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Tag: Terrorism (state and retail)

  • Gustavo Petro Represents a Progressive Alternative in Colombia

    Gustavo Petro is a force to be reckoned with in Colombian politics.  The senator – once a member of the M-19 guerilla group, later elected to the House of Representations in the 1990s and then the mayorship of Bogotá (2012-2016) – has become the candidate to beat in next year’s presidential election.  He is such a prominent opponent of right-wing politics in the country that while Donald Trump was campaigning in Florida in 2020 he included Petro in one of his anti-socialist diatribes, tweeting that “Biden is supported by socialist Gustavo Petro, a major LOSER and former M-19 guerrilla leader. Biden is weak on socialism and will betray Colombia. I stand with you!”

    Petro previously ran for president in 2018 and made a strong showing, but ultimately lost to the far-right Iván Duque of the Democratic Center party by approximately 12%.  It is worth noting that leaked recordings pertaining to the 2018 election contain evidence that Duque’s party conspired with individuals linked to narcotraffickers to commit electoral fraud, and subsequent investigations have uncovered at least six cases of fraud in both the House and the Senate.

    Since 2018, Petro’s grassroots appeal has only grown.  Polls for the upcoming 2022 election consistently place him in first place, and a survey conducted by pollster Invamer in April 2021 shows that “if elections were held tomorrow, no candidate would stand a chance against Petro.”  Nestor Morales of the Mañanas Blu radio program remarked:

    Petro is right to be celebrating, because [this survey] is well above its historical averages… what is impressive is that Petro is winning in absolutely everything…He has votes in sectors that were not related to him; for example, the upper strata, the old men who were so anti-petrist. There is a change, a transformation of public opinion.

    The discrediting of Duque and Uribismo, the far-right political project of his mentor former president Álvaro Uribe (2002-2010), has contributed to Petro’s rise in popularity.  His already solid base has been supplemented by those disillusioned by Duque’s failed COVID response and the brutal continuation of Uribista violence against former guerilla fighters and social activists, in contravention of the previous government’s peace deal with the FARC.  Furthermore, the Duque government’s recent decision to introduce a regressive tax reform that exempted the oligarchy while punishing ordinary workers has led to massive protests across Colombia.  Government forces have responded brutally, causing multiple deaths and leading the UN rights office to condemn their “excessive use of force.”  These protests have produced two general strikes thus far – one on April 28 and another on May 5 – and resistance to the austerity measures have grown to dominate the political discourse in the country, similar to how the 2019-2021 protests in Chile, which began due to a transit fare increase, soon snowballed into a nationwide indictment of neoliberal governance as a whole.

    Gustavo Petro represents an alternative.  Despite his association with Latin American socialism, however, Petro’s political views have evolved greatly over time.  No longer an adherent of M-19’s revolutionary leftism, he now advocates a more moderate social-democratic model.  In interviews, he is quick to distance his favored politics from those introduced in Cuba and Venezuela – policies which, in addition to angering domestic elites, inevitably leads to aggression from Washington as well.  Instead, he compares himself to more gradualist figures, once stating that “I have more in common with Pepe Mujica [than Castro or Chávez],” referring to Uruguay’s famously modest left-wing president who served from 2010 to 2015 and oversaw notable macroeconomic growth as well as the legalization of marijuana and same-sex marriage.

    Despite the softening of his views, Petro remains a target of the Colombian right and has received constant death threats during his public career.  He claims to have slept with an assault rifle over the course of the “parapolitics” scandal, during which dozens of politicians (many with links to the Uribe administration) were investigated and convicted for illegal ties to paramilitary groups with evidence that he helped present to Congress.  His brother was allegedly threatened with assassination (certainly no idle threat in Colombia), and his son Andrés is currently in exile, having been granted asylum by the Canadian government due to threats and political harassment from right-wing groups.  Furthermore, in March 2018 a Cuban man named Raul Gutierrez was arrested in Bogotá for plotting to bomb the Cuban embassy and assassinate both Petro and FARC leader Rodrigo “Timochenko” Londoño.  While imprisoned, he claimed that a right-wing Colombian group based out of Florida hired him to commit the attacks.

    Leftism and social activism are dangerous business in Colombia.  In the first three months of 2021 alone, 40 activists were murdered and there were 23 massacres of predominantly poor and Indigenous peoples by paramilitary groups.  The impunity rate for the murder of trade unionists is approximately 87% and, as COVID-19 wracks the country, the Duque administration has continuously ramped up violence against areas which contain former FARC fighters.

    One of the most horrific incidents so far this year was the murder of twelve children and two nineteen-year-olds in a bombing raid against an alleged armed group in Guaviare.  Petro commented publicly on the massacre, posting a list of the children’s names on Twitter and writing “14 children killed [including the two 19-year-olds] in a bombardment ordered by the Minister of Defence. These are their names. End the war, end the genocide of children in our country.”

    Marcha Patriotica, a progressive umbrella organization that brings together historically marginalized groups within Colombia including peasants, people of color, women, and the LGBTQ community, has also faced persecution.  Almost two hundred of its members have been murdered since its founding in 2011, while an Inter-American Commission on Human Rights resolution from 2017 claimed that hundreds more are living under severe risks and that the government could protect them if it chose to act.

    The Colombian right-wing has historically lumped together unionists, social activists, and left-wing figures with the longstanding peasant-led insurgencies in the countryside, labelling them “Castro-Chavistas,” “terrorists,” and “guerrillas posing as human rights defenders.”  These are extremely serious threats in Colombia, and not just due to ongoing atrocities.  One must also take into account the “political genocide” against the Patriotic Union (UP) in the 1980s and 1990s.

    The UP was formed in 1985 during peace negotiations between the FARC and the Belisario Betancur administration.  Its purpose was to allow the FARC to participate in the electoral system in exchange for a ceasefire.  What followed, however, was a massacre: the party’s members were relentlessly attacked by paramilitaries and drug cartels and over 3000 of its members, including elected officials and presidential candidates, were murdered.  This led to a resumption of overt hostilities and proved to the guerillas that the Colombian state was an inherently oppressive, right-wing organization that would not allow fair elections to weaken its hold on power.

