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#NEWS – ALEXANDER MERCOURIS (1:29:33 MIN) 15 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




IRAN BREACHES ANGLO-ZIONIST DEFENSES IN HISTORIC ATTACK: A BREAKDOWN – BY
SIMPLICIUS – 14 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Iran made history yesterday by launching “Operation True Promise”. In our usual
style here, let’s cut through all the noise currently clogging up social
networks and incisively demonstrate the facts as thoroughly as possible, while
also pointing out how this was a game-changing and historic event which has
brought Iran onto the world stage in a big way.

Firstly, as establishment, Iran’s stated goal for the operation was to strike
back at the bases from which the Israeli consular attack was launched on April
1:

> IRGC has listed its objectives for last nights missile attack: Ramon and
> Nevatim airbases (where attack on Iran Consulate was conducted from). Israeli
> Air Force intelligence HQ in Tel Aviv (where attack on Iran Consulate was
> planned) and degrading of Israeli air defence radars and assets.
> 
> The footage is of the Intelligence HQ getting hit. I have yet to see evidence
> of 99% interception. Ramon has been badly hit. Nevatim was hit by more than 7
> missiles. Air Force Intelligence HQ completely leveled. Other strikes on air
> defence installations obviously not close to population centres and out of
> view but I’m sure sat intel will show extent of damage.

And another:

> Nevatim Airbase in the south of occupied Palestine
> 
> Ramon Airbase in the south of occupied Palestine
> 
> The Israeli top-secret intelligence-spy base in Jabal al-Sheikh (Mount Hermon)
> in the north of the occupied Golan
> 
> It should be noted that the rest of the explosions or hits in other areas of
> the occupied territories are related to the confrontation of the Israeli air
> defense systems with the projectiles in the sky or the falling of the wreckage
> of the interceptor missiles or the wreckage of Iranian missiles.

Now, let’s get down to the nuts and bolts.

This strike was unprecedented for several important reasons. Firstly, it was of
course the first Iranian strike on Israeli soil directly from Iranian soil
itself, rather than utilizing proxies from Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, etc.
This alone was a big watershed milestone that has opened up all sorts of
potentials for escalation.

Secondly, it was one of the most advanced and longest range peer-to-peer style
exchanges in history. Even in Russia, where I have noted we’ve seen the first
ever truly modern near-peer conflict, with unprecedented scenes never before
witnessed like when highly advanced NATO Storm Shadow missiles flew to Crimea
while literally in the same moments, advanced Russian Kalibrs flew past them in
the opposite direction—such an exchange has never been witnessed before, as
we’ve become accustomed to watching NATO pound on weaker, unarmed opponents over
the last few decades. But no, last night Iran upped the ante even more. Because
even in Russia, such exchanges at least happen directly over the Russian border
onto its neighbor, where logistics and ISR is for obvious reasons much simpler.

But Iran did something unprecedented. They conducted the first ever modern,
potentially hypersonic, assault on an enemy with SRBMs and MRBMs across a vast
multi-domain space covering several countries and timezones, and potentially as
much as 1200-2000km.

Additionally, Iran did all this with potentially hypersonic weapons, which
peeled back another layer of sophistication that included such things as
possible endoatmospheric interception attempts with Israeli Arrow-3 ABM
missiles.

But let’s step back for a moment to state that Iran’s operation in general was
modeled after the sophisticated paradigm set by Russia in Ukraine: it began with
the launch of various types of drones, which included some Shahed-136s (Geran-2
in Russia) as well as others. We can see that from the Israeli-released footage
of some of the drone interceptions:

At the 0:49 mark you can see what looks like a Shahed, though it appears similar
to the jet-engine-equipped Shahed-238 variety.

After a certain pre-timed span, Iran then released cruise missiles so that they
could strike roughly in a similar window as the drones. One video from last
night confirmed the low-flying cruise missile presence:

It’s not known for certain, but it appears it could be the new Abu Mahdi
missile which has the appropriate ~1000km range. Here’s some other
possibilities:

Then, following the appropriate time interval, Iran launched the coup de grace,
its vaunted ballistic missiles. Here’s Iran’s own released footage of the start
of Operation True Promise, which includes the ballistic launches:

As stated, all three layers of the attack were timed to coincide, with the
slowest (drones) going first, then next fastest (cruise missiles), followed by
the fastest time-to-target, the ballistic missiles.

The U.S. scrambled a large coalition to shoot the threats down, which included
the U.S. itself, UK flying from Cyprus, France, and, controversially, Jordan
which allowed them all to also use its airspace and even partook in the shoot
downs.

Dozens of images proclaimed the “successful” shoot downs of Iranian ballistic
missiles, like the following:

The problem is, all of those are the ejected booster stages of two-stage
rockets. There is no conclusive proof that any ballistic missiles were shot
down, and in fact all the evidence points to the opposite: direct footage of the
missiles penetrating the AD net and striking targets. But we’ll get to that.


MISSILE TYPES

First: what kinds of ballistic missiles did Iran use?

There are speculations and then there’s what can be dutifully confirmed.

As for the confirmed, with my own eyes from the actual longer released launch
video we can see the following:

Which appears to match what is likely the Shahab-3 below:

Here’s another photo from a Shahab-3 test:

In the launch photo, the very top warhead nose cone does appear slightly shorter
and may match the Sejjil rocket better. The Sejjil is in fact a much newer
evolution of and upgrade to the Shahab that has both a two-stage and three-stage
variety for an extremely long range of 2500km+. And some also claim it might be
the Ghadr-110, but this is also an evolution and similar ‘upgrade’ of the
Shahab-3 system, which likewise looks almost identical.

There are some other launch videos that appear to show possible Zolfagher or the
updated Dezful systems as well.

Then there is the closest shot of the launch video, which gives us the most
accurate confirmation of one of the missile types:

On the fuselage you can see what appears to be EMA written, and the same can be
seen on this photo from today of a “downed missile” somewhere in Iraq:

This comes closest to confirming that missile to be an Emad from the chart
above, which is one of Iran’s most advanced and can feature a MaRV (Maneuverable
Re-entry Vehicle) warhead. This is where it starts getting interesting, because
the hits we saw in Israel appeared to potentially utilize some form of MaRV or
hypersonic glide vehicle, which would mean Iran could have made history even
beyond what we thought.

So let’s get there by first mentioning the other controversial claim that Iran
possibly used its most advanced new hypersonic Fattah-2 system:

In none of the launch videos was this visible, but that doesn’t necessarily
preclude Iran having secretly launched and tested some of the above. An Iranian
academic stated the following:

> “Iran has not fired its hypersonic missiles. In fact, most of the drones and
> missiles that were fired were older drones and missiles. They were very
> inexpensive and were used as decoys. So Iran spent a couple of million dollars
> to force the Israelis to spend $1.3 billion in anti-missile missiles, which
> was itself a big achievement by the Iranians. And then a number of other
> missiles that the Iranians fired…cut through and struck their targets,” the
> academic and geopolitical affairs commentator told Sputnik.

And lastly, there are some experts who believe Iran utilized its elusive
hypersonic Kheybar Shekan missile, which also features a highly maneuverable
MaRV.

These are two shots from last night’s launch video:

And here is a stock photo of the Kheybar nosecone and warhead:

This is where it gets most interesting, and why I’ve prefaced it so thoroughly.

In short: while Israel and the U.S. claim they shot down 100% of everything, and
while it’s possible that the drone and cruise missile lures were mostly shot
down—though we have no strong evidence one way or the other—we do have evidence
that the ballistic missiles largely went unopposed, slicing through what’s
claimed to be the densest air defense in the world. Not only Israel’s itself,
comprised of a layered defense of David Slings, Arrow-3s, Patriots, and Iron
Dome, but also the aforementioned allied airforces, as well as what’s now been
reported to be a U.S. Arleigh Burke warship firing upwards of 70+ SM-3 missiles
from the Mediterranean shore.

The hits that we saw were spectacular in one profound way: the terminal velocity
of the Iranian ballistic missiles appeared stunningly fast. Let’s review some of
the most exemplary videos.

Here’s by far the most revealing one, which totally refutes Israeli claims of
100% shoot downs. Note the massive swarm of air-defense missiles going up at the
onset, then at the middle mark, watch as Iranian ballistics crash through the AD
net totally unopposed at high speed, slamming into the ground:

As a quick aside, this next video was claimed by many to show Israeli Arrow-3
missiles shooting down Iranian ballistics in the exoatmosphere, i.e. in space:

But in reality, all it shows is the stage separation of the Arrow missiles as
they climb toward the exoatmospheric zone. It does not show any actual
successful interceptions, nor is there any evidence of a single ballistic
missile being shot down.

But here’s where we get down to business. The next video is the most eye-opening
in terms of the capabilities of these missiles. The two most important things to
note are: 1) the terminal velocity right before impact and 2) note how some of
the missiles strike very precisely onto the same location in groups.

First video, note the terminal speed here:

Here note the speed but also the grouping accuracy:

In particular at 0:31 above what looks like a runway on the rightside of the
screen can be seen, which could indicate this to be the Nevatim airbase in the
Negev desert—where Arabic speaking Bedouins live, which explains the Arabic in
the video.

Not all the impacts exhibit the high speed of a potentially hypersonic re-entry
vehicle. For instance, this video shows perhaps somewhat slower missiles that
nevertheless are easily bypassing the joint Israeli-Western AD net:

But getting back to the hypersonic question. Here’s a video showing one of
Iran’s missile tests, which appears to show one of the hypersonic glide vehicle
style warheads from the Ghadr missile:

> A new video of the moment one of the IRGC’s ballistic missiles was hit during
> last year’s solar exercise near Chabahar has been released with 60 frames per
> second, where you can clearly see the impact of the Ghadr missile warhead for
> the first time. This warhead also has a very good final speed around Mach 7
> and will be very strategic. The three-cone body of this cap is completely and
> severely melted, and you can also see the burning marks on the small parts of
> this cap in the first frame of entering the frame.

Photo:

The speed appears to coincide with the videos of the faster strikes, and you can
see the vehicle looks like it may be glowing white-hot, which could explain the
somewhat odd fact that in all the strike videos, the Iranian missiles appear
‘red’ as if they are still burning their engines. But we know most ballistic
missiles like the Iskander have a burn-out phase after which the engine stops
burning. Thus the red-hot nature of the strikes could potentially indicate not a
burning engine, but rather the heat of the vehicle’s outer skin from hypersonic
re-entry.

Further, most ballistics strike on a pretty steep or straight down decline,
while many of the Iranian hits are on a shallower trajectory which could
indicate a glide-style vehicle, though in the above ‘test’ it clearly shows it
coming down at a 90 degree angle, so it’s likely capable of both.

That being said, it may not be an unpowered glide vehicle but one of the
thrust-capable re-entry vehicles like so:

Unfortunately, we just don’t know the exact details—like construction material
for instance—that would allow us to fully confirm its terminal speed. However,
based on visual eye-balling, some of the strikes appear to be landing at minimum
Mach 3.5-5 if not higher, which according to some, is even higher than Iskander
terminal velocity.

That being said, while the Iranian MRBMs feature very complex propulsion
systems, given that they are two and even three stage for extra-long range,
while Russia and the U.S. lacks these because of their previous adherence to the
Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile Treaty, the guidance aspect of Iranian
MRBMs remains a question mark. We don’t know how accurate they are, and in the
end, how effective the strikes actually were in hitting their targets. That’s
because beyond the general macro objective of “hitting Nevatim airbase”, for
instance, we don’t know what precisely inside that giant airbase Iran may have
targeted.

However, Israel did confirm the base was hit upwards of 7 times, but claims the
damage was minor. In fact, they’ve now released footage showing them repairing
one of the hit runways:

And some satellite photos have been released showing what appears to be possible
strike damage throughout the base:

And another before and after timelapse, though unclear, shows possible damage to
a hangar. Keep in mind this is the base which housed F-35s:

Could Israel be downplaying serious damage by releasing the video of a minor
runway hole? For instance, they posted another video of an F-35 landing back at
Nevatim base as a demonstration that the base is unharmed, but some have alleged
that it is old footage:

That’s not to mention the official Israeli account tried to pass off old footage
of Russian MLRS launches from Ukraine as Iranian ballistic launches last night:

Thus it’s clear that truth is no obstacle for Israel, which means we certainly
cannot take their word on anything regarding last night’s operation.


CONCLUSION?

What can we conclude about last night? We don’t have any definitive ‘final
words’ on how effective Iran’s strikes were because:

 1. We don’t know Iran’s exact granular targets
 2. We don’t know Iran’s exact intentions

For the second, what I mean is that many now believe Iran merely strove to
provide a ‘demonstration en force’, as Will Schryver puts it. A show merely as a
‘warning’ to Israel, and to create deterrence from future Israeli escalations.
In fact, Iranian officials have now warned that Iran will respond similarly to
all future Israeli attacks:

They call this the New Equation. Anytime Israel attacks them, Iran now intends
to strike them ‘head on’, i.e. directly from its soil as is their newly
demonstrated capability.

Beyond this, Iran broke new ground in setting new milestones for missile
technology and modern warfare, as stated in the outset. Iran demonstrated the
capacity to bypass the most powerful and advanced anti-missile systems in the
world—ones that have no built-in excuse as is the case in Ukraine. In Ukraine,
the excuse is that the Patriots and other systems are manned by under-trained
Ukrainians, and are not reinforced and integrated as wholly into layered Western
systems as they would be in Western hands.

But last night, Iran penetrated every missile shield manned and operated by NATO
itself, with all the trappings and advanced C4ISR and SIGINT capabilities
inherent to the entire Western alliance; from THAAD, to Patriot, David’s Sling,
Arrow-3, SM-3, Iron Dome, and even ‘C-Dome’ from Israeli corvettes—not to
mention the entire complement of the West’s most advanced A2A defenses flown
from F-35s, Typhoons, Eurofighters, and likely much more.

One must understand that ballistic missiles are precisely the apex predator that
these most advanced Western AD systems were created to handle—and last night,
they failed spectacularly in the same way the Patriots did in Desert Storm
before them:

This sends a signal that Iran is now truly capable of striking any of the most
high profile, high value targets of the West’s, in the entire sphere of the
Middle East, within a radius of 2000-4000km. That is a significant capability
that dwarfs even anything Russia or the U.S. itself is capable of in the same
efficient way. Sure, Russia can send Avangards (very few, and highly expensive)
and far slower long range cruise missiles, but due to the Treaty, no other
country can match Iran’s cheap and immediate ballistic missile capability. The
U.S. would have to send up a load of slow planes and do the traditional long
range stand off attacks with slow munitions to hit targets at such distances.

As I said, the only question that remains is still of effectiveness by way of
accuracy. It’s one thing to develop long range rockets via the luxury of a
two-stage allowance, but there’s far more technology that goes into making such
objects critically accurate—and I suspect here Iran may fall short of Russia and
the U.S.’ capabilities, given that there’s a whole host of special electronics
(signal boosting, EW reflecting, etc.) and guidance redundancies that are
required for extreme accuracy. This is where Russia’s systems shine. Iran’s
missiles have been shown to be quite accurate during tests in Iran under ideal
conditions—but in highly contested EW environments, when the GPS/Beidou/Glonass
signals are jammed, it could be a completely different story. Furthermore, the
science behind signal retention in hypersonic plasma bubbles is quite extreme
and no country has yet even proven the capability to consistently do this—but we
won’t get into that for now, as I may cover that in an upcoming article focusing
on the Russian Zircon.

The optics of seeing Iranian missiles flying over the Israeli Knesset surely
sends chills down Israel’s spine because it states: we could have easily
destroyed your Knesset, and much else, but we chose to be lenient, for now:


WHO CAME OUT THE WINNER?

There are now two chief competing ‘takes’ on the situation.

One says that Iran was ‘humiliated’ as Israel intercepted everything, and more
importantly, that Iran has now blown its only advantage of surprise and
strategic uncertainty/ambiguity by ‘showing its hand’ and not achieving much.
They argue that Iran’s one true advantage over Israel was the threat that it
could effect a mass launch of its feared ballistic missiles, wiping out huge
swathes of Israel. But now that the perceived ‘damage’ from the attack was low,
Iran has shown itself to be weaker than expected, which could imbue Israel with
even more courage and motivation to continue striking and provoking Iran, as
they might see they have nothing to fear from Iran’s long-touted missiles.

This is certainly a reasonable argument. I’m not saying it’s totally wrong—we
simply don’t know for a fact because of the aforementioned reasons that:

 1. We don’t actually know how much damage the strikes caused, due to Israel’s
    obvious lies of “100% interceptions” and disproved fakes.
 2. We don’t know whether it was merely Iran’s goal to do a ‘light’ showing in
    the interest of ‘escalation management’. I.e. they may not have wanted to
    cause too much damage deliberately, simply to send a message but keep from
    provoking Israel to respond too aggressively.

Iran is said to have thousands of such missiles, so obviously having launched
only 70+ or so is likely not indicative of a major attack tasked with actually
causing serious destruction to Israeli infrastructure.

Then there’s the converse side: Iran came out the big winner by demonstrating
all the previously-outlined abilities of bypassing the West’s densest AD
shields.

Here’s why I think in some ways this conclusion to be the more correct in the
long term.

Firstly, one of the common counterarguments is that Israel possesses nuclear
weapons, which ultimately trumps anything Iran can throw at them. But in
reality, now that Iran has proven the ability to penetrate Israel, Iran too can
cause nuclear devastation by striking the Israeli Dimona nuclear power plant.
Destroyed nuclear plants would produce far more radioactive chaos than the
relatively ‘clean’ modern nuclear weapons. Furthermore, Israel is much smaller
than the comparatively gigantic Iran. Iran can take many nuclear hits and
survive; but a single mass nuclear event in Israel could irradiate the entire
country, making it uninhabitable.

Secondly, recall the main fear of Iraqi Scarabs and Scuds back in the day: that
they could contain chemical/biological warheads. Iran too could technically load
its missiles with all kinds of nasty goodies of this sort: either chem-bio or
even unenriched Uranium—which it has aplenty—to create a ‘dirty bomb’. Now that
we know it can penetrate Israel easily, Iran could actually wipe the country out
with a mass un-enriched nuclear, chemical, or biological attack with these
now-proven hyper- or quasi-hypersonic ballistics. That threat alone now presents
a psychological Damocles Sword that will act as asymmetrical deterrent or
counter to any Israeli Samson Option threat.

Thirdly, this was Iran’s very first foray into such a direct strike. It can be
argued that they gained critical data and metrics from the entire Western
alliance’s defensive capabilities as well as Israeli defensive vulnerabilities.
This means that there is an implied threat that any future attack of this scale
could be far more effective, as Iran may now ‘calibrate’ said attack to maximize
what it saw were any failings or weaknesses on its part last night. Russia has
had two years of launching such strikes, and it has only been semi-recently that
they’ve calibrated and finetuned the precise timings of the sophisticated
multi-layered drone-ALCM-ballistic triple threat attack. Iran can improve with
each iteration as well and maximize/streamline the effectiveness with each
attempt.

Fourthly, there is the now-confirmed mass discrepancy of operational costs:

> Israel’s defense of last night’s Iranian missile and drone attack is estimated
> to have costed over $1.3 billion in jet fuel, surface-to-air missile
> interceptors, air-to-air missiles, and other military equipment utilized by
> the Israeli air defense array; with an “Arrow 3” hypersonic anti-ballistic
> missile alone believed to cost between $5-20 million.

One unconfirmed source claimed Iran’s attack cost as little as $30M, while the
number floated for the West’s interceptions is around $1B to $1.3B.

Given that the average interceptor missile is minimum from about $1M to upwards
of $15-20M for the SM-6s, this total price is plausible. Given that Iran was
said to have fired a total of ~350+ drones/missiles, and that the standard
procedure is to fire 2 interceptors at each threat, one can clearly see the
math: 350 x 2 = 700 x $1-15M.

The point is that, just as we’re in the midst of the Houthis having proven the
West’s total inability to sustain defense against mass persistent drone swarms,
here too Iran may have just proven an absolutely lethal inability of Israel and
the West to sustain against a potential long drawn-out Iranian strike campaign;
i.e. one prosecuted over the course of days or weeks, with consistent daily
mass-barrages. Such a campaign would likely critically deplete the West’s
ability to shoot down even the lowest scale Shahed drone threat. Just look at
Ukraine—it is going through the same lesson as we speak.

Lastly, what does this mean?

One neglected consequence of this is that Iran now stands to field the ability
to totally disrupt Israel’s economic way of life. If Iran were to engage in a
committed campaign of mass strikes, it could totally paralyze the Israeli
economy by making entire areas uninhabitable, causing mass migrations in the
same way the Hamas attack led thousands of Israelis to flee.

Unlike Israel’s barbaric and savage genocide aimed primarily at civilians, last
night’s Iranian attack exclusively targeted military sites. But if Iran wanted
to, they could launch mass infrastructure attacks in the way Russia has now done
to Ukraine’s energy grids, further compounding the economic damage. In short:
Iran could mire Israel in months’ and years’ long economic malaise or outright
devastation.

Don’t forget this attack was still relatively limited to Iran alone. Sure, the
Houthis and even Kata’ib Hezbollah reportedly sent a few drones, but it was
minor. That means in the future, should Israel choose to escalate, Iran still
reserves several levels of its own escalatory advantage. If push came to shove,
imagine Hezbollah, Ansar Allah, Hamas, Syria, and Iran all launching
full-fledged attacks on Israel in all out war. Maybe that’s what Israel wants,
some would argue. After all, there are echoes of the various Arab-Israeli wars
where Israel ‘triumphed’ against such large Arab coalitions. But times have
changed, the calculus is slightly different now. Short of using nuclear weapons,
how would Israel survive a full-scale war against Hezbollah in the north while
Iran rains daily barrages of hypersonic missiles, drones, and everything in
between on Israel’s industries, crippling its economy?

Of course, at that point the question of the U.S. coming to help is brought up,
but, clearly desperate for an off-ramp, Biden just stated:


AN IMPORTANT OVERLOOKED POINT

The final aspect for consideration is to remember that all of the preceding and
ensuing events could very well be part of the Israeli plan. Recall, Israel
didn’t choose to blow up the Iranian embassy—a huge, unprecedented maneuver—and
slaughter Iranian generals just for its health. This appeared part of a clear
strategy of escalation aimed at baiting Iran into an escalatory spiral,
presumably with the end goal of drawing the U.S. into a large scale war to cut
down Iran once and for all.

In light of that, some experts now speculate that Iran foolishly “fell into the
trap”. However, as stated earlier, Iran can be said to have wisely ‘managed’ the
escalation for precisely this reason: to show its strength while not going too
far in a way that would invite a wider American response—or even an Israeli one
for that matter.

But I simply mention this to temper any ‘celebratory’ touts from the resistance
sphere. While Iran’s strikes may inspire some chest-beating chauvinism, in
reality it may very well have played into Israel’s hand. However, the U.S.’
unwillingness to support Israel into further escalation could very well deflate
Netanyahu’s goals and simply leave Israel with egg on its face with Iran coming
out the winner in the exchange.

We’ll have to wait and see where it leads: as of this writing, the story has
changed three separate times; the last two being that Israel decided not to
respond, with news now claiming that Israel not only has chosen to retaliate,
but will even do so as early as tonight, perhaps within minutes or hours of this
publication’s release. If that turns out to be the case, then we’ll have to see
if Israel chooses its own ‘face-saving’ off-ramp ‘light touch’ attack just for
damage control’s sake, or whether it truly aims to keep climbing that escalatory
ladder in force. Any major action without American backing is risky: not only
because it could fail, and Israeli planes could be shot down, but also because
Iran could make good on its word and unleash another far more devastating
attack.


FINAL THOUGHTS

Why now? Why did Israel bait Iran into such an action at this precise moment?

The clue to the answer lies in the news from several days ago that Israel
totally withdrew its forces from Khan Younis:

I suspect that Israel—or Netanyahu in particular—is facing failure, after not
having accomplished any of the stated objectives, and thus is desperate to
create a new distraction as a vector for continuing the war in some way that
could keep the world, and Israelis, from reaching the conclusion that the war
has been totally lost.

Have you seen the latest bombshell from Haaretz?

https://archive.ph/Fc4nx

> We’ve lost. Truth must be told. The inability to admit it encapsulates
> everything you need to know about Israel’s individual and mass psychology.
> There’s a clear, sharp, predictable reality that we should begin to fathom, to
> process, to understand and to draw conclusions from for the future. It’s no
> fun to admit that we’ve lost, so we lie to ourselves.
> 
> Some of us maliciously lie. Others innocently. It would be better to find
> solace in some airy carb with a total-victory crust. But it might just be a
> bagel. When the solace ends, the hole remains. There’s no way around it. The
> good guys don’t always win.

The astonishing article, which jibes with the sentiments of many Israelis, goes
on:

> After half a year, we could have been in a totally different place, but we’re
> being held hostage by the worst leadership in the country’s history – and a
> decent contender for the title of worst leadership anywhere, ever. Every
> military undertaking is supposed to have a diplomatic exit – the military
> action should lead to a better diplomatic reality. Israel has no diplomatic
> exit.

The article concludes that the calculus has changed, and that Israelis may
now never be able to return to the northern border, given the situation with
Hezbollah.

Another classic line:

> No cabinet minister will restore our sense of personal security. Every Iranian
> threat will make us tremble. Our international standing was dealt a beating.
> Our leadership’s weakness was revealed to the outside. For years we managed to
> fool them into thinking we were a strong country, a wise people and a powerful
> army. In truth, we’re a shtetl with an air force, and that’s on the condition
> that its awakened in time.

The author then focuses his condemnation on the upcoming ‘Rafah operation’:

> Rafah is the newest bluff that the mouthpieces are plying to fool us and make
> us think that victory is just moments away. By the time they enter Rafah, the
> actual event will have lost its significance. There may be an incursion,
> perhaps a tiny one, sometime – say in May. After that, they’ll peddle the next
> lie, that all we have to do is ________ (fill in the blank), and victory will
> be on its way. The reality is that the war’s aims will not be achieved. Hamas
> will not be eradicated. The hostages will not be returned through military
> pressure. Security will not be reestablished.

In short: this is why Netanyahu needed an escalation. It’s to divert attention
from the ongoing catastrophe of Israel’s potential defeat to Hamas, the
catastrophic loss of standing of Israel’s image in the world community, the
complete turning against Israel by the entire world. Rather than admit defeat
and face the end of his career, as well as the coming trials and tribunals that
would put Bibi in jail, he chose to take the only remaining option: to continue
escalating in the hopes that a wider-scale war could wash away his sins and undo
the past mistakes. Unfortunately, just like the ill-fated Zelensky, Netanyahu’s
doomed plan appears destined to coincide with the U.S.’ historic decline,
reaching its zenith now in this pivotal year of 2024.

At the critical moment when Israel needed the strongest possible America, they
got the weakest America in its history. That is Israel’s blunder, which may be
its ultimate, calamitous undoing. But Bibi will likely have no choice but to
continue escalating, or at least keep a strategy of tension a constant presence
in order to survive.

Only last quick postscript note is to say that the ensuing events could affect
the Ukrainian aid bill, as there is now talk of ramming through an emergency
Israeli aid package, in light of events, which could have Ukrainian aid
attached; but we’ll have to see what happens, as there is still strong
opposition among some Republicans.

……………….

Source

| Tagged iran, israel, middle-east, news, politics


#NEWS – ALEX CHRISTOFOROU (39:43 MIN) 15 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




#NEWS – ALEXANDER MERCOURIS (1:25:48 MIN) 14 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 14, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




#NEWS – ALEX CHRISTOFOROU (40:05 MIN) 14 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 14, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




#NEWS – ALEXANDER MERCOURIS (1:22:21 MIN) 13 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 13, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




#NEWS – ALEX CHRISTOFOROU (38:27 MIN) 13 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 13, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




US DEMOCRATS ABANDONED THE WORKING CLASS – RUY TEIXEIRA (SPIKED) 8 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 13, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


‘DEMOCRATS SEE ORDINARY AMERICANS AS THE GREAT UNWASHED’





Who would vote for the Democrats now? Certainly not working-class Americans.
Once the voice of the union man, the Democratic Party is now more interested in
acting as a mouthpiece for the college-educated elites. These supposed
progressives care more about imposing woke ideology and Net Zero penury on
ordinary people, than they do about improving their lives. And yet Democrats
remain baffled as to why working-class voters are turning to Donald Trump.

Ruy Teixeira, co-author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, joined Brendan
O’Neill on the latest episode of The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss all this
and more. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to
the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: How did the Democrats lose so much of their working-class voter
base so quickly?

Ruy Teixeira: On a raw, empirical level, the Democrats are rapidly losing the
support of working-class Americans. In 2020, Biden lost non-college-educated and
working-class voters, which was very unusual for the Democrats until recently.

Now there’s been an even greater deterioration of working-class support for
Biden and the Democrats. Trump is beating Biden by 14 points among working-class
voters in the polls – that’s a 10-point increase compared with 2020. But Biden
is up more than 15 points among college-educated voters. We’re seeing this kind
of educational polarisation not just among white voters, but also among other
racial groups.





In a pure, nose-counting sense, the Republicans have indeed replaced the
Democrats as the party of the working classes. And there’s a very simple reason
for this. The Democratic Party lost a lot of white working-class voters in the
last half of the 20th century, because it embraced soft neoliberalism. Slowly
but surely, working-class voters became less convinced that the Democrats were
on their side when it came to economic issues. In fact, the Democrats began
adopting what economists called the ‘compensate the losers’ strategy, which
promised to transfer the benefits of neoliberal globalisation to the masses. But
this never really happened.

More recently, we’ve seen the Democrats become increasingly responsive to an
ever-more important part of their base. That is, the liberal, college-educated,
incredibly sensitive white voter. These voters are interested in social,
cultural and political issues that are utterly alien to what most working-class
voters care about – be they black, white or Hispanic. It’s almost unimaginable
that the Democratic Party of 30 years ago would have been on board with radical
attitudes toward defunding the police, gender-affirming care, relaxed border
controls and the endless hectoring about racial ‘equity’.

Back then, the Democratic Party had enough common sense, and enough anchoring in
the working classes, to avoid these divisive ideas. But nowadays, the party is
steered by voters from the commanding heights of cultural production. The party
is particularly responsive to these voters because, quite frankly, they need
their money and support.

Obviously, Democrats in competitive districts aren’t going to run on platforms
like ‘defunding the police’ and providing gender-affirming care – but the party
is still the party. And its image is antithetical to what a lot of working-class
people are comfortable with or believe in.





These days, you could reasonably argue that the Democrats are actually
anti-working-class. Of course, the party will always argue that it still pursues
policies in the economic interests of the working classes. But in a lot of ways,
Democrats really don’t like working people. They treat ordinary Americans as the
great unwashed. In books like White Rural Rage, which are popular in Democratic
circles, rural Americans are painted as xenophobic, authoritarian troglodytes
opposed to everything that decent people stand for. The Democrats are meant to
be the party of the working classes, and yet its members outright resent them.

O’Neill: Would you say that working-class voters turned their backs on the
Democrats for cultural reasons or are the economic factors more important?

Teixeira: It’s definitely a combination of the two. There’s an old, well-known
Gallup poll that asks voters which party will do the best job of keeping America
prosperous and secure in the next few years. Democrats used to have a huge
advantage on this issue, particularly among working-class voters. In the 70s and
80s, however, that advantage really started disappearing – and it’s never come
back. To this day, Democrats are rated below the Republicans on which party can
keep the country prosperous.

More recently, the Democrats have gone far beyond the popular ideals of
tolerance, opposing discrimination and supporting equality of opportunity. These
common-sense positions have been replaced with boutique ideas in support of
‘reverse discrimination’ and the non-existence of the gender binary. This
radical push has led to the ‘culturalisation’ of important economic and
political issues in the US. The climate issue is a perfect example of this.

The culture of the Democratic Party has evolved in a way that makes achieving a
sensible industrial policy quite difficult. Instead of propping up competitive
industries, like oil and gas, the Democrats have adopted this green-oriented
approach favouring renewable energy and electric vehicles. Working-class
people simply aren’t interested in this. And they especially aren’t interested
when their energy bills start rising. Fundamentally, environmentalism has
evolved from protecting the environment and reducing pollution into an
apocalyptic crusade against global warming.

None of this makes economic sense and it doesn’t do a lot of good for the
working class. But when the party culture is constructed in such a way that the
highly educated and hyper-liberal have all the power, this is exactly the kind
of nonsense you’re going to get. The climate, after all, is a huge issue for the
elites. They don’t care if it ranks 17th on the list of priorities for ordinary,
working-class people. They’re going to pursue radical climate policies anyway.
It’s just one example of how cultural radicalism has completely infected the
Democrats’ approach to economic issues.

Democrats have ceased asking themselves the fundamental question: ‘How are we
going to make the lives of working-class people better?’ Sensing this, working
Americans are looking elsewhere.

………………..

Source

| Tagged democrats, elections, news, politics, republican-party


RUSSIA AND CHINA SKETCH THE FUTURE AS THE WORLD AWAITS IRAN’S NEXT MOVE – BY
PEPE ESCOBAR – 10 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 12, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 1,700 WORDS • 

The whole planet awaits with bated breath the avowedly inevitable Iranian
response to the attack against its consulate/ambassador residence in Damascus by
the biblical psychopaths responsible for the Gaza genocide.

Enveloped in an aura of secrecy, each passing day betrays the immensity of the
challenge: the possibly asymmetrical response must be, simultaneously, symbolic,
substantive, cogent, convincing, reasonable and rational. That is driving Tel
Aviv totally hysterical and the deciding instances of the Hegemon extremely
itchy.

Everyone with a functioning brain knows this wet dream of a stunt from the point
of view of hardcore Zionists and US Christian zio-cons was a serious
provocation, designed to draw the US to the long-cherished Israeli plan of
striking a decisive blow against both Hezbollah and Tehran.

The IDF’s Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi all but gave away the game, when he said
this past Sunday that “we are operating in cooperation with the USA and
strategic partners in the region.”

Translation: never trust the Hegemon even as the notion is floated – via Swiss
mediators – that Washington won’t interfere with Tehran’s response to Tel Aviv.
One just needs to remember Washington’s “assurances” to Saddam Hussein before
the first Gulf War.

It’s impossible to take Hegemon back-channel assurances at face value. The White
House and the Pentagon occasionally dispense these “assurances” to Moscow every
time Kiev strikes deep inside the Russian Federation using US-UK satellite
intel, logistics, weaponry and with NATO in de-facto operational control.

The state terror attack on Damascus, which shredded the Vienna convention on
diplomatic immunity, crucially was also an attack on both the expanded BRICS and
the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). Iran is a member of both
multilateral bodies, and on top of it is engaged in strategic partnerships with
both Russia and China.

Tweet

So it’s no wonder the leadership in both Beijing in Moscow is carefully
considering all possible repercussions of the next Iranian move.

Tel Aviv’s purposeful escalation – when it comes to expanding war in West Asia –
happens to mirror another escalation: NATO’s no way out in Ukraine except by
doubling down, with no end in sight.

That started with the invariably out of his depth Secretary of State Little Tony
Blinken affirming, on the record, that Ukraine will (italics mine) join NATO.
Which any functioning brain knows is translatable as the road map towards a
Russia-NATO hot war with unbelievably dire consequences.

Little Blinkie’s criminal irresponsibility was duly picked up and reverberated
by the Franco-British duo, as expressed by British FM David “of Arabia” Cameron
and French FM Stephane Sejourne: “If Ukraine loses, we all lose”.

At least they got that (italics mine) right – although that took ages, when it
comes to framing NATO’s approaching cosmic humiliation.

“Dual Opposition” to “Dual Deterrence”

Now let’s switch from clownish bit players to the adults in the room. As in
Russian FM Sergei Lavrov and Chinese FM Wang Yi discussing literally every
incandescent dossier together earlier this week in Beijing.

Lavrov and Wang could not be clearer on what’s ahead for the Russia-China
strategic partnership.

They will engage together on all matters regarding Eurasian security.

They will go, in Lavrov’s words, for “dual opposition” to counterpunch the
West’s “dual deterrence”.

They will be countering every attempt by the usual suspects to “slow down the
natural course of history”.

Add to it the confirmation that President Putin and President Xi will hold at
least two bilaterals in 2024: at the SCO summit in June and at the BRICS summit
in October.

In a nutshell: the dogs of Forever Wars bark while the Eurasian integration
caravan marches on.

Tweet

Both Lavrov and Wang made it very clear that while steering through “the natural
course of history”, the Russia-China strategic partnership will keep seeking a
way to resolve the Ukraine tragedy, taking into account Russia’s interests.

Translation: NATO better wake up and smell the coffee.

This bilateral at the FM level in Beijing is yet another graphic proof of the
current tectonic shift in what the Chinese usually describe as the “world
correlation of forces”. Next month – already confirmed – it will be Putin’s turn
to visit Beijing.

It’s never enough to remember that on February 4, 2022, also in Beijing, Putin
personally explained to Xi why NATO/Hegemon expansion into Ukraine was totally
unacceptable for Russia. Xi, for all practical purposes, understood the stakes
and did not subsequently oppose the SMO.

This time, Lavrov could not but refer to the 12-point peace plan on Ukraine
proposed by Beijing last year, which addresses the root causes “primarily in the
context of ensuring indivisible security, including in Europe and the world
over.”

Your “Overcapacity” is Driving Me Nuts

Both Tehran and Moscow face a serious challenge when it comes to the Hegemon’s
intentions. It’s impossible to definitely conclude that Washington was not in
the loop on Tel Aviv’s attack on Iran in Damascus – even though it’s
counter-intuitive to believe that the Democrats in an election year would
willingly fuel a nasty hot war in West Asia provoked by Israel.

Yet there’s always the possibility that the White House-endorsed genocide in
Gaza is about to extrapolate the framework of a confrontation between Israel and
Iran/Axis of Resistance – as the Hegemon is de facto implicated in myriad
levels.

To alleviate such tension, let’s introduce what under the circumstances can be
understood as comic relief: the “Yellin’ Yellen goes to China” adventure.

US Secretary of Treasury Janet Yellen went to Beijing to essentially deliver two
threats (this is the Hegemon, after all).

1.Yellen said that Chinese companies could face “significant consequences” if
they provided “material support for Russia’s war on Ukraine.”

2. Yellen accused Chinese companies of “overcapacity” – especially when it comes
to the electric-vehicle (EV) industry (incidentally, 18 of the top 20 EV
companies around the world are Chinese).

The Chinese, predictably, dismissed the whole show with barely a yawn, pointing
out that the Hegemon simply cannot deal with China’s competitive advantage, so
they resort to yet another instance of “de-risking” hype.

In sum: it’s all about barely disguised protectionism. Chinese Commerce Minister
Wang Wentao went straight to the point: China’s advantage is built on
innovation, not subsidies. Others added two extra key factors: the efficiency of
supply chains and ultra-dynamic market competition. EVs, in China, along with
lithium batteries and solar cells, are known as the new “three major items.”

Yellin’ Yellen’s theatrics in Beijing should be easily identified as yet another
desperate gambit by a former hyperpower which no longer enjoys military
supremacy; no dominant MICIMATT (the
military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank
complex, in the brilliant formulation by Ray McGovern); no fully controlled
logistics and sea lanes; no invulnerable petrodollar; no enforced,
indiscriminate fear of sanctions; and most of all, not even the fear of fear
itself, replaced across the Global South by rage and utter contempt for the
imperial support for the genocide in Gaza.

Just a Tawdry Greek Tragedy Remix

Once again it’s up to the inestimable Michael Hudson to succintly nail it all
down:

“The official US position recognizes that it can’t be an industrial exporter
anymore, though how is it going to balance the international payments to support
the dollar’s exchange rate? The solution is rent-seeking. That’s why the United
States says, well, what’s the main new rent-seeking opportunity in world trade?
Well, it’s information technology and computer technology.

That’s why the United States is fighting China so much, and why President Biden
has said again and again that China is the number one enemy. It moved first
against Huawei for the 5G communications, and now it’s trying to get Europe and
American and Taiwanese exporters not to export a computer chip to China, not for
the Dutch to export chip-engraving machinery to China. There’s a belief that
somehow the United States, if it can prevent other countries from producing
high-technology intellectual property rents, then other countries will be
dependent.

Rent-seeking really means dependency of other countries if they don’t have a
choice to pay you much more money than the actual cost of production. That’s
rent, the price over value. Well, the United States, since it can’t compete on
value because of the high cost of living and labor here, it can only monopolize
rent.

Well, China has not been deterred. China has leapfrogged over the United States
and is producing its own etching machinery, its own computer chips. The question
is, what is the rest of the world going to do? Well, the rest of the world
means, on the one hand, the global majority, Eurasia, the BRICS+, and on the
other hand, Western Europe. Western Europe is right in the middle of all this.
Is it really going to forego the much less expensive Chinese exports at cost,
including normal profit, or is it going to let itself be locked into American
rent-extraction technology, not only for computer chips but for military arms?”

Graphically, this eventful week provided yet another howler: Xi officially
received Lavrov when Yellin’ Yellen was still in Beijing. Chinese scholars note
how Beijing’s position in a convoluted triad is admirably flexible, compared to
the vicious deadlock of US-Russia relations.

No one knows how the deadlock may be broken. What is clear is that the
Russia-China leadership, as well as Iran’s, know full well the dangers roaming
the chessboard when the usual suspects seem to go all out gambling everything,
even knowing that they are outgunned; outproduced; outnumbered; and outwitted.

It’s a tawdry Greek tragedy remix, alright, yet without the pathos and grandeur
of Sophocles, featuring just a bunch of nasty, brutish specimens plunging into
their unblinking, self-inflicted doom.

……………………………..

(Republished from Sputnik International)

| Tagged china, geopolitics, politics, russia, ukraine


DIAGNOSING ISRAEL’S IMPERIAL NARCISSISM – BY JOHN WEEKS (LIBERTARIAN INSTITUTE)
9 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 11, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

As it continues to engage in a “plausibly genocidal” mass murder spree in Gaza,
the state of Israel has embraced the most psychotic and psychopathic
interpretation of one of the most violent narratives from the Hebrew Bible. This
is fueling a narcissism that puts the very existence of Israel at risk.

On October 28, as Israeli ground forces began turning Gaza into a free-fire
zone, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed his nation. He vowed
to destroy Hamas for “our existence” and also “for the benefit of all of
humanity.”

During the speech he said, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says
our Holy Bible. And we do remember.”

This sparked immediate global controversy and concern. Amalek was the son of
Eliphaz and Timna, which are not household names for the adventitious Abrahamic
religious adherent. But Eliphaz was the son of Esau, and Esau was the twin
brother of Jacob. Esau and Jacob were sons of Isaac. These two have one of the
most infamous rivalries in the Western Canon. Jacob’s line leads to the
Israelites while Esau’s leads to the Amalekites:

> “…descendants of Amalek, were an ancient biblical nation living near the land
> of Canaan. They were the first nation to attack the Jewish people after the
> Exodus from Egypt, and they are seen as the archetypal enemy of the Jews.”

According to the Hebrew Bible, the Amalekites went full 1973 on the embryonic
state of Israel:

> “While the Jews were still at Rephidim, recuperating from their escape from
> Egypt, the nation of Amalek launched a vicious surprise attack on them—though
> the Jews had no designs on Amalekite territory and were not even headed in
> that direction.”

As Libertarian Institute Executive Editor Sheldon Richman mused, “Since Yahweh
many times had ‘hardened Pharaoh’s heart,’ causing him to refuse to free the
Israelites, perhaps Yahweh put the Amalekites there for some unknown reason.” In
any event, the Jews defeated the Amalekites in fierce battle. Almost 400 years
later, Samuel advised Saul:

> “This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what
> they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go,
> attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not
> spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and
> sheep, camels and donkeys.’” [emphasis added]

Hence the uproar over Netanyahu’s Amalek comment. However, Netanyahu’s rhetoric
got even more spicy, when he said Israeli soldiers were “joining this chain of
Jewish heroes. A chain that has started 3,000 years ago from Joshua ben
Nun until the heroes of 1948, the Six Day War, the ’73 October War and all other
wars in this country.” [emphasis added]

Why Joshua? Netanyahu could have referenced the first man, Adam. Or Noah, who
saved humankind. He could have started the chain almost 4,000 years ago with
Abraham, considered the first Jew and one of the Three Patriarchs of Judaism by
scholars. Or Isaac or Jacob, the other two patriarchs. Jacob in particular was
renamed Israel.

Netanyahu could have drawn a line to one of Jacob’s twelve sons, who gave rise
to the twelve tribes (and thus the very foundation) of Israel. The obvious
choice would be Levi or Judah, but there’s also Joseph, who became the trusted
advisor of the Pharaoh. When famine hit the land of the Jews, Jacob and his sons
sought immigrant assistance services in Egypt and Joseph was able to provide
some much-needed administrative aid. That famine, by the way, was natural,
unlike the famine being deliberately inflicted on Gaza by Israel.

Of course, the Jews ended up enslaved by the Egyptians. Moses eventually led the
Jews out of Egypt, but it was Joshua who led them in victorious battle against
the Amalekites and then onward into the Promised Land. He was a spy, a warrior,
and a commander of men; no wonder Netanyahu evoked him.

We should keep in mind that archaeologists and other scholars have found no
artifactual or documentary evidence of Israelite enslavement in Egypt or an
exodus of two million people through the Sinai over forty years. And the
Promised Land, Canaan, was part of the Egyptian Empire at the time.

Joshua fits perfectly as the patron saint of the Israeli Military-Intelligence
Establishment. People around the world, and especially in America, should be
able to empathize with such hero-worship.

The Joshua narrative portrays the Amalekites as archetypal, malevolent, and
predatory evil. Contrast this with the portrayal of the Trojans in the Iliad, a
Greek epic created for Greek audiences that actually views the enemy as human:

> “Achilles is the hero of The Iliad, but he’s not described as the noble
> man—that title belongs to Hector the Trojan. The Greeks are just as much
> interested in the enemy as in their own troops, and they describe them with
> dignity and compassion and appreciation…There is a sense of respect for the
> other side: champions are matched as equals, and this is particularly
> Greek…The Homeric epics date to almost exactly the same period as the Book of
> Judges. Read the Book of Judges and see the way in which the Semitic
> Israelites regard their enemy. It’s a very different story.”

The Greeks destroyed Troy and killed and raped everyone they could get their
hands on, but they acknowledged the Trojans’ humanity. Israel has stopped
viewing its enemies as human. And that has allowed it to plan potentially
suicidal military action.

The Palestinians are human beings. The Yemenis are human beings. The Lebanese
are human beings. The Syrians are human beings. The Iraqis are human beings. The
Iranians are human beings. Israel’s inability to accept this reality is a
narcissistic flaw that imperils its existence.

……………..

Source

| Tagged exodus, gaza, god, israel, moses


THE JEWISH WAR AND PEACE IN AN OCEAN OF LIES – BY PHIL GIRALDI – 11 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 11, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Does anyone in Washington care about Israel’s crimes?

 • 2,400 WORDS • 

One expects that anyone involved in politics will lie whenever they think they
can get away with it to burnish one’s own image and while also distorting
reality to promote policies that are being favored. Nevertheless, the record of
high crimes committed by a series of presidents and their top aides since the
so-called “war on terror” began has established a new low for government
veracity. One would have thought that the fake intelligence fabricated by a
group of Zionists in the Pentagon and White House to launch the misadventures in
Afghanistan and Iraq would be as bad as it could possibly get, but the Joe Biden
team has outdone even those unfortunately unindicted criminals by allowing
itself to be maneuvered by friends in NATO and by Israel into situations that
are one step short of nuclear war.

Listening to John Kirby, Lloyd Austin, and Linda Thomas-Greenfield speak
suggests that a course of remedial English might be in order as they cannot
articulate a sentence that is coherent, especially as they are frequently lying
or being deliberately evasive. And then there is teleprompter Joe himself who
can pout over the killing of 13,000 children in Palestine while also secretly
sending weapons to the Israelis who are eager to slaughter still more based on
the judgement that they will grow up to be “terrorists.” Joe’s idea of a
exchange of views with the Israeli government is a threat to maybe do something
unspecific followed by a strongly worded message from Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu telling him to “Go to hell!”

Joe’s gang cannot confirm that the Israelis are committing war crimes linked to
genocide even though the rest of the world, including a majority of Americans,
watch it happening on television and are convinced regarding what is taking
place. But hey, Israel is a wonderful little democracy and America’s best friend
and ally in the whole wide world. Or at least that is what Congress and the
White House as well as the Jewish dominated media want you to believe. In
reality, Israel is a racist and sectarian state that has been a US liability
since it was founded, something that Secretary of State George Marshall warned
about, but Harry Truman wanted Jewish money so he could get reelected. Some
things never change as we watch Biden and Trump battle for the shekels by
pledging their loyalty to Israel.

The latest wrinkle on the consequences of loving Israel so much comes with what
it going on with Iran, which had its Embassy Consulate General building in
Damascus Syria attacked by Israeli fighter planes, killing two senior Iranian
generals plus a number of other Iranians, Lebanese and Syrians. For what it’s
worth, embassies and consulates are generally speaking regarded as untouchable
military targets under the terms of the Vienna Convention, which sought to keep
enemies talking to each other even under the most adverse circumstances. In
fact, Syria last fought Israel in 1973, more than fifty years ago, and has not
gone to war with the Israelis since that time while Israel has been bombing
Syria regularly as well as killing Iranian officials and scientists for many
years. Iran, like Syria of late, has never attacked Israel.

Iran has said it will retaliate and Israel has gone on high alert. So what does
Biden do? He warned Iran to back off and ignores the fact that it was Israel
that did the unprovoked attacking and started the whole business and
pledges “ironclad” support for the Jewish state if Iran dares to do anything
serious in response. There are also reports that Israel and the US are planning
jointly their possible retaliation if Iran were to strike. General Erik Kurilla,
commander of the US Central Command, is now on his way to Israel and is expected
to meet Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and senior Israel Defense Forces
officials to coordinate possible US responses with those of Israel. Nota
bene that President Biden has flipped the right or wrong of the entire affair
over to do exactly what Israel wants, i.e. hopefully have the US go to war with
the Iranians. This has been Netanyahu’s intention right from the beginning and
there is also a bit of blackmail thrown in for good measure with
Israel threatening to start using its secret nuclear arsenal if the United
States stops supplying the Jewish state with weapons. Israeli Knesset member
Nissim Vaturi, a representative in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ruling
Likud party, issued the threat in an unsubtle way while discussing the
probability that Iran would retaliate against Israel for bombing its embassy. He
said “In the event of a conflict with Iran, if we do not receive American
ammunition … we will have to use everything we have.” In other words, Israel
will have no choice but to start dropping nuclear weapons on its enemies and
might also attack its friends who failed to support it, a reference to the
Samson Option in which a beleaguered Israel would use its nukes to “take
everyone down with them.”

The timing of the embassy attack suggests that Israel is acting as it does, i.e.
taking steps to shift the narrative and restore its perpetual “victimhood,”
because it definitely needs a public relations boost in a world where only the
US and a few other nations aligned with Washington are not yet ready to give up
on Bibi and his wild plans for regional domination. The horrific killing of
hundreds of Palestinians in the Al-Shifa hospital in Gaza as well as the
targeted assassination of seven employees of a charity that was bringing in food
to those starving due to Israel’s blocking the entry of relief supplies have
been the top stories all over the world, and rightly so. The Israeli disdain for
any behavior that might show weakness in the drive to remove the Palestinians
from Palestine has resulted in the Jewish state’s being condemned and boycotted
by much of the world with more to come.

Nevertheless, even in those countries that have made illegal pro-Palestinian
expressions, demonstrations calling for a ceasefire have attracted hundreds of
thousands of protesters. The governments confronting elections later this year,
including the US and Germany, are under considerable pressure to respond to the
popular sentiment. Indeed, it is already being mooted that President Joe Biden
might well fail to be re-elected due to his kid gloves handling of Netanyahu who
has assessed Biden’s weakness and has heedlessly taken US support as a
given while also ignoring the warnings that are now coming out of Washington and
elsewhere over the genocide taking place.

Indeed, it would be useful to speculate that the conflict in Gaza is in part
being used as a smokescreen for developments with Iran and other Israeli
neighbors that may prove more dangerous in the long run. Even the well-informed
might be surprised to learn that even though Israel is not actually at war
legally with several of its neighbors, it is nevertheless de facto at war with
three countries, Lebanon, Syria and Iran. It has been exchanging fire with the
Lebanese Hezbollah militias on its northern border on an almost daily basis
since fighting with Hamas began in October and has sought and apparently
obtained US guarantees of direct support should Hezbollah escalate its activity.
In Syria, which has not in any way attacked Israel, the Israeli air and missile
forces have staged numerous attacks against targets that it invariably claims to
be “Iranian” even though most of the casualties are Syrians. There have been
missile and bombing attacks on Syria nearly weekly since 2017, including a
number of recent incidents involving both Damascus and Aleppo international
airports that endangered civilian passengers and air crews.

As reported above, the most recent and most damaging attack was directed against
the Iranian Consulate General, which was attached to the Iranian Embassy located
in an upscale neighborhood in Damascus, Syria’s capital. The building was
completely destroyed by six missiles fired from F-35 fighter planes that had
crossed over the Syrian border from Israel, killing several long-serving
diplomats alongside Brigadier General Mohammad Reza Zahedi and Zahedi’s deputy,
General Haji Rahimi. It was also reported that Brigadier General Hossein
Amirollah, the chief of general staff for the al-Quds force in Syria and
Lebanon, was among the victims as was at least one Hezbollah member. Sources in
Syria confirmed that a total of 13 people were killed in the attack, including
six Syrians. Iran’s foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, said
afterwards that “We consider this aggression to have violated all diplomatic
norms and international treaties. Benjamin Netanyahu has completely lost his
mental balance due to the successive failures in Gaza and his failure to achieve
his Zionist goals.” Both Iran and Hezbollah vowed revenge.

And just days before the attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, the
Israeli military had launched massive strikes against a target in Syria’s
northern province of Aleppo which killed at least 40 people, most of them
soldiers. The air strikes hit a weapons depot, resulting in a series of
explosions that also killed six Hezbollah fighters.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) subsequently revealed that it had strengthened
air defenses and called up reservists in expectation of a response either from
Lebanon or directly from Iran itself. Zahedi was an important Iranian official,
reportedly responsible for the IRGC’s operations in Syria and Lebanon, for
Iranian militias there, and for ties with Hezbollah, and was thus the most
senior commander of Iranian forces in the two countries. His killing was the
most significant death of a senior Iranian official since the murder in Baghdad
of General Qassim Soleimani by the Trump Administration in January 2020. As the
IRGC is a US-designated terrorist organization, Washington may have in advance
approved of the Israeli action, though that was denied by the Pentagon.

Iran’s possible reprisal includes the capability to respond by directly
launching missiles from its own territory rather than via any of its proxy
groups, which include the militias it supports in Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen.
Responding to that possibility, Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz
has warned on social media that if Tehran attacked from its territory, Israel
would react and “attack in Iran.” Iran may therefore choose to respond
indirectly or through a proxy, but any major reprisal would be giving Israel an
excuse to elevate the conflict, which just might be the main reason for the
attack on the Consulate General in the first place. It is, however, widely
believed that the Iranian leadership is eager to avoid any escalation into a
major or even a minor exchange that could be referred to as a war. Nevertheless,
posters have gone up around Tehran in a sign of public pressure for an Iranian
response. “The defeat of the Zionist regime in Gaza will continue and this
regime will be close to decline and dissolution,” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei said in a speech to the country’s officials in Tehran. “Desperate
efforts like the one they committed in Syria will not save them from defeat. Of
course, they will also be slapped for that action,” he added.

Israeli Defense Minister Gallant responded to the Ayatollah, saying that Israel
is “increasing preparedness” in the face of threats from all across the Middle
East. Gallant said that the country’s defense establishment is “expanding our
operations against Hezbollah, against other bodies that threaten us,” and
reiterated that Israel “strikes our enemies all over the Middle East… We will
know how to protect the citizens of Israel and we will know how to attack our
enemies.”

Intelligence sources in Washington suggest that Iran will try to respond by
possibly blowing up an Israeli Embassy or other building, or even by
assassinating an Israeli official, but they will more likely do something
indirectly through a proxy like Hezbollah or the Houthis. They could also send a
more subtle message by accelerating their nuclear program, though there is a
danger that that would definitely bring the US into the game, which is precisely
what Israel would like to see. They want to cripple Iran but would much prefer
that all the heavy lifting – and the casualties and costs – be endured by
Washington. If a US intervention were to occur and there were a misstep, it
could easily escalate into a regional war with Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Iran all
lined up against the US and Israel with China and Russia likely to be playing a
supporting role aiding the Arabs and Iranians. And don’t forget that Israel is
nuclear armed. If it gets in trouble it would see itself as a victim and would
be tempted to do something very dangerous.

So it is easy to see that Israel has staged a deliberate provocation to draw
Washington into its wars. It is playing with fire in an attempt to once and for
all establish its dominance over all of its neighbors. Interestingly, the tone
deaf Biden Administration appears to be falling into the trap set by the
Israelis. Beyond the “ironclad” pledge, it also voted against a Russian and
Chinese drafted UN Security Council resolution to condemn the Israeli attack on
the Iranian Consulate General. The vote should have been a no brainer given the
clear violation of international law and act of war committed by Israel in doing
what it did, but the US was joined by Britain and France in casting the veto
vote “no” reportedly after “Diplomats said the US told council colleagues that
many of the facts of what happened on Monday in Damascus remained unclear.” It
all means that Biden is stepping in it yet again in a situation where Netanyahu
is in control and running circles around him.

……………



| Tagged iran, israel, middle-east, news, syria


‘AUTOMATED MURDER’: ISRAEL’S ‘AI’ IN GAZA – BY PATRICK LAWRENCE, CARA MARIANNA –
9 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 11, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 1,900 WORDS • 

ZURICH—“Technological change, while it helps humanity meet the challenges nature
imposes upon us, leads to a paradigm shift: It leaves us less capable, not more,
of using our intellectual capacities. It diminishes our minds in the long run.
We strive to improve ourselves while risking a regression to the Stone Age if
our ever more complex, ever more fragile technological infrastructure
collapses.”

That is Hans Köchler, an eminent Viennese scholar and president of the
International Progress Organization, a globally active think tank, addressing an
audience here last Thursday evening, April 4. The date is significant: The day
before Köchler spoke, +972 Magazine and Local Call, independent publications in
Israel–Palestine, reported that as the Israel Defense Forces press their savage
invasion of the Gaza Strip, they deploy an artificial intelligence program
called Lavender that so far has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as kill targets.
In the early weeks of the Israeli siege, according to the Israeli sources +972
cites, “the army gave sweeping approval for officers to adopt Lavender’s kill
lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the machine made those
choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they were based.”

Chilling it was to hear Köchler speak a couple of news cycles after +972
published these revelations, which are based on confidential interviews with six
Israeli intelligence officers who have been directly involved in the use of AI
to target Palestinians for assassination. “To use technologies to solve all our
problems reduces our ability to make decisions,” Köchler asserted. “We’re no
longer able to think through problems. They remove us from real life.”

Köchler titled his talk “The Trivialization of Public Space,” and his topic,
broadly stated, was the impact of technologies such as digital communications
and AI on our brains, our conduct, and altogether our humanity. It was sobering,
to put the point mildly, to recognize that Israel’s siege of Gaza, bottomlessly
depraved in itself, is an in-our-faces display of the dehumanizing effects these
technologies have on all who depend on them.

Let us look on in horror, and let us see our future in it.

We see in the IDF, to make this point another way, a rupture in morality, human
intelligence, and responsibility when human oversight is mediated by the
algorithms that run AI systems. There is a break between causality and result,
action and consequence. And this is exactly what advanced technologies have in
store for the rest of humanity. Artificial intelligence, as Köchler put it, is
not intelligence: “It is ‘simulated intelligence’ because it has no
consciousness of itself.” It isn’t capable, he meant to say, of moral
decision-making or ethical accountability.

In the Lavender case, the data it produced were accepted and treated as if they
had been generated by a human being without any actual human oversight or
independent verification. A second AI system, sadistically named “Where’s
Daddy?”—and how sick is this?—was then used to track Hamas suspects to their
homes. The IDF intentionally targeted suspected militants while they were with
their families, using unguided missiles or “dumb” bombs. This strategy had the
advantage of enabling Israel to preserve its more expensive precision-guided
weapons, or “smart” bombs.

As one of +972’s sources told the magazine:

> We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a
> military building or engaged in a military activity… . On the contrary, the
> IDF bombed them in homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much
> easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these
> situations.

Once Lavender identified a potential suspect, IDF operatives had about 20
seconds to verify that the target was a male before making the decision to
strike. There was no other human analysis of the “raw intelligence data.” The
information generated by Lavender was treated as if it was “an order,” sources
told +972—an official order to kill. Given the strategy of targeting suspects in
their homes, the IDF assigned acceptable kill ratios for its bombing campaigns:
20 to 30 civilians for each junior-level Hamas operative. For Hamas leaders with
the rank of battalion or brigade commander, +972’s sources said, “the army on
several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the
assassination of a single commander.”

In other words, Israeli policy, guided and assisted by AI technology, made it
inevitable that thousands of civilians, many of them women and children, would
be killed.

There appears to be no record of any other military deploying AI programs such
as Lavender and Where’s Daddy? But it is sheer naïveté to assume this diabolic
use of advanced technologies will not spread elsewhere. Israel is already the
world’s leading exporter of surveillance and digital forensic tools. Anadolu,
Turkey’s state-run news agency, reported as far back as February that Israel is
using Gaza as a weapons-testing site so that it can market these tools as
battle-tested. Antony Lowenstein, an author Anadolu quotes, calls this the
marketing of “automated murder.”

And here we find ourselves: Haaretz, the Israeli daily, reported on April 5 that
“intelligent” weapons proven effective in Gaza were major attractions when
Israel marketed them last month at the Singapore Airshow, East Asia’s biggest
arms bazaar.

Hans Köchler, who has studied the impact of digital technologies for many years,
did not seem to have read the +972 Magazine report before he spoke here last
week. This made his remarks all the more disturbing. He was not describing—not
specifically—the murderers operating Lavender and other such technologies in
Gaza. We will all live and die by these Faustian technologies: This, our common
fate, was Köchler’s topic. Over the past six months, this is to say, Israel has
announced the dehumanization that awaits all of us in that AI systems are
technologies against which we have little defense. “Self-determination gives way
to digital competence,” Köchler said. “We can’t distinguish between virtual
reality and reality.”

Along with the +972 report on the use of AI came others in a week notable for
its stomach-churning news of Israeli depravity. In its April 3 editions The
Guardian revealed that the IDF intentionally deploys snipers and
quadcopters—remotely controlled sniper drones—to target children. The evidence
of this comes from U.S. and Canadian doctors who, while serving in Gaza, treat
many children with wounds consistent with and easily identified as caused by
snipers’ bullets. These are larger than the ammunition generally used in combat
because they are intended to kill rather than wound.



The Biden regime never addresses these barbaric developments, and our corporate
media, with rare exceptions such as The Guardian piece just cited, tell us
almost nothing of them. Official and media accounts of events in Gaza, their
“narratives,” are utterly at odds with these realities. How, we are left to ask,
do they get away with these day-in, day-out dishonesties? This was the obvious
question last week, given the extremes to which the IDF’s criminality now
extends.

If you Google “Lavender” and “The New York Times,” you get “Lavender Oil Might
Help You Sleep” and similarly frivolous headlines. Neither has The Times made
any mention of the +972 investigation. If you read detailed accounts of the
April 1 air attacks on the World Central Kitchen’s three food-delivery vehicles,
which killed seven aid workers, it is inescapable that the Israeli military
systematically targeted them, one truck to the next, until all three were
destroyed—this after WCK had carefully coordinated its deployment of the
vehicles with Israeli authorities. These killings are entirely in line with
the directive Yoav Gallant, Israel’s repulsive defense minister, issued Oct. 9:
“There will be no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything will be
closed.”

And what did we read of this incident in mainstream media?

Per usual, the Israeli military was authorized to investigate the Israeli
military—an absurdity no U.S. official and no media account questioned. On April
5 the IDF announced that two officers were dismissed and three other reprimanded
for “mishandling critical information.” President Biden declared he was
“heartbroken.” The New York Times called the attack “a botched
operation,” explaining that the IDF’s top officers “were forced to admit to a
string of lethal mistakes and misjudgments.” Over and over we hear the refrain
that Israel “is not doing enough to protect civilians.”

So it was a regrettable accident, we are led to conclude. Israel is doing its
best. It has all along done its best. Put this against the raw statistic: The
IDF has killed more than 220 humanitarian workers since it began its siege last
October, to go by the U.N.’s count. How can one possibly believe that these were
220–plus accidents? “Let’s be very clear. This is not an anomaly,” an Oxfam
official, Scott Paul, said after the WCK attack. “The killing of aid workers in
Gaza has been systemic.”

There is reality and there is meta-reality, a term I have used previously in
this space. How do the two stand side-by-side? How does the latter, the conjured
“reality,” prove so efficacious? How do so many accept the 220–plus-accidents
“narrative?” Why, more broadly, do so many accept propaganda and lies when they
know, subliminally, they are constantly fed lies and propagandized?

I go back once again to Hans Köchler. In his speech and in various of his many
books, he argues that electronic media—television chief among these—have
conditioned people to rely for information on pictures and images instead of
reading. “They lose the ability to analyze text, and so the ability to
understand problems,” he said here. “People come to live in virtual worlds.”

We cannot think of a better description of the “narratives” advanced by the
Biden regime and disseminated in corporate media: They present us with a virtual
world—fully aware that, our minds habituated to pictures and images, most of us
will mistake this virtual world for reality, just as Köchler warns. As a member
of the audience here put it, “How is it possible to watch a genocide in real
time and no one says anything? Knowledge no longer has any value. Anything goes,
and if anything goes, nothing goes.”

The Biden regime supplies Israel with weaponry to prosecute its criminal siege
of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians. It gives the apartheid state diplomatic
cover at the United Nations and legal cover at the International Court of
Justice. It distorts and obscures the IDF’s “Stone Age” conduct. All of this
requires us to speak now not of Israel’s genocide but of the Israeli–U.S.
genocide.

But the Biden regime is culpable in inflicting these multiple wounds on humanity
in one other dimension we must not miss. With its incessant attempts to suspend
us in a virtual reality of its making, distant from what it is doing in our
names, it leads us into the dehumanized, grotesquely technologized future
Köchler describes just as surely as the Israelis do as they murder human beings
wholesale with AI weapons and kill innocent children with remotely controlled
sniper drones.

……………………

(Republished from Scheerpost )

| Tagged gaza, hamas, israel, middle-east, palestine


CORNEL WEST CHOOSES BLACK LIVES MATTER ACTIVIST MELINA ABDULLAH AS HIS VP – BY
BRITTANY GIBSON (POLITICO) 10 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 10, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Cornel West tapped university professor and prominent Black Lives Matter
activist Melina Abdullah to be his running mate on his long-shot presidential
bid.

Abdullah has never run for political office before and is the former chair of
the Pan-African Studies Department at California State University, Los Angeles.

Melina Abdullah



“I wanted to run with someone who would put a smile on the face of Fannie Lou
Hamer and Martin Luther King Jr. from the grave,” West said.

He announced his pick on Wednesday’s episode of the Tavis Smiley Radio Show on
KBLA radio.

West is running as an independent candidate and faces significant challenges in
his campaign for the White House. West’s fundraising has lagged behind his
opponents, raising less than $1 million since launching his bid last summer.

Since getting in the race, West has switched parties twice, leaving the People’s
Party and the Green Party to ultimately run as an independent. The switch
mandates an expensive and difficult process to get his name on the ballot in 50
states and Washington, DC. Officially choosing his vice president allows him to
start collecting petition signatures to get on the ballot in about 20 states.



“Both of us want to disrupt the narrative that you have only two choices,”
Abdullah said of their ticket. “We can be expansive and imaginative … we enter
this really as faithful people who are not more pragmatists than we are
faithful.”

Through partnerships with existing third parties, West is already on the ballot
in three states. But this method was not successful in California, one of the
hardest states to gain ballot access, as West lost the Peace and Freedom Party’s
primary to the Party for Socialism and Liberation candidate in March.

(Party For Socialism and Liberation candidates for US President and VP)

Abdullah, who is also an organizer of grassroots and local Black Lives Matter
chapters, said she “was not expecting the phone call that I got last week at
all, like it was the furthest thing from my mind. And then he and his wife
Annahita [Mahdavi West] asked and immediately my heart just soared.”

Black Lives Matter doesn’t endorse candidates, she said, but individuals
involved with the organization may endorse her separately. Abdullah, who is also
a Howard University graduate and member of the AKA sorority, said she would not
step away from her work organizing with the grassroots local chapters.



West also said there wouldn’t be any political “burden” being associated Black
Lives Matter, which has called for defunding the police and was alleged to be
associated with property destruction at civil rights demonstrations in 2020.

As a practicing Muslim, Abdullah also spoke of the auspiciousness of her
announcement on Eid, the end of the Islamic holy month of Ramandan. She talked
openly about her faith, using a similar approach to West’s on the campaign
trail. West is a Christian and the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union
Theological Seminary.

“I’m running for Jesus. She’s running for Allah. That’s a beautiful thing,” West
said.

The announcement was a major milestone for West’s campaign but was not without
issue. A technical difficulty affecting West’s audio input cut him out from
their joint interview for almost 10 minutes.

Democrats were swift to criticize West’s announcement. “Despite Cornel West
announcing a running mate, our view remains the same: only two candidates have a
path to 270 electoral votes, President Biden and Donald Trump,” said DNC
spokesperson Matt Corridoni. “The stakes are high, and we know this is going to
be a close election — that’s why a vote for any third party candidate is a vote
for Donald Trump.”

On the morning of West’s announcement, the New York Times reported that Trump
allies view third-party candidates as advantageous for Trump’s reelection
chances. One ally, Scott Presler, has messaged both West and the Green Party’s
Jill Stein about helping them get on the ballot on social media.

West co-campaign manager Ceyanna Dent said, “Scott Presler has not worked with
the campaign in any capacity.” Though Dent added that the campaign staff was
briefed on his overtures.

West was asked by Smiley about being a possible spoiler in 2024, and said, “No
politician owns a vote. We stand for what we stand for. If you go with us, then
come with us and change the world.”

……………………

Source

| Tagged donald-trump, joe-biden, news, politics, trump


US YELLEN DISPATCHED TO BEG CHINA FOR FACE-SAVING SLOWDOWN – BY SIMPLICIUS – 9
APRIL 2024

Posted on April 10, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

SIMPLICIUS

The U.S.’ growing urgency in ‘containing’ China’s development was thrown in
sharp relief this week as Janet Yellen arrived in Beijing for what turned out to
be an execrable beggar’s tour. Just days prior to her arrival, she had buzzed
the punditry with her historically memorable exclamation that China was now
operating at “overcapacity”(!!).

What is overcapacity, you ask? It’s a new word for me, too—so let’s consult the
dictionary together:

> overcapacity
> noun
> o· ver· ca· pac· i· ty: ō′vər-kə-ˈpa-sə-tē 
> 1: When an insolent upstart nation’s surging economic activity totally
> humiliates the reigning hegemon’s own faltering economy, causing the many
> expensive dentures and porcelain veneers of the ruling class gerontocracy to
> rattle and grate with moral outrage and jealousy.
> 
> 1b: An undesirable situation causing Janet Yellen and Nancy Pelosi’s stock
> portfolio to droop like a pair of botox-sapped jowls.

Granted…my dictionary might be slightly different to yours, I have a rare
edition. That said, are we on the same page? Good.

The above definition may be missing in the new official regime argot pamphlet,
but it’s safe to say the inept leaders of the U.S. are down to making up
creative new euphemisms for describing China’s total undressing and upending of
the economic order.

But if you were skeptical about the meaning behind Yellen’s risible
“overcapacity” solecism, her speech from inside of China confirms precisely
what’s on the regime’s mind:

“China is now simply too large for the rest of the world to absorb this enormous
capacity. Actions taken by the PRC today can shift world prices….”

And the bombshell:

“When the global market is flooded with cheap Chinese goods, the viability of
American firms is put into question.”

Well, I’ll say.

The important distinction to note in the above statement is that for a long time
the ‘cheap’ moniker used to describe Chinese goods often underhandedly referred
to their quality, in the secondary definitional sense. Here, Yellen is referring
to cheap as in price: the distinction is significant because it’s referential to
the fact that Chinese manufacturing processes have simply far exceeded the
efficiency in the West, as recently highlighted by videos of the Xiaomi e-car
factory with its own native Giga Press that’s claimed to be able to pump out a
car every 17 seconds.

The fact of the matter is, China is simply leaping ahead of the decrepit,
deteriorating U.S. by every measure and the panicked elites have sent Yellen to
beg China to “slow down” and not embarrass them on the world stage.

How is China doing this? Let’s run through a few of the most poignant ways:


[1]

First and foremost, it’s become almost a passe bromide to observe: “The U.S.
funds wars, while China funds development.” But it really is true. Think about
this for a moment:

The above is factual: Esquire reported that a Brown University investigation
found the U.S. has spent an ineffable $14T on wars since 9/11:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a37575881/14-trillion-defense-spending-costs-of-war-project/

And yes, the current U.S. debt is a massive $34T. That means quite literally
almost half of the entire current U.S. debt was blown on endless, mindless,
genocidal wars in the Middle East.

The U.S. has wasted its entire blood and treasure on war. Imagine what the U.S.
could have built with $14 trillion dollars? Where the U.S. could have been in
relation to China for that amount? As someone else noted, the U.S. could have
very well built its own “one belt and road” project for that money, connecting
the world and reaping untold benefits.

China hasn’t spent a cent on war, and puts everything right back into economic
development and wellbeing for its own people.

> China is winning lion’s share of construction projects in Africa
> 
> Chinese companies accounted for 31% of African infrastructure contracts valued
> at US$50 million or more in 2022, compared with 12% for Western firms,
> according to a new study.
> 
> It is worth to be noted that in the 1990s, about eight out of 10 contracts to
> build infrastructure in Africa were won by Western companies.

The illustrative statistics for this are endless:

What makes this historic malappropriation of American funds most tragic is
that none of it came at the benefit of American people. The entire operation was
carried out by an ethnic cabal within the U.S. government with loyalties only to
Israel, and no one else. I’m speaking of course of the PNAC clan, who
masterminded the entire breadth of the 21st century wars which have engulfed
America in wretched shame and misery, irreversibly gutting the country and
squandering its global standing. These wars had nothing whatsoever to do with
America’s national interests or security, and have done naught but make
Americans less safe and the entire world more dangerous and unstable.

China doesn’t have this problem: there is no inimical ‘out’ group parasitizing
their country’s leadership, literally assassinating (JFK) and blackmailing their
presidents (Clinton). China is therefore able to focus on the interests of its
own people.

And yes, for those wondering, it’s now fairly proven that Lewinsky was a Mossad
honeytrap used to blackmail Clinton in assenting to various Israeli demands
vis-a-vis the Oslo Accords, Wye River Memorandum, etc.

The fact is, Israel is a destructive parasite sucking the lifeblood out of
America, causing the host to wage unnecessary wars on its behalf which have
utterly removed every advantageous and competitive edge the country might have
had over its Chinese ‘rival’.


[2]

As a corollary of the above, beyond just the simple kinetic nature of the
profligately wasteful wars, America wastes an exorbitant amount of money just on
maintenance and upkeep of its global hegemony. The reason is, it costs a lot of
‘enforcement’ money to strongarm vassals who hate you into compliance.

China doesn’t form vassals, it forms partners. That means it spends
comparatively far less spreading its influence because that influence has
compounding abilities owing to the fair bilateral nature of China’s
arrangements. The U.S. has to spend comparatively inordinate amounts of blood
and treasure to maintain the same level of ‘influence’ because that ‘influence’
is totally artificial, confected out of a poisonous mixture of fear,
strong-arming tactics, economic terrorism that leads to blowback which hurts the
U.S. economy, etc. In short, it is mafia tactics versus real business
partnerships.

One big difference between China and the U.S. is that China is open to sharing
the earth, willing to co-prosper with the U.S. Conversely, the U.S. is unwilling
to abdicate its global domination:

The above was highlighted by Graham Allison, coiner of the Thucydides Trap idiom
in relation to U.S./China. The Thucydides Trap, as some may know, describes a
situation where an emerging power begins to displace the incumbent global power,
and how historically this almost always leads to major war. To popularize the
theory apropos U.S./China, Graham Allison used the historical example of the
Peloponnesian war, where a cagey Sparta was forced to take on the rising power
of Athens.

Allison was recently invited by President Xi to a forum for U.S. business
leaders where Xi told him directly:

Contrast President Xi’s magnanimous statements with those of the seething,
guilt-wracked, bloodthirstily conniving Western ‘executives’. In fact, Xi called
for more exchanges between China and the U.S. in order to entwine the two
countries in mutual understanding, to avoid the Thucydides Trap:

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/3jY_Xrvp0xg?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

This is the enduring image of what global leadership truly looks like, and the
principles it embodies.

Meanwhile, when one thinks of America’s progressive decline, the one enduring
image that comes to mind is of a bitterly frightened but dangerous, beady-eyed
cornered rodent, conspiring on how to inflict damage and suffering onto the
world in order to mask its own downfall.


[3]

The U.S. government does a grave disservice to its own development by cooking
all of its economic books. Every country does it at times to some degree—and
going by U.S.’ notoriously frequent accusations of China in this regard, one
would think China to be the most flagrant violator—but in fact, no one does this
more than the current U.S. regime.

The recent “jobs” report touted as a major victory by the Biden administration
was a disgraceful travesty. The admin touted major jobs figures:

But it turned out every job was either part time, a federal job, or went to
illegals:

In reality, the U.S. economy is in atrocious shape with sky-high inflation.

Here’s Jesse Watters revealing that:

> “The Fed chair just confessed that #Bidenomics is just a migrant job fair.
> There is actually a million less American citizens working today than there
> were in 2020.”
> 
> Biden created 5 million migrant jobs! So don’t be fooled by his propaganda
> that’s spewed by the liberal machine. YOU DONT MATTER!

The data is cooked even more when comparing to China’s economic situation. As
the following Tweeter explains:

> While Chinese INCOMES are below American INCOMES, Chinese have much higher NET
> WORTH than Americans. How? They own apartments at a much higher rate and with
> a lot more equity than Americans. The MEAN and MEDIAN insight is even more
> beautiful. This graphic here is pretty much the only thing you need to
> understand about the difference between the economies of China and United
> States. But you really need to understand it and you need to have a deep
> understanding of what it means.

U.S. home ownership is on a precipitous decline toward the low ~60s%,
while China now has over 90% home ownership rate:


[4.]

The above naturally springs the question of how China is able to do these things
while the U.S. cannot. One of the answers comes by way of this fascinating
explainer which shows that, contrary to the West’s depiction of China as some
kind of rigidly authoritarian system, forward-looking President Xi is actually
utilizing very cutting edge economic experimentation models to keep the Chinese
economy as innovative, limber, and supple as possible.

In short, a deep study of thousands of official documents shows a huge upswing
in language promoting economic experimentation in the directives issued under
Xi’s government.

This is further compounded by the most important point of all: that under
President Xi, China has embarked on a meticulous plan of curbing
financialization and speculation of the ‘Western model’ in its economy. This is
where it starts getting important so buckle up.

A good breakdown of that is given here by Chinese academic Thomas Hon Wing
Polin, who pulls from this recent article:

https://www.rt.com/business/594432-financialization-death-empires/

The article gives a brief history of financialization, from the Genoese bankers
to modern times, observing the historical cycles that have precipitated
America’s current deterioration:

> Observers of the current American hegemony will recognize the transformation
> of the global system to suit American interests. The maintenance of an
> ideologically charged ‘rules-based’ order – ostensibly for the benefit of
> everyone – fits neatly into the category of conflation of national and
> international interests. Meanwhile, the previous hegemon, the British, had
> their own version that incorporated both free-trade policies and a matching
> ideology that emphasized the wealth of nations over national sovereignty.

In describing the cycle of financialization and its connection to the death of
empires, the article notes about Britain:

> For example, the incumbent hegemon at the time, Great Britain, was the country
> hardest hit by the so-called Long Depression of 1873-1896, a prolonged period
> of malaise that saw Britain’s industrial growth decelerate and its economic
> standing diminished. Arrighi identifies this as the ‘signal crisis’ – the
> point in the cycle where productive vigor is lost and financialization sets
> in.
> 
> And yet, as Arrighi quotes David Landes’ 1969 book ‘The Unbound
> Prometheus,’ “as if by magic, the wheel turned.” In the last years of the
> century, business suddenly improved and profits rose. “Confidence returned—not
> the spotty, evanescent confidence of the brief booms that had punctuated the
> gloom of the preceding decades, but a general euphoria such as had not
> prevailed since…the early 1870s….In all of western Europe, these years live on
> in memory as the good old days—the Edwardian era, la belle époque.” Everything
> seemed right again.
> 
> However, there is nothing magical about the sudden restoration of profits,
> Arrighi explains. What happened is that “as its industrial supremacy waned,
> its finance triumphed and its services as shipper, trader, insurance broker
> and intermediary in the world’s system of payments became more indispensable
> than ever.”

In short: as an empire dies, loses its industrial and manufacturing capacity,
finance takes over, pumping up huge bubbles of phony speculative money that
gives the brief appearance of economic prosperity—for a time. This is what’s
currently happening in the U.S., as it drowns in its self-created agony of debt,
misery, corruption, and global destabilization.

One thing to note—if you’ll allow me this not-so-brief aside—is that the entire
Western system is based on the actual institutionalized economic sabotage and
subversion of the developing world. Books like the following go into some of it:

> The rise of the underground economy: The book reveals how the United States’
> underground economy evolved parallel to its legitimate economy, exploiting
> loopholes and leveraging secrecy jurisdictions to facilitate illegal
> activities such as drug trafficking, arms smuggling, and money laundering.
> 
> The “dark” side of globalization: Mills challenges the prevailing narrative of
> globalization as a force for progress, highlighting how it has facilitated the
> expansion of illicit networks across borders and allowed criminal enterprises
> to flourish.
> 
> The complicity of financial institutions: The author examines the role played
> by major financial institutions in enabling money laundering and illicit
> transactions. He underlines the need for stronger regulations and
> accountability to prevent banks from becoming facilitators of underground
> activities.

I challenge you to read notes on the National Memorandum 200, if you haven’t
heard of it before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Study_Memorandum_200

Incidentally, John Michael Greer just penned a new column (thanks to whoever
shouted out this blog in the comments!) about the neologism he
coined: Lenocracy, which derives from the Latin “leno” for pimp; i.e. a
government run by pimps, or pimpocracy.

His definition of pimps in this case is that of middlemen who are the classic
rent-seeking leaches—or rentier class—which extract economic rent without adding
any value to the economy—all Michael Hudson territory, for those in the know.

Bear with me, I promise this will all tie together into an overall picture of
China.

JMG characterizes the ‘pimps’ as basically all the unelected, bureaucratic,
red-tape-weaving, blood-sucking monetary vultures killing growth and livelihoods
by each taking their nibbles in turn from the carcass of the working class,
exacting some small transactional charge at every step of routine business in
Western nations, particularly the U.S. This has served to suffocate the average
small business or entrepreneurship in general, not counting the big ticket
venture capitalists who are mostly offshoots of global financial and investment
firms. This is part and parcel to the lethal ‘financialization’ of the country
that has spelled doom for its future.

Now, getting back to Thomas Hon Wing Polin’s precis, and how it relates to
this. He notes:

> It is noteworthy that the CPC leadership recently launched a major drive to
> build China into a “financial great power,” with a financial system “based on
> the real economy.” That would be the antithesis to Anglo-American-style
> economic financialization.

He pulls from the following article:

https://archive.is/316HN

Read that last part: “…set pure profit-making aside.”

Pay attention to this big kicker:

> Beijing is powering ahead with the epic project.
> 
> “China’s 461-trillion-yuan (US$63.7 trillion) financial industry and its
> regulatory regime will be heavily prioritised in a broad economic reshuffle
> engendered by the country’s top leadership, with the sector remoulded to serve
> national objectives like sustainable growth and advancement in the global tech
> race.

Are you beginning to get it yet? If not, here’s the crowning finial:

> Specifically, it vowed to rein in Wall Street-style practices seen as
> unsustainable and crisis-prone, and move toward functionality as an overriding
> value for the financial system rather than profitability.
> 
> It also mandated that Chinese financial institutions have “higher efficiency”
> than their peers in the capitalist world and provide inclusive, accessible
> services in the pursuit of common prosperity.
> 
> “Like it or not, banks and other institutions on the supply side should expect
> top-down directives and overhauls cued by the CFC,” said Zhu Tian, a professor
> with the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS).

And there it is. In essence: China is creating a revolution, striking out a new
path of finance which steers away from the wild excesses of the West into a bold
new direction. Finance to benefit the real economy, the common man, the people.
This is what the fig leaf of Rothschild-pushed ‘stakeholder
capitalism’ is meant to be, or better yet: pretends to be.

It’s hard not to wax poetic on these developments, because they are truly
groundbreaking. China is paving a new path forward for the entire world. The
Chinese banking industry is now by far the largest on earth and President Xi has
wisely put his foot down with a bold edict: we will not follow the path of
destruction chosen by the West, but rather will set our own new path.

This is an iconoclastic, paradigm-breaking revolution which ends six centuries
of Old Nobility world finance dominion, traced from the Spanish-Crown-allied
Genoese bankers, to the Dutch then English banking system which now continues to
enslave the world, and is referred to by a variety of names in the dissident
sphere: from Hydra, to Leviathan, to Cthulu, to simply: the Cabal.

All those 600 years are going up in smoke with China’s repudiation of the ‘old
standards’, which privilege predatory, deceptive, extractive terms and practices
meant to benefit only the Old Nobility elite class. China’s system is true
stakeholder finance: the government will forcibly bend the bankers to its will,
making sure that finance serves the common good and the people first, rather
than speculation, financialization, capitalization, and all the other wicked
inventions of the Western Old Nobility class.

It begins like so:

“…bringing greed is good era to an end.”

The big one:

> “Government has called for banks to abandon a Western-style ethos and adopt an
> outlook in line with broader economic priorities.”

It’s a revolution in the making.

But if you’re thinking my dramatic flights above verge a touch on hyperbole or
idealism, you could be right. I, of course, still proceed with caution; we can’t
be sure that China will succeed in its grand demolishment of the age-old
paradigm. But all signals point to early success thus far, and more importantly,
it’s clear that China has a leader that fundamentally understands these things
at the most rooted level. Western leaders not only are incapable of even
grasping the complexities involved of reining in capital, they are unable to do
so for the mere fact that they’re totally bought and paid for by the
representatives of that very capital class. The cabal of Capital is so deeply
and institutionally entrenched in Western governmental systems that it’s simply
impossible to imagine them being able to see ‘the forest for the trees’ from
within the forest itself.

By the way, in light of the above, here’s the West’s truly desperate,
pathetically envious, face-saving attempt to tarnish and mischaracterize China’s
new direction:

As well as:

https://www.rt.com/business/595434-us-eu-china-economies/

The above is particularly astounding in its admissions. Read carefully:

> Market-based US and European economies are struggling to survive against
> China’s “very effective” alternative economic model, a top US trade
> representative has warned, according to Euractiv.
> 
> Katherine Tai told a briefing in Brussels on Thursday that Beijing’s
> “non-market” policies will cause severe economic and political damage, unless
> they are tackled through appropriate “countermeasures.” Tai’s remarks came as
> the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) kicked off in Leuven, Belgium.
> 
> “I think what we see in terms of the challenge that we have from China is… the
> ability for our firms to be able to survive in competition with a very
> effective economic system,” Tai said in response to a question from Euractiv.

In short: China isn’t playing fair—they’re actually privileging their people and
economy over financial speculation, and this is causing their firms to
outcompete ours!

But what she’s really talking about gets to the essence of the difference in the
two systems:

> The trade official described China as a system “that we’ve articulated as
> being not market-based, as being fundamentally nurtured differently, against
> which a market-based system like ours is going to have trouble competing
> against and surviving.”

These are code words: what she means by “market based” is free
market capitalism, while China uses more of a centrally-planned directive
system, as outlined earlier. Recall just recently I posted complaints from
Western officials that their companies are not able to compete with Russian
defense manufacturers due to their ‘unfairly’ efficient ‘central planning’
style.

Here too, what they mean is that the Chinese government creates directives that
spurn ‘market logics’ and are aimed at direct improvements to the lives of
ordinary citizens. In the West there’s no such thing: all market decisions are
based merely on the totally detached financial firms’ speculations and are
exclusively at the behest of a tiny claque of finance and banking elite at the
top of the pyramid.

You see, the U.S. is threatened because it knows it can never compete with China
fairly, by squelching or containing its own gluttonous financial elite—so that
leaves only one avenue for keeping up: sabotage and war.

This is the real reason the U.S. is desperate to stoke a Chinese invasion of
Taiwan by various provocations, including weapons shipments. Just like the U.S.
used Ukraine as the battering ram to bleed and weaken Russia economically,
disconnecting it from Europe, U.S. hopes to use Taiwan as the Ukraine against
China. It would love to foment a bloody war that would leave China battered and
economically set back to give the failing and greed-suffocated U.S. economy some
breathing room.

But it’s unlikely to work—China is too sagacious to take the bait and fall for
the trap. It will patiently wait things out, allowing the U.S. to drown in its
own endless poison and treachery.

No, there will be no Thucydides Trap—it’s already too late for that. The Trap
worked for Sparta because it was still at its peak and able to thwart Athens.
The U.S. is in terminal decline and would lose a war against China, which is why
they hope to stage a proxy war instead, cowardly using Taiwan as the battering
ram. But China can read these desperate motives with the clarity of finely
glazed porcelain.

…………………………

Source

| Tagged china, economy, geopolitics, news, politics


ISRAEL’S KILLING OF AID WORKERS IS NO ACCIDENT. IT’S PART OF THE PLAN TO DESTROY
GAZA – BY JONATHAN COOK – 9 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 10, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 3,100 WORDS • 

The isolation of Gaza is almost complete. The laws of war have been torn up and
the enclave is now completely at Israel’s mercy

After six months – and many tens of thousands of dead and maimed Palestinian
women and children later – western commentators are finally wondering whether
something may be amiss with Israel’s actions in Gaza.

Israel apparently crossed a red line when it killed a handful of foreign aid
workers on 1 April, including three British security contractors.

Three missiles, fired over several minutes, struck vehicles in a World Central
Kitchen (WCK) aid convoy heading up Gaza’s coast on one of the few roads still
passable after Israel turned the enclave’s homes and streets into rubble. All
the vehicles were clearly marked. All were on an approved, safe passage. And the
Israeli military had been given the coordinates to track the convoy’s location.

With precise missile holes through the vehicle roofs making it impossible to
blame Hamas for the strike, Israel was forced to admit responsibility. Its
spokespeople claimed an armed figure had been seen entering the storage area
from which the aid convoy had departed.

But even that feeble, formulaic response could not explain why the Israeli
military hit cars in which it was known there were aid workers. So Israel
hurriedly promised to investigate what Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
described as a “tragic incident”.

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Presumably, it was a “tragic incident” just like the 15,000-plus other “tragic
incidents” – the ones we know about – that Israel has committed against
Palestinian children day after day for six months.

In those cases, of course, western commentators always managed to produce some
rationalisation for the slaughter.

Not this time.

‘This has to stop’

Half a year too late, with Gaza’s entire medical infrastructure wrecked by
Israel and a population on the brink of starvation, Britain’s Independent
newspaper suddenly found its voice to declare decisively on its front page:
“Enough.”

Richard Madeley, host of Good Morning Britain, finally felt compelled to
opine that Israel had carried out an “execution” of the foreign aid workers.
Presumably, 15,000 Palestinian children were not executed, they simply “died”.

When it came to the killing of WCK staff, popular LBC talk-show host Nick
Ferrari concluded that Israel’s actions were “indefensible”. Did he think it
defensible for Israel to bomb and starve Gaza’s children month after month?

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Like the Independent, he too proclaimed: “This has to stop.”

The attack on the WCK convoy briefly changed the equation for the western media.
Seven dead aid workers were a wake-up call when many tens of thousands of dead,
maimed and orphaned Palestinian children had not been.

A salutary equation indeed.

British politicians reassured the public that Israel would carry out an
“independent investigation” into the killings. That is, the same Israel that
never punishes its soldiers even when their atrocities are televised. The same
Israel whose military courts find almost every Palestinian guilty of whatever
crime Israel chooses to accuse them of, if it allows them a trial.

But at least the foreign aid workers merited an investigation, however much of a
foregone conclusion the verdict. That is more than the dead children of Gaza
will ever get.

Israel’s playbook

British commentators appeared startled by the thought that Israel had chosen to
kill the foreigners working for World Central Kitchen – even if those same
journalists still treat tens of thousands of dead Palestinians as unfortunate
“collateral damage” in a “war” to “eradicate Hamas”.

But had they been paying closer attention, these pundits would understand that
the murder of foreigners is not exceptional. It has been central to Israel’s
occupation playbook for decades – and helps explain what Israel hopes to achieve
with its current slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza.

Back in the early 2000s, Israel was on another of its rampages, wrecking Gaza
and the West Bank supposedly in “retaliation” for Palestinians having had the
temerity to rise up against decades of military occupation.

Shocked by the brutality, a group of foreign volunteers, a significant number of
them Jewish, ventured into these areas to witness and document the Israeli
military’s crimes and act as human shields to protect Palestinians from the
violence.

They arrived under the mantle of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a
Palestinian-led initiative. They were keen to use what were then new
technologies such as digital cameras, email and blogs to focus attention on the
Israeli military’s atrocities.

Some became a new breed of activist journalist, embedded in Palestinian
communities to report the story western establishment journalists, embedded in
Israel, never managed to cover.

Israel presented the ISM as a terrorist group and dismissed its filmed
documentation as “Pallywood” – a supposedly fiction-producing industry equated
to a Palestinian Hollywood.

Gaza isolated

But the ISM’s evidence increasingly exposed the “most moral army in the world”
for what it really was: a criminal enterprise there to enforce land thefts and
the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

Israel needed to take firmer action.

The evidence suggests soldiers received authorisation to execute foreigners in
the occupied territories. That included young activists such as Rachel
Corrie and Tom Hurndall; James Miller, an independent filmmaker who ventured
into Gaza; and even a United Nations official, Iain Hook, based in the West
Bank.

This rapid spate of killings – and the maiming of many other activists – had the
intended effect. The ISM largely withdrew from the occupied territories to
protect its volunteers. Meanwhile, Israel formally banned the ISM from accessing
the occupied territories.

Meanwhile, Israel denied press credentials to any journalist not sponsored by a
state or a billionaire-owned outlet, kicking them out of the region.

Al Jazeera, the one critical Arab channel whose coverage reached western
audiences, found its journalists regularly banned or killed, and its offices
bombed.

The battle to isolate the Palestinians, freeing Israel to commit atrocities
unmonitored, culminated in Israel’s now 17-year blockade of Gaza. It was sealed
off.

With the enclave completely besieged by land, human rights activists focused
their efforts on breaking the blockade via the high seas. A series of “freedom
flotillas” tried to reach Gaza’s coast from 2008 onwards. Israel soon managed to
stop most of them.

