction than a life-long alcoholic can go cold-turkey.   

    That condition impels them to downplay the ominous trends in American politics and foreign policy. The choice of mentally unstable and/or incompetent leaders, erratic actions by unhinged political forces, high risk ventures abroad, the baiting of designated rivals – none of it moves Europeans to throw off the yoke placed on their minds, their emotions, and their morals.

    Moreover, we should bear in mind that contemporary America has become hysteria prone. First came the Global War On Terror that for twenty-odd years had it rampaging around the globe on the hunt for jihadis from the Hindu Kush to the Sahara desert while shredding its Constitutional guarantees of individual rights and due process. Then, the manic Russo-phobia: Dostoyevski removed from literature courses, Anna Netrebko summarily cancelled in all Western opera houses on the grounds that she once accompanied Putin to a fundraiser for refugees from Donetsk who fled Ukrainian artillery strikes that killed 14,000 of their fellows, boycotts of Russian goods including sewing needles, etc. etc.

    Simultaneously, the conjured China ‘menace’ has been stoking our fevered imaginings. That hysteria triggered the ‘spy’ balloon psychodrama. Congruent with this psychopathological syndrome, America today is a culture where draconian measures are taken, by all manner of institutions under pressure from braying militants, to rid themselves of persons who as much as suggest that gender identity is not just a matter of personal preference.

    The Europeans, for their part, are no less hysteria prone. It spreads from the United States at epidemic speed. Imagine a convent circa 1623. The most emotionally flammable young woman loses it in declaiming that she is possessed by a lecherous demonic agent. Soon, the other nuns are infected and mass hysteria breaks out. Today, when a whole society is dissociated from reality, there are no Mothers Superior or exorcists around to contain the ensuing bedlam. Indeed, the universal hysteria serves the purpose of those who calculatingly promote and use that hysteria to draw a “line of blood” between the collectivity and responsible, humane behavior. For once one has demonized Palestinians in general as guilty, thereby justifying gruesome acts, it becomes almost impossible to retreat into a position of condemning those selfsame acts of criminal revenge that you previously blessed since that means inculpating oneself. Even those prominent public figures who simply have kept silent in the face of atrocity thereby fall into this trap.

    The stunning, frightening truth is that Western societies – American & European – are behaving mindlessly. For the Senate in Washington to pass a near unanimous resolution condemning what it called “anti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups” is a clear sign of abnormality. It is unmistakable from statements by supporters that the label is applied to anyone who protests the onslaught in Gaza or expresses support for the Palestinian people. Widespread denunciations and purges of individuals who voice those sentiments confirm that. Some might question how one can describe as hysterical the actions of private institutions and governments as well as individuals of being part of an irrational mass psychosis – and on a matter that does not concern them directly.

    After all, these countries are composed of educated, autonomous, diverse members schooled in civic ethics – the majority secular and unattached to any dogmatic creed or movement. We are not speaking of medieval cloisters or theocracies or totalitarian societies. That is exactly the point. The observed phenomenon meets all of the criteria for a diagnosis of mass hysteria – speaking objectively.  Manifest hysteria where you do not expect to see it at once underscores the psychopathology and raises the most profound questions as to what species of social entity we have become. The few, very rough historical analogies are not ones we want to contemplate.

    Collective hysteria does have predictable effects. One is that participants cease to think independently – some, including leaders, are unable to think at all. That is to say, to interpret reality in ways other than that dictated by the fixed, unqualified and simplistic narrative of what is happening, why it is happening, as well as with whom the rights and wrongs lie. Uniformity of outlook impervious to observed facts is what we have seen in the impassioned Russo-phobia, and now regarding the Palestinians. This phenomenon, orchestrated at the top by leaders who themselves are prey to dogmas and irrational emotions, stifles critical thought and judgment even when faced with the most stark, most bloody and gross sins against the very principles that we celebrate as underlying our morally superior Western societies.

    A related effect is that deception and self-deception blend into a homogenous mindset. It is insulated from encroachments by a mental Hepa filter which keeps out anything – even the smallest particle of truth – that could stimulate doubt or self-awareness. Consider the likes of Biden, Trudeau, Sunak/Starmer, Schulz, Macron, Rutte, von der Leyen et al. Their endorsement, and thereby encouragement, of mass murder in Gaza – once expressed – becomes imprinted. Thus, if you were to probe for justification in a quiet one-on-one exchange, you would get the same canned, elusive sloganeering that marks their public statement. The mental faculty has become paralyzed. Sustaining this unnatural state is helped by the systematic suppression of dissent. Doing so serves two purposes: it keeps at bay any dissonant, reality-based idea or evidence challenging the fixed mindset, and unjust suppression/punishment of dissenters creates an additional disincentive to critical reflection since that threatens to evoke feelings of shame for those revealed misdeeds.