    The US-backed military has historically been the arbiter of the political realm in Colombia, backing conservative figures and using paramilitaries to kill or intimidate those who organize for social change.  Their brutal acts have not shaken America’s diplomatic and material support or its military cooperation – as Joe Biden wrote during the 2020 election, it is the “keystone” of US policy in Latin America and has served as an indispensable ally in the region-wide imposition of a free-trade model vulnerable to American capital.  Scandals like the extermination of the UP, the murder of over 6000 civilians in the 2000s as a way of boosting the army’s kill-count against the insurgencies, and the almost universal impunity for the killing of trade union activists have not lessened America’s support in the slightest.

    Nor have recent atrocities weakened Canada’s support for the Colombian government.  Stephen Harper made a point of deepening Canada’s ties to right-wing governments across the region, and Justin Trudeau has likewise taken a very active role in supporting the Latin American right against progressive movements.  Yves Engler writes that, in regard to Colombia, Ottawa quickly congratulated Duque after his fraud-riddled election win, refused to criticize the attempted overthrow of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro that was launched from Colombia in May 2020, and has consistently failed to draw attention to the ongoing injustices in the country.

    This is the political climate – one of violent repression that receives the tacit or outright support of imperialist countries – in which Gustavo Petro has fought to present an alternative.  Although the presidential election will not be held for over a year, Petro’s dramatic rise in popularity is evidence that the Colombian people are seeking a break from the status quo, and that he may represent their best chance to achieve this.

    Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. His areas of interest include post-colonialism and the human impact of the global neoliberal economy. Read other articles by Owen.

    This article was posted on Friday, May 7th, 2021 at 10:32pm and is filed under Colombia, Elections, Opinion, President Iván Duque, Senator Gustavo Petro, Terrorism (state and retail).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Continuing the War in Syria

    The House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Global Counterterrorism held a hearing on April 15, 2021, on “10 Years of War: Examining the Ongoing Conflict in Syria.” As is customary of American exceptionalism, the feasibility of regime change in Damascus was not left undiscussed.

    Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who is the top Republican on the subcommittee, explicitly called for President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster. “The Assad regime is illegitimate and should be replaced,” said Wilson. Omar Alshogre, Director for Detainee Affairs at the Syrian Emergency Task Force, also remained uncompromising in his insistence on the overthrow of the government, saying the 2011 uprising in Syria was inspired by USA’s “democratic” tradition.

    Fantasies of Regime Change

    Continued talk about regime change in Syria is unmoored from reality. Those begging the US to overthrow the Assad regime with guns and bombs fail to see how the involvement of external powers has led to sheer devastation. Far from being “democratic”, USA has been fuelling a viciously sectarian war in Syria.

    While initial periods of the 2011 uprising expressed the discontent of the Syrian people against Assad’s neoliberal authoritarianism, Euro-American interventionism soon gave a sectarian character to the rebellion. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood — a Sunni Islamist organization — played a lead role in the revolt from the very first moment, dominating the Syrian National Council (SNC), formed in early October 2011, which the US and its Western allies immediately apotheo­sized as “the leading interlocutor of the opposition with the international community.” The SNC, pro­claimed the West, would be “a legitimate representative of all Syrians” — a potential government-in-exile.

    The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was the SNC’s military wing. “What we are aiming for is a revolution with a political wing, repre­sented by the SNC, and a military wing, represented by the FSA,” Col. Aref Hammoud, a Turkey-based commander with the FSA, told the Wall Street Journal. Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood was funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar — this money being used, as then SNC President Burhan Ghalioun said, “to help equip the Free Syrian Army.”

    Molham al-Drobi, a senior council member and a representative of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood on the council, stated that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were funding the council to the tune of $40 million per month. Weren’t all of these states presided over by princes, emirs, and kings, who preferred to govern by decree, eschewing any form of democratic participation? While the Gulf Arab monarchies funded the rebels of Syria to overthrow Assad’s dictatorship, Washington muttered not a word of criticism against them.

    Then President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said they want a democracy in Syria. But Qatar, Kuwait and UAE are autocracies and Saudi Arabia is among the most pernicious of caliphate-kingly-dictatorships in the Arab world. Rulers of these states inherit power from their families — just as Bashar has done — and Saudi Arabia is an ally of the Salafist-Wahhabi rebels in Syria, just as it was the most fervent supporter of the medieval Taliban during Afghanistan’s dark ages. The Saudis are repressing their own Shia minority just as they now wish to destroy the Alawite-Shia minority of Syria. And we were made to believe Saudi Arabia wants to set up a democracy in Syria?

    The FSA — touted as “moderate rebels” by the West — was inevitably going to be sectarian insofar it was dominated by Muslim Brotherhood and funded by Sunni monarchies. It had virtually no representation among the roughly 30% of Syria’s population that wasn’t Sunni. Most FSA brigades used religious rhetoric and were named after heroic figures or events in Sunni Islamic history. Many of the par­ticipating groups had strong Islamist agendas, and some groups had similar ideologies as other jihadi groups, following the strict Salafist interpretation of Islam.

    Among the FSA’s Islamist members was the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which existed “on the ground” working “under the FSA umbrella.” One of the Brotherhood-affiliated guerilla groups was the Tawheed Division, which led the fight against the Syrian government in Aleppo. One FSA com­mander told recruits: “Those whose intentions are not for God, they had better stay home, whereas if your intention is for God, then you go for jihad and you gain an afterlife and heaven.” This was hardly the exhortation of a secularist.