The largest was led by the Mavi Marmara, a Turkish vessel laden with aid and
medicine. Israeli naval commandos stormed the ship illegally in international
waters in 2010, killing 10 foreign aid workers and human rights activists on
board and injuring another 30.

The western media soft-pedalled Israel’s preposterous characterisation of the
flotillas as a terrorist enterprise. The initiative gradually petered out.

Western complicity

That is the proper context for understanding the latest attack on the WCK aid
convoy.

Israel has always had four prongs to its strategy towards the Palestinians.
Taken together, they have allowed Israel to refine its apartheid-style rule, and
are now allowing it to implement its genocidal policies undisturbed.

The first is to incrementally isolate the Palestinians from the international
community.

The second is to make the Palestinians entirely dependent on the Israeli
military’s goodwill, and create conditions that are so precarious and
unpredictable that most Palestinians try to vacate their historic homeland,
leaving it free to be “Judaised”.

Third, Israel has crushed any attempt by outsiders – especially the media and
human rights monitors – to scrutinise its activities in real-time or hold it to
account.

And fourth, to achieve all this, Israel has needed to erode piece by piece the
humanitarian protections that were enshrined in international law to stop a
repeat of the common-place atrocities against civilians during the Second World
War.

This process, which had been taking place over years and decades, was rapidly
accelerated after Hamas’ attack on 7 October. Israel had the pretext to
transform apartheid into genocide.

Unrwa, the main United Nations refugee agency, which is mandated to supply aid
to the Palestinians, had long been in Israel’s sights, especially in Gaza. It
has allowed the international community to keep its foot in the door of the
enclave, maintaining a lifeline to the population there independent of Israel,
and creating an authoritative framework for judging Israel’s human rights
abuses. Worse, for Israel, Unrwa has kept alive the right of return – enshrined
in international law – of Palestinian refugees expelled from their original
lands so a self-declared Jewish state could be built in their place.

Israel leapt at the chance to accuse Unrwa of being implicated in the 7 October
attack, even though it produced zero evidence for the claim. Almost as
enthusiastically, western states turned off the funding tap to the UN agency.

The Biden administration appears keen to end UN oversight of Gaza by hiving off
its main aid role to private firms. It has been one of the key sponsors of WCK,
led by a celebrity Spanish chef with ties to the US State Department.

WCK, which has also been building a pier off Gaza’s coast, was expected to be an
adjunct to Washington’s plan to eventually ship in aid from Cyprus – to help
those Palestinians who, over the next few weeks, do not starve to death.

Until, that is, Israel struck the aid convoy, killing its staff. WCK has pulled
out of Gaza for the time being, and other private aid contractors are backing
off, fearful for their workers’ safety.

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Goal one has been achieved. The people of Gaza are on their own. The West,
rather than their saviour, is now fully complicit not only in Israel’s blockade
of Gaza but in its starvation too.

Life and death lottery

Next, Israel has demonstrated beyond doubt that it regards every Palestinian in
Gaza, even its children, as an enemy.

The fact that most of the enclave’s homes are now rubble should serve as proof
enough, as should the fact that many tens of thousands there have been violently
killed. Only a fraction of the death toll is likely to have been recorded, given
Israel’s destruction of the enclave’s health sector.

Israel’s levelling of hospitals, including al-Shifa – as well as the kidnapping
and torture of medical staff – has left Palestinians in Gaza completely exposed.
The eradication of meaningful healthcare means births, serious injuries and
chronic and acute illnesses are quickly becoming a death sentence.

Israel has intentionally been turning life in Gaza into a lottery, with nowhere
safe.

According to a new investigation, Israel’s bombing campaign has relied heavily
on experimental AI systems that largely automate the killing of Palestinians.
That means there is no need for human oversight – and the potential limitations
imposed by a human conscience.

Israeli website 972 found that tens of thousands of Palestinians had been put on
“kill lists” generated by a program called Lavender, using loose definitions of
“terrorist” and with an error rate estimated even by the Israeli military at one
in 10.

Another programme called “Where’s Daddy?” tracked many of these “targets” to
their family homes, where they – and potentially dozens of other Palestinians
unlucky enough to be inside – were killed by air strikes.

An Israeli intelligence official told 972: “The IDF bombed them in homes without
hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The
system is built to look for them in these situations.”

As so many of these targets were considered to be “junior” operatives, of little
military value, Israel preferred to use unguided, imprecise munitions – “dumb
bombs” – increasing dramatically the likelihood of large numbers of other
Palestinians being killed too.

Or, as another Israeli intelligence official observed: “You don’t want to waste
expensive bombs on unimportant people – it’s very expensive for the country and
there’s a shortage [of smart bombs].”

That explains how entire extended families, comprising dozens of members, have
been so regularly slaughtered.

Separately, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper reported on 31 March that the Israeli
military has been operating unmarked “kill zones” in which anyone moving – man,
woman or child – is in danger of being shot dead.

Or, as a reserve officer who has been serving in Gaza told the paper: “In
practice, a terrorist is anyone the IDF has killed in the areas in which its
forces operate.”

This, Haaretz reports, is the likely reason why soldiers gunned down three
escaped Israeli hostages who were trying to surrender to them.

Palestinians, of course, rarely know where these kill zones are as they
desperately scour ever larger areas in the hope of finding food.

If they are fortunate enough to avoid death from the skies or expiring from
starvation, they risk being seized by Israeli soldiers and taken off to one of
Israel’s black sites. There, as a whistleblowing Israeli doctor admitted last
week, unspeakable, Abu Ghraib-style horrors are being inflicted on the inmates.

Goal two has been achieved, leaving Palestinians terrified of the Israeli
military’s largely random violence and desperate to find an escape from the
Russian roulette Israel is playing with their lives.

Reporting stifled

Long ago, Israel barred UN human rights monitors from accessing the occupied
territories. That has left scrutiny of its crimes largely in the hands of the
media.

Independent foreign reporters have been barred from the region for some 15
years, leaving the field to establishment journalists serving state and
corporate media, where there are strong pressures to present Israel’s actions in
the best possible light.

That is why the most important stories about 7 October and the Israeli
military’s actions in Gaza and treatment of Palestinian prisoners in Israel have
been broken by Israeli-based media – as well as small, independent western
outlets that have highlighted its coverage.

Since 7 October, Israel has barred all foreign journalists from Gaza, and
western reporters have meekly complied. None have been alerting their audience
to this major assault on their supposed role as watchdogs.

Israeli spokespeople, well-practised in the dark arts of deception and
misdirection, have been allowed to fill the void in London studios.

What on-the-ground information from Gaza has been reaching western publics –
when it is not suppressed by media outlets either because it would be too
distressing or because its inclusion would enrage Israel – comes via Palestinian
journalists. They have been showing the genocide unfolding in real-time.

But for that reason, Israel has been picking them off one by one – just as it
did earlier with Rachel Corrie and Tom Hurndall – as well as murdering their
extended families as a warning to others.

The one international channel that has many journalists on the ground in Gaza
and is in a position to present its reporting in high-quality English is Al
Jazeera.

The list of its journalists killed by Israel has grown steadily longer since 7
October. Gaza bureau chief Wael al-Dahdouh has had most of his family executed,
as well as being injured himself.

His counterpart in the West Bank, Shireen Abu Akhleh, was shot dead by an
Israeli army sniper two years ago.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Israel rushed a law through its parliament last week
to ban Al Jazeera from broadcasting from the region. Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu called it a “terror channel”, claiming it participated in
Hamas’ 7 October attack.

Al Jazeera had just aired a documentary revisiting the events of 7 October. It
showed that Hamas did not commit the most barbaric crimes Israel accuses it of,
and that, in fact, in some cases Israel was responsible for the most horrifying
atrocities against its own citizens that it had attributed to Hamas.



Al Jazeera and human rights groups are understandably worried about what further
actions Israel is likely to take against the channel’s journalists to snuff out
its reporting.

Palestinians in Gaza, meanwhile, fear that they are about to lose the only
channel that connects them to the outside world, both telling their stories and
keeping them informed about what the watching world knows of their plight.

Goal three has been achieved. The lights are being turned off. Israel can carry
out in the dark the potentially ugliest phase of its genocide, as Palestinian
children emaciate and starve to death.

Rulebook torn up

And finally, Israel has torn up the rulebook on international humanitarian law
intended to protect civilians from atrocities, as well as the infrastructure
they rely on.

Israel has destroyed universities, government buildings, mosques, churches and
bakeries, as well as, most critically, medical facilities.

Over the past six months, hospitals, once sacrosanct, have slowly become
legitimate targets, as have the patients inside.

Collective punishment, absolutely prohibited as a war crime, has become the norm
in Gaza since 2007, when the West stood mutely by as Israel besieged the enclave
for 17 years.

Now, as Palestinians are starved to death, as children turn to skin and bones,
and as aid convoys are bombed and aid seekers are shot dead, there is still
apparently room for debate among the western media-political class about whether
this all constitutes a violation of international law.

Even after six months of Israel bombing Gaza, treating its people as “human
animals” and denying them food, water and power – the very definition of
collective punishment – Britain’s deputy prime minister, Oliver Dowden,
apparently believes Israel is, unfairly, being held to “incredibly high
standards”. David Lammy, shadow foreign secretary for the supposedly opposition
Labour party, still has no more than “serious concerns” that international law
may have been breached.

Neither party yet proposes banning the sale of British arms to Israel, arms that
are being used to commit precisely these violations of international law.
Neither is referencing the International Court of Justice’s ruling that Israel
is “plausibly” committing genocide.

Meanwhile, the main political conversation in the West is still mired in
delusional talk about how to revive the fabled “two-state solution”, rather than
how to stop an accelerating genocide.

The reality is that Israel has ripped up the most fundamental of the principles
in international law: “distinction” – differentiating between combatants and
civilians – and “proportionality” – using only the minimum amount of force
needed to achieve legitimate military goals.

The rules of war are in tatters. The system of international humanitarian law is
not under threat, it has collapsed.

Every Palestinian in Gaza now faces a death sentence. And with good reason,
Israel assumes it is untouchable.

Despite the background noise of endlessly expressed “concerns” from the White
House, and of rumours of growing “tensions” between allies, the US and Europe
have indicated that the genocide can continue – but must be carried out more
discreetly, more unobtrusively.

The killing of the World Central Kitchen staff is a setback. But the destruction
of Gaza – Israel’s plan of nearly two decades’ duration – is far from over.

…………………….

(Republished from Middle East Eye)

| Tagged gaza, israel, middle-east, news, palestine


ISRAEL’S BRUTAL, CHAOTIC WAR – BY ALASTAIR CROOKE – 8 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 9, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Norms, Conventions and Laws of Conduct Are Being Erased

 • 1,900 WORDS • 

We stand on the cusp of what might be termed Chaotic War. Not the formula used
by Israel often in the past to intimidate adversaries; this is different.

Israeli reporter Eddie Cohen said, in the wake of the attack on the Iranian
Consulate: “We are very clear that we want to start a war with Iran and
Hezbollah. Do you still not understand?”

“Israel wants to drag Iran into a full-scale war in order to be able to strike
at Iran’s nuclear facilities”, though these facilities are beyond American and
Israeli reach, buried beneath mountains.

Cohen, and of course, Israel’s military leadership, will know that; but Israel
nonetheless is locking itself into a logic that can only lead to defeat. Iran’s
nuclear facilities are safe from Israeli assault. The destruction of civilian
Iranian infrastructure, which is out in the open, may kill many, but will
not, per se, collapse the Iranian state.

Trita Parsi places Israel’s objective in attacking the Iranian Consulate in
Damascus in a different context:

> “An important aspect of Israel’s conduct – and Biden’s acquiescence to it – is
> that Israel is engaged in a deliberate and systematic effort to destroy
> existing laws and norms around warfare.
> 
> Even during wartime, embassies are off-limits [yet] Israel just bombed an
> Iranian diplomatic compound in Damascus.
> 
> Bombing hospitals is a war crime, [yet] Israel has bombed EVERY hospital in
> Gaza. It has even assassinated doctors and patients inside hospitals.
> 
> The ICJ obligated Israel to allow the delivery of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
> Israel actively prevents aid from coming in.
> 
> Starvation of civilians as a method of warfare is prohibited under
> international humanitarian law. Israel has deliberately created a famine in
> Gaza.
> 
> Indiscriminate bombings are illegal under international humanitarian law.
> Biden himself admits that Israel is bombing Gaza indiscriminately”.

The list goes on and on … However, Israel’s breach of Vienna Convention immunity
accorded to diplomatic premises – plus the stature of those killed – is highly
significant. It is a major signal: Israel wants war – but with U.S. support, of
course.

Israel’s aim, firstly, is to destroy the norms, conventions and laws of warfare;
to create geo-political anarchy in which anything goes, and by which, with the
White House frustrated, yet acquiescing to each norm of conduct obtrusively
trodden underfoot, allows Netanyahu to grip the U.S. bridle and lead the White
House horse to water – towards his regional End of Times ‘Great Victory’; a
necessarily brutal war – beyond existing red lines and devoid of limits.

As symbolically significant as the Damascus attack is that the U.S., France and
Britain – after a brief ‘hat tip’ to the Vienna Convention – refused to condemn
the levelling of the Iranian Consulate, thus placing the shadow of doubt over
the Vienna Convention’s immunity for diplomatic premises.

Implicitly, this refusal to condemn will be widely understood as a soft
condoning of Israel’s first tentative step towards war with Hizbullah and Iran.

This Israeli chaotic ‘Biblical’ nihilism, however, bears no relationship in
purely rational terms to Netanyahu’s aspiration for a ‘Great Victory’. The
reality is that Israel has lost its deterrence. It won’t return; the deep anger
across the Islamic world generated by Israel through its massacres in Gaza
during the last six months precludes it.

Yet, there is a second, adjunct reason why Israel is set on deliberately
flouting humanitarian law and norms: Israeli journalist, Yuval
Abraham reports in +972 Magazine in great depth how Israel has developed a AI
machine (called ‘Lavender’) to generate kill lists in Gaza – with almost no
human verification; only a “rubber stamp” check of about “20 seconds” to make
sure the AI target is male (as no females are known to belong to the
Resistance’s military).

The blatant extra-legality behind the Gaza ‘kill list’ methodology, as reported
by Abraham’s various sources, can only be immunised and sheltered through
normalising them as but one amongst a general pattern of illegalities – and in
effect, claiming sovereign exceptionalism:

> “[T]he Israeli army systematically attacks the targeted individual whilst in
> their homes — usually at night whilst the whole family is present — rather
> than during the course of military activity … Additional automated systems,
> including one, [callously] called “Where’s Daddy?” were used – specifically to
> track targets when they had entered their family’s residences… However, when a
> home was struck, usually at night, the individual target was sometimes not
> inside at all”.
> 
> “The result is that thousands of Palestinians — most of them women and
> children or people who were not involved in the fighting — were wiped out by
> Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the war, because of
> the AI program’s decisions”.
> 
> “”We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives when they were in a
> military building … or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence
> officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in
> homes without hesitation – as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a
> family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations”.
> 
> “In addition … when it came to targeting alleged junior militants marked by
> Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles, commonly known as
> “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs) which can destroy entire
> buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant casualties. “You
> don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people — it’s very
> expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs]”.
> 
> “… The army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every
> junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to
> 15 or 20 civilians … in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official
> with the rank of battalion or brigade commander – the army on several
> occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the
> assassination of a single commander”.
> 
> “Lavender — which was developed to create human targets in the current war —
> has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as suspected “Hamas militants”, most of
> them junior, for assassination (the IDF Spokesperson denied the existence of
> such a kill list in a statement to +972 and Local Call)”.

So, there it is – no wonder Israel might seek to camouflage the details within a
normalised general array of transgressions against humanitarian law: “They
wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives] automatically. That’s the
Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation goes crazy”.

It is not difficult to speculate what the ICJ might determine …

Does anyone imagine that this flawed Lavender AI machine would not be asked to
churn out its kill lists, were Israel to decide to surge into Lebanon? (Another
reason for normalising the procedures first in Gaza).

The key point made in the +972 Magazine report (with multiple sourcing) is that
the IDF were not focussed on pin-point elimination of Hamas’ Qassam Brigades (as
claimed):

“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a
ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low”, said one source
about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants:

“I nicknamed those targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical
than the targets that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — high-rises that are
evacuated and toppled just to cause destruction”.

This report makes clear nonsense of Israel’s claims to have dismantled 19 out of
24 Hamas Battalions: One source, critical of Lavender’s inaccuracy, points out
the obvious flaw: “It’s a vague boundary”; How to tell a Hamas fighter from any
other Gazan civilian male?

“At its peak, the system managed to generate 37,000 people as potential human
targets”, said B. “But the numbers changed all the time, because it depends on
where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative is. There were times when a
Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then the machine started bringing
us all kinds of civil defence personnel, police officers, on whom it would be a
shame to waste bombs”.

Just last week, War Cabinet member and Minister Ron Dermer, was delegated to
travel to Washington to plead that the IDF success in dismantling 19 Hamas
battalions justified an incursion into Rafah to dismantle the 4 to 5 battalions
that Israel claims still remain in Rafah.

What is clear is that AI was a key Israeli tool to its Gaza ‘Victory’. Israel
was going to sell a ‘smoke and mirrors story’ based on ‘Lavender’.

By contrast, Palestinians, who are aware of their quantitative inferiority, have
a very different outlook: they switched to a new way of thinking that gives the
simple act of resisting a civilisational meaning – a path to metaphysical
victory (and quite possibly a kind of military victory), if not in their
lifetimes, then for the Palestinian People, thereafter. This constitutes the
asymmetrical nature of the conflict that Israel has never managed to understand.

Israel wants to be feared, believing this will restore its deterrence. Amira
Hass writes that regardless of any revulsion for this government and its
members: “The vast majority [of Israelis] still believe that war is the
solution”. And Mairav Zonszein writing in Foreign Policy, notes that “The
Problem Isn’t Just Netanyahu, It’s Israeli Society”:

> “The focus on Netanyahu is a convenient distraction from the fact that the war
> in Gaza is not Netanyahu’s war, it is Israel’s war—and the problem isn’t only
> Netanyahu; it’s the Israeli electorate … A large majority—88 percent—of Jewish
> Israelis polled in January believe the astounding number of Palestinian
> deaths, which had surpassed 25,000 at the time, is justified. A large majority
> of the Jewish public also thinks that the [IDF] is using adequate or even too
> little force in Gaza … Putting all the blame on the prime minister misses the
> point. It disregards the fact that Israelis have long advanced, enabled, or
> come to terms with their country’s system of military occupation and
> dehumanization of Palestinians”.

Yet neither Israel, nor the U.S., has a comprehensive strategy for this mooted
war. Israel’s approach is all tactical – claiming to have degraded Hamas;
turning Gaza into a humanitarian hellscape and setting the scene for the
“decisive plan” devised by Bezalel Smotrich for the Palestinians. Amira Hass
again:

> “Either agree to an inferior status, emigrate and be uprooted ostensibly
> voluntarily, or face defeat and death in a war. This is the plan now being
> carried out in Gaza and the West Bank – with most Israelis serving as active
> and enthusiastic accomplices, or passively acquiescing in its realisation ”.

The U.S. ‘vision’ is also tactical (and far removed from reality) – Imagining
the transformation of Gaza into a ‘Vichy collaborator’ statelet; imagining that
political pressure by the French in Lebanon will force Hizbullah’s retreat from
its ancestral lands in south Lebanon; and imagining that the Biden White House
is able to achieve politically through pressure what Israel cannot
do militarily.

The paradox is that, with Israel and the U.S. being dependent on an ‘image’ that
has been confused with reality, this too works to Iran’s and the Resistance
Front’s advantage. (As the old adage goes, ‘do not disturb an adversary who is
making mistakes’).

……………………

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged gaza, israel, middle-east, news, palestine


HYPOCHONDRIACS CAN RELAX: HAVANA SYNDROME IS BALONEY – BY EVE OTTENBERG – 5
APRIL 2024

Posted on April 9, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Havana Syndrome, it turns out, is a figment of lots of overheated imaginations.
There are no death-ray microwaves aimed at American heads in the U.S. embassies
in nations Washington doesn’t like. In March, the National Institutes of Health
said so. NIH studies found neither vocational harm, nor brain injury, nor blood
biomarkers, pace 60 Minutes. The whole thing was a massive hoax that started
eight years ago, after which the ball really got rolling in 2017, as U.S.
military and intelligence officers reported symptoms from India and China.
According to Wikipedia: “The most recent studies of over 1000 reported cases of
Havana Syndrome have ruled out foreign involvement in all but a couple dozen
cases.” Now the NIH has presumably dismissed even those. The nefarious furren
conspiracy to scramble American brains was just, well, a hallucination,
suggesting some of those brains had already been scrambled due to prolonged
exposure to the madness called U.S. foreign policy. Still, the hoopla wasn’t as
loony as it could have been – no Havana Syndrome sufferers claimed twinges in
their teeth due to electromagnetic messages zapping their fillings, though
conceivably that could come next. In fact, the NIH study didn’t stop 60 Minutes
from airing a story about Havana Syndrome being caused by the Russians. So there
may well be more insanity in the pipeline.

It started in Havana in 2016. According to Spyscape, a U.S. embassy staff person
“awoke to a loud, piercing sound in one ear, followed by acute nausea and
vertigo. Within years, similar symptoms of the mysterious illness had been
reported by hundreds – some say as many as 1,000 – U.S. spies, diplomats and
defense officials in China, Russia, Austria, Serbia, the White House and
beyond.” Sound like a mass paranoid panic attack by those with brains fried by
Washington propaganda? If you said yes, you could be onto something.

“Theories range from some weapon attack to nerve agents and microwave death
rays.” The CIA “hasn’t ruled out foreign involvement –including in cases that
originated in the U.S. Embassy in Havana.” So the CIA basically straight up said
the commies could have a death ray and are using it on us. Next those wicked
reds will be hypnotizing us through our laptops to steal the formula for
Preparation H and send it to Wikileaks.

Official U.S. government theories included pulsed, directed, radio-frequency
attacks and microwave beams aimed at the U.S. embassy. One CIA officer who awoke
in a Moscow hotel room with vertigo told Spyscape: “Of course I’m concerned
about the adversaries behind this, because ultimately I believe it’s an act of
war.” One Havana embassy staffer described himself as a “zombie;” all I can say
is keep careful track of your body parts when in contact with these cannibals in
the foreign service, since who knows what they might decide to chow down on. Nor
was the foreign service the only branch of government affected. One National
Security council staffer “described collapsing at the White House gates,
convinced he was going to die.” My question is, would he then have risen from
the dead and tried to eat the president? Clearly, it was not just a mass
psychosis, but a highly contagious one, with serious meal-time ramifications
that I hope the secret service carefully kept tabs on.

You’d think the belief that an illness is in reality an act of war perpetrated
by a hostile foreign government would, prima facie, disqualify whoever made the
charge from being taken seriously. You’d also think such a fantasy would be easy
to refute, but apparently not. It took the American health bureaucracy eight
years to rule out enemy death rays, and I’m sure many Havana syndrome sufferers
still consider themselves targets of a deadly foreign conspiracy. Such
convictions require a hefty dose of megalomania, but believing that your
headache is a foreign enemy attack indicates that megalomania is not in short
supply.

Nor is hysteria about contamination by foreigners, bringing to mind General Jack
D. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove and his obsession with the purity of his bodily
fluids. Indeed, the 60 Minutes opus revealed that an FBI agent who interviewed a
Russian for 80 hours experienced disorientation, among other Havana Syndrome
symptoms, leading one to wonder why nobody asked about the possible health
implications of  80 hours of interrogation. Disorientation, crippling or
otherwise, would seem to be a logical result of such a marathon. Clearly contact
with foreigners, life abroad, or a stint out of the country, has stimulated some
rather bizarre ideation in our diplomats, spies and military men, ideation that
lay not too far below the surface and just needed the slightest nudge to come
roaring wildly into view.

Meanwhile, a Northeastern professor hypothesized a different cause: he blamed
crickets, specifically the Indies short-tailed cricket. This bug, “has a chirp
that’s extremely annoying to the point where it can harm you,” according to
professor Kevin Fu. An advisory group working with the state department agreed.
“The group performed a pulse repetition analysis,” according to Northeastern
Global News June 13, 2023, “of audio captured in Cuba and audio of the crickets
and found they were remarkably similar.” Reassuring to hypochondriacs
everywhere, the CIA asserted in 2022 that “the mysterious illness was not caused
by a ‘sustained global campaign by a hostile power.’” The CIA did not reveal if
arthropods were to blame.

The 1980s were particularly rife with mass hysterical illnesses. There was the
West Bank fainting epidemic of 1983, the Hollinwell fainting and nausea attacks
of 1980, the U.S. navy breathing difficulty attack in San Diego in 1988, which
led to evacuating 600 men from barracks. Other instances of mass hypochondriacal
lunacy include the supposed poisoning of thousands of Kosovans by toxic gases in
1990, Pokemon shock, wherein thousands of Japanese children allegedly had
seizures while watching Pokemon in 1997 and fever, nausea and walking difficulty
for over 500 female adolescents in Mexico City in 2006. And one of the most
unforgettable – an outbreak of twitching, headaches and dizziness at a Virginia
high school in 2007. Twitching was a new and rather disturbing addition to the
collection of odd psychologically-induced symptoms. The thought of a large group
of high-schoolers, twitching uncontrollably, is not one you want to contemplate
for long.

So Havana Syndrome has a long and illustrious pedigree in the annals of
hypochondriacal phantasmagoria. As such, I predict we’re not done with it yet.
CIA agents who believe the heirs to Fidel Castro focused death rays at their
skulls and believe it with such conviction that they suffered vertigo, nausea
and felt they were going to die and then rise from the dead to eat other
government officials, will not willingly let go of their peculiar and addled
pensees. To the extent that Havana Syndrome is projection, one has to wonder
what our spooks have been up to – have THEY been testing sonic beams or
microwaves that induce nausea in the floridly paranoid? We’ll never know. But
given the outlandish CIA experiments on the human body and psyche down the
years, it’s a good bet they have.

And of course, some experts say never say die. “Dr. David Relman, a professor of
microbiology and immunology at Stanford…argued in an editorial…” CNN reported
March 18, that while brain scans “appear to show that ‘nothing or nothing
serious’ happened with these cases, coming to this conclusion ‘would be
ill-advised.’ Earlier work found evidence of abnormalities, he said, and the
same is true for the study that did a wider variety of tests.” Relman argues we
need better medical tests that can detect “more specific blood markers of
different forms of cellular injury.” And tests, I would like to add, to screen
potential zombies out of the foreign service.

CNN rather unhelpfully adds that we still lack a clear definition of this
syndrome (thus throwing fuel on the lunatic fire) – “or what the government
terms ‘anomalous health incidents.’” It even cites an intelligence panel saying
in 2022 that in some instances, the symptoms could “plausibly” have come from
external “pulsed electromagnetic energy.” That nitwit conclusion’s not
conspiratorial, is it? But hey, if you were in the intelligence community, you’d
likely figure, well what would you do if you could, if the shoe was on the other
foot? You’d aim a death-ray at the heads of diplomats from countries you didn’t
like and then skedaddle before they dined on you, that’s what you’d do.

……………………………………

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard
People. She can be reached at her website.

| Tagged chronic-illness, covid-19, havana-syndrome, health, wellness


SPARTACISM JUNKED (IBT) 3 OCT 2023

Posted on April 7, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


ICL EMBRACES LIQUIDATIONISM

3 October 2023

> “Submission to the pressure of bourgeois society has repeatedly thrust
> nominally Marxist currents towards revisionism, the process of ruling out
> Marxism’s essential conclusions.”
> —“Declaration of Principles of the Spartacist League,” adopted by the founding
> conference of the Spartacist League, September 1966

The latest issue of Spartacist marks a watershed moment in the sad history of
the International Communist League (ICL). Formally junking the core of its
program and political heritage going back to its founding—a tradition it
denounces as “centrist” at best—the ICL now frames its raison d’être as the
fight against “liberalism.”

An IBT comrade intervened at a public forum of the Trotskyist League, Canadian
section of the ICL, held in Toronto on 30 September to introduce the new
approach. He pointed out that this orientation is precisely towards a kind of
liberalism: bourgeois nationalism. The ICL claims that it previously opposed
“bourgeois nationalism in oppressed nations based on sectarian class purity”
(“The ICL’s Post-Soviet Revisionism,” Spartacist No.68).

What is the “sectarian class purity” that supposedly undermined the ICL’s fight
for revolution? While the recent issue of Spartacist leaves many questions
unanswered, it provides a good sense of where the ICL is heading. Rejecting as
“social-democratic” their founder James Robertson’s orthodox Trotskyist defense
of permanent revolution, the ICL now projects “national liberation as the
fundamental lever for proletarian revolution” (“In Defense of the Second and
Fourth Comintern Congresses,” Spartacist No.68). Instead of viewing class
struggle as the “fundamental lever for proletarian revolution” in the
neocolonial world—the central idea of Trotsky’s permanent revolution—the ICL
resurrects the concept of the “anti-imperialist united front” with the national
bourgeoisie of oppressed countries. It goes so far as to suggest that rejecting
the “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry,” which Lenin
himself abandoned as outdated over a century ago, means renouncing “the alliance
between workers and peasants” and even the early Soviet government (Ibid.).

To be sure, the ICL still pays lip service to proletarian independence and the
struggle against the influence of nationalist ideology—revisionists have always
been careful to have “orthodox”-sounding formulations to confuse people. But in
promoting the fight against national oppression as the “fundamental” mechanism
for revolution; advocating “anti-imperialist” alliances with the national
bourgeoisie; and drawing an equals sign between the struggle for a two-class
“democratic dictatorship” and permanent revolution, the ICL has finally embraced
the Pabloite revisionism that the founders of the Spartacist League fought
against. Indeed, according to the ICL, only “sectarians” (or is it “social
democrats”?) “denounce bourgeois nationalism in oppressed countries as simply
reactionary” (Ibid.). Ernest Mandel would be pleased.

“What was the point of your group for the past half century?” our comrade asked
the Trotskyist League. “Was it all a waste of time? Did it ever mean anything?”

The painful truth is that it once meant everything. The Spartacist League was
founded to restore the revolutionary Marxist program, to ensure continuity with
Trotsky’s Fourth International, destroyed by a Pabloite revisionism that sought
other “fundamental levers” for socialist transformation, whether in Stalinist,
social-democratic or bourgeois-nationalist parties. From its founding until its
political degeneration in the late 1970s/early 1980s, the international
Spartacist tendency embodied the Trotskyist program. Even after its
degeneration, it was able to hold onto its core programmatic ideas at least in a
formal sense, despite notable deviations in practice. The SL was distinguished
from the Pabloites on a range of important political questions, from Northern
Ireland to Israel/Palestine, from the Iranian Revolution to the
Malvinas/Falklands War, from Mexico to Quebec and beyond. All of that has now
been erased.

The chair clearly did not much like this critique and cut our representative off
before the allotted time was up. But ICL comrades who are not exhausted, not
demoralized, not resigned, not cynical, who are committed to advancing
Trotskyism instead of neo-Pabloism must stop and ask themselves: “How did we get
here?” Answering that question means taking seriously the IBT’s critique of a
process of degeneration over the last four decades.

………………..

Source

………………..

See Also: After Decades of Preparation For US Capitalist Collapse – Spartacists
Disappear (Workers Vanguard) 14 January 2021

Spartacists – Under New Management – Sept 2023

Down the Memory Hole – ‘Workers Vanguard’ New Management Hides Past Articles – 3
March 2024



PSL Party For Socialism and Liberation Candidates For President and Vice
President of US
| Tagged imperialism, lenin, statements, theory, ukraine


MES LIMERICKS AVEC SEAMUS HEANEY

Posted on April 7, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
Mes Limericks avec Seamus Heaney


Je suis allé chercher du café et des beignets et j’ai échangé quelques comptines
avec l’homme qui signait des livres de poésie. Je ne savais pas qui il était. Il
était irlandais, je savais qu’il avait des poèmes sur les problèmes que
l’Irlande a rencontrés au fil des ans. J’avais du temps libre et j’ai entendu
parler de la réception littéraire ; Je suis alphabétisé, alors j’y suis allé.

J’avais une assiette avec un bagel à l’oignon alors que je me dirigeais vers le
poète et lui disais : « Il était une fois un garçon de Dundalk qui ne savait pas
trop marcher… ».

“C’est la faute des Britanniques, réfléchissez-y”, a-t-il répondu avec un doigt
en l’air pour souligner tout en me regardant directement. Il souriait. J’aime
jouer avec les mots, et lui aussi.

Je pensais qu’il appréciait un petit jeu de mots sans fard parmi tous les fans
complaisants qui lui demandaient son gribouillage au début d’un livre. J’ai
recommencé : « Il était une fois un garçon du Pérou qui ne savait pas trop quoi
faire, il est allé voir sa maman, qui lui a montré un lama… et le reste de la
comptine dépend de vous.

Il rit. Je ne me souviens pas de sa réponse à cela. C’était une journée
ensoleillée d’avril alors que nous discutions dans la bibliothèque de l’école
avec quelques dizaines d’autres personnes autour de nous, nous étions contre une
bibliothèque.

Nous avons parlé de Lord Montbatten tué par un commando de l’IRA lors d’un
assassinat ciblé en 1979. Il a parlé de Mountbatten comme d’un maître colonial
en Inde appliquant la domination anglaise, et du fait qu’il n’était pas
seulement un pêcheur aléatoire avec un titre. Heaney a parlé de Montbatten comme
étant le dernier vice-roi britannique de l’Inde, un dictateur non élu d’un pays
étranger. J’ai mentionné que Lord Montbatten avait été le responsable
britannique en charge de l’occupation alliée du Vietnam à la fin de la Seconde
Guerre mondiale, et Montbatten a réarmé l’Empire japonais. Des troupes
militaires pour réprimer un soulèvement de la classe ouvrière trotskyste
vietnamienne en 1945 à Saigon.

“Je ne le savais pas”, m’a-t-il dit comme si une petite pièce d’un puzzle
important avait été ajoutée.

Il m’a dit qu’il dirigeait une école d’écriture de poésie pendant l’été dans
l’ouest de l’Irlande et que j’apprécierais peut-être de venir à cette réunion.
J’espérais dans ma tête avoir assez d’argent pour acheter de l’essence pour
rentrer chez moi dans ma voiture ce soir-là, pas pour payer une retraite
d’écrivains de l’autre côté de l’océan.

Un membre du corps professoral m’a plaisanté quelques jours plus tard : « tu as
parlé plus que lui ». Je ne savais toujours pas qui était cet homme. Je savais
qu’il était irlandais, je savais qu’il avait écrit des poèmes sur la malheureuse
histoire de l’Irlande. J’avais sa traduction de Beowulf sur mon étagère à la
maison. Quelle histoire.

Plus tard, j’ai découvert que cet homme plein d’esprit avait reçu le prix Nobel
de littérature. Honnêtement, je ne suis pas impressionné par cela. Le président
Obama a un prix Nobel de la paix. Les personnes qui votent pour les gagnants
sont l’élite norvégienne et les politiciens du gouvernement ; ils choisissent
tout ce qui est à la mode avec cette clique. Pourtant, les bonnes personnes
gagnent grâce à des efforts qui en valent la peine. Henry Kissinger a reçu le
prix Nobel de la paix. Imagine ça.

Dès le lendemain, j’ai reçu un avis officiel de mon chef de service m’informant
qu’on ne me proposerait pas d’emploi l’année suivante et qu’il devait me
prévenir à cette date. Mes folles journées de discussions littéraires gratuites
devraient passer à autre chose. J’ai toujours su que je finirais par transmettre
de la poésie en tant que professeur dans une « école de haie ».

Mais au fil des années, j’ai vraiment réfléchi à sa réponse à mes paroles : « Il
était une fois un homme de Dundalk qui ne savait pas vraiment marcher… » La
réponse de Heaney : « C’est la faute des Britanniques, réfléchissez-y » m’a
vraiment fait réfléchir à cette réponse. Voulait-il dire que l’homme ne pouvait
pas marcher parce qu’il avait été blessé par les soldats britanniques ?
Voulait-il dire que l’exploitation britannique à long terme de l’Irlande a
conduit la population irlandaise à devenir en grande partie pauvre et incapable
de se permettre des soins de santé adéquats ?

Voulait-il dire que les Irlandais imputaient tout aux Britanniques plutôt que
d’assumer eux-mêmes leurs responsabilités ? J’y ai pensé de temps en temps au
cours des douze années qui se sont écoulées depuis que Heaney les a prononcées.

Je n’ai toujours pas de réponse à Seamus Heaney. Mais il est sur mon étagère,
dans la bibliothèque et vivant dans ma mémoire.

| Tagged art, francais, france, french, non-classe


MARLON BRANDO AT 100 – BY DAVID WALSH – 6 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 7, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

> “All my life I’ve questioned why I should do something. I had contempt for
> authority. I would resist it, I would trick it, I would outmaneuver it, I
> would do anything rather than be treated like a cipher.”
> 
> “I am really moved and motivated by things that occur that are unjust. I’ve
> always hated people trampling on other people.”
> 
> —Marlon Brando

April 3 marked 100 years since the birth of actor Marlon Brando in Omaha,
Nebraska. He died in July 2004.

Brando was a film and stage actor who enjoyed at certain points immense popular
and financial success, but, above all, he was someone who strove for artistic
and social truth in everything he did. The conditions, in the postwar American
film world in particular, were not often favorable to the level of commitment he
demanded of himself and of others. This brought down upon his head much abuse
and slander and also—along with a series of personal tragedies—disappointed and
wore him down in the end. He truly fell “upon the thorns of life” and bled.

On one of the audiotapes Brando left behind at the time of his death, he
explained, “I wanted very much to be involved in motion pictures, so I could
change it into something nearer the truth. And I was convinced that I could do
that.” (Excerpts from the tapes are presented in Stevan Riley’s remarkable 2015
documentary, Listen To Me Marlon.)

Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)

If Brando did not succeed as he would have liked, if he even took on occasion
serious missteps, it was not for a lack of will. No one in postwar American
cultural life was more determined to change the prevailing conditions or
exhausted him or herself more in that effort. His life and struggle verify once
again Marx’s well-known observation that human beings “make their own history,
but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected
circumstances.”

It is a paradox that Brando was perhaps the finest screen actor of his time, or
any time, yet never appeared in a genuine artistic masterpiece. The films he is
perhaps best known for, directed by Elia Kazan, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
and On the Waterfront (1954), are intensely problematic works, artistically and,
in the second case, also morally and politically.

Kazan infamously ratted in April 1952 to the House Un-American Activities
Committee about his former Communist Party comrades. He directed On the
Waterfront to elevate the informer to the status of a social hero. The film
concerns a longshoreman who eventually agrees to testify before a crime
commission against a local union leadership. In his autobiography, Brando makes
the remarkable but no doubt sincere claim that “I did not realize then … that On
the Waterfront was really a metaphorical argument” by Kazan and screenwriter
Budd Schulberg [also an informer] “to justify finking on their friends.”

Brando also explained in his memoirs that when shown the completed version of On
the Waterfront, “I was so depressed by my performance I got up and left the
screen room. I thought I was a huge failure.” On another occasion, he explained,
“I was so embarrassed, so disappointed in my performance.” In fact, despite its
immense notoriety, Brando’s performance is overwrought and, at times, almost a
caricature of “Method” acting. Unhappily, Kazan succeeded in communicating
something of his own lack of principle, self-pity and intense bad faith through
Brando and other performers.

Last Tango in Paris (1972) has interesting moments of Brando revealing something
about his own life, but it is a pretentious, dubious work overall. He appeared
in two films directed by Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather (1972)
and Apocalypse Now (1979). The former has intriguing and forthright elements,
depicting organized crime as a division of American big business. Brando saw the
story as being “about the corporate mind, because the Mafia is the best example
of capitalists we have” (cited in Stefan Kanfer’s biography, Somebody). However,
the film glamorizes and romanticizes the Mafia thugs, also one of Brando’s
concerns prior to filming. His portion of Apocalypse Now, a film that includes
striking imagery of American military violence and madness during the Vietnam
War, sadly, is the work’s weakest and murkiest.

On another of the tapes, the actor later commented bitterly,

> I didn’t make any great movies. There’s no such thing as a great movie. In the
> kingdom of the blind, the man with one eye is the king. There are no artists.
> We are businessmen, we’re merchants. And there is no art. Agents, lawyers,
> publicity people. … It’s all bullshit. Money, money, money. If you think it’s
> about something else, you’re going to be bruised.

Marlon Brando and Christian Brando in Listen to Me Marlon (2015)

Brando involved himself to the best of his power and ability in the civil rights
movement, opposition to nuclear arms and the death penalty, the cause of Native
Americans. Author James Baldwin recalled that Brando was “totally unconventional
and independent, a beautiful cat. Race truly meant nothing to him—he was
contemptuous of anyone who discriminated in any way.” The actor himself said,
“I’m standing up, not for the black race, I’m standing up for the human race.
All men are created equal.”

Notably, when Brando won an Academy Award for The Godfather in March 1973, he
sent Native activist Sacheen Littlefeather to take his place and reject the
award because of “the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry.”
At the time, some 200 Oglala Lakota and followers of the American Indian
Movement (AIM) were occupying Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge
Indian Reservation. In fact, Brando emerged in the late 1960s in particular as a
severe critic of American capitalist society. The FBI had kept him under
surveillance since the 1940s.

Two letters to the Los Angeles Times in July 2004, at the time of his death,
express something about Brando as a human being and social personality. The late
professor Susanne Jonas, a scholar in Latin American studies, explained that in
response to an op-ed piece she had written criticizing US actions in Guatemala,
Brando “contacted me and initiated an hourlong discussion about the history of
U.S. operations there. Outraged at U.S. military training and CIA manuals on
killing in Central America, he wanted to understand how it was possible to turn
normal American boys into killers and torturers abroad.”

The second Times letter came from one Jon Dosa, who had been the producer of a
television talk show in the Bay Area in 1968. Two Black Panther leaders, Bobby
Seale and Eldridge Cleaver, had been booked to appear. Brando was accompanying
them. “Although his reclusive nature and disdain for public attention was well
established by then,” Dosa wrote, “I approached him with the request that he
join the two dissidents on the show. He declined the invitation. I said, ‘Of
course, you must realize that if you appear, everybody will watch.’ Without any
further hesitation, he agreed. … The show got the press’ attention and, of
course, everybody watched it.”

Brando grew up in an unhappy family. His father, a salesman, who had his own
history of family neglect, “was tough,” according to his son. “He was a bar
fighter. He was a man with not much love in him. Staying away from home,
drinking and whoring all around the Midwest. He used to slap me around, and for
no good reason.”

The actor described his mother, who was an aspiring actress, as “the town drunk.
She began to dissolve and fray at the ends. When my mother was missing. Gone off
someplace, we didn’t know where she was. I used to have to go and get her out of
jail. Memories even now that fill me with shame and anger.”

On one occasion, Brando recalled, “my old man was punching my mother and I went
up the stairs and I went in the room. And I had so much adrenaline, and I looked
at him and I fucking put my eyes right through him and I said, ‘If you hit her
again, I am going to kill you.’”

Brando and sister Jocelyn in The Chase (1966)

Brando was sent to military school, to make “a man of him.” He despised it. “It
was a cruel and unusual punishment. The mind of the military has one aim: to be
as mechanical as possible. To function like a human machine. Individuality
simply did not exist. I had a lot of loneliness.”

At 19, he headed to New York City, eventually coming under the wing of famed
acting teacher Stella Adler, whom Brando credited with transforming his life. “I
arrived in New York,” he explains on one of his audiotapes, “with holes in my
socks and holes in my mind. I remember getting drunk, lying down on the sidewalk
and going to sleep. Nobody bothered me. I was always somebody who had an
unquenchable curiosity about people. I liked to walk down the street and look at
faces.”

Brando brought this “unquenchable curiosity” into his acting. He electrified
audiences from his first performances on stage with his naturalness and
honesty. 

His performances in The Men (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire, Viva
Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953), The Wild One (1953) and On the
Waterfront turned him into a film star, an international celebrity, something he
was extremely uncomfortable with. He refused to discuss his stardom or his
acting with anyone. His children would later learn that questions about his
performances only angered him.

Brando represented something meaningful and inspiring for a generation searching
for an alternative to deadening Cold War, Eisenhower America. “It was
pre-sixties,” he said. “People were looking for rebellion, and I happened to be
at the right place at the right time with the right state of mind. In a sense,
it was my own story.”

However, Brando quickly encountered the reality of 1950s Hollywood. In the wake
of the anticommunist blacklist (which devoured the careers of his mentor Stella
Adler’s brother, Luther, and Brando’s own sister, Jocelyn, an actress and a
supporter of various left-wing causes), the intense realism of the 1940s had
become something dangerous and forbidden. He found himself performing in the
mid- and late-1950s in a series of bloated, generally mediocre films
(Desirée, Guys and Dolls, The Teahouse of the August Moon, The Young Lions).
Brando had become sufficiently discontented by the end of the decade to form his
own production company and produced, directed and starred in One-Eyed
Jacks (1961), a revenge Western, which has compelling moments.

As we noted in an obituary in 2004, Brando’s “radical social views no doubt
influenced his unhappiness with the increasingly conformist character of the
film roles he was offered. After sharp disagreements with director Lewis
Milestone on Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), during which Milestone claimed Brando
used to stuff cotton in his ears so as to block out the director’s instructions,
the actor became known as ‘difficult.’”

Burn! (1969)

Brando asserted on one his tapes that Mutiny on the Bounty “was perhaps my very
worst experience in making a motion picture. I never want to do that kind of
picture again as long as I live.” Certain directors, he argued, “don’t know what
the process is. How delicate it is to create an emotional impression. They cover
up their sense of inadequacy by being very authoritative, commanding things.”
On Mutiny, “There was a great deal of friction, confusion and desperation,
disappointment and disgust, there were fist fights.”

Brando hoped for better things with Charlie Chaplin on A Countess From Hong
Kong (1967), but that also proved an unsatisfying experience. Released the same
year, Reflections in a Golden Eye, based on Carson McCullers, about a repressed
homosexual military officer, is another muddy “psychological study,” a Southern
Gothic, but at least Brando and director John Huston saw eye to eye.

Huston later told French filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier that it was

> a pleasure working with Brando. I was told he was very difficult. On the
> contrary, he was great. He spent his time trying to deepen his character,
> trying to find little touches that reinforce the meaning of the film. It would
> take me hours to say all the good things I think of him. I think he’s the best
> actor I’ve ever worked with.

And Huston had worked with Humphrey Bogart, Walter Huston, Edward G. Robinson,
Sterling Hayden, Jose Ferrer, John Garfield, Gregory Peck, Clark Gable,
Montgomery Clift, Kirk Douglas and numerous others.

“Brando has an exceptional power,” he added. “He can take a small detail and
make it his own, integrating it as if it were a part of himself.” 

In 1969, he featured in Burn! (Queimada), directed by Gillo Pontecorvo (The
Battle of Algiers), as a British agent provocateur sent to encourage a slave
revolt on a Caribbean island against Portuguese rule. A puppet regime emerges
dependent on a British powerful sugar company, and later Brando’s character
returns to brutally suppress a second revolt. The Chase (1966), directed by
Arthur Penn, is another one of Brando’s more promising film ventures.

The Godfather (1972)

The last decades of Brando’s life, by which time he had grown obese, part of his
revolt against his own glamorous image, were not happy ones. But then neither
were they for the American cinema—or the American population. Family disaster
added to his artistic woes. In 1990, his son shot and killed the boyfriend of
his daughter, after she falsely asserted that the latter had abused her. “Misery
has come to my house,” he painfully told the media. Brando’s daughter killed
herself some years later.

To the end, he remained an enemy of official American society. He could only say
about the powers that be: “They lie. Congressmen, presidents, all of them. They
lie when they’re alone, they lie when they’re asleep.” We never “see faces
without lies anymore, except the dead ones. They’re the true assassins, the true
murderers.”

Speaking of the responsibilities of artists, Brando argued that everything “that
we do should reflect the atmosphere of our lives. We’re living now in this mad,
crazy, murderous world.”

He referred on one of his tapes to

> Shakespeare addressing all artists [in Hamlet’s speech to the actors]: Suit
> the action to the word, the word to the action. … To hold the mirror up to
> nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age
> and body of the time its form and pressure.

There are tragic elements to Brando’s life and career, but he set an example and
a high standard of artistic and moral principle. Even many of his mistakes are
fascinating and illuminating.

Given Brando’s level of artistic and social steadfastness, it doesn’t seem
inappropriate to conclude with the language Mary Shelley used in regard to her
husband, the poet Shelley. After his death, she referred to “the eagerness and
ardour with which he was attached to the cause of human happiness and
improvement.” To purify “life of its misery and its evil was the ruling passion
of his soul; he dedicated to it every power of his mind.” Whatever faults he
had, she continued, “ought to find extenuation among his fellows, since they
prove him to be human.”

………………………..

| Tagged film, francis-ford-coppola, marlon-brando, movies, the-godfather


THE MECHANISM: HOW THE “ORDER” BASED ON MADE-UP RULES IS DESCENDING INTO
SAVAGERY – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 5 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 6, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,400 WORDS • 

The Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon money
laundering machine

> The awful shadow of some unseen Power
> Floats tho’ unseen amongst us, -visiting
> This various world with as inconstant wing
> As summer winds that creep from flower to flower.-
> Like moonbeams that behind some piny mountain shower,
> It visits with inconstant glance
> Each human heart and countenance;
> Like hues and harmonies of evening,-
> Like clouds in starlight widely spread,-
> Like memory of music fled,-
> Like aught that for its grace may be
> Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.
> Shelley, Hymn to Intellectual Beauty

As the de facto North Atlantic Terror Organization celebrates its 75th birthday,
taking Lord Ismay’s motto to ever soaring heights (“keep the Americans in, the
Russians out, and the Germans down”), that thick slab of Norwegian wood posing
as Secretary-General came up with a merry “initiative” to create a 100 billion
euro fund to weaponize Ukraine for the next five years.

Translation, regarding the crucial money front in the NATO-Russia clash: partial
exit of the Hegemon – already obsessing with The Next Forever War, against
China; enter the motley crew of ragged, de-industrialized European chihuahuas,
all in deep debt and most mired in recession.

A few IQs over average room temperature at NATO’s HQ in Haren, in Brussels, had
the temerity to wonder how to come up with such a fortune, as NATO has zero
leverage to raise money among member states.

After all, the Europeans will never be able to replicate the time-tested Hegemon
money laundering machine. For instance, assuming the White House-proposed $60
billion package to Ukraine would be approved by the U.S. Congress – and it won’t
– no less than 64% of the total will never reach Kiev: it will be laundered
within the industrial-military complex.

Yet it gets even more dystopic: Norwegian Wood, robotic stare, arms flailing,
actually believes his proposed move will not imply a direct NATO military
presence in Ukraine – or country 404; something that is already a fact on the
ground for quite a while, irrespective of the warmongering hissy fits by Le
Petit Roi in Paris (Peskov: “Russia-NATO relations have descended into direct
confrontation”).

Now couple the Lethal Looney Tunes spectacle along the NATOstan front with the
Hegemon’s aircraft carrier performance in West Asia, consistently taking its
industrial-scale slaughter/starvation Genocide Project in Gaza to indescribable
heights – the meticulously documented holocaust watched in contorted silence by
the “leaders” of the Global North.

UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese correctly summed it all up: the
biblical psychopathology entity “intentionally killed the WCK workers so that
donors would pull out and civilians in Gaza could continue to be starved
quietly. Israel knows Western countries and most Arab countries won’t move a
finger for the Palestinians.”

The “logic” behind the deliberate three tap strike on the clearly signed
humanitarian convoy of famine-alleviating workers in Gaza was to eviscerate from
the news an even more horrendous episode: the genocide-within-a-genocide of
al-Shifa hospital, responsible for at least 30% of all health services in Gaza.
Al-Shifa was bombed, incinerated and had over 400 civilians killed in cold
blood, in several cases literally smashed by bulldozers, including medical
doctors, patients and dozens of children.

Nearly simultaneously, the biblical psychopathology gang completely eviscerated
the Vienna convention – something that even the historical Nazis never did –
striking Iran’s consular mission/ambassador’s residence in Damascus.

This was a missile attack on a diplomatic mission, enjoying immunity, on the
territory of a third country, against which the gang is not at war. And on top
of it, killing General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, commander of the IRGC’s Quds Force
in Syria and Lebanon, his deputy Mohammad Hadi Hajizadeh, another five officers,
and a total of 10 people.

Translation: an act of terror, against two sovereign states, Syria and Iran.
Equivalent to the recent terror attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow.

The inevitable question rings around all corners of the lands of the Global
Majority: how can these de facto terrorists possibly get away with all this,
over and over again?

The sinews of Liberal Totalitarianism

Four years ago, at the start of what I later qualified as the Raging Twenties,
we were beginning to watch the consolidation of an intertwined series of
concepts defining a new paradigm. We were becoming familiar with notions such as
circuit breaker; negative feedback loop; state of exception; necropolitics; and
hybrid neofascism.

As the decade marches on, our plight may at least have been alleviated by a twin
glimmer of hope: the drive towards multipolarity, led by the Russia-China
strategic partnership, with Iran playing a key part, and all that coupled with
the total breakdown, live, of the “rules-based international order”.

Yet to affirm there will be a long and winding road ahead is the Mother of All
Euphemisms.

So, to quote Bowie, the ultimate late, great aesthete: Where Are We Now? Let’s
take this very sharp analysis by the always engaging Fabio Vighi at Cardiff
University and tweak it a little further.

Anyone applying critical thinking to the world around us can feel the collapse
of the system. It’s a closed system alright, easily definable as Liberal
Totalitarianism. Cui bono? The 0.0001%.

Nothing ideological about that. Follow the money. The defining negative feedback
loop is actually the debt loop. A criminally anti-social mechanism kept in place
by – what else – a psychopathology, as acute as the one exhibited by the
biblical genocidals in West Asia.

The Mechanism is enforced by a triad.

 1. The transnational financial elite, the superstars of the 0.0001%.
 2. Right beneath it, the politico-institutional layer, from the U.S. Congress
    to the European Commission (EC) in Brussels, as well as comprador elite
    “leaders” across the Global North and South.
 3. The former “intelligentsia”, now essentially hacks for hire from media to
    academia.

This institutionalized hyper-mediatization of reality is (italics mine), in
fact, The Mechanism.

It’s this mechanism that controlled the merging of the pre-fabricated “pandemic”
– complete with hardcore social engineering sold as “humanitarian lockdowns” –
into, once again, Forever Wars, from Project Genocide in Gaza to the
Russophobia/cancel culture obsession inbuilt in Project Proxy War in Ukraine.

That’s the essence of Totalitarian Normality: the Project for Humanity by the
appallingly mediocre, self-appointed Great Reset “elites” of the collective
West.

Killing them softly with AI

A key vector of the whole mechanism is the direct, vicious interconnection
between a tecno-military euphoria and the hyper-inflationary financial sector,
now in thrall with AI.

Enter, for instance, AI models such as ‘Lavender’, tested on the ground in the
Gaza killing field lab. Literally: artificial intelligence programming the
extermination of humans. And it’s happening, in real time. Call it Project AI
Genocide.

Another vector, already experimented, is inbuilt in the indirect assertion by
toxic EC Medusa Ursula von der Lugen: essentially, the need to produce weapons
as Covid vaccines.

That’s at the core of a plan to use funding of the EU by European taxpayers to
“increase financing” of “joint contracts for weapons”. That’s an offspring of
von der Lugen’s push to roll out Covid vaccines – a gigantic Pfizer-linked scam
for which she is about to be investigated and arguably exposed by the EU’s
Public Prosecutor Office. In her own words, addressing the proposed weapons
scam: “We did this for vaccines and gas.”

Call it Weaponization of Social Engineering 2.0.

Amidst all the action in this vast corruption swamp, the Hegemon agenda remains
quite blatant: to keep its – dwindling – predominantly thalassocratic, military
hegemony, no matter what, as the basis for its financial hegemony; protect the
U.S. dollar; and protect those unmeasurable, unpayable debts in U.S. dollars.

And that brings us to the tawdry economic model of turbo-capitalism, as sold by
collective West media hacks: the debt loop, virtual money, borrowed non-stop to
deal with “autocrat” Putin and “Russian aggression”. That’s a key by-product of
Michael Hudson’s searing analysis of the FIRE (Finance-Insurance-Real Estate)
syndrome.

Ouroboros intervenes: the serpent bites its own tail. Now the inherent folly of
The Mechanism is inevitably leading casino capitalism to resort to barbarism.
Undiluted savagery – of the Crocus City Hall kind and of the Project Gaza
Genocide kind.

And that’s how The Mechanism engenders institutions – from Washington to
Brussels to hubs across the Global North to genocidal Tel Aviv – stripped down
to the status of psychotic killers, at the mercy of Big Finance/FIRE (oh, such
fabulous seafront real estate opportunities available in “vacant” Gaza.)

How can we possibly escape such folly? Will we have the will and the discipline
to follow Shelley’s vision and, in “this dim vast vale of tears”, summon the
transcending Spirit of Beauty – and harmony, equanimity and justice?

……………………………..

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged gaza, genocide, israel, palestine, politics


GAZA: THE DEATH OF AMR – BY CHRIS HEDGES – 3 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 6, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Over 13,000 children have been killed in Gaza. Amr Abdallah was one of them.

 • 1,500 WORDS • 



Amr Abdallah

On the morning Amr Abdallah was killed, he woke before dawn to say his Ramadan
prayers with his father, mother, two younger brothers and aunt, in an open field
in southern Gaza.

“It is You we worship and You we ask for help,” they prayed. “Guide us to the
straight path — the path of those upon whom You have bestowed favor, not of
those who have evoked Your anger or of those who are astray.”

It was dark. They made their way back to their tents. Their old life was gone —
their village, Al-Qarara, their house — built with the money Amr’s father saved
during the 30 years he worked in the Persian Gulf — their orchards, their
school, the local mosque and the town’s cultural museum with artifacts dating
from 4,000 B.C.

Blasted into rubble.

The ruins of Amr’s home

Amr, who was 17, would have graduated from high school this year. The schools
were closed in November. He would have gone to college, perhaps to be an
engineer like his father, who was a prominent community leader. Amr was a gifted
student. Now he lived in a tent in a designated “safe area” that, as he and his
family already knew, was not safe. It was shelled sporadically by the Israelis.

It was cold and rainy. The family huddled together to keep warm. Hunger wrapped
itself around them like a coil.

“When you say ‘Amr’ it’s like you’re talking about the moon,” his uncle,
Abdulbaset Abdallah, who lives in New Jersey, tells me. “He was the special one,
handsome, brilliant, and kind.”

Amr in Gaza

The Israeli attacks began in northern Gaza. Then they spread south. On the
morning of Friday, Dec. 1, Israeli drones dropped leaflets over Amr’s village.

“To the inhabitants of al-Qarara, Khirbet al-Khuza’a, Absan and Bani Soheila,”
the leaflets read. “You must evacuate immediately and go to shelters in the
Rafah area. The city of Khan Yunis is a dangerous combat zone. You have been
warned. Signed by the Israeli Defense Army.”

One of the leaflets dropped over Amr’s village

Families in Gaza live together. Whole generations. This is why dozens of family
members are killed in a single air strike. Amr grew up surrounded by uncles,
aunts and cousins.

The villagers panicked. Some began to pack. Some refused to leave.

One of Amr’s uncles was adamant. He would stay behind while the family would go
to the “safe area.” His son was a physician at Nasser Hospital. Amr’s cousin
left the hospital to plead with his father to leave. Moments after he and his
father fled, their street was bombed.

Amr and his family moved in with relatives in Khan Yunis. A few days later more
leaflets were dropped. Everyone was told to go to Rafah.

Amr’s family, now joined by relatives from Khan Yunis, fled to Rafah.

Rafah was a nightmare. Desperate Palestinians were living in the open air and on
streets. There was little food or water. The family slept in their car. It was
cold and rainy. They did not have blankets. They looked desperately for a tent.
There were no tents. They found an old sheet of plastic, which they attached to
the back of the car to make a protected area. There were no bathrooms. People
relieved themselves on the side of the road. The stench was overpowering.

They had been displaced twice in the span of a week.

Amr’s father, who has diabetes and high blood pressure, fell sick. The family
took him to the European Hospital near Khan Yunis. The doctor told him he was
ill because he was not eating enough.

“We can’t handle your case,” the doctor told him. “There are more critical
cases.”

“He had a beautiful house,” Abdallah says of his older brother. “Now he is
homeless. He knew everyone in his hometown. Now he lives on the street with
crowds of strangers. No one has enough to eat. There is no clean water. There
are no proper facilities or bathrooms.”

The family decided to move again to al-Mawasi, designated a “humanitarian area”
by Israel. They would at least be in open land, some of which belonged to their
family. The coastal area, filled with dunes, now holds some 380,000 displaced
Palestinians. The Israelis promised the delivery of international humanitarian
aid to al-Mawasi, little of which arrived. Water has to be trucked in. There is
no electricity.

Israeli warplanes hit a residential compound in al-Mawasi in January where
medical teams and their families from the International Rescue Committee and
Medical Aid for Palestinians were housed. Several were injured. An Israeli
tank fired on a house in al-Mawasi where staff from Médecins Sans Frontières and
their families were sheltering in February, killing two and injuring six.

Amr’s family set up two makeshift tents with palm tree leaves and sheets of
plastic. Israeli drones circled overhead night and day.

On the day before he was killed, Amr managed to get a phone connection —
telecommunications are often cut — to speak to his sister in Canada.

“Please get us out of here,” he pleaded.

The Egyptian firm Hala, which means “Welcome” in Arabic, provided travel permits
for Gazans to enter Egypt for $350, before the Israeli assault. Since the
genocide began, the firm has raised the price to $5,000 for an adult and $2,500
for a child. It has sometimes charged as much as $10,000 for a travel permit.

Hala has offices in Cairo and Rafah. Once the money is paid — Hala only accepts
U.S. dollars — the name of the applicant is submitted to Egyptian authorities.
It can take weeks to get a permit. It would cost around $25,000 to get Amr’s
family out of Gaza, double that if they included his widowed aunt and three
cousins. This was not a sum Amr’s relatives abroad could raise quickly. They set
up a GoFundMe page here. They are still trying to collect enough money.

Once Palestinians get to Egypt, the permits expire within a month. Most of the
Palestinian refugees in Egypt survive on money sent to them from abroad.

Amr awoke in the dark. It was the first Friday of Ramadan. He joined his family
in the morning prayer. The Fajr. It was 5 a.m.

Muslims fast in the day during the month of Ramadan. They eat and drink once the
sun goes down and shortly before dawn. But food was now in very short supply. A
little olive oil. The spice za’atar. It was not much.

They went back to their tents after prayers. Amr was in the tent with his aunt
and three cousins. A shell exploded near the tent. Shrapnel tore apart his
aunt’s leg and critically injured his cousins. Amr frantically tried to help
them. A second shell exploded. Shrapnel ripped through Amr’s stomach and exited
from his back.

Amr stood up. He walked out of the tent. He collapsed. Older cousins ran towards
him. They had enough gas in their car — fuel is in very short supply — to drive
Amr to Nasser Hospital, three miles away.

“Amr, are you okay?” his cousins asked.

“Yes,” he moaned.

“Amr, are you awake?” they asked after a few minutes

“Yes,” he whispered.

They lifted him from the car. They carried him into the overcrowded corridors of
the hospital. They set him down.

He was dead.

Amr in death

They carried Amr’s body back to the car. They drove to the family’s encampment.

Amr’s uncle shows me a video of Amr’s mother keening over his corpse.

“My son, my son, my beloved son,” she laments in the video, her left hand
tenderly stroking his face. “I don’t know what I will do without you.”

They buried Amr in a makeshift grave.

Amr’s Burial

Later that night the Israelis shelled again. Several Palestinians were wounded
and killed.

The empty tent, occupied the day before by Amr’s family, was obliterated.

………………………….

(Republished from Scheerpost)

| Tagged gaza, israel, middle-east, news, palestine


MOODY BLUES – IN YOUR WILDEST DREAMS – A CAPPELLA (4:06 MIN) AUDIO MP3

Posted on April 6, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Moody Blues – In Your Wildest Dreams – A Cappella

Moody Blues – In Your Wildest Dreams – A Cappella (4:06 min) Audio Mp3





US ELECTION 2024 – RFKJR SUPPORTED BY ‘YOUNG TURK’ RADICAL LIBERAL CENK UYGUR –
BY GABRIEL HAYS (FOX) 5 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 6, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

#News#RFKjr Wins Radical Liberal Support – Prominent independent pundit stuns
co-host by saying he’s considering RFK Jr. for president – by Gabriel Hays (Fox)
During a recent episode of political web show “The Young Turks,” co-host Cenk
Uygur admitted that he is considering voting for independent presidential
candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., slamming President Biden and the Democratic
Party for being anti-democracy.

Prior to his announcement, Uygur discussed why he agreed with the candidate’s
recent headline-grabbing claims insisting that it could be argued that Biden is
a “much worse” threat to democracy than former President Trump.

Kennedy claimed that the Biden administration is “worse” than Trump because it
has pushed social media companies to censor certain opinions, especially during
the pandemic, among other reasons.

Uygur supported this notion, though he claimed Biden and the DNC were
anti-Democratic for reasons different than Kennedy gave, saying that Biden and
his party members “love to rig” elections.

“He’s right to be concerned about Biden being a threat to democracy himself,
maybe not for the reasons that he’s stating, but Biden did, you know, support
anti-Democratic movements within the primary,” Uygur said.

He continued, “The Democratic Party canceled the election in Florida. They tried
to keep out every candidate in North Carolina, Tennessee, et cetera. So, they
love to rig elections.”

Slamming the media, he added, “Yes, I used the word rigged, OK? So, you can go
cry about it if you’re mainstream media. How about you do your job and talk
about how they canceled an election in Florida in the primary and just declared
Biden the winner.”

Uygur also claimed that the “establishment in a of lot ways has killed democracy
long before Donald Trump tried to,” explaining that this has happened through
wealthy donors influencing most of the policy in America.” He also slammed both
major parties for using “fear” to get votes.

He was critical of Kennedy, too, accusing him of trying to pander to both
Republicans and Democrats in his campaign, but went on to say he’s currently
considering voting for the independent.

Uygur declared, “The most surprising thing is, for the first time today, I’m now
considering RFK, Jr.”

Co-host Ana Kasparian appeared stunned by the announcement, exclaiming, “What?!”
on air.

Uygur attempted to explain it to her, granting that the candidate is “cuckoo for
Cocoa Puffs on vaccines. And on several other things where he believes in
conspiratorial theories that I don’t believe in at all.”

“So why on God’s green Earth would I consider RFK, Jr.?” he asked, and then
said, “But I thought about it, Ana, and Trump I would never support in a million
years, Biden is now funding a genocide and is an awful choice, has been corrupt
his whole life. A totally — you’re never going to get anything but corruption
from Joe Biden.”

His main rationale was that he doesn’t believe Kennedy would be worse than Biden
on major issues.

“So am I positive RFK Jr. would be worse?” Uygur asked, adding, “He would
probably — on health and science, definitely he would be worse… But on
everything else, like anti-establishment, money out of politics… I’m not
positive RFK Jr. would be worse than Biden.”

…………………………

RFKjr Book – Fauci – Audiobook Mp3 (38:03 min)

RFKjr Book – Fauci – Audiobook Mp3 (38:03 min)
| Tagged donald-trump, joe-biden, news, politics, trump


США: СОЦИАЛИСТИЧЕСКАЯ АЛЬТЕРНАТИВА ПОДДЕРЖИВАЕТ КОРНЕЛА УЭСТА НА ПОСТУ
ПРЕЗИДЕНТА – 5 АПРЕЛЯ 2024 Г.

Posted on April 5, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
США: Социалистическая альтернатива поддерживает Корнела Уэста на посту
президента (8:10 min) Audio Mp3

Американская левая организация «Социалистическая альтернатива», которая в
прошлом поддерживала «независимого» сенатора США-социалиста Берни Сандерса как
«левое крыло возможного» в 2016 и 2020 годах, теперь переходит к поддержке
президентской кампании левого овода академика Корнела Уэста в Выборы 2024 года.

Социалистическая альтернатива


Совсем недавно в статье, опубликованной в прошлом месяце на его веб-сайте под
заголовком «Двухпартийная система убивает нас — можем ли мы построить
альтернативу?» «Социалистическая альтернатива» указывает на недавно
сформированную партию Уэста «Справедливость для всех» как на потенциальную
«массовую левую партию рабочего класса». На самом деле партия «Справедливость
для всех» лишена какой-либо четкой политической программы и была создана в
первую очередь как средство, позволяющее Западу получить статус избирательного
бюллетеня.

Корнел Уэст


«Социалистическая альтернатива» впервые заявила о своей поддержке Запада в
прошлом году, когда бывший демократ и бывший член Демократических социалистов
Америки добивался выдвижения на пост президента от Партии зеленых — после
первоначального объявления, что он будет добиваться выдвижения от Народной
партии, что было политической операцией. созданный бывшими сторонниками
Сандерса. Позже Уэст отказался от участия в выборах Партии зеленых и заявил, что
баллотируется как независимый кандидат. Ни одно из этих политических колебаний
не остановило «Социалистическую Альтернативу».

16 июня 2023 года Исполнительный комитет «Социалистической альтернативы»
приветствовал кампанию Уэста, заявив, что его «кандидатура потенциально может
предложить крайне необходимую левую альтернативу для трудящихся и угнетённых». В
этом заявлении было не менее 15 отдельных упоминаний Берни Сандерса.
Исполнительный комитет посетовал:

Лояльность Сандерса и «Отряда» к Демократической партии использовалась для
жестоких нападок на рабочих, включая блокирование забастовки железнодорожников,
и это глубоко подорвало способность организовывать движения трудящихся,
растрачивая импульс Берни совершил «политическую революцию» своей кампании
против класса миллиардеров.

В августе «Социалистическая альтернатива» объявила о кампании «Студенты за
Корнел Уэст», написав: «Нам нужны системные изменения, и кампания Корнела Уэста
дает нам возможность дать отпор. … Чтобы быть эффективной, нам нужно, чтобы
кампания Корнела Уэста носила массовый характер. Молодые люди призваны сыграть
центральную роль в создании первоначального импульса на низовом уровне, который
может привлечь все больше и больше людей, жаждущих перемен». С тех пор
«Социалистическая альтернатива» проводила кампанию за Уэста во всех кампусах,
где она действовала. Некоторые рассматривают эту деятельность как способ
связаться с общественностью через имя, которое они могут узнать, а затем
склонить ее на свою точку зрения, просто используя кампанию Корнела Уэста в
своих целях.

В ноябрьской статье «Социалистическая альтернатива» выразила обеспокоенность по
поводу «левых и прогрессивных избирателей, которые устали от ложных обещаний
демократов» и призвала Запад «шагнуть в пустоту», вызванную вероятными
предстоящими выборами между двумя широко презираемыми кандидатами. , Трамп и
«геноцид Джо».

Поддержка организацией кампании Запада как «левой, прорабочей» оппозиции
демократам и республиканцам является своего рода принятием желаемого за
действительное. Уэст – исполнитель левого толка.

Политический послужной список Корнела Уэста


Демократическая партия в настоящее время ведет «тотальную войну» с третьими
партиями и независимыми кандидатами, в том числе с предвыборной кампанией
Запада, стремясь помешать им получить статус избирательного бюллетеня. Однако
это не означает, что Запад представляет собой настоящий вызов двухпартийной
системе.

Любой серьезный пересмотр послужного списка Уэста одновременно подорвет
способность его кампании удерживать этот огромный гнев привязанным к тупику
капиталистической политики и покажет «Социалистическую Альтернативу» как пустую
политическую организацию, которая просто цепляется за левое крыло левого крыла
демократов.

Уэст потратил десятилетия на продвижение и поддержку политиков-демократов. Он
присоединился к радикальной либеральной партии Демократических социалистов
Америки (DSA) в 1980-х годах и был ее почетным председателем. Он проводил
кампанию за Джесси Джексона в 1980-х годах и поддержал кампанию Барака Обамы в
2008 году, прежде чем подверг критике после выборов.

Демократические социалисты Америки


Уэст выступил с ограниченной критикой Демократической партии, назвав Обаму
«черным талисманом олигархов Уолл-стрит». Уэст, как и «Социалистическая
альтернатива», участвовал в политическом цирке, известном как Народная партия,
сформированном в 2017 году на основе давления на Сандерса с целью создания новой
партии. И «Запад», и «Социалистическая альтернатива» также поддержали
президентские кампании Сандерса.

Джилл Стейн


В 2016 году «Запад» и «Социалистическая альтернатива» перешли на поддержку
кандидата от Партии зеленых Джилл Стайн после того, как Сандерс поддержал
Клинтон. В 2020 году их пути разошлись: Уэст призвал проголосовать за Байдена на
всеобщих выборах. Социалистическая альтернатива поддержала соучредителя Партии
зеленых и кандидата в президенты 2020 года Хоуи Хокинса.

Хауи Хокинс


Партия зеленых действует как группа давления, ориентированная на последние
причуды части политического и академического класса и предлагающая причудливые
антинаучные решения многих проблем. Зеленые также демонстрируют эмоциональный
триггер, который толкает их к жестокому разжиганию войны.

Если и есть какая-то последовательная нить в переходе Уэста от одного
политического альянса к другому, то это его расплывчатый реформизм, разрушающий
дом. В своей книге «Американское уклонение от философии: генеалогия прагматизма»
Уэст подробно излагает обыденный список мелких изменений, направленных на
создание «лучшего мира». Рорти, у которого Уэст учился в Принстоне в начале
1970-х годов. Прагматизм имеет различные разновидности, все они вращаются вокруг
отрицания возможности объективной истины и связанного с этим неприятия истории
как закономерного процесса, в котором закономерности можно наблюдать и изменять.
В своих современных формах и особенно в трудах Рорти прагматизм направлен явно
против вмешательства в социальную жизнь с целью изменения хода событий к лучшему
для большинства людей.

Прагматический подход Корнела Уэста к политике и теории влечет за собой
эклектическую смесь чернокожих националистов, расовой политики и политики
идентичности, которую он сочетает с открыто религиозными и иррационалистическими
концепциями.






សហរដ្ឋអាមេរិក៖ ជម្រើសសង្គមនិយមគាំទ្រ CORNEL WEST សម្រាប់ប្រធានាធិបតី – ថ្ងៃទី 5
ខែមេសា ឆ្នាំ 2024

Posted on April 5, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
សហរដ្ឋអាមេរិក៖ ជម្រើសសង្គមនិយមគាំទ្រ Cornel West សម្រាប់ប្រធានាធិបតី – ថ្ងៃទី 5
ខែមេសា ឆ្នាំ 2024 (8:09 min) Audio Mp3

អង្គការសង្គមនិយមឆ្វេងរបស់អាមេរិកដែលកាលពីអតីតកាលបានគាំទ្រសមាជិកព្រឹទ្ធសភាអាមេរិក
“ឯករាជ្យ” សង្គមនិយម Bernie Sanders ជា “ស្លាបឆ្វេងនៃលទ្ធភាព” ក្នុងឆ្នាំ 2016 និង
2020 ឥឡូវនេះកំពុងផ្លាស់ប្តូរទៅគាំទ្រយុទ្ធនាការប្រធានាធិបតីនៃក្រុមឆ្វេងនិយម
gadfly អ្នកសិក្សា Cornel West នៅក្នុង ការបោះឆ្នោតឆ្នាំ 2024 ។

ជម្មើសជំនួសសង្គមនិយម


ថ្មីៗនេះ
នៅក្នុងអត្ថបទមួយដែលបានចេញផ្សាយកាលពីខែមុននៅលើគេហទំព័ររបស់ខ្លួនដែលមានចំណងជើងថា
“ប្រព័ន្ធភាគីពីរកំពុងសម្លាប់យើង – តើយើងអាចបង្កើតជម្រើសជំនួសបានទេ?”
ជម្មើសជំនួសសង្គមនិយមចង្អុលទៅគណបក្ស “យុត្តិធម៌សម្រាប់ទាំងអស់គ្នា”
របស់ខាងលិចដែលបានបង្កើតឡើងនាពេលថ្មីៗនេះថាជា “គណបក្សឆ្វេងវណ្ណៈកម្មករ”
ដ៏មានសក្តានុពល។ តាមពិតទៅ
យុត្តិធម៌សម្រាប់គណបក្សទាំងអស់គឺមិនមានកម្មវិធីនយោបាយច្បាស់លាស់ណាមួយឡើយ
ហើយត្រូវបានបង្កើតឡើងជាចម្បងជាយានជំនិះសម្រាប់លោកខាងលិចដើម្បីទទួលបានឋានៈសន្លឹកឆ្នោត។

ជ្រុងខាងលិច


ជម្មើសជំនួសសង្គមនិយមបានប្រកាសជាលើកដំបូងនូវការគាំទ្ររបស់ខ្លួនចំពោះលោកខាងលិចកាលពីឆ្នាំមុន
នៅពេលដែលអតីតអ្នកប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ
និងជាអតីតសមាជិកនៃសង្គមនិយមប្រជាធិបតេយ្យរបស់អាមេរិកកំពុងស្វែងរកការតែងតាំងប្រធានាធិបតីនៃគណបក្សបៃតង
– បន្ទាប់ពីបានប្រកាសដំបូងថាគាត់នឹងស្វែងរកការតែងតាំងគណបក្សប្រជាជន
ដែលជាប្រតិបត្តិការនយោបាយ។ បង្កើតឡើងដោយអតីតអ្នកគាំទ្រ Sanders ។
ក្រោយមកលោកខាងលិចបានអោនចេញពីការប្រកួតប្រជែងរបស់គណបក្សបៃតង
ហើយបាននិយាយថាគាត់កំពុងឈរឈ្មោះជាអ្នកឯករាជ្យ។ គ្មាន នយោបាយ ណាមួយ ដែល បាន ផ្តល់ ការ
ផ្អាក ដល់ ជម្រើស សង្គម និយម ទេ។

នៅថ្ងៃទី 16 ខែមិថុនា ឆ្នាំ 2023
គណៈកម្មាធិការប្រតិបត្តិជម្មើសជំនួសសង្គមនិយមបានសាទរចំពោះយុទ្ធនាការរបស់ West
ដោយប្រកាសថា
“បេក្ខភាពរបស់គាត់មានសក្តានុពលក្នុងការផ្តល់នូវជម្រើសខាងឆ្វេងដែលត្រូវការយ៉ាងខ្លាំងសម្រាប់មនុស្សធ្វើការ
និងអ្នកដែលត្រូវគេជិះជាន់”។ នៅក្នុងសេចក្តីថ្លែងការណ៍នោះ មានឯកសារយោងមិនតិចជាង 15
ដាច់ដោយឡែកពីលោក Bernie Sanders ។ គណៈកម្មាធិការប្រតិបត្តិបានសោកស្ដាយ៖

ភាពស្មោះត្រង់របស់ Sanders និង “ក្រុម”
ចំពោះគណបក្សប្រជាធិបតេយ្យត្រូវបានប្រើប្រាស់ក្នុងការវាយប្រហារយ៉ាងសាហាវទៅលើកម្មករ
រួមទាំងការបិទផ្លូវដែកធ្វើកូដកម្ម
ហើយវាបានកាត់បន្ថយយ៉ាងខ្លាំងនូវសមត្ថភាពក្នុងការរៀបចំចលនាមនុស្សធ្វើការ
បង្ខូចសន្ទុះ។ Bernie បានបង្កើតជាមួយនឹង “បដិវត្តន៍នយោបាយ”
យុទ្ធនាការរបស់គាត់ប្រឆាំងនឹងថ្នាក់មហាសេដ្ឋី។

នៅក្នុងខែសីហា ជម្មើសជំនួសសង្គមនិយមបានប្រកាសយុទ្ធនាការ “សិស្សសម្រាប់ Cornel West”
ដោយសរសេរថា “យើងត្រូវការការផ្លាស់ប្តូរជាប្រព័ន្ធ ហើយយុទ្ធនាការរបស់ Cornel West
ផ្តល់ឱ្យយើងនូវឱកាសមួយដើម្បីប្រយុទ្ធប្រឆាំងនឹងការត្រឡប់មកវិញ។ …
ដើម្បីឲ្យមានប្រសិទ្ធភាព យើងត្រូវការយុទ្ធនាការរបស់ Cornel West
ដើម្បីមានចរិតលក្ខណៈមហាជន។ យុវជន មាន តួនាទី ស្នូល ក្នុង ការ កសាង សន្ទុះ មូលដ្ឋាន
ដំបូង ដែល អាច ទាញ មនុស្ស ក្នុង ស្រទាប់ ធំ ជាង មុន ដែល ស្រេក ឃ្លាន ការ ផ្លាស់
ប្តូរ»។
ជម្មើសជំនួសសង្គមនិយមចាប់តាំងពីពេលនោះមកបានធ្វើយុទ្ធនាការសម្រាប់លោកខាងលិចនៅគ្រប់បរិវេណសាលាដែលវាសកម្ម។
អ្នកខ្លះមើលឃើញសកម្មភាពនេះថាជាមធ្យោបាយមួយដើម្បីភ្ជាប់ទំនាក់ទំនងជាមួយសាធារណៈជនតាមរយៈឈ្មោះដែលពួកគេអាចស្គាល់
ហើយបន្ទាប់មកបង្វែរពួកគេទៅកាន់ទស្សនៈផ្ទាល់ខ្លួនរបស់ពួកគេដោយគ្រាន់តែប្រើប្រាស់យុទ្ធនាការរបស់
Cornel West សម្រាប់ការបញ្ចប់របស់ពួកគេផ្ទាល់។

នៅក្នុងអត្ថបទមួយពីខែវិច្ឆិកា ជម្មើសជំនួសសង្គមនិយមបានលើកឡើងពីការព្រួយបារម្ភអំពី
“អ្នកបោះឆ្នោតឆ្វេងនិងជឿនលឿនដែលឈឺ
និងធុញទ្រាន់នឹងការសន្យាមិនពិតរបស់គណបក្សប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ” ហើយបានអំពាវនាវឱ្យលោកខាងលិច
“ឈានជើងចូលទៅក្នុងមោឃៈ”
ដែលបណ្តាលមកពីការបោះឆ្នោតនាពេលខាងមុខរវាងបេក្ខជនទាំងពីរដែលត្រូវបានគេមើលងាយយ៉ាងទូលំទូលាយ។
Trump និង “ប្រល័យពូជសាសន៍ Joe” ។

ការគាំទ្ររបស់អង្គការនៃយុទ្ធនាការលោកខាងលិចក្នុងនាមជា “ពួកឆ្វេងនិយម អ្នកគាំទ្រ”
ការប្រឆាំងទៅនឹងគណបក្សប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ និងគណបក្សសាធារណរដ្ឋ
គឺជាប្រភេទនៃការគិតប្រាថ្នា។ លោកខាងលិចជាអ្នកសំដែងរសជាតិឆ្វេង..

កំណត់ត្រានយោបាយរបស់ Cornel West


គណបក្សប្រជាធិបតេយ្យបច្ចុប្បន្នកំពុងធ្វើសង្គ្រាមគ្រប់បែបយ៉ាងលើភាគីទីបី
និងបេក្ខជនឯករាជ្យ រួមទាំងយុទ្ធនាការលោកខាងលិច
ក្នុងកិច្ចខិតខំប្រឹងប្រែងដើម្បីកុំឱ្យពួកគេទទួលបានឋានៈជាសន្លឹកឆ្នោត។
ទោះជាយ៉ាងណាក៏ដោយ
នេះមិនមានន័យថាលោកខាងលិចតំណាងឱ្យបញ្ហាប្រឈមពិតប្រាកដចំពោះប្រព័ន្ធគណបក្សពីរនោះទេ។

ការពិនិត្យឡើងវិញដ៏ធ្ងន់ធ្ងរណាមួយនៃកំណត់ត្រារបស់លោកខាងលិចនឹងកាត់បន្ថយសមត្ថភាពនៃយុទ្ធនាការរបស់គាត់ក្នុងការរក្សាកំហឹងដ៏ធំធេងនេះដែលចងភ្ជាប់ទៅនឹងទីបញ្ចប់នៃនយោបាយមូលធននិយម
និងបង្ហាញពីជម្រើសសង្គមនិយមថាជាអង្គការនយោបាយទទេដែលគ្រាន់តែសង្កត់ទៅលើផ្នែកខាងឆ្វេងនៃគណបក្សប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ។

លោកខាងលិចបានចំណាយពេលជាច្រើនទសវត្សរ៍ក្នុងការលើកកម្ពស់
និងគាំទ្រអ្នកនយោបាយប្រជាធិបតេយ្យ។
គាត់បានចូលរួមជាមួយសង្គមនិយមប្រជាធិបតេយ្យសេរីរ៉ាឌីកាល់របស់អាមេរិក (DSA)
ក្នុងទសវត្សរ៍ឆ្នាំ 1980 ហើយបានបម្រើការជាប្រធានកិត្តិយសរបស់ខ្លួន។
គាត់បានធ្វើយុទ្ធនាការសម្រាប់ Jesse Jackson ក្នុងទសវត្សរ៍ឆ្នាំ 1980
ហើយបានគាំទ្រយុទ្ធនាការឆ្នាំ 2008 របស់ Barack Obama
មុនពេលដែលលើកឡើងនូវការរិះគន់បន្ទាប់ពីការបោះឆ្នោត។

សង្គមនិយមប្រជាធិបតេយ្យរបស់អាមេរិក

លោកខាងលិចបានធ្វើការរិះគន់តិចតួចលើគណបក្សប្រជាធិបតេយ្យដោយហៅលោកអូបាម៉ាថាជា
“ម៉ាស្កូតខ្មៅនៃមហាអំណាចនៅ Wall Street” ។ លោកខាងលិច
ក៏ដូចជាជម្មើសជំនួសសង្គមនិយមបានចូលរួមក្នុងសៀកនយោបាយដែលគេស្គាល់ថាជាគណបក្សប្រជាជនដែលបានបង្កើតឡើងក្នុងឆ្នាំ
2017 ដោយផ្អែកលើការជំរុញឱ្យ Sanders ចាប់ផ្តើមគណបក្សថ្មីមួយ។ ទាំងជម្រើសលោកខាងលិច
និងសង្គមនិយមក៏បានគាំទ្រយុទ្ធនាការប្រធានាធិបតីរបស់ Sanders ផងដែរ។

Jill Stein


នៅឆ្នាំ 2016 លោកខាងលិច និងជម្រើសសង្គមនិយមបានប្តូរទៅគាំទ្របេក្ខជនគណបក្ស Green
Party លោក Jill Stein បន្ទាប់ពី Sanders បានគាំទ្រលោកស្រី Clinton ។ នៅឆ្នាំ 2020
ពួកគេបានដើរតាមផ្លូវដាច់ដោយឡែក ដោយលោកខាងលិចអំពាវនាវឱ្យបោះឆ្នោតឱ្យលោក Biden
នៅក្នុងការបោះឆ្នោតទូទៅ។
សង្គមនិយមជម្មើសជំនួសបានគាំទ្រសហស្ថាបនិកគណបក្សបៃតងនិងបេក្ខជនប្រធានាធិបតីឆ្នាំ
2020 Howie Hawkins ។

Howie Hawkins


គណបក្សបៃតងដំណើរការជាក្រុមសម្ពាធមួយតម្រង់ឆ្ពោះទៅរកផ្នែកចុងក្រោយនៃថ្នាក់នយោបាយ
និងថ្នាក់សិក្សា ជាមួយនឹងដំណោះស្រាយប្រឆាំងវិទ្យាសាស្ត្រដ៏ចម្លែកចំពោះបញ្ហាជាច្រើន។
បៃតងក៏បង្ហាញពីភាពរំជើបរំជួលដែលជំរុញពួកគេទៅរកភាពកក់ក្តៅដ៏សាហាវ។

ប្រសិនបើ មាន ការ ផ្លាស់ ប្តូរ របស់ លោកខាងលិច ពី សម្ព័ន្ធភាព នយោបាយ មួយ ទៅ
សម្ព័ន្ធភាព នយោបាយ មួយទៀត នោះ គឺជា ការ ធ្វើ កំណែទម្រង់ ដែល ខូច ផ្ទះ របស់គាត់ ។
នៅក្នុងសៀវភៅរបស់គាត់ The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of
Pragmatism, West
បានរៀបរាប់យ៉ាងច្បាស់អំពីបញ្ជីបោកគក់សម្រាប់ថ្មើរជើងនៃការផ្លាស់ប្តូរតិចតួចដើម្បីនាំមកនូវ
“ពិភពលោកកាន់តែប្រសើរ” ។ Rorty ដែលលោក West បានសិក្សានៅ Princeton
នៅដើមទសវត្សរ៍ឆ្នាំ 1970 ។ Pragmatism មានពូជខុសៗគ្នា
ទាំងអស់វិលជុំវិញការបដិសេធនៃលទ្ធភាពនៃការពិតដែលមានគោលបំណង ហើយភ្ជាប់ជាមួយនេះ
ការបដិសេធនៃប្រវត្តិសាស្ត្រជាដំណើរការដែលគ្រប់គ្រងដោយច្បាប់
ដែលលំនាំអាចត្រូវបានគេសង្កេតឃើញ និងផ្លាស់ប្តូរ។ នៅក្នុងទម្រង់ទំនើបរបស់វា
និងជាពិសេសនៅក្នុងការសរសេររបស់ Rorty, pragmatism
ត្រូវបានដឹកនាំយ៉ាងច្បាស់លាស់ប្រឆាំងនឹងការអន្តរាគមន៍ចូលទៅក្នុងជីវិតសង្គមដើម្បីផ្លាស់ប្តូរដំណើរនៃព្រឹត្តិការណ៍ឱ្យកាន់តែប្រសើរឡើងសម្រាប់មនុស្សភាគច្រើន។

វិធីសាស្រ្តជាក់ស្តែងរបស់ Cornel West ចំពោះនយោបាយ
និងទ្រឹស្តីរួមបញ្ចូលនូវល្បាយចម្រុះនៃនយោបាយជាតិនិយមជនជាតិស្បែកខ្មៅ ពូជសាសន៍
និងអត្តសញ្ញាណ ដែលគាត់បានរួមបញ្ចូលគ្នាជាមួយនឹងគំនិតបែបសាសនា
និងមិនសមហេតុផលដោយបើកចំហ។




ÉTATS-UNIS : SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE SOUTIENT CORNEL WEST À LA PRÉSIDENCE – 5
AVRIL 2024

Posted on April 5, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

L’organisation de gauche américaine Socialist Alternative, qui dans le passé a
soutenu le sénateur socialiste américain « indépendant » Bernie Sanders en tant
qu’« aile gauche du possible » en 2016 et 2020, s’apprête désormais à soutenir
la campagne présidentielle de l’universitaire de gauche Cornel West aux
élections présidentielles. Élections de 2024.

Alternative socialiste


Plus récemment, dans un article publié le mois dernier sur son site Internet
intitulé « Le système bipartite nous tue : pouvons-nous construire une
alternative ? Socialist Alternative désigne le parti « Justice pour tous »
récemment formé par West comme un potentiel « parti de masse de la gauche de la
classe ouvrière ». En réalité, le parti Justice pour tous est dépourvu de tout
programme politique clair et a été créé principalement pour permettre à
l’Occident d’obtenir le statut de électeur.

Cornel West
Socialist Alternative a déclaré pour la première fois son soutien à West l’année
dernière, lorsque l’ancien démocrate et ancien membre des Socialistes démocrates
d’Amérique briguait l’investiture présidentielle du Parti vert – après avoir
initialement annoncé qu’il solliciterait l’investiture du Parti populaire, une
opération politique mis en place par d’anciens partisans de Sanders. West s’est
ensuite retiré de la course du Parti Vert et a déclaré qu’il se présentait comme
indépendant. Aucune de ces girations politiques n’a fait réfléchir l’Alternative
Socialiste.

Le 16 juin 2023, le Comité exécutif de Socialist Alternative a salué la campagne
de West, déclarant que sa « candidature a le potentiel d’offrir une alternative
de gauche cruellement nécessaire aux travailleurs et aux opprimés ». Dans cette
déclaration, il n’y avait pas moins de 15 références distinctes à Bernie
Sanders. Le Comité Exécutif a déploré :

La loyauté de Sanders et de la « Squad » envers le Parti démocrate a été
utilisée au service d’attaques brutales contre les travailleurs, y compris le
blocage de la grève des cheminots, et elle a profondément sapé la capacité
d’organiser les mouvements des travailleurs, dilapidant l’élan. Bernie a généré
avec sa campagne une « révolution politique » contre la classe milliardaire.

En août, Socialist Alternative a annoncé une campagne « Les étudiants pour
Cornel West », écrivant : « Nous avons besoin d’un changement systémique, et la
campagne de Cornel West nous offre l’opportunité de riposter. … Pour être
efficace, nous avons besoin que la campagne de Cornel West ait un caractère
populaire et de masse. Les jeunes ont un rôle central à jouer dans la création
de l’élan initial de la base qui peut attirer des couches de plus en plus
nombreuses de personnes avides de changement. Depuis lors, Socialist Alternative
a fait campagne pour l’Ouest sur tous les campus où elle est active. Certains
voient cette activité comme un moyen de se connecter avec le public à travers un
nom qu’ils peuvent reconnaître, puis de l’amener à adopter leur propre point de
vue en utilisant simplement la campagne de Cornel West à leurs propres fins.

Dans un article de novembre, Socialist Alternative a fait part de ses
inquiétudes concernant « les électeurs de gauche et progressistes qui en ont
assez des fausses promesses des démocrates » et a appelé l’Ouest à « entrer dans
le vide » causé par les probables élections à venir entre deux candidats
largement méprisés. , Trump et « le génocide Joe ».

Le soutien de l’organisation à la campagne occidentale en tant qu’opposition «
de gauche et pro-travailleurs » aux démocrates et aux républicains est une sorte
de vœu pieux. West est un artiste à saveur de gauche.

Le bilan politique de Cornel West


Le Parti démocrate mène actuellement une « guerre totale » contre les partis
tiers et les candidats indépendants, y compris ceux de campagne de l’Ouest, dans
le but de les empêcher d’obtenir le droit de vote. Cela ne signifie cependant
pas que l’Ouest représente un véritable défi pour le système bipartite.

Tout examen sérieux du bilan de West réduirait à la fois la capacité de sa
campagne à maintenir cette immense colère liée à l’impasse de la politique
capitaliste et présenterait l’Alternative socialiste comme une organisation
politique vide qui s’accroche simplement à l’aile gauche des démocrates.

West a passé des décennies à promouvoir et à soutenir les politiciens
démocrates. Il a rejoint le parti radical libéral Democratic Socialists of
America (DSA) dans les années 1980 et en a été le président honoraire. Il a fait
campagne pour Jesse Jackson dans les années 1980 et a soutenu la campagne de
Barack Obama en 2008 avant de susciter des critiques après les élections.

Socialistes démocrates d’Amérique


West a émis des critiques limitées à l’égard du Parti démocrate, qualifiant
Obama de « mascotte noire des oligarques de Wall Street ». West, ainsi que
Socialist Alternative, ont participé au cirque politique connu sous le nom de
Parti populaire, formé en 2017 sur la base de pressions exercées sur Sanders
pour qu’il lance un nouveau parti. West et Socialist Alternative ont également
soutenu les campagnes présidentielles de Sanders.