    What this tells us is that the phenomenon that we are describing is most pronounced among Western political elites. There: hysteria, mutually reinforcing collective emotion, uniform attitudes and entrenched reference points combine to produce perverse behavior. The extremity of callousnesstoward the genocide of Palestinians, the enthusiastic cheerleading for the Israeli atrocities, the tangible support for this most grotesque campaign, the deaf ear to desperate pleas for humanitarian aid, inflicting additional pain by the summary defunding of UNHCR – together form a pattern of behavior that borders on the sadistic. It obliges us to ask a painful question: are we witnessing the final playing out of the West’s long felt (and more recently sublimated) compulsion to abuse ‘other’ peoples in order to affirm their own superiority and prowess? A contemptuous, ruthless Parthian shot as Westerners sense the turn of the historical wheel of fortune?

    [The one aspect of the situation that shows a measure of conscious cerebration is the political – in particular, the electoral. It is Biden’s worries about his faltering Presidential campaign that led him to the surprise declaration that Israel was at risk of exceeding its (generous) quota in killed Palestinians. That is accompanied by a cavalier rewriting of the earlier record of when Washington promoted unrestricted Israeli retaliation and lobbied neighboring governments to accept the expelled Gazan population. Accommodating media are only too happy to go along with the mendacity since it erases memory of their own cheerleading for those draconian actions.

    We should understand Emmanuel Macron’s sudden advocacy of a ceasefire in the same vein. It is a mistake to imagine that this shift was the outcome of a somber reflection on the moral and diplomatic issues involved. Macron is another one of those self-designated messiahs without message or mission – like Barack Obama – whose sole concern is self-promotion and self-advancement. In Macron’s case, he has his eye on an even bigger position than President of France – Secretary-General of the United Nations or President of the European Union. Preferably the former. So, presenting himself as a Gaza humanitarian could win him votes in the global South and also make him more palatable to Russia and China. The rest of the French political elite are still insisting that protesting crimes against humanity in Gaza is tantamount to an act of anti-Semitism.]

    Back to Europe. In the Middle East, the net effects are 1) that Europe is burdened with the heavy baggage of interventions that inflame Muslim hostility toward the West, and 2) to create the psychological imperative to find some way to assuage their own sense of guilt by finding, and magnifying, the sins of their victims. That dubious enterprise acquires a thick veneer of contrived virtue by making a tight embrace of Jewish Israel the ultimate symbol of their good intentions and by blinding themselves to the transference of their accumulated guilt for historical abuse of the Jews into empathy for their former victims’ abuse of Arab Muslims.  

    P.S. The internal dynamics of the United States are very similar to those of Europe – with three exceptions. One, guilt regarding historical mistreatment of Jews is largely absent. Yes, individuals may feel something about the Christian scapegoating of ‘Christ-killers,’ but generally speaking it is far more abstract. The empathy for Israel has arisen, and intensified, mainly from an instinctive sympathy for the underdog threatened by people you view negatively (1956, 1967) – a heart-wrenching narrative that has been vastly strengthened by vivid accounts, cinematic and written, of the tragic 20th Century Jewish saga. Moreover, there is the exceptional influence exerted by the powerful pro-Israel lobby.

    Two, the dramatic growth in the influence of a politicized Evangelical movement has added a significant factor to the equation. The Book of Revelation is their guide and inspiration. Therein, they are told that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ and Armageddon will be signaled by the restoration of the Jews in their Hebrew homeland. What happens next, of course, is blurred by both Israelis and the Evangelicals.

    Three, the United States’ rededicated project to entrench its global dominance has spurred American assertiveness around the world. Its long-time focus on the Middle East for multiple reasons inclines Washington to secure what it sees as prized assets. That strong impulse is accentuated by its declining influence elsewhere in the region – especially the Gulf. With creeping doubts as to its prowess, and of its presumed calling to be the prophet of progress for all the world’s peoples, America compulsively grasps every occasion in order to confirm that it is Destiny’s child and to be reassured that its national mythology is inscribed in the heavens.

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  • No Matter Who Sits in the White Peoples’ House the War Being Waged by the U.S. Colonial/Capitalist Class Against the Black Colonized Working Class and All Oppressed Peoples and Nations Will Continue

    Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories…

    — Amilcar Cabral (Revolution in Guinea, stage 1, London, 1974, p 70-72)

    It was under the Democrats and the first “Black” president that the Department of Defense 1033 program that militarizes local police forces was expanded by 2,400%; the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) expanded by 1,900%; Libya, the most prosperous African  and Pan African nation was attacked and destroyed; the war on Yemen began; the Occupy Wall Street Movement was smashed; the FBI created the “Black Identity Extremist” label; the banks were bailed out from the economic collapse that they created, but not the working class; Black people lost more wealth  than was lost at the end of Reconstruction in 1870s; and, despite police killings across the country, including Mike Brown in Ferguson, the Obama administration only brought Federal charges against one killer-cop.  Yet, with the return of Trump, opportunists in our communities and beyond are telling us that the real culprits in our oppression and the targets for opposition are Trump and republicans.