    As western powers provided arms to the supposedly moderate opposition, a striking development occurred. The opposition to Assad became a fragmented movement dominated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the al-Qa’ida franchise Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Islamic Front, consisting of six or seven large rebel military formations numbering an estimated 50,000 fighters whose uniting factor was Saudi money and an extreme Sunni ideology similar to Saudi Arabia’s version of Islam. The Saudis saw the Islamic Front as capable of fighting pro-Assad forces as well as ISIS, but Riyadh’s objections to the latter appeared to be based on its independence of Saudi control rather than revulsion at its record of slaughtering Shia, Alawi, Christians, Armenians, Kurds, or any dissenting Sunni.

    The “moderate” rebels were completely marginalized. Their plan since 2011 had been to force a full-scale Western military intervention as in Libya in 2011 and, when this did not happen, they lacked an alternative strategy. The US, Britain and France did not have many options left except to try to control the jihadi Frankenstein’s monster that they helped create in Syria. At other times, they repackaged some rebel warlords, thinking they would be considered “moderates” simply because they were backed by the West and its regional allies.

    Reviving Jihadis

    In February 2021, the US government media organization Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) conducted an interview with Abu Mohammad-al-Jolani, the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the latest among the name-changing jihadis the mainstream press still refers to as Syria’s “moderate opposition.” Martin Smith’s exchange with Jolani is a piece of a documentary on Jolani that PBS’ Frontline program plans to air in the future.

    The HTS was formed in 2017 out of the remaining jihadi groups that had gathered in Idlib in 2015. The main pillar of the HTS is the al-Qaeda branch in Syria, the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, and before that the Jabhat al-Nusra. The other groups that joined the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham to create the HTS include the four main omnibus jihadi groups: the Jabhat Ansar al-Din, the Jaysh al-Sunna, the Liwa al-Haq and the Haraka Nour al-Din al-Zenki. These are hardened groups of fighters, many of them coming in and out of each other’s platforms and even fighting each other viciously.

    For the past several years, the HTS has tried to rebrand itself as “moderate”. In 2015, after it became the dominant force in Idlib, the outfit took on its new name and withdrew its pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda. It claimed to be a Syrian nationalist force with an Islamic ideology. But this is merely a superficial change. It continues to propagate the view that the Syrian state must be based on Sharia law and the general orientation of the 100,000 to 200,000 “radical” fighters inside Idlib is towards al-Qaeda. This is something that is accepted even by the US government, which has otherwise used these fighters in its geopolitical games against the government in Damascus.

    Jolani was once an Islamic State commander who went on to found Jabhat al-Nusra. The State Department declared Jolani a “specially designated global terrorist” in 2013. This designation still stands. Jolani now runs what he calls a “salvation government” in Idlib, the remaining retreat of Islamist extremists in northwestern Syria. He remains an Islamist theocrat determined to impose Sharia law on secular Syria, but he is committed to fighting Assad and so shares “common interests with the United States and the West,” as PBS puts it.

    PBS’s attempt to legitimate Jolani was not a one-off. This was made clear on April 7, 2021, with the publication by the New York Times of an article by its Middle East correspondent Ben Hubbard based on an HTS-sponsored visit last month to Idlib. Comparing Jolani’s Islamist front favorably to the Islamic ISIS, Hubbard writes: “H.T.S. is not pushing for the immediate creation of an Islamic state and does not field morality police officers to enforce strict social codes.” He failed to mention the numerous cases of torture, violence, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests, disappearances and the rest of the inexcusable stuff these groups get up to.

    Efforts to portray the Jolani and the HTS as the new representative of “moderate rebels” in Syria are another PR ploy on the part of USA to continue its war in Syria. In an interview on March 8, 2021, James Jeffrey, who served as US ambassador under both Republican and Democrat administrations and most recently as special representative for Syria during the presidency of Donald Trump, has been quoted as saying that HTS has been an “an asset” to America’s strategy in Idlib. To quote Jeffery, “They [HTS] are the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East.” USA will continue to revive jihadis as long as the Assad government remains in power.

    This article was posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2021 at 7:04am and is filed under Anti-war, Imperialism, Islam, Syria, Terrorism (state and retail).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Hunting in Yemen

    Iman Saleh fasting in Washington D.C. to protest the blockade and war against Yemen (Photo Credit: Detriot Free Press)

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Iman Saleh, now on her twelfth day of a hunger strike demanding an end to war in Yemen.

    Since March 29th, in Washington, D.C., Iman Saleh, age 26, has been on a hunger strike to demand an end to the war in Yemen. She is joined by five others from her  group, The Yemeni Liberation Movement. The hunger strikers point out that enforcement of the Saudi Coalition led blockade relies substantially on U.S. weaponry.

    Saleh decries the prevention of fuel from entering a key port in Yemen’s northern region.

    “When people think of famine, they wouldn’t consider fuel as contributing to that, but when you’re blocking fuel from entering the main port of a country, you’re essentially crippling the entire infrastructure,” said Saleh  “You can’t transport food, you can’t power homes, you can’t run hospitals without fuel.”

    Saleh worries people have become desensitized to suffering Yemenis face. Through fasting, she herself feels far more sensitive to the fatigue and strain that accompanies hunger. She hopes the fast will help others overcome indifference,  recognize that the conditions Yemenis face are horribly abnormal, and demand governmental policy changes.

    According to UNICEF, 2.3 million children under the age of 5 in Yemen are projected to suffer from acute malnutrition in 2021.

    “It’s not normal for people to live like this,” says Saleh.

    Her words and actions have already touched people taking an online course which began with a focus on Yemen.

    As the teacher, I asked students to read about the warring parties in Yemen with a special focus on the complicity of the U.S. and of other countries supplying weapons, training, intelligence, and diplomatic cover to the Saudi-led coalition now convulsing Yemen in devastating war.

    Last week, we briefly examined an email exchange between two U.S. generals planning the  January, 2017 night raid by U.S. Navy Seals in the rural Yemeni town of Al Ghayyal. The Special Forces operation sought to capture an alleged AQAP (Al Qaeda in the Arab Peninsula) leader. General Dunford told General Votel that all the needed approvals were in place. Before signing off, he wrote: “Good hunting.”