Jill Stein


En 2016, West et Socialist Alternative ont décidé de soutenir la candidate du
Parti vert, Jill Stein, après que Sanders ait soutenu Clinton. En 2020, ils se
sont séparés, West appelant à voter pour Biden aux élections générales. Howie
Hawkins, co-fondateur du Parti vert et candidat à la présidentielle de 2020,
soutenu par Socialist Alternative.

Howie Hawkins


Le Parti Vert fonctionne comme un groupe de pression orienté vers les dernières
modes d’un segment de la classe politique et universitaire avec des solutions
anti-scientifiques bizarres à de nombreux problèmes. Les Verts font également
preuve d’un déclencheur émotionnel qui les pousse à un bellicisme vicieux.

S’il y a un fil conducteur dans la transition de West d’une alliance politique à
une autre, c’est bien son vague réformisme brisé. Dans son livre The American
Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, West dresse explicitement une
longue liste de changements mineurs visant à instaurer un « monde meilleur ». La
philosophie de West appartient à l’école du pragmatisme américain telle qu’elle
a été développée notamment par Richard. Rorty, avec qui West a étudié à
Princeton au début des années 1970. Le pragmatisme a différentes variétés,
toutes tournant autour d’un déni de la possibilité d’une vérité objective et,
lié à cela, d’un rejet de l’histoire en tant que processus régi par des lois
dans lequel des modèles peuvent être observés et modifiés. Dans ses formes
modernes et en particulier dans les écrits de Rorty, le pragmatisme s’oppose
explicitement à toute intervention dans la vie sociale visant à changer le cours
des événements pour le mieux pour la plupart des gens.

L’approche pragmatique de Cornel West en matière de politique et de théorie
implique un mélange éclectique de politiques nationalistes noires, raciales et
identitaires, qu’il combine avec des conceptions ouvertement religieuses et
irrationalistes.

| Tagged europe, francais, non-classe, politique, russie


US: SOCIALIST ALTERNATIVE BACKS CORNEL WEST FOR PRESIDENT – 5 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 5, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
US: Socialist Alternative Backs Cornel West for President Audio Mp3 (5:57 min)

The American left organization Socialist Alternative, which in the past
supported “independent” socialist US Senator Bernie Sanders as the ”left wing of
the possible” in 2016 and 2020, is now moving to back the presidential campaign
of leftist gadfly academic Cornel West in the 2024 elections.

Socialist Alternative

Most recently, in an article published last month on its website headlined, “The
Two-Party System Is Killing Us—Can We Build An Alternative?” Socialist
Alternative points to West’s recently formed “Justice for All” party as a
potential “mass working-class left party.” In reality, the Justice for All party
is devoid of any clear political program and was established primarily as a
vehicle for West to obtain ballot status.

Cornel West

Socialist Alternative first declared its support for West last year, when the
former Democrat and former member of the Democratic Socialists of America was
seeking the presidential nomination of the Green Party—after initially
announcing he would seek the nomination of the Peoples Party, a political
operation set up by former Sanders supporters. West later bowed out of the Green
Party contest and said he was running as an independent. None of these political
gyrations have given pause to Socialist Alternative.

On June 16, 2023, the Socialist Alternative Executive Committee hailed West’s
campaign, declaring that his “candidacy has the potential to offer a sorely
needed left alternative for working people and the oppressed.” In that
statement, there were no less than 15 separate references to Bernie Sanders. The
Executive Committee lamented:

> The loyalty of Sanders and the “Squad” to the Democratic Party has been used
> in service of vicious attacks on workers, including the blocking of the
> railroad workers strike, and it has profoundly undercut the ability to
> organize movements of working people, squandering the momentum Bernie
> generated with his campaign’s “political revolution” against the billionaire
> class.

In August, Socialist Alternative announced a “Students for Cornel West”
campaign, writing, “We need systemic change, and Cornel West’s campaign offers
us an opportunity to fight back. … To be effective, we need Cornel West’s
campaign to have a mass grassroots character. Young people have a central role
to play in building the initial grassroots momentum that can draw in larger and
larger layers of people hungry for change.” Socialist Alternative has since
campaigned for West on every campus where it has been active. Some see the
activity as a way to connect with the public through a name they may recognize
and then sway them over to their own point of view simply using Cornel West’s
campaign for their own ends.

In an article from November, Socialist Alternative raised concerns about “left
and progressive voters who are sick and tired of the Democrats’ false promises”
and called for West to “step into the void” caused by the likely upcoming
election between two widely despised candidates, Trump and “genocide Joe.”  

The organization’s support of the West campaign as a “left-wing, pro-worker”
opposition to the Democrats and Republicans is a kind of wishful thinking. West
is a left flavored performer.

THE POLITICAL RECORD OF CORNEL WEST

The Democratic Party is currently waging an “all-out war” on third parties and
independent candidates, including the West campaign, in an effort to keep them
from getting ballot status. This does not, however, mean that West represents a
genuine challenge to the two-party system.

Any serious review of West’s record would both undercut the ability of his
campaign to keep this immense anger tied to the dead-end of capitalist politics
and show Socialist Alternative as an empty political organization that simply
latches onto the leftwing of the leftwing of the Democrats.

West has spent decades promoting and endorsing Democratic politicians. He joined
the radical liberal Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) in the 1980s and
served as its honorary chair. He campaigned for Jesse Jackson in the 1980s, and
endorsed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign before raising criticisms following the
election. 

Democratic Socialists of America

West has made limited criticism of the Democratic Party, calling Obama “a black
mascot of Wall Street oligarchs.” West, as well as Socialist Alternative,
participated in the political circus known as the People’s Party, formed in 2017
on the basis of pressuring Sanders to launch a new party. Both West and
Socialist Alternative also backed Sanders’ presidential campaigns.

Jill Stein

In 2016 West and Socialist Alternative switched to supporting Green Party
candidate Jill Stein after Sanders endorsed Clinton. In 2020, they went separate
ways, with West calling for a vote for Biden in the general election. Socialist
Alternative backed Green Party co-founder and 2020 presidential candidate Howie
Hawkins.

Howie Hawkins

The Green Party operates as a pressure group oriented toward the latest fads of
a segment of the political and academic class with bizarre anti-science
solutions to many problems. Greens also exhibit an emotional trigger that
propels them to vicious warmongering.

If there is any consistent thread in West’s transition from one political
alliance to another, it is his vague house broken reformism. In his book The
American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism, West explicitly
outlines a pedestrian laundry list of minor changes to bring about a ‘better
world.’ West’s philosophy belongs to the school of American pragmatism as it was
developed in particular by Richard Rorty, with whom West studied while at
Princeton in the early 1970s. Pragmatism has different varieties, all revolving
around a denial of the possibility of objective truth, and, bound up with this,
a rejection of history as a law-governed process where patterns can be observed
and changed. In its modern forms and especially in the writings of Rorty,
pragmatism is directed explicitly against intervention into social life to
change the course of events for the better for most people.

Cornel West’s pragmatic approach to politics and theory entails an eclectic
mixture of Black nationalist, racial and identity politics, which he combines
with openly religious and irrationalist conceptions.

| Tagged cornel-west, elections, joe-biden, politics, socialism


RUSSIA FINALLY SAYS ‘NYET’ TO CONTINUED DPRK SANCTIONS ENFORCEMENT – BY JOSEPH
D. TERWILLIGER – 4 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 4, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Last week, a United Nations Security Council resolution to extend the mandate
for the UN Panel of Experts on DPRK sanctions was vetoed by the Russian
Federation, effectively disbanding the primary enforcement mechanism for
the nine rounds of sanctions that have been imposed on the DPRK since 2006, in
response to their repeated nuclear and ICBM tests.

On October 9th, 2006, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) conducted
their first successful test of a nuclear weapon.  In response to this, the
United Nations Security Council unanimously passed resolution 1718, condemning
the DPRK for the test, and imposing a harsh regime of sanctions on the regime. 
Subsequent to a second test on May 25, 2009, they unanimously passed
resolution 1874, which tightened the sanctions regime significantly and
established a “Panel of Experts” to “gather, examine and analyze
information…regarding the implementation of the measures imposed”, for an
initial period of one year.  As more and more sanctions resolutions were passed
in response to further nuclear and ICBM tests, the mandate for this Panel of
Experts was unanimously extended each year until last week.

Leading up to the vote, China and Russia had proposed a compromise to extend the
mandate of the Panel of Experts for one year, conditional on adding a sunset
clause to the sanctions regime, as the Chinese delegate said “Sanctions should
not be set in stone or be indefinite”.  The Russian delegate argued that the
situation in Korea had changed enormously since 2006, and that continuing the
sanctions in the name of preventing the DPRK from becoming a nuclear power
was “losing its relevance” and was “detached from reality”.

It is rather ironic that the United States and its allies have been criticizing
the Russia veto of an otherwise unanimous Security Council resolution as
destabilizing, given that the US routinely uses its own veto power, as most
followers of this site are well aware.  This Russian application of its veto
power has been described as a crisis for the “broader functioning of the UN
Security Council and the post World War II international order”, even though it
is completely obvious that we would have used our veto against any Russian or
Chinese resolution to relax or discontinue the sanctions regime.

The sanctions imposed on the DPRK obviously did not have the desired effect of
deterring them from becoming a nuclear power.  It is fair to ask why they failed
to achieve the desired outcome, and whether continuing sanctions are likely to
alter that reality.  When I accompanied retired NBA superstar Dennis Rodman to
North Korea, Kim Jong Un personally explained his logic to us.  He remarked that
Libyan leader Moammar Qaddafi had given up his weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
programs in 2003, in exchange for sanctions relief and security guarantees that
weren’t worth the paper they were written on.  As soon as the opportunity
presented itself, in Spring 2011, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joyfully
bragged that we had killed Qaddafi.

Furthermore, Saddam Hussein had allowed weapons inspectors from the
International Atomic Energy Agency into his country, and they failed to find
evidence of WMD programs (as there were none), and yet despite this, the US
launched a war of regime change in 2003, which subsequently led to the death of
Saddam Hussein.  He concluded his argument by pointing out the fact that
although Pakistan harbored America’s number one enemy, Osama bin Laden, the US
never attempted a war of regime change there.  In his mind the main difference
was obvious – Pakistan was a nuclear power.

Given that the United States government has never been subtle about its desire
for regime change in North Korea, and has refused to take first use of nuclear
weapons by the United States off the table in the event of war with the DPRK,
Kim Jong Un’s rationale is quite compelling.  I certainly had no
counterargument.

One must remember that the number one goal for the North Korean regime is their
own survival, and Kim Jong Un’s strategic decisions (like those of any other
political leader) should be evaluated in that context – obviously his priority
is to stay alive and keep his job!  With that in mind, the continued pursuit of
a nuclear deterrent seems like the most rational option.  Of course he wants a
better life for his people, and relief from economic sanctions, but not at the
cost of risking the regime’s collapse.

It is important to clarify that long before the DPRK developed its nuclear
program, the US had already nuclearized the peninsula.  Although Paragraph 13
(d) of the Korean War Armistice Agreement forbade the introduction of any new
weapons into Korea, in 1958, the Eisenhower administration deployed nuclear
weapons to South Korea, in clear violation of this agreement.

This was not an isolated incident either, as the US has a long history of
breaking negotiated deals with rival nations.  In 1994, Bill Clinton negotiated
the “Agreed Framework” in which the DPRK would shut down their
graphite-moderated nuclear reactors, to be replaced with light water reactors
(LWRs) to be provided by the US, with supplies of heavy oil being provided to
them to provide energy in the interim.  George W. Bush then slow-walked
providing the LWRs and stopped the shipments of fuel oil, leading the DPRK to
restart the reactors to supply energy to their people.

Bush then made the aforementioned WMD deal with Qaddafi, which the Obama
administration failed to honor.  Obama then negotiated the JCPOA deal with Iran,
which Trump backed out of.  Trump then opened dialogue with the DPRK, but
the Biden administration quickly returned to “strategic patience” (i.e. giving
them the silent treatment).

No wonder they feel the need for a nuclear deterrent when our policy changes so
dramatically every four years, making any negotiations effectively pointless. 
As Kim Jong Un told us, the DPRK policy is always consistent, but the US changes
all the time, adding that if they don’t like what is happening, they just wait
four years.  After we brought a team of NBA players to Pyongyang in 2014, he
further remarked that in doing so, we were the first Americans who ever kept
their word.  No wonder they don’t trust any security guarantees the US has
offered them.

Sanctions have been referred to as war by other means (with apologies
to Clausewitz), and the US now has sanctions in place against more than 20
countries across Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.  The most comprehensive
sanctions are currently imposed against Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and
Venezuela, with sanctions against China growing at an alarming rate.  At the
same time, the Chinese Yuan is being used increasingly for international trade
instead of the US dollar as a result of sanctions prohibiting many countries
from using the US financial system.

The height of the sanctions absurdity was best illustrated when the DPRK was
alleged to have sold ammunition to Russia in early 2024.   In response to this
allegation, the US complained to Russia that they were violating sanctions
against the DPRK, and the US complained to the DPRK that they were violating
sanctions against Russia.  Does the United States expect other countries to just
starve to death under sanctions regimes because we said so?

Is it perhaps more rational to imagine that our overuse of economic sanctions
will inevitably create trading blocs and alliances among the countries subjected
to them?  Iran, Russia, China, and the DPRK have plenty of reasons to dislike
one another.  China and Russia have had a complex hostile relationship for
centuries, with Chairman Mao seeking a better relationship with the US partially
because he feared a Soviet invasion.  Both China and Russia repeatedly voted in
favor of all the sanctions imposed on the DPRK since 2006, because they did not
want a nuclear North Korea in their backyard. Iran and Russia have a long
history of tensions, as do Iran and China.  And Iran and DPRK have only worked
together in a partnership of convenience for the last 35 years because of their
shared status as pariahs in the eyes of the USA.

Despite the historical tensions between Iran, Russia, China, and DPRK, the
sanctions regime has forced these countries into an alliance and trading bloc of
convenience, and the US has nobody to blame but themselves.  It should surprise
nobody that China and Russia want to get the UN out of the DPRK sanctions
business.  That Russia finally vetoed the continuing mandate for the Panel of
Experts should come as no surprise – the only surprise is that it took them 18
years to get there.

……………………….

Source

Joseph D. Terwilliger is Professor of Neurobiology at Columbia University

| Tagged featured, news, north-korea, politics, russia


ISRAEL’S ‘LAVENDER’: THE AI MACHINE DIRECTING IDF BOMBING SPREE IN GAZA – BY
YUVAL ABRAHAM – 3 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 4, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


THE ISRAELI ARMY HAS MARKED TENS OF THOUSANDS OF GAZANS AS SUSPECTS FOR
ASSASSINATION, USING AN AI TARGETING SYSTEM WITH LITTLE HUMAN OVERSIGHT AND A
PERMISSIVE POLICY FOR CASUALTIES, +972 AND LOCAL CALL REVEAL.



In 2021, a book titled “The Human-Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between
Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World” was
released in English under the pen name “Brigadier General Y.S.” In it, the
author — a man who we confirmed to be the current commander of the elite Israeli
intelligence unit 8200 — makes the case for designing a special machine that
could rapidly process massive amounts of data to generate thousands of potential
“targets” for military strikes in the heat of a war. Such technology, he writes,
would resolve what he described as a “human bottleneck for both locating the new
targets and decision-making to approve the targets.”

Such a machine, it turns out, actually exists. A new investigation by +972
Magazine and Local Call reveals that the Israeli army has developed an
artificial intelligence-based program known as “Lavender,” unveiled here for the
first time. According to six Israeli intelligence officers, who have all served
in the army during the current war on the Gaza Strip and had first-hand
involvement with the use of AI to generate targets for assassination, Lavender
has played a central role in the unprecedented bombing of Palestinians,
especially during the early stages of the war. In fact, according to the
sources, its influence on the military’s operations was such that they
essentially treated the outputs of the AI machine “as if it were a human
decision.”

Formally, the Lavender system is designed to mark all suspected operatives in
the military wings of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), including
low-ranking ones, as potential bombing targets. The sources told +972 and Local
Call that, during the first weeks of the war, the army almost completely relied
on Lavender, which clocked as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants
— and their homes — for possible air strikes.

During the early stages of the war, the army gave sweeping approval for officers
to adopt Lavender’s kill lists, with no requirement to thoroughly check why the
machine made those choices or to examine the raw intelligence data on which they
were based. One source stated that human personnel often served only as a
“rubber stamp” for the machine’s decisions, adding that, normally, they would
personally devote only about “20 seconds” to each target before authorizing a
bombing — just to make sure the Lavender-marked target is male. This was despite
knowing that the system makes what are regarded as “errors” in approximately 10
percent of cases, and is known to occasionally mark individuals who have merely
a loose connection to militant groups, or no connection at all.

Moreover, the Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals
while they were in their homes — usually at night while their whole families
were present — rather than during the course of military activity. According to
the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence
standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses.
Additional automated systems, including one called “Where’s Daddy?” also
revealed here for the first time, were used specifically to track the targeted
individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family’s
residences.



The result, as the sources testified, is that thousands of Palestinians — most
of them women and children or people who were not involved in the fighting —
were wiped out by Israeli airstrikes, especially during the first weeks of the
war, because of the AI program’s decisions.

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a
military building or engaged in a military activity,” A., an intelligence
officer, told +972 and Local Call. “On the contrary, the IDF bombed them in
homes without hesitation, as a first option. It’s much easier to bomb a family’s
home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

The Lavender machine joins another AI system, “The Gospel,” about which
information was revealed in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call in
November 2023, as well as in the Israeli military’s own publications. A
fundamental difference between the two systems is in the definition of the
target: whereas The Gospel marks buildings and structures that the army claims
militants operate from, Lavender marks people — and puts them on a kill list. 

In addition, according to the sources, when it came to targeting alleged junior
militants marked by Lavender, the army preferred to only use unguided missiles,
commonly known as “dumb” bombs (in contrast to “smart” precision bombs), which
can destroy entire buildings on top of their occupants and cause significant
casualties. “You don’t want to waste expensive bombs on unimportant people —
it’s very expensive for the country and there’s a shortage [of those bombs],”
said C., one of the intelligence officers. Another source said that they had
personally authorized the bombing of “hundreds” of private homes of alleged
junior operatives marked by Lavender, with many of these attacks killing
civilians and entire families as “collateral damage.”

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided
during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that
Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the
past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during
assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event
that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or
brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more
than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

The following investigation is organized according to the six chronological
stages of the Israeli army’s highly automated target production in the early
weeks of the Gaza war. First, we explain the Lavender machine itself, which
marked tens of thousands of Palestinians using AI. Second, we reveal the
“Where’s Daddy?” system, which tracked these targets and signaled to the army
when they entered their family homes. Third, we describe how “dumb” bombs were
chosen to strike these homes. 

Fourth, we explain how the army loosened the permitted number of civilians who
could be killed during the bombing of a target. Fifth, we note how automated
software inaccurately calculated the amount of non-combatants in each household.
And sixth, we show how on several occasions, when a home was struck, usually at
night, the individual target was sometimes not inside at all, because military
officers did not verify the information in real time.


STEP 1: GENERATING TARGETS


‘ONCE YOU GO AUTOMATIC, TARGET GENERATION GOES CRAZY’

In the Israeli army, the term “human target” referred in the past to a senior
military operative who, according to the rules of the military’s International
Law Department, can be killed in their private home even if there are civilians
around. Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that during Israel’s
previous wars, since this was an “especially brutal” way to kill someone — often
by killing an entire family alongside the target — such human targets were
marked very carefully and only senior military commanders were bombed in their
homes, to maintain the principle of proportionality under international law.

But after October 7 — when Hamas-led militants launched a deadly assault on
southern Israeli communities, killing around 1,200 people and abducting 240 —
the army, the sources said, took a dramatically different approach. Under
“Operation Iron Swords,” the army decided to designate all operatives of Hamas’
military wing as human targets, regardless of their rank or military importance.
And that changed everything.

The new policy also posed a technical problem for Israeli intelligence. In
previous wars, in order to authorize the assassination of a single human target,
an officer had to go through a complex and lengthy “incrimination” process:
cross-check evidence that the person was indeed a senior member of Hamas’
military wing, find out where he lived, his contact information, and finally
know when he was home in real time. When the list of targets numbered only a few
dozen senior operatives, intelligence personnel could individually handle the
work involved in incriminating and locating them.

However, once the list was expanded to include tens of thousands of
lower-ranking operatives, the Israeli army figured it had to rely on automated
software and artificial intelligence. The result, the sources testify, was that
the role of human personnel in incriminating Palestinians as military operatives
was pushed aside, and AI did most of the work instead. According to four of the
sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call, Lavender — which was developed to
create human targets in the current war — has marked some 37,000 Palestinians as
suspected “Hamas militants,” most of them junior, for assassination (the IDF
Spokesperson denied the existence of such a kill list in a statement to +972 and
Local Call).

“We didn’t know who the junior operatives were, because Israel didn’t track them
routinely [before the war],” explained senior officer B. to +972 and Local Call,
illuminating the reason behind the development of this particular target machine
for the current war. “They wanted to allow us to attack [the junior operatives]
automatically. That’s the Holy Grail. Once you go automatic, target generation
goes crazy.”

The sources said that the approval to automatically adopt Lavender’s kill lists,
which had previously been used only as an auxiliary tool, was granted about two
weeks into the war, after intelligence personnel “manually” checked the accuracy
of a random sample of several hundred targets selected by the AI system. When
that sample found that Lavender’s results had reached 90 percent accuracy in
identifying an individual’s affiliation with Hamas, the army authorized the
sweeping use of the system. From that moment, sources said that if Lavender
decided an individual was a militant in Hamas, they were essentially asked to
treat that as an order, with no requirement to independently check why the
machine made that choice or to examine the raw intelligence data on which it is
based.

“At 5 a.m., [the air force] would come and bomb all the houses that we had
marked,” B. said. “We took out thousands of people. We didn’t go through them
one by one — we put everything into automated systems, and as soon as one of
[the marked individuals] was at home, he immediately became a target. We bombed
him and his house.”

“It was very surprising for me that we were asked to bomb a house to kill a
ground soldier, whose importance in the fighting was so low,” said one source
about the use of AI to mark alleged low-ranking militants. “I nicknamed those
targets ‘garbage targets.’ Still, I found them more ethical than the targets
that we bombed just for ‘deterrence’ — highrises that are evacuated and toppled
just to cause destruction.”

The deadly results of this loosening of restrictions in the early stage of the
war were staggering. According to data from the Palestinian Health Ministry in
Gaza, on which the Israeli army has relied almost exclusively since the
beginning of the war, Israel killed some 15,000 Palestinians — almost half of
the death toll so far — in the first six weeks of the war, up until a week-long
ceasefire was agreed on Nov. 24.


‘THE MORE INFORMATION AND VARIETY, THE BETTER’

The Lavender software analyzes information collected on most of the 2.3 million
residents of the Gaza Strip through a system of mass surveillance, then assesses
and ranks the likelihood that each particular person is active in the military
wing of Hamas or PIJ. According to sources, the machine gives almost every
single person in Gaza a rating from 1 to 100, expressing how likely it is that
they are a militant. 

Lavender learns to identify characteristics of known Hamas and PIJ operatives,
whose information was fed to the machine as training data, and then to locate
these same characteristics — also called “features” — among the general
population, the sources explained. An individual found to have several different
incriminating features will reach a high rating, and thus automatically becomes
a potential target for assassination. 

In “The Human-Machine Team,” the book referenced at the beginning of this
article, the current commander of Unit 8200 advocates for such a system without
referencing Lavender by name. (The commander himself also isn’t named, but five
sources in 8200 confirmed that the commander is the author, as reported also by
Haaretz.) Describing human personnel as a “bottleneck” that limits the army’s
capacity during a military operation, the commander laments: “We [humans] cannot
process so much information. It doesn’t matter how many people you have tasked
to produce targets during the war — you still cannot produce enough targets per
day.”

The solution to this problem, he says, is artificial intelligence. The book
offers a short guide to building a “target machine,” similar in description to
Lavender, based on AI and machine-learning algorithms. Included in this guide
are several examples of the “hundreds and thousands” of features that can
increase an individual’s rating, such as being in a Whatsapp group with a known
militant, changing cell phone every few months, and changing addresses
frequently. 

“The more information, and the more variety, the better,” the commander writes.
“Visual information, cellular information, social media connections, battlefield
information, phone contacts, photos.” While humans select these features at
first, the commander continues, over time the machine will come to identify
features on its own. This, he says, can enable militaries to create “tens of
thousands of targets,” while the actual decision as to whether or not to attack
them will remain a human one.

The book isn’t the only time a senior Israeli commander hinted at the existence
of human target machines like Lavender. +972 and Local Call have obtained
footage of a private lecture given by the commander of Unit 8200’s secretive
Data Science and AI center, “Col. Yoav,” at Tel Aviv University’s AI week in
2023, which was reported on at the time in the Israeli media.

In the lecture, the commander speaks about a new, sophisticated target machine
used by the Israeli army that detects “dangerous people” based on their likeness
to existing lists of known militants on which it was trained. “Using the system,
we managed to identify Hamas missile squad commanders,” “Col. Yoav” said in the
lecture, referring to Israel’s May 2021 military operation in Gaza, when the
machine was used for the first time. 

“We rank the results and determine the threshold [at which to attack a target],”
“Col. Yoav” said in the lecture, emphasizing that “eventually, people of flesh
and blood take the decisions. In the defense realm, ethically speaking, we put a
lot of emphasis on this. These tools are meant to help [intelligence officers]
break their barriers.” 

In practice, however, sources who have used Lavender in recent months say human
agency and precision were substituted for mass target creation and lethality.


‘THERE WAS NO “ZERO-ERROR” POLICY’

B., a senior officer who used Lavender, echoed to +972 and Local Call that in
the current war, officers were not required to independently review the AI
system’s assessments, in order to save time and enable the mass production of
human targets without hindrances. 

“Everything was statistical, everything was neat — it was very dry,” B. said. He
noted that this lack of supervision was permitted despite internal checks
showing that Lavender’s calculations were considered accurate only 90 percent of
the time; in other words, it was known in advance that 10 percent of the human
targets slated for assassination were not members of the Hamas military wing at
all.

For example, sources explained that the Lavender machine sometimes mistakenly
flagged individuals who had communication patterns similar to known Hamas or PIJ
operatives — including police and civil defense workers, militants’ relatives,
residents who happened to have a name and nickname identical to that of an
operative, and Gazans who used a device that once belonged to a Hamas
operative. 

“How close does a person have to be to Hamas to be [considered by an AI machine
to be] affiliated with the organization?” said one source critical of Lavender’s
inaccuracy. “It’s a vague boundary. Is a person who doesn’t receive a salary
from Hamas, but helps them with all sorts of things, a Hamas operative? Is
someone who was in Hamas in the past, but is no longer there today, a Hamas
operative? Each of these features — characteristics that a machine would flag as
suspicious — is inaccurate.”

Similar problems exist with the ability of target machines to assess the phone
used by an individual marked for assassination. “In war, Palestinians change
phones all the time,” said the source. “People lose contact with their families,
give their phone to a friend or a wife, maybe lose it. There is no way to rely
100 percent on the automatic mechanism that determines which [phone] number
belongs to whom.”

According to the sources, the army knew that the minimal human supervision in
place would not discover these faults. “There was no ‘zero-error’ policy.
Mistakes were treated statistically,” said a source who used Lavender. “Because
of the scope and magnitude, the protocol was that even if you don’t know for
sure that the machine is right, you know that statistically it’s fine. So you go
for it.”

“It has proven itself,” said B., the senior source. “There’s something about the
statistical approach that sets you to a certain norm and standard. There has
been an illogical amount of [bombings] in this operation. This is unparalleled,
in my memory. And I have much more trust in a statistical mechanism than a
soldier who lost a friend two days ago. Everyone there, including me, lost
people on October 7. The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”

Another intelligence source, who defended the reliance on the Lavender-generated
kill lists of Palestinian suspects, argued that it was worth investing an
intelligence officer’s time only to verify the information if the target was a
senior commander in Hamas. “But when it comes to a junior militant, you don’t
want to invest manpower and time in it,” he said. “In war, there is no time to
incriminate every target. So you’re willing to take the margin of error of using
artificial intelligence, risking collateral damage and civilians dying, and
risking attacking by mistake, and to live with it.”

B. said that the reason for this automation was a constant push to generate more
targets for assassination. “In a day without targets [whose feature rating was
sufficient to authorize a strike], we attacked at a lower threshold. We were
constantly being pressured: ‘Bring us more targets.’ They really shouted at us.
We finished [killing] our targets very quickly.”

He explained that when lowering the rating threshold of Lavender, it would mark
more people as targets for strikes. “At its peak, the system managed to generate
37,000 people as potential human targets,” said B. “But the numbers changed all
the time, because it depends on where you set the bar of what a Hamas operative
is. There were times when a Hamas operative was defined more broadly, and then
the machine started bringing us all kinds of civil defense personnel, police
officers, on whom it would be a shame to waste bombs. They help the Hamas
government, but they don’t really endanger soldiers.”

One source who worked with the military data science team that trained Lavender
said that data collected from employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security
Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants, was also fed into the
machine. “I was bothered by the fact that when Lavender was trained, they used
the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, and included people who were civil defense
workers in the training dataset,” he said.

The source added that even if one believes these people deserve to be killed,
training the system based on their communication profiles made Lavender more
likely to select civilians by mistake when its algorithms were applied to the
general population. “Since it’s an automatic system that isn’t operated manually
by humans, the meaning of this decision is dramatic: it means you’re including
many people with a civilian communication profile as potential targets.”


‘WE ONLY CHECKED THAT THE TARGET WAS A MAN’

The Israeli military flatly rejects these claims. In a statement to +972 and
Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson denied using artificial intelligence to
incriminate targets, saying these are merely “auxiliary tools that assist
officers in the process of incrimination.” The statement went on: “In any case,
an independent examination by an [intelligence] analyst is required, which
verifies that the identified targets are legitimate targets for attack, in
accordance with the conditions set forth in IDF directives and international
law.”  

However, sources said that the only human supervision protocol in place before
bombing the houses of suspected “junior” militants marked by Lavender was to
conduct a single check: ensuring that the AI-selected target is male rather than
female. The assumption in the army was that if the target was a woman, the
machine had likely made a mistake, because there are no women among the ranks of
the military wings of Hamas and PIJ.

“A human being had to [verify the target] for just a few seconds,” B. said,
explaining that this became the protocol after realizing the Lavender system was
“getting it right” most of the time. “At first, we did checks to ensure that the
machine didn’t get confused. But at some point we relied on the automatic
system, and we only checked that [the target] was a man — that was enough. It
doesn’t take a long time to tell if someone has a male or a female voice.” 

To conduct the male/female check, B. claimed that in the current war, “I would
invest 20 seconds for each target at this stage, and do dozens of them every
day. I had zero added value as a human, apart from being a stamp of approval. It
saved a lot of time. If [the operative] came up in the automated mechanism, and
I checked that he was a man, there would be permission to bomb him, subject to
an examination of collateral damage.”

In practice, sources said this meant that for civilian men marked in error by
Lavender, there was no supervising mechanism in place to detect the mistake.
According to B., a common error occurred “if the [Hamas] target gave [his phone]
to his son, his older brother, or just a random man. That person will be bombed
in his house with his family. This happened often. These were most of the
mistakes caused by Lavender,” B. said.


STEP 2: LINKING TARGETS TO FAMILY HOMES


‘MOST OF THE PEOPLE YOU KILLED WERE WOMEN AND CHILDREN’

The next stage in the Israeli army’s assassination procedure is identifying
where to attack the targets that Lavender generates.

In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the IDF Spokesperson claimed in response
to this article that “Hamas places its operatives and military assets in the
heart of the civilian population, systematically uses the civilian population as
human shields, and conducts fighting from within civilian structures, including
sensitive sites such as hospitals, mosques, schools and UN facilities. The IDF
is bound by and acts according to international law, directing its attacks only
at military targets and military operatives.” 

The six sources we spoke to echoed this to some degree, saying that Hamas’
extensive tunnel system deliberately passes under hospitals and schools; that
Hamas militants use ambulances to get around; and that countless military assets
have been situated near civilian buildings. The sources argued that many Israeli
strikes kill civilians as a result of these tactics by Hamas — a
characterization that human rights groups warn evades Israel’s onus for
inflicting the casualties. 

However, in contrast to the Israeli army’s official statements, the sources
explained that a major reason for the unprecedented death toll from Israel’s
current bombardment is the fact that the army has systematically attacked
targets in their private homes, alongside their families — in part because it
was easier from an intelligence standpoint to mark family houses using automated
systems.

Indeed, several sources emphasized that, as opposed to numerous cases of Hamas
operatives engaging in military activity from civilian areas, in the case of
systematic assassination strikes, the army routinely made the active choice to
bomb suspected militants when inside civilian households from which no military
activity took place. This choice, they said, was a reflection of the way
Israel’s system of mass surveillance in Gaza is designed.

The sources told +972 and Local Call that since everyone in Gaza had a private
house with which they could be associated, the army’s surveillance systems could
easily and automatically “link” individuals to family houses. In order to
identify the moment operatives enter their houses in real time, various
additional automatic softwares have been developed. These programs track
thousands of individuals simultaneously, identify when they are at home, and
send an automatic alert to the targeting officer, who then marks the house for
bombing. One of several of these tracking softwares, revealed here for the first
time, is called “Where’s Daddy?” 

“You put hundreds [of targets] into the system and wait to see who you can
kill,” said one source with knowledge of the system. “It’s called broad hunting:
you copy-paste from the lists that the target system produces.”

Evidence of this policy is also clear from the data: during the first month of
the war, more than half of the fatalities — 6,120 people — belonged to 1,340
families, many of which were completely wiped out while inside their homes,
according to UN figures. The proportion of entire families bombed in their
houses in the current war is much higher than in the 2014 Israeli operation in
Gaza (which was previously Israel’s deadliest war on the Strip), further
suggesting the prominence of this policy.

Another source said that each time the pace of assassinations waned, more
targets were added to systems like Where’s Daddy? to locate individuals that
entered their homes and could therefore be bombed. He said that the decision of
who to put into the tracking systems could be made by relatively low-ranking
officers in the military hierarchy. 

“One day, totally of my own accord, I added something like 1,200 new targets to
the [tracking] system, because the number of attacks [we were conducting]
decreased,” the source said. “That made sense to me. In retrospect, it seems
like a serious decision I made. And such decisions were not made at high
levels.”

The sources said that in the first two weeks of the war, “several thousand”
targets were initially inputted into locating programs like Where’s Daddy?.
These included all the members of Hamas’ elite special forces unit the Nukhba,
all of Hamas’ anti-tank operatives, and anyone who entered Israel on October 7.
But before long, the kill list was drastically expanded. 

“In the end it was everyone [marked by Lavender],” one source explained. “Tens
of thousands. This happened a few weeks later, when the [Israeli] brigades
entered Gaza, and there were already fewer uninvolved people [i.e. civilians] in
the northern areas.” According to this source, even some minors were marked by
Lavender as targets for bombing. “Normally, operatives are over the age of 17,
but that was not a condition.”

Lavender and systems like Where’s Daddy? were thus combined with deadly effect,
killing entire families, sources said. By adding a name from the
Lavender-generated lists to the Where’s Daddy? home tracking system, A.
explained, the marked person would be placed under ongoing surveillance, and
could be attacked as soon as they set foot in their home, collapsing the house
on everyone inside.

“Let’s say you calculate [that there is one] Hamas [operative] plus 10
[civilians in the house],” A. said. “Usually, these 10 will be women and
children. So absurdly, it turns out that most of the people you killed were
women and children.”


STEP 3: CHOOSING A WEAPON


‘WE USUALLY CARRIED OUT THE ATTACKS WITH “DUMB BOMBS”’

Once Lavender has marked a target for assassination, army personnel have
verified that they are male, and tracking software has located the target in
their home, the next stage is picking the munition with which to bomb them.

In December 2023, CNN reported that according to U.S. intelligence estimates,
about 45 percent of the munitions used by the Israeli air force in Gaza were
“dumb” bombs, which are known to cause more collateral damage than guided bombs.
In response to the CNN report, an army spokesperson quoted in the article said:
“As a military committed to international law and a moral code of conduct, we
are devoting vast resources to minimizing harm to the civilians that Hamas has
forced into the role of human shields. Our war is against Hamas, not against the
people of Gaza.”

Three intelligence sources, however, told +972 and Local Call that junior
operatives marked by Lavender were assassinated only with dumb bombs, in the
interest of saving more expensive armaments. The implication, one source
explained, was that the army would not strike a junior target if they lived in a
high-rise building, because the army did not want to spend a more precise and
expensive “floor bomb” (with more limited collateral effect) to kill him. But if
a junior target lived in a building with only a few floors, the army was
authorized to kill him and everyone in the building with a dumb bomb.

“It was like that with all the junior targets,” testified C., who used various
automated programs in the current war. “The only question was, is it possible to
attack the building in terms of collateral damage? Because we usually carried
out the attacks with dumb bombs, and that meant literally destroying the whole
house on top of its occupants. But even if an attack is averted, you don’t care
— you immediately move on to the next target. Because of the system, the targets
never end. You have another 36,000 waiting.”


STEP 4: AUTHORIZING CIVILIAN CASUALTIES


‘WE ATTACKED ALMOST WITHOUT CONSIDERING COLLATERAL DAMAGE’

One source said that when attacking junior operatives, including those marked by
AI systems like Lavender, the number of civilians they were allowed to kill
alongside each target was fixed during the initial weeks of the war at up to 20.
Another source claimed the fixed number was up to 15. These “collateral damage
degrees,” as the military calls them, were applied broadly to all suspected
junior militants, the sources said, regardless of their rank, military
importance, and age, and with no specific case-by-case examination to weigh the
military advantage of assassinating them against the expected harm to
civilians. 

According to A., who was an officer in a target operation room in the current
war, the army’s international law department has never before given such
“sweeping approval” for such a high collateral damage degree. “It’s not just
that you can kill any person who is a Hamas soldier, which is clearly permitted
and legitimate in terms of international law,” A. said. “But they directly tell
you: ‘You are allowed to kill them along with many civilians.’ 

“Every person who wore a Hamas uniform in the past year or two could be bombed
with 20 [civilians killed as] collateral damage, even without special
permission,” A. continued. “In practice, the principle of proportionality did
not exist.”

According to A., this was the policy for most of the time that he served. Only
later did the military lower the collateral damage degree. “In this calculation,
it could also be 20 children for a junior operative … It really wasn’t like that
in the past,” A. explained. Asked about the security rationale behind this
policy, A. replied: “Lethality.”

The predetermined and fixed collateral damage degree helped accelerate the mass
creation of targets using the Lavender machine, sources said, because it saved
time. B. claimed that the number of civilians they were permitted to kill in the
first week of the war per suspected junior militant marked by AI was fifteen,
but that this number “went up and down” over time. 

“At first we attacked almost without considering collateral damage,” B. said of
the first week after October 7. “In practice, you didn’t really count people [in
each house that is bombed], because you couldn’t really tell if they’re at home
or not. After a week, restrictions on collateral damage began. The number
dropped [from 15] to five, which made it really difficult for us to attack,
because if the whole family was home, we couldn’t bomb it. Then they raised the
number again.”


‘WE KNEW WE WOULD KILL OVER 100 CIVILIANS’

Sources told +972 and Local Call that now, partly due to American pressure, the
Israeli army is no longer mass-generating junior human targets for bombing in
civilian homes. The fact that most homes in the Gaza Strip were already
destroyed or damaged, and almost the entire population has been displaced, also
impaired the army’s ability to rely on intelligence databases and automated
house-locating programs. 

E. claimed that the massive bombardment of junior militants took place only in
the first week or two of the war, and then was stopped mainly so as not to waste
bombs. “There is a munitions economy,” E. said. “They were always afraid that
there would be [a war] in the northern arena [with Hezbollah in Lebanon]. They
don’t attack these kinds of [junior] people at all anymore.” 

However, airstrikes against senior ranking Hamas commanders are still ongoing,
and sources said that for these attacks, the military is authorizing the killing
of “hundreds” of civilians per target — an official policy for which there is no
historical precedent in Israel, or even in recent U.S. military operations.

“In the bombing of the commander of the Shuja’iya Battalion, we knew that we
would kill over 100 civilians,” B. recalled of a Dec. 2 bombing that the IDF
Spokesperson said was aimed at assassinating Wisam Farhat. “For me,
psychologically, it was unusual. Over 100 civilians — it crosses some red line.”

Amjad Al-Sheikh, a young Palestinian from Gaza, said many of his family members
were killed in that bombing. A resident of Shuja’iya, east of Gaza City, he was
at a local supermarket that day when he heard five blasts that shattered the
glass windows. 

“I ran to my family’s house, but there were no buildings there anymore,”
Al-Sheikh told +972 and Local Call. “The street was filled with screams and
smoke. Entire residential blocks turned to mountains of rubble and deep pits.
People began to search in the cement, using their hands, and so did I, looking
for signs of my family’s house.” 

Al-Sheikh’s wife and baby daughter survived — protected from the rubble by a
closet that fell on top of them — but he found 11 other members of his family,
among them his sisters, brothers, and their young children, dead under the
rubble. According to the human rights group B’Tselem, the bombing that day
destroyed dozens of buildings, killed dozens of people, and buried hundreds
under the ruins of their homes.


‘ENTIRE FAMILIES WERE KILLED’

Intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call they took part in even deadlier
strikes. In order to assassinate Ayman Nofal, the commander of Hamas’ Central
Gaza Brigade, a source said the army authorized the killing of approximately 300
civilians, destroying several buildings in airstrikes on Al-Bureij refugee camp
on Oct. 17, based on an imprecise pinpointing of Nofal. Satellite footage
and videos from the scene show the destruction of several large multi-storey
apartment buildings.

“Between 16 to 18 houses were wiped out in the attack,” Amro Al-Khatib, a
resident of the camp, told +972 and Local Call. “We couldn’t tell one apartment
from the other — they all got mixed up in the rubble, and we found human body
parts everywhere.”

In the aftermath, Al-Khatib recalled around 50 dead bodies being pulled out of
the rubble, and around 200 people wounded, many of them gravely. But that was
just the first day. The camp’s residents spent five days pulling the dead and
injured out, he said.

Nael Al-Bahisi, a paramedic, was one of the first on the scene. He counted
between 50-70 casualties on that first day. “At a certain moment, we understood
the target of the strike was Hamas commander Ayman Nofal,” he told +972 and
Local Call. “They killed him, and also many people who didn’t know he was there.
Entire families with children were killed.”

Another intelligence source told +972 and Local Call that the army destroyed a
high-rise building in Rafah in mid-December, killing “dozens of civilians,” in
order to try to kill Mohammed Shabaneh, the commander of Hamas’ Rafah Brigade
(it is not clear whether or not he was killed in the attack). Often, the source
said, the senior commanders hide in tunnels that pass under civilian buildings,
and therefore the choice to assassinate them with an airstrike necessarily kills
civilians.

“Most of those injured were children,” said Wael Al-Sir, 55, who witnessed the
large-scale strike believed by some Gazans to have been the assassination
attempt. He told +972 and Local Call that the bombing on Dec. 20 destroyed an
“entire residential block” and killed at least 10 children.

“There was a completely permissive policy regarding the casualties of [bombing]
operations — so permissive that in my opinion it had an element of revenge,” D.,
an intelligence source, claimed. “The core of this was the assassinations of
senior [Hamas and PIJ commanders] for whom they were willing to kill hundreds of
civilians. We had a calculation: how many for a brigade commander, how many for
a battalion commander, and so on.”

“There were regulations, but they were just very lenient,” said E., another
intelligence source. “We’ve killed people with collateral damage in the high
double-digits, if not low triple-digits. These are things that haven’t happened
before.”

Such a high rate of “collateral damage” is exceptional not only compared to what
the Israeli army previously deemed acceptable, but also compared to the wars
waged by the United States in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan. 

General Peter Gersten, Deputy Commander for Operations and Intelligence in the
operation to fight ISIS in Iraq and Syria, told a U.S. defense magazine in 2021
that an attack with collateral damage of 15 civilians deviated from procedure;
to carry it out, he had to obtain special permission from the head of the U.S.
Central Command, General Lloyd Austin, who is now Secretary of Defense. 

“With Osama Bin Laden, you’d have an NCV [Non-combatant Casualty Value] of 30,
but if you had a low-level commander, his NCV was typically zero,” Gersten said.
“We ran zero for the longest time.”


‘WE WERE TOLD: “WHATEVER YOU CAN, BOMB”’

All the sources interviewed for this investigation said that Hamas’ massacres on
October 7 and kidnapping of hostages greatly influenced the army’s fire policy
and collateral damage degrees. “At first, the atmosphere was painful and
vindictive,” said B., who was drafted into the army immediately after October 7,
and served in a target operation room. “The rules were very lenient. They took
down four buildings when they knew the target was in one of them. It was crazy.

“There was a dissonance: on the one hand, people here were frustrated that we
were not attacking enough,” B. continued. “On the other hand, you see at the end
of the day that another thousand Gazans have died, most of them civilians.”

“There was hysteria in the professional ranks,” said D., who was also drafted
immediately after October 7. “They had no idea how to react at all. The only
thing they knew to do was to just start bombing like madmen to try to dismantle
Hamas’ capabilities.”

D. stressed that they were not explicitly told that the army’s goal was
“revenge,” but expressed that “as soon as every target connected to Hamas
becomes legitimate, and with almost any collateral damage being approved, it is
clear to you that thousands of people are going to be killed. Even if officially
every target is connected to Hamas, when the policy is so permissive, it loses
all meaning.”

A. also used the word “revenge” to describe the atmosphere inside the army after
October 7. “No one thought about what to do afterward, when the war is over, or
how it will be possible to live in Gaza and what they will do with it,” A. said.
“We were told: now we have to fuck up Hamas, no matter what the cost. Whatever
you can, you bomb.”

B., the senior intelligence source, said that in retrospect, he believes this
“disproportionate” policy of killing Palestinians in Gaza also endangers
Israelis, and that this was one of the reasons he decided to be interviewed.

“In the short term, we are safer, because we hurt Hamas. But I think we’re less
secure in the long run. I see how all the bereaved families in Gaza — which is
nearly everyone — will raise the motivation for [people to join] Hamas 10 years
down the line. And it will be much easier for [Hamas] to recruit them.”

In a statement to +972 and Local Call, the Israeli army denied much of what the
sources told us, claiming that “each target is examined individually, while an
individual assessment is made of the military advantage and collateral damage
expected from the attack … The IDF does not carry out attacks when the
collateral damage expected from the attack is excessive in relation to the
military advantage.”


STEP 5: CALCULATING COLLATERAL DAMAGE


‘THE MODEL WAS NOT CONNECTED TO REALITY’

According to the intelligence sources, the Israeli army’s calculation of the
number of civilians expected to be killed in each house alongside a target — a
procedure examined in a previous investigation by +972 and Local Call — was
conducted with the help of automatic and inaccurate tools. In previous wars,
intelligence personnel would spend a lot of time verifying how many people were
in a house that was set to be bombed, with the number of civilians liable to be
killed listed as part of a “target file.” After October 7, however, this
thorough verification was largely abandoned in favor of automation. 

In October, The New York Times reported on a system operated from a special base
in southern Israel, which collects information from mobile phones in the Gaza
Strip and provided the military with a live estimate of the number of
Palestinians who fled the northern Gaza Strip southward. Brig. General Udi Ben
Muha told the Times that “It’s not a 100 percent perfect system — but it gives
you the information you need to make a decision.” The system operates according
to colors: red marks areas where there are many people, and green and yellow
mark areas that have been relatively cleared of residents. 

The sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call described a similar system for
calculating collateral damage, which was used to decide whether to bomb a
building in Gaza. They said that the software calculated the number of civilians
residing in each home before the war — by assessing the size of the building and
reviewing its list of residents — and then reduced those numbers by the
proportion of residents who supposedly evacuated the neighborhood. 

To illustrate, if the army estimated that half of a neighborhood’s residents had
left, the program would count a house that usually had 10 residents as a house
containing five people. To save time, the sources said, the army did not surveil
the homes to check how many people were actually living there, as it did in
previous operations, to find out if the program’s estimate was indeed accurate.

“This model was not connected to reality,” claimed one source. “There was no
connection between those who were in the home now, during the war, and those who
were listed as living there prior to the war. [On one occasion] we bombed a
house without knowing that there were several families inside, hiding
together.” 

The source said that although the army knew that such errors could occur, this
imprecise model was adopted nonetheless, because it was faster. As such, the
source said, “the collateral damage calculation was completely automatic and
statistical” — even producing figures that were not whole numbers.


STEP 6: BOMBING A FAMILY HOME


‘YOU KILLED A FAMILY FOR NO REASON’

The sources who spoke to +972 and Local Call explained that there was sometimes
a substantial gap between the moment that tracking systems like Where’s Daddy?
alerted an officer that a target had entered their house, and the bombing itself
— leading to the killing of whole families even without hitting the army’s
target. “It happened to me many times that we attacked a house, but the person
wasn’t even home,” one source said. “The result is that you killed a family for
no reason.”

Three intelligence sources told +972 and Local Call that they had witnessed an
incident in which the Israeli army bombed a family’s private home, and it later
turned out that the intended target of the assassination was not even inside the
house, since no further verification was conducted in real time.

“Sometimes [the target] was at home earlier, and then at night he went to sleep
somewhere else, say underground, and you didn’t know about it,” one of the
sources said. “There are times when you double-check the location, and there are
times when you just say, ‘Okay, he was in the house in the last few hours, so
you can just bomb.’” 

Another source described a similar incident that affected him and made him want
to be interviewed for this investigation. “We understood that the target was
home at 8 p.m. In the end, the air force bombed the house at 3 a.m. Then we
found out [in that span of time] he had managed to move himself to another house
with his family. There were two other families with children in the building we
bombed.”

In previous wars in Gaza, after the assassination of human targets, Israeli
intelligence would carry out bomb damage assessment (BDA) procedures — a routine
post-strike check to see if the senior commander was killed and how many
civilians were killed along with him. As revealed in a previous +972 and Local
Call investigation, this involved listening in to phone calls of relatives who
lost their loved ones. In the current war, however, at least in relation to
junior militants marked using AI, sources say this procedure was abolished in
order to save time. The sources said they did not know how many civilians were
actually killed in each strike, and for the low-ranking suspected Hamas and PIJ
operatives marked by AI, they did not even know whether the target himself was
killed.

……………………….

Source

| Tagged gaza, hamas, israel, middle-east, palestine


CHINA IN THE YEAR OF THE DRAGON AND BEYOND – BY RICHARD SOLOMON – 2 APRIL 2024

Posted on April 3, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 2,600 WORDS • 

As the US Anglo-Zionist empire ramps up its war against China, an ancient
archetype makes its cyclical appearance to offer guidance through “interesting
times.” As per a brief Google search, the “Year of the Dragon” represents power,
nobility, luck, and success. Up until now, China has demonstrated incredible
humility and restraint in response to the outrageous insults and provocations of
the US neocon government. Goodbye “Year of the Rabbit,” time for China to “show
its pimp hand.”* (*Am. slang- display one’s power.)

First, warmest Year of the Dragon wishes to Emperor President Xi- Earthly
Representative of the Tao, Monarch Butterfly Princess Meng Wanzhou, and the
people of China.

Second, some readers might accuse me of betraying my “country” by siding with
China. Nonsense. The US republic and its Constitution no longer exist. Both were
subsumed by the US Anglo-Zionist Empire, a confederation of financial cartels,
multinational corporations, oligarchs, the Military Industrial Complex, the Deep
State, and the Zionist Lobby. Like all end-stage pathologically corrupt empires,
reform is a lunatic’s dream. The best hope for its subjects is to avoid drowning
in the sinking behemoth’s vortex. Perhaps the weary survivors who find space on
lifeboats or cling to floating wreckage can regroup to form a beautiful
ideological-ethno state republic that embraces win-win cooperation as primary
global influencer China torchlights humanity’s path to Star Trek Kardashev Level
II Civilization.

China’s position has always been- “don’t start none, won’t be none.”* (*A
self-defense postulate that advocates conflict avoidance yet acknowledges the
right to hit back when attacked). Based on the actions of the US and its
vassals, China needs to prepare for continued escalations of aggression. To take
creative license with a Socrates attributed saying- “Know thy enemy.”

The Anglo-Zionist war trident contains three sharp points- “extreme war,”
“conventional war,” and “economic war.” Sometimes the trident’s prong
applications overlap and merge. An example of an overlap-merge application is
cyberwarfare.

“Extreme war” primarily entails nuclear and biological warfare. It is extreme
because its applications hold the potential to spread beyond the battlefield to
take down human civilization.

America uses nuclear weapons as a threat deterrent. In this case, “threat” is a
relative term. The US dollar should not say, “In God We Trust,” but rather “In
Nukes We Trust,” because its nuclear and military arsenal keep the dollar afloat
via dollar hegemony enforcement. As the insanity and idiocy associated with
dying empire intensifies and the dollar slips, expect dangerous acts of
desperation, e.g. use of tactical battlefield mini-nukes, biological weapon
attacks.

As to the US nuclear threat, from my viewpoint, the correct deterrent for China
is what I call the “skin in the game”* approach.” (*when the policies or actions
of an individual or entity expose them to the same risk or loss as everyone
else). The West’s 1% and rootless .01% ruling classes are parasitic leeches and
more importantly, cowards. While they may condemn millions or billions to death
with little regard, they will do anything to cling to their wretched earthly
existences. Chinese intelligence must locate all their bunkers and underground
cities and make it known that in the event of nuclear war, China will
relentlessly and repeatedly strike their high strata-class rat holes with the
strongest bunker-busting nukes available.

With biological war, while an appropriate response is warranted, unless it comes
down to a case of revenge killing your enemy before dying, I advise against
biological tit-for-tat. Biological weapons can mutate and go global. Barring
accidental or insane rogue scientist release, the US is limited in the lethality
of its bio-attacks, as super-powerful pathogens could easily turn on their
creators. If Chinese intelligence confirms that COVID-19 was a bio-attack, which
I suspect it has, then China should publically announce its findings. It’s the
“Year of the Dragon.” Expose the motherfuckers.* (*Someone who copulates with
their mother or a generic term for a person(s). In this case, both meanings
could apply.)

I won’t dwell on “conventional war” strategy because China wins.

Regarding “economic war.” Wall Street outsourced US manufacturing to China to
turn America into a usury-based F.I.R.E. (finance, insurance, real estate)
economy that sells debt, with the expectation that China would buy that debt and
let Wall Street insiders manage China’s economy. This economic model was known
as “Chimerica.” While China initially benefited from the arrangement, it
rejected the part where a rootless Wall Street class takes over China’s
5000-year-old civilization after they suck the US drier than a mummy’s 陰戶.

US economic numbers are built on fraud. The wildly inflated $65,000 hospital
emergency room bill counts toward American GDP. The US stock market stays afloat
through Federal Reserve intravenous feeding, stock buybacks, and other forms of
corporate welfare and chicanery. Military Industrial Complex profits rely on the
captive printing press treasuries of the US and its vassals. It’s a giant scam
bubble waiting for the inevitable pin. BRICS is a good start to withstanding the
“pop” and also offers an alternative to US economic bullying, debt slavery, and
asset seizure. Although, from my viewpoint, China’s best defense is autarky that
coexists with global trade.

China’s BRI is a mind-blowing accomplishment. However, as any sandcastle can
attest, it’s easier to destroy than create. America’s pretty good at kicking
down sandcastles.

The CIA stymied Germany’s energy flow with the destruction of the Nord Stream 2
pipeline. If the homemade missiles of Houthi freedom fighters can disrupt a
major shipping route, imagine what the subs and destroyers of the US or its
vassals can achieve. Global infrastructure projects are susceptible to sabotage
or attack from CIA-funded terrorist groups. In the event of a major trade
shutdown, China must be able to provide all life requirements to its population.
I believe it can do that. The weak link is energy. China’s Artificial Sun cold
fusion reactor offers a possible solution. I recommend China invest the same
ratio of manpower, money, and brain-battery into cold fusion reactors as the US
put into its WW2 Manhattan Project. Post-US Empire collapse, Chinese space
tankers can fill their hulls from the liquid methane sea of Titan, Saturn’s
moon. The current Petroleum Civilization model is unsustainable and is
destroying the ecosystems that sustain life on Earth.

Just like China transformed Marxist economics into “socialism with Chinese
characteristics,” when the right time comes, I recommend the same evolutionary
approach toward globalization. From an energy conservation standpoint, it is
illogical for a nation to grow a bunch of carrots for a cost of one dollar and
then ship them around the world to buy back the same carrots for three dollars.
Or export the carrots only to buy another country’s carrots. While globalization
has profited China, at some point it will create negative blowback if the
system’s internal defects are not addressed and corrected. Nigeria can produce
its own food and textiles. What it cannot do, at least at this juncture, is
build a high-speed rail system. Neither can the US.

For decades Hollywood (US cinema/music) conquered the world’s hearts and minds.
To quote George Orwell- “All art is propaganda.” One reason the American Empire
is dying is because Hollywood can no longer make good movies. They can’t sell
the dream. China needs to fill that entertainment void. The shortcut path is
simple replication of the movies/music currently mass-produced by Western
entertainment corporations using AI/machine learning programs. The longer, but
from my viewpoint, more fruitful path, is for China to set up an institute to
study American (and Western) cultural entertainment (cinema, music, novels) from
the years 1945-1999. While the institute’s technicians will wade through much
detritus, they’ll also discover gems that can birth beautiful children.

Outside of religious conflict, spirituality is seldom discussed in the
geopolitical arena. Mistake. During the Cold War, the Rothschild-Rockefeller
bank cartel set up a system whereby a nationalist revolutionary leader had to
choose either colonialist resource-theft capitalism or atheistic materialistic*
Marxism. (*materialism not as in capitalist hyper-consumerism, but rather the
Marxist belief that humans are biological machines devoid of divine spark, and
can be programmed and managed in a purely mechanical capacity). The opposing
capitalist and Marxist programs worked as balancing forces within the context of
international finance’s world domination program, maintaining the status quo of
banker rule. Chairman Mao chose Marxism, which history shows was the correct
choice. If he had chosen colonialist resource theft capitalism, an independent
Chinese nation-state would not exist today.

Once China broke the chains of Western imperialism it was free to chart its own
course, and subsequently transformed Marxism into “socialism with Chinese
characteristics” by filtering out the negative elements of Marxism while
incorporating pragmatic aspects of capitalism. The atheistic component of
Marxism put it at odds with China’s ancient spiritual technologies- Taoism,
Buddhism, luck attraction, Chi theory, etc. STEM disciplines answer many things,
but can’t sufficiently respond to: “What is this?” and “What is beyond this?”
During the CPC’s atheist phase, some spiritual seekers became estranged from the
government and that dissatisfaction was capitalized on by the CIA who partnered
with disenfranchised religious groups for nefarious purposes. I believe the rift
between China and most of these religious groups is repairable. Rapprochement
would deal a painful blow to Western intelligence agencies. Better to convert an
enemy than fight him.

Just like China transmogrified economic theory, I believe it can do the same
thing with spiritual theory. Working in win-win cooperation with spiritual
organizations from around the world, I envision China spearheading the
development of spiritual technology compatible with Kardashev Level II
Civilization. In the yin-yang circle, the science and spirituality compartments
coexist in harmonious balance. May the Tao be with you.

In keeping with the Year of the Dragon, I need to address the unbearable arrest
and detention of Monarch Butterfly Princess and Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou. So what
if Huawei did business with Iran? Why does the US get to dictate who a sovereign
Chinese company transacts with? This US-Canadian false-arrest action insulted
not just Meng Wanzhou, but the entire Chinese nation. Either the perpetrators
issue a full apology or when the light turns green, don’t stop until it’s red.

Do you think the sociopathic and blackmailed Western CEO actors propped up by
international bankers and managed by Deep State technocrats will ever speak on
behalf of the frog, dolphin, and owl? Huawei with Meng Wanzhou’s influence holds
the potential to build the blueprint for the technological-ecological
harmonization advocated by scientist Buckminster Fuller in his book, “Operating
Manual for Spaceship Earth.”

Wait a minute. Are you in love with her? Do you plan on showing up at Princess
Wanzhou’s door with a bouquet of pretty flowers? Ha ha ha. Pathetic clown. She
doesn’t know you exist. I’m actually embarrassed for you.

Hold on. Confession time friend. I’m a pathetic clown too. Is it so terrible to
close one’s eyes for a moment to imagine what can never be?



As seen with the Moscow concert hall attack and CIA disruption operations in
Maidan-Ukraine, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang- Western intelligence agencies love
terrorism and color revolution. While China avoids terror-targeting civilians (a
wise policy) and interfering in the domestic affairs of other nations (perhaps
some revision), each provocation must receive the appropriate response. No more
humiliation.

It stands to reason that CIA-Mossad will repeat a 9/11-style false flag to push
the US public into anti-China war mode. China’s public relations and media teams
must be ready to offer swift denial. On a global level, this will prove
effective. However, due to hyper-capitalist irrational racism components in
America’s founding and the universal mob-think outlined in Gustave Le Bon’s
“Psychology of Crowds,” in a post-false flag environment, US Chinese ethnics
(and mistaken identity Asians) would be at risk. During WW2 the US government
threw US Japanese ethnics into concentration camps while the greedy mob grabbed
their assets for pennies on the dollar. To address this possibility, I recommend
China build an underground railroad* (US antebellum secret networks that helped
Black slaves escape North) or assist in the creation of a warrior-monk based
“Monarch Butterfly Princess Holy Order of the Tao.”

What of Taiwan? It’s the “Year of the Dragon.” Go as far as you can go China.
Perhaps all the way.

And now a word for Dragon-skeptics.

Some claim that China is already under the control of the Rothschild-Rockefeller
bank cartel (or planet owners) and East vs West is WEF kabuki theater. I
disagree for the following reasons:

1- Techno-feudalism requires not only the cultural destruction of its subjects,
but also their genetic alteration/destruction. All human DNA is considered the
property of the owners and can therefore be used as a resource commodity and
control mechanism. Under WEF protocol, China’s leaders would have to be willing
to destroy their people’s 5000-year-old culture and DNA. I don’t see that
happening. While some of China’s technological innovations play into state
security (legit action, given CIA history), the tech is primarily used to
improve the lives of China’s citizens- the exact opposite of US policy.

2- In its 5000-year history, China never pursued a policy of military invasion
or conquest outside of its security/territorial sphere. China built a wall to
keep the barbarians out.

3- China’s engagement with foreign nations is of a transactional nature. Unlike
the West, they’ve never displayed a proclivity for stealing the DNA, culture,
politics, assets, bodies, or souls of the people they do business with.

4- During the COVID-19 pandemic, China offered its citizens traditional
vaccines. Although certain CPC officials (they always reveal themselves) pushed
for Pfizer mRNA shipments and domestic mRNA vax production, the CPC as a whole
rejected the mRNA pressure tactics of the US political class. While you may feel
the CPC overreacted with the lockdowns, keep in mind that they faced an
unprecedented bio-attack. For future occurrences, I recommend zinc, vitamin C &
D, and the 5000-year-old Traditional Chinese Medicine cabinet.

5- For those who believe this is all a perfectly choreographed show, what harm
is there in supporting China? NWO is already a fait accompli. If that’s the
case, kick back with a bottle of Patrón and Mossberg 12 gauge, and wait for the
AI killer drones to arrive.

From my viewpoint, China remains the primary bulwark against the US
Anglo-Zionist Empire aggressors and their global financial mafia handlers. Given
the terrible power of the international bankers, Emperor President Xi must
juggle a complex mishmash of neutrals, allies, and adversaries to navigate China
to victory, which by extension means human species survival. Based on my
observation, he has upheld the basic tenets of Tao. Until I see evidence to the
contrary, like Petula Clark sang in her version- “I will follow him.”



I look forward to watching China’s evolutionary path to national-actualization.
As per Oswald Spengler, the “West” is done. Western genius took the world from
horse and wagon to modern industrial society. While many amazing creations came
from that, so did much suffering and death. If Western philosophy incorporates
the principles of karmic law to form yin-yang balance and Europe joins China and
Russia in a true Eurasian bloc, I believe Western rejuvenation and positive
reintegration into the global family remain possible.

Prepare for takeoff China. Like Far East Movement said, “Now I’m feeling so fly.
Like a G6.”



Fly Dragon, fly.

……………………………….

Source

| Tagged china, economy, politics, taiwan, xi-jinping


CORPORATE PROFITEERING DESTROYED THE BALTIMORE BRIDGE – BY SONALI KOLHATKAR – 1
APRIL 2024

Posted on April 2, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

The collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore has sent shock waves
throughout the United States. The bridge was not built to withstand a direct hit
from a container ship as large as the Dali, which brought down the structure
within minutes after its engine failed and it became an uncontrollable force
drifting toward the bridge.

The incident is a symbol of how unfettered capitalism has resulted in safety
concerns becoming secondary to profits.

The Dali, operated by shipping giant Maersk, was carrying more than 800 tons of
corrosive and flammable materials. Transportation secretary Pete Buttigieg
likened the 95,000-ton ship to an aircraft carrier and the New York
Times explained that “When the bridge was built, cargo ships were not the size
they are today.” In fact, such ships have grown steadily in size over the past
few decades. One economist told the Times that shipping companies “did what they
thought was most efficient for themselves—make the ships big—and they didn’t pay
much attention at all to the rest of the world.” This in turn has forced nations
to expand waterways to accommodate the behemoths, often at the expense of the
public.

Some 90 percent of all traded goods that are shipped from one part of the world
to the other are transported by water. As corporate appetites for profits have
increased, so has globalized trade. And, safety concerns have taken a back seat,
as per an investigation published by Jacobin.

In 2023, the U.S. Department of Labor investigated a complaint against Maersk
and concluded that the company had violated the Seaman’s Protection Act by
retaliating against a whistleblower employee. At stake was the fact that, as per
the Labor Department, “Reporting Policy requires seamen to report safety
concerns to the company and allow it time to abate the conditions before
reporting to the [U.S. Coast Guard] or other regulatory agencies.” In other
words, Maersk, which is one of the world’s top shipping companies, tried to
protect itself from government regulators.

A similar scenario of compromising safety in service of profits has unfolded at
Boeing, one of the world’s top airplane manufacturers. After an Alaska Airlines
flight in January 2024 was forced to make an emergency landing when the Boeing
737 Max plane lost a panel mid-flight, the New York Times published a bizarrely
headlined story: “Boeing Faces Tricky Balance Between Safety and Financial
Performance.” The story points out a conundrum for Boeing’s executives: “Should
they emphasize safety or financial performance?”

The Times explained that, for years the company “put too much emphasis on
increasing profits and enriching shareholders with dividends and share buybacks,
and not enough on investing in engineering and safety.”

It’s worth stating the obvious: An unsafe aircraft is not an aircraft, it’s a
death trap. And yet, within a capitalist framework, everything boils down to a
cost-benefit analysis. If the cost of safety for companies like Boeing or Maersk
outweighs the financial benefits, it’s simply not worth it for executives and
shareholders. While the Alaska Airlines flight thankfully did not result in any
deaths this time, hundreds of people on board 737s in 2018 and 2019were not so
lucky. Workers at Boeing factories in Washington and South Carolina where
aircraft are assembled are required to work at breakneck speed and compromise on
safety in the interest of churning out planes as fast as possible.

Who pays the price for such corporate hubris? Vulnerable workers and the public.
In the case of the Baltimore bridge accident, all 22 workers on board the Dali
were of Indian origin and their quick thinking in notifying authorities that the
ship lost power helped ensure that casualties were minimized. As of this
writing, they remain trapped on board the ship with one worker having
been treated at a hospital for minor injuries. [Ship’s Master appears to be from
Ukraine.]

Meanwhile, the six people who are presumed dead and two who were rescued from
the frigid waters were all immigrant workers from Mexico and Central America,
working on the bridge as part of a construction crew.

These are the same sort of people who suffer racist attacks and ridicule from
white supremacist forces in the U.S. A right-wing outlet posted a virulently
racist cartoon of the Dali’s crew on social media. And only weeks earlier,
Georgia’s unhinged ultraconservative Congressional representative Marjorie
Taylor Greene heckled President Joe Biden during his State of the Union address
about a white woman who “was killed by an illegal,” in an attempt to whip up
anti-immigrant frenzy. [Nursing student kidnapped, beaten, raped, stabbed to
death by repeat criminal released by authorities and able to gleefully terrorize
US women. ]

Greene appeared utterly unconcerned about the fact that construction workers in
the U.S. hail disproportionately from Latin American immigrant communities and
many die from work-related injuries. According to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, in 2022, “Foreign-born Hispanic or Latino workers accounted for 63.5
percent (792) of total Hispanic or Latino worker fatalities (1,248).”

Taxpayers also pay the price for corporate profiteering at the expense of
safety. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is apparently footing the bill for the
massive cleanup operation from the Baltimore bridge accident. And, President
Biden announced that the federal government would “pay the entire cost of
reconstructing that bridge.” Meanwhile, Grace Ocean Private, the Singapore-based
company that owns the Dali, is expected to invoke a centuries-old maritime law
to limit its liability—the same law that the owners of the RMS Titanic used to
limit theirs.

In the case of Boeing, the state of Washington in 2013 gave the company
the largest ever tax break in the state’s history in exchange for housing its
factory and spurring the creation of jobs. The cost to taxpayers was nearly $9
billion. And, because Washington’s governor failed to make job retention a
condition for the massive tax break, Boeing then had it both ways when it cut
its labor costs by slashing about 15 percent of its workforce in the state a few
years later. Washington eventually eliminated the tax break but Boeing still
reaps tens of millions of dollars in other state-level incentives tied to
aerospace manufacturing.

It’s critically important to contextualize accidents that are the result of
corporations putting profits over safety and people. These incidents are not
isolated or unpredictable. They are the cost of doing business—a cost that the
rest of us pay for in money and lives.

| Tagged aviation, baltimore, boeing, business, news


GAZA: A GENOCIDE FORETOLD – BY CHRIS HEDGES – 31 MARCH 2024

Posted on April 1, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 1,600 WORDS • 



The genocide in Gaza is the final stage of a process begun by Israel decades
ago. Anyone who did not see this coming blinded themselves to the character and
ultimate goals of the apartheid state.

There are no surprises in Gaza. Every horrifying act of Israel’s genocide has
been telegraphed in advance. It has been for decades. The dispossession of
Palestinians of their land is the beating heart of Israel’s settler colonial
project. This dispossession has had dramatic historical moments — 1948 and 1967
— when huge parts of historic Palestine were seized and hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians were ethnically cleansed. Dispossession has also occurred in
increments — the slow-motion theft of land and steady ethnic cleansing in the
West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

The incursion on Oct. 7 into Israel by Hamas and other resistance groups, which
left 1,154 Israelis, tourists and migrant workers dead and saw about 240 people
taken hostage, gave Israel the pretext for what it has long craved — the total
erasure of Palestinians.

Israel has razed 77 percent of healthcare facilities in Gaza, 68 percent of
telecommunication infrastructure, nearly all municipal and governmental
buildings, commercial, industrial and agricultural centers, almost half of all
roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential
buildings — the bombing of the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City on Oct. 25, killed 101
people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds — and
obliterated refugee camps. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on Oct.
25 killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured 280. Israel
has damaged or destroyed Gaza’s universities, all of which are now closed, and
60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries. It has
also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, including 208 mosques, churches, and
Gaza’s Central Archives that held 150 years of historical records and documents.

Israel’s warplanes, missiles, drones, tanks, artillery shells and naval guns
daily pulverize Gaza — which is only 20 miles long and five miles wide — in a
scorched earth campaign unlike anything seen since the war in Vietnam. It has
dropped 25,000 tons of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — on Gaza,
many targets selected by Artificial Intelligence. It drops unguided munitions
(“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on refugee camps and densely
packed urban centers as well as the so-called “safe zones” — 42 percent of
Palestinians killed have been in these “safe zones” where they were instructed
by Israel to flee. Over 1.7 million Palestinians have been displaced from their
homes, forced to find refuge in overcrowded UNRWA shelters, hospital corridors
and courtyards, schools, tents or the open air in south Gaza, often living next
to fetid pools of raw sewage.

Israel has killed at least 32,705 Palestinians in Gaza, including 13,000
children and 9,000 women. This means Israel is slaughtering as many as 187
people a day including 75 children. It has killed 136 journalists, many, if not
most of them deliberately targeted. It has killed 340 doctors, nurses and other
health workers — four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel. These numbers do
not begin to reflect the actual death toll since only those dead registered in
morgues and hospitals, most of which no longer function, are counted. The death
toll, when those who are missing are counted, is well over 40,000.

Doctors are forced to amputate limbs without anesthetic. Those with severe
medical conditions — cancer, diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease — have died
from lack of treatment or will die soon. Over a hundred women give birth every
day, with little to no medical care. Miscarriages are up by 300 percent. Over 90
percent of the Palestinians in Gaza suffer from severe food insecurity with
people eating animal feed and grass. Children are dying of starvation.
Palestinian writers, academics, scientists and their family members have been
tracked and assassinated. Over 75,000 Palestinians have been wounded, many of
whom will be crippled for life.

“Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and
children,” writes Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of
human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967, in her report
issued on March 25. “Israel failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent, i.e.
adult males, were active Hamas combatants — a necessary condition for them to be
lawfully targeted. By early-December, Israel’s security advisors claimed the
killing of ‘7,000 terrorists’ in a stage of the campaign when less than 5,000
adult males in total had been identified among the casualties, thus implying
that all adult males killed were ‘terrorists.’”

Israel plays linguistic tricks to deny anyone in Gaza the status of civilians
and any building – including mosques, hospitals and schools – protected status.
Palestinians are all branded as responsible for the attack on Oct. 7 or written
off as human shields for Hamas. All structures are considered legitimate targets
by Israel because they are allegedly Hamas command centers or said to harbor
Hamas fighters.

These accusations, Albanese writes, are a “pretext” used to justify “the killing
of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping
pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.”

In scale we have not seen an assault on the Palestinians of this magnitude, but
all these measures – the killing of civlians, dispossession of land, arbitrary
detention, torture, disappearances, closures imposed on Palestinians towns and
villages, house demolitions, revoking residence permits, deportation,
destruction of the infrastructure that maintains civil society, military
occupation, dehumanizing language, theft of natural resources, especially
aquifers — have long defined Israel’s campaign to eradicate Palestinians.

The occupation and genocide would not be possible without the U.S. which gives
Israel $3.8 billion in annual military assistance and is now sending another
$2.5 billion in bombs, including 1,800 MK84 2,000-pound bombs, 500 MK82
500-pound bombs and fighter jets to Israel. This, too, is our genocide.

The genocide in Gaza is the culmination of a process. It is not an act.
The genocide is the predictable denouement of Israel’s settler colonial project.
It is coded within the DNA of the Israeli apartheid state. It is where Israel
had to end up.

Zionist leaders are open about their goals.

Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant, after Oct. 7, announced that Gaza
would receive “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel.” Israeli Minister of
Foreign Affairs Israel Katz said: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical
switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened.” Avi Dichter, the
Minister of Agriculture, referred to Israel’s military assault as “the Gaza
Nakba,” referencing the Nakba, or “catastrophe”, which between 1947 and
1949, drove 750,000 Palestinians from their land and saw thousands massacred by
Zionist militias. Likud member of the Israeli Knesset Revital Gottlieb posted on
her social media account: “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without
distinction!!…Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for
mercy!” Not to be outdone, Minister of Heritage Amichai Eliyahu supported using
nuclear weapons on Gaza as “one of the possibilities.”

The message from the Israeli leadership is unequivocal. Annihilate the
Palestinians the same way we annihilated Native Americans, the Australians
annihilated the First Nations peoples, the Germans annihilated the Herero in
Namibia, the Turks annihilated Armenians and the Nazis annihilated the Jews.

The specifics are different. The process is the same.

We cannot plead ignorance. We know what happened to the Palestinians. We know
what is happening to the Palestinians. We know what will happen to the
Palestinians.

But it is easier to pretend. Pretend Israel will allow in humanitarian aid.
Pretend there will be a ceasefire. Pretend Palestinians will return to their
destroyed homes in Gaza. Pretend Gaza will be rebuilt. Pretend the Palestinian
Authority will administer Gaza. Pretend there will be a two-state solution.
Pretend there is no genocide.

The genocide, which the U.S. is funding and sustaining with weapons shipments,
says something not only about Israel, but about us, about Western civilization,
about who we are as a people, where we came from and what defines us. It says
that all our vaunted morality and respect for human rights is a lie. It says
that people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable, do not
count. It says their hopes, dreams, dignity and aspirations for freedom are
worthless. It says we will ensure global domination through racialized violence.

This lie — that Western civilization is predicated on “values” such as respect
for human rights and the rule of law — is one the Palestinians, and all those in
the Global South, as well as Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans have
known for centuries. But, with the Gaza genocide live streamed, this lie is
impossible to sustain.

We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we are Israel, infected with white
supremacy and intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power
to obliterate others with our industrial weapons. Remember The New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman telling Charlie Rose on the eve of the war in Iraq
that American soldiers should go house to house from Basra to Baghdad and say to
Iraqis “suck on this?” That is the real credo of the U.S. empire.

The world outside of the industrialized fortresses in the Global North is
acutely aware that the fate of the Palestinians is their fate. As climate change
imperils survival, as resources become scarce, as migration becomes an
imperative for millions, as agricultural yields decline, as costal areas are
flooded, as droughts and wild fires proliferate, as states fail, as armed
resistance movements rise to battle their oppressors along with their proxies,
genocide will not be an anomaly. It will be the norm. The earth’s vulnerable and
poor, those Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” will be the next
Palestinians.

…………………….

(Republished from Scheerpost)

| Tagged gaza, human-rights, israel, middle-east, palestine


ISRAEL’S QUEST FOR A PALESTINIAN-FREE PALESTINE CONTINUES WITH US SUPPORT – BY
PHILIP GIRALDI – 29 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 30, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

US support enables Netanyahu to ignore international pressure

Israel’s plan to expand into an Eretz or “Greater” state incorporating large
chunks of its neighbors’ land starts with eliminating the pre-1948 inhabitants
of a place once known as Palestine. That nearly all of those who think of
themselves as Palestinians must be killed or otherwise removed is perhaps
reduced to an aphorism, like “Israel has a right to defend itself,” to absolve
the Israeli state and its rampaging army of any guilt in the process. Indeed,
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s ability to avoid any serious consequences
for his behavior is remarkable, and it generates further atrocities that might
have been unimaginable when the fighting in Gaza started back in October. Al
Jazeera has reported how Netanyahu is now pushing ahead to formalize what has
been referred to as the “colonial project,” whereby “the appropriation of all
Palestinian Lands will follow on… the outright exclusion of the Palestinian
people from their homeland.” Bibi said in a speech to supporters that “These are
the basic lines of the national government headed by me: The Jewish people have
an exclusive and unquestionable right to all areas of the Land of Israel. The
government will promote and develop settlement in all parts of the Land of
Israel — in the Galilee, the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

Journalist Patrick Lawrence, writing at Consortium News, recently described how
“Israel’s savagery in its determination to exterminate the Palestinians of Gaza
— and we had better brace for what is next on the West Bank of the Jordan —
marks a turn for all of humanity. In its descent into depravity the Zionist
state drags the West altogether down with it.” Indeed, and the United States of
America is the foremost great power to be reduced to the status of a
wholly-owned subsidiary of the Jewish state, unable to advance its own interests
when confronted by the juggernaut of the so-called Israel Lobby and associated
Jewish and Zionist-Christian organizations that have corrupted and controlled
American foreign as well as select domestic policies.

Witness what has occurred in the last several weeks when the international
community has rallied to end the slaughter and deliberate starvation of largely
defenseless Gazan civilians. First came a United Nations Security Council move
by the United States, which introduced a resolution calling for, but not
demanding, an immediate though possibly temporary cease fire in Gaza. When the
resolution came up for a vote it was vetoed by Russia and China. There were
several problems with the text as it inevitably sought to give Israel
considerable flexibility in managing the situation. It included an admonition
that the effort to secure a ceasefire must be “in connection with the release
of all remaining hostages,” which is an Israeli demand with the willingness of
Israel to participate at all very much dependent on the hostage issue. The
resolution allowed the fighting to continue and it put control of the entry and
distribution of urgently needed relief supplies under the ”security” management
of the Israeli army. Then came a Russian and Chinese resolution, approved by all
members of the council but the US which “abstained.” The US immediately declared
the resolution to be “non-binding” and while the document was meant to permit a
ceasefire through the end of Ramadan, it has yet to be enacted by Israel which
continues to block food and medicine relief shipments and has focused its latest
attacks on the few remaining hospitals, killing hundreds more Gazans. Even
though the resolution demanded action on the ceasefire and access to relief
supplies Israel has ignored it and so has Washington. As only the United States
can compel Israel to change course the fact that it continues to fund Israel and
provide it with secret shipments of planeloads weapons, without which Netanyahu
would be unable to continue his war, speaks for itself in terms of who is
controlling whom.

And don’t be fooled by President Joe Biden’s alleged pressure on Netanyahu to
“protect civilians” even as Bibi draws up plans with his war cabinet to invade
Gaza’s southernmost Rafah Region, where 1.5 million Palestinians have sought
refuge and are now confronted by imminent death with no way out. Biden is
responding to opinion polls in the US that indicate that more than half of
Americans are opposed to what Israel is doing in Gaza and the percentage is
steadily growing, so he is pretending to have humanitarian impulses and a
conscience, neither of which is true, in a cynical effort to support his
possible reelection.

To be sure both the White House and Congress, supported by the Jewish dominated
media, are totally in Netanyahu’s pocket, something which he has admitted to
publicly more than once, saying that the United States is “easily moved” by
someone like him. But if one really needed proof positive about who is in charge
in the US-Israel relationship, one need only look at the recent omnibus federal
government budget bill of $1.2 trillion. Activist Pascal Lottaz has taken the
time to go through the complete 1,012 page document detailing where the money
goes and discusses his findings in a 9 minute podcast on YouTube. Lottaz has
confirmed both the immediate cash payment of $3.8 billion in “tribute money” to
Israel plus the already reported blocking of any federal government funding of
United Nation Relief and Works Agency for Gaza (UNRWA) for at least a year. As
UNRWA is the key humanitarian aid agency, the latter is a prohibition completely
inconsistent with Biden’s expressed desire to confront the “surging”
humanitarian aid crisis for the Gazans who are facing starvation in the context
of an active genocide. The prohibition is in spite of the continuing lack of
evidence to substantiate Israel’s claims of “terrorism support” leveled against
the UN agency and despite the famine conditions already present in Gaza. In his
review of the document, Lottaz has also discovered those and other specific
benefits that involve Israel in 10 sections of the bill.

The bill also seeks to protect Israel from accountability under existing or new
international law and to limit Palestinian efforts to resist or defend
themselves. It requires any organization receiving US funding to show that it is
actively taking steps “to combat anti-Israel bias” and it prohibits any funding
to support Palestinian statehood unless it is shown that a list of specified
conditions are met including satisfactory “cooperation with Israeli security
organizations.” It prohibits any funding to the Palestinian Authority if
Palestine is granted statehood status by the UN or any UN agency without
Israel’s consent. It oddly prohibits any security support to the West Bank or
Gaza unless it is shown that satisfactory steps are being taken by the
Palestinian Authority to “end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and degrading
treatment of detainees.” It should be noted that the Palestinians, not Israel,
are required to end abuse of detainees even though it is Israel that routinely
engages in those practices. The detailed sections of the bill expanding on what
is blocked or prohibited are as follows:

 1.  The bill forbids any US funding of the UN International Commission of
     Inquiry investigation into Israel’s unlawful occupation of Palestinian
     territory: Sec. 7848(C)(2) None of the funds appropriated by this Act may
     be made available for the United Nations International Commission of
     Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem,
     and Israel.
 2.  The bill defunds the UN Human Rights Council unless the organization drops
     all inquiry into human rights violations by Israel: Sec. 7048(b)(2)(c)
     UNITED NATIONS HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL. (1) None of the funds appropriated by
     this Act may be made available in support of the United Nations Human
     Rights Council unless the Secretary of State determines and reports to the
     appropriate congressional committees that participation in the Council is
     important to the national interest of the United States and that such
     Council is taking significant steps to remove Israel as a permanent agenda
     item and ensure integrity in the election of members to such Council.
 3.  The bill requires any international organization, department, or agency
     receiving US funding to show that it is taking “credible steps to combat
     anti-Israel bias”: SEC. 7048. (a) TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY. Not
     later than 120 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary
     of State shall report to the Committees on Appropriations whether each
     organization, department, or agency receiving a contribution from funds
     appropriated by this Act under the headings ‘‘Contributions to
     International Organizations’’ and ‘‘International Organizations and
     Programs’’:
 4.  The bill prohibits funding of any support to Palestinian Statehood except
     under US State Department confirmation that its government meets specified
     conditions including that is is “cooperating with appropriate Israeli and
     other appropriate security organizations.”
 5.  The bill prohibits any support to the Palestinian Broadcasting
     Corporation: SEC. 7038. None of the funds appropriated or otherwise made
     available by this Act may be used to provide equipment, technical support,
     consulting services, or any other form of assistance to the Palestinian
     Broadcasting Corporation.
 6.  The bill prohibits any funding to security assistance to the West Bank or
     Gaza unless the State Department reports on “the steps being taken by the
     Palestinian Authority to “end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and
     degrading treatment of detainees”: 7039(C)(2) SECURITY ASSISTANCE AND
     REPORTING REQUIREMENT. Notwithstanding any other provision of law, none of
     the funds made available by this or prior appropriations Acts, including
     funds made available by transfer, may be made available for obligation for
     security assistance for the West Bank and Gaza until the Secretary of State
     reports to the Committees on Appropriations on the steps being taken by the
     Palestinian Authority to end torture and other cruel, inhuman, and
     degrading treatment of detainees, including by bringing to justice members
     of Palestinian security forces who commit such crimes.
 7.  The bill prohibits any funding of the Palestinian Authority if Palestine
     achieves recognition of statehood by the UN or any UN agency without
     Israel’s agreement or if the Palestinians initiate an investigation of
     Israel in the International Criminal Court: Sec.7401(k)(2)(A)(i) None of
     the funds appropriated under the heading ‘‘Economic Support Fund’’ in this
     Act may be made available for assistance for the Palestinian Authority, if
     after the date of enactment of this Act the Palestinians obtain the same
     standing as member states or full membership as a state in the United
     Nations or any specialized agency thereof outside an agreement negotiated
     between Israel and the Palestinians or the Palestinians initiate an
     International Criminal Court (ICC) judicially authorized investigation, or
     actively support such an investigation, that subjects Israeli nationals to
     an investigation for alleged crimes against Palestinians.
 8.  The bill extends existing loan guarantees to Israel under the Emergency
     Wartime Supplemental Appropriations Act through September 30, 2029: SEC.
     7034(k)(6).
 9.  The bill grants $3.3 billion in “Foreign Military Financing” to Israel, to
     be disbursed within 30 days: 7401(d) ISRAEL.—Of the funds appropriated by
     this Act under the heading ‘‘Foreign Military Financing Program’’, not less
     than $3,300,000,000 shall be available for grants only for Israel which
     shall be disbursed within 30 days of enactment of this Act: Provided, That
     to the extent that the Government of Israel requests that funds be used for
     such purposes, grants made available for Israel under this heading shall,
     as agreed by the United States and Israel, be available for advanced
     weapons systems, of which not less than $725,300,000 shall be available for
     the procurement in Israel of defense articles and defense services,
     including research and development.
 10. The bill authorizes half a billion dollars in military aid to Israel for
     “Iron Dome” and other missile defense systems: SEC. 8072. Of the amounts
     appropriated in this Act under the headings ‘‘Procurement, Defense-Wide’’
     and ‘‘Research, Development, Test and Evaluation, Defense-Wide,
     $500,000,000 shall be for the Israeli Cooperative Programs.

The bill has passed through Congress, is written into law, and is on its way for
Joe Biden’s signature. In other words, the US is willingly complicit in
thousands of deaths already plus the impending deaths of some tens of thousands
more innocent people. It is funding Israel’s war of extermination against the
Palestinians and is opposed to any attempts by the Palestinians to either defend
themselves or their interests as a people. It is shameful and our government is
behaving monstrously, controlled by a foreign power that has thoroughly
corrupted it. And the rot is spreading throughout our political system to
include the death of our own right to freedom of speech. Only last week Governor
Greg Abbott of Texas boasted of new legislation to stamp out alleged
antisemitism and as criticism of Israel or the behavior of Jews is defined as
being antisemitic it is likely that students demonstrating against the Jewish
state and in support of Gaza will be expelled from universities and even
prosecuted. And it is also reported that the Israel Lobby in the US is busy
assembling a war chest of $100 million to fund the removal of politicians and
other public figures who are critical of Israel. This is serious stuff that will
affect all of us.

| Tagged human-rights, israel, middle-east, palestine, politics


RUSSIA PRISON – WALL STREET JOURNAL ACTIVIST/REPORTER GERSHKOVICH (POLITICO) 29
MARCH 2024

Posted on March 30, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


INSIDE THE WSJ’S ‘VERY INTENSE’ EFFORT TO FREE EVAN GERSHKOVICH

“Until he’s out, not enough has been done by anyone,” says WSJ publisher Almar
Latour.

POLITICO illustration/Photo by Getty Images

By RYAN LIZZA

03/29/2024 05:00 AM EDT

Ryan Lizza is a Playbook Co-Author and the Chief Washington Correspondent for
POLITICO

Ayear ago today Evan Gershkovich, a Wall Street Journal Moscow correspondent,
was meeting with a source at a steakhouse when FSB agents arrested him and
charged him with espionage, an allegation he and the Journal said was absurd.
The U.S. government agreed. In less than two weeks, the State Department
declared that Gershkovich was “wrongfully detained,” an official status that
commits the Biden administration to work for his release.

Almar Latour is the publisher of the Journal and the CEO of Dow Jones. One
responsibility he did not expect when he took this job in 2020 was assisting in
a hostage negotiation with Vladimir Putin. Latour has played a key role in the
legal and diplomatic effort to free Gershkovich. He has worked with the Biden
administration, foreign governments and through private channels to figure out
what exactly Putin wants to secure the 32-year-old journalist’s freedom.

I spoke with Latour on this week’s episode of Playbook Deep Dive to learn the
inside story of this effort. We discussed how the shadow of basketball star
Brittney Griner’s detainment in Russia is influencing talks to bring Evan home;
what Gershkovich’s detention means for Paul Whelan, the only other American
considered by the U.S. to be wrongfully detained in Russia.; why a Russian
hitman who is serving a life sentence in Germany for murder may be the key to
unlocking a deal with Putin; and how the 2024 election may affect Gershkovich’s
fate.

The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity with help from
Deep Dive Senior Producer Alex Keeney and Producer Kara
Tabor.https://player.simplecast.com/6ac87e9b-0698-43e8-9cb0-a38a78a562b8?dark=false 

What is the current status of the U.S. government’s efforts to bring Evan home
and how has this played out over the past year?

Without speaking for the administration in any form, I would characterize it as
a very intense effort. There are people dedicated to situations like these in
the State Department. The Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs is a
unit within the State Department that concentrates on cases like these, not
necessarily around press freedom, but around Americans who are wrongfully
detained.

There are many senior administration officials who have commented — the
president, of course, has commented on the case. There is just a lot of activity
from the White House and the State Department. What has been very impressive is
how people have coalesced around this cause and how so many people are giving it
their all.

That said, the outcome is sort of binary: He’s either free or he’s not. And so
if the question is, “Has enough been done?” Well, we’ll know that when he walks
free.

There are many senior administration officials who have commented — President
Joe Biden, of course, has commented on the case. | Carolyn Kaster/AP

One of the eye-opening pieces of reporting the Journal published this week was
about a complex prisoner swap to secure Evan’s freedom that involved both the
Russian and German governments. According to the Journal’s reporting, the
exchange involved Alexei Navalny before he died and a Russian assassin, Vadim
Krasikov, who is in prison in Germany. Can you tell us anything about what
happened there?



In the past year, there have been many forays into the realm of trying to free
Evan. And there are different channels for that. First, there is the publicity
around Evan that keeps him in the news and that helps with making sure that his
release is a priority with the administration.

Then, there’s the official diplomacy that takes place that, in my view, would
include signals that the president or the White House might send publicly. But
also, a lot that happens behind the scenes bilaterally [or] on a multilateral
basis.

And then there is what I would call “private diplomacy.” We have retained a law
firm that has, among its many specialties, hostage affairs. So [we’re] creating
additional channels to find a solution because you never know in cases like
these where the eventual solution is going to come from. And so it’s important
for us at the Wall Street Journal as an institution, but also, I think, for the
administration, to have all these paths work simultaneously.

If that sounds complicated, it is because it is. And I think some of the
reporting that you’ve read that I can’t comment on blow-by-blow reflects, at a
minimum, that these cases and potential solutions often happen in very muddled
terrain and in very blurry circumstances, where there just are a lot of
variables.

Obviously, you’re not going to say anything that would jeopardize Evan in any
way. But do you feel like the German government has been a good partner in this
effort? Do you feel like the German government has understood how important this
case is to the Biden administration? Or would you like them to do more?

We want everybody to do more until he’s out. Until he’s out, not enough has been
done by anyone, and that goes for all of us. But we’re confident that at some
point, he will be released.

I think on the specific Germany question, on this private diplomacy path, we
have met a lot of people from a lot of different countries. We have traveled
with Evan’s parents to different spots, including very publicly to Davos
recently where they had a chance to meet with world leaders. And so, without
commenting specifically on the Germans, we’ve had a chance for the parents to
meet with world leaders, or for our lawyers to meet with world leaders, in
addition to whatever the U.S. administration does on that front. And I think
wherever and whenever we’ve done that, when faced with the parents, I’ve seen
some senior figures on the world stage realize how much pain this causes for one
family.

In addition, I think there is a realization that this case reverberates beyond
one individual; that the wrongful incarceration of a journalist has wider
implications, very negative implications for press freedom. So I do think that
we’ve seen that awareness take hold with world leaders, in Western Europe, and
around the world, and certainly also in the U.S.

I wanted to ask you about one of the stranger parts of this effort, and that is
Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin, where he asked about releasing
Evan. What did you and the Journal learn from that exchange? Did Tucker reach
out to the Journal at all, or did he just raise Evan’s case to Putin on his own
initiative?

I can’t speak to whom Tucker may have reached out to or not. There was, I think,
a public awareness and certainly an awareness in this building that he was going
to have that interview. And I think, at least I was under the impression, that
the topic might come up. At least to me, there wasn’t a direct request or any
notification of that sort, nor were we seeking that per se. We were more focused
on Putin’s response.

What did you make of it?

It reinforced the notion that this was something very deliberate and that there
was some forethought; that there was no surprise to this question and the answer
didn’t seem so spontaneous.

Evan Gershkovich (right) is escorted from court in Moscow, Russia on Jan. 26,
2024. | Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP

He was weirdly honest about it, sort of like there was no B.S. about what was
really going on with Evan. Or am I reading that incorrectly?

“Honest” is not a word that I would use in a sentence containing “Vladimir
Putin.” I think you could see, at that moment, the transactional nature. So, it
was a naked portrayal of the motivation, in my view.





Did it spin things forward? Not that I can tell.