    The Black Alliance for Peace (BAP) rejects this kind of ahistorical opportunism.

    We are clear. The anti-democratic duopoly is made up of  representatives of the capitalist class and provides cover for what is, in reality, the dictatorship of capital. In this, the duopoly reveals the class nature of the state. This dictatorship, the true enemy of the people, is the target of our agitation and organizing.

    Focusing attention on the Trumpian wing of the capitalist class as the primary or principal contradiction facing the people in the U.S. or in the world, obscures the reality that the dominant wing of capital, finance capital, along with the U.S. based transnational corporations, have captured and are operating through both parties. However, it is the democratic party wing of the dictatorship of capital that has championed what is popularly referred to as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism, first given coherence under Ronald Reagan, eventually migrated to the democratic party under Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council, whose “third way politics” aligned with both neoliberals and neoconservatives (neocons). Trumpism is the particular (national) manifestation of the global crisis of neoliberal capitalism. The republican party’s capture of the executive and all branches of government will not resolve the structural contradictions of neoliberal capital. What we can expect, then, is the strengthening of the repressive state apparatus and more targeted repression. To be clear, this process would have continued under a Harris administration because Harris promised to maintain the same trajectory of state repression in the name of capital. Because of the bipartisan jettisoning of liberal democratic and human rights in favor of the capitalist order, it does not matter which individual is sitting in the white peoples’ house. Therefore, the correct approach for opposition forces is one that grounds the people’s understanding of the objective structural contradictions of the capitalist order and that builds their capacity to struggle against that order  – regardless of which wing of the duopoly represents it. Focusing on only one part of the duopoly is akin to focusing on only one faction of the capitalist class.

    Despite any rhetoric to the contrary, BAP expects Trump will govern as a neoliberal. That is why certain elements of the ruling class turned to him again. Continued austerity, especially at the state and local levels, will persist, as well as privatization of public assets, tax breaks for the capitalist class, the suppression and repression of labor, fiscal and monetary policies that prop-up capitalist profits and undermine human rights and, of course, the targeted use of military power to advance the interests of the capitalist dictatorship. We believe, however, that Trump will make as his main mission the primary concern of the neoliberal elite:  smashing the movement toward de-dollarization.

    We cannot afford to have any illusions or harbor any sentimentality about the nature of this system. As we organize in political spaces controlled by Black democrats, it would be suicidal if we did not understand the role these neocolonial puppets play – primarily against any organized opposition – in the war that capital is waging against the people. Under Biden-Harris, we saw  police, judicial, and media suppression of mobilizations in solidarity with the Palestinian people, the student intifada, the Uhuru 3, African Stream media, and many others. And it is no coincidence that so-called “cop cities” are being constructed across the country in those urban areas being managed by Black democrat party functionaries or, what Black Agenda Report refers to as the “Black Misleadership Class.”

    This corrupted Black petit-bourgeois professional/managerial class, positioned in government, corporate and non-profit sectors, provides the buffer and role models for individual material advancement at the expense of the Black working class.

    And while we are dealing with cop cities, we also understand what is coming with the mass deportations of non-white migrants and the violent law and order rhetoric that is already emanating from the Trumpian forces. But let us not forget that, under the Biden-Harris regime, mass deportations rose by 250 percent, of which Harris campaigned on being “tough” on the border. Anti-immigrant rhetoric is also bipartisan.

    Like all people, we want to live decent, prosperous lives in peace and in harmony with all humanity and nature. But we are going to have to fight for peace. And for that struggle BAP is guided by the principles of the Black radical peace tradition that states clearly:

    Peace is not the absence of conflict, but rather the achievement by popular struggle and self-defense of a world liberated from the interlocking issues of global conflict, nuclear armament and proliferation, unjust war, and subversion through the defeat of global systems of oppression that include colonialism, imperialism, patriarchy, and white supremacy.

    That is the task and the responsibility that we take on. We are not afraid of any individual or oppressive system. We gladly take on this fight with the certainty that one day we will defeat the Pan European white supremacist colonial/capitalist patriarchy that is the enemy of collective humanity.

    The struggles and sacrifices being made by the Palestinian peoples to defend their dignity and popular sovereignty is the example we embrace. This is why we say that, no matter the circumstances, no matter the challenge, no matter the intensity of the repression, we are building on the sacrifices of our people and guided by revolutionary principles. Our call will always be:

    No Compromise, No Retreat!

    The post No Matter Who Sits in the White Peoples’ House the War Being Waged by the U.S. Colonial/Capitalist Class Against the Black Colonized Working Class and All Oppressed Peoples and Nations Will Continue first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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