    The “hunting” went horribly wrong. Hearing the commotion as U.S. forces raided a village home, other villagers ran to assist. They soon disabled the U.S. Navy Seals’ helicopter. One of the Navy Seals, Ryan Owen, was killed during the first minutes of the fighting. In the ensuing battle, the U.S. forces called for air support. U.S. helicopter gunships arrived and U.S. warplanes started indiscriminately firing  missiles into huts. Fahim Mohsen, age 30, huddled in one home along with 12 children and another mother. After a missile tore into their hut, Fahim had to decide whether to remain inside or venture out into the darkness. She chose the latter, holding her infant child and clutching the hand of her five-year old son, Sinan. Sinan says his mother was killed by a bullet shot from the helicopter gunship behind them. Her infant miraculously survived. That night, in Al Ghayyal, ten children under age 10 were killed. Eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki died by bleeding to death after being shot. “She was hit with a bullet in her neck and suffered for two hours,” her grandfather said. “Why kill children?” he asked.

    Mwatana, a Yemeni human rights group, found that the raid killed at least 15 civilians and wounded at least five civilians—all children. Interviewees told Mwatana that women and children, the majority of those killed and wounded, had tried to run away and that they had not engaged in fighting.

    Mwatana found no credible information suggesting that the 20 civilians killed or wounded were directly participating in hostilities with AQAP or IS-Y. Of the 15 civilians killed, only one was an adult male, and residents said he was too old, at 65, to fight, and in any case had lost his hearing before the raid.

    Carolyn Coe, a course participant, read the names of the children killed that night:

    Asma al Ameri, 3 months; Aisha al Ameri, 4 years; Halima al Ameri, 5 years; Hussein al Ameri, 5 years; Mursil al Ameri, 6 years; Khadija al Ameri, 7 years; Nawar al Awlaki, 8 years; Ahmed al Dhahab, 11 years; Nasser al Dhahab, 13 years

    In response, Coe wrote:

    ee cummings writes of Maggie and Milly and Molly and May coming out to play one day. As I read the children’s names, I hear the family connections in their common surnames. I imagine how lively the home must have been with so many young children together. Or maybe instead, the home was surprisingly quiet if the children were very hungry, too weak to even cry. I’m sad that these children cannot realize their unique lives as in the ee cummings poem. Neither Aisha nor Halima, Hussein nor Mursil, none of these children can ever come out again to play.

    Dave Maciewski, another course participant, mentioned how history seemed to be repeating itself, remembering his experiences visiting mothers and children in Iraq where hundreds of thousands of tiny children couldn’t survive the lethally punitive US/UN economic sanctions.

    While UN agencies struggle to distribute desperately needed supplies of food, medicine and fuel, the UN Security Council continues to enforce a resolution, Resolution 2216, which facilitates the blockade and inhibits negotiation. Jamal Benomar, who was United Nations special envoy for Yemen from 2011-2015,  says that this resolution,  passed in 2015, had been drafted by the Saudis themselves. “Demanding the surrender of the advancing Houthis to a government living in chic hotel-exile in Riyadh was preposterous,” says Benomar, “but irrelevant.”

    Waleed Al Hariri heads the New York office of the Sana’a Center for Strategic Studies and is also a fellow-in-residence at Columbia Law School Human Rights Institute.

    “The council demanded the Houthis surrender all territory seized, including Sana’a, fully disarm, and allow President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi’s government to resume its responsibilities,” Al Hariri writes. “In essence, it insisted on surrender. That failed, but the same reasons that allowed the UNSC to make clear, forceful demands in 2015 have kept it from trying anything new in the five years since.”

    Does the UNSC realistically expect the Ansarallah (informally called the Houthi) to surrender and disarm after maintaining the upper hand in a prolonged war? The Saudi negotiators say nothing about lifting the crippling blockade. The UN Security Council should scrap Resolution 2216 and work hard to create a resolution relevant to the facts on the ground. The new resolution must insist that survival of Yemeni children who are being starved is the number one priority.

    Now, in the seventh year of grotesque war, international diplomatic efforts should heed the young Yemeni-Americans fasting in Washington, D.C. We all have a responsibility to listen for the screams of children gunned down from behind as they flee in the darkness from the rubble of their homes. We all have a responsibility to listen for the gasps of little children breathing their last because starvation causes them to die from asphyxiation. The U.S. is complying with a coalition using starvation and disease to wage war. With 400,000 children’s lives in the balance, with a Yemeni child dying once every 75 seconds, what U.S. interests could possibly justify our further hesitation in insisting the blockade must be lifted? The war must end.

    This article was posted on Saturday, April 10th, 2021 at 1:41am and is filed under Activism, Children/Youth, Crimes against Humanity, Hunger, Hunger Strikes, Militarism, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism (state and retail), United States, War Crimes, War Industry, Yemen.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Rise Up, Say the Birds to the Bread

    It was early morning on St. Patrick’s Day and I was sitting in the kitchen eating a few slices of delicious Irish Soda Bread.  My wife had made it at 5 A.M. while I was still in bed half-asleep, but its smell wafting through the rooms induced me to get up.  From outside the window came the sound of mourning doves cooing and crows playing their little raw saxophones.

    It’s not every day that such an invitation to awaken arrives through the air.  Some people are never so invited and others refuse the call, but the bread is always rising, if only we knew.

    The bread is always rising.

    The Irish soda bread’s smell and taste with my coffee was extremely sensuous and brought me back to our time in Ireland long before the world was locked down by the machine people into a virtual world in front of screens because of coronavirus. The bread was real, not virtual.  I felt as though for a few slow hours I would luxuriate in the silence and allow my mind to go on vacation and wander through the narrow lanes of reverie and memory.

    My wife, Jeanne Lemlin, a James Beard Award winning cookbook writer, had created the recipe after visiting  the bakery department at Field’s supermarket in Skibbereen, County Cork, where she observed Dennis McSweeney and his staff preparing their breads in the early morning.  Here’s the recipe so you can join me in the breaking of the bread.