So in a weird way, did it give you a little bit more optimism like, “Okay, this
guy’s just looking for a deal, and we’ve got to find the deal that will satisfy
him.”

Hostage-taking, you know, works like this to begin with.

You knew that already.

This is the whole game, right? We take somebody and we want a ransom or a trade
or something in return.

So by this point, nobody on the Russian side is pretending that that’s not what
this is about?

I can’t speak to specifically what the Russians have said or not said, but what
I can say is that I would dismiss any sort of portrayal that this is anything
other than seeking a trade. It comes on the back of another trade that has been
made involving Brittney Griner. There’s very little that is truthful that comes
out of the Kremlin these days. So even quasi-frank comments have to be seen in
that transactional light.

Where were you when you learned that Evan had been arrested?

I was in South Africa. There was a period that preceded that moment where I got
a phone call from my head of HR and head of security saying that, “We may have
some difficult news and there might be a very difficult situation. A reporter in
Russia did not show up at their appointed time.”

And that was really a moment because we have, like many major news
organizations, a very strict security protocol where if you go out on something
sensitive or you find yourself in a danger zone, there’s a significant amount of
planning that happens. And there are appointed times when you check in; and
depending on the situation, there might be some tracking. But when somebody
doesn’t show up — which was the very first moment of this saga for me — that was
alarming.



Putin ‘ready to talk’ about release of US prisoner Evan GershkovichShare

And initially, I suppose you didn’t know why Evan had missed his check-in?

No. And you hope for the best, of course. But a little bit later, it became
clear that a second checkpoint had been missed. And Evan did not show up at his
apartment — this is some hours later — and so it went from a suspicion that
something had gone wrong to an ever-stronger suspicion that something had gone
wrong.



And there were also, at that point, some rumors that had reached me indirectly
that he might have been arrested. Some hours later, there was a confirmation of
some sort that that had happened. And then for me, the next morning, very early
morning on the East Coast, the FSB put out a statement.

The FSB statement was the first official word, right?

That was the first official word with context as to what this was and that
contained this espionage lie immediately. And when you hear in a hostage
situation that somebody has been taken, maybe at first your instinct is, “Let’s
address this in the quiet. Let’s have the conversations that we need to have
with the authorities in this case, maybe with an embassy or with the right
team.”

But this got tossed out into the open right away. There was never really a
chance to have that conversation, which is very different than some other cases.
But here I think it shows the deliberate nature of what has happened. It got
very deliberately pushed out into the world with a very clear message from the
Russian Federation.

Let me ask you about two quick things. One, were there signs of the
deteriorating situation for journalists in Russia? Was Evan picking up on that?
Was your newsroom?

And second, the story that the Journal published this past Wednesday was an
amazing piece of journalism, and I assume you’re very intimately aware of all
the details. One thing it says is that Putin was looking for a new pawn at this
point in time. And I’m just curious if that was something that was on anyone’s
radar back then or if it’s just something we all realized in hindsight.

When you read that somebody has been falsely accused of something, you
understand that there is some motivation to drive that, whether that is defaming
the Western press or something else altogether.

But I think, at that moment a year ago, we were institutionally aware that the
circumstances in Russia — and also in some other places around the world — were
just more difficult for reporters. And when people are sent out into the field,
it’s with their consent, with an elaborate discussion with security. And so we
had been monitoring it. Did we know that there was a methodical approach to
hostage-taking [by the Russian government] as it looks today? It’s easy to say
with hindsight. But the situation did not seem accidental.

Almar Latour has worked with the Biden administration, foreign governments and
through private channels to figure out what exactly President Vladimir Putin
wants to secure Gershkovich’s freedom. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

The other wrongfully detained American in the Russian system is Paul Whelan. How
much do the people like yourself, who are advocating on Evan’s behalf,
coordinate with your counterparts who are advocating on Paul Whelan’s behalf?

You know, first off, my heart goes out to Paul and Paul’s family and they’ve
been at this for way too long — five years. We want him to be released and we
think it’s incredibly important. Our task here is to focus on our colleague. The
government is focusing on a broader set of hostage situations. I do think that
with the spotlight that we’ve deliberately put on Evan, there’s been, over the
past year, a greater awareness of the hostage situations that exist in Russia
and even elsewhere. And so in that sense, the Evan situation, when we talk about
it implicitly, of course, pertains to Paul as well as to Alsu [Kurmasheva], who
recently got apprehended there for what seems like bogus reasons.

Sadly, the court recently extended Evan’s imprisonment by three more months.
What’s your reading of how the 2024 presidential campaign and political
situation in the United States may or may not play into these efforts to get
Evan back?

We have had bipartisan support for Evan’s release, and that has been very
consistent throughout.

I think the extension that was made clear this week — through June 30th — has
the air of sounding official, but all these things are really arbitrary and in
parallel with the official legal system, could be decided separately if the
Kremlin wanted to speed things up or slow things down.

So I mainly look at these extensions as the language of the Kremlin and whether
they have what they want or not. So this means that at least for the next few
months, theoretically, they don’t yet have what they want.

Gershkovich stands in a defendants’ cage at a hearing in Moscow on Sept. 19,
2023. | Dmitry Serebryakov/AP

What did you learn from previous efforts to get wrongfully detained Americans
out of Russia? For example, Brittney Griner, who was swapped for the notorious
arms dealer Viktor Bout?

So, a very different situation… But two decades ago, we did have a situation
that did not end well when [Wall Street Journal correspondent] Daniel Pearl was
taken hostage [in Pakistan]. And so there is an acute awareness institutionally
here that you have to take these situations incredibly seriously. I think that
was one lesson: that there’s no guarantee for the outcome necessarily, so you
have to give it your all.

And I think that led to a very speedy organization around this where we set up
various teams, a comms team, a legal team in the U.S., a legal team in Russia
and a lot of other different channels.

Want to read more stories like this? POLITICO Weekend delivers gripping reads,
smart analysis and a bit of high-minded fun every Friday. Sign up for the
newsletter.

On the Griner case, one conclusion was that putting a spotlight on a situation
like this helps. It helps with the prioritization. I think that has been a
dominant theme for the past year: to make sure that having that voice, having
that spotlight, helps this case. And then I think the transactional nature of
the Griner case — having a major arms dealer traded against a basketball player
of renown — that shows the crass nature of a situation like this.

So I think those lessons and a few other things quite quickly found their way
into our bloodstream as we tried to get organized around this.

I think having the realization that you need to stay in close contact with the
family, with the government, and bring to bear anyone you know who might
influence the situation — so bring in all your resources — those are all
lessons, at least in hindsight, that I think we picked up or we found out along
the way.

I want to ask you one last question, and that is to explain to listeners who
haven’t been following this case, one, why should they care about this? And two,
what can people do if they care about Evan and want to help?

This case is important because it pertains to one man’s freedom, and that
matters. Evan is a journalist and he was just doing his job. He was arrested for
doing his job. And when that can happen and nobody says anything about it, that
has a tremendous negative impact on society, on free press.

His arrest, in my view, was a direct attempt to suppress press freedom, to send
a signal that you are not safe as a journalist in Russia. If we let that go by
unnoticed, if we don’t say anything about it, if we don’t fight for Evan’s
release, that signals to Russia that this is okay behavior. That makes any
chance for reliable information to get to Russia even more difficult.

But I believe it can also be contagious. And that this may give other dictators,
strongmen, the idea that, “Hey, there’s another way to deal with press that you
don’t like,” and that is just by arresting them or by taking harsher measures.

And so what can you do about this? At first, I think, have this awareness and
follow the case. I think it does matter to talk about it to your friends, to
talk about press freedom to people you know, to talk to your elected officials
about it.

I often get this question like, does it really matter? But if you wear that
[Free Evan] pin, every little bit helps to support that thesis that free press
is a good thing and that society needs that more than ever. And so, in fighting
for Evan’s release, I think we can all make a statement for him, but also for
society at large.

…………………

Source

| Tagged evan-gershkovich, news, russia, world, world-news


MAY DAY 2024: FOR INTERNATIONAL WORKERS ACTION AGAINST THE GENOCIDAL U.S./ISRAEL
WAR ON GAZA!

Posted on March 29, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


ALL OUT IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE! (INTERNATIONALIST GROUP)


Labor activists of S.I. Cobas, the CALP (Autonomous Collective of Port Workers)
and other “rank-and-file” unions blockade the port of Genova, Italy on February
23-24, preventing loading/unloading of an Israeli Zim Line ship.  (Photo: S.I.
Cobas)

With the barbaric war on Gaza now in its sixth month, it is utterly clear that
this is an actual genocide, targeting the entire Palestinian Arab population of
what has been termed the world’s largest open-air prison. After over 40,000
killed,1 the destruction of more than half of all homes in the densely populated
enclave, the bombing of schools and universities and attacks on hospitals, now
more than one million people face the spectre of imminent starvation.2 It is
also clear that this is a joint U.S./Israeli war, as all the heavy bombs
and all the warplanes from which they are dropped are supplied by the Pentagon,
while Washington funnels billions in U.S. aid to Israel annually. Millions have
marched worldwide to denounce the slaughter and calling for a ceasefire, to no
avail. Every appeal to the Zionist/imperialist warmongers has come to naught.

What’s desperately needed is the mobilization of power that can bring the
slaughter to a halt, the power of the working class, in the United States and
around the world. This coming May 1, the workers day, should become a day of
militant international workers action – including strikes and labor-led mass
mobilization – to stop the genocidal U.S./Israel war on Gaza. It should be
followed up with labor action worldwide to shut down all flights and shipping to
and from Israel so long as the Zionist war on Gaza continues. Workers should
demand: stop the bombing, stop the massacres, Israeli military and settlers get
the hell out of Gaza and all the Occupied Territories NOW!


This is what genocide looks like. Residents of Gaza City gather at site of
destroyed building, March 2024  (Photo: Agence France-Presse)

Last October, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) in Gaza
and more than two dozen Palestinian unions and professional associations issued
an urgent appeal to labor internationally to refuse to build or transport arms
for and to Israel. In the U.S., over 200 union bodies have since passed
resolutions calling for a ceasefire – but with no action beyond joining “peace”
marches. In some cases, notably the AFL-CIO, these appeals are actually support
for Israel, denouncing Palestinians for starting the war, not demanding that
Israel get out of Gaza and calling for release of all Israeli hostages and
nothing about the over 9,000 Palestinians being held hostage in Israeli jails
(plus another 4,000 workers from Gaza who were in Israel when the war began and
are now being held in military camps).3

The League for the Fourth International and its U.S. section, the
Internationalist Group, have called from the outset to “Defend the Palestinians
Against U.S./Israel Genocidal War on Gaza!” (The Internationalist, 10 October
2023), “For Workers Action Against Zionist Terror” and “against the shipment of
arms to Israel and Ukraine,” where the U.S. and its NATO allies are waging an
imperialist proxy war against Russia. We have underlined that, so far, calls for
labor solidarity have been mainly on paper, and what port shutdowns there have
been were mostly called by community groups rather than the unions, as long-time
maritime labor activist Jack Heyman pointed out in his recent article
reiterating the call “Dock Workers: Block Military Cargo to Israel” (The
Internationalist, 15 February).

Motion calling for ILWU Local 10 to stop work on May 1 in solidarity with the
Palestinian people and against genocidal war on Gaza. 

Last week, Heyman and others put forward a resolution for International
Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 in the San Francisco Bay Area to
stop work on May Day, the international workers day, “calling for international
workers action in solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people, in opposition
to the genocidal Israel/U.S. war on Gaza and to stop the flow of arms to that
war.” The motion also urged the rest of the union and dock workers
internationally to join in taking May Day Palestinian solidarity actions.

Now the Palestinian General Federation of Labor, Gaza has issued a May Day
appeal to unions in the United States calling to do just that. The PGFTU
statement says frankly that “we have encountered shocking silence and neglect by
the international labor movement.” It spells this out:

> “The international labor movement … retreated to verbal positions without
> taking measures on the ground or pressuring the decision-makers to stop this
> war of extermination, limiting union activities to conferences and statements
> and not delving deeply into the need to guarantee humanitarian aid, or
> influencing international public opinion to expose the truth about Zionist
> crimes and the practices of the allied countries that continue to support
> Israel.”  

> (Click here or on image below for the full text of the PGFTU, Gaza appeal.)

In response to the PGFTU’s urgent appeal to unions and trade-unionists in the
U.S. and internationally “to be our voice and advocate inside and outside
America,” the League for the Fourth International urges labor militants around
the world to mobilize workers’ power in hard-hitting labor-led actions on May 1
in solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people against the genocidal
U.S./Israel war. Such actions can and should include not only focusing May Day
marches on Palestine solidarity and organizing workers aid to Gaza, but blocking
arms shipments and carrying out labor boycotts of flights and shipping to and
from Israel, and wherever possible, strike action and shutting down production.
Such actions should demand an immediate stop to the bombing, forced population
transfers and any restrictions on emergency aid to Gaza; an end to all aid to
Israel, and for Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza and all the Occupied
Territories.

In the U.S., it is crucial to fight for the workers and oppressed to break with
the Democrats, who are financing, advising, arming and jointly waging war on the
Palestinians in Gaza together with the Israeli government of hardline Zionists
and outright fascists; and to oust the class-collaborationist labor bureaucracy,
which for decades has chained the unions to the bosses’ parties. A prime example
of this is the leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), which in response to
clamor from the ranks, particularly in the Detroit area with its large Arab
American population, called for a ceasefire in Gaza, and then turned around and
endorsed “Genocide Joe” Biden for president! For their part, the Teamster tops
are currently flirting with Donald Trump, who said of the war in Gaza that he
would tell Israeli prime minister Netanyahu to “finish it up and do it quickly”
(Haaretz, 17 March).

The contours of effective solidarity action with the Palestinian people vary
from country to country. In Germany, labor action against the genocidal war must
necessarily oppose not only the ferociously pro-Zionist Social Democrat/Free
Democrat/Green government (which has banned many pro-Palestinian protests) and
the equally rabidly pro-Israel right-wing “opposition” but also the Left Party,
as all the parliamentary parties explicitly support “Israel’s right to
self-defense,” the formula justifying the mass murder in Gaza. In Italy, where
fascists lead a far-right-wing government, organizing effective labor solidarity
will require united action by the normally fractious “rank-and-file” unions and
bringing out key industrial sectors in a direct challenge to the “mainstream”
confederations, which despite talk of a ceasefire are solidly pro-Israel.

Everywhere, the opportunist left seeks to build a “broad antiwar movement,”
typically centered on calls for a ceasefire, in order to include dissident
liberal or “progressive” elements from the bourgeois and reformist parties, who
don’t necessarily oppose the war on Gaza but only its “excesses.” Rather than
such “popular-front” coalitions pushing impotent pressure politics, what’s
urgently needed is independent, militant class struggle against all the
capitalist and governing social-democratic parties, which are all cogs in the
imperialist system, and therefore, one way or another, complicit in the genocide
being carried out in Gaza. Classless appeals for “peace” are a diversion in the
face of implacable U.S. and Israeli mass murderers, who can only be stopped by
international socialist revolution.


Activists of Class Struggle Workers Portland (above at 11 November 2023
Palestine labor solidarity rally) call to defend Gaza, defeat U.S./Israel war on
Palestinians. Four Portland area unions have passed motions demanding an end to
Israeli bombing of Gaza, for Israel out of West Bank and Gaza and to end to U.S.
arming and funding. (Internationalist photo)

Highlighting the urgency of this independent class-struggle policy are
resolutions that have been passed by four unions – Iron Workers Local 29, IUPAT
(Painters) Local 10, IBEW (electrical workers) Local 48 and AFT (education)
Local 111 – in the Portland, Oregon area of the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Rather
than calling for a ceasefire, which would leave the Israeli in control of Gaza
and which plays into the hands of the Biden administration that is now toying
with the word, the resolutions, introduced by supporters of Class Struggle
Workers – Portland, call for labor action to stop the shipment of arms to
Israel, for “the immediate end to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, for Israel to vacate
Gaza and the West Bank, and to end all arming or funding to it now”
(click here or on reproductions below to read resolutions on the web site of
Class Struggle Workers – Portland).

Above all the fight to halt the genocidal U.S./Israel war against the
Palestinian people requires a political fight against the capitalist parties.
This was addressed by the Portland Painters, who in a 2016 resolution called to
break with all the bosses’ parties and build a class-struggle workers party. The
call in that resolution for the national union to repudiate its endorsement of
the Democratic presidential candidate should be a beacon to worker militants
today as unions in the U.S. join calls for a ceasefire in Gaza, and then endorse
war criminal Democrat Biden who is responsible for arming, financing and
directing the genocidal war.

August 2016 Resolution of International Union of Painters and
Allied Trades (IUPAT) Local 10 for a Class-Struggle Workers Party
(Excerpt)

“Whereas across the country, from Oakland to Baltimore, police under Democratic
mayors regularly murder black men and women with impunity, and

“Whereas the 2016 presidential election offers us the “choice” between a raving,
bigoted clown and a career representative of Wall Street, and …

“Whereas Democrats and Republicans are and have always been strike-breaking,
war-making parties of the bosses, and

“Whereas so long as the labor movement supports one or another party of the
bosses, we will be playing a losing game, therefore be it

“Resolved that IUPAT Local 10 does not support the Democrats, Republicans, or
any bosses’ parties or politicians, and

“Resolved that we call on the International Union to repudiate its endorsement
of Hillary Clinton for president, and

“Resolved that we call on the labor movement to break from the Democratic Party,
and build a class-struggle workers party.

The embattled Palestinian Arabs have been subjected to “ethnic cleansing” for
more than three-quarters of a century, following subjugation by the British
imperialists and the Ottoman Empire – and now to outright genocide by the
Zionist state of Israel and its U.S. patrons. It will take a revolution to put
an end to this oppression, a revolution that can only be successful by splitting
and exploding Israeli society from within. This requires intransigent,
internationalist class struggle, throughout the entire region. As the League for
the Fourth International has emphasized since the beginning of that war, and
long before that, the bottom line is that defenders of the oppressed and
opponents of imperialism must stand foursquare with the Palestinian people
against the Zionist oppressors and their state, and that the only solution that
promises a just and equitable future to the two peoples inhabiting this tiny
land is for an Arab-Hebrew Palestinian workers state, in a socialist federation
of the Middle East.

All out for militant international workers action on May Day in solidarity with
the Palestinian people against the genocidal U.S./Israel war! ■

(28 March 2024 NYC Protest Versus Biden Fundraiser)

…………………………

 1. 1. Includes 7,000+ missing under rubble of collapsed buildings. Euro-Med
    Monitor, Infographic, The Israeli Genocide in the Gaza Strip, 7 October 2023
    – 14 March 2024.
 2. 2. Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, Famine Review Committee:
    Gaza Strip, March 2024.
 3. 3. “9,077 ‘Security’ Inmates Are Held In Prisons Inside Israel,” HaMoked,
    March 2024.

Source

| Tagged gaza, human-rights, israel, news, palestine


NYC: INTERNATIONALIST GROUP JOINS HUNDREDS PROTESTING BIDEN – 28 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 29, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




THE CRUCIFIXION OF JULIAN ASSANGE – BY CHRIS HEDGES – 27 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 29, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | 1 Comment

• 1,400 WORDS • 





British courts for five years have dragged out Julian Assange’s show trial. He
continues to be denied due process as his physical and mental health
deteriorates. This is the point.

Prosecutors representing the United States, whether by design or incompetence,
refused — in the two-day hearing I attended in London in February — to provide
guarantees that Julian Assange would be afforded First Amendment rights and
would be spared the death penalty if extradited to the U.S.

The inability to give these assurances all but guaranteed that the High Court
— as it did on Tuesday — would allow Julian’s lawyers to appeal. Was this done
to stall for time so that Julian would not be extradited until after the U.S.
presidential election? Was it a delaying tactic to work out a plea deal?
Julian’s lawyers and U.S. prosecutors are discussing this possibility. Was it
careless legal work? Or was it to keep Julian locked in a high security prison
until he collapses mentally and physically?

If Julian is extradited, he will stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts
of the 1917 Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years, along with
another charge for “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” carrying an
additional five years.

The court will permit Julian to appeal minor technical points — his basic free
speech rights must be honored, he cannot be discriminated against on the basis
of his nationality and he cannot be under threat of the death penalty.

No new hearing will allow his lawyers to focus on the war crimes and corruption
that WikiLeaks exposed. No new hearing will permit Julian to mount a
public-interest defense. No new hearing will discuss the political persecution
of a publisher who has not committed a crime.

The court, by asking the U.S. for assurances that Julian would be granted First
Amendment rights in the U.S. courts and not be subject to the death penalty,
offered the U.S. an easy out — give the guarantees and the appeal is rejected.

It is hard to see how the U.S. can refuse the two-judge panel, composed of Dame
Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson, which issued on Tuesday
a 66-page judgment accompanied by a three-page court order and a four-page media
briefing.

The hearing in February was Julian’s last chance to request an appeal of the
extradition decision made in 2022 by the then British home secretary, Priti
Patel, and many of the rulings of District Judge Vanessa Baraitser in 2021.

If Julian is denied an appeal, he can request an emergency stay of execution
from the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) under Rule 39, which is given in
“exceptional circumstances” and “only where there is an imminent risk of
irreparable harm.” But it is possible the British court could order Julian’s
immediate extradition prior to a Rule 39 instruction, or decide to ignore a
request from the ECtHR to allow Julian to have his case heard there.

Julian has been engaged in a legal battle for 15 years. It began in 2010 when
WikiLeaks published classified military files from the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan — including footage showing a U.S. helicopter gunning
down civilians, including two Reuters journalists, in Baghdad.

Julian took refuge in the Embassy of Ecuador in London for seven years, fearing
extradition to the U.S. He was arrested in April 2019 by the Metropolitan
Police, who were permitted by the Embassy to enter and seize him. He has been
held for nearly five years in HM Prison Belmarsh, a high-security prison in
southeast London.

The case against Julian has made a mockery of the British justice system and
international law. While in the embassy, the Spanish security firm UC
Global provided video recordings of meetings between Julian and his lawyers to
the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege.

The Ecuadorian government — led by Lenin Moreno — violated international law by
rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permitting police into their embassy to
carry Julian into a waiting van. The courts have denied Julian’s status as a
legitimate journalist and publisher. The U.S. and Britain have ignored Article 4
of their Extradition Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses.
The key witness for the U.S., Sigurdur Thordarson — a convicted fraudster and
pedophile — admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian in
exchange for immunity for past crimes..

Julian, an Australian citizen, is being charged under the U.S. Espionage Act
although he did not engage in espionage and was not based in the U.S when he was
sent the leaked documents. The British courts are considering extradition,
despite the CIA’s plan to kidnap and assassinate Julian, plans that included a
potential shoot-out on the streets of London, with involvement by London’s
Metropolitan Police.

Julian has been held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial,
although his only technical violation of the law is breaching bail conditions
after he obtained asylum in the Embassy of Ecuador. This should only entail a
fine.

Finally, Julian did not, unlike Daniel Ellsberg, leak the documents. He
published documents leaked by U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning.

Three of the nine legal grounds were accepted by the judges as potential points
for appeal. The other six were denied. The two-judge panel also rejected the
request by Julian’s lawyers to present new evidence.

Julian’s legal team asked the court to introduce into the case the Yahoo! News
report that revealed, after the release of the documents known as Vault 7, that
the then-director of the CIA Mike Pompeo, considered assassinating Julian.
Julian’s lawyers also hoped to introduce a statement from Joshua Dratel, a U.S.
attorney, who said that Pompeo’s use of the terms “non-state hostile
intelligence service” and “enemy combatant” were phrases designed to give legal
cover for an assassination. The third piece of evidence Julian’s lawyers hoped
to introduce was a statement from a Spanish witness in the criminal proceedings
underway in Spain against UC Global.

The CIA is the engine behind Julian’s extradition. Vault 7 exposed hacking
tools that permit the CIA to access our phones, computers and televisions,
turning them — even when switched off — into monitoring and recording devices.
The extradition request does not include charges based on the release of the
Vault 7 files, but the U.S. indictment followed the release of the Vault 7
files.

Justice Sharp and Justice Johnson dismissed the report in Yahoo! News as
“another recitation of opinion by journalists on matters that were considered by
the judge.” They rejected the argument made by the defense that Julian’s
extradition would be in violation of Section 81 of the U.K. Extradition Act of
2003, which prohibits extraditions in cases where individuals are prosecuted for
their political opinions. The judges also dismissed the arguments made by
Julian’s attorneys that extradition would violate his protections under the
European Convention of Human Rights — the right to life, the prohibition of
inhuman and degrading treatment, the right to a free trial and protections
against punishment without law respectively.

The U.S. largely built its arguments from the affidavits of the U.S. prosecutor
Gordon D. Kromberg. Kromberg, an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District
of Virginia has stated that Julian, as a foreign national, is “not entitled to
protections under the First Amendment, at least as it concerns national defense
information.”

Ben Watson, King’s Counsel, who represented the U.K. government during the
two-day hearing in February, conceded that if Julian is found guilty under the
Espionage Act, he could receive a death penalty sentence.

The U.S. and the U.K Secretary of State were urged by the judges to offer the
British court assurances on these three points by April 16.

If the assurances are not provided, the appeal will proceed.

If the assurances are provided, lawyers for both sides have until April 30th to
make new written submissions to the court. At that point, the court will convene
again on May 20 to decide if the appeal can go forward.

The goals in this Dickensian nightmare remain unchanged. Erase Julian from the
public consciousness. Demonize him. Criminalize those who expose government
crimes. Use Julian’s slow motion crucifixion to warn journalists that no matter
their nationality, no matter where they live, they can be kidnapped and
extradited to the U.S. Drag out the judicial lynching for years until Julian,
already in a precarious physical and mental condition, disintegrates.

This ruling, like all of the rulings in this case, is not about justice. It is
about vengeance.

……………………….

(Republished from Scheerpost)

| Tagged politics, news, julian-assange, wikileaks, assange


US CONGRESS GOES BERSERK OVER TIKTOK – BY EVE OTTENBERG – 29 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 29, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Lots of people have been blamed for the frenzy to ban TikTok, from the CIA and
FBI, to the mainstream media, to political elites, to AIPAC, to competitors like
Facebook. But I blame Congress. They pulled the trigger. Now as we teeter on the
abyss of a Steve Mnuchin takeover of TikTok – a development, make no mistake,
that would be disastrous for everything from free speech to ownership of such a
platform by a capitalist super-predator, to intelligent, rational foreign
policy, to those who simply object to his let-them-eat-cake wife – we can thank
the intellectual heavyweights on capitol hill who thought it would be a dandy
idea to wade into a hopeless morass of hysteria and hokum and to extract from it
an absolute monster of congressionally regulated speech.

As Arnaud Bertrand noted on Twitter March 14,Ccongress is stealing TikTok
because it is “owned by the Chinese government.” He added: “It’s not, China only
has a 1 percent stake in the mother company.” To this, someone else tweeted:
“This is exactly how the Nazis forced Jewish owners of companies to sell to
German capitalists.” Or, as China’s foreign ministry succinctly summed it up:
“This is banditry.”

Whatever you want to call it, it’s bad. It sets a lousy financial and business
precedent at a moment jam-packed with lousy financial and business precedents –
for instance, the west looting Russia’s frozen assets to the tune of $300
billion, or previously making off with Afghanistan’s money, or earlier
Venezuela’s gold, or the U.S. blowing up the Nordstream pipeline to corner
Europe’s energy market. So now we gonna just straight up steal a company because
China owns one percent of it? Who in their right mind will do business with the
United States if this nonsense becomes law? I’ll tell you who: Other bandits.
And that means one stinking awful thing – ordinary Americans will get fleeced.
We’re already getting fleeced, but this just sets it in stone for the
foreseeable future.

One thing’s for sure: the youth vote ain’t gonna like this. And overall, there
are about 180 million TikTok users. So those people, young and less young, may
very well drop Biden like a hot potato come November. He doesn’t seem to think
so – how else to explain his eagerness to sign this offensive law? But I noticed
Trump came out against it. Remember he’s the one who, back in 2020, called for
banning TikTok. But unlike Biden, he figured out which way the wind is blowing,
and what it’s blowing from Congress is such a putrid stench that over 100
million voters may very well stampede in the other direction. (Trump may also be
trying to align with Jeff Yass, the billionaire stakeholder in TikTok, a
moneyman who owns much of another company that recently merged with Trump’s
Truth Social, thus possibly legally rescuing the former president by helping him
make bail.)

This idiotic House TikTok vote comes at a very bad time, too, as Beijing casts a
dour and doubtful eye over all parts of the Washington project. Indeed, a
Chinese defense representative stated March 16 that Beijing is “ready to
intervene,” should NATO or the U.S. attack Russia. NATO troops recently landed
south of Kiev in Cherkassy might want to keep that in mind, as might the
megageniuses who cooked up this nitwit scheme. Just as ominously, according to
Anti-War.com March 14, U.S. Army special forces soldiers are in Kinmen, “a group
of islands that are controlled by Taiwan but located just off the coast of
mainland China.” Some are just 2.5 miles from the Chinese city of Xiamen. “The
U.S. soldiers are also deployed in Penghu, a Taiwanese-controlled archipelago
about 30 miles west” of Taiwan, “and 70 miles east of mainland China.” That’s
not provocative, oh no, never!

Making matters worse, according to the Global Times March 21, the U.S. wants to
expand the AUKUS military alliance, “forming a mini-NATO in Asia.” And everyone
with a brain, and the Chinese have plenty, knows what that means. NATO on
Russia’s front porch, in Ukraine, started a big, horrible war. It will try to do
the same if mini-NATO expands to include Japan and Canada and muscles in on
China’s doorstep. Of course, Washington wants to corral the Philippines into it
too, and indeed anyone they can to enhance an aggressive posture that Beltway
bandits will no doubt insist, just as they did after the 2014 CIA neo-Nazi
putsch in Kiev, is purely “defensive.” It’s called creating the enemy from whose
much-hyped putative danger your weapons contractors can then get rich.

And that’s not all. Global Times reports March 14 that “the UK is now mulling
curbs on the number of Chinese nationals who can enter the UK on official
business and bypass normal visa checks…” The article notes that with an election
approaching, “Conservatives could resort to more hawkish China policies and
enhance their coordination with the U.S.” It quotes a Shanghai Academy of Global
Governance and Area Studies researcher to the effect that the UK has been
“hyping China espionage threats since 2023.” Another Chinese researcher cites
coordination between the UK and the U.S. on international affairs. This at a
time when no diplomat in their right mind wants to “coordinate” with the U.S. on
China. But rampant Western Sinophobia long ago ditched the concerns of mere
diplomacy.

Also on the bad news radar March 14, a Global Times headline: “Trilateral summit
suggests Manila intensifying collusion with U.S., Japan to further complicate S.
China Sea issues.” This report warns that the upcoming April summit could
destabilize a pelagic expanse already bristling with warships from multiple
nations. The three countries will discuss China’s growing “hegemonic
activities,” a descriptor Beijing vigorously denies, with a foreign ministry
spokesman arguing “that China’s activities in those waters fully comply with
domestic and international law.”

Well, good luck with that. If the U.S. is involved, so is the so-called
“rules-based order,” which means all bets are off, what Washington says goes and
if those imperial commands defy international law, tough luck. The Empire loves
is rules-based order, making up those rules as it goes along, and discarding
them when they’re no longer convenient. Oh, and the rest of the world better not
imitate Washington. Copycats not allowed. Only Beltway mandarins get to junk
these opaque rules when they get in the way.

Also alarming to Beijing is the recent replacement of Victoria “Fuck the EU”
Nuland as deputy secretary of state by China Hawk Kurt “Let Congress Critters
Swarm Taiwan” Campbell, famous for calling out Beijing’s “provocative” behavior.
In what context did he mention such provocations? Back on August 12, 2022, in a
statement where he turned a simple factual narrative into a pretzel to trash
Beijing. In short, then House speaker Nancy “My Husband’s Stock Trades Are His
Business” Pelosi had just jetted into Taiwan, something everyone knew, because
Beijing told them, crossed a very bright red line. Even Pelosi herself publicly
aired Pentagon worries that her jet might get shot down and thereafter was
careful to sneak into Taiwan in the dead of night, like someone who knew darn
well she was doing something she shouldn’t. Well, according to Campbell,
Pelosi’s little performance – against which everyone with an IQ above the double
digits warned and which utterly spoiled Sino-American relations for over a year
– was “a visit that is consistent with our One China Policy and is not
unprecedented.” So yes, China’s worried about this loose cannon.

There is some good news, however. The head of the House Select Committee on
(Bashing) China, Mike “The Chinese Are Coming” Gallagher, a rabid opponent of
the 5000-year-old civilization, announced his retirement in February. He’s even
leaving early, in April. This should hearten anti-war advocates everywhere, as
it will decrease congressional Sinophobic pugilism and the chances of military
fireworks erupting between two of the world’s three superpowers. Because we’re
all on the same page here – right? We don’t want to glow in the dark or starve
via nuclear winter. The five billion of us who would perish come Atomic
Armageddon, aka war between the U.S. and China, don’t want that. So anything
that blocks such a disaster is a good thing. Besides, it was a good bet
Gallagher would find very lucrative employment anyway at a K Street lobby shop
or in a right-wing think tank; then came news March 22 via Forbes that Gallagher
in fact snagged a comfortable berth at Palantir, a very defense and intelligence
connected tech company if ever there was one and one that has led the fight
against…dum, da, dum, dum, you got it – TikTok! And by an astonishing
coincidence, so did Gallagher while in the House! Golly gee, don’t his goals and
Palantir’s dovetail nicely and, evidently, remuneratively, for the congressman?

So in the end, no matter how much of a ruckus our congressional luminaries make
while in office, they usually manage a soft, cushy landing when they leave. A
win/win situation for everyone who counts, which excludes, of course, all
ordinary Americans and most of the rest of the world’s people. But we’re not
resentful. We’re just happy they condescend to let us live.

…………………….

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard
People. She can be reached at her website.

| Tagged china, taiwan, technology, united-states, xi-jinping


THE CIA DOES ‘SOULFUL WORK’ – BY EDWARD CURTIN – 27 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 27, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a spate of books and articles extolling
the word “soul” became the rage in the United States.  Soul became the chic
word.  It popped up everywhere.  Everything seemed to acquire soul – cars,
toasters, underwear, cats’ pajamas, assorted crap, kitsch, etc.  Soul sold
styles from boots to bras to bibelots from The New York Times to O Magazine.



The vogue in soul talk spread to every domain as everyone was commodified and
capital was financialized.  While political, economic, and ecological reality
spun out of regular people’s control and they felt unable to feel connected to a
religious tradition that cut through the materialistic and war miasma, they were
ravaged with a hunger to devour, to consume.  It was soul propaganda, highbrow
New Ageism at its finest, the religious equivalent of an old-fashioned Ralph
Lauren interior.  It was the era of consuming souls in a society that had become
a spiritual void.  At least for those who had become divorced from their bodies
and tradition at its best.  Fantasy started to rapidly replace reality.

The great popularizer of this new sense of soul and self (though no-self would
be more accurate) was Thomas Moore, the author of the best-selling book – Care
of the Soul, “a pathbreaking lifestyle handbook” and soon to be soul franchise
(The Soul of Sex, Soul Therapy, The Soul of Christmas, etc.)  His works replaced
the idea of an existential self with a precious, epicurean conception.  “You
have a soul, the tree in front of your house has a soul, but so too does the car
parked under the tree,” he said, adding that things “have as much personality
and independence as I do.”  Ah, soul!

Not soul as I once learned in Catholic school: the essence of human freedom and
consciousness in God united with the body.

Definitely not soul as the essence of a person bound by conscience to God and
other human beings.

Not soul as in “For what shall it profit a man if he should gain the whole world
and lose his soul.”

Not even soul as the dictionary defines it” “the immortal essence of an
individual life.”

Although I have seen this soul-talk used for decades now to sell all sorts of
bullshit and thought I couldn’t be surprised by any more usage, I just stumbled
on one that took my breath away.  I read in Life Undercover, a memoir by RFK,
Jr.’s presidential campaign manager, daughter-in-law, and former CIA spy under
nonofficial cover in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and North Africa,
Amaryllis Fox (Kennedy), that CIA work is “soulful work.”  I didn’t know this. 
I thought its job was to spy, kill, and foment chaos for its Wall St handlers
(with certain exceptions being some analysts who gather information).  I recall
former CIA Director Mike Pompeo saying, “I was the CIA director. We lied, we
cheated, we stole. It’s – it was like – we had entire training courses. It
reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”  Or as my friend Doug
Valentine, an expert on the CIA, puts it, the CIA is “Organized Crime,” not a
bunch of soul-force workers out to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.  He
writes:

CIA and military intelligence units now operate out of a global network of
bases, as well as secret jails and detention sites operated by complicit secret
police interrogators. Their strategic intelligence networks in any nation are
protected by corrupt warlords and politicians, the ‘friendly civilians’ who
supply the death squads that in fact are their private militias, funded largely
by drug smuggling and other criminal activities.

Yet Fox effusively thanks her CIA colleagues for their great work and for making
her the woman she has become.  “Your allegiance is to the flag, to the
Constitution, to some higher power, be that God or Love,” she writes in
gratitude.

For some reason, I don’t think the assassinated JFK or RFK would buy her love
talk; rather, they may quote another eloquent Irish-American, the playwright
Eugene O’Neill: “God damn you, stop shoving your rotten soul in my lap.”

The man Fox is trying to elect president of the U.S., Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,
also wrote a memoir – American Values – that revolves around an indictment of
the CIA for an endless series of crimes:  “What are we going to do about the
CIA?” he quotes his father saying to his aide Fred Dutton at the beginning of
JFK’s presidency, before both Kennedys had yet to be killed by the soulful CIA. 
Kennedy, Jr. writes:

Critics warned that the ‘tail’ of the covert operations branch would inevitably
wag the dog of intelligence gathering (espionage). And indeed , the clandestine
services quickly subsumed the CIA’s espionage function as the Agency’s
intelligence analysts increasingly provided justification for the CIA’s endless
interventions.

Fifty-six years later his campaign manager Fox Kennedy – you can’t make this
weirdness up – married to RFK, III, is touting the soulful work of the Agency. 
She replaced Dennis Kucinich, who was a strong a supporter of the Palestinians. 
Is Fox and RFK, Jr.’s relationship a matter of what the Boss says to Luke in the
iconic movie Cool Hand Luke – “What we got here is failure to communicate” – or
the kind of communication that takes place in elite circles behind closed doors?

Sometimes sick people utter truths that lead to sardonic assent.  They remind
you of history that is so shameful you cringe.  Fox and Pompeo also seem to live
in separate realities, their psyches twisted by some deep evil force for which
they both worked.

And here we are in another presidential election year.  When you think about
presidential politics, you have to laugh.  I like to laugh, so I think about
them from time to time.  It’s always a bad joke, but that’s why they are funny.
 It makes no difference whether the president is Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan,
George H. W. Bush, Clinton, Bush Jr., Obama, Trump, Biden, or anyone who tries
to square the oval office for their special sort of big change that never
comes.  Those who tell you with a straight face that the lesser of two (or more)
evils is better than nothing have not studied history.  They choose the evil of
two lessers and wash their hands.  They live on pipe dreams, as Eugene O’Neill
put it in his play The Iceman Cometh:

To hell with the truth! As the history of the world proves, the truth has no
bearing on anything. It’s irrelevant and immaterial, as the lawyers say. The lie
of a pipe dream is what gives life to the whole misbegotten mad lot of us, drunk
or sober.

I am reminded of advice I was given during the immoral and illegal Vietnam War
when I had decided to apply for a discharge from the Marines as a conscientious
objector.  But if you don’t go to the war, people said to me with straight
faces, some poor draftee will.  The military needs good people.  To which I
would often respond: Like the country needs good commanders-in-chief such as
Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.  It’s like what people say about buying a
lottery ticket when your odds are 1 in 500,000,000 – someone has to win.  Ha! 
Ha!  Never reject the system is always the message.

Contemplating U.S. history for the past fifty-five plus years confirms the
continuity of government policy for war and economic policies that enrich the
wealthy at the expense of the working class and massacre the innocent around the
world.  But we can pretend otherwise.  For an egregious recent example, the
three leading candidates in this year’s election – Biden, Trump, and RFK, Jr. –
all stand firmly behind the Israeli genocide in Gaza that any human being with a
soul would condemn.

That these men are controlled by the Israel Lobby is obvious, but we can pretend
otherwise.

That this is corruption is obvious, but we can pretend otherwise.

We can pretend and pretend and pretend all we want because we are living in a
pretend society.

What’s that old Rodney Dangerfield joke: the problem with happiness is that it
can’t buy you money?  Well, the problem with presidential politics is it can’t
buy you the truth, but if you do it right it can fetch you money, a lot of
corrupt money to help you rise to the pinnacle of a corrupt government.  For the
truth is that the CIA/NSA run U.S. foreign war policy and the presidents are
figureheads, actors in a society that lost all connection to reality on November
22, 1963.

Now, amid such a tense environment, it appears the C.I.A. has not only
green-lighted an actual invasion of the Russian Federation, but more than likely
was involved in its planning, preparation and execution.

Never in the history of the nuclear era has such danger of nuclear war been so
manifest.

That the American people have allowed their government to create the conditions
where foreign governments can determine their fate and the C.I.A. can carry out
a secret war which could trigger a nuclear conflict, eviscerates the notion of
democracy.

If this is soulful work, God help us.

Ask the 32,000 + dead Palestinians in Gaza whose voices cry out for justice
while the top presidential contenders cheer on the Israeli/U.S. slaughter.

“The terrible truth is,” writes Douglass Valentine, “that a Cult of Death rules
America and is hell-bent on world domination.”

And yes, presidential politics is a funny diversion from that reality.  Eugene
O’Neill could be humorous also.  He played the Iceman theme to perfection, the
Grim Reaper of two faces.

There was a tale circulating in the 1930s that a man came home and called
upstairs to his wife, “Has the iceman come yet?”  “No,” she replied, “but he’s
breathing hard.”

…………………….

Source

| Tagged books, cia, history, john-f-kennedy, politics


RFKJR FEAR OF THE JEWS AND THE JEWISH GOD OF TERROR – BY LAURENT GUYÉNOT – 25
MARCH 2024

Posted on March 27, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,900 WORDS • 

“It’s time for Jews to be feared!” declared Rabbi Shmuley recently. Jews having
failed to overcome anti-Semitism by trying to be loved, respected or admired,
must now make themselves feared. This is the new watchword.

The problem is, if Jews want to be feared, then they must also accept being
hated. “Fear of the Jews” can be translated, literally, as “Judeophobia” (from
the Greek phobos, to fear). To be feared, you must have the power to harm, and
you must prove it. So if Jews want to be feared in order to fight anti-Semitism,
then anti-Semitism has a bright future ahead.

This all doesn’t make much sense. But it’s very biblical. To my knowledge, the
Hebrew Bible does not recommend that Jews should strive to be loved by non-Jews.
On the contrary, Yahweh said to his people in Deuteronomy 2:25:

> “Today and henceforth, I shall fill the peoples under all heavens with fear
> and terror of you; whoever hears word of your approach will tremble and writhe
> in anguish because of you”

If Yahweh wants to spread terror among non-Jews, doesn’t that make him a
terrorist, or the god of terrorists? It does, and it makes Zionists good
Yahwists. In his 1951 memoir The Revolt, Menachem Begin bragged about “the
military victory at Deir Yassin,” because the news of this slaughter of 254
villagers (mostly unarmed men, women, and children) immediately led to the
“maddened, uncontrollable stampede of 635,000 Arabs. … The political and
economic significance of this development can hardly be
overestimated.”[1] Wasn’t Begin a worthy servant of his national god?

What Netanyahu is doing today is more than a hundred Deir Yassins. And the goal,
again, is not just to kill indiscriminately, but by doing so to terrorize
millions of Palestinians into leaving “voluntarily”. This explains why they let
so many images of the martyrdom of Gaza filter: it is a public crucifixion,
meant for all to see. (Andrew Anglin has suggested another reason, not
contradictory with this one).

One of Netanyahu’s favorite biblical stories is the Book of Esther. He mentioned
it in 2015 before the American Congress, as an argument why America should bomb
Iran.[2] The Book of Esther is important for understanding how the Jews want to
be feared. Under the influence of his minister Haman, the Persian king Ahasuerus
issued a decree of final solution regarding the Jews of his kingdom, because
“this people, and it alone, stands constantly in opposition to every nation,
perversely following a strange manner of life and laws, and is ill-disposed to
our government, doing all the harm they can so that our kingdom may not attain
stability” (3:13). But thanks to Esther, Ahasuerus’s secretly Jewish wife, the
Jews turn the situation around and obtain from the king that Haman be hanged
with these ten sons, and that a new royal decree is promulgated, which gives the
Jews “permission to destroy, slaughter and annihilate any armed force of any
people or province that might attack them, together with their women and
children, and to plunder their possessions” (8.11). And so the Jews massacred
seventy-five thousand people. Throughout the land, the book concludes, “there
was joy and gladness among the Jews, with feasting and holiday-making. Of the
country’s population many became Jews, since now the Jews were feared” (8.17).

This story is entirely fictional, but it is very important to Jews, because
every year, at Purim, they celebrate the hanging of Haman with his twelve sons,
and the massacre of 75,000 people, including women and children.

According to the conclusion of this story, fear of the Jews produces new Jews,
meaning Gentiles who become Jews out of fear of the Jews: “many became Jews,
since now the Jews were feared.” Or in a more literal translation: “many people
became Jews because the fear of the Jews fell upon them.” As I said, fear of
Jews is more likely to produce anti-Semites than new Jews. Yet there are many
examples of people who make themselves Jews out of fear of the Jews: any
non-Jewish politician who one day put a yarmulke on his head and swore eternal
loyalty to Israel fits that profile.

There is another story in the Book of Joshua that goes along the same lines. At
the beginning of chapter 2, Joshua, who receives his orders directly from Yahweh
in the Tabernacle, sends two spies to the city of Jericho. Having been spotted,
they hide with a prostitute named Rahab. She helps them escape in exchange for
being spared together with her family when Israel attacks the city, because, she
says, “we are afraid of you and everyone living in this country has been seized
with terror at your approach” (2:9). Because Israel is so terrifying, she
assumes that “Yahweh your god is God.”

The French Catholic Bible de Jérusalem adds a footnote saying that “Rahab’s
profession of faith in the god of Israel made her, in the eyes of more than one
Church Father, a figure of the Gentile Church, saved by her faith.” I find
perplexing the idea of making the whore of Jericho a symbol of the Church
because, out of fear of Israel, she converted to the god of Israel and helped
Israel to commit the genocide of her own city (“men and women, young and old,
including the oxen, the sheep and the donkeys, slaughtering them all,” Joshua
6:21).



On the other hand, it is not a bad metaphor for the complicity of the Christian
world in the Israeli genocide of Gazans. There is no doubt that, in most
Christians today, fear of the Jews is much stronger than pity for the Gazans.
And the heads of states of most Christian nation would rather start World War
III with Russia than criticize Israel. Russia is, after all, a rational enemy,
while no one knows what psychopathic Israel is capable of.

Israel is the only country that openly threatens to blow up the planet. They
call it the Samson Option. The Samson Option is the combination of Israel’s
nuclear capability and Israel’s reputation as a dangerous paranoid. Everyone
knows that Israel has a hundred nuclear warheads (80 according to the Stockholm
International Peace Research Institute). And everyone knows that Israel is
biblical, eager to fulfill prophecies, such as Zechariah 14:12:

> “And this is the plague with which Yahweh will strike all the nations who have
> fought against Jerusalem; their flesh will rot while they are still standing
> on their feet; their eyes will rot in their sockets; their tongues will rot in
> their mouths.”

Martin van Creveld, professor of military history at the University of
Jerusalem, explained to the British newspaper The Gardian in 2003 that the
Palestinians’ recurrent Intifadas will find only one solution: the “transfer” of
all Palestinians out of Palestine. On the risk of opposition from the
international community to such a project, he added:

> “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at
> targets in all directions … We have the capability to take the world down with
> us. And I can assure you that that will happen before Israel goes under.”[i]

That’s the Samson Option in a nutshell. Its essence is nuclear terrorism.

The audacity and impunity of Israel today are incomprehensible if we do not take
into account the Samson Option. But the Samson Option, like Jewish Power in
general, is taboo: everyone must know about it, but no one has the right to talk
about it. This silence is the ultimate test of Israel’s fear. In a very recent
post, Seymour Hersh writes:

> “No one who’s anyone in Washington is allowed to talk about Israel’s nuclear
> arsenal. Or how it affects the region. Or whether it serves U.S. interests,
> even as the Middle East teeters on the brink of regional war.”[3]

As Hersh himself has documented in The Samson Option, it was thanks to the
Kennedy assassination that Israel was able to adopt the Samson Option. Jefferson
Morley, an investigator on the Kennedy assassination, noted, in a comment on
Hersh’s post, that there is also an “Israeli gag” in Kennedy research:

> “you can see the effects of the Israeli gag rule in the long-classified
> testimony of James Angleton, chief of CIA counterintelligence, to Senate
> investigators in June 1975. The redactions make visible what the U.S. and
> Israel government seek to conceal in 2024: how Israel obtained nuclear weapons
> on Angleton’s watch.”[4]

In the extract below, the word “Israeli” has been redacted to conceal the fact
that Angleton was running the “Israeli account” and was, in that function, the
sole liaison with the Mossad.

In his remarkable biography of Angleton, Morley shows that Angleton’s loyalty to
Israel went as far as allowing them and covering their smuggling of nuclear
materials and technology. As every Kennedy research knows, Angleton is also the
number one suspect in the CIA for the Kennedy assassination. Which means the CIA
trail in the Kennedy assassination runs directly into the Mossad trail
(something that Morley avoids saying, as a respectable member of the
mainstream It’s-the-CIA school).

I must say that I am very disappointed by President Kennedy’s nephew, Robert
Kennedy Junior, who either seems to have no idea of the heavy suspicion hanging
over Israel in the assassinations of his uncle and father, or else pretends not
to know, or just don’t want to know.

And since I started this article talking about Rabbi Shmuley, the sad news is
that Rabbi Shmuley is one of RFK Jr.’s friends and advisors. At a rally on July
25, 2023, he introduced Robert Kennedy by mentioning his father:



> “On the fifth of June, 1968, at 12:15 am, … Robert Kennedy Sr., one of the
> greatest Americans who ever lived, was gunned down by a Palestinian domestic
> terrorist, Sirhan Sirhan, and murdered because of his support for Israel. He
> was gunned down because he wanted to share the fate of the Jewish people.”

Bobby Jr. listened and took it in, without the slightest sign of disapproval,
even though he knows very well that his father was not killed by Sirhan, and
certainly not for his support of Israel. He remained frozen and mute in his
chair, not even nodding when a brave lady in the audience protested, “Why are
you lying? Sirhan Sirhan was not the murderer of Robert Kennedy…”[5] RFK Jr.
will not contradict the lying Rabbi.

It’s a sadly revealing moment. By publicly humiliating Robert Kennedy Junior,
insulting the memory of his father with his gross lie, right beside him, Shmuley
is making an example. To be feared, Jews must show their power by making
examples. That’s a good example.

Notes

[1] Menachem Begin, The Revolt: Story of the Irgun, Henry Schuman, 1951, quoted
in Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel?, op. cit., p. 81.

[2] “Benjamin Netanyahu Speech to Congress 2015” on YouTube.

[3] Seymour Hersh, « It’s Bibi’s War
», https://seymourhersh.substack.com/p/its-bibis-war

[4] Jefferson Morley, “In the Last of the JFK Files, Israel’s Nuclear Secrets
Are Safe,” 26 féb
2024, https://jfkfacts.substack.com/p/in-the-last-of-the-jfk-files-israels

[5] “Conversation with RFK Jr. 7.25.23”
sur www.youtube.com/watch?v=kihS7wFPG6I&t=434s, à partir de 5:30 minutes.

[i] David Hirst, “The War Game”, The Gardian, September 21,
2003: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/sep/21/israelandthepalestinians.bookextr

…………………………

RFKjr Book – Fauci – Audiobook Mp3 (38:03 min)
| Tagged anti-semitism, israel, palestine, politics, zionism


GERMANY: TAURUS AND THE BULLFIGHTERS – BY VICTOR GROSSMAN – 25 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 26, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

A Taurus on display at the 2006 ILA air show. Photograph Source: axesofevil2000
– Public Domain

Watching genteel Bundestag ladies and gentlemen speechifying, often with
forceful words and gestures but mostly polite, it is hard to imagine that their
topic is war or peace, possibly world war or peace, even atomic war or peace. A
key word was Taurus, Latin for “bull.” But they weren’t arguing about Zodiac
astrology or the myth about the god Jupiter, cheating on wife Juno by taking on
the shape of a bull to abduct a princess. Nor about the starry constellation
named for his disguise. The name of that princess was Europa, and the continent
bearing her name was indeed involved in the subject of debate: steel-covered
missiles called Taurus, weighing 1000 lbs., 17 foot long, which, if fired from a
plane well inside Ukraine can reach and pierce the walls of the Kremlin or
destroy concrete bunkers as deep or deeper than Moscow’s subway system. 

Of course, Volodymir Zelenskiy wants them and any weapons or aid in a war now
looking less and less like the triumph he predicted a year ago. Should his
wishes, which often sounded more like demands, be fulfilled?  

That mythical Jupiter fathered three sons with Europa (I hope he was back in the
body of Jupiter by then). Three sons of modern Europa met in a hastily arranged
“Paris-Berlin-Warsaw” summit in early March to reach an agreement about Ukraine,
especially about Taurus. Poland’s Tusk, only four months into his top job, is
seen as more moderate than his predecessor. But he seems no less eager to supply
anything if it damages the hereditary Russian enemy and solidifies Poland’s role
as main USA outpost in Eastern Europe. However, he soon had to hurry home to
mollify farm tractor drivers blockading borders to protest cheap Ukrainian grain
imports. 

Macron, who had spoken boldly of sending in “European” troops to oppose the
Russians, toned that down with the words: “Maybe at some point – I don’t want
it, I won’t take the initiative – we will have to have operations on the
ground…to counter the Russian forces… France’s strength is that we can do it.”  

Evidently Scholz had stepped on the brakes with Tusk and Macron: “To say it
sharp and clear: as German chancellor, I will send no Bundeswehr soldiers into
Ukraine!” So, at least for now – no Taurus!

Was his seemingly bold front a façade for a general German downward skid in
Europe? There was a decline of the economy in 2023. A predicted puny plus of
0.2% for 2024 could mean that Germany is already in a recession, for only the
second time since 1945. Economy Minister Habeck warned: “We cannot continue this
way!” One expert’s brief analysis: “Germany has lost cheap energy from Russia,
flourishing trade markets in China and an almost cost-free guarantee of security
from the USA.” 

Olaf Scholz’s three-party government has rapidly declined in popularity. The
Greens, who promised a “green economic miracle” a year ago, have made one
ecology compromise after another, like their go-ahead for big docks for liquid
gas from US frackers to replace the Russian gas-oil cut by war, politics and
that suspicious explosion of the Baltic pipeline. The new docks threaten both
major bird emigration stopovers and some of Germany’s most idyllic beach resorts
(once peopled, back in GDR days, by happy, mostly nudist bathers).

Ecology disputes turned dramatic with Elon Musk’s Tesla gigafactory on Berlin’s
outskirts, his first and largest in all Europe and now capable of turning out
500,000 E-cars a year, beating out VW. That meant chopping down 740 acres of the
protective forest ring around Berlin and draining into crucial aquifers. But
Musk now aims at a million cars – costing 420 more forest acres and drying-up
ponds and creeks. The village hit hardest voted “No!” and one group plans to
defy a planned police onslaught in tree houses and platforms. On March 5th a
secret, more extremist group set fire to a high-voltage power pylon, cutting
local electricity for a few hours and shutting down production for a few days.
Such disputes are getting hotter. 

Rounding out the picture, Germany has been facing its biggest strike wave in
years: railroad engineers, bus and tram drivers, airport personnel, public
service workers, kindergarten teachers, even clinic doctors. Their demands are
mostly for enough pay to catch up with inflation and frightening rent increases
but also – for many – for a 35-hour work week with no cut in pay. 

While the compromising Greens strain to hold onto their dwindling professional
college-graduate base and the Social Democrats struggle to win back
working-class support, the weakest of the three partners, the Free Democrats
(FDP), closest to big-biz, keep flirting with the Christian Democrats across the
aisle, blackmailing attempts by the other two to seem socially conscious by
resisting remaining environmental restrictions, preventing rules against child
labor on products from abroad, limiting aid for the many poverty-ridden children
in Germany, reducing assistance for the elderly and, above all, insisting on
keeping or lowering low taxes on the super-wealthy, using the old trickle-down
argument. More and more, the coalition is coming to resemble a free-for-all
wrestling match.

But they agreed on one main issue: in Ukraine, keep that war going! Till
victory! The Greens, always most valiant with Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock
hoping to see Russia “ruined,” are being overtaken as word and banner bearers by
the Free Democrats, who now boast a “Defense Committee” spokesperson who is
formidable in word, appearance, personality and even name: Marie-Agnes
Strack-Zimmermann. Her imperative calls for more weapons until total victory
over the Russians rouse up TV viewers almost every single evening. And even when
a majority in the Bundestag ended the Taurus debate by voting “Nein” to a
Christian Democratic bill to give Kyiv the missiles, she broke the ranks of
coalition party discipline and voted “Ja” with the opposition. 

Somehow I haven’t yet heard anyone remark that Düsseldorf, which she represents,
is also home to Rheinmetall, Germany’s leading armaments manufacturer since
1889. After great sales records in World War I it had giant success in World War
II, largely by working thousands of miserable POWs and forced laborers to the
bone. Now super-good times are back again thanks to its Panther tanks and all
kinds of weapons and explosive ammo. Company boss  Armin Papperger, who took
home a tidy € 3,587,000 in 2022 (about  $3.9 m) and expects this year’s company
earnings to finally top its € 10 billion goal made a happy prediction of “a
continuing strong growth increase in sales and earnings.” But who could dare to
suspect any connection between Rheinmetall and its Düsseldorf neighbor,  Frau
Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann. (BTW, big hunks of those handsome sums also go to
Blackrock in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards and other solid Transatlantic
benefactors.) 

But in his crumbling coalition Olaf Scholz’s leading Social Democratic Party has
also been vigorously supporting  the Ukrainian cause! It was he who dramatically
called for a “Zeitenwende” an “historic turning point” – with an extra fund
of  € 100 billion for a major military build up – in Ukraine, Germany, the
European Union and NATO, with drones, jets, artillery, ammo, tanks, missiles
(but at least not yet the Taunus for Kyiv.

But his Defense Minister Boris Pistorius (Social Democrat) is never sated; for
him the Bundeswehr is always far too weak. “It must be made fit for the
challenges ahead. Germany needs a Bundeswehr that can fight, one which is
operational and sustainable. Germany must defend itself, because ‘war is back in
Europe.’  The Bundeswehr must become fit for war again. I know that sounds
harsh… But I am concerned with nothing other than preventing war. That is why
credible deterrence is the motto of the hour – to be able to fight in order not
to have to fight. An important signal in this context is the formation of the
brigade in Lithuania.”

Despite all disavowals, some beans have recently been spilled about NATO
military experts secretly helping Kyiv ever since 2014. A mysteriously leaked
report on a meeting of top German brass revealed plans for helping  Ukraine use
the Taunus to destroy the Russian bridge to Crimea. The whole atmosphere in
Germany is becoming frighteningly “kriegstüchtig,” to use Pistorius’ word –
“ready for war.” He also raised the question of renewing the military draft
whose last vestiges were ended thirteen years ago – this time perhaps including
women. The proposal was a trial balloon – and soon dropped, at least for this
pre-election season. Another trial balloon came from the Education Minister,
Bettina Stark-Watzinger, who called for air raid drills in schools, with
renovated or new shelter rooms in the cellars and more visits by officers to
prepare children  for the worst – or recruit them. When protests against this
proposal grew too strong she modified it a bit – to stress, aside from war,
readiness for possible floods or other climate catastrophes.

Weapons, weapons, weapons – the more the better! With ever louder talk about
“the foe” and “protective measures”, as if Putin were amassing troops or
maneuvering warships along German borders – instead of just the opposite taking
place in the Baltic and Lithuania – and no longer so secretly in Ukraine. The
blitzkrieg-laden spirit of 1941 Germany is all over the media, with no audible
recollections of Stalingrad in 1943 or a wrecked and wretched Berlin (and
Dresden, Hamburg and all the others) in 1945.  

The reports on Gaza since October contrasted markedly with the anger over the
Russian attack on Ukraine; they almost never mentioned Hamas without the
prefaced adjective “terrorist” but showed few pictures of devastated Gaza which,
for me, bitterly recalled those German cities I saw a few years after the war,
like Dresden. Over and over we were shown Israeli soldiers bravely firing away;
at what? Or digging in wrecked hospitals;  for what? Or showing those
“compassionate” parachute drops, a sad joke when small crowds of Israelis were
somehow permitted to block hundreds of truckloads of really tangible assistance
– and while Germany joined the USA in sending weapons to Netanyahu while
stymying UNO efforts to end the slaughter.  

But the heart-wrenching pictures of weeping fathers and dead or maimed children
in Gaza could not be ignored. Demonstrations, led by Arabs in Germany but
including many other, also Jewish Germans, grew larger, despite all attempts to
prevent, limit or sideline them. Their calls for negotiations and peace
sometimes included the war in Ukraine – and a rejection of SPD-FDP-Green-CDU-CSU
militarist unity. But then came the giant rallies against the fascistic
Alternative for Germany (AfD). In the past often harassed or at best ignored,
they were now amazingly well-organized and coordinated, clearly promoted from
above and blessed in the media. I suspect they were consciously aimed at
deflecting a progressive, pro-peace trend born of horror at the hugely
disproportionate Israeli response to October 7th, misusing a popular anti-AfD
cause for the purpose, together with an increased stress on opposing
anti-Semitism, while equating it with any criticism of Israeli repression and
extreme brutality. It was good that the rallies  opposed racism and fascists,
but they were no longer leaning toward united left opposition.  

Is there now any opposition to top level policies?  Yes, of a sort. Or rather of
approximately four sorts. 

Within the ranks of the Social Democrats, while many admire dynamic (and
ambitious?) Minister Pistorius, some others may be coming to their senses. Most
courageous recently was Rolf Mützenich, chair of the SPD caucus in the Bundestag
and long known as a rare opponent of militarism. During the Taurus debate he
asked the Bundestag delegates: “Isn’t it time not only to speak about waging a
war but to start thinking about how we can freeze a war and then end it as
well?“ He had hardly finished his brief remarks with question when the
counterattack began, from fellow politicians and from most of the mass media.
Two nasty words recurred shamelessly: “Appeasement” and “Cowardice”. Unlike Pope
Francis, who dared to voice similar sentiments, Mützenich had no shred of any
“infallibility” status, and the truly vicious attacks forced him to stage a
partial retreat to save his neck. But the words had been uttered and some may
have listened. As for appeasement, Neville Chamberlain and Daladier let Hitler
expand in Spain, then tolerated his expansion eastward to Austria and
Czechoslovakia because it meant closing in on the hated USSR. His all-European
attack in June 1941 was more analogous to EU-NATO eastward-aimed unanimity than
the reverse!

Olaf Scholz often vacillates. But at times, unlike some ministers, he seems to
listen to and echo people like Mützenich. “German soldiers must at no point and
in no place be linked to targets this Taurus system reaches…Not in Germany
either…This clarity is necessary. I am surprised that this doesn’t move some
people, that they don’t even think about whether … a participation in the war
could emerge from what we do.” 

But then, Scholz certainly learned arithmetic at school. The European elections
are due this June, Bundestag elections next year, with key state elections in
between. In the polls his Social Democratic party is stuck at about a weak 15%,
half its traditional Christian rivals and even behind the Alternative for
Germany (AfD). Opinions change frequently but 80% now favor diplomatic
negotiations for Ukraine and 41% want less weapons sent there. Scholz – or
Germany – cannot really change course in such basic matters. But  he may think
that dragging his feet rather ambiguously might win back more voters.  

A second group demanding negotiations and an end to the Ukraine war, perhaps
very surprisingly,  is the AfD. Although it supports big business, NATO, the
draft and German rearmament enthusiastically, it calls nevertheless for
negotiations, peace and a resumption of normal trade relations. It is possible
that the AfD simply wants only to further increase its popularity , especially
in eastern Germany, where there is the least military enthusiasm – and it is
already amazingly strong  (and dangerous) position, at about30%. Of course they
are called “Putin-lovers.” Who knows, perhaps they are. But their top woman in
leadership, Alice Weidel, is intelligent, shrewd, a skilled speaker, and made an
eloquent plea for peace, while thanking Mützenich and congratulating Scholz for
not sending Taurus to Kyiv. Thus creating a difficult
complication.                        

And then there is the Linke party, which has seen itself from birth as the
”party of peace”. Indeed, over the years it has opposed every deployment of
German troops or ships outside its borders, it has opposed the payment of giant
sums to Rheinmetall and its siblings at home or abroad, it has opposed the
export of German weapons to nearly every oppressive government that could be
found, it has opposed every form of militarization. A brave and exemplary
record, alongside its fight for a higher minimum wage, more money for seniors,
for child care and women’s rights. Its stand also forced Social Democrats and
Greens to take better positions, if only to avoid a drift of their voters to the
small yet potentially growing Linke.

Perhaps it was its successes which became its weak point. Not only the delegates
who got elected on the national, state or local level but also  their staffs and
assistants had good jobs. Some tended, too often, to become a part of the
mistrusted “establishment” in the eyes of dissatisfied and disappointed voters –
or then non-voters. Their increasingly respectable status led to interest in
“identity rights”, immigrant rights, gender rights, but too often to a growing
distance from neglected, underpaid, overburdened working people, including temps
and the jobless. Some leaders, hoping to crown state cabinet posts with those in
a national coalition, watered down their rejection of NATO and its relentless
eastward moves and threats. Their rejection of even meager approval of the giant
peace demonstration led by Sahra Wagenknecht last year on flimsy grounds
borrowed from the mass media proved the last straw for many members and led to
the formation of a breakaway party, called (temporarily it is hoped) Bündnis
Sahra Wagenknecht. 

Some in the Linke, convinced Marxists, think it was a mistake to split and leave
the party instead of fighting it out, even though they were outvoted by
conformist, status quo leaders who now want to force them out just as they did
to Sahra Wagenknecht and her adherents. And some believe that if the Linke again
becomes more militant in something whose name is hardly even whispered these
days  (class conflict) then it can be rescued from menacing-oblivion. It is
already in great trouble, nationally down to 3%, which would bar it from the
next Bundestag. 

As for Sahra’s BSW, it stands full square for negotiations and peace, like no
other, and certainly for working people’s rights and needs. But much of its
program remains vague as yet and seems to be turning out to be less militant
than expected. It polls 5 to 7% nationally, not bad for a newbie with
rudimentary state structures but less than some had expected in view of Sahra’s
popularity. The European Union elections in June and the state elections in
September will show how the two stand, now as rivals in a divided Left.  

As for the bellicose forces, some pro-American “Atlanticists” are worried about
being cast adrift after November 5th by that unpredictable man from Mar-a-Lago,
or they are studying geriatric tables. Others, the Germanic wing, who reject
American infiltration, from music styles to dirty slang, are scheming and
dreaming of the good old days of smart uniforms, clicking heels, Iron Crosses
and people knowing their proper place. But they all join Rheinmetall, Lockhead
and the others in hoping the warring may last until they get new chances to win
out in broad Eurasian expanses, re-establish Germany’s proper position in the
world and perhaps for some, a hope to avenge that disaster for their
grandfathers back in 1945. More and more, we are engulfed by all their  war talk
– and preparatory action.

What is desperately needed, not only in Germany but especially in Germany, is a
new consolidation of all those in any party, or no party, who still have
unaddled brains in their heads and a heart in their chests for an end to the
killing and starving of Ukrainians, Russians, the Palestinians and the still as
yet far too small number of  brave Jewish Israelis (like the “refuseniks”) to
build up a dynamic peace movement like that against the Vietnam war, or against
missiles in West Germany in the 1980s, or the marches to prevent the Iraq war
or,  I recent months, to rescue the tortured million and more innocent people of
Gaza – yes, and those100 hostages as well.  Such a movement is desperately
necessary; the clock is ticking away. Can the Jupiters of the world be
dethroned? For Europa and for the world. Is that possible?

…………………..

Victor Grossman writes the Berlin Bulletin, which you can subscribe to for free
by sending an email to: wechsler_grossman@yahoo.de.

| Tagged germany, nato, politics, russia, ukraine


US AND ISRAELI SICK CULTURES: WHEN BELIEF SYSTEMS TURN PATHOLOGICAL – BY
LAWRENCE DAVIDSON – 26 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 26, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

It might come as a surprise but the answer to this question derives from
influences many of which are beyond our control. For instance, most of us
experience attitudinal changes along a spectrum from day to day or maybe even
hour to hour. This has to do with our individualized reaction to all manner of
hormonal and other secretions in your body. These, in turn, are influenced by
epigenetic factors triggered by both internal and external environmental
conditions.

A lot of these factors are inherited. You did not choose your genetic makeup or
the parents who gave it to you and they did not choose their parents, and so on.
This unchosen heritage sets your body up for all sorts of possibilities. Some
might turn out to be good for you: nicely working immune system, relatively
stable and positive mental disposition and acuity, etc. But it doesn’t have to
go like that, and a propensity for illness and instability might be your
inherited lot. 

Nor did you choose the sort of environment in which you were born. I might tell
you to avoid being born into poverty, but you can’t do that. Nonetheless,
statistically, the chance for a “prosperous and productive” life is low if early
poverty is your fate. I might suggest that you avoid parents who are neglectful
or physically/emotionally abusive. Do not grow up next to a “super fund”
contaminated site. Just so, you should avoid being born in the middle of a
raging war. Despite the fact that all of these outcomes would certainly affect
your behavior, none involve choices you can make. It is amazing how much of our
history and condition is beyond our control. 

What Do We Believe?

Just as we are arbitrarily centered in a body we did not choose, we are
arbitrarily centered locally in time and space. That is, in a culture. And, here
too, much is beyond our control. 

It has been one of the frequent themes of these blog essays that there is
something called “natural localism.”* That is, most people tend to settle down
in a local community. It is within this locale that they work or go to school,
live within a family and friendship network, and come to feel a community
identity. That does not mean that people don’t travel (mostly to visit friends
and family) or relocate within that same cultural realm for work or school.
However, the natural inclination of most is find a place to settle down. There
is even an evolutionary aspect to this. Natural localism provides a time and
space that maximizes familiarity and predictability. That is why it usually
provides a sense of security. 

There is, of course, a downside. Natural localism ties one to a community
worldview that mitigates against independent questioning and fact-checking. Over
time established communities and groups socialize members into views supported
by traditions, the interests of whatever passes for a ruling class, and often an
ideology that idealizes the community’s raison d’être. Most who live within the
range of such an aggregation will, almost habitually, see the world through the
community’s lens. 

That means, for most of us, our belief system encompassing our notion of what is
right and wrong and who is friendly and who is unfriendly, is not something we
have independently chosen. There are endless examples of this. Take the Cold War
between the U.S. and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union, the Warsaw
Pact countries and China on the other. If you are old enough to remember this
time (roughly 1945 to 1991) you should recall that the majority of adults in the
U.S. and Western Europe had a hostile outlook toward the USSR and its allies.
Most had no direct contact or experience that would provoke this hostility. They
got it in an osmotic way. The culturally negative messages in one’s external
environment shaped their perceptions so that they conformed to a community-wide
point of view. 

Of course, just like bodies react differently to hormones and other secretions,
individuals have varying reactions to the inherited belief systems of their
cultures. A bell curve results—most people will be within an average range of
cultural compliance. They will readily accept what they are taught at at home
and in school, and hear from their teachers, leaders and media. There may be
differences of opinion on the details, but most will buy into the overall
message. At the edges of the curve will be found those who, for whatever
experiential reasons, ignore or reject the message. The majority will see this
minority as weird. At the extreme, they will be seen as a threat to social
stability.

The Pathological Potential of Belief Systems

The negative feelings generated during the Cold War were felt by populations
that were, for the most part, geographically separated. What happens when this
inherited fear and negativity runs between populations sharing the same
immediate landscape? What can your community point of view make you feel and do
then?

Here are two examples: 

The United States prior to the 1960s:

U.S. culture prior to the 1960s was characterized by an institutionally and
legally sanctioned racial divide between White and Black Americans. Racism
relegated Black Americans to an inferior status enforced by legal segregation
and discrimination. This resulted in an impoverished economic and social
environment. From the point of view of many Whites, Black disadvantage was an
historically ratified “normal” situation. That is, it felt natural and orderly
to the White population based on tradition and long practice.

Thus, White Americans had been acculturated to a system that periodically pushed
Black Americans to rebellion—“race riots.” These uprisings frightened White
citizens who then supported strong police action against Blacks in order to
maintain social stability and security. Such a posture only made future
uprisings more likely. 

This situation did not begin to change until the 1954 Supreme Court decision in
the case of Brown v Board of Education, followed by a Black political movement
led by Martin Luther King Jr.  The goal of this movement was to outlaw
segregation and other egregious acts of discrimination in the public sphere.
This effort was supported by a liberal sector of the White population who
recognized the need for change based on a culturally idealized view of American
socio-economic potential. King and his allies were successful in bringing change
to the public sphere— essentially creating a new definition of normal based on a
more egalitarian United States. However, changing individual laws is relatively
easy compared to changing culture. Since the 1980s the country has experienced
what is known as “culture wars.” That is, a political pushback by a sizable
number of “conservatives” against progressive legislation.

Several things are to be noted here: (1) U.S. culture, since its beginning, has
had a racist character that dehumanized its minority populations. It is in this
sense that it was and, in some regards, still is pathological. (2) For most of
its history this toxic environment was, and for some continue to be, invisible
because most Whites were raised in family and/or local community surroundings
that registered the toxicity as normal. Despite the change that eventually came
in the 1950s and 60s, today some are so addicted to the older worldview that
they are waging a political battle to return to a “sick normal.”

Contemporary Israel:

Israel’s story overlaps with that of the United States: (1) A sense of
racially/religiously based superiority. While it is White Christians in the
U.S., it is Jewish Zionists in Israel. (2) A claim that the country’s land is
divinely deeded or blessed. (3) The existence of a largely segregated and
disadvantaged class of “others.” In Israel, the “others” are the Palestinians. 

Israeli and other Jews, and many who support them (i.e. Joe Biden), have learned
about Israel through a biased narrative. The result is an attitude sustained by
a customized pro-Zionist history. To maintain the narrative within Israel
itself, education has been turned into a process of indoctrination. What is
taught in this process? (1) God gave the land of Palestine to the Hebrew
ancestors of contemporary Jews. (2) Jews need the State of Israel to be safe in
a world where antisemitism is widespread. (3) The world owes it to the Jews to
secure this Jewish state. (4) Palestinians are dangerous interlopers who hate
Jews and seek to destroy the Jewish state. For Zionists, the Palestinians have
replaced the Nazis as perpetrators of another potential Holocaust. The result
has been the maintenance of Israel as a fortress nation—roughly resembling
ancient Sparta where an elite population lived in fear of the serfs (helots)
they had oppressed and driven by that fear, these elites trained constantly for
war.

The national and local environment inherited by Israeli Jews is infused with
this mindset. Defense against Palestinian and Arab “terrorists” is an important
psychological theme of their culture. It is reinforced in the average family
setting. It is detailed out for them in school. It provides a sense of
camaraderie among friends and within the workplace. It is capped off by a
program of near-universal conscription of Jewish Israelis. It is extraordinarily
difficult to escape the pressures of such an overbearing cultural climate. Here
too, the toxic nature of this environment is invisible to many of Israel’s
Jewish citizens because of having been raised in local surroundings that
registered their perceptions as normal. The predominant rationalization for the
resulting Israeli aggressiveness has always been “national defense.” What can be
more normal than that? Hence, the fact that “Israelis overwhelmingly are
confident in the justice of the present Gaza war.” And this support of the
wholesale destruction of Gaza** is the final confirming factor demonstrating the
pathological nature of Israeli/Zionist culture. 

Conclusion

The United States and Israel are not the only sick cultures on the planet.
However, as noted, they stand together due to a historical symmetry. This
connection allowed the Zionists in the U.S. to build a powerful special interest
organization and easily convince most of the American population to accept the
Israeli narrative that, among other things, claimed the two countries held
similar values. This despite the fact that Israel does not even have the
framework for an idealized just society. It lacks a constitution and, insisting
on a culture of Jewish supremacy, guarantees the absence of equal justice for
all.

The connection also sees both nations attempting to deny similar sins while
claiming similar virtues: Israeli claim that it is “the only democracy in the
Middle East” covers up the reality that it is an apartheid state and, in the
case of the U.S., the claim of exceptionalism due to the practice of high
ethical standards covers up a continuing national struggle against racism and a
foreign policy that contradicts U.S. claims of spreading democracy.

On the other hand, over time the United States did create legislative and
judicial ideals for itself based on a self-glorifying narrative—that the U.S.
was a nation of superior moral-ethical potential. Thus, when the government
fails the citizenry you can get civil rights movements and anti-war protests of
historic importance.

Significantly, it is this lurking moral uneasiness with their nation’s
hypocrisy, felt particularly by the youth, that is now eroding the American
alliance with Israel. The ethnic cleansing and genocide, so acceptable to
Israeli Jews, is a behavior that a number of Americans see as
indefensible—particularly from an “ally” claiming to hold values similar to
their own. 

Thus is change possible even in an environment over which we have but nominal
control. And, in this case, for the U.S. to get past its own hypocrisy—the sick
elements of its own culture—it must finally leave Israel behind. 

…………………

Notes.

*See Lawrence Davidson, Foreign Policy Inc. (University Press of Kentucky,
2009), chapter 1. 

**The proper historical analogy to the destruction of Gaza is the Nazi
destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto.  

Lawrence Davidson is a retired professor of history at West Chester University
in West Chester, PA.

| Tagged israel, middle-east, palestine, politics, zionism


ГИМНРОССИИ RUSSIAN NATIONAL ANTHEM – SUNG BY SHAMAN (1:00 MIN) AUDIO MP3

Posted on March 26, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
ГимнРоссии Russian National Anthem – Sung By Shaman (1:00 min) Audio Mp3
ГимнРоссии Russian National Anthem – Sung By Shaman (3:30 min) Audio Mp3



ГимнРоссии если любишь свою Родину 





THE NULAND – BUDANOV – TAJIK – CROCUS CONNECTION – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 26
MARCH 2024

Posted on March 26, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | 2 Comments

• 1,700 WORDS • 

The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin total carte blanche to exercise
brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and wherever it takes

Let’s start with the possible chain of events that may have led to the Crocus
terror attack. This is as explosive as it gets. Intel sources in Moscow
discreetly confirm this is one of the FSB’s prime lines of investigation.

December 4, 2023. Former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen Mark Milley,
only 3 months after his retirement, tells CIA mouthpiece The Washington Post:
“There should be no Russian who goes to sleep without wondering if they’re going
to get their throat slit in the middle of the night (…) You gotta get back there
and create a campaign behind the lines.”

January 4, 2024: In an interview with ABC News, “spy chief” Kyrylo Budanov lays
down the road map: strikes “deeper and deeper” into Russia.

January 31: Victoria Nuland travels to Kiev and meets Budanov. Then, in a dodgy
press conference at night in the middle of an empty street, she promises “nasty
surprises” to Putin: code for asymmetric war.

February 22: Nuland shows up at a Center for Strategic and International Studies
(CSIS) event and doubles down on the “nasty surprises” and asymmetric war. That
may be interpreted as the definitive signal for Budanov to start deploying dirty
ops.

February 25: The New York Times publishes a story about CIA cells in Ukraine:
nothing that Russian intel does not already know.

Then, a lull until March 5 – when crucial shadow play may have been in effect.
Privileged scenario: Nuland was a key dirty ops plotter alongside the CIA and
the Ukrainian GUR (Budanov). Rival Deep State factions got hold of it and
maneuvered to “terminate” her one way or another – because Russian intel would
have inevitably connected the dots.

Yet Nuland, in fact, is not “retired” yet; she’s still presented as
Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs and showed up recently in Rome for
a G7-related meeting, although her new job, in theory, seems to be at Columbia
University (a Hillary Clinton maneuver).

Meanwhile, the assets for a major “nasty surprise” are already in place, in the
dark, and totally off radar. The op cannot be called off.

March 5: Little Blinken formally announces Nuland’s “retirement”.

March 7: At least one Tajik among the four-member terror commando visits the
Crocus venue and has his photo taken.

March 7-8 at night: U.S. and British embassies simultaneously announce a
possible terror attack on Moscow, telling their nationals to avoid “concerts”
and gatherings within the next two days.

March 9: Massively popular Russian patriotic singer Shaman performs at Crocus.
That may have been the carefully chosen occasion targeted for the “nasty
surprise” – as it falls only a few days before the presidential elections, from
March 15 to 17. But security at Crocus was massive, so the op is postponed.

March 22: The Crocus City Hall terror attack.

ISIS-K: the ultimate can of worms

The Budanov connection is betrayed by the modus operandi – similar to previous
Ukraine intel terror attacks against Daria Dugina and Vladimir Tatarsky: close
reconnaissance for days, even weeks; the hit; and then a dash for the border.

And that brings us to the Tajik connection.

There seem to be holes aplenty in the narrative concocted by the ragged bunch
turned mass killers: following an Islamist preacher on Telegram; offered what
was later established as a puny 500 thousand rubles (roughly $4,500) for the
four of them to shoot random people in a concert hall; sent half of the funds
via Telegram; directed to a weapons cache where they find AK-12s and hand
grenades.

The videos show that they used the machine guns like pros; shots were accurate,
short bursts or single fire; no panic whatsoever; effective use of hand
grenades; fleeing the scene in a flash, just melting away, almost in time to
catch the “window” that would take them across the border to Ukraine.

All that takes training. And that also applies to facing nasty
counter-interrogation. Still, the FSB seems to have broken them all – quite
literally.

A potential handler has surfaced, named Abdullo Buriyev. Turkish intel had
earlier identified him as a handler for ISIS-K, or Wilayat Khorasan in
Afghanistan. One of the members of the Crocus commando told the FSB their
“acquaintance” Abdullo helped them to buy the car for the op.

And that leads us to the massive can of worms to end them all: ISIS-K.

The alleged emir of ISIS-K, since 2020, is an Afghan Tajik, Sanaullah Ghafari.
He was not killed in Afghanistan in June 2023, as the Americans were spinning:
he may be currently holed up in Balochistan in Pakistan.

Yet the real person of interest here is not Tajik Ghafari but Chechen Abdul
Hakim al-Shishani, the former leader of the jihadi outfit Ajnad al-Kavkaz
(“Soldiers of the Caucasus”), who was fighting against the government in
Damascus in Idlib and then escaped to Ukraine because of a crackdown by Hayat
Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) – in another one of those classic inter-jihadi squabbles.

Shishani was spotted on the border near Belgorod during the recent attack
concocted by Ukrainian intel inside Russia. Call it another vector of the “nasty
surprises”.

Shishani had been in Ukraine for over two years and has acquired citizenship. He
is in fact the sterling connection between the nasty motley crue Idlib gangs in
Syria and GUR in Kiev – as his Chechens worked closely with Jabhat al-Nusra,
which was virtually indistinguishable from ISIS.

Shishani, fiercely anti-Assad, anti-Putin and anti-Kadyrov, is the classic
“moderate rebel” advertised for years as a “freedom fighter” by the CIA and the
Pentagon.

Some of the four hapless Tajiks seem to have followed ideological/religious
indoctrination on the internet dispensed by Wilayat Khorasan, or ISIS-K, in a
chat room called Rahnamo ba Khuroson.

The indoctrination game happened to be supervised by a Tajik, Salmon Khurosoni.
He’s the guy who made the first move to recruit the commando. Khurosoni is
arguably a messenger between ISIS-K and the CIA.

The problem is the ISIS-K modus operandi for any attack never features a fistful
of dollars: the promise is Paradise via martyrdom. Yet in this case it seems
it’s Khurosoni himself who has approved the 500 thousand ruble reward.

After handler Buriyev relayed the instructions, the commando sent the bayat –
the ISIS pledge of allegiance – to Khurosoni. Ukraine may not have been their
final destination. Another foreign intel connection – not identified by FSB
sources – would have sent them to Turkey, and then Afghanistan.

That’s exactly where Khurosoni is to be found. Khurosoni may have been the
ideological mastermind of Crocus. But, crucially, he’s not the client.

The Ukrainian love affair with terror gangs

Ukrainian intel, SBU and GUR, have been using the “Islamic” terror galaxy as
they please since the first Chechnya war in the mid-1990s. Milley and Nuland of
course knew it, as there were serious rifts in the past, for instance, between
GUR and the CIA.

Following the symbiosis of any Ukrainian government post-1991 with assorted
terror/jihadi outfits, Kiev post-Maidan turbo-charged these connections
especially with Idlib gangs, as well as north Caucasus outfits, from the Chechen
Shishani to ISIS in Syria and then ISIS-K. GUR routinely aims to recruit ISIS
and ISIS-K denizens via online chat rooms. Exactly the modus operandi that led
to Crocus.

One “Azan” association, founded in 2017 by Anvar Derkach, a member of the Hizb
ut-Tahrir, actually facilitates terrorist life in Ukraine, Tatars from Crimea
included – from lodging to juridical assistance.

The FSB investigation is establishing a trail: Crocus was planned by pros – and
certainly not by a bunch of low-IQ Tajik dregs. Not by ISIS-K, but by GUR. A
classic false flag, with the clueless Tajiks under the impression that they were
working for ISIS-K.

The FSB investigation is also unveiling the standard modus operandi of online
terror, everywhere. A recruiter focuses on a specific profile; adapts himself to
the candidate, especially his – low – IQ; provides him with the minimum
necessary for a job; then the candidate/executor become disposable.

Everyone in Russia remembers that during the first attack on the Crimea bridge,
the driver of the kamikaze truck was blissfully unaware of what he was carrying,

As for ISIS, everyone seriously following West Asia knows that’s a gigantic
diversionist scam, complete with the Americans transferring ISIS operatives from
the Al-Tanf base to the eastern Euphrates, and then to Afghanistan after the
Hegemon’s humiliating “withdrawal”. Project ISIS-K actually started in 2021,
after it became pointless to use ISIS goons imported from Syria to block the
relentless progress of the Taliban.

Ace Russian war correspondent Marat Khairullin has added another juicy morsel to
this funky salad: he convincingly unveils the MI6 angle in the Crocus City Hall
terror attack (in English here, in two parts, posted by “S”).

The FSB is right in the middle of the painstaking process of cracking most, if
not all ISIS-K-CIA/MI6 connections. Once it’s all established, there will be
hell to pay.

But that won’t be the end of the story. Countless terror networks are not
controlled by Western intel – although they will work with Western intel via
middlemen, usually Salafist “preachers” who deal with Saudi/Gulf intel agencies.

The case of the CIA flying “black” helicopters to extract jihadists from Syria
and drop them in Afghanistan is more like an exception – in terms of direct
contact – than the norm. So the FSB and the Kremlin will be very careful when it
comes to directly accusing the CIA and MI6 of managing these networks.

But even with plausible deniability, the Crocus investigation seems to be
leading exactly to where Moscow wants it: uncovering the crucial middleman. And
everything seems to be pointing to Budanov and his goons.

Ramzan Kadyrov dropped an extra clue. He said the Crocus “curators” chose on
purpose to instrumentalize elements of an ethnic minority – Tajiks – who barely
speak Russian to open up new wounds in a multinational nation where dozens of
ethnicities live side by side for centuries.

In the end, it didn’t work. The Russian population has handed to the Kremlin
total carte blanche to exercise brutal, maximum punishment – whatever and
wherever it takes.

………………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged news, politics, russia, ukraine, war


‘I’VE BEEN A JOLLY TINKER NEAR FORTY YEARS OR MORE’ – CLANCY BROS (2:11 MIN)
AUDIO MP3

Posted on March 25, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
Jolly Tinker – Clancy Bros (2:11 min) Audio Mp3




IT’S WAR: THE REAL MEAT GRINDER STARTS NOW – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 23 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 24, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,300 WORDS • 

No more shadow play. It’s now in the open. No holds barred.

Exhibit 1: Friday, March 22, 2024. It’s War. The Kremlin, via Peskov, finally
admits it, on the record.

The money quote:

“Russia cannot allow the existence on its borders of a state that has a
documented intention to use any methods to take Crimea away from it, not to
mention the territory of new regions.”

Translation: the Hegemon-constructed Kiev mongrel is doomed, one way or another.
The Kremlin signal: “We haven’t even started” starts now.

Exhibit 2: Friday afternoon, a few hours after Peskov. Confirmed by a serious
European – not Russian – source. The first counter-signal.

Regular troops from France, Germany and Poland have arrived, by rail and air, to
Cherkassy, south of Kiev. A substantial force. No numbers leaked. They are being
housed in schools. For all practical purposes, this is a NATO force.

That signals, “Let the games begin”. From a Russian point of view, Mr. Khinzal’s
business cards are set to be in great demand.

Exhibit 3: Friday evening. Terror attack on Crocus City, a music venue northwest
of Moscow. A heavily trained commando shoots people on sight, point blank, in
cold blood, then sets a concert hall on fire. The definitive counter-signal:
with the battlefield collapsing, all that’s left is terrorism in Moscow.

And just as terror was striking Moscow, the US and the UK, in southwest Asia,
was bombing Sana’a, the Yemeni capital, with at least five strikes.

Some nifty coordination. Yemen has just clinched a strategic deal in Oman with
Russia-China for no-hassle navigation in the Red Sea, and is among the top
candidates for BRICS+ expansion at the summit in Kazan next October.

Not only the Houthis are spectacularly defeating thalassocracy, they have the
Russia-China strategic partnership on their side. Assuring China and Russia that
their ships can sail through the Bab-al-Mandeb, Red Sea and Gulf of Aden with no
problems is exchanged with total political support from Beijing and Moscow.

The sponsors remain the same

Deep in the night in Moscow, before dawn on Saturday 23. Virtually no one is
sleeping. Rumors dance like dervishes on countless screens. Of course nothing
has been confirmed – yet. Only the FSB will have answers. A massive
investigation is in progress.

The timing of the Crocus massacre is quite intriguing. On a Friday during
Ramadan. Real Muslims would not even think about perpetrating a mass murder of
unarmed civilians under such a holy occasion. Compare it with the ISIS card
being frantically branded by the usual suspects.

Let’s go pop. To quote Talking Heads: “This ain’t no party/ this ain’t no disco/
this ain’t no fooling around”. Oh no; it’s more like an all-American psy op.
ISIS are cartoonish mercenaries/goons. Not real Muslims. And everyone knows who
finances and weaponizes them.

That leads to the most possible scenario, before the FSB weighs in: ISIS goons
imported from the Syria battleground – as it stands, probably Tajiks – trained
by CIA and MI6, working on behalf of the Ukrainian SBU. Several witnesses at
Crocus referred to “Wahhabis” – as in the commando killers did not look like
Slavs.

It was up to Serbia’s Aleksandar Vucic to cut to the chase. He directly
connected the “warnings” in early March from American and British embassies
directed at their citizens not to visit public places in Moscow with CIA/MI6
intel having inside info about possible terrorism, and not disclosing it to
Moscow.

The plot thickens when it is established that Crocus is owned by the Agalarovs:
an Azeri-Russian billionaire family, very close friends of…

… Donald Trump.

Talk about a Deep State-pinpointed target.

ISIS spin-off or banderistas – the sponsors remain the same. The clownish
secretary of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine, Oleksiy
Danilov, was dumb enough to virtually, indirectly confirm they did it, saying on
Ukrainian TV, “we will give them [Russians] this kind of fun more often.”

But it was up to Sergei Goncharov, a veteran of the elite Russia Alpha
anti-terrorism unit, to get closer to unwrapping the enigma: he told Sputnik the
most feasible mastermind is Kyrylo Budanov – the chief of the Main Directorate
of Intelligence at the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.

The “spy chief” who happens to be the top CIA asset in Kiev.

It’s got to go till the last Ukrainian

The three exhibits above complement what the head of NATO’s

military committee, Rob Bauer, previously told a security forum in Kiev: “You
need more than just grenades – you need people to replace the dead and wounded.
And this means mobilization.”

Translation: NATO spelling out this is a war until the last Ukrainian.

And the “leadership” in Kiev still does not get it. Former Minister of
Infrastructure Omelyan: “If we win, we will pay back with Russian oil, gas,
diamonds and fur. If we lose, there will be no talk of money – the West will
think about how to survive.”

In parallel, puny “garden-and jungle” Borrell admitted that it would be
“difficult” for the EU to find an extra 50 billion euros for Kiev if Washington
pulls the plug. The cocaine-fueled sweaty sweatshirt leadership actually
believes that Washington is not “helping” in the form of loans, but in the form
of free gifts. And the same applies for the EU.

The Theater of the Absurd is unmatchable. The German Liver Sausage Chancellor
actually believes that proceeds from stolen Russian assets “do not belong to
anyone”, so they can be used to finance extra Kiev weaponizing.

Everyone with a brain knows that using interest from “frozen”, actually stolen
Russian assets to weaponize Ukraine is a dead end – unless they steal all of
Russia’s assets, roughly $200 billion, mostly parked in Belgium and Switzerland:
that would tank the Euro for good, and the whole EU economy for that matter.

Eurocrats better listen to Russian Central Bank major “disrupter” (American
terminology) Elvira Nabiullina: The Bank of Russia will take “appropriate
measures” if the EU does anything on the “frozen”/stolen Russian assets.

It goes without saying that the three exhibits above completely nullify the “La
Cage aux Folles” circus promoted by the puny Petit Roi, now known across his
French domains as Macronapoleon.

Virtually the whole planet, including the English-speaking Global North, had
already been mocking the “exploits” of his Can Can Moulin Rouge Army.

So French, German and Polish soldiers, as part of NATO, are already in the south
of Kiev. The most possible scenario is that they will stay far, far away from
the frontlines – although traceable by Mr. Khinzal’s business activities.

Even before this new NATO batch arriving in the south of Kiev, Poland – which
happens to serve as prime transit corridor for Kiev’s troops – had confirmed
that Western troops are already on the ground.

So this is not about mercenaries anymore. France, by the way, is only 7th in
terms of mercenaries on the ground, largely trailing Poland, the US and Georgia,
for instance. The Russian Ministry of Defense has all the precise records.

In a nutshell: now war has morphed from Donetsk, Avdeyevka and Belgorod to
Moscow. Further on down the road, it may not just stop in Kiev. It may only stop
in Lviv. Mr. 87%, enjoying massive national near-unanimity, now has the mandate
to go all the way. Especially after Crocus.

There’s every possibility the terror tactics by Kiev goons will finally drive
Russia to return Ukraine to its original 17th century landlocked borders: Black
Sea-deprived, and with Poland, Romania, and Hungary reclaiming their former
territories.

Remaining Ukrainians will start to ask serious questions about what led them to
fight – literally to their death – on behalf of the US Deep State, the military
complex and BlackRock.

As it stands, the Highway to Hell meat grinder is bound to reach maximum
velocity.

……………………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged nato, politics, russia, ukraine, war


TERRORIST ATTACK IN MOSCOW — WHO DID IT? – BY LARRY JOHNSON – 22 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 23, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 800 WORDS • 

On the “Usual Suspects” list we have Ukraine and we have ISIS (Islamic State). A
good case can be made for both. I am posting three videos — some of it is
repetitive — that discusses the attack and the very odd behavior of the Biden
Administration. Let’s go through the chronology of events.

On March 7 US Embassy Moscow issued the following alert:

> The Embassy is monitoring reports that extremists have imminent plans to
> target large gatherings in Moscow, to include concerts, and U.S. citizens
> should be advised to avoid large gatherings over the next 48 hours.

What you need to understand is that this warning was not issued at the
discretion of the embassy. This was approved in Washington, DC at Main State and
would have required some intelligence that was deemed somewhat specific and
“credible.” When I was doing this job at State Counter Terrorism in 1990, this
was in the aftermath of the bombing of Pan, 103. It was widely believed in the
public that state department, and the CIA had information in advance about the
terrorist bombing of that plane, and warned our person out not to get on board.
That was not true but it did raise the issue of when, and how to warn the public
about a potential threat. We came up with a system that required specific and
credible intelligence. The more specific and credible the intelligence, the less
need to warn the public. Consider, for example, that if we knew a terrorist
attack was going to be carried out on Friday at a public concert hall by a
particular group, we would be able to alert appropriate authorities and take
precautions to intercept the attack without alarming the public.

On the other hand, if the information was not in great detail, but did come from
a credible source, then we would take the time to put together a public warning.
That is what happened when the US Embassy Moscow issued the warning on 7 March.
They had information they thought was credible, but not terribly specific. This
raises a key question — did the United States warn Russian authorities?
Normally, when I was doing the job, we would share the information with the
appropriate government and law enforcement authorities, in order to try to
prevent the attack. Based on public comments by Maria Zakharova and Dimitri
Medvedev, following the March 7, warning, and following today’s attack, it
appears that the United States did not share any of its information with Russia.
I would note there is a Wall Street Journal report tonight, stating that the
United States did warn, but Russian authorities insist that they were not
provided with an Intel heads up.

What makes the entire situation so bizarre and questionable in terms of what the
United States knew, and when it knew it, is that the State Department issued a
statement within two hours of the bombing — remember, we still did not know how
many attackers, what kind of weapons, how many casualties, and whether or not,
they were hostages — declaring that Ukraine was not responsible for this attack.
How did State Department know that? It’s strongly suggests that the United
States had intelligence, which did not share with Moscow.

Then we have this very unusual X message (formerly Twitter) that was posted at
3:30 AM this morning, 22 March, by OSINTdefender (which I think of has a CIA
front for spreading messages the CIA wants out there):

> Members of U.S. National Security Council and the White House have reportedly
> started to become Increasingly Frustrated by “Unauthorized Brazen Actions”
> taken by Ukraine against Russia, including their recent Campaign of Long-Range
> Drone Strikes having Targeted at least 25 Oil Refineries, Terminals, Depots
> and Storage Facilities across Western Russia; with some Biden Administration
> Officials believing these Strikes will cause a Spike in Global Oil Prices as
> well as Significant Escalation and Retaliation against Ukraine like was seen
> during tonight’s Large-Scale Missile Attack.

Do you think that is just a happy coincidence that the Biden White House is
bemoaning Ukraine taking “unauthorized brazen actions” on the same day there is
a massive terrorist attack in Moscow? I don’t believe in coincidence. I think
the Biden ministration was trying to get out ahead of an attack that they knew
was coming.

Some claims have emerged late in the day with ISIS, allegedly, taking credit for
the attack. What makes that interesting is that we have evidence that some
members of ISIS have been fighting in Ukraine against Russia, so this does not
necessarily exonerate, either Ukraine or the United States.

Anyway, I deal with these issues from different perspectives in the following
videos:

Here’s the Judge and Ray:



And Nima:



(Republished from Sonar21)

| Tagged moscow, news, russia, ukraine, world


BOEING’S UNCONTROLLED DESCENT – BY CHARLES WING-UEXKULL – 18 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 21, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

HOW THE AEROSPACE MANUFACTURING COMPANY DECLINED OVER THE DECADES

There’s no doubt that Boeing is in serious trouble. Recent reports of serious
safety issues and concerns over workforce diversity campaigns are symptoms of a
corporate culture that has been ailing for a while. The legendary American
company that helped win WWII and dominated the postwar aviation industry used to
attack engineering problems by empowering the organization’s best men with
almost dictatorial authority. But over the past quarter-century, Boeing has
transformed from a hard-nosed, mission-focus company into a complacent
mediocrity defined by bureaucratic entrenchment and financial chicanery.

Boeing’s golden age during WWII was defined by the execution of projects like
the B-29: a four-engine bomber that could deliver up to 20,000 pounds of bombs
against a target more than 2,600 miles away at a speed exceeding 250 miles per
hour, far in excess of any other aircraft in the war. The B-29 was the first
bomber with a pressurized cabin, which helped extend its service ceiling above
30,000 feet, well out of the range of Mitsubishi Zeroes. It had
remote-controlled machine gun turrets that could be slaved together in a
synchronized aiming system run by an analog computer. The plane itself had a
startling, graceful silhouette — albatross-like wings that stretched 141 feet,
longer than the Wright Brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk.

The project was a hideously complex and expensive weapons program with a total
cost more than double that of the Manhattan Project, requiring the coordination
of thousands of contractors and production facilities spread across the United
States. After Boeing missed multiple deadlines to deliver combat-worthy planes
to the U.S. Army Air Force, Hap Arnold empowered General Bennett Meyers to take
control of the production process and do everything possible to bring out the
plane; ‘The Battle of Kansas’ thus ensued. Thousands of technicians from all
over the country were called into Wichita, modification centers at Great Bend,
Pratt, Walter, and Salina, working in subzero weather and snowstorms. The shock
force of aircraft technicians replaced the plating on the wings, the glass in
the cockpit, modified the cowl flaps around the engines, and removed, replaced,
and resoldered every electrical connection.

The ‘Battle of Kansas’ involved direct military control over civilian workforce,
and it furnished an example of how centralized authority and accountability
could quickly yield results. Within weeks, the first B-29s were flying. By the
war’s end, Boeing delivered more than 3,600 Superfortresses. On the night of
March 9, 334 B-29s were sent to bomb Tokyo from altitudes between 5,000 and
10,000 feet, each loaded with 16,000 pounds of incendiary bombs. Eventually,
the Enola Gay, a B-29, dropped the bomb on Hiroshima.

Today, Boeing lacks this commitment to pushing the technological envelope as
well as any sense of urgency with regard to the national interest: in this
respect it still represents a mirror of America, only now it is a mirror of
decline. The history of Boeing over the past thirty years is a story of a
critical American institution that sold off its engineering culture and embraced
an asset-light focus on margin instead of product vision, and then executed that
strategy poorly. In 2024, Boeing is producing fewer planes than it did a decade
ago and faces an onslaught of headlines about spectacular accidents, nagging
regulators, and disappointing earnings.

A large part of the issues can be traced back to the Boeing-McDonnell Douglas
merger in 1997. The deal seemed like a good idea at the time. By 1996, McDonnell
Douglas commanded only 4% share in U.S. commercial aviation, and its production
lines were languishing. Meanwhile, Boeing had a $100 billion backlog, and needed
more assembly capacity to ramp deliveries and fulfill its orders. Yet in the
event, the joke on Wall Street became that “McDonnell Douglas bought Boeing with
Boeing’s money.” McDonnell Douglas CEO Harry Stonecipher and John McDonnell, the
chair of McDonnell Douglas’ board, became the largest shareholders of the
combined entity after a stock swap worth $13 billion and they brought McDonnell
Douglas’ bureaucratic defense contractor culture of margin-focused, risk-averse
financial engineering with them.

This culture almost immediately began to win out over Boeing’s engineering
culture committed to innovation and quality. The first “clean-sheet” aircraft
produced by the combined entity would be the 787 Dreamliner. From the start of
the project in 2003 Stonecipher imposed strict cost controls, demanding that the
plane be developed for less than 40% of what it cost Boeing to develop the 777
more than a decade before. He also required each plane’s unit cost to be less
than 60% of the cost of a 777. Boeing would accomplish this, Stonecipher said,
by abandoning full-fledged, bottoms-up assembly. Instead, for the first time,
workers in Boeing’s Everett plant would connect sub-assemblies and integrate
disparate systems provided by suppliers rather than attaching every bolt and
component themselves.

For the 787, Boeing engineers eschewed the expensive, time-consuming process of
designing new components in-house — instead, they provided high-level
specifications to their suppliers and let them design the parts, pushing cost
and accountability outside the organization and diluting authority. In short,
Stonecipher implemented the kind of development and design program that you’d
expect from a company that wanted to reduce its assets and costs and guarantee
the production of airplanes at a wide gross margin. But his plan backfired:
costs ballooned as the problems of orchestrating more suppliers handling more of
the work outran the savings generated by outsourcing it in the first place. The
787, named the ‘Dreamliner’, was a beautiful plane — the way that its
carbon-fiber wings can flex up and down more than 25 feet make it resemble a
living creature, a bird instinctively controlling its feathers as it rides the
air. But its deferred costs piled up to more than $30 billion, almost ten times
the cost of the 777 program.

The 787 ended up as a financial catastrophe for Boeing: even after delivering
more than 1,100 Dreamliners, the program is still billions of dollars in the
red. During the pandemic, production of the 787 was moved to Boeing’s North
Charleston plant, which had a mandate to increase deliveries to 14 planes per
month. But Boeing never came close to those targets: currently North Charleston
is only delivering five to six 787s per month.

The conventional wisdom is that Boeing’s recent obsession with quarterly
results, margin, and an asset-light balance sheet led to deterioration in
quality control that manifested not only in assembly — the Alaska Air flight
with the blown-out door — but also in design — the faulty 737 MAX software that
sent planes diving toward the ground. But the conventional wisdom is only
half-right. Not only did the McDonnell Douglas executives shift Boeing’s
strategy to optimize for margin and profitability, but they incompetently
executed their own strategy — their new plane, the 787, burned more money than
any other Boeing commercial aviation airframe.

Fundamentally, Boeing’s problem was that it lost sight of the truth that
advancing complex projects is only possible when command and control
is concentrated, rather than dispersed. Extraordinarily committed engineers must
be given great authority to execute; groundbreaking planes don’t come together
simply because the unit economics are favorable or subcontractor agreements are
favorably written.

There’s no sign that Boeing has taken this lesson to heart since the
embarrassing state of the 787 program or the 737 MAX’s safety debacle. Before
the so-called pandemic, Boeing was neck-and-neck with its chief rival in
commercial jetliners, Airbus: in 2018, Boeing delivered 806 commercial aircraft
and Airbus delivered 800. But the grounding of the 737 MAX in 2019, coupled with
the lockdowns that started in 2020, devastated Boeing’s ability to produce
planes. Its 2020 deliveries fell to 157 planes, while Airbus managed to deliver
566 planes. That year, Boeing made the decision to gut its engineering force
even further, laying off 1,239 engineers and technical workers and nearly 3,800
machinists. Those cost-saving decisions made in a panic during an industry
trough hampered Boeing’s ability to ramp deliveries once the lockdowns ended: in
2021 when Airbus delivered 611 planes, Boeing only delivered 340.

Boeing is still missing its delivery numbers in 2024, even as its market share
among the big four domestic airlines fell from 88.7% in 2012 to 69.4% in 2023.
In a few years, Delta will be flying a majority Airbus fleet; American Airlines
already is. The storied American aircraft manufacturer is literally losing its
home market, the densest, most mature commercial aviation market in the
world, the market it built, to a state-supported European manufacturer that is
outcompeting it in efficiency and volume.

Meanwhile, management is rearranging deck chairs to make them more diverse. In
2022, Boeing tied managers’ incentive compensation to the ‘diversity’ of their
interview slates, meaning that their bonuses depended on whether or not they
considered women, racial minorities, and the disabled for positions they were
hiring for. In Boeing’s Global Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (GEDI) 2023
Report, Sara Bowen, vice president of GEDI, Talent Intelligence, and Employee
Listening, wrote: “We know diversity must be at the table for every important
decision our company makes — every challenge we face, every innovation we
design. Equity, diversity and inclusion are core values because they make Boeing
— and each of us individually — better.”

The GEDI report boasted that racial and ethnic minorities now hold 41.4% of all
jobs in U.S. Boeing Commercial Airplanes, 28.3% of all jobs in Defense, Space, &
Security, and 38.2% of all jobs in Global Services. Minorities accounted for
47.5% of all new hires in 2022, and 34.4% of all promotions. More Boeing
employees are disabled — in 2022, 7.7% of Boeing employees had a disability, up
1.3 points from the previous year, the report noted. The proportion of military
veterans at the company, on the other hand, is declining. 

But DEI is only part of the problem. Historically, Boeing has achieved great
results by centralizing authority and control in the hands of the most
exceptionally talented engineers. Today, the culture at Boeing is the opposite:
listening sessions with the downtrodden, coddling the broken, and tiptoeing
around the oppressed. Authority diffused throughout an entire organization’s
hierarchy is no authority at all; accountability to technical results becomes
challenging, if not impossible, when managers are serving two masters. 

“Progress is every teammate acting on our Seek, Speak & Listen habits,” Bowen
wrote in the 2023 report. “[It] is every teammate feeling physically and
psychologically safe, and ensuring that safety for each other.” In November
2022, Boeing CEO David Calhoun told investors that the company would not
introduce a new clean sheet design until the 2030s. This will be the first
decade in Boeing’s history that the company will fail to bring out a new
airplane; nearly a generation will pass between new aircraft launches, a gap in
institutional knowledge and organizational capacity that will impose costs on
the company for years to come, if not finish it off for good.

……………….

Source

CHARLES WING-UEXKÜLL IS A WRITER AND EX-ACADEMIC. HE CAN BE
FOLLOWED @CWINGUEXKULL.

| Tagged airbus, aviation, boeing, business, travel


IS TIKTOK A WEAPON AGAINST AMERICAN HEGEMONY? – BY HUGO DIONÍSIO – 20 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 21, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 3,400 WORDS • 

TikTok not only destroys Silicon Valley’s monopoly by competing furiously with
its platforms, it also steals their space, which was previously shielded, as the
White House believed.

In the aftermath of Vladimir Putin’s resounding victory; after an election with
a very high turnout (with a lower abstention rate than is usually the case in
the West); an even higher approval rating for the current president of the
Russian Federation; the contradiction between the real information, witnessed
and verified by countless international observers, and the information broadcast
on the White House-dominated communication spectrum, forces us to put into
perspective an entire information battle taking place in the virtual universe.

When we see news that this or that Silicon Valley platform is leaving Russia, in
the light of the war waged on TikTok by the U.S. plutocracy, we can only
consider that this departure is fortunate for the country and its people. Had
the Russian authorities not made the necessary efforts to build a sovereign
digital ecosystem, leaving the country to the propaganda of California, would we
be talking about the same results? I have my doubts!

A Rutgers study with the NCRI (Network Contagion Research Institute), on the
alignment of TikTok with the geopolitical perspectives of the Communist Party of
China, analyzes the information conveyed by the Chinese platform in comparison
with Instagram, using, of course, the latter as a control reference.

Subsequently, they draw the conclusion that there is an alignment by saying
that, comparing the number of posts between the two platforms, the “pernicious”
TikTok and the “transparent” Instagram, posts about Uighurs are 1 (on TikTok) to
11 (on Instagram); about Tibet 1 to 38, Tiananmen 1 to 82 and “democracy in Hong
Kong” 1 to 180. The study says that these are “sensitive” topics for the Chinese
government. Not for a moment does it question the veracity of such sensitive
information for “Communist China”.

A concrete example is the war in Ukraine subject, which pits NATO against the
Russian Federation, where posts have a ratio of 5 (TikTok) to 8 (Instagram) when
it comes to the “support Ukraine” movement, or the genocide in Gaza, where the
ratio is 2 to 6 when it comes to “supporting Israel”. The study does little to
analyze the metrics in reverse, i.e. in relation to hashtags that are in
opposition to Washington’s interests. But what is truly conclusive is the total
disparity between what is mentioned more or less on each of the platforms. The
same accusation that is leveled at TikTok regarding sensitive topics for the
Chinese government, could also be leveled at the U.S. administration when it
comes to topics that run counter to its propaganda, on Silicon Valley platforms.
Rutgers doesn’t deal with that, much less the algorithmic biases that justify
the disparity in the treatment of certain topics. We know why they exist. And
that reason doesn’t work in the White House’s favor, quite the opposite.

If an analysis of the hashtags, which are supposedly in China’s universe of
interests, already shows us that what is in China’s interest is diametrically
disinterested in Washington’s, there is one issue in particular that is much
more sensitive than the rest, and that is the Palestinian cause. For every
3 posts of “support for Palestine” on TikTok, we only have 1 on Instagram. This
tells us, in my opinion, more about the U.S. than about China. Considering that
the Chinese government is known for not meddling in the internal affairs of
other countries and considering that it maintains important trade relations with
Israel, this gap between TikTok and Instagram is indicative, above all, of the
concerns of the United States.

And here we have a brief indication of the real driving force behind the
anti-TikTok wave that has been sweeping the Capitol. The truth is that the
American-Jewish community has been the most active in anti-TikTok lobbying. An
article on www.jewishreviewofbooks.com, with the title “Israel’s TikTok
problem” says in so many words that “protecting Americans from TikTok’s
political influence will be a gain for the relationship between Israel and its
most important ally”. Words for what?

The big concern is the space given by TikTok to pro-Palestinian groups and ideas
they call “antisemitic”, knowing how exacerbated the antisemitic sensitivities
of Zionists are. The warning in this article is extremely serious, pointing to
the serious problems this elite has with democracy itself. In addition to
mentioning, as a negative factor, the demographic weight that countries such as
Indonesia, Malaysia or Pakistan have in TikTok, influencing the algorithm – this
democracy thing has a lot to say about it – the whole article appeals to the
attention of the American ruling class to the fact that a generational
confrontation between the young and the old is at stake. What really worries
them is that younger people are far more “pro-Palestinian” than “pro-Israeli”.
The culprit? It’s TikTok! Why is that? Because it prevents them from effectively
spreading their propaganda.

This reality is even acknowledged in the article, when it criticizes the TikTok
administration for not accepting a paid advertisement that dramatized the issue
of the return of kidnapped Israeli citizens. At the same time, it is the
website www.vox.com that reports on the fact that the Israeli foreign ministry
spent 1.5 million dollars on propaganda on Youtube, X and the mainstream media
about the lie – already confirmed – of the 40 beheaded babies. This is really
TikTok’s main sin. Rather than spreading low-quality information or information
aligned with Chinese pretensions, the platform is not controlled to the liking
of Washington or Tel Aviv.

As if to make my point about democracy and the problems the White House has with
it – well reported in its handling of the Russian elections and the choices made
by the Russian people – the American Pew Research Center, in an analysis of the
importance of social media for democracy, tells us that only in three countries
does more than half the population say that social media is bad for democracy:
the Netherlands, France and the United States. It’s ironic that the country that
has the most social networks and controls them the most – contrary to what it
assumes – is precisely the one in which the most people say that social networks
are bad for democracy: in this case, the USA, with 64% of responses in the
negative. Symptomatic, given the exposure to White House manipulation. Perhaps
the American and European people don’t sleep that much.

What does this have to do with all the “Russiagate” propaganda, the anti-Trump
“fakenews”, or the recent TikTok affair? In my opinion, everything! Above all,
it’s a problem of dealing with an undeniable fact: the opening up of social
networks to the world puts the White House’s pretensions in an unfavorable
demographic position, dissolving the propaganda that Washington manufactures to
denigrate governments that don’t obey it into a huge global majority. As such,
platforms that don’t obey its dictates, deleting posts or users that contradict
Western propaganda, must be banned. There is no shortage of articles such as the
one on www.nbcnews.com, stating that “critics are renewing calls for TikTok to
be banned, claiming it has an anti-Israel bias”. A whole unipolar model is at
stake.

So, the U.S. problem with TikTok is simple. TikTok represents a digital
counterpoint, on a par with the counterpoints that already exist in the real
world. Until very recently, the virtual world was seen as a kind of heavenly
paradise – like a neoliberal Garden of Eden – totally controlled by the U.S.
power clique. Until, one day, some countries began to find solutions that
favored the creation of their own digital ecosystems.

The fateful and strategic decision was made by the People’s Republic of China
when it rejected a Google and Facebook “without manual brakes”, which did not
operate according to the procedures that the White House had defined for its
territory, but according to its own. Huawei, Tik-Tok, Weechat, Aliexpress and
other top digital platforms are “children” of this decision, which is referred
to in the West as “the great Firewall of China”. And the most cartoonish thing
about this is that the existence of the “great firewall of China” is, above all,
the responsibility of the aggressive and intrusive American foreign policy. If
there is any truth to the Rutgers study, it is that the American anti-Chinese
agenda has been partly responsible for the generational problems that the U.S.
now encounters among its population and which concern relations between its
American territory and its arm in the Middle East.

And this reading can be partially confirmed in a Quinnipiac University poll
from October 17, 2023, which says that voters aged 18-34 (39%) disapprove of
sending arms to Israel to fight Hamas, those aged 35-49 (35%), while those over
50 (only 17%) disapprove. In other words, there is a clear generational divide
(50% difference), confirmed by the fact that TikTok’s metrics show an equal
number of views over the last 30 days for videos with the hashtag “I support
Palestine” and “I support Israel”. Something that doesn’t happen on Silicon
Valley platforms.

In response to China’s intention not to be dependent on an ecosystem dominated
by Washington, attacks have poured in. “There is no freedom in China”; “there is
so much dictatorship in China that not even Google is the same”.
Symptomatically, both China and Russia demonstrated early on that they wanted to
develop their own digital environment, anticipating, as independently as they
did wisely, the risks associated with large-scale access to the minds of their
peoples. Through the back door, the White House’s attitude has proved both
countries right. Today, it is the White House that wants to protect its vital
virtual space.

You may or may not agree with the limitations that the PRC demanded of the
search engine at the time, and whose unwillingness to accept them led to the
blocking of these applications. Today, we realize that for Alphabet and Meta it
wasn’t a question of agreeing to apply “limits”, but of who defined them and
ordered them to be applied. Quite simply – and paradoxically – it was up to
Uncle Sam to apply limitations, and the Chinese state itself did not have the
power to apply them on its territory. Conversely, by applying them here more
than ever, Uncle Sam is accusing the PRC of wanting to impose a “digital
autocracy”.

Thus, on the material level, with the inauguration of the multipolar world, the
growing autonomy of nations such as Iran, China, Russia, India, Brazil, Saudi
Arabia and South Africa, it wasn’t long before the “threat” of multipolarity
began to be felt on the digital level too. In my opinion, the imposition of the
“great firewall of China” was an important step in this process.

The first symptom of this success was Huawei, which challenged the dictatorship
of communication technologies, until then monopolized by the U.S. Above all,
Huawei meant access to the most advanced technologies of the future for a
country considered “lesser” by the Anglo-Saxon supremacist elite and
their wannabes. Stemming this development has become one of the main tasks of
the U.S., of its “contain China” enterprise. An obvious sign of this success is
that U.S. discourse is moving from the level of “containing China” to the more
acute level of “countering China”, which seems to indicate a recognition of
failure. It is no longer a question of “containing”, but of contradicting,
annulling, counter-attacking, “countering” what has not been contained.

The result of these choices is that anyone who reads the bill H.R. 7521
(Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act) or the
report issued by the Energy and Commerce Committee, which served as the basis
for the bill, can see from the U.S.’s own words what China’s main concerns were
at the time of the attempt by Google and Facebook to enter its territory without
limits. All the risks that are pointed out to TikTok, many of which have already
been pointed out to Huawei, are known practices by the U.S. against countries
that do not guard their virtual space as they should and as the protection of
their sovereignty and the interests of their peoples would demand.

This is what the Energy and Commerce Committee report says right at the start:
“Foreign adversaries have used access to data (…) to disrupt Americans’ daily
lives, conduct espionage activities, and push disinformation and propaganda
campaigns in an attempt to undermine our democracy and gain global influence and
control.”

Symptomatically, we have to take this “control” and “national interest” thing
very seriously. According to the data provided by the report itself, TikTok is
in 150 countries and serves 1 billion people, including 170 million Americans.
And this is a real drama for Washington. How can you control the minds of a
people when half of them follow a platform you don’t control? How do you
manipulate the minds of 170 million Americans when the technology that could be
used to manipulate them is in China? How can you collect the data of 170 million
people, aggregating it into profiles and predicting their behavior, so that you
can push them in the desired directions, when that data is stored in China? If
Israel is in danger, then so are the dollar and hegemony.

Meanwhile, the triggering of the panic button is also related to the effect that
Tik-Tok has as a disruptor of the virtual, monopolistic environment created in
Silycon Valey. The CIA, through DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency), has created an entire virtual ecosystem, transporting every one of its
people’s minds into it. This ecosystem, controlled throughout the West only by
the security agencies at Washington’s service, wanted a certain degree of
invulnerability. In order to be perfect, the flow of data had to be closed and
watertight, so that the algorithms could not be infected and, with it, the
“harmonious” functioning of the system of “surveillance capitalism”, as Shoshana
Zuboff rightly called it, could not be disrupted.

It is this ecosystem, through which U.S. security agencies monitor all the
digital information of the world’s peoples in real time, predicting and
producing behavior, promoting and demoting parties, governments and public
figures, accelerating or delaying agendas, that is at stake. Above all, with
TikTok, the Washington regime’s concern exceeds the Trump administration’s
anxiety levels with Huawei. Badly or well, with Huawei it was about the more
structural, more architectural technological aspects. With TikTok, what’s at
stake is the very central nervous system of the internet. China now has
privileged access to the neuronal network and the central nervous system of a
body, which the U.S. had created in order to dominate the world.

With the virtual monopoly deeply affected, on its own territory, the U.S. is
choosing to shoot itself in the foot, as it did when it decided to load Russia
with endless sanctions. With this action on TikTok, the U.S. is sending out
another serious warning to countries that hold capital and investments in the
West. At any moment, a change in the law, a geopolitical pretext or a false
accusation could justify confiscation.

To position TikTok in the firing line, the U.S. is once again looking in the
mirror. In the preamble, the bill, H.R. 7521, refers to the Chinese National
Security Law, published in 2017, clearly distorting both its content and its
territorial scope. Referring to what we know to be Article 7 of that law –
through the report of the Energy and Commerce Committee – they state that there
is a risk that Tik-Tok will be called upon to share international personal data
with the Chinese government, since, as they claim, all organizations, public or
private, have to collaborate with the efforts of the Chinese intelligence
services. This is at least partly true. The text of Article 7 of the PRC’s
National Security Law reads: “All organizations and citizens shall support,
assist and cooperate with national intelligence efforts in accordance with the
law, and protect the secrets of national intelligence work of which they are
aware.”

What the text of the proposal doesn’t mention is what’s in the next article of
China’s National Security Law. After all, Article 8 of the same law requires
“respecting and protecting human rights, protecting the rights and interests of
individuals and organizations”. In other words, contrary to what the U.S.
Congress says, this aid is conditional on compliance with the law and the rights
of citizens and organizations, and is not a discretionary, authoritarian or
autocratic power.

But the main distortion introduced in the energy and trade committee’s report is
the territorial interpretation of the Chinese National Security Law. Article 7
of the PRC National Security Law is to be read within the framework of the
Chinese constitution, i.e. cooperation is limited to persons and organizations
of Chinese nationality, in relation to actions carried out on Chinese territory.

And it is precisely in China that Bytedance maintains its fundamental
technological base. That really is the biggest obstacle for the U.S. Contrary to
what the promoters of the proposal to “protect Americans from foreign
adversaries – the Controlled Applications Act” say, this is not about the fear
that their 170 million Americans will be monitored. After all, realistically, we
all know from practice and theory that China has a doctrine of non-interference
in the internal affairs of other countries. No matter how much they talk about
the Chinese “Data Protection” Law of 2020, arguing that it provides for the use
of personal and organizational data to prevent and anticipate risks to national
security, none of this is groundbreaking or an exception these days in any
country that cares about protecting its people. Monitoring all the people, as
the U.S. does, is completely unjustified.

What really worries the American plutocratic and gerontocratic regime is
monopoly. An empire is made up of monopolies, and to be an empire it’s not
enough to be big, you have to monopolize. And in order to build and maintain a
hegemonic empire, it is essential to monopolize the structural sectors of the
economy. And this is the real problem. TikTok not only destroys Silicon Valley’s
monopoly by competing furiously with these platforms, it also steals their
space, which was previously shielded, as the White House believed.

To protect what’s left of the monopoly, how about choosing someone who feels
sentimentally connected to it? The choice fell on the illustrious New Delhi-born
congressman of Indian descent, Raja Krishnamoorthi. What is certain is that Raja
has everything to do with anti-Chinese things, such as his responsibilities on
the “U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United
States and the Chinese Communist Party”. The Democratic intention is obvious, a
way of turning something political into a personal agenda that seeks
confrontation and direct provocation.

Thus, we are witnessing yet another act of desperation, the effect of which will
be to increase the already established mistrust of the seriousness with which
the West views its own “free and open market” ideology. At the head of a sector
inaugurated by the U.S. itself, surpassing them at their own game, Titok and
China are thus demonstrating that the days of exclusivity and restricted access
to the best the world has to offer are long gone. Just as Russia had already
shown that the time for excesses around its territory was over.

So, thinking about empires and monopolies – with reference to a resolution
recently passed in the European Parliament that aims to “decolonize,
de-imperialize and re-federalize Russia” – this TikTok issue once again
demonstrates the existence of a disintegration movement. TikTok is to the
virtual world as BRICS is to de-dollarization in the material world. Both are
inexorable processes that threaten to accelerate the “de-imperialization” of the
West.

TikTok’s relationship with Israel is premonitory. The defeat imposed by TikTok
on the Zionist narrative is not unrelated to Israel’s role in securing the
petrodollar, hegemony and its defeat by the multipolar world. TikTok puts
everything at risk!

………………………………….

Hugo Dionísio is a Lawyer, researcher and geopolitics’ analyst. He is the owner
of Canal-factual.wordpress.com Blog and co-founder of MultipolarTv, a Youtube
Channel targeted to geopolitical analysis. He develops activity as Human Rights
and Social rights activist as board member of the Portuguese Democratic Lawyers
Association. He is also a researcher at the Portuguese Workers Trade Union
Confederation (CGTP-IN).

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged china, news, social-media, technology, tiktok


DONETSK, AVDEYEVKA, MARIUPOL – ON THE ROAD IN ELECTORAL DONBASS – BY PEPE
ESCOBAR – 20 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 20, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,600 WORDS • 

They have waited 10 long, suffering years to vote in this election. And vote
they did, in massive numbers, certifying a landslide reelection for the
political leader who brought them back to Mother Russia. VVP may now be widely
referred to as Mr. 87%. In Donetsk, turnout was even higher: 88,17%. And no less
than 95% voted for him.

To follow the Russian electoral process at work in Donbass was a humbling – and
illuminating – experience. Graphically, in front of us, the full weight of the
collective West’s relentless denigration campaign was instantly gobbled up by
the rich black soil of Novorossiya. The impeccable organization, the full
transparency of the voting, the enthusiasm by polling station workers and voters
alike punctuated the historical gravity of the political moment: at the same
time everything was enveloped in an impalpable feeling of silent jubilation.

This was of course a referendum. Donbass represents a microcosm of the solid
internal cohesion of Russian citizens around the policies of Team Putin – while
at the same time sharing a feeling experienced by the overwhelming majority of
the Global South. VVP’s victory was a victory of the Global Majority.

And that’s what’s making the puny Global Minority even more apoplectic. With
their highest turnout since 1991, Russian voters inflicted a massive strategic
defeat to the intellectual pigmies who pass for Western “leadership” – arguably
the most mediocre political class of the past 100 years. They voted for a
fairer, stable system of international relations; for multipolarity; and for
true leadership by civilization-states such as Russia.

VVP’s 87% score was followed, by a long shot, by the Communists, with 3.9%. That
is quite significant, because these 91% represent a total rejection of the
globalist Davos/Great Reset plutocratic “future” envisioned by the 0.001%.


AVDEYEVKA: VOTING UNDER TOTAL DEVASTATION

On Election Day Two, at section 198 in downtown Donetsk, not far from Government
House, it was possible to fully measure the fluidity and transparency of the
system – even as Donetsk was not spared from shelling, in the late afternoon and
early evening in the final day of voting.

Afterwards, a strategic pit stop in a neighborhood mini-market. Yuri, an
activist, was buying a full load of fresh eggs to be transported to the nearly
starving civilians who still remain in Avdeyevka. Ten eggs cost the equivalent
of a dollar and forty cents.

Electoral Donbass © Sputnik

At Yasinovata, very close to Avdeyevka, we visit the MBOU, or school number 7,
impeccably rebuilt after non-stop shelling. The director, Ludmilla Leonova, an
extraordinary strong woman, takes me on a guide tour of the school and its brand
new classrooms for chemistry and biology, a quaint Soviet alphabet decorating
the classroom for Russian language. Classes, hopefully, will resume in the Fall.

Close to the school a refugee center for those who have been brought from
Avdeyevka has been set up. Everything is spotlessly clean. People are processed,
entered into the system, then wait for proper papers. Everyone wants to obtain a
Russian passport as soon as possible.

For the moment, they stay in dormitories, around 10 people in each room. Some
came from Avdeyevka, miraculously, in their own cars: there are a few Ukrainian
license plates around. Invariably, the overall expectation is to return to
Avdeyevka, when reconstruction starts, to rebuild their lives in their own town.

Then, it’s on the road to Avdeyevka. Nothing, absolutely nothing prepares us to
confront total devastation. In my nearly 40 years as a foreign correspondent,
I’ve never seen anything like it – even Iraq. At the unofficial entry to
Avdeyevka, beside the skeleton of a bombed building and the remains of a tank
turret, the flags of all military batallions which took part in the liberation
flutter in the wind.

Each building in every street is at least partially destroyed. A few remaining
residents congregate in a flat to organize the distribution of essential
supplies. I find a miraculously preserved icon behind the window of a bombed-out
ground floor apartment.

FPVs loiter overheard – detected by a handheld device, and our military escort
is on full alert. We find out that as we enter a ground floor apartment which is
being kept as a sort of mini food depot – housing donations from Yasinovata or
from the military – that very same room, in the morning, had been converted into
a polling station. That’s where the very few remaining Avdeyevka residents
actually voted.

A nearly blind man with his dog explains why he can’t leave: he lives in the
same street, and his apartment is still functional – even though he has no water
or electricity. He explains how the Ukrainians were occupying each apartment
block – with residents turned into refugees or hostages in the basements – and
then, pressed by the Russians, relocated to nearby schools and hospitals until
finally fleeing.

The basements are a nightmare. Virtually no light. The temperature is at least
10 degrees Celsius lower than at street level. It’s impossible to imagine how
they survived. Another resident nonchalantly strolls by in his bicycle,
surrounded by derelict concrete skeletons. The loud booms – mostly outgoing –
are incessant.

Then, standing amidst total devastation, a vision: the elegant silhouette of the
Church of Mary Magdalen, immaculately preserved. Dmitry, the caretaker, takes me
around; it’s a beautiful church, the paintings on the roof still gleaming under
the pale sunlight, a gorgeous chandelier and the inner chamber virtually intact.


THE MARIUPOL RENAISSANCE

The final election day is spent in Mariupol – which is being rebuilt at nearly
breakneck speed: the new railway station has just been finished. Voting is
seamless at school number 53, housing district 711. A beautiful mural behind the
ballot box depicts the sister cities St. Petersburg and Mariupol, with the
legendary Scarlet Sails from the Alexander Green story right in the middle.

I revisit the port: international cargo is still not moving, only ships coming
from the Russian mainland. But the first deal has been reached with Cameroon –
fruits in exchange with metals and manufactured products. Several other deals
with African nations are on the horizon.

in Electoral Donbass © Sputnik

The Pakrovska church, a Mariupol landmark, is being carefully restored. We are
welcomed by Father Viktor, who hosts lunch for a group of people from the
parish, and a fine conversation ensues ranging from Christian Orthodoxy to the
Decline of the West and the LGBT agenda.

We go to the roof and walk around a balustrade offering a spectacular 360-degree
view of Mariupol, with the port, the destroyed Azovstal iron works and the
Russian Sea of Azov in the deep background. The massive church bells ring – as
in a metaphor for the resurrection of a beautiful city which has the potential
to become a sort of Nice in the Sea of Azov.

Back in Donetsk, going to a “secret” school/museum only 2 km away from the line
of fire – which I first visited last month – has to be canceled: Donetsk
continues to be shelled.

With Avdeyevka in mind, as well as the shelling that refuses to go away, a few
questions on numbers pop up on the long 20-hour drive back to Moscow.

In Chechnya, led by uber-patriot Kadyrov, turnout was 97%. And no less than 99%
voted for VVP. So, unlike in the past, forget about any ulterior attempt at a
color revolution in Chechnya.

Same pattern in the Caucasus, in the region of Kabardino: turnout was 96%. No
less than 94% voted for VVP.

Between Kazakhstan and Mongolia, in Tuva, turnout was 96%. And 95% voted for
VVP. In the autonomous Yamal-Nenets, turnout was 94%. But VVP got “only” 79% of
the votes. In lake Baikal, Buryatia had 74% turnout and 88% of votes for VVP.

The key, once again, remains Moscow. Turnout, compared to other regions, was
relatively low: 67%. Well, Moscow is still largely Westernized and in several
aspects ideologically globalist – thus more critical than other parts of Russia
when it comes to the patriotic emphasis.

And that brings us to the clincher. Even with the resounding success of Mr. 87%,
they will never give up. If there ever is a minor chance of a successful Hybrid
War strategy provoking a color revolution, the stage will be Moscow. Quite
pathetic, actually, when compared to the images of Mr. 87% saluted by a packed
Red Square on Sunday like the ultimate rock star.

The Kremlin is taking no chances. Putin addressed the FSB and went straight to
the point: attempts to sow interethnic trouble – as a prelude to color
revolutions – must be strictly suppressed. The FSB will go for the next level:
traitors will be identified by name and targeted without a statute of
limitations.

After the electoral euphoria, no one really knows what happens next. It has to
be something hugely significant, honoring the historical VVP electoral
landslide. He has carte blanche now to do anything. Priority number one: to
finish once and for all with the Hegemon-built terror mongrel that has been
attacking Novorossiya for 10 long years.

……………………….

(Republished from Sputnik International)

| Tagged nato, politics, russia, ukraine, ukraine-war


THE RESISTANCE’S DISRUPTIVE MILITARY INNOVATION MAY DETERMINE THE FATE OF ISRAEL
– BY ALASTAIR CROOKE – 18 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 20, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,900 WORDS • 

Looking back to what I wrote in 2012, in the midst of the so-called Arab Spring
and its aftermath, it is striking just how much the Region has shifted. It is
now almost 180° re-orientated. Then, I argued,

> “That the Arab Spring “Awakening” is taking a turn, very different to the
> excitement and promise with which it was hailed at the outset. Sired from an
> initial, broad popular impulse, it is becoming increasingly understood, and
> feared, as a nascent counter-revolutionary “cultural revolution” – a
> re-culturation of the region in the direction of a prescriptive canon that is
> emptying out those early high expectations …
> 
> “That popular impulse associated with the ‘awakening’ has now been subsumed
> and absorbed into three major political projects associated with this push to
> reassert [Sunni primacy]: a Muslim Brotherhood project, a
> Saudi-Qatari-Salafist project, and a [radical jihadi] project.
> 
> “No one really knows the nature of the [first project] the Brotherhood project
> – whether it is that of a sect; or if it is truly mainstream … What is clear,
> however, is that the Brotherhood tone everywhere is increasingly one of
> militant sectarian grievance. The joint Saudi-Salafist project was conceived
> as a direct counter to the Brotherhood project – and [the third] was the
> uncompromising Sunni radicalism [Wahhabism], funded and armed by Saudi Arabia
> and Qatar, that aims, not to contain, but rather, to displace traditional
> Sunnism with the culture of Salafism. i.e. It sought the ‘Salifisation’ of
> traditional Sunni Islam.
> 
> “All these projects, whilst they may overlap in some parts, are in a
> fundamental way competitors with each other. And [were] being fired-up in
> Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, north Africa, the Sahel, Nigeria, and the
> horn of Africa.
> 
> [Not surprisingly] …“Iranians increasingly interpret Saudi Arabia’s mood as a
> hungering for war, and Gulf statements do often have that edge of hysteria and
> aggression: a recent editorial in the Saudi-owned al-Hayat stated: “The
> climate in the GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] indicates that matters are
> heading towards a GCC-Iranian-Russian confrontation on Syrian soil, similar to
> what took place in Afghanistan during the Cold War. To be sure, the decision
> has been taken to overthrow the Syrian regime, seeing as it is vital to the
> regional influence and hegemony of the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

Well, that was then. How different the landscape is today: The Muslim
Brotherhood largely is a ‘broken reed’, compared to what it was; Saudi Arabia
has effectively ‘switched off the lights’ on Salafist jihadism, and is focussed
more on courting tourism, and the Kingdom now has a peace accord with Iran
(brokered by China).

> “The cultural shift toward re-imagining a wider Sunni Muslim polity”, as I
> wrote in 2012, always was an American dream, dating back to Richard
> Perle’s ‘Clean Break’ Policy Paper of 1996 (a report that had been
> commissioned by Israel’s then-PM, Netanyahu). Its roots lay with the British
> post-war II policy of transplanting the stalwart family notables of the
> Ottoman era into the Gulf as an Anglophile ruling strata catering to western
> oil interests.

But look what has happened —

A mini revolution: Iran has, in the interim, ‘come in from the cold’ and is
firmly anchored as ‘a regional power’. It is now the strategic partner to Russia
and China. And Gulf States today are more preoccupied with ‘business’ and Tech
than Islamic jurisprudence. Syria, targeted by the West, and an outcast in the
region, has been welcomed back into the Arab League’s Arab sphere with high
ceremony, and Syria is on its way to assuming again its former standing within
the Middle East.

What is interesting is that even then, hints of the coming conflict between
Israel and the Palestinians were apparent; as I wrote in 2012:

> “Over recent years we have heard the Israelis emphasise their demand for
> recognition of a specifically Jewish nation-state, rather than for an Israeli
> State, per se. A Jewish state that in principle, would remain open to any Jew
> seeking to return: the creation of a ‘Jewish umma’, as it were.
> 
> “Now, it seems we have, in the western half of the Middle East, at least, a
> mirror trend, asking for the reinstatement of a wider Sunni nation –
> representing the ‘undoing’ of the last remnants of the colonial era. Will we
> see the struggle increasing epitomised as a primordial struggle between Jewish
> and Islamic religious symbols – between al-Aqsa and the Temple Mount?
> 
> “It seems that both Israel and its surrounding terrain are marching in step
> toward language which takes them far away from the underlying, largely secular
> concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been conceptualised. What
> will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own logic, becomes a clash of
> religious poles?”

What has driven this 180° turn? One factor, assuredly, was Russia’s limited
intervention into Syria to prevent a jihadi sweep. The second has been China’s
appearance on the scene as a truly gargantuan business partner – and putative
mediator too – precisely at a time when the U.S. had begun its withdrawal from
the region (at least in terms of the attention it pays to it, if not (yet)
reflected in any substantive physical departure).

The latter – U.S. military withdrawal (Iraq and Syria) – however, seems more a
question of ‘when’, rather than if. All expect it.

Put plainly, we have experienced a Mackinder-style ‘pivot of history’: Russia
and China – and Iran – are slowly taking control of the Asian heartland (both
institutionally and economically), as the pendulum of the West swings away.

The Sunni world – ineluctably and warily – marches towards the BRICS.
Effectively, the Gulf finds itself badly wrong-footed by the so-called ‘Abraham
Accords’ that tied them to Israeli Tech (which, in turn, was channelling
considerable Wall Street venture ‘free money’ their way). Israel’s ‘suspect
genocide’ (ICJ language) in Gaza is slowly driving a stake into the heart of the
Gulf ‘business model’.

But another key factor has been the smart diplomacy pursued by Iran. It is easy
for western Iran-hawks to decry Iran’s politicking and influencing across the
region – the Islamic Republic is after all, unrepentantly ‘non-compliant’ with
the U.S. aims and pro-Israeli ambitions in the Region. What else, other than
pushback, might you expect when all the encircling western ‘fire’ was so
concentrated on the Islamic Republic?

Yet, Iran has pursued an astute path. It has NOT gone to war against Sunni Arab
states in Syria, as was mooted in 2012. Rather, it quietly has pursued a
strategy of diplomacy and joint Gulf security and trade with Gulf States. Iran
too, has partly succeeded in shaking itself free from much of the effects of
western sanctions. It has joined both BRICS and the SCO and has acquired a new
economic and political ‘spatial depth’.

Whether the U.S. and Europe likes it or not, Iran is a major regional political
player, and it sits atop, with others, the coalition of Resistance Movements and
Fronts that have been woven together through shrewd diplomacy to work in close
conjunction with each other.

This development has become a key strategic ‘project’: Sunni (Hamas) and Shi’i
(Hizbullah) are joined with other ‘fronts’ in an anti-colonial struggle for
liberation under the non-sectarian symbol of Al-Aqsa (which is neither Sunni,
nor Shi’a, nor Muslim Brotherhood, nor Salafist or Wahhabi). It represents,
rather, the storied tale of Islamic civilisation. Yes, it is, in its way,
eschatological too.

This latter achievement has done much to limit the threat of all-out war from
engulfing the region (fingers-crossed though …). The Iranian and Resistance
Axis’ interest is twofold: First, to retain power to carefully calibrate
the intensity of conflict – upping and lowering as appropriate; and secondly, to
keep escalatory dominance as much as possible in their hands.

The second aspect encompasses strategic patience. The Resistance Movements well
understand the Israeli psyche – therefore, NO Pavlovian reflexes to Israeli
provocations are accepted. But rather, to wait and rely on Israel to provide the
pretext to any further step up the escalatory ladder. Israel must be seen to
be the instigator for escalation – and the resistance merely the responder. The
‘eye’ must be on the Washington political psyche.

Thirdly, Iran draws confidence to pursue its ‘forwardness’ by having innovated a
tectonic shift in asymmetric warfare, and in deterrence against Israel and the
West. The U.S. might huff and puff, but Iran felt assured throughout this period
that the U.S. well knows the risks associated with trying ‘blow the house down’.

Realists in the West tend to believe that ‘power’ is a simple function of
national population size and GDP. So that, given the disparity in air and
firepower, no way, as an example, can Hizbullah expect to ‘come out quits’
against Israel – a much richer and more populated entity.

This blindspot is the Resistance’s silent ‘ally’. It prevents the West (mostly)
from understanding this pivot in military thinking.

Iran and its allies take a different view: They regard a state’s power to rest
on intangibles, rather than literal tangibles: strategic patience; ideology;
discipline; innovation and the concept of military leadership defined as the
ability to cast a ‘magic’ spell over men so that they would follow their
commander, even unto death.

The West has (or had) airpower and unchallenged air superiority, but the
Resistance Fronts have their two-stage solution. They manufacture their own
AI-assisted swarm drones and smart earth-hugging missiles. This is their Air
Force.

The second stage naturally would be to evolve a layered air defence system
(Russian-style). Does the Resistance possess such? Like Brer Rabbit, they stay
mum.

The Resistance’s underlying strategy is clear: the West is over-invested in its
air dominance and in its overwhelming fire-power. It prioritises quick shock and
awe thrusts, but usually quickly exhausts itself early in the encounter. They
rarely can sustain such high-intensity assault for long.

In Lebanon in 2006, Hizbullah remained deep underground whilst the Israeli air
assault swept overhead. The physical surface damage was huge, yet their forces
were unaffected and emerged only afterwards. Then came the 33 days of
Hizbullah’s missile barrage – until Israel called it quits. This patience
represents the first pillar of strategy.

The second therefore, is that whereas the West has short endurance, the
opposition is trained and prepared for long attritional conflict – missile and
rocket barrage to the point that civil society can sustain the impact no longer.
War’s aim not necessarily has killing the enemy soldiers as a prime objective;
rather it is exhaustion and inculcating a sense of defeat.

And what of the opposing project?

In 2012, I wrote:

> “It seems that both Israel and [the Islamic world] are marching in step toward
> [eschatological narratives] which is taking them far away from the underlying,
> largely secular concepts by which this conflict traditionally has been
> conceptualised. What will be the consequence as the conflict, by its own
> logic, becomes a clash of religious poles? ” [– Al-Aqsa versus the Temple
> Mount].

Well, the West remains stuck with trying to manage and contain the conflict,
using precisely those ‘largely secular concepts’ by which this conflict has been
conceptualised and managed (or non-managed, I would say). In so doing, and
through the West’s (secular) support for one particular eschatological vision
(which happens to overlap with its own) over another, it inadvertently fuels the
conflict.

Too late to return to secular modes of management; the genie is out.

……………………………..

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged iran, israel, middle-east, saudi-arabia, syria


JOE BIDEN’S PARTING GIFT TO AMERICA WILL BE CHRISTIAN FASCISM – BY CHRIS HEDGES
– 17 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 18, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,500 WORDS • 



Onward Christian Fascism – by Mr. Fish

The Democratic Party had one last chance to implement the kind of New Deal
Reforms that could save us from another Trump presidency and Christian fascism.
It failed.

Joe Biden and the Democratic Party made a Trump presidency possible once and
look set to make it possible again. If Trump returns to power, it will not be
due to Russian interference, voter suppression or because the working class is
filled with irredeemable bigots and racists. It will be because the Democrats
are as indifferent to the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza as they are to
immigrants, the poor in our impoverished inner cities, those driven into
bankruptcy by medical bills, credit card debt and usurious mortgages, those
discarded, especially in rural America, by waves of mass layoffs and workers,
trapped in the serfdom of the gig economy, with its job instability and
suppressed wages.

Biden and the Democrats, along with the Republican Party, gutted antitrust
enforcement and deregulated banks and corporations, allowing them to cannibalize
the nation. They backed legislation in 1982 to green light the manipulation of
stocks through massive buybacks and the “harvesting” of companies by private
equity firms that resulted in mass layoffs. They pushed through onerous trade
deals, including the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal
of the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, which crippled union
organizing. They were full partners in the construction of the vast archipelagos
of the U.S. prison system — the largest in the world — and the militarization of
police to turn them into internal armies of occupation. They fund the endless
wars.

The Democrats dutifully serve their corporate masters, without whom most of
them, including Biden, would not have a political career. This is why Biden and
the Democrats will not turn on those who are destroying our economy and
extinguishing our democracy. The slops in the trough would dry up. Advocating
reforms jeopardize their fiefdoms of privilege and power. They fancy themselves
as “captains of the ship,” labor journalist Hamilton Nolan writes, but they are
“actually the wood-eating shipworms who are consuming the thing from inside
until it sinks.”

Authoritarianism is nurtured in the fertile soil of a bankrupt liberalism. This
was true in Weimar Germany. It was true in the former Yugoslavia. And it is true
now. The Democrats had four years to institute New Deal reforms. They failed.
Now we will pay.

A second Trump term will not be like the first. It will be about vengeance.
Vengeance against the institutions that targeted Trump – the press, the courts,
the intelligence agencies, disloyal Republicans, artists, intellectuals, the
federal bureaucracy and the Democratic Party.

Our imperial presidency, if Donald Trump returns to power, will shift
effortlessly into a dictatorship that emasculates the legislative and judicial
branches. The plan to snuff out our anemic democracy is methodically laid out in
the 887-page plan amassed by the Heritage Foundation called “Mandate for
Leadership.”

The Heritage Foundation spent $22 million to draw up policy proposals, hiring
lists and transition plans in Project 2025 to save Trump from the rudderless
chaos that plagued his first term. Trump blames “snakes,” “traitors,” and the
“Deep State” for undermining his first administration.

Our industrious American fascists, clutching the Christian cross and waving the
flag, will begin work on day one to purge federal agencies of “snakes” and
“traitors,” promulgate “Biblical” values, cut taxes for the billionaire
class, abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, stack the courts and federal
agencies with ideologues and strip workers of the few rights and protections
they have left. War and internal security, including the wholesale surveillance
of the public, will remain the main business of the state. The other functions
of the state, especially those that focus on social services, including Social
Security and protection of the vulnerable, will wither away.

Unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which has no self-imposed limits, turns
everything into a commodity, from human beings to the natural world, which it
exploits, until exhaustion or collapse. It first creates a mafia economy,
as Karl Polanyi writes, and then a mafia government. Political theorists,
including Aristotle, Karl Marx and Sheldon Wolin, warn that when oligarchs seize
power, the only options left are tyranny or revolution.

The Democrats know the working class has abandoned them. And they know why.
Democratic Party pollster Mike Lux writes:

> [C]ontrary to many pundits’ assumptions, economic issues are driving the
> problems of Democrats in non-metro working class counties far more than the
> culture war…[T]hese voters wouldn’t care all that much about cultural
> difference and the woke thing if they thought Democrats gave more of a damn
> about economic challenges they face deeply and daily…The voters we need to win
> in these counties are not inherently right-wing on social issues.

But the Democrats will not alienate the corporations and billionaires who keep
them in office. They have opted instead for two self-defeating tactics: lies and
fear.

The Democrats express a faux concern for workers who are victimized by mass
layoffs while at the same time courting the corporate leaders who orchestrate
these layoffs with lavish government contracts. The same hypocrisy sees
them express concern for civilians being slaughtered in Gaza while funneling
billions of dollars in weapons to Israel and vetoing ceasefire resolutions at
the U.N. to sustain the genocide.

Les Leopold in his book Wall Street’s War on Workers, filled with exhaustive
polling and data, illustrates that economic dislocation and despair is the
engine behind an enraged working class, not racism and bigotry.

He writes about the decision by Siemens to close its plant in Olean, New York
with 530 decent paying union jobs. While Democrats bemoaned the closure, they
refused to deny federal contracts to Siemans to protect the workers at the
plant.

Biden then invited Siemens’ USA CEO Barbara Humpton to the White House signing
of the 2021 infrastructure bill. The photo of the signing shows Humpton standing
in the front row along with New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

Mingo County in the early 20th century was the epicenter of an armed clash
between the United Mine Workers and the coal barons, with their hired gun thugs
from the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency. The gun thugs evicted striking workers
in 1912 from company housing and beat up and shot union members until the state
militia occupied the coal towns and broke the strike. The federal siege was not
lifted until 1933 by the Roosevelt administration. The union, which had been
banned, was legalized.

“Mingo County didn’t forget, at least not for a long time,” Leopold writes. “As
late as 1996, with more than 3,200 coal miners still at work, Mingo County gave
Bill Clinton a whopping 69.7 percent of its vote. But every four years
thereafter, support for the Democrats declined, going down and down, and down
some more. By 2020, Joe Biden received only 13.9 percent of the vote in Mingo, a
brutal downturn in a county that once saw the Democratic Party as its savior.”

The 3,300 Mingo County coal mining jobs by 2020 had fallen to 300, the largest
loss of coal jobs in any county in the country.

The lies of Democratic politicians did far more damage to working men and women
than any of the lies spewed by Trump.

There have been at least 30 million mass layoffs since 1996 when the Bureau of
Labor Statistics started tracking them, according to the Labor Institute. The
reigning oligarchs, not content with mass layoffs and reducing the unionized
workforce in the private sector to a paltry 6 percent, have filed legal
papers to shut down the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the federal
agency that enforces labor rights. Elon Musk’s SpaceX as well as Amazon,
Starbucks and Trader Joe’s targeted the NLRB – already stripped of most of its
power to levy fines and force corporate compliance – after it accused Amazon,
Starbucks and Trader Joe’s of breaking the law by blocking union organizing. The
NLRB accused SpaceX of illegally firing eight workers for criticizing Musk.
SpaceX, Amazon, Starbucks and Trader Joes are seeking to get the federal courts
to overturn the 89-year-old National Labor Relations Act to prevent judges from
hearing cases brought against corporations for violating labor laws.

Fear — fear of the return of Trump and Christian fascism — is the only card the
Democrats have left to play. This will work in urban, liberal enclaves where
college educated technocrats, part of the globalized knowledge economy, are busy
scolding and demonizing the working class for their ingratitude.

The Democrats have foolishly written off these “deplorables” as a lost political
cause. This precariat, the mantra goes, is victimized not by a predatory system
built to enrich the billionaire class, but by their ignorance and individual
failures. Dismissing the disenfranchised absolves the Democrats from advocating
the legislation to protect and create decent-paying jobs.

Fear has no hold in deindustrialized urban landscapes and the neglected
wastelands of rural America, where families struggle without sustainable work,
an opioid crisis, food deserts, personal bankruptcies, evictions, crippling debt
and profound despair.

They want what Trump wants. Vengeance. Who can blame them?

………………………………

(Republished from Scheerpost)

| Tagged labor, news, politics, trump, unions


NORTHERN IRELAND: UK STATE OPERATIVE “STAKEKNIFE” MURDERS OF RESISTANCE – BY
STEVE JAMES – 17 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 18, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

The interim report published this month from Operation Kenova, the police
investigation into the British spy “Stakeknife”, confirmed that British agents
within the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) committed multiple murders.

The Stakeknife operation is among the foulest episodes of British imperialism’s
decades long dirty war in Northern Ireland. Infiltration of the IRA and other
republican and loyalist paramilitary groups, by British and Northern Ireland
security and intelligence forces, was a central component of the 30-year
conflict.

Kenova report, March 2024 [Photo: PSNI]

In line with the “Low Intensity Operations” doctrine codified by the British
Army’s late General Sir Frank Kitson, infiltration of republican groups provided
information allowing arrests, operations to be sabotaged and executions and
bloody ambushes set up. Infiltration of, and collusion with, the loyalist,
pro-British groups provided them with weaponry and targeting information,
allowing them to function as state sanctioned assassination squads.

For several years up to 1991, for motives that remain uncertain, although money
played a role, Freddie Scappaticci, a republican from Belfast, in the leadership
of the IRA’s Internal Security Unit (ISU) intimidated, tortured, manipulated and
murdered IRA members accused or suspected of being British agents. But, from
sometime around 1978, Scappaticci was a British agent, feeding information on
IRA discussions, operations and members to his British Army paymasters and
controllers.

Freddie Scappaticci

Scappaticci was handled by the British Army’s spy operating Force Research Unit
(FRU), while maintaining the image of a tough and violent operator respected by
the republican leadership. Scappaticci, whose ISU also vetted new recruits to
the Provisionals and maintained a brutal dictatorship in working class areas
against youth accused of petty crimes, was outed in 2003 after years of
suspicion, following failed operations, regarding the existence of top level
British spies in the IRA.

In his readable 2023 work, “Stakeknife’s Dirty War” former IRA prisoner and
press officer, Richard O’Rawe noted “the road to peace was strewn with dead
bodies—many of them ASU [Active Service Unit] members, who were cut down in
carefully constructed SAS [Special Air Services] ambushes.”

O’Rawe notes that the late Deputy First Minster of Northern Ireland, former head
of the IRA’s Northern Command, Martin McGuinness, was central to Scappaticci’s
rise to head the ISU in 1986.

Scappaticci’s treachery ran parallel with efforts of the Sinn Fein leadership to
end their guerrilla war and find terms on which they could integrate themselves
into the British government in the North and serve as partners in the
exploitation of the working class. Remarkably, although sidelined and widely
distrusted in republican circles from 1991 on, Scappaticci continued to live in
Belfast, unhindered and unharmed.

When he was first publicly named in 2003, then Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams
said he initially accepted Scappaticci’s protestations of innocence “at face
value.” Stakeknife came to be identified, not because of republican efforts, but
primarily through the work of disgruntled ex-FRU member Ian Hurst, incensed at
the brutal treatment and murder of other British agents, sacrificed to maintain
Stakeknife in place.

Scappaticci eventually fled, later in 2003, to unknown locations in the UK,
after abandoning efforts to deny his role. He died in April last year.

He only surfaced in public once, at Westminster Magistrates Court, where he was
found guilty of possessing extreme animal pornography. His case was heard by
Chief Magistrate and Senior District Judge for England and Wales, Emma
Arbuthnot, the same judge who spearheaded the legal torture of Wikileaks
founder, Julian Assange.

“Judge” Emma Arbuthot

Unlike her treatment of the principled journalist and publisher targeted for
exposing imperialist war crimes, Arbuthnot thought well of the brutal torturer
and murderer Scappaticci. She told him “You have not been before the court for
50 years—and that’s good character in my book,” handing him a suspended
sentence.

In 2003, the Stakeknife revelations threatened not only further damaging
documentary and legal exposure of the British state’s murderous and cynical
methods, and a large number of murder trials, but also to discredit the Sinn
Fein leadership with grave political consequences for the Good Friday Agreement.
Therefore Operation Kenova was not commissioned until 2015, 13 years after
Scappaticci’s exposure and tasked with investigating 24 murders. Scappaticci was
not interviewed until 2018.

It has taken another nine years for Kenova to deliver an interim report which
does not even formally confirm that Scappaticci was Stakeknife. Instead, Kenova
led by led then Chief Constable of Bedfordshire Jon Boutcher, names Scappaticci
as “inextricably bound up with and a critical person of interest at the heart of
Operation Kenova”. Beyond that, the report rests on generalisations.

For example, Kenova identified three types of murders:

 * murders committed by agents, including cases in which one agent murdered
   another.
 * murders of alleged or suspected agents, carried out as punishment or
   deterrence, including cases when the victim was not in fact an agent.
 * murders of both categories which could have been prevented but were not.

Kenova came to its conclusions after following up 12,000 lines of enquiry,
taking 2,000 statements and interviewing 300 people, including 40 under caution.
Eventually 35 files were submitted to the Public Prosecution Service for
Northern Ireland (PPSNI). These referred to over 50,000 pages of evidence
acquired from official sources including previously undisclosed files. Newly
available forensic techniques were deployed.

More detailed and specific reports on individual murders are going to be handed
to families at a later date along with a final report which, Boutcher claims,
“will confirm the truth and set out the full facts”.

Much of Boutcher’s interim report is devoted to problems setting up and managing
the investigation and his frustrations in dealing with multiple security and
legal agencies. These are bound up with the need to draw a line under the dirty
war, present all the issues arising out of it as “legacy” while offering a
pretence of legal restitution for families whose relatives were killed.

The Shankill road, Belfast during the troubles, circa 1970 [Photo by Fribbler /
Wikimedia / CC BY-SA 3.0]

This has given rise to considerable tensions between police and legal
authorities—tasked with formally investigating large numbers of unsolved
murders—and the huge intelligence, police and military apparatus and their
political leadership in Britain and Northern Ireland. The British government and
military have no more interest in investigating their crimes in Northern Ireland
than in later and current atrocities in Iraq, Afghanistan and worldwide.

Boutcher, despite repeatedly insisting on his support for the intelligence
services work, writes of:

“The lack of any legal or policy framework to guide FRU and [Royal Ulster
Constabulary] agent handlers in particular and of any associated oversight or
supervisory mechanisms were very serious failings: they put lives at risk, left
those on the frontline exposed and fostered a maverick culture where agent
handling was sometimes seen as a high-stakes ‘dark art’ practised ‘off the
books’.”

He admits:

“Whether a result of cultural obstruction, documents being over-classified or
difficulty identifying and locating relevant material held by the authorities,
access to records has been a persistent problem and a legitimate concern to
families.”

Despite having negotiated agreements and single points of contact with the
Security Service, MI5, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Police Service of
Northern Ireland (PSNI), data was still difficult to extract.

The Kenova team, for example, was given logins to intelligence database, MACER,
used by the British Army. It became apparent that the MoD had a different set of
logins with access to more records. Kenova was duly given more access, but
Boutcher noted that the logins with greater rights had not been available to the
series of previous investigations into intelligence activity and collusion in
the “Troubles”.

Jon Boutcher [Photo: kenova/kenova.co.uk]

Boutcher complained that MI5 was holding historical material from the Royal
Ulster Constabulary Special Branch and the FRU which remained marked as Top
Secret.

Boutcher notes that on the very day Kenova intended to submit its first set of
files regarding members of both the Provisional IRA and the security forces, MI5
informed his team that their security credentials on their London building had
expired.

He placed his difficulties in the context of a series of investigations into
intelligence handling and collusion between loyalist killers and the British
state, many remain Secret or Top Secret.

These include the Stalker report of 1984 into “shoot to kill” allegations
against the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), predecessor to the PSNI. A follow
up report, Sampson 1986, also remains Secret while a further review into both
the Stalker and Sampson reports, the 1988 McLachlan report, is labeled Top
Secret.

Sir John Stevens’ three reports into the leaking of targeting information from
the security forces to loyalist killers found that almost all loyalist
intelligence came from the British security forces. They were only partly
released. A central focus of Stevens’ first report, Stevens 1, was the former
soldier Brian Nelson’s role as both intelligence officer for the loyalist Ulster
Defence Association and an agent for the FRU. Nelson had a role in as many as 30
murders. He was eventually charged and found guilty of 20 crimes, including
conspiracy to murder.

Remarkably, Stevens was entirely unaware of Stakeknife despite Scappaticci being
handled by the same FRU that he investigated regarding Nelson. Stevens 1 remains
Top Secret. A follow up Blelloch report on agent handling was, until Boutcher
requested a change, marked as Top Secret, now downgraded to Secret. Boutcher
noted, “Lord Stevens said it was apparent that discussions at the highest level
in the Army had resulted in the decision to withhold vital information from his
inquiry team.” Stevens 2 remains Top Secret. Stevens 3, released in 2003, found
that members of the security forces had colluded with the UDA in loyalist
murders including that of human rights lawyer Pat Finucane in 1989.

Pat Finucane mural on the Falls Road, west Belfast [Photo by Zubro © 2003 / CC
BY-SA 3.0]

In his outcomes and findings, Boutcher insists that files handed to the PPSNI
“contain significant evidence implicating Stakeknife and others in very serious
criminality and that this needs to be ventilated publicly.” But no-one in senior
government or military positions claimed to have had any knowledge of
Stakeknife. Boutcher points to what he euphemistically describes as “conscious
lack of professional curiosity from the very senior leadership of the Army”
regarding recruitment and running of agents.

Nevertheless, “Our Kenova investigations have established that agents were
regularly involved in inciting and committing serious criminal acts” and “It is
undoubtedly the case that some FRU and RUC Special Branch agents disclosed their
involvement in criminality to their handlers (both before and after the event)
and were assured that their anonymity and status would always be protected and
they would never stand trial or spend time in jail.”

Shortly before Boutcher’s report was published, the PPSNI announced it would not
be taking action against seven people alleged to have been Provisional IRA
members and five retired members of the British Army’s Force Research Unit, said
to be agent handlers, and more senior army figures. This follows decisions,
stretching back to 2020 to avoid prosecuting former Security Service members and
a PPSNI prosecutor.

Late 2023, the PPSNI said it would not be proceeding against “civilian suspects”
in connection with murders, conspiracy to murder and false imprisonment, one
police officer and six military personnel over allegations of perverting the
course of justice and misconduct in public office. Earlier last month the PPSNI
decided not to proceed against a further two former soldiers and two alleged
Provisional IRA members.

Not one of the files submitted to the PPSNI by Kenova have resulted in a single
prosecution.

…………………

Source

| Tagged history, ira, ireland, northern-ireland, the-troubles


THE DEBATE OVER ISRAEL AS ‘US AIRCRAFT CARRIER’ – BY DIANA JOHNSTONE (CONSORTIUM
NEWS) 12 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 17, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 2,900 WORDS • 



U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin addressing an AIPAC forum in Washington,
D.C., Jan. 10, 2023. (DoD, Alexander Kubitza)

As was to be expected, considering the extreme complexity of the U.S.-Israel
relationship, our recent article on “The Myth of Israel as ‘US Aircraft Carrier’
in Middle East,” far from settling this controversial issue, aroused numerous
objections. We see these disagreements as an invitation to respond, in the hope
that a friendly debate can contribute to clarifying the issues.

The Aircraft Carrier Image

A reader directly asks us “what individual or entity is the quotation ‘The Myth
of Israel as “US Aircraft Carrier” in Middle East’ borrowed from or attributed
to?”

There is no single answer, inasmuch as this image is used quite frequently,
originally by advocates of the U.S.-Israel alliance, to justify it. That the
Zionists make this claim is to be expected, and is no more credible than their
other claims.

Our questioning of that expression is directed primarily at pro-Palestinian
friends, usually on the left who accept and spread the belief that Israel is a
U.S. “strategic asset,” usually meaning it contributes to U.S. control of Middle
East oil.

This assumption is often based on the notion that a capitalist power must act in
its own economic interest, and thus could not be fooled by ideology or bribery
into acting against its own interests.

Not wanting to engage in ad hominem attacks on commentators with whom we largely
agree on just about everything else, we have been reluctant to name names. But
here goes: a perfect example is a recent interview with the excellent economist
Michael Hudson by Ben Norton. Both identify as Marxist. Their interview is
titled “Israel as a Landed Aircraft Carrier.”

Norton introduces his interview by citing Biden’s notorious declaration, “if
there were not an Israel, we would have to invent one.”

Michael Hudson takes up the theme. He stresses that U.S. support to Israel, is
“not altruistic” (no doubt), and provides his own explanation.

> “Israel is a landed aircraft carrier in the Near East. Israel is the takeoff
> point for America to control the Near East…The United States has always viewed
> Israel as just our foreign military base…”

His initial justification for this statement is historic.

> “When England first passed the act saying that there should be an Israel, the
> Balfour Declaration, it was because Britain wanted to control the Near East
> and its oil supplies…”

However, we maintain that the reasons for the Balfour Declaration (discussed at
length in the book by Alison Weir that we cite) are long out of date and cannot
explain current U.S. official devotion to Israel.

By the time Israel came into being, after World War II, the U.S. had effectively
taken control of the region and its oil sources and had no
particular interest in Israel.

Saudi King Ibn Saud converses with FDR (right) through an interpreter, Feb. 14,
1945, on board the USS Quincy, in the Suez Canal, during which U.S. secured
Saudi oil flows in exchange for U.S. security guarantees. (U.S. Navy/Wikimedia
Commons)

Hudson’s second justification is a generalization about U.S. imperialism:

> “And that’s really the U.S. strategy all over the world; it’s trying to fuel
> other countries to fight wars for its own control.”

But in fact, the fighting and dying in the Middle East has been done by the
United States itself and certain NATO allies, while the only people Israeli
soldiers are actively fighting are the Palestinians, whose destruction provides
no advantage to the United States.

Uzi Arad in 2011. (Harald Dettenborn, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0 de)

Hudson’s third justification is an anecdote. From his work at the Hudson
Institute, he became a close associate of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s main national security adviser, Uzi Arad. Once they were together at
a party in San Francisco, and

> “one of the U.S. generals came over and slapped Uzi on the back and said,
> ‘you’re our landed aircraft carrier over there. We love you.’ ”

So that is what a U.S. general said, and probably believed. It is certainly what
the Israeli lobby has been telling the Americans for a long time, to justify all
that money and military aid. But is it true?

Perhaps one can say that Israel is an aircraft carrier salesman who never
delivers the aircraft carrier. Because Israel for a long time has had the rare
privilege of NOT housing a U.S. military base, or at least not housing it
openly.

Only in 2017, the U.S. and Israel revealed the inauguration of “the first
American military base on Israeli soil,” which the U.S. military said was not an
American base but merely living quarters for U.S. personnel working on a secret
Israeli radar site in the Negev desert evidently spying on Iran. This facility
serves Israeli defense interests. Some aircraft carrier!

And all through the Middle East, the U.S. has its own floating aircraft
carriers, as well as great big genuine, non-floating military bases. The largest
is Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, and there are important military bases in
Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Netanyahu as Zelensky

However, Hudson’s argument does not in fact explain how Israel serves U.S.
purposes as a military asset, as an “aircraft carrier” in the sense of an
unsinkable military base which the U.S. can use to attack its enemies. Rather,
Hudson sees Israel as an expendable pawn, a puppet used by Washington to trigger
a war that the U.S. wants to wage against Iran, to the ruin of Israel itself.

Hudson sees Netanyahu as “the Israeli version of Zelensky in the Ukraine.” Just
as the U.S. used Ukraine to provoke Russia, the United States pushes Netanyahu
to escalate against Gaza so that he will provoke Hezbollah to come to the aid of
the Palestinians, and since Hezbollah is described as an Iranian proxy, this
will be the excuse for the U.S. to go to war against Iran.

March 21, 2019: Netanyahu on phone with U.S. President Donald Trump during a
visit by U.S. Secretary of State Michael Pompeo to Jerusalem. (U.S. State
Department/Ron Przysucha)

Hudson said:

> “The whole world has noticed that the U.S. now has two aircraft carriers in
> the Mediterranean, right off the Near Eastern shore, and it has an atomic
> submarine near the Persian Gulf…. And it’s very clear that they’re there not
> to protect Israel, but to fight Iran. Again and again, every American
> newspaper, when it talks about Hamas, it says Hamas is acting on behalf of
> Iran….
> 
> America isn’t trying to fight to protect Ukraine. It’s fighting for the last
> Ukrainian to be exhausted in what they’d hoped would be depleting Russia’s
> military. …Well, the same thing in Israel. If the United States is pushing
> Israel and Netanyahu to escalate, escalate, escalate, to do something that at
> a point is going to lead [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah to finally say,
> ‘okay, we can’t take it anymore.
> 
> We’re coming in and helping rescue the Gazans and especially rescue the West
> Bank, where just as much fighting is taking place. We’re going to come in.’
> And that’s when the United States will then feel free to move not only against
> Lebanon, but all the way via Syria, Iraq, to Iran.”

So this implies that the U.S. military and civilian strategists are eager to
find an excuse to go to war with Iran, after having failed to gain full control
of Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan or Syria after attacking them militarily (with help
from certain NATO allies, but not from Israel). And Iran is a much more
formidable power than any of those.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Armed Forces are having difficulty in recruitment (although
they may be counting on filling the ranks with some of the undocumented
immigrants flooding across the southern borders). Bogged down in Ukraine,
preparing for conflict with China, are U.S. leaders really eager to get into a
major war with Iran?

This speculation raises the key question raised by a number of Consortium
News readers: what is meant by the U.S. national interest?

The National Interest

As we anticipated, there are readers on the left who interpret our appeal to
“the national interest” as proof that we are defenders of capitalism. One reader
writes: “The defense of capitalism in this article is truly bewildering. The
authors conflate U.S. interests with Corporate interests.” That conflation is
being done by the reader who assumes that “national interest” cannot be
diversely defined.

Our position is simple. We are not aware of any realistic prospect for
abolishing the American capitalist system in the foreseeable future, even though
there are many symptoms of its radical decline both domestically and in
international relations. This decline is due largely to the way the “national
interest” is currently defined and pursued.

> “This assumption is often based on the notion that a capitalist power must act
> in its own economic interest, and thus could not be fooled by ideology or
> bribery into acting against its own interests.”

Our view is that even under capitalism, some policies are better or worse than
others. When it comes to the urgency of the survival of the Palestinian people,
or more broadly, of sparing humanity the devastation of nuclear war, prudent
policies are worth the risk of benefiting some less harmful branches of
capitalism in some way.

Although the political system is largely paralyzed, there exist contrary ways of
defining the national interest, and some are more perilous for the future of
humanity than others.

The current policies that define the official “national interest” in the United
States did not spring forth from a unanimous understanding or scientific
analysis of what is best for capitalist profit or for anything else. The current
ruling foreign policy doctrine is the product of specific influences and
individuals that can be named and identified.

To be precise, the “national interest” that is being pursued by the current
administration both on the elected top and especially the deep state below is a
theoretical construct that has been created by the convergence of two powers
that have excluded their rivals from the process.

These two powers are the military-industrial complex and the intellectual branch
of the Zionist lobby, known as the “neoconservatives.”

The Lobby as Policy Maker

Biden in Israel, July 2022. (U.S. Embassy Jerusalem, Flickr, CC BY 2.0)

U.S. foreign policy has encountered moments where positive change was possible:
after withdrawal from Vietnam, and even more, after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. At that point, all the interests linked to the military industrial
complex were under threat from the prospect of a “peace dividend” involving
substantial disarmament.

What was needed was a fresh ideological justification for the MIC, and this was
provided by the growing influence of the privately-financed think tanks that
began their takeover of foreign policy definition in the 1970s.

In the following decades, these institutions came under the decisive influence
of Zionist donors such as Haim Saban, Sheldon Adelson and AIPAC itself, which
founded the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. These think tanks
provided echo chambers for pro-Israel neocon intellectuals to shape editorial
policy of major liberal media as well as foreign policy itself.

Here is the point: current U.S. policy is not the natural expression of
“capitalist corporate interests,” but rather is the product of that process, of
the deliberate takeover of U.S. foreign policy by a highly motivated, coherent
and talented group of intellectuals, some with dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship.
This policy has a name: the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

The Wolfowitz Doctrine & PNAC

The text is available on internet and speaks for itself. It was written as the
initial version of the Defense Planning Guidance for the 1994–1999 fiscal years
in the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, Paul Wolfowitz, an
ardent Zionist.

The version leaked to The New York Times in March 1992 was officially toned down
after it caused an uproar, but it has remained as the guidelines for aggressive
U.S foreign policy ever since.

Basically, the doctrine announces that the main objective of the United States
is to retain its status as the world’s only remaining superpower. No serious
rival must be allowed to develop.

This amounts to decreeing that history has come to a stop, and denies the
natural historical process whereby China, for instance, which in the past was a
leading power, must not be allowed to resume that status.

Wolfowitz during a press conference at the Pentagon on March 1, 2001. (DoD photo
by R. D. Ward)

In 1997, neocons William Kristol and Robert Kagan founded the “Project for the
New American Century” with the clear purpose of defining U.S. foreign policy in
line with the Wolfowitz Doctrine.

As the “world’s pre-eminent power,” the United States must “shape a new century
favorable to American principles and interests.” This was to be done neither by
virtuous example nor by diplomacy, but by military strength and the force of
arms.

PNAC members including Vice President Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
took control of policy under President George W. Bush and have kept it ever
since.

Inside one administration after another, Robert Kagan’s wife, former Cheney aide
Victoria Nuland (who last week said she would be resigning her State Dept.
position) has advanced the neocon agenda, notably by managing the Ukrainian
disaster. PNAC dissolved itself in 2006, announcing that its job was done.

This job amounted to linking the powerful military industrial complex to the
global extension of U.S. power that was turned first and foremost against
Israel’s Arab neighbors, starting with Iraq.

This branch of the Lobby, inside the government itself and mainstream media, on
the false claim that Iraq was a dangerous enemy of the U.S., got the U.S. to
attack and destroy a regime that was in fact an enemy of Israel.

The U.S. was fighting on Israel’s behalf, not the other way around.

The neoconservatives have designed the policy which AIPAC pays members of
Congress to support. Every senator has taken AIPAC money.

National Interests Can Be Redefined

The Wolfowitz doctrine is expressed in Nuland’s anti-Russian Ukrainian policy as
well as in the American provocations surrounding Taiwan. These policies are not
inevitable, even under capitalism.

The expansion of NATO, as an example, was firmly opposed by a generation of U.S.
foreign policy experts who have been sidelined and expelled from the
policy-making process by the triumphant neocons.

Some are still alive, and others can emerge. So it is neither far-fetched nor
“pro-capitalist” to suggest that a more realistic, less arrogant and belligerent
foreign policy might be possible.

Such a change cannot be easy, but may be favored precisely by growing
recognition of the multiple failures of the reigning neoconservative foreign
policy.

For this, a free debate is necessary, in which it is possible to challenge the
role of the Lobby without being accused of plagiarizing the Protocols of the
Elders of Zion.

It is obvious that in the United States, where this debate is most significant,
there are Zionists who are not Jewish, while a very large proportion of the
Jewish population is highly critical of Israel and has nothing to do with the
Lobby.

The government in Jerusalem proclaiming itself “the Jewish State” as it
slaughters native Palestinians is responsible for any current rise in misguided
anti-Jewish feelings, which that government blatantly exploits to attract Jewish
immigrants from France and New Jersey, in particular.

A reader suggests: “Some folks may find it emotionally and psychologically
comforting to blame The Lobby and Israel for the evil of U.S. foreign policy,
and somehow the good ol USA is an unwitting victim.”

Can’t we more accurately suggest: “Some folks may find it emotionally and
psychologically comforting to blame the U.S. foreign policy for everything
rather than risk the inevitable furious reactions to any mention of the Lobby
and Israel?”

> “The U.S. was fighting on Israel’s behalf, not the other way around.”

Certainly U.S. foreign policy is responsible for everything it does, and that is
a gigantic evil. But that does not mean that everyone else is totally innocent.

The Lobby is most certainly responsible for doing all it can to encourage the
very worst tendencies in U.S. arrogant exceptionalism, the MIC, Islamophobia and
Christian evangelical fantasies, when they can be used against Israel’s
adversaries.

And we maintain that encouraging the worst tendencies is not in the American
interest.

………………………..

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European
Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness:
Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in
the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her
other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western
Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H.
Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity
Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

(Republished from Consortium News)

| Tagged iran, israel, middle-east, palestine, politics


THE GERMAN-AMERICAN STRATEGIC DEPTH CLOWN SHOW – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 15 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 16, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

The Four Stooges saga of Bundeswehr officers plotting to blow up the Kerch
bridge in Crimea with Taurus missiles and getting away with it is a gift that
keeps on giving.

President Putin, in his comprehensive interview to Dmitry Kiselev for Russia
1/RIA Novosti, did not fail to address it:

“They are fantasizing, encouraging themselves, first of all. Secondly, they are
trying to intimidate us. As for the Federal Republic of Germany, there are
constitutional problems there. They correctly say: if these Taurus hit that part
of the Crimean Bridge, which, of course, even according to their concepts, is
Russian territory, this is a violation of the constitution of the Federal
Republic of Germany.”

Yet it gets curioser and curioser.

When the transcript of the Taurus leak was published by RT, everyone was able to
hear Brigadier General Frank Gräfe – head of operations of the German Air Force
– speaking with Lieutenant Colonel Fenske from the German Space Command Air
Operations on the plan to deploy Taurus systems in Ukraine.

A key point is that during the plotting, these two mention that plans were
already discussed “four months ago” with “Schneider”, the successor of
“Wilsbach”.

Well, these are German names, of course. Thus it did not dawn on anyone that
(Kevin) Schneider and (Kenneth) Wilsbach could instead be… Americans.

Yet that did raise the eyebrows of German investigative journalist Dirk Pohlmann
– who I had the pleasure to meet in Berlin years ago – and his fellow researcher
Tobias Augenbraun.

They found out that the German-sounding names did identify Americans. Not only
that: none less than the former and the current Commanders of the U.S. Pacific
Air Forces.

The Four (actually Six) Stooges element gets an extra boost when it is
established that Liver Sausage Chancellor Scholz and his Totalenkrieg Minister
Pistorius learned about the Taurus plan no less than four months later.

So here apparently we have a clear cut case of top German military officers
taking direct orders regarding an attack on Crimea – part of the Russian
Federation – directly from American officers in the Pacific Air Forces.

That in itself opens the dossier to a large spectrum ranging from national
treason (against Germany) to casus belli (from the point of view of Russia).

Of course none of that is being discussed on German mainstream media.

After all, the only thing that seems to disturb Brigadier General Gräfe is that
German media may start seriously prying on the Bundeswehr’s Multiple Stooges
methods.

The only ones who actually did proper investigation were Pohlmann and Augenbaun.

It would be too much to expect from German media of the “Bild” type to analyze
what would be the Russian response to the Multiple Stooge shenanigans against
Crimea: a devastating retaliation against Berlin assets.

It’s so cold in Alaska

During the jolly Bundeswehr conversation yet another “plan” is mentioned:

“Nee, nee. Ich mein wegen der anderen Sache.” (“No, no. I mean the other
matter.”) Then: “Ähm … meinst du Alaska jetzt?” (“Ahm, you mean Alaska now?”)

It all gest juicier when it is known that German Space Command Air Operations
Centre officer Florstedt will meet none other than Schneider next Tuesday, March
19, in Alaska.

And Gräfe will also “have to go back to Alaska” to explain everything all over
again to Schneider as he is “new” in the post.

So the question is: Why Alaska?

Enter American shadowplay on a lot of “activities” in Alaska – which happen to
concern none other than China.

And there’s more: during the conversation still another “plan” (“Auftrag”,
meaning “mission”) also surfaces, bearing a not clearly understandable code name
sounding like “Kumalatra”.

What all of that tells us is that the Crash Test Dummy administration in the
White House, the CIA and the Pentagon seem to betting, in desperation, on Total
War in the black soil of Novorossiya.

And now they are sayin’ it out loud, with no shadow play, and coming directly
from the head of the CIA, William Burns, who obviously sucks at secrecy.

This is what Burns told the members of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee
earlier this week:

> “I think without supplemental assistance in 2024, you’re going to see more
> Avdeevkas, and that – it seems to me – would be a massive and historic mistake
> for the United States.”

That spells out how much the Avdeevka trauma is impressed on the psyche of the
U.S. intel apparatus.

Yet there’s more: “With supplemental assistance, Ukraine can hold its own on the
front lines through 2024 and into early 2025. Ukraine can continue to exact
costs against Russia, not only with deep penetration strikes in Crimea, but also
against Russia’s Black Sea Fleet.”

Here we go: Crimea all over again.

Burns actually believes that the humongous $60 billion new “aid” package which
must be approved by the U.S. Congress will enable Kiev to launch an “offensive”
by the end of 2024.

The only thing he gets right is that if there’s no new package, there will be
“significant territorial losses for Ukraine this year.”

Burns may not be the brightest bulb in the – intel – room. A long time ago he
was a diplomat/CIA asset in Moscow, and seems to have learned nothing.

Apart from letting cats and kitties galore out of the bag. It’s not only about
attacking Crimea. This one is being read with surpreme delight in Beijing:

> “The U.S. is providing assistance to Ukraine in part because such activities
> help curb China.”

Burns nailed his Cat Out of the Bag Oscar win when he said “if we’re seen to be
walking away from support for Ukraine, not only is that going to feed doubts
amongst our allies and partners in the Indo-Pacific; it’s going to stoke the
ambitions of the Chinese leadership in contingencies ranging from Taiwan to the
South China Sea”.

The inestimable Andrei Martyanov perfectly summed up the astonishing
incompetence, peppered with tawdry exceptionalism, that permeates this
performance by Burns.

There are things “they cannot grasp due to low level of education and culture.
This is a new paradigm for them – all of them are ‘graduates’ of the school of
‘beating the crap from defenseless nations’ strategic ‘studies’, and with the
level of economic ‘science’ in the West they cannot grasp how this all unfolds.”

So what is left is panic, as expressed by Burns in the Senate, mixed with the
impotence in understanding a “different warrior culture” such as Russia’s: “They
simply have no reference points.”

And still they choose war, as masterfully analyzed by Rostislav Ishchenko.

Even as the acronym fest of the CIA and 17 other U.S. intel agencies have
concluded, in a report shown to Congress earlier this week, that Russia
is “almost certainly” seeking to avoid a direct military conflict with NATO and
will calibrate its policies to steer clear of a global war.

After all the Empire of Chaos is all about Forever Wars. And we are all in the
middle of a do or die affair. The Empire simply cannot afford the cosmic
humiliation of NATO in Novorossiya.

Still every “plan” – Taurus on Crimea-style – is a bluff. Russia is aware of
bluff after bluff. The Western cards are now all on the table. The only question
is when, and how fast will Russia call the bluff.

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged crimea, germany, russia, ukraine, war


WHEN TITANS CLASHED: HOW THE RED ARMY STOPPED HITLER – BY DAVID M. GLANTZ –
AUDIOBOOK (4:56:34 MIN) AUDIO MP3

Posted on March 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
When Titans Clashed: How The Red Army Stopped Hitler – by David M. Glantz –
Audiobook (4:56:34 min) Audio Mp3



THINK ABOUT IT, THERE MUST BE HIGHER LOVE – STEVE WINWOOD – VIDEO / AUDIO MP3

Posted on March 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
Higher Love – Instrumental (6:04 min) Audio Mp3





HOLLYWOOD: DEFEND JONATHAN GLAZER ‘THE ZONE OF INTEREST’ DIRECTOR FROM
ZIONIST ATTACKS

Posted on March 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


IN DEFENSE OF JONATHAN GLAZER: THE ZONE OF INTEREST DIRECTOR UNDER VENOMOUS
ATTACK FOR ACADEMY AWARDS STATEMENT



James Wilson, from left, Leonard Blavatnik, and Jonathan Glazer accept the award
for “The Zone of Interest” from the United Kingdom, for best international
feature film at the Oscars on Sunday, March 10, 2024, at the Dolby Theatre in
Los Angeles. [AP Photo/Chris Pizzello]

……………………..

British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer has become the target of a vicious witch-hunt
for his remarks at the Academy Awards ceremony last Sunday. Upon receiving the
award for best international feature film for The Zone of Interest, about the
commandant of Auschwitz, Glazer told the audience:

> All our choices we made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say
> “look what they did then.” Rather, “look what we do now.” Our film shows where
> dehumanization leads at its worst. It shaped all of our past and present.
> 
> Right now, we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust
> being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent
> people. Whether the victims of October 7 in Israel or the ongoing attack on
> Gaza—all the victims of this dehumanization, how do we resist?

Glazer’s entirely legitimate response to the fact that he and his colleagues
have had “their Jewishness and the Holocaust hijacked” by the current Israeli
onslaught in Gaza struck a nerve with the professional defenders of Israel’s
mass crimes. Someone letting the general public in on a dirty secret, that the
Zionists routinely and cynically make use of the horrors of the Holocaust to
justify their atrocities—before an international viewing audience that still
numbers in the tens of millions—had to be denounced and smeared.

The result has been a stream of vitriolic, hysterical abuse.

Some of the critics were stupid or dishonest enough to misquote Glazer and
report that he had simply “refuted his Jewishness.” Meghan McCain, “television
personality,” daughter of the late warmonger Sen. John McCain and a reactionary
in her own right, denounced a situation in which “a man gets on stage to ‘refute
his Jewishness’ and half the room claps.” She was corrected by hundreds of
commentators on social media, to no effect of course.

Abraham Foxman, former director of the Anti-Defamation League and a ferocious
defender of Israel, also chose to distort Glazer’s statement, asserting that as
“a survivor of the Holocaust I am shocked the director would slap the memory of
over 1 million Jews who died because they were Jews by announcing he refutes his
Jewishness. Shame on you.”

The pro-Zionist forces who managed to grasp Glazer’s comment, however, were no
less hostile.

Noa Tishby, a former Israeli government official, has become a leading apologist
in the US for Israel’s crimes. She denounced the entire film award event March
10, without mentioning Glazer by name, as “a subtle and overt display of
Jew-hatred.”

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, another media-seeking defender of Zionism, took to X to
denounce Glazer’s comments as “Absolutely disgusting!” The director, according
to Boteach, had “betrayed his people and disgraced himself and trivialized the 6
million martyrs of the holocaust, when he said that Israel’s War in Gaza was
hijacking the memory of the holocaust. How dare you compare the two? You fool.
The whole purpose of Israel’s war in Gaza is to make sure THERE ISN’T A SECOND
HOLOCAUST so we don’t need more of your films because Jews actually remain
alive. HAMAS HAS ONE INTENTION. GENOCIDE OF JEWS.”

These are fascist-minded individuals who only restrain themselves, for the
moment at least, from bellowing: Kill all the Arabs!

David Schaecter, president of the Miami-based Holocaust Survivors’ Foundation
USA, defensively claimed that Glazer’s comment was “factually incorrect and
morally indefensible” and said that Israel “has nothing to do with the
Holocaust.” He insisted Glazer was trying to “equate Hamas’ maniacal brutality
against innocent Israelis with Israel’s difficult but necessary self-defense in
the face of Hamas’s ongoing barbarity.”

The CEO of Combat Antisemitism Movement Sacha Roytman Dratwa claimed that Glazer
had appropriated “his religious and ethnic identity to attack the national
homeland of the Jewish People which is fighting a war on seven fronts against
those who openly call for the genocide of Jews.”

These people can justify anything. One hundred thousand Gazans dead, wounded or
missing; 2,000 pound Israeli-“Made in the USA” bombs dropped on residential
neighborhoods; the destruction of hospitals, universities, mosques, libraries
and schools; the assassination of political opponents, intellectuals, artists;
the slaughter of thousands of women and children; the sadistic torture and
summary execution of prisoners; the deliberate starvation of an entire
population.

The world watches in horror as the Israeli military commits one crime after
another, each more heinous than the one before. And through it all, the pack of
fascists that comprise Netanyahu’s cabinet, along with the leading voices of the
Israeli and global media, and the Biden administration and its European allies
insist they are fighting “terrorism” and “antisemitism.”

One of the most repulsive and dishonest attacks on Glazer was posted on
the Hollywood Reporter website, appropriately enough, as the publication played
a leading role in the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the late 1940s and 1950s. The
piece, by one Richard Trank, first of all, lyingly asserts that the current
conflict began October 7, not 76 years ago with the expulsion of hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians, followed by decades of destruction of villages and
orchards, theft of land, persecution, murder and abuse, including almost 20
years of forcing the Gazan population to live in an open-air prison camp.

Trank presents the ongoing genocidal campaign and subsequent events in these
terms:

> Toward the end of October, the Israeli army attacked Hamas in Gaza, determined
> to wipe it out forever so that an atrocity like this [October 7] will never
> happen again. In the subsequent months, we have watched pro-Hamas and
> anti-Israel forces unleash a campaign of worldwide antisemitism the likes of
> which has not been seen since the Nazi era.

Trank argues that those actors and others at the awards ceremony March 10 who
sported “red pins in support of a Cease Fire Now and Palestinian flags on their
lapels” were wearing the equivalent of “swastika pins in sympathy with Hitler’s
Reich.”

There is an element of derangement in this type of slanderous comment. Glazer’s
observation about “dehumanization” seems entirely fitting. No crime is beyond
the Israeli regime and its backers in Washington, London, Paris and Berlin.
There are no military, moral or intellectual “red lines.”

Derangement, and extreme anxiety. Tens of millions have expressed their horror
at the mass killings in Gaza. Great numbers of Jewish young people, in the US
and elsewhere, are participating in the mass protests. Glazer’s remarks, from a
filmmaker without a history of political commentary or intervention,
demonstrates how far the discrediting of Zionism’s lies has reached.

……………………..

| Tagged christian-friedel, jonathan-glazer, reviews, sandra-huller,
the-zone-of-interest


THE DECLINE AND FALL OF IT ALL? AMERICAN EMPIRE IN CRISIS – BY ALFRED W. MCCOY –
14 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 14, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Empires don’t just fall like toppled trees. Instead, they weaken slowly as a
succession of crises drain their strength and confidence until they suddenly
begin to disintegrate. So it was with the British, French, and Soviet empires;
so it now is with imperial America.

Great Britain confronted serious colonial crises in India, Iran, and Palestine
before plunging headlong into the Suez Canal and imperial collapse in 1956. In
the later years of the Cold War, the Soviet Union faced its own challenges in
Czechoslovakia, Egypt, and Ethiopia before crashing into a brick wall in its war
in Afghanistan.

America’s post-Cold War victory lap suffered its own crisis early in this
century with disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Now, looming just
over history’s horizon are three more imperial crises in Gaza, Taiwan, and
Ukraine that could cumulatively turn a slow imperial recessional into an
all-too-rapid decline, if not collapse.