    I was returning to my Irish rebel roots, thinking of how my ancestors rose up against their oppressors, the British colonizers.  How those Irish rebels became an inspiration for colonized people around the world.  How the enslaved and oppressed need the bread of hope.

    The bread is always rising.  Can you hear its music?

    By being lost in reverie, I was violating the terms the machine people have laid down for us to start and spend and end each day in fear and trembling.

    They are the experts who, as the English essayist Adam Philips has said, “construct the terror, and then the terror makes them expert.” 

    Contrarian that I am. I refuse to be terrorized, now or later.  For twenty years, the U.S. government “experts” have lied about Muslim terrorists coming to get us as they have killed millions of innocent Muslims around the world.

    Now it’s an invisible virus that has arrived to slay us.

    Of course, the Russians are always coming to get us, but they are very slow; they’ve been coming for at least eighty years but the lies about them continue.  Here they come again!

    It is just an odd happenstance that each of these three terrors has in its turn  resulted in further losses of freedoms and increased “emergency” powers for the government. We all know why the caged bird sings.

    Freedom is under assault.

    Outside on a large tree I see nine black vultures looking my way.  Behind them in the sky are another four or five soaring majestically. The birds have recently returned after wintering farther south. They roost in the tall pine streets on the other side of the house.  They are beautifully ugly.

    Love is a mystery.

    Their return gives me hope, as did the red-tailed hawks we saw the other morning doing clasped talon barrel-rolls as a bald eagle sailed before them.  So too the little multi-colored moth I saw on the outside glass of the door yesterday.  And the two insects that came up the drain into the kitchen sink.  These little ones had no fear, although their chances of surviving cold nights and water were slim.  But they took the risk of death as the world slowly rises into new life.  All creation conspires toward resurrection in the spring.

    But the machine people, like the colonizers and oppressors, are intent on burying us for good. They want to destroy our spirits through fear and falsehoods. They planted their seeds long ago.  If we buy their poisonous fruit, we will reap what we sow.

    “What,” wrote Thomas Hobbes in the seventeenth century, “is the heart but a spring, and the nerves so many strings, and the joints so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body.”

    Now they want to make us all into machines, obedient artificial intelligence cyborgs, conspiring in our own enslavement.  The only birds the machine people like are drones, satellites, war planes, flying missiles and bullets. They have filled the earth with the blood of the innocent, the blood that doesn’t stop running. They have contaminated the air. They have filled it with electronic noise, the unheard cacophony of billions of desperadoes talking from their cells, caged and clipped-wing birds talking of the unknown.  Lost in cyberspace while thinking they are free and grateful for the little talking machines the rulers have deemed to give them.  Their cells.

    The machine people have set their traps to capture any wild birds left.  They want to inject them with their poisonous vaccines, to brand and band them as fit for further torture and control within a totally digitized world.  The medical bureaucrats and their controllers create categories to which they assign people so that they can grant them permission to do or not do various human activities that are their natural rights. As Ivan Illich tells us in his classic Medical Nemesis, the template for this was set down more than two-and-a-half centuries ago:

    On November 5, 1766, the Empress Maria Theresa issued an edict requesting the court physician to certify fitness to undergo torture so as to ensure healthy, i.e. ‘accurate,’ testimony; it was one of the first laws to establish mandatory medical certification.

    But out of the blue, like a wayward thought, last night’s dream came to me while I was just typing those words.

    In my dream, I went down to the basement of the house I grew up in.  It was dark but I could see a large bird sitting on the floor. It startled me by its still presence. Off to the side stood the poet Allen Ginsberg, and next to him was a coffin.  In the coffin was a blue-eyed man in a blue shirt. The man was me.  Ginsberg said the man needed my help with his contact lenses, for they were preventing him from seeing clearly. So I spit on my fingers and removed his contact lenses so he could see. In each of his eyes a cross appeared.  I heard the bird rustle and turned to see it stand up.  It opened its huge wings and its feathers fanned to reveal dazzling colors which it fluttered open and closed. The man rose from the coffin and smiled. I woke up.

    It’s not believable of course, although it’s true, even if you think I just made it up, which I didn’t.  Dream and reality – what are they?  In memory I can vaguely hear T.S. Eliot’s words:

    Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
    Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
    Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
    Cannot bear very much reality.

    Loren Eiseley, the great naturalist/scientist and enchanting writer, wrote in his 1959 essay, “The Bird and the Machine,” that “I learned there [on an isolated expedition to the western American desert to capture birds – which he never did – circa 1910] that time is a series of planes existing superficially in the same universe.  The tempo is a human illusion, a subjective clock ticking in our own kind of protoplasm.”

    Which is to say that the night country we inhabit when asleep and our day hours cross over in the same consciousness to create the strange human creatures that we are.  We generally prefer to dismiss the night like the birds that keep watch on us because we have learned to think of ourselves as Hobbesian machines who live by clocks under the watchful embrace of the rational experts who tell us we are indeed “the incredible human machine[s].”

    They lie.  We are flesh and blood and bones, like our friends the birds.  There are profound reasons why birds and bread have held such important places in people’s spiritual lives and imaginations for thousands of years.  They symbolize our human solidarity in the breaking of the bread and our need for freedom in the winged beauty and song of birds in flight.

    Despite their dead philosophy, the machine people can never defeat these two human realities. At the still point of the turning world, where past and future are gathered up in the music of the dance, their mechanical philosophies will be defeated.

    I am going out for a walk now, up by the lake above the town and the railroad tracks, but in the spirit of that Irish soda bread and the Irish rebel spirit, I will leave you with the song I listened to on the evening of March 17 when I toasted my friends the black vultures with a glass of Guinness as they soared high in the evening sky above the mountains here.

    Please welcome our invited Irish guest, Van Morrison: “The Beauty of the Days Gone By.”