As a start, let’s put the very idea of an imperial crisis in perspective. The
history of every empire, ancient or modern, has always involved a succession of
crises — usually mastered in the empire’s earlier years, only to be ever more
disastrously mishandled in its era of decline. Right after World War II, when
the United States became history’s most powerful empire, Washington’s leaders
skillfully handled just such crises in Greece, Berlin, Italy, and France, and
somewhat less skillfully but not disastrously in a Korean War that never quite
officially ended. Even after the dual disasters of a bungled covert invasion of
Cuba in 1961 and a conventional war in Vietnam that went all too disastrously
awry in the 1960s and early 1970s, Washington proved capable of recalibrating
effectively enough to outlast the Soviet Union, “win” the Cold War, and become
the “lone superpower” on this planet.

In both success and failure, crisis management usually entails a delicate
balance between domestic politics and global geopolitics. President John F.
Kennedy’s White House, manipulated by the CIA into the disastrous 1961 Bay of
Pigs invasion of Cuba, managed to recover its political balance sufficiently to
check the Pentagon and achieve a diplomatic resolution of the dangerous 1962
Cuban missile crisis with the Soviet Union.

America’s current plight, however, can be traced at least in part to a growing
imbalance between a domestic politics that appears to be coming apart at the
seams and a series of challenging global upheavals. Whether in Gaza, Ukraine, or
even Taiwan, the Washington of President Joe Biden is clearly failing to align
domestic political constituencies with the empire’s international interests. And
in each case, crisis mismanagement has only been compounded by errors that have
accumulated in the decades since the Cold War’s end, turning each crisis into a
conundrum without an easy resolution or perhaps any resolution at all. Both
individually and collectively, then, the mishandling of these crises is likely
to prove a significant marker of America’s ultimate decline as a global power,
both at home and abroad.

Creeping Disaster in Ukraine

Since the closing months of the Cold War, mismanaging relations with Ukraine has
been a curiously bipartisan project. As the Soviet Union began breaking up in
1991, Washington focused on ensuring that Moscow’s arsenal of possibly
45,000 nuclear warheads was secure, particularly the 5,000 atomic weapons then
stored in Ukraine, which also had the largest Soviet nuclear weapons plant at
Dnipropetrovsk.

During an August 1991 visit, President George H.W. Bush told Ukrainian Prime
Minister Leonid Kravchuk that he could not support Ukraine’s future independence
and gave what became known as his “chicken Kiev” speech, saying: “Americans will
not support those who seek independence in order to replace a far-off tyranny
with a local despotism. They will not aid those who promote a suicidal
nationalism based upon ethnic hatred.” He would, however, soon recognize Latvia,
Lithuania, and Estonia as independent states since they didn’t have nuclear
weapons.

When the Soviet Union finally imploded in December 1991, Ukraine instantly
became the world’s third-largest nuclear power, though it had no way to actually
deliver most of those atomic weapons. To persuade Ukraine to transfer its
nuclear warheads to Moscow, Washington launched three years of multilateral
negotiations, while giving Kyiv “assurances” (but not “guarantees”) of its
future security — the diplomatic equivalent of a personal check drawn on a bank
account with a zero balance.

Under the Budapest Memorandum on Security in December 1994, three former Soviet
republics — Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine — signed the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty and started transferring their atomic weapons to
Russia. Simultaneously, Russia, the U.S., and Great Britain agreed to respect
the sovereignty of the three signatories and refrain from using such weaponry
against them. Everyone present, however, seemed to understand that the agreement
was, at best, tenuous. (One Ukrainian diplomat told the Americans that he had
“no illusions that the Russians would live up to the agreements they signed.”)



Meanwhile — and this should sound familiar today — Russian President Boris
Yeltsin raged against Washington’s plans to expand NATO further, accusing
President Bill Clinton of moving from a Cold War to a “cold peace.” Right after
that conference, Defense Secretary William Perry warned Clinton, point blank,
that “a wounded Moscow would lash out in response to NATO expansion.”

Nonetheless, once those former Soviet republics were safely disarmed of their
nuclear weapons, Clinton agreed to begin admitting new members to NATO,
launching a relentless eastward march toward Russia that continued under his
successor George W. Bush. It came to include three former Soviet satellites, the
Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland (1999); three one-time Soviet Republics,
Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania (2004); and three more former satellites,
Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia (2004). At the Bucharest summit in 2008,
moreover, the alliance’s 26 members unanimously agreed that, at some unspecified
point, Ukraine and Georgia, too, would “become members of NATO.” In other words,
having pushed NATO right up to the Ukrainian border, Washington seemed oblivious
to the possibility that Russia might feel in any way threatened and react by
annexing that nation to create its own security corridor.

In those years, Washington also came to believe that it could transform Russia
into a functioning democracy to be fully integrated into a still-developing
American world order. Yet for more than 200 years, Russia’s governance had been
autocratic and every ruler from Catherine the Great to Leonid Brezhnev had
achieved domestic stability through incessant foreign expansion. So, it should
hardly have been surprising when the seemingly endless expansion of NATO led
Russia’s latest autocrat, Vladimir Putin, to invade the Crimean Peninsula in
March 2014, only weeks after hosting the Winter Olympics.

In an interview soon after Moscow annexed that area of Ukraine, President
Obama recognized the geopolitical reality that could yet consign all of that
land to Russia’s orbit, saying: “The fact is that Ukraine, which is a non-NATO
country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter
what we do.”

Then, in February 2022, after years of low-intensity fighting in the Donbass
region of eastern Ukraine, Putin sent 200,000 mechanized troops to capture the
country’s capital, Kyiv, and establish that very “military domination.” At
first, as the Ukrainians surprisingly fought off the Russians, Washington and
the West reacted with a striking resolve — cutting Europe’s energy imports from
Russia, imposing serious sanctions on Moscow, expanding NATO to all of
Scandinavia, and dispatching an impressive arsenal of armaments to Ukraine.

After two years of never-ending war, however, cracks have appeared in the
anti-Russian coalition, indicating that Washington’s global clout has declined
markedly since its Cold War glory days. After 30 years of free-market growth,
Russia’s resilient economy has weathered sanctions, its oil exports have
found new markets, and its gross domestic product is projected to grow a healthy
2.6% this year. In last spring and summer’s fighting season, a Ukrainian
“counteroffensive” failed and the war is, in the view of both Russian and
Ukrainian commanders, at least “stalemated,” if not now beginning to turn in
Russia’s favor.

Most critically, U.S. support for Ukraine is faltering. After successfully
rallying the NATO alliance to stand with Ukraine, the Biden White
House opened the American arsenal to provide Kyiv with a stunning array of
weaponry, totaling $46 billion, that gave its smaller army a technological edge
on the battlefield. But now, in a move with historic implications, part of the
Republican (or rather Trumpublican) Party has broken with the bipartisan foreign
policy that sustained American global power since the Cold War began. For weeks,
the Republican-led House has even repeatedly refused to consider President
Biden’s latest $60 billion aid package for Ukraine, contributing to Kyiv’s
recent reverses on the battlefield.

The Republican Party’s rupture starts with its leader. In the view of former
White House adviser Fiona Hill, Donald Trump was so painfully deferential to
Vladimir Putin during “the now legendarily disastrous press conference” at
Helsinki in 2018 that critics were convinced “the Kremlin held sway over the
American president.” But the problem goes so much deeper. As New York
Times columnist David Brooks noted recently, the Republican Party’s historic
“isolationism is still on the march.” Indeed, between March 2022 and December
2023, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of Republicans who think
the U.S. gives “too much support” to Ukraine climbed from just 9% to a whopping
48%. Asked to explain the trend, Brooks feels that “Trumpian populism does
represent some very legitimate values: the fear of imperial overreach… [and] the
need to protect working-class wages from the pressures of globalization.”

Since Trump represents this deeper trend, his hostility toward NATO has taken on
an added significance. His recent remarks that he would encourage Russia to “do
whatever the hell they want” to a NATO ally that didn’t pay its fair share sent
shockwaves across Europe, forcing key allies to consider what such an alliance
would be like without the United States (even as Russian President Vladimir
Putin, undoubtedly sensing a weakening of U.S. resolve, threatened Europe with
nuclear war). All of this is certainly signaling to the world that Washington’s
global leadership is now anything but a certainty.

Crisis in Gaza

Just as in Ukraine, decades of diffident American leadership, compounded by
increasingly chaotic domestic politics, let the Gaza crisis spin out of control.
At the close of the Cold War, when the Middle East was momentarily disentangled
from great-power politics, Israel and the Palestine Liberation
Organization signed the 1993 Oslo Accord. In it, they agreed to create the
Palestinian Authority as the first step toward a two-state solution. For the
next two decades, however, Washington’s ineffectual initiatives failed to break
the deadlock between that Authority and successive Israeli governments that
prevented any progress toward such a solution.

In 2005, Israel’s hawkish Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to withdraw his
defense forces and 25 Israeli settlements from the Gaza Strip with the aim of
improving “Israel’s security and international status.” Within two years,
however, Hamas militants had seized power in Gaza, ousting the Palestinian
Authority under President Mahmoud Abbas. In 2009, the controversial Benjamin
Netanyahu started his nearly continuous 15-year stretch as Israel’s prime
minister and soon discovered the utility of supporting Hamas as a political foil
to block the two-state solution he so abhorred.

Not surprisingly then, the day after last year’s tragic October 7th Hamas
attack, theTimes of Israel published this headline: “For Years Netanyahu Propped
Up Hamas. Now It’s Blown Up in Our Faces.” In her lead piece, senior political
correspondent Tal Schneider reported: “For years, the various governments led by
Benjamin Netanyahu took an approach that divided power between the Gaza Strip
and the West Bank — bringing Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to
his knees while making moves that propped up the Hamas terror group.”

On October 18th, with the Israeli bombing of Gaza already inflicting severe
casualties on Palestinian civilians, President Biden flew to Tel Aviv for a
meeting with Netanyahu that would prove eerily reminiscent of Trump’s Helsinki
press conference with Putin. After Netanyahu praised the president for drawing
“a clear line between the forces of civilization and the forces of barbarism,”
Biden endorsed that Manichean view by condemning Hamas for “evils and atrocities
that make ISIS look somewhat more rational” and promised to provide the weaponry
Israel needed “as they respond to these attacks.” Biden said nothing about
Netanyahu’s previous arm’s length alliance with Hamas or the two-state solution.
Instead, the Biden White House began vetoing ceasefire proposals at the U.N.
while air-freighting, among other weaponry, 15,000 bombs to Israel, including
the behemoth 2,000-pound “bunker busters” that were soon flattening Gaza’s
high-rise buildings with increasingly heavy civilian casualties.



After five months of arms shipments to Israel, three U.N. ceasefire vetoes, and
nothing to stop Netanyahu’s plan for an endless occupation of Gaza instead of a
two-state solution, Biden has damaged American diplomatic leadership in the
Middle East and much of the world. In November and again in February,
massive crowds calling for peace in Gaza marched in Berlin, London, Madrid,
Milan, Paris, Istanbul, and Dakar, among other places.

Moreover, the relentless rise in civilian deaths well past 30,000 in Gaza,
striking numbers of them children, has already weakened Biden’s domestic support
in constituencies that were critical for his win in 2020 — including
Arab-Americans in the key swing state of Michigan, African-Americans nationwide,
and younger voters more generally. To heal the breach, Biden is now becoming
desperate for a negotiated cease-fire. In an inept intertwining of international
and domestic politics, the president has given Netanyahu, a natural ally of
Donald Trump, the opportunity for an October surprise of more devastation in
Gaza that could rip the Democratic coalition apart and thereby increase the
chances of a Trump win in November — with fatal consequences for U.S. global
power.

Trouble in the Taiwan Straits

While Washington is preoccupied with Gaza and Ukraine, it may also be at the
threshold of a serious crisis in the Taiwan Straits. Beijing’s relentless
pressure on the island of Taiwan continues unabated. Following the incremental
strategy that it’s used since 2014 to secure a half-dozen military bases in the
South China Sea, Beijing is moving to slowly strangle Taiwan’s sovereignty. Its
breaches of the island’s airspace have increased from 400 in 2020 to 1,700 in
2023. Similarly, Chinese warships have crossed the median line in the Taiwan
Straits 300 times since August 2022, effectively erasing it. As commentator Ben
Lewis warned, “There soon may be no lines left for China to cross.”

After recognizing Beijing as “the sole legal Government of China” in 1979,
Washington agreed to “acknowledge” that Taiwan was part of China. At the same
time, however, Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, requiring “that
the United States maintain the capacity to resist any resort to force… that
would jeopardize the security… of the people on Taiwan.”

Such all-American ambiguity seemed manageable until October 2022 when Chinese
President Xi Jinping told the 20th Communist Party Congress that “reunification
must be realized” and refused “to renounce the use of force” against Taiwan. In
a fateful counterpoint, President Biden stated, as recently as September 2022,
that the US would defend Taiwan “if in fact there was an unprecedented attack.”

But Beijing could cripple Taiwan several steps short of that “unprecedented
attack” by turning those air and sea transgressions into a customs
quarantine that would peacefully divert all Taiwan-bound cargo to mainland
China. With the island’s major ports at Taipei and Kaohsiung facing the Taiwan
Straits, any American warships trying to break that embargo would face a lethal
swarm of nuclear submarines, jet aircraft, and ship-killing missiles.

Given the near-certain loss of two or three aircraft carriers, the U.S. Navy
would likely back off and Taiwan would be forced to negotiate the terms of its
reunification with Beijing. Such a humiliating reversal would send a clear
signal that, after 80 years, American dominion over the Pacific had finally
ended, inflicting another major blow to U.S. global hegemony.

The Sum of Three Crises

Washington now finds itself facing three complex global crises, each demanding
its undivided attention. Any one of them would challenge the skills of even the
most seasoned diplomat. Their simultaneity places the U.S. in the unenviable
position of potential reverses in all three at once, even as its politics at
home threaten to head into an era of chaos. Playing upon American domestic
divisions, the protagonists in Beijing, Moscow, and Tel Aviv are all holding a
long hand (or at least a potentially longer one than Washington’s) and hoping to
win by default when the U.S. tires of the game. As the incumbent, President
Biden must bear the burden of any reversal, with the consequent political damage
this November.

Meanwhile, waiting in the wings, Donald Trump may try to escape such foreign
entanglements and their political cost by reverting to the Republican Party’s
historic isolationism, even as he ensures that the former lone superpower of
Planet Earth could come apart at the seams in the wake of election 2024. If so,
in such a distinctly quagmire world, American global hegemony would fade with
surprising speed, soon becoming little more than a distant memory.

………………………………..

This column is distributed by Tom Dispatch.

| Tagged china, nato, politics, russia, ukraine


THE MYTH OF ISRAEL AS ‘US AIRCRAFT CARRIER’ IN MIDDLE EAST – BY JEAN BRICMONT
AND DIANA JOHNSTONE (CONSORTIUM NEWS) 6 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 13, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 2,700 WORDS • 



Outside annual AIPAC meeting in Washington, March 2016. (Susan Melkisethian,
Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

If Israeli apartheid were to disappear, oil and trade would still flow from the
Middle East towards the West.

Why does the United States give total support to Israel?

In answer, there is a common myth shared by both champions and radical critics
of the Zionist state which needs to be dispelled.

The myth is that Israel is a major U.S. strategic asset, described as a sort of
unsinkable American aircraft carrier vital to Washington’s interests in the
Middle East.

The line of argument of those who share this myth is to show that the United
States has economic and strategic interests in the oil-rich Middle East (which
nobody denies) and to quote American (and, of course, Israeli) political figures
who claim that Israel is the best or even the sole U.S. ally in the region.

For example U.S. President Joe Biden has gone so far as to say that if Israel
didn’t exist the U.S. should have invented it.



But the crucial evidence, totally missing from their analysis, is the slightest
example of Israel actually serving American interests in the region.

If no examples are given, it’s simply because there are none. Israel has never
fired a shot on behalf of the United States or brought a drop of oil under U.S.
control.

We can start with a common sense argument: If the U.S. is interested in Middle
East oil, why would it support a country that is hated (for whatever reasons) by
all the populations of the oil producing countries?

In the 1950s, such was the reasoning of most U.S. experts, who put good
relations with Arab countries ahead of support to Israel. This no doubt helps
explain why AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, was founded in
1963, to align U.S. policy with that of Israel.

1967 War & After

U.S. support for Israel took off after the 1967 war. Israel’s success dealt a
fatal blow to the Arab nationalism embodied by Egypt’s Gamal Nasser, which some
U.S. policy-makers falsely saw as a potential communist threat (which they saw
just about everywhere).

But the war was waged by Israel for its own interests and expansion, with no
benefit to the United States.

On the contrary: a remarkable official silence has been maintained over the fact
that in the course of that short war, the American intelligence gathering ship
USS Liberty, which was spying on the conflict, was shelled for several hours by
the Israeli air force, with the obvious intention to sink it, killing 34 sailors
and wounding 174.

Damage to USS Liberty, June 1967. (Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain)

Had there been no survivors, Egypt could have been accused (making it a “false
flag” operation). The survivors were ordered not to speak about it, and the
incident was never fully investigated, accepting the official Israeli
explanation that it was a “mistake.” In any case, Israel’s behavior was not
exactly that of a precious ally.

When Israel attacked Lebanon in 2006, that country’s government was perfectly
“pro-Western.” What’s more, during the 1991 war against Iraq over Kuwait, the
United States insisted that Israel should not participate, because such
involvement would have collapsed their Arab anti-Iraq coalition. Again, it’s
hard here to see Israel as an indispensable “ally.”

U.S. post-9/11 wars have targeted Israel’s enemies — Iraq, Libya, Syria — with
no advantage to U.S. oil companies, on the contrary. The question arises whether
the U.S. choice of enemies in the Middle East has not been determined by the
interests of a foreign government, contrary to American interests in the region.

Washington & Gaza Today

Now we come to the current situation: what interest does the United States have
in the slaughter being perpetrated in Gaza?

In reality, what Washington is doing is trying to maintain good relations with
their Arab allies (Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States) by pretending to seek a
compromise while exerting no effective pressure on Israel – for instance, by
cutting off funds.

And why don’t they? The answer is obvious but saying so is politically
incorrect, and is rarely discussed by defenders of the myth, except to refute
it. It is the action of the pro-Israeli lobby, which de facto controls Congress
and without which no president can really act.

[See: Israel Lobby’s Disastrous Domination]

The lobby is no secret conspiracy. It is openly coordinated by AIPAC, which
spreads billionaire donations throughout the U.S. political system and dictates
the line to take on Israel to ensure a successful career.

Outside annual AIPAC meeting in Washington, March 2016. (Susan Melkisethian,
Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Control is virtually complete over the two parties represented in Congress.

It is achieved primarily through the funding of election campaigns. All those
who comply can count on campaign donations, while anyone daring to defy the
lobby’s injunctions would quickly be challenged by a very well-funded opponent
in the next primary election, thus losing support of his or her own party in the
next election — as happened to Georgia representative Cynthia McKinney in 2002.

[See: Zionist Suppression in Congress and US Congress: ‘We Stand With Genocide’]

The lobby also animates smear campaigns against any critic of Israel, as seen
recently in the attacks on university presidents (Harvard, MIT, Pennsylvania)
for not having sufficiently cracked down on alleged student “anti-Semitism” on
their campuses.

There are several books that explain in detail how the lobby works:

 * They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel’s Lobby
   (1985) by Paul Findley, a Republican congressman from Illinois, who details
   how the lobby politically “liquidated” all those who wanted a different
   policy in the Middle East, precisely because they wanted to defend the
   interests of the United States.
 * The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen
   Walt (2007) a comprehensive and well sourced book on the functioning and the
   effects of the lobby.
 * Against Our Better Judgment : The hidden history of how the U.S. was used to
   create Israël, by Alison Weir, 2014, which goes back to the Balfour
   declaration.

One can also watch hidden-camera reports by Al Jazeera on the lobby’s work in
the U.S. and Britain.

The way the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn was “eliminated” politically rests
entirely on the lobby’s action and campaigns against his (imaginary)
anti-Semitism. The same process is currently underway in France with Jean-Luc
Mélenchon and his France Insoumise party.

American presidents as different as Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter have
complained that their actions were hampered by the lobby. In fact, every
American president has wanted to get rid of the “Palestinian problem” (through
the two-state solution) but has been impeded by Congress.



As for Congress itself, let us quote very explicit insider testimony, that of
James Abourezk, who was first a congressman and then a senator from South Dakota
in the 1970s and who sent this letter in 2006 to Jeff Blankfort, an anti-Zionist
activist:

> “I can tell you from personal experience that, at least in the Congress, the
> support Israel has in that body is based completely on political fear — fear
> of defeat by anyone who does not do what Israel wants done. I can also tell
> you that very few members of Congress — at least when I served there — have
> any affection for Israel or for its Lobby. What they have is contempt, but it
> is silenced by fear of being found out exactly how they feel.
> 
> I’ve heard too many cloakroom conversations in which members of the Senate
> will voice their bitter feelings about how they’re pushed around by the Lobby
> to think otherwise. In private one hears the dislike of Israel and the tactics
> of the Lobby, but not one of them is willing to risk the Lobby’s animosity by
> making their feelings public.
> 
> Thus, I see no desire on the part of Members of Congress to further any U.S.
> imperial dreams by using Israel as their pit bull. The only exceptions to that
> rule are the feelings of Jewish members, who, I believe, are sincere in their
> efforts to keep U.S. money flowing to Israel.”

AIPAC Suppression

Abourezk added that the Lobby made every effort to suppress even a single voice
of congressional dissent – as his own – that might question annual
appropriations to Israel, so that

> “if Congress is completely silent on the issue, the press will have no one to
> quote, which effectively silences the press as well. Any journalists or
> editors who step out of line are quickly brought under control by well
> organized economic pressure against the newspaper caught sinning.”

Abourezk once traveled through the Middle East with a reporter who wrote
honestly about what he saw. As a result, newspaper executives received threats
from several of their large advertisers that their advertising would be
terminated if they continued publishing the journalist’s articles.

Abourezk circa 1977. (Handout photo, Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

> “I do not recall a single instance where any administration saw the need for
> Israel’s military power to advance U.S. Imperial interests. In fact, as we saw
> in the Gulf War, Israel’s involvement was detrimental to what Bush, Sr. wanted
> to accomplish in that war. They had, as you might remember, to suppress any
> Israeli assistance so that the coalition would not be destroyed by their
> involvement.
> 
> So far as the argument that we need to use Israel as a base for U.S.
> operations, I’m not aware of any U.S. bases there of any kind. The U.S. has
> enough military bases, and fleets, in the area to be able to handle any kind
> of military needs without using Israel. In fact I can’t think of an instance
> where the U.S. would want to involve Israel militarily for fear of upsetting
> the current allies the U.S. has, i.e., Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. The
> public in those countries would not allow the monarchies to continue their
> alliance with the U.S. should Israel become involved.”

Abourezk said that U.S. encouragement in its invasions of Lebanon “was merely an
extension of the U.S. policy of helping Israel because of the Lobby’s continual
pressure. … Lebanon always has been a ‘throw away’ country so far as the
Congress is concerned, that is, what happens there has no effect on U.S.
interests. There is no Lebanon Lobby.”

> “The public must realize that far from being an asset, Israel is a chronic
> liability that squanders billions of American dollars, drags the United States
> into wars and whose genocidal treatment of the Palestinians is radically
> destroying America’s moral pretensions in most of the world.”

Alleged Strategic Value

The alleged strategic value of Israel is just one among many examples of
claiming that some imperial/colonial project is necessary for the global
capitalist system.

The Vietnam war was justified in part by the domino theory: all of South-East
Asia would become communist if Vietnam “fell.” The only domino that fell was
Cambodia, as a result of U.S. bombing, after victorious Vietnam intervened to
overthrow a genocidal regime there.

South African apartheid was supported by the West, in part out of fear of
communism, but the end of apartheid had no dramatic effect on capitalist
imperialism in Africa.

If Israeli apartheid were to disappear in Palestine, oil and trade would still
flow from the Middle East towards the West, and there would be no attempts by
Houthis to block shipments in the Red Sea.

A realistic analysis shows that Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and
aggressive policies toward its neighbors are entirely detrimental to American
interests in the Middle East, which the current crisis only serves to highlight
even more.

The trouble with the “Israel as U.S. aircraft carrier” thesis is that while it’s
very comfortable for its defenders, it is also very damaging for the Palestinian
cause.

It’s comfortable because it doesn’t risk incurring accusations of anti-Semitism,
as it shifts responsibility for Israeli atrocities to American imperialism and
its multinational corporations.

On the other hand, if you emphasize the Lobby’s leading role in U.S. Middle East
policy, you will be accused of echoing fantasies and “conspiracy theories” about
“Jewish power” dating from times when there was no Israel and thus no Israel
Lobby.

Rejection of discredited stereotypes is no reason to ignore the facts of the
unprecedented relationship that has developed between the United States and
Israel.

Harm to Palestinian Cause

The “Israel as U.S. aircraft carrier” is precisely an Israeli argument designed
to win over total U.S. political, financial and military support.

Thus it is no wonder that echoing that argument is extremely harmful to the
Palestinian cause. If it were true, how could we hope to end this American
support to Israel?

Persuade the American population to revolt against something said to be highly
beneficial to U.S. interests? Or wait for American imperialism to collapse?
That’s not likely to happen any time soon.

But if the power of the lobby is the key to U.S. support, then the strategy to
be followed is much simpler and has a much greater chance of success: we need
simply to dare speak out and tell the truth.

The public must realize that far from being an asset, Israel is a chronic
liability that squanders billions of American dollars, drags the United States
into wars and whose genocidal treatment of the Palestinians is radically
destroying America’s moral pretensions in most of the world.

Once this is understood, support for Israel will collapse, and voters may put
enough pressure on the national elite, the administration and even the
intimidated Congress to reorient U.S. policy in line with genuine national
interests.

There are signs that part of the economic ruling class is moving this way: Elon
Musk’s defense of free speech on social networks is a step in the right
direction (to the rage of Israel’s supporters).

Although Donald Trump, as president, did all he could for Israel, his popular
slogan “America First” means something quite different, as understood by
anti-interventionists on the right such as Tucker Carlson.

Unfortunately, many on the left cling to an ostensibly “Marxist” view that U.S.
support for Israel must be motivated by economic interests, by capitalist
profits, by control of the flow of Middle Eastern oil. This belief is not only
unsupported factually, it amounts to an invitation to U.S. rulers to keep it up.

With worldwide indignation rising against the genocidal assault on Gaza, how is
it possible for any American to claim that Israel is “acting in American
interests?” Israel is responsible for its crimes, and it is both true and in the
U.S. national interest to recognize that far from being a strategic asset,
Israel is America’s No. 1 liability.

………………………….

Jean Bricmont is professor of theoretical physics at the Catholic University of
Louvain (Belgium), and author of numerous articles and books,
including Humanitarian Imperialism, La République des Censeurs,and Fashionable
Nonsense (with Alan Sokal).

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European
Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness:
Memoirs of a World Watcher(Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in
the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her
other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western
Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H.
Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity
Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

………………….

(Republished from Consortium News)

| Tagged aipac, human-rights, israel, palestine, zionism


COMMUNIST CHINA – CONFIDENT DRAGON LAYS OUT MODERNIZATION ROADMAP – BY PEPE
ESCOBAR – 12 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 13, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 1,800 WORDS • 

As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on
overdrive. Forever Wars never die.

This is the Year of the Wooden Dragon, according to China’s
classic wuxing (“five elements”) culture. The dragon, one of the 12 signs of the
Chinese zodiac, is a symbol of power, nobility and intelligence. Wood adds
growth, development and prosperity.

Call it a summary of where China is heading in 2024.

The second session of the 14th National Committee of the Chinese People’s
Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) was finalized on Sunday in Beijing.

The wider world should know that within the framework of grassroots democracy
with Chinese characteristics, an extremely complex – and fascinating –
phenomenon, the importance of the CPPCC is paramount.

The CPPCC channels wide-ranging expectations of the average Chinese to the
decision level, and actually advises the central government on a vast range of
issues – from everyday living to high-quality development strategies.

This year, most of the discussion focused on how to drive China’s modernization
even faster. This being China, concepts – like flowers – were blooming all
around the spectrum, such as “new quality productive forces, “deepening reform,”
“high-standard opening-up,” and a fabulous new one, “major-country diplomacy
with Chinese characteristics.”

As the Global Times emphasized, “2024 is not only a critical year for achieving
the goals of the ‘14th Five-Year Plan’ but also a key year for achieving the
transition to high-quality development of the economy.”

Betting on strategic investment

So let’s start with Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s first “work report” delivered a
week ago, which opened the annual session of the National People’s Congress. The
key takeaway: Beijing will be pursuing the same economic targets as in 2023.
That translates as 5% annual growth.

Of course deflationary risks, a downturn in the real estate market and somewhat
shaky business confidence simply won’t vanish. Li was quite realistic,
emphasizing Beijing is “keenly aware” of the challenges ahead: “Achieving this
year’s targets will not be easy.” And he added: “Global economic growth lacks
steam and the regional hotspot issues keep erupting. This has made China’s
external environment more complex, severe and uncertain.”

Beijing’s strategy remains focused on a “proactive fiscal policy and prudent
monetary policy”. In a nutshell: the song remains the same. There won’t be a
“stimulus” of any kind.

Deeper answers should be found in the work report/budget released by the
National Development and Reform Commission: the focus will be on structural
change, via extra funds to science, technology, education, national defense,
agriculture. Translation: China bets on strategic investment, the key for a
high-quality economic transition.

In practice, Beijing will be heavily invested in modernizing industry and
developing “new quality productive forces” such as new-energy vehicles,
biomanufacturing and commercial space flight.

Science Minister Yin Hejun made it clear: there was an 8.1% increase in national
investment in research and development in 2023. He wants more – and he will get
it: R&D spending will grow by 10% to a total of 370.8 billion yuan.

The mantra is “self-reliance”. On all fronts – from chipmaking to AI. A no holds
barred tech war is on – and China is totally focused to counter “tech
containment” from the Hegemon as much as its ultimate goal is to wrest tech
supremacy from its prime competitor. Beijing simply cannot allow itself to be
vulnerable to U.S.-imposed tech choke points and supply chain disruptions.

So short-term economic problems will not be causing sleepless nights. The
Beijing leadership is always looking ahead – focusing on long-term challenges.

Learning lessons from the Donbass battlefield

Beijing will continue to steer the economic development of Hong Kong and Macau,
and invest even more in the crucial Greater Bay Area, which is the premier
southern China high tech, services and finance hub.

Taiwan of course was central to the work report; Beijing fiercely opposes
“external interference” – code for Hegemon tactics. That will become even
trickier in May, when William Lai Ching-te, who flirts with independence,
becomes president.

On defense, there will be only a 7.2% increase in 2024, which is peanuts
compared to the Hegemon’s defense budget now approaching $900 billion: China’s
stands as $238 billion, even as China’s nominal GDP is approaching the U.S.

A great deal of China’s defense budget will go for emerging tech – considering
the immensely valuables lessons the PLA is learning out of the Donbass
battlefield, as well as the deep interactions part of the Russia-China strategic
partnership.

And that brings us to diplomacy. China will continue to be firmly positioned as
a champion of the Global South. That was made explicit by Foreign Minister Wang
Yi in a press conference on the sidelines of the National People’s Congress.

Wang Yi’s priorities: to “maintain stable relations with major powers; join
hands with its neighbouring countries for progress; and strive for
revitalisation with the Global South”.

Wang Yi once again stressed that Beijing favors an “equal and orderly”
multipolar world and “inclusive economic globalization”.

And of course he could not allow U.S. Secretary of State Little Blinken – always
out of his depth – to get away with his latest “recipe”: “It is impermissible
that those with the bigger fist have the final say, and it is definitely
unacceptable that certain countries must be at the table while others can only
be on the menu.”

BRI as a global accelerator

Crucially, Wang Yi re-emphasized the drive for “high-quality” cooperation within
the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) framework. He defined BRI as “an engine for
the common development of all countries and an accelerator for the modernisation
of the whole world”. Wang Yi actually said he’s hopeful about the emergence of a
“Global South moment in global governance” – in which China and BRI play an
essential part.

Li Qiang’s work report, incidentally, had only one paragraph on BRI. But then we
find this nugget as Li refers to the New International Land-Sea Trade Corridor –
which links China’s landlocked southwest with the eastern seaboard, via Guangxi
province.

Translation: BRI will be focusing on opening new economic roads for China’s less
developed regions, diversifying from the previous emphasis on Xinjiang.

Dr Wei Yuansong is a member of the CPPCC and also the Chinese Peasants’ and
Workers’ Democratic Party – which happens to be one of the eight non-CCP parties
in Chinese politics (very few outside of China know about this).

He offered some fascinating comments on BRI to Fengmian News and also stressed
the need to “tell China’s story well” to avoid “conflict and incidents” along
the BRI road. For that, Wei suggests the need to use an “international language”
in telling these stories; that implies using English.

As for what Wang Yi said in his press conference, in fact that was discussed in
detail at the closed-door Central Conference on Foreign Affairs Work in late
2023, where it was established that China faced “strategic opportunities” to
raise its “international influence, appeal and power” despite “high winds and
choppy waters”.

The key takeaway: the narrative war between China and the Hegemon will be
pitiless. Beijing is confident it’s capable of offering stability, investment,
connectivity and sound diplomacy to the whole Global South, instead of Forever
Wars.

That is reflected, for instance, by Ma Xinmin, the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s
legal advisor, telling the International Court of Justice that the Palestinians
have the right to armed resistance when it comes to fighting the colonialist,
racist, apartheid state of Israel. Therefore, Hamas cannot be defined as a
terrorist organization.

This is the overwhelming position across the lands of Islam and across the
majority of the Global South – linking Beijing with fellow BRICS member Brazil
and President Lula, who compared the genocide in Gaza to the Nazi genocide in
WWII.

How to resist collective West sanctions

The Two Sessions did reflect Beijing’s full understanding that Hegemon
containment and destabilization tactics remain the biggest challenge to China’s
peaceful rise. But simultaneously it reflected Chinese confidence on its global
diplomatic clout as a force for peace, stability and economic development. It’s
an extremely sensitive balance that only the Middle Kingdom seems capable of
pulling off.

Then there’s the Trump factor.

Economist Ding Yifan, a former deputy director of the World Development
Institute, part of the State Council’s Development Research Centre, is one among
those who’s aware China is learning key lessons from Russia on how to resist
collective West sanctions – which will be inevitable against China especially if
Trump is back at the White House.

And that brings us to the absolute key issue being currently discussed in
Moscow, within the Russia-China partnership, and soon among the BRICS:
alternative settlement payments to the U.S. dollar, increasing trade among
“friendly nations”, and controls on capital flight.

Nearly all Russia-China trade is now in yuan and rubles. As much as Russian
trade with the EU fell by 68% in 2023, trade with Asia rose by 5.6% – with new
landmarks reached with China ($240 billion) and India ($65 billion) – and 84% of
Russia’s total energy exports going to “friendly countries”.

The Two Sessions did not get into detail on some extremely thorny geopolitical
issues. For instance, India’s version of multipolarity – considering New Delhi’s
unresolved love affair with Washington – is quite different from China’s.
Everyone knows – and no one more than the Russians – that within BRICS 10 the
biggest strategic issue is how to accommodate the perpetual tension between
India and China.

What’s clear even behind the fog of goodwill enveloping the Two Sessions is that
Beijing is fully aware of how the Hegemon is – deliberately – already crossing a
key Chinese red line, officially stationing “permanent troops” in Taiwan.

Since last year U.S. Special Forces have been training Taiwanese in operating
Black Hornet nano microdrones. In 2024 U.S. military advisers are deployed full
time at army bases on Kinmen and Penghu islands.

Those actually driving U.S. foreign policy behind the Crash Test Dummy at the
White House believe that even as they are powerless to handle the Houthi
Ansarallah in the Red Sea, they are capable of poking the Dragon.

No posturing will alter the Dragon’s roadmap. The CPPCC’s political resolution
on Taiwan calls for uniting “all patriotic forces”, “deepen integration and
development in various fields across the Taiwan Straits”, and go all out on
“peaceful reunification”. That will translate in practice into increased
economic/trade cooperation, more direct flights, more cargo ports and logistics
bases.

As Project Ukraine goes down the drain of history, Project Taiwan will go on
overdrive. Forever Wars never die. Bring it on. The Dragon is ready.

……………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged bri, china, economy, politics, taiwan


BIDEN’S UNPOPULAR WARS REAP MASS DEATH AND NUCLEAR BRINKMANSHIP – BY CONNOR
FREEDMAN (LIBERTARIAN INSTITUTE) 7 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 10, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Protesters demanding a ceasefire in Gaza interrupt U.S. President Joe Biden’s
speech at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. January 8,
2024.

President Joe Biden, better known as Genocide Joe, in cooperation with a
perfunctory legislative branch has mired the American people in savage,
reckless, costly, and unpopular wars. The White House’s catastrophic foreign
policy may force American society to a breaking point.

The American public is increasingly rejecting Washington’s proxy war against
Russia in Ukraine, which has already cost well over $100 billion, put the world
on the brink of nuclear annihilation, and seen Ukrainians killed or injured by
the hundreds of thousands.

As Americans are more concerned with simultaneous crises of inflation,
healthcare, immigration, and crime, according to the latest Harris poll, 70% of
Americans oppose Biden’s policy of unending military aid going to the Ukrainian
meat grinder and instead want a diplomatic settlement.

The disconnect between those living in the country and those in Washington DC is
highlighted by members of the U.S. Senate openly salivating about drawing
Russian blood and funneling tens of billions of dollars into the
military-industrial complex.

Arch-neocon and top State Department official Victoria Nuland is threatening
Moscow that the United States will assist Ukraine to “accelerate [its]
asymmetric warfare” and provide “nasty surprises on the battlefield.” At the
same time, French President Emmanuel Macron says deploying NATO troops to
Ukraine to fight Russia should not be off the table.

Subsequent to a meeting with other leaders in Europe concerning the effort to
weaken Russia with the Ukrainian battering ram, Macron declared, “There’s no
consensus today to send in an official, endorsed manner troops on the ground.
But in terms of dynamics, nothing can be ruled out.”

In response to Macron’s bluster, Russian President Vladimir Putin proclaimed in
a speech to the Federal Assembly “[our] strategic nuclear forces are on full
combat alert, and the ability to use them is assured.” The Russian leader
continued, “Now they have started talking about the possibility of deploying
NATO military contingents to Ukraine…They must grasp that we also have
weapons—yes, they know this, as I have just said—capable of striking targets on
their territory.”

Concurrently, the head of the German Air Force has been caught on a leaked
tape discussing with his officers plans to provide Taurus missiles to Kiev,
weapons which have a range of roughly 300 miles, in hopes of carrying out
attacks against Russia. London confirmed last week that “a small number” of
British troops are on the ground “supporting the armed forces of Ukraine.”

On numerous occasions last year, neo-Nazis armed with NATO weaponry and ties to
Ukrainian military intelligence attacked civilian areas across the border in
Russia. Using Western intelligence, Kiev has already waged drone warfare deep
inside Russia.

Despite Putin’s ominous remarks and the sentiments of the American people, NATO
is launching massive war games, including on Russia’s borders, in preparation
for war with Moscow. As the Libertarian Institute’s News Editor Kyle
Anzalone reports, “[These] latest drills are a part of NATO’s Steadfast Defender
military exercises—the bloc’s largest series of war games, which will see
over 90,000 troops participate in about a dozen maneuvers from January through
August.”

Biden’s unpopular war with Russia has brought humanity closer to a nuclear
holocaust than ever before. But perhaps more widely despised and devastating to
the American soul is the genocidal campaign unleashed by Israel against the
Palestinian Muslims and Christians inhabiting the besieged Gaza Strip.

Per a recent Data For Progress poll, two-thirds of the American population
oppose the Biden administration’s unconditional support for Israel and instead
want the White House to back a permanent ceasefire. 77% of Democrats, 69% of
Independents, and a staggering 56% of Republicans agree regarding this issue.

However, Israel’s globally livestreamed mass killing spree—primarily against
women and children—is fully supported by the White House. The same government
which practically every member of America’s political class swears is “our
greatest ally” has cut Gaza off from food, water, fuel, and electricity. Israel
is destroying Gaza, making it uninhabitable by bombing cities, neighborhoods,
apartments, homes, schools, universities, hospitals, ambulances, UN shelters,
mosques, churches, greenhouses, orchards, and refugee camps.

So far, the Israeli apartheid army has butchered over 30,000 people, including
more than 12,000 children. Unfortunately, these confirmed figures paint a
picture less macabre than reality, as thousands of men, women, and children are
buried beneath rubble and presumed dead. One can only imagine what the final
death toll and excess death rate will be.

Often using dystopian AI programs to select targets, the United States and
Israel have leveled a greater percentage of infrastructure in Gaza than the
Allied bombings in Dresden during World War II. The Guardian recently reported,
“As of 17 January, analysis of satellite data by Corey Scher of the City
University of New York and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University reveals
that between 50% and 62% of all buildings in Gaza have likely been damaged or
destroyed.”

Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, approximately half of which are children, have
been bombed everywhere. At times, this has included 2,000-pound bombs raining
down on the Israeli-designated safe zones. Virtually every city in Gaza has been
eradicated except Rafah, where 1.5 million refugees have fled to and which the
Israeli war cabinet plans to hit with a blitzkrieg this month.

Social media feeds in every American household have been flooded with graphic
videos and images showing countless Palestinian babies, children, women, elderly
people, and men being blown to bits, killed, shot, mutilated, or permanently
disfigured with our weaponry.

Last week, in what is known now as the “Flour Massacre,” the Israeli
occupation opened fire killing over a hundred Palestinians and injuring hundreds
more near Gaza City as they desperately attempted to obtain what they could from
a trickle of aid that was allowed into the Strip.

Biden, previously known as “Israel’s man in Washington,” is fond of reciting
his assertion that “If Israel didn’t exist, [the United States] would have to
invent it.” But each day, new horrors and atrocities are unearthed, revealing
Israel to be nothing more than a rogue state (incidentally armed with dozens, if
not hundreds, of nuclear weapons).

Caitlin Johnstone perfectly sums up the reaction of normal people with a
conscience to the unending stream of Israeli barbarism reported daily:

> So it turns out the IDF has been running a Telegram channel featuring homemade
> snuff films in which Gazans are brutally murdered by Israeli forces, captioned
> with celebrations of the gore and pain therein like “Burning their mother…You
> won’t believe the video we got! You can hear their bones crunch.” The IDF had
> previously denied any association with the channel, but Haaretz now
> reports that it was directly run by an IDF psychological warfare unit.
> 
> This is one of those many, many times where Israel is so awful that at first
> you’re not sure what you’re looking at. You think you must be misreading the
> report. Then you read it again and go “Oh wow, that’s SO much worse than I
> would have guessed.”
> 
> However bad you think Israel is, you can always be sure that information will
> come out later that proves it’s even worse.

Palestinians are being subjected to inhumane torture as well. After The New York
Times analyzed a report from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for
Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the paper reported, “Detainees said they were
beaten, stripped, robbed, blindfolded, sexually abused, and denied access to
lawyers and doctors, often for more than a month.”

The Times article continues, “Some detainees, according to the report, told
UNRWA investigators that they had often been beaten on open wounds, had been
held for hours in painful stress positions, and had been attacked by military
dogs.”

One prisoner was “beaten so badly that his genitals turned blue and that there
was still blood present in his urine…guards made him sleep naked in the open
air, next to a fan blowing cold air, and played music so loudly that his ear
bled.”

This coincides with numerous Israeli media reports of torture inflicted against
the occupied Palestinians at the hands of their Zionist army captors. In
January, +972 Magazine reported on the hellish scenes inside Israeli detention
centers holding untold numbers of civilians rounded up in Gaza:

> “Israeli soldiers subjected Palestinian detainees to electric shocks, burned
> their skin with lighters, spat in their mouths, and deprived them of sleep,
> food, and access to bathrooms until they defecated on themselves. Many were
> tied to a fence for hours, handcuffed, and blindfolded for most of the
> day…Several people are known to have died as a result of being held in these
> conditions.”

Israel has the population of Gaza trapped in an open-air concentration camp,
with 75% of Palestinians crammed into a single city. More than 90% of the
Palestinians living in the Strip have been internally displaced amidst the
Israeli onslaught.

Tens of thousands of bombs have been dropped in Gaza, as the United States has
delivered Israel some 25,000 tons of weapons including thousands of 2,000 pound
bombs and tens of thousands of artillery shells.

It is a repudiation of every treasured American value for our government to make
all of us a party to such atrocities under any conditions.

The whole world sees this for what it is. Half of Americans who voted for Biden
in 2020 believe he is complicit in genocide. Indeed, the International Court of
Justice has issued a preliminary ruling that Israel’s actions may plausibly
constitute genocide. Nevertheless, our Congress is committed to financing this
systematic destruction of Gaza with another $14 billion of the American people’s
hard-earned money.

Palestinians are not only being ripped apart with American bombs and shells,
they are being starved to death by the hundreds of thousands. As Antiwar.com
News Editor Dave DeCamp reports:

> At least 16 Palestinian children have starved to death in the Gaza Strip over
> the past few days due to the US-backed Israeli siege, and the UN’s child
> relief agency is warning that the number of child deaths will “rapidly
> increase” if conditions don’t immediately change.
> 
> “Last week, we warned that an explosion in child deaths was imminent if the
> burgeoning nutrition crisis wasn’t resolved,” said Adele Khodr, UNICEF’s
> director for the Middle East and North Africa. “Now, the child deaths we
> feared are here and are likely to rapidly increase unless the war ends and
> obstacles to humanitarian relief are immediately resolved.”
> 
> The latest Palestinian child reported to die of hunger was Yazan al-Kafarna, a
> 10-year-old with cerebral palsy who was in the al-Najjar Hospital in Rafah.
> Fifteen children have also died of malnutrition and dehydration at the Kamal
> Adwan Hospital in northern Gaza.
> 
> The UN has previously warned that Gaza’s entire population of about 2.2
> million people is facing “crisis” levels of food insecurity, and at least
> 576,000 Palestinians in Gaza are “facing catastrophic levels of deprivation
> and starvation.”
> 
> Despite the dire situation, the State Department reaffirmed on Monday that it
> will continue to provide military assistance for Israel’s genocidal war.

The last vestiges of our deluded American exceptionalism burned up in front of
the Israeli embassy in Washington D.C. with Aaron Bushnell last month. As the
former member of the U.S. Air Force stated before his self-immolation in protest
of the genocide in Gaza, “this is what our ruling class has decided will be
normal.”

But regardless of what excuses White House spokespeople are able to conjure up
in an attempt to hide the blood on their hands, this is not normal and the
American people will never accept it. As evidenced by the public opinion
polls and protest movements across the country, Biden will pay dearly in the
coming election for his role in the mass murder ongoing in Palestine.

NBC News revealed the Biden reelection team has taken “extraordinary steps” to
avoid antiwar protesters including “by making [their events] smaller,
withholding their precise locations from the media and the public until he
arrives, and avoiding college campuses.”

Additionally, the more than 100,000 “uncommitted” protest votes in the Michigan
Democratic primary last week foreshadows things to come for Genocide Joe and the
Democratic Party establishment. Demonstrators camped out daily in front of
Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s residence chant “Blinken! Blinken! We see
you and all the war crimes that you do!”

In his last words, Bushnell said he could “no longer be complicit in genocide.”
His message was one that resonates with perhaps a majority of Americans. But in
Washington, his message could not be more alien.

Americans have witnessed the true nature of the U.S. empire, its allies,
partners, and proxies. They have voiced their abhorrence to their government and
have been shocked at the abject lack of empathy for the Palestinian women and
children being slaughtered, tortured, and deprived to death on an industrial
scale.

In a video last month, Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) was told by a peace activist on
Capitol Hill, “I’ve seen the footage of shredded children’s bodies. That’s my
taxpayer dollars that are going to bomb those kids.” Ogles responded proudly, “I
think we should kill ’em all, if that makes you feel better.”

An American antiwar populace cannot be ruled by unrepentant and unAmerican
warmongers in perpetuity; a breaking point cannot come soon enough.

……………………

Source

| Tagged gaza, human-rights, israel, palestine, politics


US EMPIRE DECLINE AND COSTLY DELUSIONS – BY RICHARD D. WOLFF – 8 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 9, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

(Napoleon Retreats From Russia In Defeat)



Пераправа цераз раку Бярэзіну (Biarezina)

When Napoleon engaged Russia in a European land war, the Russians mounted a
determined defense, and the French lost. When Hitler tried the same, the Soviet
Union responded similarly, and the Germans lost. In World War 1 and its
post-revolutionary civil war (1914-1922), first Russia and then the USSR
defended with far greater effect against two invasions than the invaders had
calculated. That history ought to have cautioned U.S. and European leaders to
minimize the risks of confronting Russia, especially when Russia felt
threatened and determined to defend itself.

Instead of caution, delusions prompted ill-advised judgments by the collective
West (roughly the G7 nations: the U.S. and its major allies). Those delusions
emerged partly from the collective West’s widespread denial of its relative
economic decline in the 21st century. That denial also enabled a remarkable
blindness to the limits that decline imposed on the collective West’s global
actions. Delusions also flowed from a basic undervaluation of Russia’s
defensiveness and its resulting commitments. The Ukraine war starkly illustrates
both the decline and the costly delusions it fosters.

The United States and Europe seriously underestimated what Russia could and
would do to prevail militarily in Ukraine. Russia’s victory—at least so far
after two years of war—has proven decisive. Their underestimation stemmed from a
shared inability to grasp or absorb the changing world economy and its
implications. By mostly minimizing, marginalizing, or simply denying the decline
of the U.S. empire relative to the rise of China and its BRICS allies, the
United States and Europe missed that decline’s unfolding implications. Russia’s
allies’ support combined with its national determination to defend itself have
so far defeated a Ukraine heavily funded and armed by the collective West.
Historically, declining empires often provoke denials and delusions that teach
their people “hard lessons” and impose on them “hard choices”. That is where we
are now.

The economics of the U.S. empire decline constitutes the continuing global
context. The BRICS countries’ collective GDP, wealth, income, share of world
trade, and presence at the highest levels of new technology increasingly
exceed those of the G7. That relentless economic development frames the decline
of the G7’s political and cultural influences as well. The massive U.S. and
European sanctions program against Russia after February 2022 has failed. Russia
turned especially to its BRICS allies to quickly as well as comprehensively
escape most of those sanctions’ intended effects.

UN votes on the ceasefire issue in Gaza reflect and reinforce the mounting
difficulties facing the U.S. position in the Middle East and globally. So does
the Houthis’ intervention in Red Sea shipping and so too will other future Arab
and Islamic initiatives supporting Palestine against Israel. Among the
consequences flowing from the changing world economy, many work to undermine and
weaken the U.S. empire.

Trump’s disrespect for NATO is partly an expression of disappointment with an
institution he can blame for failing to stop empire’s decline. Trump and his
supporters broadly downgrade many institutions once thought crucially central to
running the U.S., empire globally. Both the Trump and Biden regimes attacked
China’s Huawei corporation, shared commitments to trade and tariff wars, and
heavily subsidized competitively challenged U.S. corporations. Nothing less than
a historic shift away from neoliberal globalization toward economic nationalism
is underway. An American empire that once targeted the whole world is shrinking
into a merely regional bloc confronting one or more emerging regional blocs.
Much of the rest of the world’s nations—a possible “world majority” of the
planet’s people—are pulling away from the U.S. empire.

U.S. leaders’ aggressive economic nationalist policies distract attention from
the empire’s decline and thereby facilitate its denial. Yet they also cause new
problems. Allies fear that economic nationalism in the United States already has
or will soon adversely affect their economic relations with the United States;
“America first” targets not only the Chinese. Many countries are rethinking and
reconstructing their economic relations with the United States and their
expectations about those relations’ futures. Likewise, major groups of U.S.
employers are reconsidering their investment strategies. Those who invested
heavily overseas as part of the neoliberal globalization frenzies of the last
half century are especially fearful. They anticipate costs and losses from
policy shifts toward economic nationalism. Their pushback slows those shifts. As
capitalists everywhere adjust practically to the changing world economy, they
also quarrel and dispute the direction and pace of change. That injects more
uncertainty and volatility into a thereby further destabilized world economy. As
the U.S. empire unravels, the world economic order it once dominated and
enforced likewise changes.

“Make America Great Again” (MAGA) slogans have politically weaponized U.S.
empire’s decline, always in carefully vague and general terms. They simplify and
misunderstand it within another set of delusions. Trump will, he promises
repeatedly, undo that decline and reverse it. He will punish those he blames for
it: China, but also Democrats, liberals, globalists, socialists, and Marxists
whom he lumps together in a bloc-building strategy. There is rarely any serious
attention to the economics of the G7’s decline since to do so would critically
implicate capitalists’ profit-driven decisions as key causes of the decline.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats dare do that. Biden speaks and acts as if the
U.S. wealth and power positions within the world economy were undiminished from
what they were across the second half of the 20th century (most of Biden’s
political lifetime).

Continuing to fund and arm Ukraine in the war with Russia, like endorsing and
supporting Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, are policies premised on denials
of a changed world. So too are successive waves of economic sanctions despite
each wave failing to achieve its goals. Using tariffs to keep better, cheaper
Chinese electric vehicles off the U.S. market will only disadvantage U.S.
individuals (via such Chinese electric vehicles’ higher prices) and businesses
(via global competition from businesses buying the cheaper Chinese cars and
trucks).

Perhaps the greatest, costliest delusions that follow from a denial of years of
decline dog the upcoming presidential election. The two major parties and their
candidates offer no serious plan for how to deal with the declining empire they
seek to lead. Both parties took turns presiding over the decline, yet denial and
blaming the other is all either party offers in 2024. Biden offers voters a
partnership in denial that the empire is declining. Trump promises vaguely to
undo the decline caused by bad Democratic leadership that his election will
remove. Nothing either major party does entails sober admissions and assessments
of a changed world economy and how each plans to cope with that.

The last 40 to 50 years of the economic history of the G7 witnessed extreme
redistributions of wealth and income upward. Those redistributions functioned as
both causes and effects of neoliberal globalization. However, domestic reactions
(economic and social divisions increasingly hostile and volatile) and foreign
reactions (emergence of today’s China and BRICS) are undermining neoliberal
globalization and beginning to challenge its accompanying inequalities. U.S.
capitalism and its empire cannot yet face its decline amid a changing world.
Delusions about retaining or regaining power at the top of society proliferate
alongside delusional conspiracy theories and political scapegoating (immigrants,
China, Russia) below.

Meanwhile, the economic, political, and cultural costs mount. And on some level,
as per Leonard Cohen’s famous song, “Everybody Knows.”

………………………..

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media
Institute.

Richard Wolff is the author of Capitalism Hits the Fan and Capitalism’s Crisis
Deepens. He is founder of Democracy at Work.

| Tagged brics, economics, politics, russia, ukraine


ISRAEL – ENEMY POW TORTURE VIDEOS MAKE JEWISH STATE OVERLORDS PROUD – BY
JONATHAN OFIR (MONDOWEIS) 6 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 9, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


‘WE ARE THE MASTERS OF THE HOUSE’: ISRAELI CHANNELS AIR SNUFF VIDEOS FEATURING
SYSTEMATIC TORTURE OF PALESTINIANS

Israeli TV channels aired a number of reports showing the torture and
humiliation of Palestinians in Israeli prisons. The videos are consumed by the
Israeli public as entertainment, revealing the sadism of Israeli society.

BY JONATHAN OFIR 

Over the past month, mainstream Israeli television channels have aired what can
only be described as snuff films. They depict the systematic torture of
Palestinians from Gaza in Israeli jails. Such videos have aired on at least
three occasions — twice on Channel 14, and once on the public broadcaster,
Channel 13. While Channel 14 is considered right-wing, so is about two-thirds of
the Israeli public, and the more “mainstream” Channel 13 has shown no qualms
about airing similar footage. 

The broadcasts follow prison officials into detention centers to document the
mistreatment of prisoners, which seems to be something that the officials — and
apparently the viewers — find satisfying rather than revolting. The airing of
these snuff films is a demonstration of societal sadism. 

As Yumna Patel has recently reported, several rights groups have sounded the
alarm over the widespread and systemic abuse that Palestinian prisoners face at
the hands of the Israeli authorities. These groups’ calls have been
unintentionally buttressed by Israeli soldiers’ unapologetic videos of
themselves torturing or demeaning Palestinian detainees, which they boastfully
post on social media. Now, it seems that the phenomenon has expanded to
mainstream Israeli television.   

The two aforementioned reports on Channel 14 (threads with subtitles can be
found here and here) contained footage of actual interrogation sessions during
which torture was used. The Channel 13 report did not, but it exposed some of
the worst prison conditions to be broadcast to the public. These conditions
include forcing prisoners to live in inhumane conditions and subjecting them to
torture and harassment. Here’s the 11-minute video with translated subtitles.


‘THE FEELING IS ONE OF PRIDE’

“Here, we see the cells in which the Nukhba terrorists are held,” the narrator
says.

The “Nukhba” refers to elite Hamas-led fighters who carried out the October 7
attack. In the cell, viewers notice metal bunkbeds without mattresses, and
instead of a toilet, there is just a hole in the floor. The room is almost
completely dark throughout the day, and prisoners have their hands and legs
chained together. 

We hear attack dogs barking constantly as prisoners are made to kneel while
bound and blindfolded, their heads touching the floor. 

“This is how it should be,” a guard says. “This is how a Nukhba prisoner should
be…what happened on October 7 will never return.” 

In another scene, a guard shouts at prisoners as dogs continue to bark
incessantly. “Heads down! Heads on the floor!” he yells. 

“There are many prisoners here that I personally saw at the [October 7] events,”
a prison official says, taking pride in humiliating them. “The difference is
that this time, he is afraid, shaking, with his head on the floor…no Allahu
Akbar, nothing. You won’t hear a squeak from him.”

“They have no mattresses,” says a warden shift commander. “They have nothing…we
control them 100% — their food, their shackling, their sleep…[we] show them we
are the masters of the house.” Even without knowing the background to that
phrase, to hear him say it is chilling. 

“Masters of the house” was the election slogan of Itamar Ben-Gvir, the Jewish
Power leader and current Minister of National Security. Ben-Gvir declared war on
Palestinian prisoners long before October 7, and this has included shutting down
bakeries that supply bread to prisoners — described by Ben-Gvir as an
“indulgence” — and drastically limiting prisoners’ water use. So now it’s become
much worse. 

While one is tempted to believe that all prisoners here are “Nukhba” members, it
turns out that many of them aren’t even suspected of that. Rather, they were
rounded up in Gaza after October 7, during mass arrests in which hundreds of
Gazan men were stripped and paraded in a most sadistic demonstration of power.
The mass arrests also included hundreds of women, including pregnant women
detained with their babies. Israeli security officials told Haaretz that by
their own estimate, “only 10 to 15 percent of the hundreds of the semi-naked and
bound Gazan men arrested in the Strip during the recent days are Hamas members
or those who identified with the organization.”

Back to the Channel 13 coverage, viewers can hear the nonstop blasting of the
Zionist anthem, Am Israel Hai (“the people of Israel live”). 

“The prison authorities claim that it is meant to boost the morale of the
staff,” the narrator declares. “But it is clear that this is another part of the
psychological warfare against the prisoners.” 

Torture, in other words. 

It’s hard to imagine the depths to which Israeli society has sunk. The official
tells the Channel 13 reporter that “the feeling is one of pride.”

 The reason such sadism has become formalized as a matter of policy is because
this is what the Israeli public demands. The Israeli Democracy
Institute released a survey last week showing that two-thirds of Jewish Israelis
oppose “the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza residents at this time,” even
if “via international bodies that are not linked to Hamas or to UNRWA.” For
right-wing voters, the opposition to aid jumps from 68% to 80%. 

This is not Israel’s Abu Ghraib moment, because when Abu Ghraib was revealed,
most Americans were revolted. Israeli society, on the other hand, is thirsting
for genocide. No wonder they consume such videos as entertainment on mainstream
TV.

…………………

Source

| Tagged israel, middle-east, news, palestine, politics


ALL I WANT TO SAY IS THEY DON’T REALLY CARE ABOUT US! (4:00 MIN) AUDIO MP3

Posted on March 9, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
All I Want To Say Is They Don’t Really Care About Us! (4:00 min) Audio Mp3




ISRAELI LOBBY LEAK – KEY WORDS (GREYZONE) 6 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 7, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


LEAKED ISRAEL LOBBY PRESENTATION URGES US OFFICIALS TO JUSTIFY WAR ON GAZA WITH
‘HAMAS RAPE’ CLAIMS

MAX BLUMENTHAL


THE GRAYZONE HAS OBTAINED SLIDES FROM A CONFIDENTIAL ISRAEL LOBBY PRESENTATION
BASED ON DATA FROM REPUBLICAN POLLSTER FRANK LUNTZ. THEY CONTAIN TALKING POINTS
FOR POLITICIANS AND PUBLIC FIGURES SEEKING TO JUSTIFY ISRAEL’S ASSAULT ON THE
GAZA STRIP.

Two prominent pro-Israel lobby groups are holding private briefings in New York
City to coach elected officials and well-known figures on how to influence
public opinion in favor of the Israeli military’s rampage in Gaza, The Grayzone
can reveal. These PR sessions, convened by the UJA-Federation and Jewish
Community Relations Council, rely on data collected by Frank Luntz, a veteran
Republican pollster and pundit.

A source who was present during several meetings provided Luntz’s slides to The
Grayzone. Participants were informed that the presentations and data contained
in the slides were strictly confidential, the source said.

“This is NOT helpful,” Luntz stated in response to an email from The Grayzone
requesting his comment on the private meetings.

The Luntz-tested presentations on the war in Gaza urge politicians to avoid
trumpeting America’s supposedly shared democratic values with Israel, and focus
instead on deploying “The Language of War with Hamas.” According to this
framing, they must deploy incendiary language painting Hamas as a “brutal and
savage…organization of hate” which has “raped women,” while insisting Israel is
engaged in “a war for humanity.”



On his personal website, Luntz markets himself as “one of the most honored
communications professionals in America today.” He has earned a small fortune
crafting talking points for Republican Party heavyweights and scandal-stained
corporate clients like Enron, the energy company which collapsed after
engineering California’s energy crisis. Following the financial crash of
2008-09, Luntz advised the GOP on shielding the party’s big business donors from
scrutiny. At around the same time, he furnished the Republican Governor’s
Association with advice on undermining Occupy Wall Street, the movement
demanding accountability for the banking industry’s malfeasance.

The celebrity GOP pollster has moonlighted as a consultant for the Israel lobby,
producing a “Global Language Dictionary” for the now-defunct Israel Project in
the aftermath of the brutal 2008-09 attack on Gaza known as Operation Cast Lead.
In his propaganda handbook, Luntz counseled “leaders who are on the front lines
of fighting the media war for Israel” to shy from debates related to the illegal
occupation of Palestine.

“Avoid talking about borders in terms of pre- or post-1967,” he advised,
“because it only serves to remind Americans of Israel’s military history.
Particularly on the left, this does you harm.”

Tweet

Luntz’s Gaza war presentation puts his poll-tested tactics back in the Israel
lobby’s hands, urging pro-Israel public figures to stay on the attack with
incendiary language and shocking allegations against their enemies.

In one focus group, Luntz asked participants to state which alleged act by Hamas
on October 7 “bothers you more.” After being presented with a laundry list of
alleged atrocities, a majority declared that they were most upset by the claim
that Hamas “raped civilians” – 19 percent than those who expressed outrage that
Hamas supposedly “exterminated civilians.”



Data like this apparently influenced the Israeli government to launch an
obsessive but still unsuccessful campaign to prove that Hamas carried out sexual
assault on a systematic basis on October 7. Initiated at Israel’s United Nations
mission in December 2023 with speeches by neoliberal tech oligarch Sheryl
Sandberg and former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, a recipient of
hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations and speaking fees from Israel
lobby organizations, Tel Aviv’s propaganda blitz has yet to produce a single
self-identified victim of sexual assault by Hamas. A March 5 report by UN
Special Representative on Sexual Violence Pramila Patten did not contain one
direct testimony of sexual assault on October 7. What’s more, Patten’s team said
they found “no digital evidence specifically depicting acts of sexual violence.”

To further the demonization of Palestinians, the Luntz-crafted slides advise
that “Israel’s best response is the brainwashed children of Hamas spewing hatred
towards Jews (even more than condemning Israelis) with words they don’t know the
meaning of and can’t even pronounce.”

The portrayal of the youth of Gaza as ignorant tools of Hamas is clearly
intended to deflect from Israel’s industrial-scale slaughter of some 15,000
children in the Gaza Strip since October 7, as well as
the wounding, orphaning and starving of countless more in the besieged
territory.



To make their arguments stick, Luntz recommends pro-Israel forces avoid the
exterminationist language favored by Israeli officials who have called, for
example, to “erase” the population of Gaza, and to instead advocate for “an
efficient, effective approach” to eliminating Hamas.

At the same time, veteran pollster acknowledges that Republican voters prefer
phrases which imply maximalist violence, like “eradicate” and “obliterate,”
while sanitized terms like “neutralize” appeal more to Democrats. Republican
presidential candidates Nikki Haley and Donald Trump have showcased similar
focus-grouped rhetoric with their calls to “finish them” and “finish the
problem” in Gaza.



As in past Israel-lobby seminars, Luntz has urged pro-Israel forces to divert
from arguments about Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory by
deploying banal slogans like, “Israelis have a right to defend themselves.”

“This is about Israelis,” a Luntz-crafted slide declares, “not about territory.”



According to the pollster’s research, pro-Israel politicians should avoid
references to “Israel” entirely and instead discuss “Israelis” when “setting the
context” for a debate over the war in Gaza.

The recommended tweak hints at the PR crisis Israel lobby forces have
encountered since Israel’s military invaded and besieged Gaza, leaving most of
its residents homeless, placing its entire public health and sanitation system
out of service, and exterminating over 2% of the overall population, according
to conservative death toll estimates.

One slide demonstrates that only a small sliver of those polled by Luntz buy
into the Israeli government’s mantra that “Hamas is ISIS.” The same visual aid
counsels pro-Israel officials to shy from the phrases “genuine accuracy” and
“hard evidence,” and allude more generally to “the truth” when discussing
Israel’s actions.



Luntz acknowledges Israel’s mounting PR problems in a slide identifying the most
powerful tactics employed by Palestine solidarity activists. “Israelis attacking
Israel is the second most potent weapon against Israel,” the visual display
reads beside a photo of a protest by Jewish Voices for Peace, a US-based Jewish
organization dedicated to ending Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

“The most potent” tactic in mobilizing opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza,
according to Luntz, “is the visual destruction of Gaza and the human toll.” The
slide inadvertently acknowledges the cruelty of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza,
displaying a bombed out apartment building with clearly anguished women and
children fleeing in the foreground.

But Luntz assures his audience, “It ‘looks like a genocide’ even though the
damage has nothing to do with the definition.”

According to this logic, the American public can become more tolerant of
copiously documented crimes against humanity if they are simply told not to
believe their lying eyes.


| Tagged gaza, israel, middle-east, palestine, politics


US – HARVARD LAW PROF – OPPOSING ISRAEL’S WAR IS ANTISEMITISM – MARCH 2024

Posted on March 7, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


HARVARD PROFESSOR NOAH FELDMAN DENOUNCES OPPOSITION TO THE GAZA WAR AS THE “NEW
ANTISEMITISM”



Time Magazine has chosen as its cover story Harvard Professor of Law Noah
Feldman’s maliciously dishonest and morally bankrupt defense of Israel’s savage
war against the population of Gaza.

The “old” antisemitism was a central element of fascism, espousing virulent
nationalism, anti-communism and anti-socialism, and implementing genocide of
defenseless people.

The “new” antisemitism, according to Feldman, is a central element of the left,
which opposes the Israeli war machine, nationalist xenophobia, anti-Arab racism,
and the mass murder of defenseless and oppressed people in Gaza.

Feldman’s propaganda piece consists of the crudest historical falsifications. He
writes, “Ultimately, in different ways, both Nazism and Marxism identified Jews
as an enemy deserving liquidation.” This is an outrageous lie.

The Marxist and socialist movement led the struggle against antisemitism in
Germany, throughout Europe, and in the United States. Fundamental to Nazi and
fascist ideology and politics was the identification of Jews with socialism and
the labor movement.

Feldman dissolves Judaism as a religion into Israeli nationalism, proclaims the
Israeli state as the supreme manifestation of Jewish existence, and asserts its
“status as the only homeland for a historically oppressed people who have
nowhere else to call their own.”

This claim ignores the fact that more than half the world’s Jewish population,
including Feldman, hold citizenship in countries other than Israel. And, one
might add, that thousands of Israelis abandon this “homeland” every year.

Feldman resorts to the most vile sophistries to minimize Israeli crimes, such as
the claim that ethnic cleansing practiced by Israel “would arguably not count as
genocide under the legal meaning of the term.”

He also states, “The genocide charge depends on intent. And Israel, as a state,
is not fighting the Gaza War with the intent to destroy the Palestinian people.”

According to Feldman, since Israel’s “stated war aims” are merely “to hold Hamas
accountable,” it cannot be accused of genocide. Israel’s “aims are lawful in
themselves.”

Writing as an attorney for mass murderers, Feldman asserts, “There is no single,
definitive international-law answer to the question of how much collateral
damage renders a strike disproportionate to its concrete military objective.”

Feldman, shedding a tear, writes, “The number of Palestinian dead, over 29,000
as of this writing, is heartbreaking.” But the actual killing of the 29,000,
according to Feldman, is not a crime.

Of all the arguments advanced by Feldman, the most cynical is his claim that
“Accusing Israel of genocide can function, intentionally or otherwise, as a way
of erasing the memory of the Holocaust and transforming Jews from victims into
oppressors.”

This is the same argument made by the Polish government in introducing a law in
2018 illegalizing references to the complicity of Poles in the mass murder of
Jews during World War II.

The bill passed by the Polish Senate declared that “whoever accuses … the Polish
nation, or the Polish state, of being responsible or complicit in the Nazi
crimes … shall be subject to a fine or a penalty of imprisonment of up to three
years.”

The fascistic Polish government justified this law on the grounds that
references to Polish complicity in the Holocaust detracted from the sufferings
of the Polish people during the years of Nazi occupation. Israel denounced the
Polish law.

Feldman invokes the Holocaust as a cover for Israeli atrocities. But his defense
of Israel’s genocidal war, with the support of the US, is a desecration of the
memory of the six million Jewish victims of Nazism and the universal
significance of the Holocaust.

……………….

Information Liberation

The Washington Post ran a column from Noah Feldman on Tuesday telling
progressive Jews to get with the program and back Israel’s genocide campaign in
Gaza or face excommunication.

After paragraph upon paragraph aimed at building rapport with the progressive
Jews Feldman is targeting, he finally got to the point at the end of his column.

From The Washington Post, “To be a Jew today: The aftermath of Oct.
7” (Archive):

> [Young progressive Jews] believe in the teachings of social justice that
> compel them to social action. But they also find that they cannot avoid what
> they see as the broken reality of Israel.
> 
> […] Their solution — their Jewish, progressive, sincerely felt solution — is
> to express their belief in social justice by criticizing or condemning Israel
> for its failures of equality, liberty, dignity and human rights.
> 
> […] As today’s college students become adults and gradually assume leadership
> of their movements, progressive Judaism will have to work out its long-term
> attitude toward Israel. One possibility is for progressive Jews to tack away
> from the focus on Israel, to engage their Jewishness in other ways — familial,
> spiritual and personal. This would entail real theological change.
> 
> But so would embracing simultaneously a God of loving social justice and a
> state that rejects liberal democracy. Israel will not change just because
> progressive American Jews want it to. They will have to find their own answers
> to the looming crisis facing them — and soon, before a new generation finds
> itself alienated from a Jewishness whose inner contradictions it cannot
> reconcile.
> 
> At the individual level, Jews who want to think less about Israel also face
> serious challenges because Jewishness is a collective identity. If most Jews
> self-define in relation to Israel, positively or negatively, it is hard for
> any Jews to choose not to do so.
> 
> Yet a turn to a Jewishness that is more personal, familial and spiritual and
> less national-political may be the inevitable result, even if no formal
> movement within Jewish life consciously adopts such a policy. If this happens,
> Jews will have to draw more than ever on their rich traditions of faith,
> doubt, struggle and love — and do so as families, rather than as a nation.

Translation: get with the program and back Israel’s genocide campaign or face
excommunication. Israel’s not going to change anything — and you will never be
given any national-political power — so you need to change yourself to get in
line with Israel (or become a hermit and stay the hell out of our way).

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said similar in the wake of October 7, stating that
“every Jewish person is a Zionist” and labeling anti-Zionist Jews (whom he
stripped of their Jewishness) as a “hate group.”

Noah Feldman, who is a professor at Harvard Law School, is the same writer who
had the cover story in Time Magazine last week on “The New Anti-Semitism” which
argued that the entire world was antisemitic for opposing Israel’s genocide of
women and children in Gaza.

…………………………………

Source

| Tagged antisemitism, israel, palestine, politics, zionism


GLOBAL SOUTH YOUTH FLOCKS TO ‘ISOLATED’ RUSSIA – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 5 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 7, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 800 WORDS • 

By any metric, the World Youth Festival running in the Sirius federal territory
(Sochi, southern Russia) on March 1-7 is a stunning achievement: a sort of
Special Cultural Operation (SCO) encompassing the young Global South.

It starts with the incomparable setting – the 2014 Olympics park of science and
art, nested between snowy mountains and the Black Sea – all the way to the stars
of the show: over 20,000 young leaders from over 180 nations, Russians and
mostly Asians, Africans and Latin Americans, as well as assorted dissidents from
the sanctions-obsessed Western “garden”.

Among them are scores of educators, PhDs, public sector or culture activists,
charity volunteers, athletes, young entrepreneurs, scientists, citizen
journalists, as well as teenagers from 14 to 17, for the first time the focus of
a special program, “Together into the Future”. These are the generations that
will be building our common future.

President Putin is once again quite sharp: he emphasized how a clear distinction
applies between citizens of the world – including the Global North – and the
intolerant, extremely aggressive Western plutocracy. Russia, a multinational,
multicultural civilization-state, by principle welcomes all citizens of the
world.

The World Youth Festival 2024, taking place seven years after the last one,
renews a tradition that harks back to the 1957 World Festival of Youth and
Students when the USSR welcomed everyone on both sides of the Iron Curtain
during the Cold War.

The idea of an open platform for young, committed, very organized people
attracted by Russian conservative/family values permeates the whole festival –
in sharp contrast to the artificial, cancel culture-obsessed “open society” P.R.
incessantly sold by the usual hegemonic foundations.

Each day at the festival is dedicated to a main theme. For instance, March 2 was
on “responsibility for the fate of the world”; March 3 was for “unity and
cooperation among nations”; March 4 was for “a world of opportunities for
everyone”.

No less than 300,000 youngsters from around the world applied to come to the
festival. So obviously to select a little over 20,000 was quite a feat. After
the festival, 2,000 foreign participants will travel to 30 Russian cities for
cultural exchange. Exactly what comrade Xi Jinping defines as “people to
people’s exchanges”.

It’s no wonder the festival organizers, Rosmolodezh, the Russian federal agency
for youth affairs, call it “the largest youth event in the world”. Director
Ksenia Razuvaeva noted, “we are destroying the myth that Russia is isolated.”

The Pitfalls of “Asynchronous Multipolarity”

The festival is all about networking among youth groups, intercultural/business
ties ranging from the sustainable community level to the larger geopolitical
level.

I had the huge honor and responsibility to address a truly multi-Global South
audience at the Belgorod oblast pavilion, invited by the Russia Knowledge
Foundation, alongside a consultant from Hyderabad, India.

The Q&A session was terrific: ultra-sharp questions from Iran to Serbia, from
Brazil to India, from Palestine to Donbass. A true microcosm of the
multicultural Young Global South, eager to know everything about the current
geopolitical Great Game as well as how national governments can facilitate
international cultural and scientific cooperation among young people.

The Valdai Club is running a particularly attractive daily program at the
forum, The World in 2040.

A workshop on Sunday, for instance, focused on “The Future of a Multipolar
World”, anchored by the excellent Andrey Sushentsov, dean of the School of
International Relations at MGIMO, arguably the best international relations
school on the planet.

The discussion on “asynchronous multipolarity” was particularly useful to the
audience (a solid Chinese presence, mostly PhDs), and elicited ultra-sharp
questions by researchers from Serbia, South Ossetia, Transnistria and of course
China.

Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor of China studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru
University, elaborated on the key concept of “Asian multipolarity” – the many
Asias within Asia, something that totally baffles simplistic Western
categorizations. After the session we had an excellent exchange about it.

Yet nothing at the forum compares to going from room to packed room, getting a
glimpse of the in-depth discussions and then wandering the pavilions in total
networking mode. I was approached by everyone from Sudan to Ecuador, from New
Guinea to a group of Brazilians, from Indonesians to an official of the
Communist Party of the United States.

And then there’s the special prize: the stands of the several Russian republics.
That’s when you get the chance to be immersed in a Yamal tea ritual; to receive
first-hand information on the Nenets Autonomous Region; or to discuss the
procedure to embark on a trip in a nuclear icebreaker in the Northern Sea Route
– or Arctic Silk Road: the connectivity channel of the future. Once again:
multipolar Russia in effect.

Now compare this peaceful, pan-global gathering focused on all forms of
sustainable community programs, drenched in hopes and dreams, to NATO launching
a two-week, massive warmongering exercise dubbed “Nordic Response 2024”, carried
out by Finland, Norway and newcomer Sweden less than 500 km away from the
Russian borders.

…………………………

(Republished from Sputnik International)

| Tagged brics, diplomacy, geopolitics, russia, ukraine


“THEY DON’T REALLY CARE ABOUT US!” – UNCENSORED – MICHAEL JACKSON IN BRAZIL
(4:42 MIN)

Posted on March 7, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




CRISIS OF CULTURE IN THE US – BY DOM SHANNON (DAILYWORKER) 2 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 6, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

“George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.” These were the words of famed
rapper Kanye West during the 2005 nationally televised telethon benefit for
victims of Hurricane Katrina. In this notorious quote, Kanye expressed a popular
conception of the Bush administration for a whole generation of people. How is
it then, that less than 15 years later the same Kanye West — son of a Black
Panther who had previously made commentary on racism in the U.S. — would go on a
national tour professing his love for Hitler? Even more recently, beloved star
in the Black community, Nicki Minaj, cozied up to Ben Shapiro after rapper Megan
Thee Stallion blasted her for misogynoir. Both of these instances illustrate the
right’s newfound investment in popular culture in response to young people,
people of color and the LGBTQ community’s increasing acceptance of socialism.

Outside of exploiting the fissures in Black popular culture, the right has
become increasingly interested in permeating their ideas through internet
culture. Popular streamers/podcasters like Sneako and Andrew Tate diffuse ideas
of misogyny, queerphobia, and racism to a young and impressionable audience,
ensuring they have “first dibs” on shaping their worldview as they enter into
adolescence and young adulthood. These instances don’t solely remain within the
realm of various -isms or phobias. Right wing media personality Tucker Carlson
has been featured on the podcast Full Send promoting a new tobacco product Zyn,
for reasons that can only be seen as a promotional money making scheme for the
company and its owners.

The right’s new interest in popular culture could be understood as a response to
the leftward shift in the U.S. socio-political landscape that occurred between
2016–2020. When the Black Lives Matter movement came to a head after the murder
of George Floyd and COVID shut down the economy, capitalist antagonisms were
incredibly sharp and noticeable. This was in part because of the horrendous
Trump presidency, but also in part because a new socialist movement was set into
motion by the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016. This latest utopian socialist
moment brought many people into new political life: previously apolitical or
demobilized, as well as young people who were experiencing political life for
the very first time. This spawned the movements’ very own streamers and
podcasters, such as the Red Scare Podcast, the Chapo Trap House Podcast and
streamers like Hasan Piker. They sought to speak to, and for, this newly
mobilized political base of young workers and students. But as the movement’s
energy dwindled, their viewership and popularity declined. At the same time,
some of these podcasters and streamers became advocates of “post-left”
nihilistic politics, which was due to a concerted effort, perhaps even the first
“attack,” by rightwing billionaire Peter Thiel who funds their projects with an
endless stream of money. Simultaneously, but not coincidentally, right wing
billionaire Elon Musk bought the social media platform Twitter, now known as X.
This move was less so aimed at creating a new revenue stream but more so aimed
at creating and controlling popular narratives on the internet.

The left has yet to respond to or recover from the right’s new method of
disseminating their ideas. The current crisis in capitalism has pushed seemingly
unimportant cultural commentary to the wayside for a myriad of reasons,
including racist and patriarchal chauvinism, which can’t be discounted.

Where exactly does this leave us? The right wing has become the main agitators
of a “culture war” they claim to want no part in, and many socialists have taken
them at their word. We’ve seemingly given up on or have no interest in what is
not overtly political, economic or legislative. While non-socialist progressives
make commentary on culture/cultural events and even give solutions — which may
not make adequate considerations to class implications — socialists remain
silent, making us look fringe, out of touch and even non-existent. This is
especially damning when you take into account the rate in which access to news
is being put behind a paywall. Working people are being increasingly priced out
of being informed on the world around them and increasingly rely on the media we
do consume, which cannot be assumed to be factual.

There are hundreds, if not millions, of people currently in “political limbo.”
Some of them are the utopian socialists who were invigorated during the
2016–2020 time period. Many of these people have yet to find a political home or
adopt a coherent political agenda and may fall victim to “post-left” nihilistic
politics propagated by the aforementioned streamers and podcasters. However,
there are many, maybe even more, people who have never or scarcely been
mobilized for overt political action, but have political opinions nonetheless.
To some socialists, their politics may seem crude or rudimentary, because they
are not derived explicitly from political analysis, rather from cultural events
that nevertheless do have political implications. Indeed, those who care greatly
about and pay attention to popular/celebrity culture are far from vapid or
unintelligent. Instead, is it us who’ve failed to recognize their value?

Gramsci’s theory of capitalist cultural hegemony, particularly in the era of a
rising fascist movement, is vindicated by the events of today. As the fascist
right takes an “all-in” approach to reify its social and cultural dominance,
socialists remain glued to “pure” politics. If it is our aim to become a mass
party, then we cannot afford to concede the realm of cultural commentary to the
far right. Nor should we concede to non-socialist progressives who often fail to
center the working class in their approach. A concerted effort on the party’s
behalf must be made to confront the current crisis of culture happening in the
United States, with a body dedicated to understanding popular culture and the
underlying politics. I believe this will breathe political life into those in
“limbo” who have yet to be reached or heard.

…………………

The Church of Logic, Sin, and Love (6:35 min) Audio Mp3
| Tagged communism, history, politics, socialism, soviet-union


US PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY – TENS OF THOUSANDS OF MASSACHUSETTS VOTERS ‘NO
PREFERENCE’ FOR ‘GENOCIDE JOE’ – BY LILA HEMPEL-EDGERS – 5 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 6, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Massachusetts voters who picked ‘no preference’ hope to send a message
to “Genocide Joe” Biden – by Lila Hempel-Edgers

Supporters of the Vote No Preference campaign gathered at Andala Coffee House, a
Middle Eastern restaurant, to watch the numbers roll in on Super Tuesday in
hopes that enough “no preference” ballots were cast to send a message to
President Biden.

Garnering 83 percent of the vote, Biden won a decisive victory in Massachusetts
over author Marianne Williamson and Minnesota Congressman Dean Phillips, who
were also on the Democratic ballot. As results continued to come in Tuesday, “no
preference” was winning an even bigger slice of the vote than either Williamson
or Phillips, in an indication of dissatisfaction with the president among
liberal voters.
Around 9:30 p.m., the crowd cheered for over 11,000 ballots cast for no
preference. “Not bad for a five day turnaround,” said Sara Halawa, one of the
campaign’s organizers. By 10:45 p.m., the group had garnered over 27,000 votes,
and they felt the momentum.

“It looks like it’s going to be something like 50,000 or 60,000 [votes] based on
how things are going,” Nathan Foster, 27, of Medford, said at around 10:30 p.m.,
long after Biden was declared the winner. “This is so many votes for no
preference, I’m really happy and satisfied with it.”

Omar Siddiqi, a 41-year old resident of Brighton, said the numbers exceeded his
expectations.

“We had no clue that we were going to do this, even a week ago,” said Siddiqi.
“So I think, given the speed with which this came together, this is exceeding
expectations. We would have been happy with 10,000 votes.”

Aly Madan, a 32-year-old from Roxbury, who started the Vote No Preference
instagram page for Massachusetts last Wednesday, was also pleased.

“At first I thought ‘I’ll get like 100 of my friends to do this, maybe a
thousand.’ Now, we have hundreds of volunteers and thousands of phone calls and
texts being made,” said Madan. “I’m just so excited that people are engaged and
are aligned and are doing what they can.”

The Massachusetts Vote No Preference effort mirrored a similar movement in
Michigan, the Uncommitted Campaign, that amassed over 101,000 “uncommitted”
votes during the state’s Democratic Primary last Tuesday, according to the
Associated Press.

Many Democratic voters are angry at Biden’s support for Israel in its ongoing
war with Hamas that has led to the deaths of 30,000 Palestinians living in Gaza
since October.

“When we saw what happened in Michigan last Tuesday, we realized we absolutely
have to mobilize here in Massachusetts on Super Tuesday,” said Halawa. “And in
the days that followed, we reached out to all of the different people we knew
that cared about this, and a coalition came together.”



Over 300 volunteers spent the past three days advising thousands of
Massachusetts voters, through phone calls, protests, and over 220,000 text
messages, to vote “no preference.” The group gathered in front of several major
polling sites across the state on Tuesday morning to suggest people cast their
vote in protest of President Biden on their Democratic ballots.

“Over the last four days, we’ve had hundreds of volunteers working with us,”
said Cicia Lee, a 31-year-old resident of Jamaica Plain who helped mobilize the
coalition.

Some attendees at Tuesday night’s watch party were hopeful that their campaign
might motivate Biden to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. Merrie Najimy, a Watertown
resident and a former president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, said
that ending the genocide is completely within the the president’s control.

“In the 80s, Ronald Reagan picked up the phone and called Menachem Begin, who
was then the prime minister of Israel, and told him to stop the bombing of
Southern Lebanon. In 20 minutes, it was over,” said Najimi. “If Biden is saying
he doesn’t have that power, then why would we elect him?”

………………….

Source

| Tagged donald-trump, elections, news, politics, trump


ISRAELI TANKS HAVE DELIBERATELY RUN OVER DOZENS OF PALESTINIAN CIVILIANS ALIVE
(EURO-MED MONITOR) 4 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 5, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Palestinian territory– The Israeli army’s repeated killings of Palestinian
civilians by deliberately running them over alive with military vehicles was
vehemently denounced by Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor on Sunday, as was the
widespread destruction of civilian property. These crimes are part of Israel’s
genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, the rights group said, ongoing
since 7 October 2023.

Euro-Med Monitor documented the Israeli army’s killing of a Palestinian man who
was deliberately run over in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighbourhood on 29 February
after he was arrested. The man was subjected to harsh interrogation by members
of the Israeli army, who bound his hands with plastic zip-tie handcuffs before
running him over with a military vehicle from the bottom to the top of his body.

The incident occurred on the main Salah al-Din Street in the Zaytoun
neighbourhood, according to eyewitnesses who spoke to the Euro-Med Monitor team.
Israeli soldiers restrained the victim’s hands before they crushed him, and
tramped on his body from the legs up, confirming that he was alive during the
incident. To guarantee thorough and complete crushing, the victim was placed on
asphalt rather than in an adjacent sandy area.

The victim’s mutilated body and the surrounding area bear obvious signs that a
military bulldozer or tank was present. It appears that the victim was
purposefully stripped of his clothes, as he was seen wearing only his underpants
at the time of his death.

The ramming operation occurred before the Israeli army withdrew to the outskirts
of the Zaytoun neighbourhood two days ago, as evidenced by the condition of the
entrails and other body parts, which had not yet decomposed when the case was
documented.

Another documented incident took place on 23 January, when an Israeli tank ran
over members of the Ghannam family while they were sleeping in a shelter caravan
in the Taiba Towers area of Khan Younis. As a result, a man and his eldest
daughter were killed, and his remaining three children and wife were injured.
Amina, his 13-year-old daughter, confirmed that her father and older sister were
killed when an Israeli tank unexpectedly and repeatedly ran over the caravan,
where the family had been sleeping. While her mother and two other siblings
survived the attack, Amina experienced extreme pressure in her eyes, nearly
losing her sight.

Euro-Med Monitor also documented Israeli tanks and bulldozers running over and
crushing displaced people inside their tents in Beit Lahia’s Kamal Adwan
Hospital courtyard on 16 December 2023. Several people were killed during the
incident, including individuals who were initially injured and did not
ultimately survive. The corpses of those who had been previously buried in the
courtyard were also crushed in the 16 December incident, stated the rights
group.

More recently, a Palestinian family survived a 20 February running attack after
Israeli tracks ran over their tent on the shore of the Khan Yunis Sea. A female
civilian said that she was shocked by the tank suddenly running over her tent.

In addition, Euro-Med Monitor has documented numerous incidents of Israeli army
tanks destroying civilian property, particularly cars, during Israel’s ground
incursions into different parts of the Gaza Strip. Most of these tank attacks
have targeted vehicles parked in the streets without any military affiliation,
indicating the Israeli army’s deliberate and systematic destruction of
Palestinian property.

Euro-Med Monitor affirmed that all of these violations are part of a larger
Israeli effort to dehumanise every Palestinian in the Gaza Strip, in order to
justifiy and normalise the crimes being committed against them. Crushing
civilians with tanks is just one of the many cruel ways the Israeli army murders
Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, disregarding their humanity, suffering, and
dignity. These practices reflect the desire of Israel’s government and military
to collectively punish the Palestinian people, with the aim of eliminating,
intimidating, and/or harming them physically and psychologically. These crimes
come alongside a public incitement campaign by Israeli officials, media figures,
and settlers calling for the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza, and are also
a result of the total impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators—evident by the
absence of any meaningful action being taken to hold them accountable by any
party or at any level.

The human rights organisation warned that the Israeli army has escalated its
premeditated murders, extrajudicial executions, and judicial killings against
Palestinian civilians since 7 October through direct targeting with snipers,
drones, and running operations in various regions of the Gaza Strip. According
to Euro-Med Monitor, these actions amount to war crimes and crimes against
humanity under the Rome Statute Basic Law of the International Criminal Court
(ICC).

There is no justification for the Israeli army to commit these serious crimes,
Euro-Med Monitor confirmed. Even its claim that some of the aforementioned acts
were directed towards Palestinian fighters does not release Israel from criminal
responsibility, seeing as international law protects both civilians and fighters
who have given up or lost all means of defense, with the Rome Statute
classifying their killing or wounding as war crimes. The Israeli army’s
deliberate and widespread destruction of Palestinian property, carried out in an
irresponsible manner and without military necessity, also qualifies as a war
crime under the Rome Statute.

In parallel to taking all necessary steps to ensure Israel’s accountability for
the crimes it commits against the Palestinian people, Euro-Med Monitor
reiterated its call for the international community to immediately implement its
international obligations to stop the genocide that Israel has been committing
against all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for roughly five months now.

In light of the fact that the ICC has not yet taken any action or filed any
charges in relation to the investigations it is supposed to be carrying out into
the situation in the Gaza Strip, Euro-Med Monitor expressed deep concern about
the ICC Prosecutor’s performance regarding the genocide taking place there.
Genocide is one of the most serious international crimes, with catastrophic
consequences for civilians. The Court has not said anything about the crimes
committed by Israel in the Gaza Strip, even in the face of a plethora of
evidence presented by Israeli officials and soldiers themselves, as well as
warnings and documentary reports from international organisations, the United
Nations and its experts, and the governments of many other nations. The ICC’s
last update on the situation in Palestine was posted on 17 November 17 on its
official website. This raises serious questions and concerns about its
independence and integrity, as well as the extent to which it can perform its
duties without becoming politicised or impacted by standards of duality and
selective justice.

Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor called for the formation of an independent
international investigation committee specialising in Israel’s ongoing military
attack on the Gaza Strip. It also urged the international community to enable
the work of a separate independent international investigation committee
concerned with the Occupied Palestinian Territory, formed in 2021, to carry out
its work by ensuring its access to the Strip and opening the necessary
investigations into all crimes and violations committed against Palestinians
there, including the deliberate killing and extrajudicial execution of
civilians.

The rights group also demanded that the Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial,
summary, or arbitrary executions visit the Gaza Strip as soon as feasible to
look into the illegal killings that fall under the purview of his substantive
mandate.

………………….

Source

| Tagged gaza, israel, jenin, news, palestine


JOE BIDEN KNOWINGLY AND PURPOSELY BLEW UP THE US SOUTHERN BORDER IN 2021 — DON’T
BELIEVE HIS BLAME GAME NOW – BY RICH LOWRY (NYPOST)

Posted on March 4, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Opinion by Rich Lowry

President Biden was inaugurated Jan. 20, 2021.

Weeks later, Feb. 2, he issued the executive order that began the unraveling at
the border in earnest. 

The border crisis isn’t something that happened to Biden.

It’s not a product of circumstances or understandable policy mistakes made under
duress.

No, he sought it and created it, on principle and as a matter of urgency. 

It wasn’t a second-year priority or even a second-quarter-of-the-first-year
priority.

The new president set out in his initial days and weeks in office to destroy
what President Donald Trump had built, most consequentially in the Feb. 2
executive order. 

By then, mind you, there had already been significant action to loosen up on the
border, including on his first day in office. 

The Feb. 2 order emphasized an effort to “enhance lawful pathways for migration
to this country” and revoked a slew of Trump rules, executive orders,
proclamations and memoranda.

The sense of it was that there’s nothing we can or should do on our own to
control illegal immigration; rather, we had to fix deep-seated social, economic
and political problems in Central America instead.

It called for getting more refugees into the United States, using parole to let
more migrants join family members here, enhancing access to visa programs and
reviewing whether the United States is doing enough for migrants fleeing
domestic or gang violence, among other things. 

No, he sought it and created it, on principle and as a matter of urgency. 

It wasn’t a second-year priority or even a second-quarter-of-the-first-year
priority.

The new president set out in his initial days and weeks in office to destroy
what President Donald Trump had built, most consequentially in the Feb. 2
executive order. 

By then, mind you, there had already been significant action to loosen up on the
border, including on his first day in office. 

The Feb. 2 order emphasized an effort to “enhance lawful pathways for migration
to this country” and revoked a slew of Trump rules, executive orders,
proclamations and memoranda.

The sense of it was that there’s nothing we can or should do on our own to
control illegal immigration; rather, we had to fix deep-seated social, economic
and political problems in Central America instead.

It called for getting more refugees into the United States, using parole to let
more migrants join family members here, enhancing access to visa programs and
reviewing whether the United States is doing enough for migrants fleeing
domestic or gang violence, among other things. 

And it put on the chopping block numerous Trump policies that had helped
establish order at the border, from Trump’s expansion of expedited removal, to
his termination of a parole program for Central American minors, to his
memorandum urging the relevant departments to work toward ending “catch and
release.”