  • Image credit: Sugar Geek Show

    • This article was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2021 at 8:02am and is filed under Disinformation, Terrorism (state and retail).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Peace With Iran Is Tricky: Is Biden Making It Impossible? 

    American policy toward Iran has long been stupid and self-defeating. Anyone here not see that? Anyone here think that’s a necessary state of affairs?

    OK, it’s true that stupid, self-defeating policy toward Iran is an American tradition of more than 70 years standing. And yes, it has had some short-term benefits, enriching the Shah’s thugocracy and its American supporters like the Rockefellers and other oil interests. That’s a plus in some books, just not in Iranian books. There it looks more like colonial exploitation laced with crimes against humanity.

    Wait a minute: didn’t they take our diplomats hostage in 1979? As well they might. Get over it. Some of you should be particularly grateful for that hostage-taking, since Iran did the US the great “favor” of holding the hostages till their captivity helped elect Ronald Reagan. Ever since then, most Americans have been the hostages of the American right.

    Once in power, Reagan showed US gratitude by supporting Saddam Hussein’s war on Iran. Iraq had invaded Iran in September 1980 and the Reagan administration backed Iraq’s eight-year war against Iran. Iraq sometimes used chemical weapons, with US blessing.

    Over the last thirty years, US policy has largely consisted of a cold war typified by demonization of anything Iranian and by repeated sky-is-falling cries of Iran getting nuclear weapons as soon as next month. That it never happened has done nothing to quell the cries of wolf. From time to time the US and Israelis assassinate Iranian officials and nuclear scientists, but we don’t call that terrorism. What we call terrorism is any Iranian support for its allies in the region.

    The US broke diplomatic relations with Iran in 1979 and has not attempted to restore normal diplomatic dialogue since then. No wonder, then, that American policy toward Iran has long since lost touch with anything resembling intellectual integrity, never mind moral authority. American policy toward Iran is little more than chauvinistic resentment supported by tenacious bigotry against non-white Shia Muslims with a civilization millennia older than ours.

    The present moment, the early Biden administration, presents the US with a rare opportunity to re-think our Iran policy and at least attempt to create a relationship with Iran based on mutual respect, honesty, and a recognition of our own historical culpability. This is an opportunity that is not likely to last for long. And it will likely lead nowhere unless the US takes the initiative. So far, that appears unlikely.

    At the core of the present moment is the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) signed on July 14, 2015, by the US, China, France, Germany, Russia, UK, the European Union, and Iran, after almost two years of negotiation. The joint treaty established limits on Iranian nuclear development, enforced by inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). In exchange for signing the agreement, Iran was to be relieved of various sanctions imposed by the other parties. (Only three countries in the world opposed the JCPOA at the time – Saudi Arabia, United Arab Republic, and Israel.)

    In October 2017, the Trump administration unilaterally violated the agreement by refusing to lift agreed-upon sanctions. In May 2018, the Trump administration violated the agreement again, by unilaterally withdrawing from it despite opposition from all the other signatories. No other signatory has withdrawn from the JCPOA. The US has acted in bad faith toward Iran at least since 2017, and that bad faith continues under the Biden administration.

    According to the IAEA, Iran remained in compliance with the agreement through May 2019. Two months later, Iran announced that it had breached its limit on low-level enriched Uranium, which the IAEA confirmed: Iran had 205 kg of enriched Uranium, 2.2 kg above the agreement’s level of 202.8 kg. This is not a significant difference, it was self-reported, and it is meaningless in relation to nuclear weapons.

    In January 2020, the Trump administration assassinated an Iranian general at the Baghdad airport in Iraq, deemed a violation of international law by the UN. In response, Iran said it would not continue to comply with the agreement without US assurance that it would rejoin the agreement and lift the sanctions it had previously agreed to lift. The Trump administration maintained its hard line. The IAEA has maintained a partial verification with Iran through March 2021. The Biden administration has maintained the Trump administration’s hard line. Despite President Biden’s expressed intention to rejoin the JCPOA, he has taken unilateral inaction to maintain President Trump’s unilateral action to disrupt the agreement.

    In addition, in late February, Biden used disputed assertions of “Iranian influence” to launch a dubiously-legal attack on a base in Syria said to be the source of attacks in Iraq on US mercenaries there. The US attack came in the midst of intensified Israeli bombing of “Iran-backed” forces in Syria, along with Israel’s announced contingency plans for bombing nuclear facilities in Iran. For more than two years, Israel has carried on an undeclared war on Iranian shipping (according to Haaretz and the Wall Street Journal): “several dozen attacks were carried out, which caused the Iranians cumulative damage of billions of dollars, amid a high rate of success in disrupting its shipping.” Haaretz has also reported two unconfirmed “Iranian missile” attacks on Israeli ships in the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman.

    US intelligence on Iran has been politicized and unreliable for decades. Iran is a country of fifty million people on the other side of the world, ringed by US military bases and the US Navy. Iran is under the threat of nuclear attack from US forces every minute of every day. Iran is struggling under crippling economic sanctions imposed and enforced by the US. Despite this longstanding reality, US senators Bob Menendez (D-NJ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) recently wrote to President Biden affirming the deep-seated lie that “Iran continues to pose a threat to US and international security.” Whatever sliver of truth may lurk in that assertion, it’s minuscule compared to the threat the US continues to pose to the rest of the world.

    Official American paranoia about Iran became hilarious on March 21, as dutifully and uncritically reported by the Associated Press (AP) under the headline:

    AP sources: Iran threatens US Army post and top general

    The breathless lead gave no clue that the “threats” were already two months old, as well as virtually impossible to carry out:

    Iran has made threats against Fort McNair, an Army post in the U.S. capital, and against the Army’s vice chief of staff, two senior U.S. intelligence officials said.

    The most serious question raised here is why the AP, much less anyone else, should take seriously a story leaked by anonymous sources offering no evidence of any credible military threat by a country thousands of miles away from a US fort on an inland waterway in Washington, DC. How scared are we supposed to be? Intelligence agencies refused to respond to press queries. The local military commander, Gen. Omar Jones, had already managed to reduce the threat to absurdity: “The only specific security threat he offered was about a swimmer who ended up on the installation and was arrested.”

    In a rational world, a story like this would go unpublished. Or it would be written in its real context: a local zoning dispute between the city and the Pentagon.

    The same day that the AP was indulging in Iranophobia, Iran was reiterating its position with regard to US sanctions and entering new negotiations. As reported by Al Jazeera, Iran said that, first, the US should restore the JCPOA to its pre-Trump status and lift all Trump-imposed sanctions, then Iran would return to full compliance. In an hour-long address marking the Persian new year that coincides with the spring equinox, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in part:

    … that previous fool [Trump] … went away in that infamous way, bringing disgrace to his country…. [The US] must know ‘maximum pressure’ has failed so far, and if the current US administration wants to continue, it will also fail.

    This was not widely reported in US media. Reuters omitted mention of Iran’s stated position on the JCPOA, but mentioned Biden’s empty gesture of sending the Iranians greetings and hope for the new year.

    Loss of trust in the US is the crux of the Trump legacy. The US has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to abide by international agreements. The US has demonstrated that it cannot be trusted to protect its own citizens from a pandemic. Biden cannot evade this multifaceted reality by pretending it doesn’t exist. Restoring trust is not likely to be quick or easy, but it won’t be possible without determined effort.

    The Biden administration has made some progress on the pandemic front. So far, some of the Biden administration’s cold war mentality hardliners seem to have stymied progress on Iran. There can be no break with the past as long as the US continues Trump’s policies, which are themselves breaks with the past.

    Biden’s special envoy to Iran provides reason for hope. Robert Malley is generally respected for his nuanced understanding of Middle East politics. He is a veteran diplomat and mediator who served in both the Clinton and Obama administrations. His appointment sparked right-wing accusations that he has too much sympathy for Iran and an “animus towards Israel,” even though he is of Egyptian Jewish descent. Malley has a record of challenging Washington orthodoxy. In a lecture in 2008, Malley acknowledged that US actions abroad have often been “destructive,” and that the US:

    … anoints preselected leaders, misreads local dynamics, misinterprets local balances of power, misuses its might, misjudges the toxicity of its embrace, encourages confrontation, exports political models and plays with the sectarian genie.  

    Although that analysis has been true since long before 2008, it still raises hackles in that part of US leadership still guided more by ideological fantasy than complex reality.

    That reality added a new complexity March 27, when China and Iran announced a new economic agreement for the next quarter-century. Five years in negotiation, the pact provides $400 billion in Chinese investments in Iran in exchange for a steady supply of Iranian oil at a discounted price. At a minimum, this agreement seems to offer Iran some breathing room and stability as well as real relief from economic sanctions.

    The Biden administration continues to take positions designed to assure failure to resolve the issue. Maybe that’s the Biden goal, in which case all the posturing is time-wasting theatre. When the US Secretary of State is publicly saying, “The ball is really in their court,” he sounds like he’s mired in mindless denial, not making any gesture to restore broken trust. But if Biden actually wants rapprochement of some balanced nature, he has to decide just how long it’s in US interests to continue to accept the damage of prolonging Trump policies. How is that such a hard choice?

    William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. A collection of his essays, EXCEPTIONAL: American Exceptionalism Takes Its Toll (2019) is available from Yorkland Publishing of Toronto or Amazon. This article was first published in Reader Supported News. Read other articles by William.

    This article was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2021 at 7:44am and is filed under Anti-war, Iran, Joe Biden, Media, Terrorism (state and retail).

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • The (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror

    by C.J. Hopkins / February 8th, 2021

    If you enjoyed the Global War on Terror, you’re going to love the new War on Domestic Terror! It’s just like the original Global War on Terror, except that this time the “Terrorists” are all “Domestic Violent Extremists” (“DVEs”), “Homegrown Violent Extremists” (“HVEs”), “Violent Conspiracy-Theorist Extremists” (“VCTEs”), “Violent Reality Denialist Extremists” (VRDEs”), “Insurrectionary Micro-Aggressionist Extremists” (“IMAEs”), “People Who Make Liberals Feel Uncomfortable” (“PWMLFUs”), and anyone else the Department of Homeland Security wants to label an “extremist” and slap a ridiculous acronym on.

    According to a “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” issued by the DHS on January 27, these DCEs, HVEs, VCTEs, VRDEs, IMAEs, and PWMLFUs are “ideologically-motivated violent extremists with objections to the exercise of governmental authority” and other “perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.” They are believed to be “motivated by a range of issues, including anger over Covid-19 restrictions, the 2020 election results, police use of force,” and other dangerous “false narratives” (e.g., the existence of the “deep state,” “herd immunity,” “biological sex,” “God,” and so on).

    “Inspired by foreign terrorist groups” and “emboldened by the breach of the US Capitol Building,” this diabolical network of “domestic terrorists” is “plotting attacks against government facilities,” “threatening violence against critical infrastructure” and actively “citing misinformation and conspiracy theories about Covid-19.” For all we know, they might be huddled in the “Wolf’s Lair” at Mar-a-Lago right now, plotting a devastating terrorist attack with those WMDs we never found in Iraq, or generating population-adjusted death-rate charts going back 20 years, or posting pictures of “extremist frogs” on the Internet.

    The Department of Homeland Security is “concerned,” as are its counterparts throughout the global capitalist empire. The (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror isn’t just a war on American “domestic terror.” The “domestic terror” threat is international. France has just passed a “Global Security Law” banning citizens from filming the police beating the living snot out of people (among other “anti-terrorist” provisions). In Germany, the government is preparing to install an anti-terror moat around the Reichstag. In the Netherlands, the police are cracking down on the VCTEs, VRDEs, and other “angry citizens who hate the system,” who have been protesting over nightly curfews. Suddenly, everywhere you look (or at least if you are looking in the corporate media), “global extremism networks are growing.” It’s time for Globocap to take the gloves off again, root the “terrorists” out of their hidey holes, and roll out a new official narrative.