Most important, it targeted two of the pillars of Trump’s success at the border:
the Migrant Protection Protocols, better known as Remain in Mexico, and the
safe-third-country agreements with the Northern Triangle countries that allowed
us to divert asylum-seekers to Central American countries other than their own
to make asylum claims. 

Joe Biden: The most unfit incumbent president up for re-election since FDR

After a few fits and starts thanks to legal challenges, Homeland Security
Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas indeed ended Remain in Mexico.

Although he’s now attempting to portray himself to sympathetic journalists as an
innocent bystander to Biden’s border policy, he killed the policy knowing
exactly what he was doing. 

“After carefully considering the arguments, evidence and perspectives presented
by those who support re-implementation of MPP, those who support terminating the
program and those who have argued for continuing MPP in a modified form, I have
determined that MPP should be terminated,” he said in an Oct. 2021 memo.

He acknowledged, by the way, the policy “likely contributed to reduced migratory
flows.” 

For his part, Secretary of State Antony Blinken moved expeditiously.

On Feb. 6, 2021, he announced the end of the asylum agreements. 

And just like that, the carefully crafted suite of Trump polices that had given
us control of the border were demolished. 

It didn’t require esoteric knowledge of border policy to realize how this would
play out.

During the transition, Trump officials warned of a catastrophe if Biden followed
through on his promises, and in April 2021, The Washington Post ran a piece
headlined “At the border, a widely predicted crisis that caught Biden off
guard.”

Now the Feb. 2 memo feels almost like an artifact from another era, as the
open-borders orthodoxy begins to show cracks.

The White House sent Biden to visit the border and is considering measures to
curtail illegal immigration and calling on sanctuary cities to cooperate with
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, while Mayor Eric Adams criticizes aspects
of his city’s sanctuary regime. 

The executive order, though, is a stark reminder the current chaos is the
product of deliberate policy.

It’s all there in black and white, a prelude to a disaster that has roiled the
country and could well play an outsize role in Biden losing the presidency.

Twitter: @RichLowry

| Tagged illegal-immigration, immigration, joe-biden, news, politics


DOWN THE MEMORY HOLE – ‘WORKERS VANGUARD’ NEW MANAGEMENT HIDES PAST ARTICLES – 3
MARCH 2024

Posted on March 3, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
Down the Memory Hole – ‘Workers Vanguard’ New Management (7:34 min) Audio Mp3

………………….

To the recycle bin, or Marxist Archive, or…. oblivion.

One might ask why the people who took over ‘Workers Vanguard’ wanted to join the
Spartacists in the first place. From the outside, it looks like a hostile
takeover. Did these people voice opposition to everything the Spartacists had
written in ‘Workers Vanguard’ as they joined?

Does this mean that this blog’s ‘Workers Vanguard’ posts about the French
Revolution, The Paris Commune, The Russian Revolution, The Founding of the
Zionist State, The Kronstad Anarchist Revolt, and others, are most easily
accessed on this blog and not the official ‘Workers Vanguard’ site?

After copying and watching and listening to the Neo-Spartacist versus
Internationalist Group debate a number of times an impression comes through to
me. The Neo-Spartacist leader is an academic. I have no knowledge of this man’s
name even, or personal history. I am making this judgement from his speaking
style and evident thinking style. He is used to speaking with a condescending
self satisfied smirk of someone who is speaking at a podium with an audience
that must listen and be graded.

The Internationalist Group speaker seemed like someone who was used to speaking
in many different situations, some calling for short declarative sentences, a
joke or bit of humor, and a firm voice when emphasizing and important point.
Selling ‘Workers Vanguard’ on the street or at a factory gate may teach one to
speak in many different ways to convince people. The Internationalist Group
speaker gave example after example of actual workers in the audience who had
been on picket lines, in labor unions, at universities during demonstrations.

“All you do is call us names,” was the bizarre response from the Neo-Spartacist
speaker.

Simply not used to classical debating techniques. Of the levels of argument,
name calling is the lowest form. But, saying that the Neo-Spartacists are
following the ideas of Michael Pablo and the tired tiny Trotskyists parties
faced with the Stalinist victories of the 1940’s is not ‘name calling.’ Saying
that the Neo-Spartacists want to join the ‘mass movements’ is not name calling.
True or false, the description is about political activity and writing.

The stunning collapse of the Spartacist in the spring of 2020 was simply
dismissed by the Neo-Spartacist speaker. “So you put out a few leaflets,” he
said dismissively.

So, what were the Neo-Spartacists doing while the biggest demonstrations in
decades were happening across the US after the killing of George Floyd?

At the time, with the media full of death from COVID stories, I wondered if key
Spartacists had gotten sick, or died.

Now, I wonder if this was the “Night of the Long Knaves” elimination of the Old
Guard Spartacists to complete the take-over and then renunciation of the last
thirty years of the Spartacist League. The online meeting format works for some
things, but limits all kinds of contact people might have in a political setting
where all kinds of incidental meetings and communication may take place. Every
crisis is an opportunity apparently.

The Internationalist Group speaker noted that the founders of the
Internationalist Group were kicked out of the Spartacist League in 1996 and that
was to be the Decline and Fall of the Classic Spartacist League.

Bizarrely the Neo-Spartacist speaker admits, in a hurry, that the expulsion was
wrong, but won’t say why. What went wrong? The answer is “that was almost thirty
years ago, who cares?” The words of someone who is in charge, but not because of
the power to persuade people. The technique works in closed organizations. In
the rough and tumble real world, not so much.

The thinking seems the same style of academic glibness that throws out a number
of points sounding intelligent enough, questioned on a point immediately
transitions to a related, or unrelated topic. Assumes that because they are
officially “smart” and degreed they must be right. A pedant…

I noted the multicolor ‘Workers Vanguard’ issued 22 Dec 2024. Color print is
more expensive than black ink on newsprint paper. Printing photos is expensive.
All this could be on a website at less cost. But, the price is still fifty
cents. The articles are more general, essay type pieces so that the issue may be
sold many months after print date. Okay.

But what happened to the bi-weekly print schedule? When I first subscribed
‘Workers Vanguard’ had just gone from bi-monthly to once a week. But, the output
was hard to maintain for a small revolutionary organization. Now, what is it,
twice a year. Are all the articles written by Comrade X?

Curiouser, and curiouser….

I don’t see how this organization can thrive in the US at this time. Listening
to Comrade X I feel like I’m back in the 1970’s with the constant talk about
“The Movement.” Last summer when there was a UAW strike the Neo-Spartacist
called for a General Strike to shut down Detroit. The general strike did not
happen. Why not just call for a Detroit Soviet, that’s not going to happen
either.



The summer when Lenin was fifteen years old he read the populist novel “What is
to Be Done?” In some ways that fictional narrative of a workers cooperative and
people who wanted to create a new society is the Foundational Myth of the Soviet
Union. One commenter noted that religions and social movements are not based on
lists of rules or dry documents… some kind of simple narrative is usually at the
heart of the idea. Christians were around for decades before anyone dreamed up
the Jesus was born and walked the Earth story.

So, narratives matter.

The Neo-Spartacists narrative is “that was a long time ago.” As the
Internationalist speaker said “You are all about the Now.”

Again, back to the 1970’s, it seems.

On the Ukraine Russia War the Internationalist group first adopted the classic
‘both sides are capitalists, workers don’t have a side’ and then reassessed and
said this is US Imperialism and the European satellites trying to defeat Russia
and then go on to China. So, militant workers should militarily defend the
Russians against Western Imperialism. The Neo-Spartacists say that workers labor
unions in Ukraine and Russia should oppose their own rulers. I must read and
hear three or four solid hours of news about the Ukraine War each day. I have
never seen one reference to Ukrainian labor unions. What political power or
presence in political life do Ukrainian labor unions have? Do Russian labor
unions have any political power or projection. I do not know. I never hear of
any. The Communist Party of Russia looks like almost every leader is over 70 and
they sound like National Stalinists, not organized workers.

The Neo-Spartacist did protest at Columbia University when the college bosses
said there was a ban on pro-Palestinian protests. The Neo-Spartacist did mount a
protest against the monarchy in the UK that I would have attended if in the
area. So, it is not all negative.

Neo-Spartacist Comrade X complained that the Internationalist Group would not
join the Neo-Spartacists in a demonstration they had called. A few months ago
the Neo-Spartacist were calling on the Internationalist Group to join them and
asked for private meetings. Perhaps Comrade X thought he could use his
organizational magic to charm the Internationalist Group into joining his
project. The Internationalist Group asked for a public debate instead.

……………

Afterthought…

Comrade X from the Spartacist claimed that “Hundreds of thousands” of black
people have been killed by the US police? What? The US police kill about 1,000
people a year over the last half decade that people have been keeping a
relatively accurate tally. About 400 of the people shot dead or killed by other
methods by police are black. Four hundred a year is a lot, but are there
40,000,000 black people in the US. The police claim that only twenty of the
black people killed were unarmed. Do the police lie. Yes. But Comrade X is
engaged in hyperbole.

What is the claim “Open Police Archives” supposed to prove. Is it supposed to
imply that the police are conducting massive campaigns of repression an violence
across the US that is only a vague rumor to the public? 100,000 black people are
killed, and no one took note? But, we can expose the Liberals by opening the
police archives and see the secret reports of mass systematic repression and
thousands and thousands of unknown killings by the state. Hyperbole.

In the Spring of 2020 when the COVID lockdowns and hysteria reigned the
Spartacist League…. disappeared. Despite having a functioning website, nothing
new was posted. Why? Some have noted in the past that Workers Vanguard articles
are edited and checked by numerous people because they are not just a columnist
or a person’s opinion but a group statement of matters of public and working
class import. Couldn’t that be done online? Or, was something else going on? I
don’t know.

The excuse for collapse and other problems that “so did everybody else on the
Left” from Comrade X is mind boggling after dealing and listening and reading
Spartacist and Leninist and Trotskyist ideas for decades. Having presented
Workers Vanguard to workers at factory gates in the morning or on college
campuses at noon, the appeal was never “We’re like everybody else on the Left.”


I don’t remember an appeal to build some amorphous outpouring of justified rage
like the “Palestinian Justice Movement” as something that militants should seek
to build. The outpouring of street protests and anger can and has arrived and
then disappeared leaving little of any “Movement.”

So, perhaps the Neo-Spartacist League will latch on to the “Palestine Justice
Movement” and become the best builders of the Movement the way the Socialist
Workers Party became the best builders the anti-war “Movement” in the 1960’s and
1970’s and then became a cult with the copyrights to a lot of Trotsky’s works
that they did not read. The copyrights to those works are close to expiring, and
the Socialist Workers Party has a couple of dozen members and they are all over
seventy years of age.

https://xenagoguevicene.wordpress.com/2021/12/16/us-socialist-workers-party-how-an-organization-became-a-cult-2013/

I remember in the 1980’s running into American Communist Party members who were
outrage that the Spartacists had the gaul to claim to defend the Soviet Union
while opposing Stalinist leaders while the CP/USA defended Democrats and held
victory parties when Democrats won control of the US Congress. I felt like I was
in a play. The old Communist Stalinists were laughable crypto-Democrat Radical
Liberals.

And… now the Spartacists are…. crypto-Democrat Liberals looking for Communist
allies in the Democratic Socialist USA. Curiouser and curiouser…. I’m still in a
play.

…………………..

What you see… is what you get.



| Tagged history, politics, russia, statements, ukraine


SOCIAL MEDIA FREEDOM – ANDREW TORBA AND THE GRIFT OF GAB – BY PROVIDENCE – 15
MARCH 2023

Posted on March 3, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

BY PROVIDENCE ON MARCH 15, 2023

https://archive.ph/o8x2T

Long Article Archived

…… Founded just months before the 2016 Presidential Election by self-described
Silicon Valley conservative Andrew Torba, Gab touted itself as a censorship-free
alternative to Twitter and was heavily promoted by the media before becoming
associated with far-right extremism and hate after the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue
shooting. As of 2022, Gab has adopted a militant Christian nationalist bent and
boasts of having an excess of one million “cumulative registered accounts”1 as
well as having a value of $10 million, despite indisputable evidence to the
contrary. 

Since Gab’s inception, Torba has shapeshifted and rebranded himself many times
in order to attract any group that would promote Gab and give him money. Over
the course of Gab’s history, Torba has pandered to nearly every fringe online
community on the right-wing spectrum; ranging from 4chan lolicon connoisseurs
and edgelords to the QAnon and MAGA cults and beyond. If one looks past Torba’s
conservative christian veneer they will find an affinity grifter who says and
does everything in his power to keep the façade of Gab being a viable
alternative to Twitter going and keep the money flowing. Torba relied on making
misleading claims about the user base and utility of Gab in order to rip off
millions of dollars from investors, many of whom he swindled using his
conservative christian affinity grift.  …..

………………..

https://archive.ph/o8x2T

 BUSINESS, CULTURE, LIBERTY, TECH and US

| Tagged media, meta, social-media, threads, twitter


THE JEWISH WAR – FIRST IT WAS CORBYN. NOW THE WHOLE BRITISH PUBLIC IS BEING
SMEARED OVER GAZA – BY JONATHAN COOK – 1 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 3, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 2,700 WORDS • 

Under cover of fear for MPs’ safety, Labour leader Keir Starmer has helped the
ruling Tories paint as villains anyone opposed to Israel’s slaughter of children

For the best part of a decade now, the British establishment has been
weaponising antisemitism against critics of Israel, claiming as its biggest
scalp the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

He lost the 2019 general election – and stepped down as leader – amid a barrage
of smears that he had indulged, if not stoked, antisemitism in the party’s wider
ranks.

Corbyn is the only major British party leader to have prioritised the rights of
Palestinians over Israel’s oppression of them. He was finally drummed out of the
parliamentary party by his successor, Keir Starmer, in 2020 for pointing
out that antisemitism in Labour had been “dramatically overstated for political
reasons”.

Last week, that same establishment campaign plumbed new depths. Now it is not
just the left wing of the Labour Party – traditionally critical of Israel for
its decades of oppressing Palestinians – facing demonisation. Large parts of the
British public are finding themselves being smeared too – and for the same
reason.

The inciting cause is a parliamentary crisis precipitated last week by Starmer’s
refusal to identify Israel’s slaughter and starvation of the 2.3 million people
of Gaza as “collective punishment” – a war crime.

The House of Commons speaker, who is supposed to be strictly neutral, defied
convention to allow Starmer to water down a ceasefire motion on Gaza promoted by
the Scottish Nationalists, all so he could avert a rebellion in his party’s
ranks.

But while a bitter row ensued between Labour and the ruling Tories over the
abuse of parliamentary protocol, it also brought the two sides together on a
separate matter.

For different reasons, they exploited the crisis over the ceasefire vote to
imply, without a shred of evidence, that demonstrations against Israel’s
flagrant, months-long atrocities in Gaza constituted not just antisemitic
behaviour but a threat to the democratic order and the safety of MPs.

As a result, the consensus of the English political and media establishment has
swiftly shifted onto even more dangerous, and anti-democratic, terrain than the
earlier antisemitism smears.

Wilfully deaf

According to a recent survey, two-thirds of Britons support a ceasefire in Gaza
– with many of them blaming Israel for killing and maiming at least 100,000
Palestinians in Gaza and imposing an aid blockade that is gradually starving the
rest of the population.

Only 13 percent of the public share the two main parties’ view that Israel is
justified in continuing to take military action.

For months, many hundreds of thousands of protesters have taken to the streets
of London each week to demand that the UK stop its complicity in what the World
Court ruled recently is plausibly a genocide being committed by Israel.

Britain is supplying Israel with arms, giving it diplomatic cover at the United
Nations, and has effectively joined Israel in its aid blockade. The UK
has frozen funds to the UN’s main aid agency, Unrwa, a last lifeline to the
enclave.

But those demanding that international law be upheld – and castigating the
political class for failing to do the same – are now finding themselves
demonised as potential terrorists.

Already, the talk on both sides of the Commons – and in the media – is of the
need for new police powers, curbs on the right of the public to protest, and
further security measures to keep politicians shielded from the people they are
supposed to represent.

This week, a committee of MPs used pressures placed on the police to manage
regular mass marches in London against the slaughter in Gaza as grounds for
introducing tighter limits on the right to protest.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak took up the refrain, calling for greater police
powers against what he described as “mob rule” that was supposedly “replacing
democratic rule”.

Separately, he insinuated that this so-called “mob” – those troubled by the
killing of at least 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza over the past five months –
may not “belong here“, in Britain. Notably, he made these remarks during an
address to the Community Security Trust, which was at the forefront of promoting
the smearing of Corbyn and his supporters as antisemites.

But the fearmongering is far from restricted to the ruling Tories.

Labour’s shadow international development secretary, Lisa Nandy, publicly
complained at the weekend about members of the public shouting “genocide” at
her, linking it to the greater security measures she has been taking.

Opposition to Israel’s behaviour is a majority view among the public, but
neither major party is prepared to listen or respond. Both are wilfully deaf to
public concern that Britain needs to stop actively enabling one of the greatest
crimes in living memory.

As Labour MP Diane Abbott, a Corbyn ally and long-time target of death threats,
noted, Britain is taking “the first step towards a police state“.

Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza is tearing the mask off Westminster.
By the day, Britain is looking more overtly like an oligarchy.

Israel partisans

The full import of last week’s events – when the Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle
did a grubby backroom deal with Starmer, effectively sabotaging the Scottish
National Party’s ceasefire motion – has been obscured by subsequent politicking
and point-scoring.

The real story is to be found in the aftermath.

The pair proferred a dangerous cover story to justify Starmer’s determined
efforts to avoid naming Israel’s egregious violations of international law as
“collective punishment”.

Hoyle apologised for breaking with long-established convention and allowing
Starmer’s watered-down amendment. But he justified his move on the grounds that
Labour MPs would have been put in danger if they had been forced to reject the
SNP ceasefire motion on their leader’s orders.

He declared: “I don’t ever want to go through the situation of picking up a
phone to find that a friend, of whatever side, has been murdered by terrorists.”

The speaker produced no evidence to support this unprecedented claim, one that
sounded like it was intended to bring to mind the scenes of the Capitol building
being invaded by Trump supporters in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.

Notably, both Starmer and Hoyle are among the many MPs on each side of the aisle
who have consistently and proudly demonstrated partisanship towards Israel.



Large numbers of MPs continue to belong to their parties’ Friends of Israel
groups, including Starmer, even as the international human rights community has
reached a consensus that Israel is an apartheid state – and now that it
is committing mass slaughter and starving Gaza’s population.

Hoyle even took time out in November to head off to Israel – now on trial for
genocide at the world’s highest court – to be briefed by the very army doing
that genocide. He was accompanied by Israel’s ambassador to the UK, Tzipi
Hotovely, who has repeatedly sought to justify the slaughter.

Starmer himself trumpeted the fact that, before drafting his amendment to the
SNP motion, he had called Israel’s president, Isaac Herzog, for advice. That is
the same Herzog who had earlier argued that Gaza’s entire population, including
its children, were legitimate targets for Israel’s military attacks on the
enclave.

Moral panic

During the Corbyn years, opposition to Israel’s oppression of Palestinians was
denounced as antisemitism.

And in just the same way, reality is being turned on its head once again. Now,
the call for an end to Israel’s slaughter of children is being variously
denounced as extremism, an attack on democracy, and the stifling of free speech.

Last week, as the Tories dogpiled Hoyle for tearing up the parliamentary
rulebook, Sunak warned that the lesson was “we should never let extremists
intimidate us into changing the way in which parliament works”.

What could he possibly mean? That the right to protest could not be tolerated
within a parliamentary democracy? That free speech was now equivalent to
“intimidation”?

Starmer has opened the floodgates to a moral panic in which the people of Gaza
are forgotten, except as bit players in a smear campaign to silence those
calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal bombing and starvation policies.

In the current climate, it was largely unremarkable that Paul Sweeney, a Labour
member of the Scottish parliament, made headlines accusing Gaza protesters of
“storming” his offices and “terrifying” his staff – until Scottish police
investigated and found no evidence for his claims.

The police described the demonstration as “peaceful”, an assessment confirmed by
a reporter for the Scotsman newspaper who was present.

Senior journalists are sticking their oars in too.

The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg claimed the dangers extended beyond politicians
to journalists like herself. The current crisis, she suggested, could be traced
back to Corbyn’s supporters, who were wont to “boo and jeer” as she and the rest
of the media promoted evidence-free claims that Labour was beset by
antisemitism.

True charlatans

Sudden concern about the dangers caused by public protest against the slaughter
of Palestinians should be ridiculed as the self-serving nonsense it is.

The political and media establishment now whipping up fears for the safety of
MPs – so they can continue ignoring Israel’s genocide – is the same
establishment that endlessly vilified Corbyn for highlighting Israel’s ugly rule
over the Palestinians.

For many years, Corbyn had warned that Israel was brutalising the Palestinian
people and stealing their land to prevent the emergence of a Palestinian state.
His 2019 manifesto promised to end the UK’s arms sales to Israel and recognise a
Palestinian state.

History has now proven his stance as warranted, while also demonstrating that
the political and media class – and most of all Starmer, a human rights lawyer –
are the real charlatans.

But more to the point, no one expressed concern for the safety of Corbyn,
Labour’s elected leader, or his supporters when they were being subjected to a
years-long campaign of vilification. He was variously painted as an antisemite,
a Soviet-era spy, and a traitor.

When the Daily Mail presented Corbyn as Dracula above the headline “Labour must
kill vampire Jezza”, everyone chuckled. As they did when Newsnight transposed
his face onto the Dark Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter franchise.

Tweet

When British soldiers were shown using Corbyn’s face as target practice, it made
fleeting headlines before being forgotten.

There were no demands for soul searching then, as there are now. There was no
panic about the stoking of a dangerous public mood. There was no concern about
the threat to democracy or the safety of Corbyn and other MPs who spoke out
against Israel.

Why? The question hardly needs answering. Because it was the establishment
political and media class doing the smearing and inciting. It was the same
people whining now about their safety who were actively endangering elected
representatives like Corbyn.

‘Barrage of racist abuse’

This is not just about history, of course.

The establishment campaign that claimed to be outing antisemitism – and that
maliciously conflated opposition to Israel’s military oppression of Palestinians
(anti-Zionism) with antisemitism – has simply metamorphosed into something even
uglier.

Now it seeks to tar those it smeared as antisemites as worse: as a supposed
menace not just to Jews but to MPs and democracy. Those trying to stop the
slaughter of children are potential terrorists.

One of Corbyn’s few surviving allies – not yet purged by Starmer from the
parliamentary party – is the Labour Muslim MP Zarah Sultana.

A tweet of hers that went viral at the weekend read: “Whenever I speak up for
the rights of the Palestinian people, I am subjected to a barrage of racist
abuse, threats and hate. Things have been particularly bad in recent months.”

As she noted, the prime minister used an Islamophobic trope against her last
month, as did another Tory MP, when she urged a ceasefire. Neither apologised.
Once again, these incidents barely made ripples, let alone elicited an
outpouring of concern.

Though Sultana was careful not to allude to Starmer’s role, she warned that this
cynical moral panic must not be allowed to become “a pretext to demonise the
Palestine solidarity movement specifically or attack our democratic rights more
broadly”.

But the truth is, that boat sailed some time ago.

Plot on parliament?

From the start, Palestine solidarity demonstrations were demonised as “hate
marches” by the then-home secretary, Suella Braverman.

Plumbing new levels of disingenuousness, she and other politicians – backed by
the media – pretended a longtime leftwing Palestinian solidarity slogan chanted
at marches that demands equality for Jews and Palestinians “between the river
and the sea” was a call for genocide against Jews.

At the weekend, the Times newspaper turned the flame higher. A front-page
article headlined “Plot to target parliament” was meant to evoke in the public’s
mind Guy Fawkes’ infamous gunpowder plot in the 17th century to blow up the
Houses of Parliament.

But all the stories described were entirely legitimate efforts by the Palestine
Solidarity Campaign (PSC) to lobby parliament to uphold international law and
press for a ceasefire.

The Times insinuated that Ben Jamal, leader of the PSC, was behaving in a
sinister fashion by calling on the public to “ramp up pressure” on MPs – that
is, exercise the most basic of democratic rights.



Meanwhile, Braverman’s successor as home secretary, James Cleverly, insisted
that MPs must not be subjected to “undue pressure” – as though it was
threatening behaviour for members of the public to give their elected
representatives vocal warning that they would refuse to vote for them based on
actions such as refusing to oppose a genocide.


TWO NASTY PARTIES

There is little doubt where this is all designed to lead.

Weaponised antisemitism was always about silencing those protesting against
British foreign policy – a foreign policy that prioritises Israel’s pivotal role
in promoting western control over the oil-rich Middle East above ending Israel’s
oppression of the Palestinian people.

Previously, that chiefly meant smearing Corbyn and the anti-imperialist,
anti-war Labour left.

But with public outrage growing at Israel’s genocide, the stakes have risen
dramatically. Now the political and media establishments are desperate to shift
attention away both from Israel and their complicity in the slaughter of
children.

Their preferred method has been pretending that it is only Muslims and leftwing,
antisemitic extremists opposed to the genocide. Normal people, apparently,
should be invested exclusively in the impossible task Israel claims to have set
itself: of “eliminating Hamas”, however many Palestinian children die in the
process.

Evoking King Canute trying to hold back the tide, Nandy denounced Tory MP Lee
Anderson – and the wider Conservative party – for Islamophobia after he claimed
“Islamists” were in control of London and its mayor, Sadiq Khan.

In the Daily Telegraph last week, Braverman advanced similar racist paranoia,
arguing that Britain was becoming a country where “Sharia law, the Islamist mob,
and anti-Semites take over communities”.

Giving Starmer a taste of Corbyn’s medicine – and illustrating the way
career-minded politicians are kept in line – she accused the Labour leader of
being “in hock to extremists” and that the party was “still rotten to the core”.

Two nasty parties, each complicit in a genocide of the Palestinian people, are
now competing to stoke Islamophobia – one explicitly, the other implicitly.

With no place to hide for his political cowardice, Starmer has opened the gates
to the bipartisan vilification of Muslims, not just in Gaza but at home too.
Will he get away with it?

He may find it tougher going than he expects. With the slaughter in Gaza playing
out on TV screens and social media accounts, many millions of Britons are
incensed. Whatever the political class claims, it is not just Muslims and the
anti-war left angry at the complicity of British politicians in genocide.

The smearing of Corbyn over his criticisms of Israel’s oppression of
Palestinians largely worked. But gaslighting much of the public as a dangerous
“mob” for opposing even more egregious Israeli crimes may yet backfire.

……………………..

(Republished from Middle East Eye)

| Tagged jeremy-corbyn, keir-starmer, labour-party, politics, uk-politics


WHY ‘OPPENHEIMER’ GOT A WORLD WIDE AUDIENCE – 2 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 2, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment



Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer, the film biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, physicist and “father
of the atomic bomb,” written, directed and co-produced by Christopher Nolan, has
struck an obvious chord with audiences around the world.

The film has met with widespread critical honors, having received some 377
nominations for prizes worldwide. Most recently, at the Screen Actors Guild
awards ceremony in Los Angeles on February 24, Oppenheimer earned four major
awards (the event only considers acting performances). Nolan’s film is nominated
for 13 Academy Awards, and is expected to win in a number of categories at the
upcoming event March 10.

The notice the film has received is genuinely deserved. Oppenheimer is a work
that bears re-viewing, and the second or third viewing brings out elements that
one has previously missed. It has a powerful, multi-layered performance by
Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer, an extremely complicated personality, and
important performances by Robert Downey, Jr., Florence Pugh, David Krumholtz,
Tom Conti, Benny Safdie, Gary Oldman, Kenneth Branagh and others, several of
them in small roles.

The drama has various fascinating and pertinent elements. Oppenheimer manages to
examine a wide range of issues—the development of the nuclear bomb, various
debates in theoretical physics, the Cold War and McCarthyism, and more. It
presents Albert Einstein (Conti) not merely as a brilliant scientist but as a
profound social thinker, Edward Teller (Safdie) as an unpleasant, ambitious
opportunist, and Harry Truman (Oldman) as the wretched, criminal figure he was.

Oppenheimer depicts the manner in which the American establishment persuaded or
cajoled leading scientists, many of them Jewish and left-wing and often
politically naïve, to work on the atomic bomb on the basis of their deep hatred
of Hitler and fear that the Nazis would develop the terrible weapon first. Here
the Stalinized Communist Party, falsifying the nature of the second imperialist
world war and the Roosevelt-Truman administration, played such a devastating
role, disorienting the physicists along with many others, leaving them utterly
unprepared for the witch-hunts and repression to come.

Even then, numerous figures refused to join the Manhattan Project or criticized
it. Nolan’s film offers a relatively nuanced picture of the numerous conflicts
and contradictions. In his efforts to convince one scientist to participate,
Oppenheimer asserts, “So you’re a fellow traveler [of the Communist Party], so
what? This is a national emergency. I’ve got some skeletons, and they’ve put me
in charge. They need us.” And the other replies prophetically, “Until they
don’t.” Confronted with Oppenheimer in full military regalia, fellow physicist
Isidor Rabi (a Nobel Prize winner in 1944, played by Krumholtz) tells him, “Take
off that ridiculous uniform—you’re a scientist.”

Oppenheimer deals meaningfully with these remarkable people, many of them torn
by conflicting impulses, its lead character in particular. Following the August
6, 1945 bombing of Hiroshima, Oppenheimer addresses a cheering crowd of
scientists in these words: “The world will remember this day. It’s too early to
determine what the results of the bombing are … But I’m sure the Japanese didn’t
like it.” Murphy is able to communicate Oppenheimer’s own awareness of the
horrifying callousness of his comment, as the screenplay continues (written in
the first person), “I see FLESH RIPPED FROM THE SMILING YOUNG FACES… I see
PLASMA ROILING and the DEVIL’S CLAW reach into the night sky… I see piles of
ASHES where the young crowd was cheering.”

The story should be an object lesson today for those choosing to believe the
lies about America’s “democratic” intentions in regard to Ukraine or Gaza.
Oppenheimer and the others fell obediently into line, convincing themselves of
the official story. American imperialism manipulated them and subsequently, in
many cases, disposed of them, often harshly. As the military packs up the bomb
for use in Hiroshima and Oppenheimer offers practical advice, an Air Force
officer, speaking, in effect, for the entire ruling elite, informs him, “With
respect, Dr. Oppenheimer. We’ll take it from here.” Indeed…

Nolan and his colleagues treat their audience sincerely, arranging issues and
arguments in an accessible manner, without pandering or vulgarizing, and people
have responded with interest and support.

Tom Conti and Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer has taken in some $960,000,000 at the international box office. It
is possible, with an opening in Japan scheduled for March—a controversial
event—the film may surpass the one-billion-dollar mark.

How many people have seen Oppenheimer? It is difficult to arrive at a precise
figure. The American film industry in particular is only interested in “gross
revenue.” With $330,000,000 taken in US ticket sales, and an average movie
ticket price of $10, one comes up with the very rough estimate of 30-40 million
audience members.

Globally, ticket prices average $5 or so, but they vary so widely that the
figure is not very helpful (with a much higher cost in Western Europe and
Japan). About certain countries one can be more precise. In France, for example,
figures released by the National Cinema Center at the beginning of the new year
showed that Oppenheimer was the fifth-most successful film in the country, with
4.39 million individual admissions. The Federal Film Board (FFA) reports that
the film was the fourth most popular in Germany last year, with 4.1 million
tickets sold.

In the UK, the film’s gross revenue was $74,872,624 and ticket prices averaged
US$10.04 last year, for an attendance of approximately 7.45 million people. In
Italy, Oppenheimer “secured over 70 percent of market share” during its first
five days in cinemas, “and recorded the highest-ever opening weekend in the
territory for IMAX screenings.” (Collider) More than two million Australians
have watched the film, a figure apparently matched in South Korea. According to
the Korea Times in August, “Oppenheimer topped the local box office for five
consecutive days, selling over 1.5 million tickets.” If this writer’s
calculations are accurate, some five million spectators have attended showings
of Oppenheimer in Mexico.

The number of Chinese viewers has probably surpassed 10 million, and perhaps far
surpassed that figure. The Hollywood Reporter noted in September that “Despite
its long runtime and weighty historical subject matter—which many analysts
expected would be a drag in China—Oppenheimer has been boosted by a rave local
reception. On the influential fan platform Douban, it has received nearly half a
million reviews averaging 8.8, one of the highest scores of any Hollywood film
of recent memory. On Maoyan and Alibaba’s Tao Piao Piao ticket services, it
averages 9.4 and 9.6, respectively.” Large numbers have also
watched Oppenheimer in India, Brazil, Spain, the Netherlands, Saudi Arabia,
Poland and Sweden.

In addition, given present-day realities, millions of people internationally
have likely seen the film in “pirated” versions, and millions more now through
streaming platforms.

Making use of the most conservative estimates, well over 100 million people have
seen Nolan’s film, an intense and compressed work dealing with world-historical
events, in half a year.

Robert Downey Jr. in Oppenheimer

The reference above, about the response to the film in China having confounded
the “expectations” of analysts, holds good everywhere. In the US, above all,
empty-headed commentators continue to express astonishment. The Associated
Press reported, no doubt accurately if crudely, that “no one in the industry
expected that a long, talky, R-rated drama released at the height of the summer
movie season would earn over $900 million at the box office.” Variety, for its
part, observed that the film’s “numbers” were “more or less unheard of for an
incredibly dense, three-hour, R-rated historical drama.”

The Motion Picture Association in the US, revealing all we need to know
about its outlook, described Oppenheimer’s box office “haul” as “staggering” for
a film “about such a complicated figure that includes no superheroes.” Unable to
suppress its surprise, the Association went on to remark that a “long,
oft-technical, complicated movie about a historic figure many people knew little
about is not supposed to be the type of movie that enchants audiences all over
the globe.”

Oppenheimer is now, according to Box Office Mojo, at number 62 on the list of
“top lifetime grosses” worldwide. To be blunt, it is the only substantial film
for adults among the first 100 films ranked, the others all being either comic
book adaptations, children’s movies, James Cameron’s miserable efforts
(Titanic, Avatar, etc.) and the like. Indeed, one has to dive deep into the list
to find, for example, Rain Man at 428, Schindler’s List at 494, Green Book at
496, Lincoln at 599, The Truman Show at 631. Rising ticket prices over time
cloud the picture somewhat, but Oppenheimer’s accomplishment remains
significant.

Why has Nolan’s film resonated so strongly with so many people regardless of
geography?

A second viewing confirms that Oppenheimer stands out, first of all, for its
complexity and challenging character, and its appeal to the viewer’s mental
powers, under conditions where film production has become increasingly dominated
by noisy, empty blockbusters that insult or benumb the intelligence. Its success
demonstrates once again there is a genuine, abiding, growing hunger for more
substantial film work.

Nolan’s film treats political life in a convincing and objective manner, both
through its scathing portrait of figures such as Truman, Lewis Strauss (Downey)
and a collection of military and governmental McCarthyite thugs worthy of an
authoritarian dictatorship, and its sympathetic gaze at left-wing intellectual
life in the US in the 1930s. Some of the most compelling, intimate scenes take
place there. Alex Wellerstein, a science historian specializing in the history
of nuclear weapons at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New
Jersey, pointed out to Time magazine that every person in Oppenheimer’s “close
circle is or was at one point either a member of the Communist Party or very
close, and he was probably very close himself.” Or, as one character in the film
observes, Oppenheimer’s security file revealed the existence of “his Communist
brother, sister-in-law, fiancée, best friend, wife.” 

Florence Pugh as Jean Tatlock

It never occurs to any of the pundits that the arguments offered
for Oppenheimer’s anticipated lack of broad success—for example, according to
one startled critic, “it’s a biopic about a scientist, a morality tale about the
creation of the atom bomb, and a red scare courtroom drama” (AV
Club)—are precisely what has attracted a wide audience: above all, in other
words, the seriousness of the film’s themes and historical setting, and the
seriousness of its presentation.

As argued in an initial review last July, Oppenheimer is an “appropriately
disturbing film about nuclear weapons and nuclear war. It is intended to leave
viewers shaken, and it succeeds in that.” At a time when—with criminal
recklessness—the “Biden administration and its NATO allies continue to blithely
insist they will not be ‘deterred’ by the threat of nuclear conflict” with
Russia in particular, that Nolan’s film “has gained a wide audience speaks to a
different sentiment in the general population, one deeply appalled by the
possibility of the use of atomic bombs.”

In interviews, Nolan (born 1970) has disclosed that such concerns have been with
him for decades. He grew up in Britain in the 1980s, “a time of great fear of
nuclear weapons,” he told Deadline in an interview. “It was like growing up in
the ’60s, with the Cuban missile crisis.” Nolan went on. “The ’80s were a very
similar thing. There were protests, and there was a lot in the pop culture about
nuclear weapons. But it was Sting’s song ‘Russians’ [1985] where I first heard
Oppenheimer’s name, and there was this very palpable fear of nuclear
Armageddon.”

In an intriguing conversation with John Mecklin, editor-in-chief of the Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists, prior to the film’s release, Nolan was quite specific,
insisting that “our intention with the film—whatever world it was coming out
into—absolutely part of the intention of the film is to reiterate the unique and
extraordinary danger of nuclear weapons. That’s something we should all be
thinking about all the time and care about very, very deeply. But obviously,
it’s extraordinarily troubling that the geopolitical situation would have
deteriorated once again to the extent that it’s being talked about in the news.”

The writer-director decried a situation in which government and military
officials “start to see them [nuclear weapons] as more ordinary armaments …
You’re normalizing killing tens of thousands of people. You’re creating moral
equivalences, false equivalences with other types of conflict, et cetera, et
cetera.” He referred to army spokesmen who “start talking about tactical
nukes—that’s the conversation that I now am most afraid of, because I hear that
from both sides of the political spectrum, not just from [Russian president
Vladimir] Putin. I feel we’re in a world now where people are starting to once
again talk about those things as some kind of acceptable possibility for our
world.”

Nolan suggested nuclear Armageddon was unlikely to occur through “some Dr.
Strangelove-type scenario with bombers getting the wrong signal.” It was far
more probable, he said, “to be the normalizing of atomic weapons at the
beginning, the use of tactical nukes leading to larger- and larger-scale
conflict that will ultimately destroy the planet.” He came away from
making Oppenheimer, the filmmaker asserted, “with a different understanding, a
different set of fears that ultimately are founded on the same ultimate fear,
which is that the world is going to be destroyed by these things.”

Time, in its piece on Nolan, remarked that “Oppenheimer’s little Hiroshima bomb
had an explosive power of 15 kilotons—or 15 thousand tons of TNT. A single,
modern-day U.S. Trident II missile can carry up to 12 nuclear warheads, packing
475 kilotons of punch each.” In other words, each such missile (of which there
are hundreds in existence) contains more than 380 times the destructive power of
the bomb that demolished a major city and killed some 100,000 people.

Cillian Murphy and David Krumholtz in Oppenheimer

The filmmaker has taken his pressing concerns, ones that affect humanity as a
whole, and acted on them conscientiously and rigorously. A major film is one of
the most elaborate, involved artistic undertakings imaginable, with a tremendous
number of moving parts. The writer-director has concentrated his attention on
this particular theme, and coordinated the efforts and skills of hundreds of
collaborators in the same direction, bringing to bear a host of technologies, in
such a fashion that the viewer relives or reworks this same problem, this
complex of moods and ideas about historical events and about the present.
Nolan’s film effectively communicates a sense of urgency because the filmmakers
have found a means of materializing their own urgency in the form of a patient,
carefully constructed artistic work.

Oppenheimer sets about addressing historical questions for which vast numbers of
people, whether they are fully aware of it or not, urgently need answers: How
has humanity arrived at its present dangerous, threatening condition? What’s to
be done about it? Moreover, it does so not as a lecture or tract, but as an
absorbingly human, many-sided drama. Even disagreement with Nolan’s too
apologetic, accepting view of Robert Oppenheimer’s role and legacy (“he was
definitely a hero” and the scientists on the Manhattan Project “had to do what
they had to do”) does nothing to take away from Murphy’s subtle, extraordinarily
sincere performance and, as noted, the performances of many of the others.

The repulsive nature of contemporary bourgeois politics, the vast moral and
intellectual void it represents, also helps produce an atmosphere receptive to a
work like Oppenheimer. The leading political figures in country after country
are an assortment of corrupt corporate shills, fascist thugs and warmongers, the
dominant parties are generally despised, the authorized sources of information
become seen to be as little more than lying extensions of the state. It is
unsurprising that millions will look in another direction, perhaps naively and
even credulously, to artists for an honest appraisal of life. “Art,” Trotsky
wrote in Culture and Socialism, “is one of the forms through which man finds an
orientation in the world.” When so little rational orientation is forthcoming
from official sources, the filmmaker may take on an outsized importance.

Beyond that, however, one might also argue that Oppenheimer has drawn forth a
strong response not simply because of the immediate conjuncture. There is
something here of an cumulative effect, which bursts forth “unexpectedly” and
“astonishingly” only in the mind of the philistine. Masses of people have
undergone traumatic experiences in recent decades, or witnessed them. War has
been a constant. Upheaval, disruptions, instigated directly or indirectly by the
great powers, have occurred in every corner of the globe. Rough estimates place
the number of forcibly displaced and stateless persons at 130 million in 2024,
in 133 countries and territories and more than 500 locations.

Nearly everyone on the planet becomes involved. Imperialism is agitating,
politicizing and radicalizing great numbers of people, forcing them to think
about very basic questions. These are not isolated episodes, small clouds in an
otherwise sunny sky, but persistent, recurring, increasingly violent. Decades of
conflict and disequilibrium, and now the emergence of a third world war, lead to
shifts in popular thinking. People begin to connect up the experiences, to draw
conclusions, to search for deeper causes, not the ones offered in the capitalist
media. Parochialism, nationalism, “exceptionalism” tend to break down. These are
more and more shared, collective global experiences. No wonder there is a hunger
for more serious artistic material!

Moreover, in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the enormous
historical issues brought to the fore by that trauma, cheap, demagogic
radicalism will appear inadequate to a growing number. In the aftermath of the
restoration of capitalism in the former “socialist” countries, only the most
penetrating arguments and analyses are called for. How was this “failure”
possible? Denunciations and sloganeering will not do. Precise and sober
examinations once more begin to “catch on.” Even if many matters are not yet
understood, there is a growing intuition that difficult, demanding problems have
to be tackled, that much hard, taxing work needs to be done.

The potential once again emerges for human beings to consider their own lives as
historically and socially shaped, for them to see the life-and-death importance
of understanding and mastering crucial historical and social developments. It is
not accidental that filmmaking, as a mass, large-scale, industrial-style
activity, which tends to function at its best under conditions of popular
mobility and seething unrest, begins to pick up on this process. And Nolan
himself admits to being “drawn to working at a large scale” and feeling “the
responsibility” to use those resources “in the most productive and interesting
way.”

Cillian Murphy

Oppenheimer of course is not the only art work that reflects some of these
developments, nor has this artistic process just begun. We have pointed to other
works, films and television series that have conveyed unease, dissatisfaction,
even disgust with the existing state of affairs. But Oppenheimer’s enormous,
international prominence represents something of a nodal point.

None of this is meant to suggest that the film is without weaknesses and blind
spots. As we noted last July, the problems with Oppenheimer “are not so much the
failings of the individual writer-director. They reveal more general problems
bound up with understanding the Second World War and mid-20th century political
realities.” One might even say that “absolving” Oppenheimer, as it were, becomes
obligatory when one works backward, as the filmmakers do, from a defense of
World War II as the great battle for democracy and the Roosevelt administration
as a social reformist utopia. The weakest portion of the film, when it
temporarily turns into something of a formulaic “procedural,” occurs during the
organization of Los Alamos as a secret military facility and the preparations
for the first atomic bomb test.

As we argued last year, “The working class cannot adopt Oppenheimer as one of
its heroes. Although he held sincerely left-wing views in the late 1930s,
Oppenheimer became a significant figure in the American military-intelligence
apparatus. That the ‘left’ in America by and large, including prominently the
Communist Party, cheered on the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and that
Oppenheimer could more or less seamlessly pass from pro-Roosevelt Popular
Frontism to direct participation in the war machine, none of that excuses his
role.”

The character of the 1917 October Revolution, which still held such a power for
figures like Oppenheimer and his generation, the emergence of Stalinism in the
USSR and the betrayal of the revolution, the filthy role of the Communist Party
in the US, these are gigantic questions that hover unresolved over
Nolan’s Oppenheimer.

In his interview with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last year, Nolan
made suggestive reference to some of the issues. Speaking of “the revolutionary
nature of quantum physics in the 1920s,” he added, “You’re dealing with people
who were engaged in a revolutionary reappraisal of the laws of the universe,
just as Picasso and other artists were engaged in a revolutionary reappraisal of
aesthetic art, of visual representation, just as Stravinsky, you know, was there
writing all his music, and indeed, Marx, the communists—that is to say, moving
on from Marx, the communist 1920s, the Russian Revolution.”

He continued: “It’s kind of an amazing time. And then, of course, as you start
to research and look at the drama of his [Oppenheimer’s] story and where it then
went, where this revolutionary fervor actually wound up—that’s when so many
revolutions wound up in a pretty awful place.”

This is a critical point, although Nolan does not proceed any farther in his
comments or perhaps his thinking. There is indeed a profound connection between
the “awful place” that the October Revolution “wound up,” as a result of the
perfidy and treachery of Stalinism, and the terrible historical dilemma in which
vast portions of humanity, including scientists and intellectuals, found
themselves in the late 1930s, and in the ensuing slaughterhouse of the world war
and the Holocaust. This too is surely a matter to be investigated in a serious
artistic film (or films), which would also, we are convinced, gain the interest
of millions and millions.

……………………

| Tagged christopher-nolan, cillian-murphy, drama, film, oppenheimer


THE GLOBAL SOUTH CONVERGES TO MULTIPOLAR MOSCOW – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 1 MARCH 2024

Posted on March 1, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 1,000 WORDS • 

Here’s the key takeaway of these frantic days in Moscow: Normal-o-philes of the
world, unite.

These have been frantic multipolar days at the capital of the multipolar world.
I had the honor to personally tell Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov that
virtually the whole Global South seemed to be represented in an auditorium of
the Lomonosov innovation cluster on a Monday afternoon – a sort of informal UN
and in several aspects way more effective when it comes to respecting the UN
charter. His eyes gleamed. Lavrov, more than most, understands the true power of
the Global Majority.

Moscow hosted a back-to-back multipolar conference plus the second meeting of
the International Russophiles Movement (MIR, in its French acronym, which means
“world” in Russian). Taken together, the discussions and networking have offered
auspicious hints on the building of a truly representative international order –
away from the agenda-imposed doom and gloom of single unipolar culture and
Forever Wars.

The opening plenary session in the first day fell under the star power of
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova – whose main message was crystal
clear: “There can’t be freedom without free will”, which could easily become the
new collective Global South motto. “Civilization-states” set the tone of the
overall discussion – as they are meticulously designing the blueprints of
economic, technological and cultural development in the post-Western hegemonic
world.

Professor of International Relations Zhang Weiwei at Fudan University’s China
Institute in Shanghai summarized the four crucial points when it comes to
Beijing propelling its role as a “new independent pole.” That reads like a
concise marker of where we are now:

 1. Under the unipolar order, everything from dollars to computer chips can be
    weaponized. Wars and color revolutions are the norm.
 2. China has become the largest economy in the world by PPP; the largest trade
    and industrial economy; and it is currently at the forefront of the Fourth
    Industrial Revolution.
 3. China proposes a model of “Unite and Prosper” instead of a Western model of
    “Divide and Rule”.
 4. The West tried to isolate Russia, but the Global Majority sympathizes with
    Russia. Thus, the Collective West has been isolated by the Global Rest.

Fighting the “theo-political war”

“Global Rest”, incidentally, is a misnomer: Global Majority is the name of the
game. The same applies to “golden billion”; those that profit from the unipolar
moment, mostly across the collective West and as comprador elites in the
satraps, are at best 200 million or so.

Monday afternoon in Moscow featured three parallel sessions: on China and the
multipolar world, where the star was Professor Weiwei; on the post-hegemony
West, under the title “Is it possible to save the European civilization?” –
attended by several dissident Europeans, academics, think tankers, activists;
and the main treat – featuring the frontline actors of multipolarity.

I had the honor to moderate the awesome Global South session, which ran for over
three hours – it could have been the whole day, actually – and featured several
stunning presentations by a stellar cast of Africans, Latin Americans and
Asians, from Palestine to Venezuela, including Nelson Mandela’s grandson,
Mandla.

That was the multipolar Global South in full flight – as my imperative was to
open the floor to as many people as possible. Were the organizers to release a
Greatest Hits of the presentations, that could easily become a global hit.

Mandla Mandela emphasized how it’s about time to move away from the unipolar
system dominated by the Hegemon, “which continues to support Israel”.

That complemented Benin’s charismatic activist Kemi Seba – who brilliantly
personifies the African leadership of the future. In the plenary session, Seba
introduced a key concept – which begs to be developed around the world: we are
living under a “theo-political war”.

That neatly summarizes the Western simultaneous Hybrid War on Islam, Shi’ism,
Christian Orthodoxy, in fact every religion, apart from the Woke Cult.

The next day, the second congress of the International Russophiles movement
offered three debate sessions: the most relevant was on – what else –
“Informational and Hybrid Warfare”.

I had the honor to share the stage with Maria Zakharova – and after my free
jazz-style presentation, focused on over 40 years of practicing journalism
across the planet and watching first-hand the utter degradation of the industry,
we carried a hopefully useful dialogue on media and soft power.

My suggestion not only to the Russian Foreign Ministry but to everyone all
across the Global South was straightforward: forget about oligarchy-controlled
legacy/mainstream media, it is already dead. They have nothing relevant to say.
The present and the future rely on social media; “alternative” – which is not
alternative anymore, on the contrary; and citizen media, to all of which, of
course, the highest standards of journalism should be applied.

In the evening, before everyone got down to party hard, a few of us were invited
for an open, frank and enlightening working dinner with Foreign Minister Lavrov
in one of the magnificent frescoed rooms of the Metropol Hotel, one the grand
hotels of Europe since 1905.

A legend with a wicked sense of humor

Lavrov was relaxed, among friends; after an initial, stunning diplomatic tour de
force which covered quite a few highlights of the recent decades all the way to
the current gloom and doom, he opened the table to our questions, taking notes
and answering each one of them in detail.

What’s so striking when you are face to face with the most legendary diplomat in
the world for quite some time, in a relaxed setting, is his genuine sadness when
faced with the rage, intolerance and total absence of critical thought exhibited
especially by the Europeans. That was much more relevant throughout our
conversation than the fact that U.S.-Russia relations are at an all-time low.

Lavrov though remains highly driven because of the Global South/Global Majority
– and the Russian presidency of the BRICS this year. He hugely praised Indian FM
Jaishankar, and the comprehensive relations with China. He suggested the
Russophiles Movement should take a global role, playfully suggesting we should
all be part of a “Normal-o-philes” movement.

Well, Lavrov The Legend is also known for his wicked sense of humor. And humor
is most effective when it is deadly serious. So here’s the key takeaway of these
frantic days in Moscow: Normal-o-philes of the world, unite.

………………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged china, geopolitics, politics, russia, ukraine


THE CIA IN UKRAINE — THE NY TIMES GETS A GUIDED TOUR – BY PATRICK LAWRENCE – 29
FEB 2024

Posted on March 1, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 2,800 WORDS • 



Credit: Scheerpost/Wikimedia Commons

If you have paid attention to what various polls and officials in the U.S. and
elsewhere in the West have been doing and saying about Ukraine lately, you know
the look and sound of desperation. You would be desperate, too, if you were
making a case for a war Ukrainians are on the brink of losing and will never,
brink or back-from-the-brink, have any chance of winning. Atop this, you want
people who know better, including 70 percent of Americans according to a recent
poll, to keep investing extravagant sums in this ruinous folly.

And here is what seems to me the true source of angst among these desperados:
Having painted this war as a cosmic confrontation between the world’s democrats
and the world’s authoritarians, the people who started it and want to prolong it
have painted themselves into a corner. They cannot lose it. They cannot afford
to lose a war they cannot win: This is what you see and hear from all those
good-money-after-bad people still trying to persuade you that a bad war is a
good war and that it is right that more lives and money should be pointlessly
lost to it.

Everyone must act for the cause in these dire times. You have Chuck Schumer in
Kyiv last week trying to show House Republicans that they should truly, really
authorize the Biden regime to spend an additional $61 billion on its proxy war
with Russia. “Everyone we saw, from Zelensky on down made this very point
clear,” the Democratic senator from New York asserted in an interview with The
New York Times. “If Ukraine gets the aid, they will win the war and beat
Russia.”

Even at this late hour people still have the nerve to say such things.

You have European leaders gathering in Paris Monday to reassure one another of
their unity behind the Kyiv regime—and where Emmanuel Macron refused to rule out
sending NATO ground troops to the Ukrainian front. “Russia cannot and must not
win this war,” the French president declared to his guests at the Elysée Palace.

Except that it can and, barring an act of God, it will.

Then you have Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s war-mongering sec-gen, telling Radio Free
Europe/Radio Liberty last week that it will be fine if Kyiv uses F–16s to attack
Russian cities once they are operational this summer. The U.S.–made fighter
jets, the munitions, the money—all of it is essential “to ensure Russia doesn’t
make further gains.” Stephen Bryen, formerly a deputy undersecretary at the
Defense Department, offered an excellent response to this over the weekend
in his Weapons and Strategy newsletter: “Fire Jens Stoltenberg before it is too
late.”

Good thought, but Stoltenberg, Washington’s longtime water-carrier in Brussels,
is merely doing his job as assigned: Keep up the illusions as to Kyiv’s potency
and along with it the Russophobia, the more primitive the better. You do not get
fired for irresponsible rhetoric that risks something that might look a lot like
World War III.

What would a propaganda blitz of this breadth and stupidity be without an entry
from The New York Times? Given the extent to which The Times has abandoned all
professional principle in the service of the power it is supposed to report
upon, you just knew it would have to get in on this one.

The Times has published very numerous pieces in recent weeks on the necessity of
keeping the war going and the urgency of a House vote authorizing that $61
billion Biden’s national security people want to send Ukraine. But never mind
all those daily stories. Last Sunday it came out with its big banana. “The Spy
War: How the C.I.A. Secretly Helps Ukraine Fight Putin” sprawls—lengthy text,
numerous photographs. The latter show the usual wreckage—cars, apartment
buildings, farmhouses, a snowy dirt road lined with landmines. But the story
that goes with it is other than usual.

Somewhere in Washington, someone appears to have decided it was time to let the
Central Intelligence Agency’s presence and programs in Ukraine be known. And
someone in Langley, the CIA’s headquarters, seems to have decided this will be
O.K., a useful thing to do. When I say the agency’s presence and programs, I
mean some: We get a very partial picture of the CIA’s doings in Ukraine, as the
lies of omission—not to mention the lies of commission—are numerous in this
piece. But what The Times published last weekend, all 5,500 words of it, tells
us more than had been previously made public.

Let us consider this unusually long takeout carefully for what it is and how it
came to make page one of last Sunday’s editions.

In a recent commentary I reflected on the mess The Times landed in when it
published a thoroughly discredited p.o.s.—and I leave readers to understand this
newsroom expression—on the sexual violence Hamas militias allegedly committed
last Oct. 7. I described a corrupt but routinized relationship between the
organs of official power and the journalists charged with reporting on official
power, likening it to a foie gras farmer feeding his geese: The Times’s
journalists opened wide and swallowed. For appearances’ sake, they then set
about dressing up what they ingested as independently reported work. This is the
routine.

It is the same, yet more obviously, with this extended piece on the CIA’s
activities in Ukraine. Adam Entous and Michael Schwirtz tell the story of—this
the subhead—“a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical
for both countries in countering Russia.” They set the scene in a below-ground
monitoring and communications center the CIA showed Ukrainian intel how to build
beneath the wreckage of an army outpost destroyed in a Russian missile attack.
They report on the archipelago of such places the agency paid for, designed,
equipped, and now helps operate. Twelve of these, please note, are along
Ukraine’s border with Russia.

Entous and Schwirtz, it is time to mention, are not based in Ukraine. They
operate from Washington and New York respectively. This indicates clearly enough
the genesis of “The Spy War.” There was no breaking down of doors involved here,
no intrepid correspondents digging, no tramping around in Ukraine’s mud and
cold, unguided. The CIA handed these two material according to what it wanted
and did not want disclosed, and various officials associated with it made
themselves available as “sources”—none of the American sources named, per usual.

Are we supposed to think these reporters found the underground bunker and all
the other such installations by dint of their “investigation”—a term they have
the gall to use as they describe what they did? And then they developed some
kind of grand exposé of all the agency wanted to keep hidden? Is this it?

Sheer pretense, nothing more. Entous and Schwirtz opened wide and got fed. There
appears to be nothing in what they wrote that was not effectively authorized,
and we can probably do without “effectively.”

There is also the question of sources. Entous and Schwirtz say they conducted
200 interviews to get this piece done. If they did, and I will stay with my
“if,” they do not seem to have been very good interviews to go by the published
piece. And however many interviews they did, this must still be counted a
one-source story, given that everyone quoted in it reflects the same perspective
and so reinforces, more or less, what everyone else quoted has to say. The
sources appear to have been handed to Entous and Schwirtz as was access to the
underground bunker.

The narrative thread woven through the piece is interesting. It is all about the
two-way, can’t-do-without-it cooperation between the CIA and Ukraine’s main
intel services—the SBU (the domestic spy agency) and military intelligence,
which goes by HUR. In this the piece reads like a difficult courtship that leads
to a happy-at-last consummation. It took a long time for the Americans to trust
the Ukrainians, we read, as they, the Americans, assumed the SBU was thick with
Russian double agents. But the Ukrainian spooks enticed them with stacks and
stacks of intelligence that seems to have astonished the CIA people on the
ground and back in Langley.

So, a tale with two moving parts: The Americans helped the Ukrainians get their
technology, methods, and all-around spookery up to snuff, and the Ukrainians
made themselves indispensable to the Americans by providing wads of raw intel.
Entous and Schwirtz describe this symbiosis as “one of Washington’s most
important intelligence partners against the Kremlin today.” Here is how a former
American official put it, as The Times quotes him or her:

> The relationships only got stronger and stronger because both sides saw value
> in it, and the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv—our station there, the operation out of
> Ukraine—became the best source of information, signals and everything else, on
> Russia. We couldn’t get enough of it.

As to omissions and commissions, there are things left out in this piece, events
that are blurred, assertions that are simply untrue and proven to be so. What
amazes me is how far back Entous and Schwirtz reach to dredge up all this
stuff—even to the point they make fools of themselves and remind us of the
Times’s dramatic loss of credibility since the current round of Russophobia took
hold a decade ago.

Entous and Schwirtz begin their account of the CIA–SBU/HUR alliance in 2014,
when the U.S. cultivated the coup in Kyiv that brought the present regime to
power and ultimately led to Russia’s military intervention. But no mention of
the U.S. role in it. They write, “The CIA’s partnership in Ukraine can be traced
back to two phone calls on the night of Feb. 24, 2014, eight years to the day
before Russia’s full-scale invasion.” Neat, granular, but absolutely false. The
coup began three days earlier, on Feb. 21, and as Vladimir Putin reminded Tucker
Carlson during the latter’s Feb. 6 interview with the Russian president, it was
the CIA that did the groundwork.

I confess a special affection for this one: “The Ukrainians also helped the
Americans go after the Russian operatives who meddled in the 2016 U.S.
presidential election,” Entous and Schwirtz write. And later in the piece, this:

> In one joint operation, a[n] HUR team duped an officer from Russia’s military
> intelligence service into providing information that allowed the C.I.A. to
> connect Russia’s government to the so-called Fancy Bear hacking group, which
> had been linked to election interference efforts in a number of countries.

Wonderful. Extravagantly nostalgic for that twilight interim that began eight
years ago, when nothing had to be true so long as it explained why Hillary
Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and why Donald Trump is No. 1 among America’s
“deplorables.”

I have never seen evidence of Russian government interference in another
nation’s elections, including America’s in 2016, and I will say with confidence
you haven’t, either. All that came to be associated with the Russiagate fable,
starting with the never-happened hack of the Democratic Party’s mail, was long
ago revealed to be concocted junk. As to “Fancy Bear,” and its cousin “Cozy
Bear”—monikers almost certainly cooked up over a long, fun lunch in Langley—for
the umpteenth time these are not groups of hackers or any other sort of human
being: They are sets of digital tools available to anyone who wants to use them.

Sloppy, tiresome. But to a purpose. Why, then? What is The Times’s purpose in
publishing this piece?

We can start, logically enough, with that desperation evident among those
dedicated to prolonging the war. The outcome of the war, in my read and in the
view of various military analysts, does not depend on the $61 billion in aid
that now hangs in the balance. But the Biden regime seems to think it does, or
pretends to think it does. The Times’s most immediate intent, so far as one can
make out from the piece, is to add what degree of urgency it can to this
question.

Entous and Schwirtz report that the people running Ukrainian intelligence are
nervous that without a House vote releasing new funds “the CIA will abandon
them.” Good enough that it boosts the case to cite nervous Ukrainians, but we
should recognize that this is a misapprehension. The CIA has a very large budget
entirely independent of what Congress votes one way or another. William Burns,
the CIA director, traveled to Kyiv two weeks ago to reassure his counterparts
that “the U.S. commitment will continue,” as Entous and Schwirtz quote him
saying. This is perfectly true, assuming Burns referred to the agency’s
commitment.

More broadly, The Times piece appears amid flagging enthusiasm for the Ukraine
project. And it is in this circumstance that Entous and Schwirtz went long on
the benefits accruing to the CIA in consequence of its presence on the ground in
Ukraine. But read these two reporters carefully: They, or whoever put their
piece in its final shape, make it clear that the agency’s operations on
Ukrainian soil count first and most as a contribution to Washington’s long
campaign to undermine the Russian Federation. This is not about Ukrainian
democracy, that figment of neoliberal propagandists. It is about Cold War II,
plain and simple. It is time to reinvigorate the old Russophobia, thus—and hence
all the baloney about Russians corrupting elections and so on. It is all there
for a reason.

To gather these thoughts and summarize, This piece is not journalism and should
not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as journalists. They
are clerks of the governing class pretending to be journalists while they post
notices on a bulletin board that pretends to be a newspaper.

■

Let’s dolly out to put this piece in its historical context and consider the
implications of its appearance in the once-but-fallen newspaper of record. Let’s
think about the early 1970s, when it first began to emerge that the CIA had
compromised the American media and broadcasters.

Jack Anderson, the admirably iconoclastic columnist, lifted the lid on the
agency’s infiltration of the media by way of a passing mention of a corrupted
correspondent in 1973. A year later a former Los Angeles Times correspondent
named Stuart Loory published the first extensive exploration of relations
between the CIA and the media in the Columbia Journalism Review. Then, in 1976,
the Church Committee opened its famous hearings in the Senate. It took up all
sorts of agency malfeasance—assassinations, coups, illegal covert ops. Its
intent was also to disrupt the agency’s misuse of American media and restore the
latter to their independence and integrity.

The Church Committee is still widely remembered for getting its job done. But it
never did. A year after Church produced its six-volume report, Rolling Stone
published “The CIA and the Media,” Carl Bernstein’s well-known piece. Bernstein
went considerably beyond the Church Committee, demonstrating that it pulled its
punches rather than pull the plug on the CIA’s intrusions in the media. Faced
with the prospect of forcing the CIA to sever all covert ties with the media, a
senator Bernstein did not name remarked, “We just weren’t ready to take that
step.”

We should read The Times’s piece on the righteousness of the CIA’s activities in
Ukraine—bearing in mind the self-evident cooperation between the agency and the
newspaper—with this history in mind.

America was just emerging from the disgraces of the McCarthyist period when
Stuart Loory opened the door on this question, the Church Committee convened,
and Carl Bernstein filled in the blanks. In and out of the profession there was
disgust at the covert relationship between media and the spooks. Now look. What
was then viewed as top-to-bottom objectionable is now routinized. It is “as
usual.” In my read this is one consequence among many of the Russiagate years:
They again plunged Americans and their mainstream media into the same paranoia
that produced the corruptions of the 1950s and 1960s.

Alas, the scars of the swoon we call Russiagate are many and run deep.

……………………

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for
the International Herald Tribune , is a media critic, essayist, author and
lecturer. His new book, Journalists and Their Shadows , is out now from Clarity
Press. His website is Patrick Lawrence. Support his work via his Patreon site.

(Republished from Scheerpost)

| Tagged cia, politics, russia, ukraine, war


UKRAINIAN DOWNFALL – WHAT COMES NEXT – BY JOHN HELMER – 28 FEB 2024

Posted on February 29, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


SCORCHING THE EARTH WESTWARD — WHAT COMES NEXT AS THE UKRAINIAN ARMY COLLAPSES*

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  @bears_with

The collapse of the Ukrainian army following the battle of Avdeyevka, and its
disorganized retreat, have accelerated Russian military thinking of how far
westward the NATO allies will decide that the Ukrainian statelet can be defended
against the expected Russian advance – and how fast new NATO defences can be
created without the protection of ground-to-air missile batteries like Patriot,
long-range artillery like the M777, and mobile armour like the Abrams, Bradley,
and Caesar: all of them  have already been defeated in the east.

In short, there is no longer a NATO-command line of fortification east of the
Polish border which deters the Russian General Staff. Also, no bunker for the
Zelensky government and its NATO advisors to feel secure.

Cutting and pasting from the Russian military bloggers and the Moscow analytical
media, as a handful of US podcasters and substackers are doing as often as their
subscribers require, is the Comfy-Armchair method for getting at the truth.
  Reading the Russian sources directly, with the understanding that they are
reporting what their military and intelligence sources are saying off the
record, is still armchair generalship, but less comfy,  more credible.

Offence is now the order of the day up and down the contact line. The daily
bulletin from the Ministry of Defense in Moscow calls this “improving the
tactical situation” and “taking more advantageous positions”. In the past three
days, Monday through Wednesday, the Defense Ministry also reported the daily
casualty rate of the Ukrainian forces at 1,175, 1,065, and 695, respectively;
three M777 howitzer hits; and the first Abrams tank to be destroyed.  Because
this source is blocked in several of the NATO states, the Russian military
bloggers, which reproduce the bulletins along with videoclips and maps, may be
more accessible; also more swiftly than the US-based podcasters and substackers
can keep up.

Moscow sources confirm the obvious:  the operational objective is to apply more
and more pressure at more and more points along the line, in as many sectors or
salients (“directions” is the Russian term) as possible simultaneously.  At the
same time, air attack, plus missiles and drones, are striking all rear Ukrainian
and NATO airfield, road, and rail nodes, ammunition storages, vehicle parks,
drone manufactories, fuel dumps, and other supply infrastructure, so as make
reinforcement and redeployment more difficult and perilous.

What cannot be seen are the Russian concentrations of forces aimed in the north,
centre and south of the battlefield. Instead, there is what one source calls “an
educated guess is that when the main blow comes, it will be North,  Chernigov,
Sumy, Kharkov, Poltava,  or Centre,  Dniepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye,  or both
simultaneously.” For timing, the source adds, “after the Russian election.”

That is now less than three weeks away, on March 17. President Vladimir Putin
will then reform his new government within four to six weeks for announcement by
early May. Ministerial appointments sensitive to the General Staff’s planning
are the Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who is expected to remain in place; and
the Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who may retire.

Following the call of French President Emmanuel Macron for the “possibility” of
French ground force deployment to the Ukraine battlefield, and the subsequent
clarification by French Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu, the Russian
assessment has been derisory. “As for Emmanuel Macron’s statements about the
possibility of sending NATO troops to Ukraine,” replied Foreign Ministry
spokesman Maria Zakharova,  “I would like to remind you that just a month ago,
the French Foreign Minister denied Paris’s involvement in recruiting mercenaries
for the Kiev regime, and called direct evidence ‘crude Russian propaganda.’
 There is a strong impression that the French President is, in principle, not
aware of what his subordinates say, or what he says himself.  And now I want to
remind Macron of the history of France. That is different. In April 1945, Berlin
was defended by the French SS division known as Charlemagne, and a number of
others. They also directly defended the Fuhrerbunker — Hitler’s bunker. They
were among the last to be awarded the Nazi Order of the Knight’s Cross in the
Third Reich. The French SS men from Charlemagne became the last defenders of the
Reichstag and the Reich Chancellery. Emmanuel, have you decided to organize the
Charlemagne II division to defend Zelensky’s bunker?”

The view in Moscow is that there is now as much indecision, vacillation,  and
chaos between  the Elysée and the Hexagon Balard  in Paris as there is in
Washington between the White House and the Pentagon, over what last stand NATO
can make in the Ukraine, and where to position it —  east of Kiev, or east of
Lvov and the Polish border region.

The Moscow source again: “the NATO fortress and bunker plan for the Ukraine is
proving a failure, and the Ukrainians are falling back on the
old Wehrmacht tactic of ad hoc battlegroups with  increasing percentages of unit
leftovers and low-quality conscripts acting as fire brigades to plug holes in
the lines so as to delay the Russian advances. But what is the bunker fallback
plan along what lines – is the plan to wait until the Americans, French, Germans
or Poles show up? This is the stuff of Nazi dreams. It’s too late.”

A western military source comments: “I’m not so sure, as some of the Russian
milbloggers are, that the broad front approach [Russian General Valery]
Gerasimov is taking heralds a new approach to modern warfare – or operational
art, if you like. The push at different points, conserving men and materiel in
favour of firepower is being done as much, or more out of political
considerations, which include those of a domestic character (Putin’s public
support, domestic stability);  and also the military objective since Day One of
the Special Military Operation — to draw in and destroy as many and as much of
the US-NATO manpower and equipment in the Ukraine as possible.”

“The Russian ‘retreat’ conducted in Fall of 2022 was part of the plan and struck
me as being inspired by the Mongol tactic of attacking, making a big show of
running away, only to turn to pursue and then destroy the enemy. The Ukrainians
and their NATO handlers fell for it hook, line and sinker. Now they don’t have
the forces needed to maintain their fortress strategy, let alone conduct much in
the way of counter-attacks. It was in this fashion that Gerasimov gained the
upper hand in the two-front war – the one on the Ukrainian battlefield and the
one on the Russian home front.”

“Deep battle is still the Russian doctrine. Its form and components may change,
but the concept remains the same. The art is in figuring out where and when the
holes drilled in the other side’s military, economic, and political structures
will line up, and present the path to be exploited by Gerasimov. We can bet he’s
known for quite some time.”

Two translations follow of current Russian military analyses. The first is by
Boris Rozhin, whose Colonel Cassad Telegram platform is one of the leading
military blogs in Moscow. The second is by Yevgeny Krutikov  who publishes long
pieces in Vzglyad, the semi-official security analysis medium in Moscow, and
short pieces in his Telegram account, Mudraya Ptitsa (“Wise Bird”).  

The translation is verbatim and unedited. Maps and illustrations have been
added.

Source: https://t.me/s/boris_rozhin -- posted on February 27, 2024 – 20:25.
 Part II has not been published yet.

February 27, 2024
The operational crisis of the Armed Forces of the Ukraine – Part 1
By Boris Rozhin (“Colonel Cassad”)

The successes of our troops strengthen faith in a collective victory. However,
it is necessary to soberly assess the three factors that make up the operational
situation at the front:

— our forces and materiel – the forces and materiel of the enemy;

— the ratio between them;

— the operational environment.

The situation in which the enemy is now on the defensive can be called an
operational crisis. For four months, the Armed Forces of the Ukraine [VSU is the
Russian acronym] command concentrated their reserves in Avdeyevka and Chas Yar,
weakening other sectors of the front (in particular, Kupyansk and Zaporozhye).
Having failed to ensure a crucial preponderance of forces, against the
background of an increase in the media importance of Avdeyevka,  the enemy lost
the operational initiative and is now forced to withdraw to reserve linesof
defence. But they are not fully operational.

The transfer of reserves of the VSU is carried out under the increasing attacks
of our aviation and high-precision attacks on key railway nodes (for example,
Pokrovsk and Konstantinovka). Many VSU units need to be withdrawn for
reformation, which is currently impossible. Therefore, they are equipped at the
expense of mobilized citizens with low motivation and combat training.

LARGE MAP OF OPERATIONS AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Source: Rybar. Click on original to enlarge view: https://t.me/s/rybar --
February 29 00:42.

By developing an offensive initiative west of Avdeyevka, our units have deprived
the enemy of the opportunity to gain a foothold there. According to the Bakhmut
scenario in the summer of 2023, when attacking near Kleshcheyevka and Berkhovka,
the VSU  created a hotbed of tension, forcing us to hold large forces in
position. Today, the Armed Forces of Ukraine do not have the opportunity to
fully regroup, so they are withdrawing troops in key operational areas:
Zaporozhye (Orekhov) and Slavyansk-Kramatorsk (taking into account our positions
in the Avdeyevka and Bakhmut initial areas).

The new [VSU] commander-in-chief, [General Alexander] Syrsky, is confused about
exactly where to concentrate his forces. In conditions of simultaneous movement
of our formations along the entire front line: in the Zaporozhye,  Donetsk,
Lugansk (the Svatovo-Kremennaya line) and Kupyansk operational directions, the
concentration of forces and materiel in a particular area will inevitably create
conditions for a breakthrough of the Ukrainian defence.

The advance of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation in the
Maryinsk-Ugledar operational and tactical direction and in the area of
Novomikhailovka creates conditions for squeezing the enemy west of the
Marinka-Ugledar highway and in the direction of Kurakhovo, which in the
foreseeable future will become a key node in the VSU defence  in this area. The
situation is developing in a similar way in the Konstantinovsky direction, where
our troops are having success at Chas Yar, advancing at the moment with coverage
to Ivanovskoye, the largest defensive line in front of the Chas–Yar fortress
area.

MAP OF THE CHAS YAR OPERATIONS AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Source: Rybar.  Click on the original to enlarge view: https://t.me/rybar/57610

Steady pressure is recorded in the area of Yampolovka and Ternov, the
Serebryansky forest, as well as on the left bank of the Seversky Donets, where
an offensive is underway against Belogorovka in order to reach Seversk.
Positional battles continue south of Seversk in the Razdolovka–Veseloe strip.
Our units are moving along the railway line, although the tactical conditions of
the terrain are not conducive to a rapid offensive there. The situation is more
complicated in the Kupyansk direction. However, despite the difficulties of
advancing and the altitude differences, we are managing to contain large enemy
forces on both banks of the Oskol.

A likely scenario for the development of the situation is that during the coming
month the VSU will continue the gradual withdrawal of troops to new lines along
a rear echelon from 15 to 20 kilometres back,  while simultaneously trying to
engage us in battles in areas where terrain conditions and defensive
fortifications will allow us to hold positions: these are  Chas
Yar–Konstantinovka, the southern approaches to Seversk (Rayaleksandrovsky
fortress area), the Marinka– Kurakhovo–Ugledar line (Donetsk direction), and
Rabodino–Orekhov (Zaporozhye).

At the moment of withdrawal from a particular area, the enemy will transfer his
forces from site to site in order to inflict maximum damage to our advancing
group. The VSU does not consider any other option, for example, to
counterattack, since the concentration of troops required for that risks taking
the shape of the Avdeyevka scenario, with the real prospect of falling into a
котёл [trap].

 Left, Boris Rozhin; right, Yevgeny Krutikov. 

Source: https://vz.ru/

February 28, 2024How Russian troops are shifting Ukrainian defenses after  
Avdeyevka
By Yevgeny Krutikov

The advance of Russian troops to the West after the liberation of Avdeyevka has
not been stopped at all. The Armed Forces of Ukraine have not been able to gain
a foothold on any defensive line for many days, and moreover, this applies not
only to the Avdeyevka direction. What is happening on the line of contact in the
special operation zone and what will be the target of the Russian army in the
coming weeks?

After the liberation of Avdeyevka the units of the Russian Armed Forces
maintained a high rate of advance in this section of the line of contact. The
enemy hastily tried to create new lines of defence to the west of the city along
the Stepovoye–Berdych-Orlovka–Lastochkino–Tonenkoe–Severnoye line. But by
Tuesday, February 27, Russian assault units had occupied the first line
(Stepovoye, Lastochkino, Severnoye) and began operations to occupy the second
line.

In some instances the enemy simply abandoned their positions, unable to
withstand the blows of bombs and assault actions. The open spaces (fields,
forests, and gullies) west of Avdeyevka came under the control of the Armed
Forces of the Russian Federation almost without a fight.

There is an explanation for this. First of all, the organization of defence on
new frontlines is extremely costly and time–consuming; it requires a huge amount
of equipment and specialists, and most importantly, time. It is precisely this
time which the Russian troops are seizing to consolidate their positions,
denying them to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and constantly putting pressure on
them, primarily with long-range weapons.

The VSU, as it now turns out, were not prepared at all for the rapid abandonment
of Avdeyevka. In addition, it seems that the enemy cannot withstand a direct
clash with Russian troops outside of positions they have fortified in advance.
 The VSU can cling to long-term fortified areas which have been prepared for a
long time, but with the constant pace of the Russian offensive, they are forced
to withdraw even from these positions.

Behind the new line of defence of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which has
developed in the Avdeyevka area at the moment (provisionally around Orlovka), an
empty space has opened up in which there are no natural obstacles capable of
supporting new defensive fortifications. There is nothing like this up to the
next major settlements of the Donbass, primarily Krasnoarmeysk (Pokrovsky). The
enemy has not strengthened the small villages there in any way, thinking it
wouldn’t be necessary.

MAP OF AVDEYEVKA AREA OPERATIONS AS OF FEBRUARY 28, 2024

Source: Rybar. Click on original to enlarge view: https://t.me/rybar/57677 

The only limitation on the Russian forces for moving forward in this direction
may be the old positions of the VSU on the flanks. For example, Kurakhovo is
planned to be another “fortress”, which by the very fact of its existence
creates a flank threat to the advance of the Avdeyevka grouping of the Russian
forces.

The situation in another section of the contact line, west of Artemovsk, is
indicative in this regard. The enemy’s positions in front of Chasov Yar in the
villages of Krasnoe (Ivanovskoye) and Bogdanovka have looked to be very strong.
But the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation began to move there not head-on,
but from the north, pushing through and bypassing the fortified areas of the
VSU.  As a result, by Tuesday, the assault groups had advanced almost to the
centre of the village. At the same time, several heights were occupied, opening
the way further to the west.

This manoeuvre is clearly visible on satellite images of the area where the
lines of the enemy’s trenches south of Krasnoe are visible. Apparently, the VSU
was afraid of the movement of Russian attack aircraft from this direction, from
Kleshcheyevka. The ruins of Kleshcheyevka themselves are practically surrounded
at the moment, but this direction has become secondary to movement on Chasov
Yar.

The first districts of Chasov Yar – east of the canal, where the VSU units are
located – are now being constantly shelled by Russian artillery and bombs [ФАБ],
 which make it impossible for the enemy to manoeuvre their reserves and rotate.

The enemy transferred most of the reserves available at the beginning of
February to Kupyansk. In Kiev this stabilization of the front near Kupyansk is
considered a great achievement. The Kiev command is motivated to hang stubbornly
on to the zone around Kupyansk by the realization that if they lose this node,
 that would lead to the redeployment of parts of the Russian forces all the way
up to Kharkov.

But the most important thing that the intelligence and leadership of the VSU are
currently doing is trying to determine where the new main blow of the Russian
offensive will occur after Avdeyevka.  The fact is that the Russian armed forces
are now maintaining an operational pace along the entire line of contact. There
is no section of the front line where successful assault operations would not be
noted. This “multiple bites” [множества укусов] strategy currently being
undertaken by the Russian forces has led to the disorganization of enemy
behaviour and the dispersion of its resources.

For example, the first assault detachments of the Armed Forces of the Russian
Federation on Tuesday night already entered the settlement of Terny in the
Limansky direction and gained a foothold in it. The movement to Terny had not
halted even for a day over several weeks, remaining in the shadow of the
larger-scale events in the Avdeyevka direction and around Rabocino. But all of a
sudden now it has turned out that in this area, units of the Armed Forces of the
Russian Federation have entered completely new positions, threatening to move
further west to the Estuary and looming over the enemy’s Seversk grouping.

In Kiev, there is a well-founded fear that these new landmark breakthroughs by
Russian units may generally lead to the collapse of Ukrainian defence and the
transition of military operations to the more western regions of Ukraine.

Moreover, almost the entire line of contact, except for the Chasov Yar area, is
now so fragmented that the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation have the
opportunity to enter the operational space in several directions at once. Even
the western press is now actively writing that the Russian forces are capable of
providing assault operations simultaneously in two or three areas. No one knows
which one of them will end up being the main one.

It is possible that there will be no “main” direction of impact, at least in the
classical understanding of this concept. The new military reality also offered
by the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation is a novel tactic: the movement of
small assault groups with powerful support from artillery and heavy aerial
bombs. Thus, the occupation of enemy strongholds is ensured, and only then are
large open spaces cleared with the help of tanks.

In other words, relatively large settlements, turned into strongholds by the
enemy, become something like a general direction, a vector of movement. For
example, Pokrovskoye (Krasnoarmeysk) is located 40 kilometres west of Avdeyevka.
This is clearly the next target for Russian troops. But the movement towards
this goal need not be direct, but may be guided by the requirement to bypass and
destroy the enemy’s defence lines.

At Chasov Yar, movement that was not in a straight line turned out to be
effective for the Russian forces,  bypassing from the flanks the enemy’s
fortified areas south of Krasny. Operations to hold down the enemy are conducted
in Kupyansk in a straight line, while unexpected assault actions on the
outskirts of this section of the front (the same Terny) lead to new threats of
the encirclement of the defending units of the VSU.

Perhaps in the coming days we will see the next offensive operations of the
Russian forces according to a linear scheme: the encirclement of Kurakhovo
through the occupation of Krasnogorovka, access to the heights south of Chasov
Yar, movement to Seversk, access to the supply lines of Ugledar, forcing the
channel in Terny, breaking the enemy’s defences west of Avdeyevka, and much
more.

None of these areas will be the “chief” or “main” one, but each of them will
create the preconditions for the further liberation of the Donbass.

 [*] The lead picture is reproduced by Boris Rozhin to illustrate his
battlefield report of February 28, at 19:17, indicating the disorganized retreat
of Ukrainian forces west and south along the Berdych-Orlovka-Tonenkoe line in
the central sector. “Today, the enemy has actually lost this line. Orlovka is in
the process of coming under the control of Russian troops. In the next 24 hours,
we should expect the appearance of videos with flags in Orlovka. Berdych is
next.  An advantageous and prepared line of defence did not last long. The enemy
will retreat to the west with subsequent attempts to use natural water barriers
and terrain to compensate for the lack of prepared engineering structures.”   

……………………………

Source

| Tagged nato, russia, ukraine, ukraine-war, war


ROCKY ROAD TO DEDOLLARIZATION: SERGEI GLAZYEV INTERVIEW – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 29
FEB 2024

Posted on February 29, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 2,300 WORDS • 

Very few people in Russia and across the Global South are as qualified as Sergei
Glazyev, the Minister for Integration and Macroeconomics of the Eurasia Economic
Commission (EEC), the policy arm of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), to speak
about the drive, the challenges and the pitfalls in the road towards
de-dollarization.

As the Global South issues widespread calls for real financial stability; India
inside the BRICS 10 makes it clear that everyone needs to think seriously about
the toxic effects of unilateral sanctions; and Professor Michael Hudson keeps
reiterating current policies are not sustainable anymore, Glazyev graciously
received me at his office at the EEC for an exclusive, extensive conversation,
including fascinating off the record odds and ends.

These are the highlights – as Glazyev’s ideas are being re-examined, and there’s
huge expectation for the green light from the Russian government for a new trade
settlement model – which for the moment is in the final stages of fine-tuning.

Glazyev explained how his main idea was “elaborated a long time ago. The basic
idea is that a new currency should be first of all introduced on the basis of
international law, signed by the countries which are interested in the
production of this new currency. Not via some kind of conference, like Bretton
Woods, with no legitimacy. At the first stage, not all countries would be
included. BRICS nations will be enough – plus the SCO. In Russia, we already
have our own SWIFT – the SPFS. We have our currency exchange, we have
correspondent relations between banks, consultation between Central Banks, here
we are absolutely self-sufficient.”

All that leads to adopting a new international currency: “We don’t really need
to go large scale. BRICS is enough. The idea of the currency is that there are
two baskets: one basket is national currencies of all countries involved in the
process, like the SDR, but with more clear, understandable criteria. The second
basket are commodities. If you have two baskets, and we create the new currency
as an index of commodities and national currencies, and we have a mechanism for
reserves, according to the mathematical model that will be very stable. Stable
and convenient.”

Then it’s up to feasibility: “To introduce this currency as an instrument for
transactions would not be too difficult. With good infrastructure, and all
Central Banks approving it, then it’s up to businesses to use this currency. It
should be in digital form – which means it can be used without the banking
system, so it will be at least ten times cheaper than present transactions
through banks and currency exchanges.”

That Thorny Central Bank Question

“Have you presented this idea to the Chinese?”

“We presented it to Chinese experts, our partners at Renmin University. We had
good feedback – but I did not have the opportunity to present it on a political
level. Here in Russia we promote the discussion via papers, conferences,
seminars, but there’s still no political decision on introducing this mechanism
even on the BRICS agenda. The proposal by our team of experts is to include it
in the agenda of the BRICS summit next October in Kazan. The problem is the
Russian Central Bank is not enthusiastic. The BRICS have only decided on an
operating plan to use national currencies – which is also a quite clear idea, as
national currencies are already used in our trade. Russian ruble is the main
currency in the EAEU, trade with China is conducted in rubles and renminbi,
trade with India and Iran and Turkiye also switched to national currencies. Each
country has the infrastructure for it. If Central Banks introduce digital
national currencies and allow them to be used in international trade, it’s also
a good model. In this case crypto exchanges can easily balance payments – and
it’s a very cheap mechanism. What is needed is an agreement from Central Banks
to allow a certain amount of national currencies in digital form to participate
in international transactions.”

“Would that be feasible already in 2024, if there is political will?”

“There are some start-ups already. By the way, they are in the West, and the
digitalization is conducted by private companies, not Central Banks. So the
demand is there. Our Central Bank needs to elaborate a proposal for the summit
in Kazan. But this is only one part of the story. The second part is price. For
the moment price is determined by Western speculation. We produce these
commodities, we consume them, but we do not have our own price mechanism, which
will balance supply and demand. During the Covid panic, the price for oil fell
to nearly zero. It’s impossible to make any strategic planning for economic
development if you do not control prices of basic commodities. Price formation
with this new currency should get rid of Western exchanges of commodities. My
idea is based on a mechanism that existed in the Soviet Union, in the Comecon.
In that period we had long-term agreements not only with socialist countries,
but also with Austria, and other Western countries, to supply gas for 10 years,
20 years, the basis of this price formula was the price for oil, and the price
for gas.”

So what stands out is the effectiveness of a long-term, long view policy: “We
did create a long-term pattern. Here in the EEC we are looking at the idea of a
common exchange market. We already prepared a draft, with some experiments. The
first step is the creation of an information network, exchanges in different
countries. It was rather successful. The second step will be to set up online
communication between exchanges, and finally we move to a common mechanism of
price formation, and open this mechanism for all other countries. The main
problem is that the major producers of commodities, first of all the oil
companies, they don’t like to trade through exchanges. They like to trade
personally, so you need a political decision to make sure that at least half of
production of commodities should go through exchanges. A mechanism where supply
and demand balance each other. For the moment the price of oil in foreign
markets is ‘secret’. It’s some type of colonial times thinking. ‘How to cheat’.
We must create legislation to open all this information to the public.”

The NDB in Need of a Shake-up

Glazyev offered an extensive analysis of the BRICS universe, based on how the
BRICS Business Council had its first meeting on financial services in early
February. They agreed on a working plan; there was a first session of fintech
experts; and during this week a breakthrough meeting may lead to a new
formulation – for the moment not made public – to be put into the BRICS agenda
for the October summit.

“What are the main challenges within the BRICS structure in this next stage of
trying to bypass the US dollar?”

“BRICS in fact is a club which doesn’t have a secretariat. I can tell it, from a
person that has some experience in integration. We discussed the idea of a
customs union here, on the post-Soviet territory, immediately after the
collapse. We had a lot of declarations, even some agreements signed by heads of
state, over a common economic space. But only after the establishment of a
commission the real work stated, in the year 2008. After 20 years of papers,
conferences, nothing was done. You need someone who’s responsible. In BRICS
there is such an organization – the NDB [New Development Bank]. If the heads of
state decide to appoint the NDB as an institution which will elaborate the new
model, the new currency, organize an international conference with the draft of
an international treaty, this can work. The problem is that the NDB works
according to the dollar charter. They have to reorganize this institution in
order to make it workable. Now it works like an ordinary international
development bank under the American framework. The second option would be to do
it without this bank, but that would be much more difficult. This bank has
enough expertise.”

“Could an internal shake-up of the NDB be proposed by the Russian presidency of
BRICS this year?”

“We are doing our best. I’m not sure the Ministry of Finance understands how
serious this is. The President understands. I personally promoted this idea to
him. But the chairman of the Central Bank, and ministers are still thinking in
the old IMF paradigm.”

‘Religious Sects Don’t Create Innovation’

Glazyev had a serious discussion on sanctions with the NDB:

“I discussed this issue with Mrs. Rousseff [the former Brazilian President,
currently presiding the NDB) at the St. Petersburg Forum. I gave her a paper
about it. She was rather enthusiastic and invited us to come to the NDB. But
afterwards there was no follow-up. Last year everything was very difficult.”

On BRICS, “the financial services working group is discussing reinsurance,
credit rating, new currencies in fintech. That’s what should be in the agenda of
the NDB. The best possibility would be a meeting in Moscow in March or April, to
discuss in depth the whole range of issues of BRICS settlement mechanism, from
most sophisticated to least sophisticated. It would be great if the NDB sign up
for it, but as it stands there is a de facto gulf between the BRICS and the
NDB.”

The key point, insists Glazyev, is that “Dilma should find time to organize
these discussions at a high level. A political decision is needed.”

“But wouldn’t that decision have to come from Putin himself?”

“It’s not so easy. We heard statements by at least three heads of the state:
Russia, South Africa and Brazil. They publicly said ‘this is a good idea’. The
problem, once again, is there is no task force yet. My idea, which we proposed
before the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, is to create an international working
group – to prepare in the next sessions the model, or the draft, of the treaty.
How to switch to national currencies. That’s the official agenda now. And they
have to report about that in Kazan [for the BRICS annual summit]. There are some
consultations between the Central Banks and Ministers of Finance.”

Glazyev cut to the chase when it comes to the inertia of the system: “The main
problem for bureaucrats and experts is ‘why they don’t have ideas?’ Because they
assume the current status quo is the best one. If there are no sanctions,
everything will be good. The international financial architecture that was
created by the United States and Europe is convenient. Everyone knows how to
work in the system. So it’s impossible to move from this system to another
system. For businesses it will be very difficult. For banks it will be
difficult. People have been educated in the paradigm of financial equilibrium,
totally libertarian. They don’t care that prices are manipulated by speculators,
they don’t care about volatility of national currencies, They think it’s natural
(…) It’s a kind of religious sect. Religious sects don’t create innovation.”

Now Get on That Hypersonic Bicycle

We’re back to the crucial issue of national currencies: “Even five years ago,
when I spoke about national currencies in trade, everybody said it was
completely impossible. We have long-term contracts in dollars and euro. We have
an established culture of transactions. When I was Minister of Foreign Trade, 30
years ago, at the time I tried to push all our trade in commodities into rubles.
I argued with Yeltsin and others, ‘we have to trade in rubles, not in dollars’.
That would automatically make the ruble a reserve currency. When Europe moved to
the euro, I had a meeting with Mr. Prodi, and we agreed, ‘we will use euro as
your currency, and you will use rubles’. Then Prodi came to me after
consultations and said, ‘I talked to Mr. Kudrin [former Russian Finance
Minister, 2000-2011], he didn’t ask me to make the ruble a reserve currency’.
That was sabotage. It was stupidity.”



The problems actually run deep – and keep running: “The problem was our
regulators, educated by the IMF, and the second problem was corruption. If you
trade oil and gas in dollars, a large part of profits is stolen, there are a lot
of intermediate companies which manipulate prices. Prices are only the first
step. The price for natural gas in the first deal is about 10 times less than
the final demand. There are institutional barriers. A majority of countries do
not allow our companies to sell oil and gas to the final customer. Like you
cannot sell gas to households. Nevertheless, even in the open market, quite
competitive, we have intermediates between producer and consumer – at least half
of the revenues are stolen from government control. They don’t pay taxes.”

Yet fast solutions do exist: “When we were sanctioned two years ago, transfer
from US dollar and euro to national currencies took only a few months. It was
very quick.”

On investments, Glazyev stressed success in localized trade, but capital flows
are still not there: “The Central Banks are not doing their job. The
ruble-renminbi exchange is working well. But the ruble-rupee exchange doesn’t
work. The banks that keep these rupees, they have a lot of money, accrue
interest rates on these rupees, and they can play with them. I don’t know who’s
responsible for this, our Central Bank or the Indian Central Bank.”

The succinct, key takeaway of Glazyev’s serious warnings is that it would be up
to the NDB – prodded by the leadership of BRICS – to organize a conference of
global experts and open it for public discussion. Glazyev evoked the metaphor of
a bicycle that keeps rolling along – so why invent a new bicycle? Well, the –
multipolar – time has come for a new hypersonic bicycle.

……………………….

(Republished from Sputnik International )

| Tagged brics, china, economy, finance, russia


SPACE HERO OF THE SOVIET UNION – TIME TRAVELING COSMONAUT RETURNS

Posted on February 29, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

CCCP Cosmonaut returns from time loop and finds Russia fighting German allied
fascists in the Ukraine.

…………………

On Rumble Video Hosting Site Космический Герой Советского Союза –
Космонавт-путешественник во времени возвращается


https://

rumble.com/v4gdugx-269384577.html






MOON SHOT – CAPITALIST PRIVATE CRAFT FALLS ON SIDE HELPLESSLY – 28 FEB 2024

Posted on February 28, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Moon Shot – Capitalist Private Craft Falls On Side Helplessly – 28 Feb 2024
(9:18 min) Audio Mp3


LATEST PRIVATELY-OWNED MOON MISSION ENDS ABRUPTLY AFTER BOTCHED LANDING

The first privately-owned mission to the surface of the Moon ended prematurely
Tuesday as a result of a botched landing that has resulted on the spacecraft
ending up lying on its side, unable to use its solar panels to recharge its
batteries, and with several antennae pointing in the wrong direction. The
lander, named Odysseus, continued collecting data until power failed.

(The Odysseus lunar lander can be seen Thursday in this image taken as it lands
the south pole region of the Moon. The toppled lunar lander is still beaming
back pictures of the moon, as its nears the final hours of its life.© Intuitive
Machines via AP)

Much is being made in the corporate media about the fact that this is the
first-ever Moon landing with a profit-making private corporation in control.
The New York Times gushed that that the landing would “inaugurate a more
revolutionary era” of more “economical” spaceflight. The Washington Post called
it “a significant step toward NASA’s plan to eventually return astronauts” to
the Moon. The Wall Street Journal asserted that the landing was a “milestone”
for the space industry.