    Actually, there’s not much new about it. When you strip away all the silly new acronyms, the (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror is basically just a combination of the “War on Terror” narrative and the “New Normal” narrative; i.e., a militarization of the so-called “New Normal” and a pathologization of the “War on Terror.” Why would GloboCap want to do that, you ask?

    I think you know, but I’ll go ahead and tell you.

    See, the problem with the original “Global War on Terror” was that it wasn’t actually all that global. It was basically just a war on Islamic “terrorism” (i.e., resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology), which was fine as long as GloboCap was just destabilizing and restructuring the Greater Middle East. It was put on hold in 2016, so that GloboCap could focus on defeating “populism” (i.e., resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology), make an example of Donald Trump, and demonize everyone who voted for him (or just refused to take part in their free and fair elections), which they have just finished doing, in spectacular fashion. So, now it’s back to “War on Terror” business, except with a whole new cast of “terrorists,” or, technically, an expanded cast of “terrorists.” (I rattled off a list in my previous column.)

    In short, GloboCap has simply expanded, recontextualized, and pathologized the “War on Terror” (i.e., the war on resistance to global capitalism and its post-ideological ideology). This was always inevitable, of course. A globally-hegemonic system (e.g., global capitalism) has no external enemies, as there is no territory “outside” the system. Its only enemies are within the system, and thus, by definition, are insurgents, also known as “terrorists” and “extremists.” These terms are utterly meaningless, obviously. They are purely strategic, deployed against anyone who deviates from GloboCap’s official ideology … which, in case you were wondering, is called “normality” (or, in our case, currently, “New Normality”).

    In earlier times, these “terrorists” and “extremists” were known as “heretics,” “apostates,” and “blasphemers.” Today, they are also known as “deniers,” e.g., “science deniers,” “Covid deniers,” and recently, more disturbingly, “reality deniers.” This is an essential part of the pathologization of the “War on Terror” narrative. The new breed of “terrorists” do not just hate us for our freedom … they hate us because they hate “reality.” They are no longer our political or ideological opponents … they are suffering from a psychiatric disorder. They no longer need to be argued with or listened to … they need to be “treated,” “reeducated,” and “deprogrammed,” until they accept “Reality.” If you think I’m exaggerating the totalitarian nature of the “New Normal/War on Terror” narrative, read this op-ed in The New York Times exploring the concept of a “Reality Czar” to deal with our “Reality Crisis.”

    And this is just the beginning, of course. The consensus (at least in GloboCap circles) is, the (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror will probably continue for the next 10 to 20 years, which should provide the global capitalist ruling classes with more than enough time to carry out the “Great Reset,” destroy what’s left of human society, and condition the public to get used to living like cringing, neo-feudal peasants who have to ask permission to leave their houses. We’re still in the initial “shock and awe” phase (which they will have to scale back a bit eventually), but just look at how much they’ve already accomplished.

    The economic damage is literally incalculable … millions have been plunged into desperate poverty, countless independent businesses crushed, whole industries crippled, developing countries rendered economically dependent (i.e., compliant) for the foreseeable future, as billionaires amassed over $1 trillion in wealth and supranational corporate behemoths consolidated their dominance across the planet.

    And that’s just the economic damage. The attack on society has been even more dramatic. GloboCap, in the space of a year, has transformed the majority of the global masses into an enormous, paranoid totalitarian cult that is no longer capable of even rudimentary reasoning. (I’m not going to go on about it here … at this point, you either recognize it or you’re in it.) They’re actually lining up in parking lots, the double-masked members of this Covidian cult, to be injected with an experimental “vaccine” that they believe will save the human species from a virus that causes mild to moderate symptoms in roughly 95% of those “infected,” and that over 99% of the “infected” survive.

    So, it is no big surprise that these same mindless cultists are gung-ho for the (New Normal) War on Domestic Terror, and the upcoming globally-televised show trial of Donald Trump for “inciting insurrection,” and the ongoing corporate censorship of the Internet, and can’t wait to be issued their “Freedom Passports,” which will allow them to take part in “New Normal” life — double-masked and socially-distanced, naturally — while having their every movement and transaction, and every word they write on Facebook, or in an email, or say to someone on their smartphones, or in the vicinity of their 5G toasters, recorded by GloboCap’s Intelligence Services and their corporate partners, subsidiaries, and assigns. These people have nothing at all to worry about, as they would never dream of disobeying orders, and could not produce an original thought, much less one displeasing to GloboCap, if you held a fake apocalyptic plague to their heads.

    As for the rest of us “extremists,” “domestic terrorists,” “heretics,” and “reality deniers,” (i.e., anyone criticizing global capitalism, or challenging its official narratives, and its increasingly totalitarian ideology, regardless of our specific DHS acronyms), I wish I had something hopeful to tell you, but, the truth is, things aren’t looking so good. I guess I’ll see you in a quarantine camp, or in the psych ward, or an offshore detention facility … or, I don’t know, maybe I’ll see you in the streets.

    C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing and Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. His dystopian novel, Zone 23, is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. Volume I of his Consent Factory Essays is published by Consent Factory Publishing, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Amalgamated Content, Inc. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org. Read other articles by C.J..

    This article was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2021 at 9:17pm and is filed under Authoritarianism, COVID-19, Global Capitalism, Satire, Terrorism (state and retail), The “Great Reset”.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Who’s Killing Iranian Nuclear Scientists?

    by RT / November 29th, 2020

    Israel denies being behind the assassination of top Iranian nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, and the US is keeping quiet. But the fact remains, Iranian scientists have been continuously and mysteriously murdered for at least a decade now. Who do you think is doing it?

    This article was posted on Sunday, November 29th, 2020 at 8:11am and is filed under Assassinations, Iran, Israel/Palestine, Terrorism (state and retail), Video.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.