And NASA Administrator Bill Nelson set the tone for the nationalism and jingoism
surrounding the event. “Today for the first time in the history of humanity, a
commercial company—an American company—launched and led the voyage up there.”

(Steve Altemus, CEO and co-founder of Intuitive Machines, describes how it is
believed the company’s Odysseus spacecraft landed on the surface of the moon,
during a news conference in Houston on Friday, Feb. 23, 2024. [AP Photo/NASA])

In reality the landing was something of an exercise in reinventing the wheel. As
the media and politicians themselves admit, there were landings that were far
more technically challenging achieved more than half a century ago, both the
famous landings of Apollo 11, 12, 14, 15, 16 and 17, and the numerous Soviet
Luna landers, which achieved the first soft landing on the Moon in 1966 and the
first robotic sample return in 1970.

Odysseus, in contrast, is quite limited. The spacecraft was built and launched
by Intuitive Machines, an aerospace company co-founded by Stephen Altemus, Tim
Crain and Iranian-American billionaire Kam Ghaffarian, and which focuses on
lunar orbits and landings. It was a test bed for six experimental systems and
was only slated to last nine or ten days on the lunar surface, according to
Crain, which was based on how long the lander’s solar panels were to be exposed
to the Sun. There was no backup power for the lander and its instruments to
operate or survive the two-week-long lunar night.

Moreover, reports that have come out since the launch indicate that the probe
may have been doomed from the start. Odysseus, the primary component of mission
IM-1, was launched on February 15 by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, and descended to
the Moon’s surface seven days later. The day after the launch, the company’s
header of navigation, Mike Hansen, told Reuters that the lander’s laser-powered
range finder wasn’t functional because Intuitive Machine’s engineers failed to
unlock a safety switch during pre-flight checks. The range finder measures the
time from when a light pulse is emitted from a laser to when the reflected light
is detected, and is critical for measuring the craft’s distance from the Moon as
it is landing. Range finders are a standard component of the vast majority of
all modern landing systems.

The problem was only discovered while the spacecraft was en route to the Moon,
and no software on board was able to unlock the switch remotely. As a result,
the company was forced to use NASA’s Navigation Doppler Lidar for Precise
Velocity and Range Sensing, one of the instruments launched as a technology
demonstration, to measure the craft’s distance from the Moon as it was landing.

It’s currently unclear how much data was transmitted back to Earth from
Odysseus. Intuitive Machines has been careful to say that “flight controllers
intend to collect data” until the lander dies, but has so far provided
essentially no information on the amount or quality of the data received. The
most concrete bit of information revealed is that two of the lander’s antennae
are pointed at the Moon, and the bandwidth between Odysseus and its controllers
is much lower than expected.

The fact that the solution partially worked is a credit to the engineers and
technicians who developed and operated NASA’s lidar system. Odysseus would have
crash-landed otherwise. That the craft landed on its side is likely due to
measurement errors caused by using the system in a way that it was never
designed for. Intuitive Machines estimates that Odysseus touched down on the
Moon at about twice the expected velocity, likely a major factor in why it
ultimately tipped over.

The fact that a secondary system had to be relied on at all came from
cost-cutting measures by Intuitive Machines. Hansen admitted in his interview
with Reuters, “There were certainly things we could’ve done to test it and
actually fire it. They would’ve been very time-consuming and very costly.” He
continued: “So that was a risk as a company that we acknowledged and took that
risk.”

Market pressures no doubt played a significant role. Stock of Intuitive Machines
is traded on the NASDAQ and its value had been trending downwards since the
company merged with Inflection Point Acquisition Corp. and then went public in
2023. The company’s stock spiked after rumors emerged of some sort of
collaboration with SpaceX, but almost immediately tanked. Stockholders were no
doubt urging a successful launch as soon as possible in order to boost share
values. In that regard, the mission was a success. The value of the company more
than doubled in the lead-up to the launch and remains about 50 percent higher
than it was at the beginning of the month, despite sharp falloffs after the
company reported the poor landing.

That is not to say that the Apollo or Luna projects were themselves flawless.
They suffered numerous setbacks, including the tragic loss of the Apollo 1
astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee in a fire during a
launch rehearsal. But they were genuinely new developments in humanity’s ability
to develop technology and scientific methods to understand the world in which we
live. The space race itself was started by the launch of Sputnik 1, a product of
the progressive impulse provided the conquest of power by the working class in
Russia in October 1917, led by the Bolsheviks, and Sputnik was achieved in spite
of the subsequent Stalinist degeneration of the Soviet Union.

Now, space flight is either subordinated wholly to militarism, private profit,
or both. That so many companies are taking part is not a reflection of the
strength of American capitalism, but of its terminal decline. Space travel is an
inherently international endeavor, requiring infrastructure around the world to
be successful. It cannot be done in any truly progressive manner on the basis of
rival corporations, no matter how much money a figure like Elon Musk may have.

This was again proven by the explosion of the Astrobotic Technology lander in
January shortly after its launch, the crash of the Japanese company ispace’s
lunar lander in 2023, and the crash of Beresheet in 2019, a lunar lander
developed privately by the Israeli company SpaceIL. And because the
International Space Station is incapable of turning a profit, it is slated to be
de-orbited and destroyed by 2030.

The drive by American capitalism to assert dominance in all aspects of
geopolitics, which increasingly includes outer space, also plays a major role.
Since the 1970s, Japan and India, professed allies of the US, and China, one of
the main targets of imperialism, have all landed on the Moon. China launched its
own space station, the Tiangong, in 2021, and several other countries have
launched their own communications (and spy) satellites and sent missions to
Mars. And if another country can send rockets to the Moon or Mars, so the
thinking of think tanks and military minds goes, they can launch those same
rockets at the US.

Real mastery of space travel will only be achieved when the resources of Earth
are marshalled in a globally planned and scientifically coordinated manner.
Capitalism has demonstrated time and time again it is incapable of doing this to
deal with terrestrial problems—war, pandemics, climate change, social
inequality—and it is no surprise that spaceflight is increasingly difficult.
Like all the challenges facing modern humans, the issues are fundamentally
political and will only be resolved when socialism finally buries capitalism.

…………………………..

One Hour of Communist Music – The Moon (1:00:22 min) Audio Mp3
| Tagged moon, nasa, news, science, space


BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE — THE COMPLICATED LIFE IN A MOVIE – REVIEW – 26 FEB 2024

Posted on February 26, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | 2 Comments

Jamaican Robert Nesta Marley (1945-1981) was one of the most gifted and
appealing musicians of the 1970s. This outstanding singer and songwriter did
much to popularise and develop reggae, taking it in new directions for a global
audience. Young people everywhere responded to his anti-establishment and
rebellious music. He was a popular music star at a time when such figures still
meant something substantial to masses of people.

Bob Marley’s continued popularity is reflected in the size of the audiences
flocking to see Reinaldo Marcus Green’s biopic Bob Marley: One Love, despite
almost universal criticism of its airbrushed superficiality.

At the end of Green’s film, we are told that Marley’s songs have become beacons
for the oppressed everywhere. This deserves attention, but the necessary
reflection on the contradictions in Marley’s life and work this involves is not
forthcoming.

Bob Marley–One Love

Marley lived through a period of intense political turmoil. His musical career
began as Jamaica was establishing its independence from British imperialism in
1962, and he achieved prominence and fame during a period of global
revolutionary upsurge beginning in 1968 and into the mid-1970s.

Marley, like others of his generation, was shaped by this political environment
in his response to the political and social oppression he stood against. Reggae
voiced opposition to repression in a spiritual form that shackled and limited
even its finest exponents, like Marley.

Green focuses on the period between 1976, when Marley left Jamaica following a
politically motivated attempt on his life, and his return two years later,
having recorded his masterpiece album Exodus in London. The songs
from Exodus are at the core of the soundtrack, but Marley’s whole catalogue is
significant.

This was a period of extreme political violence in Jamaica. The leading
parliamentary parties—the People’s National Party (PNP) led by Michael Manley,
in power since 1972, and the Jamaican Labour Party (JLP), which had ruled after
independence—were both bankrolling criminal gangs as muscle.

The PNP advanced a left-nationalist programme of reforms for what Manley called
“our own model of socialism which must grow out of the application of basic
principles to the special nature of Jamaican society.”

While orienting towards the Soviet Union and Cuba, Manley also appealed to US
imperialism and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for economic support, at
the expense of the island’s poor. His vague anti-imperialist rhetoric, however,
won popular support against the right-wing JLP, which was more openly identified
with US imperialism. Many Third World and non-aligned nations tried to play both
sides off against each other in the Cold War to get some advantage for
themselves.

Under Jamaica’s first Prime Minister Alexander Bustamante, the JLP fomented
political violence against any protest. The JLP’s head in the 1970s, Edward
Seaga, commonly dubbed “CIAga,” was prominent in Bustamante’s campaigns. In
1965, Seaga told a PNP crowd, “We can deal with you in any way at any time. It
will be fire for fire and blood for blood.”

As Manley flirted with Castroism, the CIA armed the JLP and doubled its presence
on the island. More than 100 people were killed in the run-up to the 1976
election.

In the absence of an articulated political response to this crisis, popular
opposition to the brutality found its outlet in music and spirituality. In a
distorted form, reggae music and Rastafari/Rastafarianism both spoke to popular
discontent. There were no organized working class defense guards.

Rastafari is a religious and social movement that emerged in the 1930s,
influenced by the black nationalism of Marcus Garvey. Rastafari idolised Haile
Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia between 1930 and 1974, as the returned messiah and
god incarnate. On a religious basis it espoused unity of people and rejected
earthly governments (Babylon) as oppression. Notwithstanding this idealist,
individualist form, Rastafari provided an outlet for anti-imperialist sentiment
before independence and against government oppression afterwards.

In a pattern familiar across anti-colonial movements, such criticism became a
threat to the newly independent national political class and capitalists, and
Rastas were targeted and victimized after independence. In 1963, Bustamante told
the police and army to “Bring in all Rastas, dead or alive,” resulting in more
than 150 detentions and an unknown number of deaths. Early in the film, we see
traffic police pulling over Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir), a prominent Rasta. He is
only released because of his high profile.

Rastafari contributed to the development of reggae as a fusion of older Jamaican
music styles with soul. Bob Marley and the Wailers’ first album (1965) was a ska
release that included “One Love,” incorporating Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get
Ready.” “One Love” was later reworked on Exodus in the now internationally
famous reggae version.

Reggae became a popular expression of hopes for peace and an end to political
violence. By 1976, both the PNP and JLP were trying to exploit this, which is
where Green opens his film. Marley, already a star, was due to play “Smile
Jamaica,” an ostensibly “non-political” peace concert in 1976 increasingly
linked to Manley’s PNP.

Green shows Marley coming under pressure over it. His wife Rita (Lashana Lynch)
wants him to cancel because of the violence. Some Rastafarians see it as a
concession to “Babylon.” Others suggest it could be interpreted as support for
Manley.

Kingsley Ben-Adir in Bob Marley–One Love

The violence here is described, even shown, but there is a disconnect between
this and the musical response. Marley is presented as an otherworldly figure
striving for peace. The film offers only a rather vapid presentation of his
religious perspective for achieving this that does not bear scrutiny.

It sidesteps the real contradictions, offering a sanitised view of a world in
conflict and responses to it. Rita tells Bob later, “You swim in pollution, you
get polluted.” But a Rastafarian aloofness from Babylon gets us no closer to
understanding anything.

Marley’s “Natural Mystic,” central here, sums this up. Apocalyptic about
conditions, it anticipates even worse (“Many more will have to die”), but
counters this with “a natural mystic blowing through the air / If you listen
carefully now you will hear”), all while remaining compellingly listenable and
danceable. 

The film’s weakest moments are all but a beginner’s guide to Rastafari. Rita
introduces the young Bob to Rastas who discuss “the prophet Marcus Garvey.” A
repeated dream image of a horseman rescuing the child Bob from a burning field
is finally revealed as Selassie himself. The lyrics of arguably his finest
track, “Redemption Song,” reflect its inspiration in the writings of the
unprincipled opportunist Garvey.

Gunmen attacked Marley’s home ahead of Smile Jamaica. Rita only survived a shot
to the head because her dreadlocks slowed the bullet’s impact. Marley’s manager
Don Taylor (Anthony Welsh) was so seriously injured he required airlifting to
Miami. The wounded Marley played Smile Jamaica, then left Jamaica to recover
from the trauma.

He decamped to London for two years in late 1976, where he began work on what
would become his masterpiece, Exodus, which became a massive hit in the UK
staying in the album charts for more than a year and spawning several hit
singles. London was socially and politically volatile—riots in the street prompt
the comment, “This reminds me of Trench Town neighborhood in the Kingston,
Jamaica area”—but Green does not get beneath the surface of these conflicts.



Nor can he get any deeper into relations between this social crisis and musical
responses to it. We see Marley at a Clash gig as they play “White Riot,” an
appeal for a reaction against oppression. Hearing Marley’s new songwriting, Rita
says: “You sound like you’re vexed.”

Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley and his wife Beverley with US President
Jimmy Carter in 1977.

Marley began to develop his sound, taking on the guitarist Junior Marvin, who
was raised as a child in Britain and played some of his career in the US. Marley
encountered several different musical influences, as when Aston “Family Man”
Barrett plays him the soundtrack to the 1960 film Exodus. Yet the primary
driving force behind that soundtrack’s influence is the referencing of the
biblical Exodus cited in a Hollywood movie depicting a Zionist account of the
foundation of the Jewish State of Israel. Marley’s totally uncritical response
to such issues is given voice in the song “Exodus,” with the line “Movement of
Jah people.” 

Marvin and Barrett are played by their sons (David Marvin Kerr Jr and Aston
Barrett Jr). Like the Marley family’s backing of this film, this is touching but
signals that Marley’s depiction as an icon is assured.

It is no criticism of Ben-Adir to note that Marley was more complex than painted
here. Green offers perfunctory indications of this complexity, confined within a
framework of saintly justness. Only in the electrifying archive footage during
the end credits do we get a better sense of Marley’s intensity and power as an
artist.

Marley always wanted to tour Africa. This is presented as a clash between his
pan-African idealism and cynical financial corruption. When Chris Blackwell
(James Norton), owner of Island Records, tells him there is no infrastructure in
Africa, Marley says, “Then we build it.” Marley physically attacks Taylor for
instead lining his own pockets from African backhanders. When Marley finally did
play in Africa, as the end credits note, it was for a 1980 gig celebrating the
end of colonial rule in Zimbabwe.

Marley considers a unity gig in Jamaica to end the political violence, saying,
“I’m in it because of a cause.” The 1978 One Love Peace Concert came about
because gang leaders Bucky Marshall (PNP) and Claudie Massop (JLP) hoped it
might quell the violence.

Green reinforces the myth of the concert, with its iconic image of Marley
between Manley and Seaga as they shook hands. Rita tells Marley his struggle is
the source of his power and that sometimes the messenger has to become the
message. By this point we already know about the rare skin cancer that would
kill him at just the age of 36, so this is the consolidation of a mythic hero.

The real concert was more interesting and less conclusive. Former Wailer Peter
Tosh spent half his set berating Manley and Seaga about conditions in Jamaica.
Footage of the handshake (in the end credits) reveals the leaders’ cynical
calculation. Far from achieving peace, the concert saw an escalation of
violence. Massop and Marshall were both killed in 1979, while the next election
year (1980) saw 889 murders. Jamaican parties continued to fund murderous gangs.

Marley’s music deserves a serious appreciation, but that requires an equally
serious assessment of the world that created it.

……………………

| Tagged bob-marley, jamaica, kingsley-ben-adir, lashana-lynch, reggae


GERMANY: MAINSTREAM CALLS FOR NUCLEAR WEAPONS – 26 FEB 2024

Posted on February 26, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | 1 Comment
Der Spiegel cover of the 17 February 2024 issue

Former President Trump’s joke that he would not stop a Russian invasion of a
NATO country that refused to pay NATO level funding for ‘defense’ and weapons
was a bombastic off the cuff remark. But, Germans who seek rearmament used the
quip to beat the war drums. The supposed threat of a second Trump term is being
used by some in Germany for an campaign in favour of its own nuclear weapons.
Hardly a day goes by without a leading politician or a central media
organization calling for a German or European nuclear bomb.

The current issue of Germany’s highest-circulation news magazine Der
Spiegel shows a menacing-looking Trump on the cover. Trump is quoted saying, “I
wouldn’t protect you!” followed by the question, “Does Germany need the bomb
now?” The magazine’s unequivocal answer is yes.

Among other things, the authors are outraged that the “uproar was great” when
the Social Democrats’ lead candidate for the European elections, Katarina
Barley, “stated the obvious in the Berlin Tagesspiegel and called for
consideration of a European nuclear weapon.” The necessary “discussion about
building a European nuclear umbrella” should no longer be “dismissed as an
ornament” by the chancellor and his advisers.

In fact, the government has long been working behind the scenes on alternatives
to the US nuclear umbrella, in which Germany is involved through “nuclear
sharing.” Even though Scholz prefers to avoid any public debate, “Trump
scenarios are being played out in confidential meetings in the chancellery, the
foreign ministry and the defence ministry,” Der Spiegel reports. Confidential
talks are already taking place with the “nuclear powers Britain and France.”
Also at the instigation of the Chancellery.”

In his speech at the Munich Security Conference, Scholz also spoke indirectly
about the transformation of the EU into a nuclear power. “More than ever, we
need to ensure that our deterrence fulfils modern requirements,” he said. In its
first National Security Strategy, which was adopted last summer, Germany had
therefore decided, among other things, to promote “the development and
introduction of future capabilities such as stand-off precision weapons.”
Discussions were currently underway with France and the UK. Obviously, the aim
was to equip these “stand-off precision weapons” with nuclear warheads.

The aggressive media campaign serves to advance these plans and prepare the
population for a much more comprehensive rearmament campaign, including the
nuclear bomb.

In an editorial, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung editor Berthold Kohler warned
that Trump’s return to the White House “would also have consequences for Europe
that we don’t want to imagine but must.” And he added provocatively, “Imagining
alone is not enough, of course. Germany must finally prepare itself resolutely
for the fact that the backbone of its security against military attacks and
political blackmail could break away.”

Ramstein Air Base, Germany

One of the largest military bases in the world is the US military base at
Ramstein, Germany. One might ask if that base with massive armaments is
considered any kind of deterrence to a Russian invasion. Or doesn’t that fit the
narrative of poor little unarmed Deutschland.

US Ramstein Air Base, Germany

“Prepare itself resolutely” means nuclear armaments. The Scholz government
should “no longer bury its head in the sand and hope that the Trump nightmare
will be over when it pulls it out again.” The Europeans must “massively rearm
conventionally without any further delay,” but “also have nuclear forces that
can restore the balance of terror in Europe, which is being disrupted by America
in a way that Moscow had never dared to hope.”

Significantly, the former pacifists of the Green Party are among the most
aggressive nuclear warmongers. Former Green foreign minister Joschka Fischer,
who initiated the first German combat mission since the Second World War during
his time in office, called for “our own nuclear deterrent” in Die Zeit back in
December. Last week, the taz newspaper, which is close to the Greens, followed
up with a commentary under the headline “Yes to the nuclear bomb.” In it,
business editor Ulrike Herrmann cynically praises nuclear weapons as
“paradoxical weapons” that are needed “to prevent a nuclear war.”

The Green Party’s in-house newspaper taz calls for nuclear weapons

This turns reality on its head. In fact, with the constant escalation of the
proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which they themselves provoked, the leading
NATO powers—including Germany—are not only accepting an all-destructive nuclear
third world war but are actively preparing for it. The most senior Luftwaffe
officer (Air Force) General Ingo Gerhartz threatened Russia with the use of
nuclear weapons back in June 2022. “For a credible deterrent, we need both the
means and the political will to implement nuclear deterrence, if necessary,” he
said.

General Ingo Gerhartz

A double interview recently conducted by the Süddeutsche Zeitung with the noted
political scientists Carlo Masala and Herfried Münkler gives a particularly
drastic impression of the idea of Germany fighting Russia. In it, the two
pro-war professors out-do each other with calls for nuclear armament and
possible nuclear strikes against Russia. “Nuclear weapons no longer prevent
conventional war, they are a way of expanding it,” said Münkler. Germany needed
to find “a different response to this than simply shying away from it.”

Masala calls for a return “to the principle of ‘massive retaliation’” and “to
the old NATO maxim of responding to every attack with a major nuclear
counter-attack.” The basic issue was “that we have to organize defense so
quickly and hard that Russia cannot exploit its advantages,” he said. What was
needed were “deep strike capabilities,” that is, “the ability to immediately
attack strategically relevant targets in Russia with medium-range missiles or
conventionally equipped intercontinental missiles.”

This is nothing less than a plea for a third nuclear world war. Russian military
doctrine authorizes the use of nuclear weapons to defend Russia and Russian
populations. Leading Russian politicians have repeatedly threatened to respond
with nuclear strikes in the event of a full-scale NATO attack. Neither Münkler
nor Masala and the other warmongers in official politics and the media have ever
explained what their scenario is and how many millions of lives they are
prepared to sacrifice. The fact is that a nuclear war with Russia would not only
completely destroy Europe, but potentially turn the entire planet into a nuclear
desert.

Despite this danger, the government continues to escalate the conflict with
Russia. A motion passed in the Bundestag (federal parliament) on Thursday by the
government coalition parties calls for a further massive expansion of military
support for Ukraine with the declared aim of extending the war deep into the
Russian heartland. Although the Taurus cruise missiles long demanded by Ukraine
are not explicitly mentioned, there is no doubt that these are also on the
agenda.

According to the motion, the “delivery of additional long-range weapons systems
and ammunition is necessary to enable Ukraine to carry out targeted attacks on
strategically relevant targets far to the rear of the Russian aggressor in
accordance with international law and to further strengthen its land forces with
the delivery of armoured combat systems and protected vehicles.” In this
context, “an immediate replenishment should be initiated in the event of the
Bundeswehr’s disposal of armoured vehicles.”



Some say that as in the 1930s, the ruling political class is reacting to the
failure of the European Union to expand easily up to Russia’s border by
effectively taking over Ukraine by preparing a massive invasion of Russia to
break the country up and install a client government. The resulting
multi-national invasion of the USSR by a large coalition of countries led by
Germany failed miserably. The same confidence of simply getting over the border
with troops would cause the vast continental country of Russia to collapse was
expessed by Hitler who said, “Russia is a rotten shack, kick in the door and the
whole thing will collapse.” That did not happen. The Russians beat Germany and
the dozen other allied armies that invaded.

Some German’s tangible interests for military buildup and confrontation with
Russia are being articulated ever more clearly. One of the leading foreign
policy experts, Roderich Kiesewetter, (Christian Democrat, CDU) pointed out a
few weeks ago in broadcaster ARD’s programme Report from Berlin that a military
victory over Russia in Ukraine was “also an extremely economic question.”

“If Ukraine disintegrates, the follow-up costs will be much greater than if we
go in much stronger now,” he declared. “And if Europe wants to realise the
energy transition, it needs its own lithium deposits. The largest lithium
deposits in Europe are in the Donetsk-Luhansk region.”

| Tagged nato, nuclear, nuclear-weapons, russia, ukraine


UPS MASS LAYOFF: WHY THE TEAMSTERS SHOULD HAVE STRUCK UPS – BY EVE OTTENBERG –
23 FEB 2024

Posted on February 26, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Last summer, 340,000 Teamsters were ready to strike UPS, but the union settled
instead. One could argue it made a mistake. “We’ve changed the game,” the
Teamsters announced at the time, because they got some of the life-and-death
air-conditioning they demanded in UPS trucks, higher wages, more jobs, part-time
rewards, equal pay and a MLK Day holiday among other supposedly “great” wins.
But ah, what a difference six months makes. Because at the end of January, UPS
announced it would eliminate 12,000 full and part-time managerial jobs to help
get $1 billion in cost savings. Why? Because revenue shrank.

UPS hastened to assure the Teamsters that all was well: these luckless workers
were not in the union. Though a part-time manager probably doesn’t earn big
bucks, getting rid of 12,000 of them helps corporate savings add up. Indeed,
given the long-time, anti-union ploy of classifying as many workers as possible
as “management,” one wonders how many of these poor part-time managers really
should have been in the union. And one also wonders on whom the next round of
cuts will fall. Because clearly there will be one, maybe several.

This mass layoff was entirely predictable, bodes poorly for the future for
unionized workers, and should have been vigorously addressed and negotiated with
more than the sentence on separation of employment: “Upon discharge the Employer
shall pay all money due to the employee during the first (1st) payroll
department working day,” or that “No bargaining unit employee currently
performing work in the payroll department will be laid off or suffer a loss of
their current payroll type position as a result of this section.” Another
mention of circumstances that might involve a reduction of jobs is “If a
technological change creates new work that replaces, enhances or modifies
bargaining unit work, bargaining unit employees will perform that new or
modified work.” Also “Driver-facing sensors will not be used for any purpose
during any phase of a disciplinary process or be the sole basis for
disqualifying a driver during the thirty (30) day period.” Regarding employees
about to be fired, the contract says they should be kept on until their
grievance procedure is finished. It also states that workers who won’t cross a
picket line can’t be fired, specifies other instances in which they may not be
fired, and those – a positive drug test – in which they may and lays out methods
to increase hiring. These are the sorts of job termination and expansion issues
that the contract addresses in legalese. They are standard boilerplate and
indicate that the union did not specifically address mass job cuts. It probably
should have.

But Teamster general president Sean O’Brien was strike-averse and eager to cut a
deal. Even critical a/c in the trucks got short shrift, with only one third of
UPS vehicles to have it installed over the five-year agreement. What do the
drivers in the other two-thirds of the trucks do in sweltering summer heat? Hope
they don’t collapse and die of heat prostration, I guess, the way Estaban
Chavez, Jr. did in 2022, expiring in his truck from heat stroke. Meanwhile,
part-timers continue living out of their cars as they work multiple jobs,
because the two-tier wage structure was not ended.

So management got its cake and ate it too. First, with the contract it happily
shelled out to snag more flexibility with work schedules. Then, half a year
later, unhappy with having paid extra, it fires 12,000 “management” employees.
All while UPS ceo Carol Tome pulled down $27 million in 2022. With hindsight,
Teamster leadership looks a bit foolish, because rank and file workers were
ready to strike and that, not stellar union negotiating skills, is what won
employees some of their goals. As Truthout wrote July 26: “Any significant gains
won by the Teamsters against a reluctant employer will have come about because
rank-and-file workers showed the company they were prepared to strike.”

But worker solidarity was, not to put too fine a point on it, betrayed. “Many of
the younger radicals,” Joe Allen wrote in CounterPunch February 1, “that got
jobs on some of the most socially isolating shifts at Big Brown, were left
confused and in some cases very demoralized by their experience.” These were the
activists from Democratic Socialists of America, who had flocked to UPS, getting
hired there in expectation of a strike. To make matters worse, O’Brien very
publicly hobnobbed with Donald “Tax Cuts for the Rich” Trump at Mar-A-Lago and
met with other far-right politicos. Allen blames Teamsters for a Democratic
Union for “cleaning up O’Brien’s previous image as a thug, with the broad left
media, including Labor Notes, Jacobin and In These Times.”

UPS director of financial and strategy communications, Brian Hughes, was quoted
in the Louisville Courier Journal February 2 that this round of layoffs amounts
to “less than three percent of the UPS workforce and does not impact
union-represented roles.” The ceo, meanwhile, has pointed out that full-time
drivers earn $170,000 on average, thanks to the new contract. To repeat, though
UPS has not announced which jobs specifically will vanish, company brass was at
pains to emphasize that union workers are not affected. Translation: we’re
tossing employees into the unemployment line, but we don’t want the union to
notice.

And yet, the Courier Journal noted, “UPS reported nearly $2.5 billion in profit
for the fourth quarter, according to USA Today. However, the fourth-quarter 2023
consolidated revenues of $24. 9 billion were a 7.8 decrease from fourth quarter
revenue numbers in 2022.” Management can’t have that, oh no! Earnings must rise
each year, relative to the last, or else UPS will cut jobs to make up the
difference. “UPS is shooting for 2024 revenues in the range between
approximately $92 and $94.5 billion. However, these numbers would still fall far
short of the company’s historic 2022 earnings of $100.3 billion.” As Tome
announced back then, “Our results in 2022 demonstrate our strategy is working.”
So I guess one must conclude that if UPS doesn’t repeat its 2022 high this year,
and it probably won’t, more layoffs will come next year. Fun times.

In fact, future lay-offs are a near certainly, as UPS struggles to match its
2022 revenue bonanza. One wonders about union negotiations with regard to job
security, because that, as these latest firings show, is a big issue at UPS, a
company that ditches thousands of workers because its revenue fell short of $100
billion. True, the contract won “the creation of 75,000 new full-time Teamster
jobs at UPS and the fulfillment of 22,500 open positions,” according to the
Teamster’s press release on the contract, but nothing specifically appears to
address protections against job cuts. This is always a dicey contract demand,
because management doesn’t want to lose its grip on the absolute power to fire,
but if these 12,000 lay-offs are an omen, maybe the Teamsters should have
addressed it.

In these times, with companies more focused than ever on investor profits, stock
buybacks, top brass compensation and stock dividends, it is wise for unions to
be proactive about job security. Even if it means going out on strike. After
all, strikes work. Why else did the railroad industry turn to president Joe
“Phony Lunch Bucket” Biden to break a trainman strike, the focus of which for
workers was job conditions? Precarity is a job condition, like overwork or being
on call multiple days in a row. It is arguably the condition that enables all
other on-the-job abuses. Remember, Biden was only too happy to sweep all
workplace condition demands off the table for railroad employees. But he
couldn’t do so for UPS, because there’s no federal involvement in the company.
Turns out he didn’t need to, because the union decided not to press the issue.

Unions ignore precarity and working conditions at their peril. Teamsters head
O’Brien’s laser focus on pay to the exclusion, say, of getting a/c in ALL the
trucks speaks volumes about union leadership’s lack of touch with day-to-day
labor. If O’Brien had to drive an un-air-conditioned vehicle for days on end in
100-plus degree weather, air-conditioning would have been a non-negotiable
demand. If he lived in terror of losing his job, like some unfortunate part-time
“manager,” you can bet precarity would have been an issue too. A genuinely good
contract would have addressed these matters.

Meanwhile, over at the United Auto Workers, leader Shawn Fain led a successful
strike and guess what? Contrary to management predictions, the sky didn’t fall
in – even though one worker demand was the right to strike over plant closures
and one key achievement was saving jobs at a factory in Belvedere, Illinois,
previously slated for closure. This is a worthy union goal, and the UAW proved
it attainable. Maybe next time, after who knows how many rounds of layoffs, the
Teamsters will pursue it, too.

…………………..

Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Lizard
People. She can be reached at her website.

| Tagged labor, news, strike, unions, ups


TWO YEARS AFTER THE START OF THE SMO, THE WEST IS TOTALLY PARALYZED – BY PEPE
ESCOBAR – 24 FEB 2024

Posted on February 25, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,300 WORDS • 

Exactly two years ago this Saturday, on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin
announced the launching – and described the objectives – of a Special Military
Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. That was the inevitable follow-up to what happened
three days before, on February 21 – exactly 8 years after Maidan 2014 in Kiev –
when Putin officially recognized the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and
Lugansk.

During this – pregnant with meaning – short space of only three days, everyone
expected that the Russian Armed Forces would intervene, militarily, to end the
massive bombing and shelling that had been going on for three weeks across the
frontline – which even forced the Kremlin to evacuate populations at risk to
Russia. Russian intel had conclusive proof that the NATO-backed Kiev forces were
ready to execute an ethnic cleansing of Russophone Donbass.

February 24, 2022 was the day that changed 21st century geopolitics forever, in
several complex ways. Above all, it marked the beginning of a vicious, all-out
confrontation, “military-technical” as the Russians call it, between the Empire
of Chaos, Lies and Plunder, its easily pliable NATOstan vassals, and Russia –
with Ukraine as the battleground.

There is hardly any question Putin had calculated, before and during these three
fateful days, that his decisions would unleash the unbounded fury of the
collective West – complete with a tsunami of sanctions.

Ay, there’s the rub; it’s all about Sovereignty. And a true sovereign power
simply cannot live under permanent threats. It’s even feasible that Putin
had wanted (italics mine) Russia to get sanctioned to death. After all, Russia
is so naturally wealthy that without a serious challenge from abroad, the
temptation is enormous to live off its rents while importing what it could
easily produce.

Exceptionalists always gloated that Russia is “a gas station with nuclear
weapons”. That’s ridiculous. Oil and gas, in Russia, account for roughly 15% of
GDP, 30% of the government budget, and 45% of exports. Oil and gas add power to
the Russian economy – not a drag. Putin shaking Russia’s complacency generated a
gas station producing everything it needs, complete with unrivalled nuclear and
hypersonic weapons. Beat that.

Ukraine has “never been less than a nation”

Xavier Moreau is a French politico-strategic analyst based in Russia for 24
years now. Graduated from the prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy and with a
Sorbonne diploma, he hosts two shows on RT France.

His latest book, Ukraine: Pourquoi La Russie a Gagné (“Ukraine: Why Russia has
Won”), just out, is an essential manual for European audiences on the realities
of the war, not those childish fantasies concocted across the NATOstan sphere by
instant “experts” with less than zero combined arms military experience.

Moreau makes it very clear what every impartial, realist analyst was aware of
from the beginning: the devastating Russian military superiority, which would
condition the endgame. The problem, still, is how this endgame –
“demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine, as established by Moscow –
will be achieved.

What is already clear is that “demilitarization”, of Ukraine and NATO, is a
howling success that no new wunderwaffen – like F-16s – will be able to change.

Moreau perfectly understands how Ukraine, nearly 10 years after Maidan, is not a
nation; “and has never been less than a nation”. It’s a territory where
populations that everything separates are jumbled up. Moreover, it has been a –
“grotesque” – failed state ever since its independence. Moreau spends several
highly entertaining pages going through the corruption grotesquerie in Ukraine,
under a regime that “gets its ideological references simultaneously via admirers
of Stepan Bandera and Lady Gaga.”

None of the above, of course, is reported by oligarch-controlled European
mainstream media.

Watch out for Deng Xiao Putin

The book offers an extremely helpful analysis of those deranged Polish elites
who bear “a heavy responsibility in the strategic catastrophe that awaits
Washington and Brussels in Ukraine”. The Poles actually believed that Russia
would crumble from the inside, complete with a color revolution against Putin.
That barely qualifies as Brzezinski on crack.

Moreau shows how 2022 was the year when NATOstan, especially the Anglo-Saxons –
historically racist Russophobes – were self-convinced thar Russia would fold
because it is a “poor power”. Obviously, none of these luminaries understood how
Putin strengthened the Russian economy very much like Deng Xiaoping on the
Chinese economy. This “self-intoxication”, as Moreau qualifies it, did wonders
for the Kremlin.

By now it’s clear even for the deaf, dumb, and blind that the destruction of the
European economy has been a massive tactic, historic victory for the Hegemon –
as much as the blitzkrieg against the Russian economy has been an abysmal
failure.

All of the above brings us to the meeting of G20 Foreign Ministers this week in
Rio. That was not exactly a breakthrough. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov
made it very clear that the collective West at the G20 tried by all means to
“Ukrainize” the agenda – with less than zero success. They were outnumbered and
counterpunched by BRICS and Global South members.

At his press conference, Lavrov could not be more stark on the prospects of the
war of the collective West against Russia. These are the highlights:

 * Western countries categorically do not want serious dialogue on Ukraine.
 * There were no serious proposals from the United States to begin contacts with
   the Russian Federation on strategic stability; trust cannot be restored now
   while Russia is declared an enemy.
 * There were no contacts on the sidelines of the G20 with either Blinken or the
   British Foreign Secretary.
 * The Russian Federation will respond to new Western sanctions with practical
   actions that relate to the self-sufficient development of the Russian
   economy.
 * If Europe tries to restore ties with the Russian Federation, making it
   dependent on their whims, then such contacts are not needed.

In a nutshell – diplomatically: you are irrelevant, and we don’t care.

That was complementing Lavrov’s intervention during the summit, which defined
once again a clear, auspicious path towards multipolarity. Here are the
highlights:

 * The forming of a fair multipolar world order without a definite center and
   periphery has become much more intensive in the past few years. Asian,
   African and Latin American countries are becoming important parts of the
   global economy. Not infrequently, they are setting the tone and the dynamics.
 * Many Western economies, especially in Europe, are actually stagnating against
   this background. These statistics are from Western-supervised institutions –
   the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD.
 * These institutions are becoming relics from the past. Western domination is
   already affecting their ability to meet the requirements of the times.
   Meanwhile, it is perfectly obvious today that the current problems of
   humanity can only be resolved through a concerted effort and with due
   consideration for the interests of the Global South and, generally, all
   global economic realities.
 * Institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the EBRD, and the EIB are
   prioritizing Kiev’s military and other needs. The West allocated over $250
   billion to tide over its underling thus creating funding shortages in other
   parts of the world. Ukraine is taking up the bulk of the funds, relegating
   Africa and other regions of the Global South to rationing.
 * Countries that have discredited themselves by using unlawful acts ranging
   from unilateral sanctions and the seizure of sovereign assets and private
   property to blockades, embargoes, and discrimination against economic
   operators based on nationality to settle scores with their geopolitical
   opponents cannot be considered guarantors of financial stability.
 * Without a doubt, new institutions that focus on consensus and mutual benefit
   are needed to democratize the global economic governance system. Today, we
   are seeing positive dynamics for strengthening various alliances, including
   BRICS, the SCO, ASEAN, the African Union, LAS, CELAC, and the EAEU.
 * This year, Russia chairs BRICS, which saw several new members join it. We
   will do our best to reinforce the potential of this association and its ties
   with the G20.
 * Considering that 6 out of 15 UN Security Council members represent the
   Western bloc, we will support the expansion of this body solely through the
   accession of countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Call it the real state of things, geopolitically, two years after the start of
the SMO.

……………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation )

| Tagged geopolitics, politics, russia, ukraine, war


US WALL STREET AI FUELED MARKET FRENZY AND NVIDIA – HYPE AND OVERINVESTMENT? –
24 FEB 2024

Posted on February 25, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

The stock market surge, powered by the US chip designer Nvidia, which has sent
Wall Street and other markets, including Tokyo, to new record highs, expresses
some of the essential contradictions of the capitalist profit system.

A Nvidia office building in Santa Clara, Calif., May 31, 2023

There is no question that artificial intelligence (AI), for which Nvidia is the
main supplier of computer chips with about 80 percent of the market, is a
powerful development of the productive forces, laying the foundation for major
economic advances.

But at the same time, the market frenzy it has set off underscores the central
role which unproductive speculation and parasitism now plays as a driving force
of profit and wealth accumulation. The tens, even hundreds, of billions of
dollars being raked in by hedge funds, speculators and corporate CEOs on the
rise of its share price do not contain an atom of real value. They have only
added another storey to the house of cards which is the global financial system.

Nvidia started in 1993 as a chipmaker for computer video games producing graphic
producing units (GPUs) to run them. As the Financial Times reported: “Two years
ago, Nvidia made most of its money selling graphics cards. It was a household
name only to the most dedicated PC gamers.”

But it was discovered that its GPUs, which functioned somewhat differently from
other chips, enabling more rapid multiple calculations, had applications which
were necessary for the development of AI.

Its big break came at the end of 2022 when OpenAI made its ChatGPT tool publicly
available, and it became clear the enormous potential which AI had across the
board.

This led to a flood of investment in OpenAI because of the capacity of ChatGPT
to generate human-like language and to provide answers to a range of questions.

The major high-tech companies moved into the development of AI and became big
buyers of Nvidia’s chips while at the same time seeking to develop their own.

Last year saw a spectacular rise in the sales, profit and share price of Nvidia,
capped off by the announcement of its results for the fourth quarter released
last Wednesday.

It posted $22.1 billion in revenue, well above forecasts by analysts of $20.4
billion, with net profit coming in at $12.29 billion, compared to $1.49 billion
a year earlier. It forecast sales of around $24 billion for the current quarter
declaring the demand was not the issue but the ability of the company to meet
it.

The profit and revenue results were released after the market had closed for the
day, with Nvidia shares falling 2.9 percent in regular trading. But in
after-hours trading the stock price surged by 10 percent to hit $741 withing 30
minutes of its results being released. This was a surge of $250 billion market
value in less than a hour after the company’s shares had already tripled in
price over the past 12 months.

There have even been projections that its shares could go to $1,300 which would
transform Nvidia into a $3 trillion company. It is already surged past a market
valuation of $2 trillion and is now the world’s third most valuable company
after Apple and Microsoft.

In the wake of the Nvidia result, European markets rose with the Stoxx Europe
600 index reaching a record high. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index also hit a record
eclipsing the level it reached 34 years ago before the share market and real
estate bubble collapsed in the early 1990s.

The rise in Nvidia shares has been responsible for a quarter of the rise in the
benchmark S&P 500 index in the year to date. So great has been its influence
that some market analysts claimed that the release of its revenue and profit
figures was a more important event than the release of inflation data.

In the event, Wall Street ignored the release of minutes from the meeting of the
Federal Reserve which showed that members of its policymaking body were cautious
on a round of interest rate cuts on which it has been banking.

As is always the case when what is regarded as the “next big thing” arrives
there were plenty of boosters on hand with Nvidia founder and chief executive
Jensen Huang occupying first place.

“Accelerated computing and generative AI have hit the tipping point. Demand is
surging worldwide across companies, industries and nations,” he said.

In a call with investors, he said Nvidia had enabled “a whole new computing
paradigm called generative AI.” Nvidia’s chips were “essentially AI-generation
factories” of the new industrial revolution.

The trading desk at Goldman Sachs chimed in calling the company “the most
important stock on planet earth.”

Last week Huang’s personal wealth jumped by $9.6 billion in a single day. As
recently as last year Nvidia’s market value was $13.5 billion, Now it is over $2
trillion.

Soaring Nvidia shares have boosted the wealth of the 30 billionaires who appear
on Bloomberg’s wealth list and attribute some of their wealth to AI by a
combined total of $42.8 billion.

Two small companies connected to Nvidia, Nano-X Imaging and SoundHound AI also
jumped after Nvidia detailed its connection with them. Nano-X shares doubled
while those of SoundHound AI increased by 69 percent. Someone was either “in the
know” or made an educated guess.

Large amounts of money were made following a massive increase in short-term call
options on Nano-X that would only pay if there was a sharp rally. And there was,
with the result that a contracted trade that sold for just $0.04 on Monday rose
by almost 16,000 percent.

Hedge funds have been among the major beneficiaries. Arrow Street Capital,
according to the FT, bought almost four million Nvidia shares in the fourth
quarter of last year, lifting the value of its holdings to $2.1 billion and
stood to make a profit of $1 billion so far this year.

The Bridgewater hedge fund stood to make $65 million so far this year after
quadrupling its holdings of Nvidia stock and the gains on the stocks held by the
hedge fund Renaissance Technologies are likely to come in at more than $375
million.

Amid the hype surrounding AI and Nvidia, recalling that of the dotcom bubble at
the beginning of this century, some cautionary notes are being sounded.

FT columnist John Thornhill commented that it could well be the case that
“investors are getting way ahead of themselves in their enthusiasm for
AI-related hardware companies. … There is overcapacity in several segments of
the notoriously cyclical semiconductor industry. There is geopolitical risk
associated with China, one of the world’s biggest chip markets, which is being
squeezed by US export restrictions. A salutary market correction is probably
heading our way.”

Thornhill referred to an article by fellow FT journalist June Yoon in which she
recalled the telecoms bust at the beginning of the 2000.

“The biggest risk of throwing too much cash, too fast, at AI chips is
overcapacity,” she wrote. “That is already a problem for older-generation chips.
With the current sector downturn lasting longer than expected, Samsung had to
slash production last year to deal with a deepening chip glut.”

She concluded that broader adoption of AI may take time, “longer than today’s
stock prices and funding expectations suggest” and that “hype and overinvestment
are a dangerous combination.”

For all the billions being generated on the stock market, none of this
represents real value. AI certainly contains the prospect of real advances. But
it is being developed in the world of deepening recessionary trends where the
only “growth” areas are financial speculation and military budgets.

Under these conditions, the marker frenzy is not a sign of health but is rather
creating the conditions for a crisis. The contradiction between the
possibilities of AI and the feverish speculation it has produced, recalls the
analysis that an era of social revolution is ushered in by the conflict between
the growth of the productive forces and the social relations in which they are
encased.

| Tagged ai, business, nvidia, stock-market, technology


GLOBAL LABOR UNION ACTION TO STOP THE ISRAELI WAR MACHINE – BLOCK ARMS SHIPMENTS
– 24 FEB 2024

Posted on February 24, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Last October 18, 2023, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions
(PGFTU) issued an urgent appeal notably “calling on trade unions in relevant
industries: 1) To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel. 2) To refuse to
transport weapons to Israel. 3) To pass motions in their trade union to this
effect,” as well as to take action against companies complicit with the Israeli
siege, to pressure governments to stop military trade with Israel “and, in the
case of the U.S., stop funding it.”



In response, on October 30, five Belgian transport unions issued a joint
statement saying they were refusing to load or unload arms shipments heading to
the war zone. And on November 6, the Barcelona dock workers union announced it
would “not permit activity in our port of ships containing war materiel,” while
calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

In Britain, Canada and elsewhere unions have passed motions and there have been
protests outside Israeli companies, notably the “defense” contractor Elbit. In
Italy, rank-and-file dock unions in Genoa and other ports actually stopped
operations with Israeli ships and held a national one-day strike against the war
on Gaza on November 17 that shut down hundreds of warehouses in logistics hubs.
In Sydney, the Maritime Union of Australia (MUA) joined protests against Israeli
ZIM Lines ships and has called for an immediate ceasefire. In January, the
20-million-member International Transport Workers’ Federation (ITF) issued a
statement, “Global Unions Call for Unified Action Following IJC Ruling on Gaza
Genocide Case.” Sounds good, but there is no call for labor action, just an
appeal to the U.N. and “world leaders.”

In the United States, beginning in October the United Electrical Workers (UE)
circulated a petition to other unions with demands for a ceasefire and
restoration of food, fuel, water and electricity to Gaza, demands that were
taken up by the United Auto Workers (UAW), American Postal Workers Union (APWU),
National Nurses Union (NNU), Service Employees (SEIU), Painters (IUPAT), Flight
Attendants (AFA) and even the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National
Education Association (NEA). But these appeals were not opposed to Israel’s war
on Gaza as such, and in the case of the UAW specifically were rendered moot by
its endorsement of warmonger Democrat Biden, who has emphatically backed and
enabled the Israeli slaughter, for president. The rest of the liberal union
leaders will certainly follow suit.

As for the national AFL-CIO, after first quashing a ceasefire call by a local
labor council in Washington State last October, on February 8, 2024, it issued a
statement that begins by “condemn[ing] the attacks by Hamas,” does not oppose
the Israeli assault on Gaza, and calls for the release of Israeli hostages held
in Gaza but not for freeing the more than 8,000 Palestinians held hostage in
Israeli prisons. In short, this is a pro-war statement – but what else can you
expect from the outfit whose international “labor” operations in conjunction
with U.S. intelligence agencies earned it the nickname “AFL-CIA” in much of the
world?

The International Dockworkers Council (IDC), which in 2014 and 2021 issued sharp
denunciations of Israeli massacres in Gaza, has said nothing about the genocide
currently under way. The only recent “action” by the IDC, now headed by Dennis
Daggett (son of ILA president Harold Daggett), was a statement in November
against “any kind of war or confrontation” that didn’t even mention Gaza, and a
January visit to Pope Francis in the Vatican, where likewise no mention of Gaza
was reported.

(Dennis Daggett – International Dockworkers Council Head)

In contrast to the complicit silence of the ILA and ILWU leaders in the U.S.,
the Canadian section of the ILWU on December 20 issued a brief statement calling
for a ceasefire in Gaza and expressing “solidarity with the Palestine General
Federation of Trade Unions.” It did not, however, call for any specific action,
such as boycotting war materiel. Not coincidentally, the week before, the
Canadian government voted for a ceasefire resolution in the United Nations. In
January, Canadian ILA Locals 273 (St. John, New Brunswick) and 1953 (St. John’s,
Newfoundland) took a stand for a ceasefire in Gaza. The reality is that almost
all trade-union leaderships are part of a privileged labor bureaucracy that is
ultimately beholden to the capitalist-imperialist rulers. Occasionally some may
break ranks, particularly when they as well as the workers organizations they
lead are under attack. But mostly that will reflect divisions in the ruling
class, as with “antiwar” Democrats over Vietnam.

……………….

https://archive.ph/PePDL

| Tagged ceasefire, gaza, human-rights, israel, palestine


ASSANGE FINAL APPEAL – YOUR MAN IN THE PUBLIC GALLERY – BY CRAIG MURRAY – 21
FEB 2024

Posted on February 22, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Reporting on Julian Assange’s extradition hearings has become a vocation that
has now stretched over five years. From the very first hearing, when Justice
Snow called Assange “a narcissist” before Julian had said anything whatsoever
other than to confirm his name, to the last, when Judge Swift had simply in 2.5
pages of glib double-spaced A4 dismissed a tightly worded 152-page appeal from
some of the best lawyers on earth, it has been a travesty and charade marked by
undisguised institutional hostility.

We were now on last orders in the last chance saloon, as we waited outside the
Royal Courts of Justice for the appeal for a right of final appeal.

The architecture of the Royal Courts of Justice was the great last gasp of the
Gothic revival; having exhausted the exuberance that gave us the beauty of St
Pancras Station and the Palace of Westminster, the movement played out its
dreary last efforts at whimsy in shades of gray and brown, valuing scale over
proportion and mistaking massive for medieval. As intended, the buildings are a
manifestation of the power of the state; as not intended, they are also an
indication of the stupidity of large scale power.

Court number 5 had been allocated for this hearing. It is one of the smallest
courts in the building. Its largest dimension is its height. It is very high,
and lit by heavy mock medieval chandeliers hung by long cast iron chains from a
ceiling so high you can’t really see it. You expect Robin Hood to suddenly leap
from the gallery and swing across on the chandelier above you. The room is very
gloomy; the murky dusk hovers menacingly above the lights like a miasma of
despair, below them you peer through the weak light to make out the
participants.

A huge tiered walnut dais occupies half the room, with the judges seated at its
apex, their clerks at the next level down, and lower lateral wings reaching out,
at one side housing journalists and at the other a huge dock for the prisoner or
prisoners, with a massy iron cage that looks left over from a production of The
Hunchback of Notre Dame.

This is in fact the most modern part of the construction; caging defendants in
medieval style is in fact a Blair era introduction to the so-called process of
law.

Rather incongruously, the clerks’ tier was replete with computer hardware, with
one of the two clerks operating behind three different computer monitors and
various bulky desktop computers, with heavy cables twisting in all directions
like sea kraits making love. The computer system seems to bring the court into
the 1980’s, and the clerk behind it looked uncannily like a member of a
synthesiser group of that era, right down to the upwards pointing haircut.

In period keeping, this computer feed to an overflow room did not really work,
which led to a number of halts in proceedings.

All the walls are lined with high bookcases housing thousands of leather bound
volumes of old cases. The stone floor peeks out for one yard between the
judicial dais and the storied wooden pews, with six tiers of increasingly narrow
seating. The barristers occupied the first tier and their instructing solicitors
the second, with their respective clients on the third. Up to ten people per
line could squeeze in, with no barriers on the bench between opposing parties,
so the Assange family was squashed up against the CIA, State Department and UK
Home Office representatives.

That left three tiers for media and public, about thirty people. There was
however a wooden gallery above which housed perhaps twenty more. With little
fuss and with genuine helpfulness and politeness, the court staff – who from the
Clerk of Court down were magnificent – had sorted out the hundreds of those
trying to get in, and we had the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, we had 16
Members of the European Parliament, we had MPs from several states, we had NGOs
including Reporter Without Borders, we had the Haldane Society of Socialist
Lawyers, and we had, (checks notes) me, all inside the Court.

I should say this was achieved despite the extreme of official unhelpfulness
from the Ministry of Justice, who had refused official admission and recognition
to all of the above, including the United Nations. It was pulled together by the
police, court staff and the magnificent Assange volunteers led by Jamie. I
should also acknowledge Jim, who with others spared me the queue all night in
the street I had undertaken at the International Court of Justice, by
volunteering to do it for me.

This sketch captures the tiny non-judicial portion of the court brilliantly.
Paranoid and irrational regulations prevent publications of photos or
screenshots.

Twitter

The acoustics of the court are simply terrible. We are all behind the barristers
as they stood addressing the judges, and their voices were at the same time
muffled yet echoing from the bare stone walls.

I did not enter with a great deal of hope. As I have explained in How the
Establishment Functions, judges do not have to be told what decision is expected
by the Establishment. They inhabit the same social milieu as ministers, belong
to the same institutions, attend the same schools, go to the same functions. The
United States’ appeal against the original blocking of Assange’s extradition was
granted by a Lord Chief Justice who is the former room-mate, and still best
friend, of the minister who organised the removal of Julian from the Ecuadorean
Embassy.

The blocking of Assange’s appeal was done by Judge Swift, a judge who used to
represent the security services, and said they were his favourite clients. In
the subsequent Graham Phillips case, where Mr Phillips was suing the Foreign
Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) for sanctions being imposed upon him
without any legal case made against him, Swift actually met FCDO officials – one
of the parties to the case – and discussed matters relating to it privately with
them before giving judgment. He did not tell the defence he had done this. They
found out, and Swift was forced to recuse himself.

Personally I am surprised Swift is not in jail, let alone still a High Court
judge. But then what do I know of justice?

The Establishment politico-legal nexus was on even more flagrant display today.
Presiding was Dame Victoria Sharp, whose brother Richard had arranged an
£800,000 loan for then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and immediately been
appointed Chairman of the BBC, (the UK’s state propaganda organ). Assisting her
was Justice Jeremy Johnson, another former barrister representing MI6.

By an amazing coincidence, Justice Johnson had been brought in seamlessly to
replace his fellow ex-MI6 hiree Justice Swift and find for the FCDO in the
Graham Phillips case!

And here these two were now to judge Julian!

What a lovely, cosy club is the Establishment! How ordered and predictable! We
must bow down in awe at its majesty and near divine operation. Or go to jail.

Well, Julian is in jail, and we stood ready for his final shot for an appeal. We
all stood up and Dame Victoria took her place. In the murky permanent twilight
of the courtroom, her face was illuminated from below by the comparatively
bright light of a computer monitor. It gave her a grey, spectral appearance, and
the texture and colour of her hair merged into the judicial wig seamlessly. She
seems to hover over us as a disturbingly ethereal presence.

Her colleague, Justice Johnson, for some reason was positioned as far to her
right as physically possible. When they wished to confer he had to get up and
walk. The lighting arrangements did not appear to cater for his presence at all,
and at times he merged into the wall behind him.

Dame Victoria opened by stating that the court had given Julian permission to
attend in person or to follow on video, but he was too unwell to do either.
After that disturbing news, Edward Fitzgerald KC rose to open the case for the
defence to be allowed an appeal.

There is a crumpled magnificence about Mr Fitzgerald. He speaks with great
authority and a moral certainty that compels belief. At the same time he appears
so large and well-meaning, so absent of vanity or pretence, that it is like
watching Paddington Bear in a legal gown. He is a walking caricature of Edward
Fitzgerald. Barrister’s wigs have tight rolls of horsehair stuck to a mesh that
stretches over the head. In Mr Fitzgerald’s case, the mesh has to be stretched
so far to cover his enormous brain, that the rolls are pulled apart, and dot his
head like hair curlers on a landlady.

Fitzgerald opened with a brief headline summary of what the defence would argue,
in identifying legal errors by Judge Swift and Magistrate Baraitser, that meant
an appeal was viable and should be heard.

Firstly, extradition for a political offence was explicitly excluded under the
UK/US Extradition Treaty which was the basis for the proposed extradition. The
charge of espionage was a pure political offence, recognised as such by all
legal authorities, and Wikileaks’ publications had been to a political end, and
even resulted in political change, so were protected speech.

Baraitser and Swift were wrong to argue that the Extradition Treaty was not
incorporated in UK domestic law and therefore “not justiciable”, because
extradition against its terms engaged Article V of the European Convention on
Human Rights on Abuse of Process and Article X on Freedom of Speech.

The Wikileaks revelations had revealed serious state illegality by the
government of the United States, up to and including war crimes. It was
therefore protected speech.

Article III and Article VII of the ECHR were also engaged because in 2010
Assange could not possibly have predicted a prosecution under the Espionage Act,
as this had never been done before despite a long history in the USA of
reporters publishing classified information in national security journalism. The
“offence” was therefore unforeseeable. Assange was being “Prosecuted for
engaging in the normal journalistic practice of obtaining and publishing
classified information”.

The possible punishment in the United States was entirely disproportionate, with
a total possible jail sentence of 175 years for those “offences” charged so far.

Assange faced discrimination on grounds of nationality, which would make
extradition unlawful. US authorities had declared he would not be entitled to
First Amendment protection in the United States because he is not a US citizen.

There was no guarantee further charges would not be brought more serious than
those which had already been laid, in particular with regard to the Vault 7
publication of CIA secret technological spying techniques. In this regard, the
United States had not provided assurances the death penalty could not be
invoked.

The CIA had made plans to kidnap, drug and even to kill Mr Assange. This had
been made plain by the testimony of Protected Witness 2 and confirmed by the
extensive Yahoo News publication. Therefore Assange would be delivered to
authorities who could not be trusted not to take extrajudicial action against
him.

Finally, the Home Secretary had failed to take into account all these due
factors in approving the extradition.

Fitzgerald then moved into the unfolding of each of these arguments, opening
with the fact that the US/UK Extradition Treaty specifically excludes
extradition for political offences, at Article IV.



Fitzgerald said that espionage was the “quintessential” political offence,
acknowledged as such in every textbook and precedent. The court did have
jurisdiction over this point because ignoring the provisions of the treaty
rendered the court liable to accusations of abuse of process. He noticed that
neither Swift nor Baraitser had made any judgment on whether or not the offences
charged were political, relying on the argument the treaty did not apply anyway.

But the entire extradition depended on the treaty. It was made under the treaty.
“You cannot rely on the treaty, and then refute it”.

This point brought the first overt reaction from the judges, as they looked at
each other to wordlessly communicate what they had made of it. It was a point of
which they had felt the force.

Fitzgerald continued that when the 2003 Extradition Act, on which the Treaty
depended, had been presented to Parliament, ministers had assured parliament
that people would not be extradited for political offences. Baraitser and Swift
had said that the 2003 Act had deliberately not had a clause forbidding
extradition for political offences. Fitzgerald said you could not draw that
inference from an absence. There was nothing in the text permitting extradition
for political offences. It was silent on the point.

Nothing in the Act precluded the court from determining that an extradition
contrary to the terms of the treaty under which the extradition was taking
place, would be a breach of process. In the United States, there had been cases
where extradition to the UK under the treaty had been prevented by the courts
because of the ‘no political extradition’ clause. That must apply at both ends.

Of the UK’s 158 extradition treaties, 156 contained a ban on extradition for
political offences. This was plainly systematic and entrenched policy. It could
not be meaningless in all these treaties. Furthermore this was the opposite of a
novel argument. There were a great many authoritative cases, stretching back
centuries, in the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, Australia and many other countries in
which no political extradition was firmly established jurisprudence. It could
not suddenly be “not justiciable”.

It was not only justiciable, it had been very extensively adjudicated.

All of the offences charged were as “espionage” except for one. That “hacking”
charge, of helping Chelsea Manning in receiving classified documents, even if it
were true, was plainly a similar allegation of a form of espionage activity.

The indictment describes Wikileaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence agency”.
That was plainly an accusation of espionage. This is self-evidently a
politically motivated prosecution for a political offence.

Julian Assange is a person in political conflict with the view of the United
States, who seeks to affect the policies and operations of the US government.

Section 87 of the Extradition Act 2003 provides that a court must interpret it
in the light of the defendant’s human rights as enshrined in the European
Convention of Human Rights. This definitely brings in the jurisdiction of the
court. It means all the issues raised must be viewed through the prism of the
ECHR and from not other angle.



To depend on the treaty yet ignore its terms is abuse of process and contrary to
the ECHR. The obligation in UK law to respect the terms of the extradition
treaty with the USA while administering an extradition under it, was comparable
to the obligation courts had found to follw the Modern Slavery Convention and
Refugee Convention.

Mark Summers KC then arose to continue the case for Assange. A dark and
pugnacious character, he could be well cast as Heathcliff. Summers is as blunt
and direct as Fitzgerald is courteous. His points are not so much hammered home,
as piledriven.

This persecution, Summers began, was “intended to prohibit and punish the
exposure of state level crime”. The extradition hearing had heard unchallenged
evidence of this from many witnesses. The speech in question was thus protected
speech. This extradition was not only contrary to the US/UK Extradition Treaty
of 2007, it was also plainly contrary to Section 81 of the Extradition Act of
2003.



This prosecution was motivated by a desire to punish and suppress political
opinion, contrary to the Act. It could be shown plainly to be a political
prosecution. It had not been brought until years after the proposed offence; the
initiation of the charges had been motivated by the International Criminal Court
stating that they were usking the Wikileaks publications as evidence of war
crimes. That had been immedately followed by US government denunciation of
Wikileaks and Assange, by the designation as a non-state hostile intelligence
acency, and even by the official plot to kidnap, poison, rendition or
assassinate Assange. That had all been sanctioned by President Trump.

This prosecution therefore plainly bore all of the hallmarks of political
persecution.

The magistrates’ court had head unchallenged evidence that the Wikileaks
material from Chelsea Manning contained evidence of assassination, rendition,
torture, dark prisons and drone killings by the United States. The leaked
material had in fact been relied on with success in legal actions in many
foreign courts and in Strasbourg itself.

The disclsures were political because the avowed intention was to affect
political change. Indeed they had caused political change, for example in the
Rules of Engagement for forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and in ending drone
killings in Pakistan. Assange had been highly politically acclaimed at the time
of the publications. He had been invtied to address both the EU and the UN.

The US government had made no response to any of the extensive evidence of
United States state level criminality given in the hearing. Yet Judge Baraitser
had totally ignored all of it in her ruling. She had not referred to United
States criminality at all.

At this point Judge Sharp interrupted to ask where they would find references to
these acts of criminality in the evidence, and Summers gave some very terse
pointers, through clenched teeth.

Summers continued that in law it is axiomatic that the exposure of state level
criminality is a political act. This was protected speech. There were an
enormous number of cases across many jurisdictions which indicate this. The
criminality presented in this appeal was tolerated and even approved by the very
highest levels of the United States government. Publication of this evidence by
mr Assange, absent any financial motive for him to do so, was the very
definition of a political act. He was involved, beyond dispute, in opposition to
the machinery of government of the United States.

This extradition had to be barred under Section 81 of the Extradition Act
because its entire purpose was to silence those political opinions. Again, there
were numerous cases on record of how courts should deal under the European
Convention with states reacting to people who had revealed official criminality.
in the judgment being appealed Judge Baraitser did not address the protected
nature of soeech exposing state criminality at all. That was plainly an error in
law.

Baraitser had also been in error of fact in stating that it was “Purely
conjecture and speculation” that the revelation of US war crimes had led to the
prosecution. This ignored almost all of the evidence before the court.

The court had been given evidence of United States interference with judicial
procedure over US war crimes in Spain, Poland, Germany and Italy. The United
States had insultated its own officials from ICC jurisdiction. It had actively
threatened both the institutions and employees of the ICC and of boides of other
states. All of this had been explained in detail in expert evidence and had been
unchallenged. All of it had been ignored by Baraitser.

Following the publication of the Manning material, there had been six years of
non-prosecution of Assange. WHy was there a prosecution after six years? What
had changed?

Following the declaration by the International Criminal COurt that it would use
Wikileaks material to investigate US government officials for war crimes, US
officials described Assange as “a political actor”. This period saw the origin
of the phrase “non state hostile intelligence agency”. Assange had been accused
of “working with Russia” and “trying to take down the USA”.

Baraitser had acknowledged hostility from the CIA but stated that “the CIA does
not speak on behalf of the US administration”.

It was important to note that it was after the Baraitser judgment that Yahoo
News had published its investigation into the US government plot against
Assange.



The court had heard of CIA action against Assange from Protected Witness No.2,
but that had only gone to unlawful surveillance at the Ecuadorean Embassy and
elsewhere. He did not know of the kidnap and kill plot. This was very real, and
it was chilling. Indeed, the prosecution and extradition request was only
initiated in order to provide a framework for the rendition attempt.



Political persecution was also apparent in the highly selective prosecution of
the appellant. Numerous newspapers had also published the exact same
information, as had other websites. Yet only Assange was being
prosecuted.Baraitser had simply ignored numerous facts which were key to the
case, and therefore her judgment was plainly wrong.

The European Court of Human Rights had ruled that, under Article 7 of the
Convention, a prosecution must be forseeable, for the act committed to be
criminal. This prosecution failed the forseeability test because no journalist
had ever before been prosecuted under the US Espionage Act. Baraitser was
obliged to rule on this but instead had simply said it would be a matter for the
US court.

Publication of leaks was routine. National security journalism is a thing. It
was a well established aspect of the profession in the USA. Encouraging those in
possession of classified material to reveal it is routine journalistic practice.
Whistleblowers had been frequently published. But no publisher or journalist had
ever been prosecuted for obtaining or publishing classified state material.

Baraitser had heard much unchallenged evidence on this point. A prosecution
which has never happened before is not forseeable.

At this point, Judge Johnson intervened to ask whether the publication of so
many unredacted names of informants had not also been unprecedented, and this
may have been expected to trigger an unprecedented response?

Summers replied there had been other examples of publication of names. At this
point, the court broke up for lunch.

It had been a strong start to the case by the defence. The judges had appeared
to pay increasing attention as the case went on, and at times seemed surprised
by some of the assertions made. The first substantive question, coming just on
the lunch break, was however plainly intended to be hostile to Assange.

I am publishing this update at this stage. We are a quarter of the way in. I
shall be continuing to write.

……………………

Source

| Tagged assange, julian-assange, news, politics, wikileaks


UK: JULIAN ASSANGE’S FINAL APPEAL – BY CHRIS HEDGES – 18 FEB 2024

Posted on February 20, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 2,600 WORDS •



Julian Assange will make his final appeal this week to the British courts to
avoid extradition. If he is extradited it is the death of investigations into
the inner workings of power by the press.

LONDON — If Julian Assange is denied permission to appeal his extradition to the
United States before a panel of two judges at the High Court in London this
week, he will have no recourse left within the British legal system. His lawyers
can ask the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for a stay of
execution under Rule 39, which is given in “exceptional circumstances” and “only
where there is an imminent risk of irreparable harm.” But it is far from certain
that the British court will agree. It may order Julian’s immediate extradition
prior to a Rule 39 instruction or may decide to ignore a request from the ECtHR
to allow Julian to have his case heard by the court.

The nearly 15-year-long persecution of Julian, which has taken a heavy toll on
his physical and psychological health, is done in the name of extradition to the
U.S. where he would stand trial for allegedly violating 17 counts of the 1917
Espionage Act, with a potential sentence of 170 years.

Julian’s “crime” is that he published classified documents, internal messages,
reports and videos from the U.S. government and U.S. military in 2010, which
were provided by U.S. army whistleblower Chelsea Manning. This vast trove of
material revealed massacres of civilians, torture, assassinations, the list of
detainees held at Guantanamo Bay and the conditions they were subjected to, as
well as the Rules of Engagement in Iraq. Those who perpetrated these crimes —
including the U.S. helicopter pilots who gunned down two Reuters journalists and
10 other civilians and severely injured two children, all captured in
the Collateral Murder video — have never been prosecuted.

Julian exposed what the U.S. empire seeks to airbrush out of history.

Julian’s persecution is an ominous message to the rest of us. Defy the U.S.
imperium, expose its crimes, and no matter who you are, no matter what country
you come from, no matter where you live, you will be hunted down and brought to
the U.S. to spend the rest of your life in one of the harshest prison systems on
earth. If Julian is found guilty it will mean the death of investigative
journalism into the inner workings of state power. To possess, much less
publish, classified material — as I did when I was a reporter for The New York
Times — will be criminalized. And that is the point, one understood by The New
York Times, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País and The Guardian, who issued a joint
letter calling on the U.S. to drop the charges against him.

Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and other federal lawmakers voted on
Thursday for the United States and Britain to end Julian’s incarceration, noting
that it stemmed from him “doing his job as a journalist” to reveal “evidence of
misconduct by the U.S.”

The legal case against Julian, which I have covered from the beginning and will
cover again in London this week, has a bizarre Alice-in-Wonderland quality,
where judges and lawyers speak in solemn tones about law and justice while
making a mockery of the most basic tenants of civil liberties and jurisprudence.

How can hearings go forward when the Spanish security firm at the Ecuadorian
Embassy, UC Global, where Julian sought refuge for seven
years, provided videotaped surveillance of meetings between Julian and his
lawyers to the CIA, eviscerating attorney-client privilege? This alone should
have seen the case thrown out of court.

How can the Ecuadorian government led by Lenin Moreno violate international law
by rescinding Julian’s asylum status and permit London Metropolitan Police into
the Ecuadorian Embassy — sovereign territory of Ecuador — to carry Julian to a
waiting police van?

Why did the courts accept the prosecution’s charge that Julian is not a
legitimate journalist?

Why did the United States and Britain ignore Article 4 of their Extradition
Treaty that prohibits extradition for political offenses?

How is the case against Julian allowed to go ahead after the key witness for the
United States, Sigurdur Thordarson – a convicted fraudster and pedophile
– admitted to fabricating the accusations he made against Julian?

How can Julian, an Australian citizen, be charged under the U.S. Espionage Act
when he did not engage in espionage and wasn’t based in the U.S when he received
the leaked documents?

Why are the British courts permitting Julian to be extradited to the U.S. when
the CIA — in addition to putting Julian under 24-hour video and digital
surveillance while in the Ecuadorian Embassy — considered kidnapping and
assassinating him, plans that included a potential shoot-out on the streets of
London with involvement by the Metropolitan Police?

How can Julian be condemned as a publisher when he did not, as Daniel Ellsberg
did, obtain and leak the classified documents he published?

Why is the U.S. government not charging the publisher of The New York Times or
The Guardian with espionage for publishing the same leaked material in
partnership with WikiLeaks?

Why is Julian being held in isolation in a high-security prison without trial
for nearly five years when his only technical violation of the law is breaching
bail conditions when he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy? Normally this
would entail a fine.

Why was he denied bail after he was sent to HM Prison Belmarsh?

If Julian is extradited, his judicial lynching will get worse. His defense will
be stymied by U.S. anti-terrorism laws, including the Espionage Act and Special
Administrative Measures (SAMs). He will continue being blocked from speaking to
the public — except on a rare occasion — and being released on bail. He will be
tried in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia where most
espionage cases have been won by the U.S. government. That the jury pool
is largely drawn from those who work for or have friends and relatives who work
for the CIA, and other national security agencies that are headquartered not far
from the court, no doubt contributes to this string of court decisions.

The British courts, from the inception, have made the case notoriously difficult
to cover, severely limiting seats in the courtroom, providing video links that
have been faulty, and in the case of the hearing this week, prohibiting anyone
outside of England and Wales, including journalists who had previously covered
the hearings, from accessing a link to what are supposed to be public
proceedings.

As usual, we are not informed about schedules or timetables. Will the court
render a decision at the end of the two-day hearing on Feb. 20 and Feb. 21? Or
will it wait weeks, even months, to render a ruling as it has previously? Will
it permit the ECtHR to hear the case or immediately railroad Julian to the U.S.?
I have my doubts about the High Court passing the case to the ECtHR, given that
the parliamentary arm of the Council of Europe, which created the ECtHR, along
with their Commissioner for Human Rights, oppose Julian’s “detention,
extradition and prosecution” because it represents “a dangerous precedent for
journalists.” Will the court honor Julian’s request to be present in the
hearing, or will he be forced to remain in the high-security HM Prison Belmarsh
in Thamesmead, south east London, as has also happened before? No one is able to
tell us.

Julian was saved from extradition in January 2021 when District Judge Vanessa
Baraitser at Westminster Magistrates’ Court refused to authorize the extradition
request. In her 132-page ruling, she found that there was a “substantial risk”
Julian would commit suicide due to the severity of the conditions he would
endure in the U.S. prison system. But this was a slim thread. The judge accepted
all the charges leveled by the U.S. against Julian as being filed in good faith.
She rejected the arguments that his case was politically motivated, that he
would not get a fair trial in the U.S. and that his prosecution is an assault on
the freedom of the press.

Baraitser’s decision was overturned after the U.S. government appealed to the
High Court in London. Although the High Court accepted Baraitser’s conclusions
about Julian’s “substantial risk” of suicide if he was subjected to certain
conditions within a U.S. prison, it also accepted four assurances in U.S.
Diplomatic Note no. 74, given to the court in February 2021, which promised
Julian would be treated well.

The U.S. government claimed in the diplomatic note that its assurances “entirely
answer the concerns which caused the judge [in the lower court] to discharge Mr.
Assange.” The “assurances” state that Julian will not be subject to SAMs. They
promise that Julian, an Australian citizen, can serve his sentence in Australia
if the Australian government requests his extradition. They promise he will
receive adequate clinical and psychological care. They promise that, pre-trial
and post-trial, Julian will not be held in the Administrative Maximum Facility
(ADX) in Florence, Colorado.

It sounds reassuring. But it is part of the cynical judicial pantomime that
characterizes Julian’s persecution.

No one is held pre-trial in ADX Florence. ADX Florence is also not the only
supermax prison in the U.S. where Julian can be imprisoned. He could be placed
in one of our other Guantanamo-like facilities in a Communications Management
Unit (CMU). CMUs are highly restrictive units that replicate the near total
isolation imposed by SAMs. The “assurances” are not legally binding. All come
with escape clauses.

Should Julian do “something subsequent to the offering of these assurances that
meets the tests for the imposition of SAMs or designation to ADX” he will, the
court conceded, be subject to these harsher forms of control. If Australia does
not request a transfer it “cannot be a cause for criticism of the USA, or a
reason for regarding the assurances as inadequate to meet the judge’s concerns,”
the ruling reads. And even if that were not the case, it would take Julian 10 to
15 years to appeal his sentence up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which would be
more than enough time to destroy him psychologically and physically. Amnesty
International said the “assurances are not worth the paper they are written on.”

Julian’s lawyers will attempt to convince two High Court judges to grant him
permission to appeal a number of the arguments against extradition which Judge
Baraitser dismissed in January 2021. His lawyers, if the appeal is granted, will
argue that prosecuting Julian for his journalistic activity represents a “grave
violation” of his right to free speech; that Julian is being prosecuted for his
political opinions, something which the U.K.-U.S. extradition treaty does not
allow; that Julian is charged with “pure political offenses” and the U.K.-U.S.
extradition treaty prohibits extradition under such circumstances; that Julian
should not be extradited to face prosecution where the Espionage Act “is being
extended in an unprecedented and unforeseeable way”; that the charges could be
amended resulting in Julian facing the death penalty; and that Julian will not
receive a fair trial in the U.S. They are also asking for the right to introduce
new evidence about CIA plans to kidnap and assassinate Julian.

If the High Court grants Julian permission to appeal, a further hearing will be
scheduled during which time he will argue his appeal grounds. If the High Court
refuses to grant Julian permission to appeal, the only option left is to appeal
to the ECtHR. If he is unable to take his case to the ECtHR he will be
extradiated to the U.S.

The decision to seek Julian’s extradition, contemplated by Barack Obama’s
administration, was pursued by Donald Trump’s administration following
WikiLeaks’ publication of the documents known as Vault 7, which exposed the
CIA’s cyberwarfare programs, including those designed to monitor and take
control of cars, smart TVs, web browsers and the operating systems of most smart
phones.

The Democratic Party leadership became as bloodthirsty as the Republicans
following WikiLeaks’ publishing of tens of thousands of emails belonging to the
Democratic National Committee (DNC) and senior Democratic officials, including
those of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman during the 2016
presidential election.

The Podesta emails exposed that Clinton and other members of Obama’s
administration knew that Saudi Arabia and Qatar — which had both donated
millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation — were major funders of the
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. They revealed transcripts of three private
talks Clinton gave to Goldman Sachs — for which she was paid $675,000 — a sum so
large it can only be considered a bribe. Clinton was seen in the emails telling
the financial elites that she wanted “open trade and open borders” and believed
Wall Street executives were best positioned to manage the economy, a statement
that contradicted her campaign promises of financial reform. They exposed the
Clinton campaign’s self-described “Pied Piper” strategy which used their press
contacts to influence Republican primaries by “elevating” what they called “more
extreme candidates,” to ensure Trump or Ted Cruz won their party’s nomination.
They exposed Clinton’s advance knowledge of questions in a primary debate. The
emails also exposed Clinton as one of the architects of the war and destruction
of Libya, a war she believed would burnish her credentials as a presidential
candidate.

Journalists can argue that this information, like the war logs, should have
remained secret. But if they do, they can’t call themselves journalists.

The Democratic leadership, which attempted to blame Russia for its election loss
to Trump — in what became known as Russiagate — charged that the Podesta emails
and the DNC leaks were obtained by Russian government hackers, although
an investigation headed by Robert Mueller, the former FBI director, “did not
develop sufficient admissible evidence that WikiLeaks knew of — or even was
willfully blind to” any alleged hacking by the Russian state.

Julian is persecuted because he provided the public with the most important
information about U.S. government crimes and mendacity since the release of the
Pentagon Papers. Like all great journalists, he was nonpartisan. His target was
power.

He made public the killing of nearly 700 civilians who had approached too
closely to U.S. convoys and checkpoints, including pregnant women, the blind and
deaf, and at least 30 children.

He made public the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians and the
torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 to 89, at Guantánamo
Bay detention camp.

He showed us that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered U.S. diplomats to spy on U.N.
Secretary General Ban Ki-moon and other U.N. representatives from China, France,
Russia, and the U.K., spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans,
fingerprints, and personal passwords.

He exposed that Obama, Hillary Clinton and the CIA backed the June 2009 military
coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically-elected president Manuel
Zelaya, replacing him with a murderous and corrupt military regime.

He revealed that the United States secretly launched missile, bomb and drone
attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians.

No other contemporary journalist has come close to matching his revelations.

Julian is the first. We are next.

………………………..

(Republished from Scheerpost)

| Tagged assange, julian-assange, news, press-freedom, wikileaks


“JAMES P. CANNON AND THE EMERGENCE OF U.S. TROTSKYISM” (BRYAN D. PALMER)(33:07
MIN) VIDEO

Posted on February 19, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




BRYAN D. PALMER ON HIS NEW BOOK, JAMES P. CANNON AND THE EMERGENCE OF TROTSKYISM
– BY CHAD PEARSON – 21 DEC 2022

Posted on February 19, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Chad Pearson recently interviewed Bryan Palmer about this new book,  James P.
Cannon and the Emergence of Trotskyism in the United States, 1928-1938 (Leiden
and Boston: Brill 2020; Chicago: Haymarket, 2021).

Why did you write this book?

There are many levels on which one could answer such a question. At the most
basic, somewhat apolitical, level, it is a question of curiosity about an
intriguing life. Cannon, who has not really been studied in depth for reasons we
will likely get into in later questions, is a fascinating figure on the left.
Born in the heartland of the United States, in an industrial suburb of Kansas
City, Kansas, Jim Cannon was the son of Irish immigrants, the mother a devout
Catholic, the father an Irish Republican with an attachment to the cause of
labor reform and Debsian socialism. How did someone raised as an altar boy end
up as a hobo agitator for the Industrial Workers of the World, a leading figure
in the Communist Party, USA, and founder of American Trotskyism?

James Cannon. Credit: Socialist Workers Party, Pathfinder Press

Another level is historiographic: the writing on American communism has long
been one of oppositional camps. Followers of Theodore Draper (with Harvey Klehr
and John Haynes being his most prolific subsequent counterparts), known as
traditionalists, have written studies of American communism that stress that it
was a “foreign import,” imposed on the United States and its class struggles by
the Comintern, which exercised an ironclad “Moscow domination.” A more New
Left-inspirited school tilts against this interpretive orientation. These
so-called revisionists stress instead that United States communists, while
advocates of the Soviet Union and the Revolution of 1917, were also leading
activists in the struggles against racism, unemployment, and exploitation,
battling for industrial unions and civil rights. Of course, both sides tell us
important things about the Communist Party in the United States. But in their
oppositional stands they manage to each miss an important dimension of the
communist experience.

Both sides wrestle with the issue of the Stalinization of the Bolshevik
Revolution, the Communist International, and its affiliated national parties.
They do so, however, quite differently. Traditionalists insist that Stalinism
was an outgrowth of Leninism and reflected merely the authoritarianism of Soviet
communism. Revisionists tend to regard Stalinism as a tragic flaw in a Communist
project that American revolutionaries aligned with the national section of the
Comintern managed to bypass in their struggles against capitalism.

Diego Rivera Mural features Cannon with Trotsky in the Center and Cannon on
lower right, just below Karl Marx. Credit: Prometheus Research Library

Cannon steps outside of these analytic schools, throwing a spanner into the
interpretive works. If, as traditionalists argue, American communists were
simply willing workers in Moscow’s Soviet cause, how could one of their leading
figures, a native son, to boot, embrace wholeheartedly the Revolution of 1917,
learn from architects of Bolshevism like Lenin, Zinoviev, and Trotsky, and then
reject the Stalinist leadership and turn away from the degeneration of
revolutionary internationalism that was expressed in the Comintern with its
Stalinization in the 1925-1929 years. And, if the history of American communism
needs to be written, as revisionists so often suggest, as the chronicle of
heroic struggles, often forged locally and outside of Communist Party obeisance
to Moscow, how could someone as central to American communism as Jim Cannon
manage to continue those struggles and the original commitments of 1917, but
place so much stress on the necessity of winning United States communists and
their Party back to their original purposes, going so far as to break from
longstanding friendships and attachments to the International founded by Lenin
but reconfigured by Stalin. Was it really possible for the secondary cadre of
the Communist Party, USA, and its rank-and-file to express their allegiance to
the Comintern, and to Stalin, and not take into their day-to-day activities some
of what we know was a politics of a problematic nature?

So writing about Cannon offers an alternative to an historiographic impasse, one
that in some ways reduces Communism in the United States to an either/or
expression of foreign domination or progressive struggle. This bifurcation
ultimately fails to deal with Stalinization and a dissident communist opposition
to it.

Cannon, to me was “the red thread of continuity” that links the revolutionary
workers upheavals associated with the Industrial Workers of the World and the
attraction of the Russian Revolution and the Marxism it espoused to native
American radicals and immigrant workers alike, with the struggle for socialism
in the world’s most powerful nation.

Ultimately more is at stake than curiosity or historiography. The real reason to
write this book, which of course encompasses the above issues as well, is that
Cannon, to me was “the red thread of continuity” that links the revolutionary
workers upheavals associated with the Industrial Workers of the World and the
attraction of the Russian Revolution and the Marxism it espoused to native
American radicals and immigrant workers alike, with the struggle for socialism
in the world’s most powerful nation. Cannon’s political project, nothing less
than the building of socialism in America, is what ultimately drew me to write
this book. It explores Cannon’s role in the tumultuous decade of the 1930s,
which witnessed Trotskyism’s emergence in the United States, an under-studied
and unheralded political achievement, in which the Left Opposition of the early
1930s became the largest and most successful international section of a
Trotskyist movement struggling to resuscitate world revolution. This entailed
opposing the Stalinizing fixation on freezing revolutionary struggle in the
cul-de-sac of the program of ‘socialism in one country’. Cannon is thus a vital
red thread of continuity in the international, and American, revolutionary
tradition.

You write that Cannon has “hardly been embraced by the students of the American
labor and revolutionary movements” (46). Why do you think this is the case?

There has always been an interest in Cannon, of course, with his writings
published by the Trotskyist movement. And Draper considered Cannon an exemplary
source on the early history of communism, relying on interviews with Cannon in
his two-volume history of the origins of the American movement, insisting that
for Cannon the cause of revolutionary communism remained alive into his later
years in the 1950s, and this meant that he, above all of those Draper
interviewed, was able to provide insights and tell the truth about the movement.
Still, interest in Cannon in academic circles has been relatively muted, and up
to the publication of my first volume in 2007 the best account of American
Trotskyism and its leading figure remained that of a literary scholar of the New
York intellectuals, Alan Wald’s 1987 book. Constance Ashton Myers’ The Prophet’s
Army: Trotskyists in America, 1928-1941 (1977) was weakly researched and, at its
worst, condescendingly dismissive about Cannon, indeed about the anti-Stalinist
left. There were important essays on Trotskyism, written by advocates such as
Wald, Paul LeBlanc, and George Breitman, of which this trio’s 1996 edited
volume, Trotskyism in the United States: Historical Essays and
Reconsiderations, is undoubtedly the best example, but such writings were no
substitute for an archivally-based, fully-researched treatment, one that put
Cannon as the preeminent leader of the movement at its center.

Most labor historians were simply uninterested in Cannon, largely because the
Trotskyist organizations he led, compared to the Communist Party, were always
quite small. They did not register in the same way that the Communists did in
terms of overall impact and involvement in major mobilizations. The CP, its
membership, and large activist periphery, were especially visible in the union
campaigns that gave rise to the Congress of Industrial Organizations and major
anti-racist struggles, such as the protests against the legal lynching of the
Scottsboro Boys. Trotskyists, for much of the 1930s, were fighting a rearguard
battle to win the Communist Party back to its revolutionary principles, and few
labor historians seemed interested in this, preferring to chronicle the epic
struggles of organizing campaigns, strikes, and movements for social justice in
which the larger CP was immersed.

“How ironic that New Leftists, dedicated to building an alternative politics in
their 1960s practice, turned their historical inquiries into American labor and
the left in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, back to the Stalinized Communist Party
that they in good part rejected politically.”

In addition, I cannot help but think that age-old bigotries, in which
Trotskyists were caricatured as “splitters and wreckers,” influenced many New
Left historians drawn to the study of labor; they simply did not think that the
kind of history they wanted to write, and in which Communists clearly were both
active participants and willing subsequent sources, had much of a place for
Trotskyists, with whom they may have crossed contentious paths in the days of
student radicalism and the anti-war movement of the 1960s. So Cannon and the
movement he invested his life in building tended to languish. How ironic that
New Leftists, dedicated to building an alternative politics in their 1960s
practice, turned their historical inquiries into American labor and the left in
the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, back to the Stalinized Communist Party that they in
good part rejected politically. In their oral histories, for instance, they
tended to venerate Communist Party members, and rarely, if ever, questioned
their adherence to the Stalinized Comintern, its policy zig-zags from the Third
Period to the Popular Front to the Hitler-Stalin Pact. The ridiculousness of the
allegations about Trotskyism being a Fifth Column for Hitler and aligned,
conspiratorially, with capitalism, that were the stock in trade of the Moscow
Trials, went largely unchallenged by many historians of labor and the left. Much
more could be said. The point is that Cannon was indeed a marginal figure in the
proliferating texts of histories of workers and revolutionaries that appeared in
the late 20th century and into the 21st.

You offer a very critical analysis of the American Communist Party. After
producing a rich introduction, you treat us to many examples of CP attacks on
Trotskyists. Why should labor historians care about this factionalism?

I do indeed offer a critical analysis of the American Communist Party. I
believe, deeply, that the Stalinization of the Communist International and its
various national sections, including that of the United States, has much to
atone for, souring socialism in the mouths of millions, as this process of
political degeneration has done globally. From the 1920s abandonment of Chinese
revolutionaries to the murderous outcomes of the Moscow Trials inside the Soviet
Union and the deadly consequences of sectarian Stalinism in the Spanish Civil
War to the disastrous policies that led to the evisceration of the powerful
Indonesian Communist Party in the 1960s, the record is a terrible one. This had
its impact in the United States, and included the active role of the United
States Communist Party in the imprisonment of Trotskyists like Cannon under the
Smith Act in the war hysteria of the 1940s.

If I am insistent on this record being called out for what it was – which was a
shameful repudiation of revolutionary solidarity – I do also recognize that in
parties like the CP, USA militants could and did do wonderful work in organizing
the unorganized, in fighting unemployment and racism, and in mobilizing workers
to resist capital and the state. I make this clear in what I have written, not
only in my studies of Cannon, but also in other publications.

The Militant, published by the Communist League of Ameirca, was edited by James
P. Cannon and others. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

That said, yes, there were atrocities committed by both leaders and
rank-and-file members of the Communist Party, directed against their Trotskyist
counterparts. Trotskyists insisted on open debate, discussion among rival wings
of the revolutionary movement. They wanted a dialogue on policies followed by
the Comintern, and they demanded, as should all revolutionaries, that when
policies led to failures and worse, then those policies should be critically
examined. This was the basis on which Cannon, Max Shachtman, and Martin Abern
were originally expelled from the American Party in 1928, which sets the stage
on which my book develops. As these dissident communists organized followers
into a Communist League of America, Opposition (CLA) and published a
newspaper, The Militant, that sought to make clear to revolutionaries in the
United States how Trotsky’s critique of Comintern policies of the late 1920s, in
which Stalin was orchestrating a shift away from advocacy of world revolution to
the protection and entrenchment of Soviet power, to building “socialism in one
country” rather than extending revolution internationally, the discussion Cannon
and his allies wanted was shut down.

Trotskyists selling their newspaper were attacked, Trotskyists holding public
forums were heckled and physically assaulted, necessitating the organization of
labor defense guards (composed of Cannon’s former comrades in the IWW among
others) to defend the right of free speech in the movement. Furriers knives and
brass knuckles and lead pipes became weapons silencing Trotskyists. There was an
ugliness to this gangsterism and thuggery that was entirely new to the
revolutionary movement. In some ways it was the American equivalent to the
Moscow Trials that began in the Soviet Union in the early 1930s, and culminated
in the coerced confessions and murderous judicial execution of many old
Bolsheviks. The difference was that in Moscow, Stalinists had a state and its
power to effect their violence, while in the US Communists had only the capacity
of their members to terrorize political opponents on the revolutionary left.

This violence brought into the revolutionary left was new. It had often infected
trade unions, as revolutionaries were assailed by goons working on behalf of
degenerate officialdoms, but it had never, before the attacks by Communists on
Trotskyists in the late 1920s and early 1930s, been commonplace in gatherings of
the revolutionary left, where heated debates, even acrimonious, sectarian,
challenges were not uncommon, but where physical violence was virtually unheard
of.

> “My attention to the detail of this gangsterism on the part of the Communist
> Party, a thuggery orchestrated by CP leaders, but often carried out by
> secondary cadre and rank and file members, was purposeful. It is meant to
> challenge historians who have evaded this sordid history, even written
> articles suggesting the treatment of Trotskyists was rather benign, to look at
> what was done to revolutionary leftists whose active pursuit of tactical and
> strategic ways forward led to physical attacks on them as well as slanderous
> verbal denunciation.”

There are really two reasons labor historians should care about this, and they
are different, but related. First, labor historians who inevitably address the
left should care about the issue of factionalism, and many do, because it is an
expression of ideas and programmatic orientations on the left and that are being
implemented in the unions and social movements, because such ideas matter. They
are the substance that animates activism, and an activism that is not driven
forward by ideas, policies, and programs, is acutely compromised. So
factionalism, often scorned as divisive, matters. Not all factional disputes are
sectarian, and how one conducts a struggle to implement particular politics
inside a revolutionary organization or, indeed, inside a union or social
movement, is critical. This is where labor historians attentive to the violence
that was perpetrated on the nascent Trotskyist movement by the Communist Party
must draw a line, indicating that such resort to physical assault, premised on
the view that ideas cannot be discussed, demands repudiation. My attention to
the detail of this gangsterism on the part of the Communist Party, a thuggery
orchestrated by CP leaders, but often carried out by secondary cadre and rank
and file members, was purposeful. It is meant to challenge historians who have
evaded this sordid history, even written articles suggesting the treatment of
Trotskyists was rather benign, to look at what was done to revolutionary
leftists whose active pursuit of tactical and strategic ways forward led to
physical attacks on them as well as slanderous verbal denunciation. This needs
to be recognized, for any communist party that descends into this kind of a
response to engagement with its policies has clearly abandoned much that it
needs to recover.

One of the most important labor victories in the 1930s involved Trotskyists.
Here I’m talking about the Minneapolis Teamster strikes in 1934. How important
were Trotskyists to the success of these strikes?

I argue that of the four major strikes in 1933-1934 – a series of textile
strikes led by the CP in the South, the Toledo Auto-Lite Strike led by the
American Workers Party, the longshore conflict in San Francisco in which Harry
Bridges and the Communist Party were in the leadership, and the Minneapolis
Truckers’ strikes organized by Trotskyists in the CLA – it was the Minneapolis
strikes that were the most successful in securing for workers collective
bargaining rights and advances in their wages/conditions. The three strikes of
the International Brotherhood of Teamsters affiliated truckers in Minneapolis,
occurring in February, May, and July-August 1934 ultimately, after much
struggle, secured for the teamsters of the once proudly open shop city, union
affiliation and improved conditions. These were bloody confrontations in which
street battles led to the deaths of Citizen’s Alliance (an employers’ group)
supporters who were special deputies, and striking workers. The strikes
polarized the entire Minneapolis community, with tens of thousands of workers
and their supporters massed in the streets. At the end of the bitter struggle, a
union that was small and inhibited by its international leadership, who declared
an interest in organizing only those workers who actually drove trucks, and, as
a consequence could command an allegiance of less than 150 members, grew into a
broad industrial union that boasted a membership of 7,000. John L. Lewis looked
at the Minneapolis truckers and their willingness to battle reactionary bosses,
Citizen’s Alliance ideologues and their special deputies, cops, local
politicians, and a Farmer-Labor Party governor, Floyd Olson, and he realized it
was time to make a move inside the American Federation of Labor to break with
the so-called craft organization of workers and instead opt for a more inclusive
industrial organization.

Battle of Deputies Run, Minneapolis 1934

> “This Trotskyist leadership envisioned and built the infrastructure that would
> eventually carry the teamsters to an impressive victory. Their large and
> disciplined strike headquarters was run with military precision…“

Women engaged in the Battle of Deputies Run, 1934, Minneapolis.

This was, from the beginning, the approach of the Trotskyists who envisioned
organizing Minneapolis as a trucking hub, and who developed an extremely
efficient set of preparations for an unprecedented class struggle. It was a
nucleus of no more than a dozen members of the Trotskyist Communist League of
America, Opposition, led by the Dunne brothers and Karl Skoglund, who worked,
from 1928-1929 into 1933 to create the possibilities for the strikes. They had a
long-term commitment and, once workers were eventually won over to the necessity
of taking job action, they provided an exemplary blueprint for how to conduct a
strike. This Trotskyist leadership envisioned and built the infrastructure that
would eventually carry the teamsters to an impressive victory. Their large and
disciplined strike headquarters was run with military precision; a commissary
and a Women’s Auxiliary was established, feeding striking workers and extending
support for the confrontation with the bosses and their political supporters
throughout Minneapolis; a workers hospital inside the strike headquarters,
staffed by a doctor and nurses, was set up to care for the injured that the
Trotskyists knew would likely emerge from street clashes and picket-line
battles; a range of tactics were championed and developed, like the flying
pickets that closed down thoroughfares and blocked incoming and outgoing trucks
servicing a market center and 166 small trucking companies; and a daily
newspaper, The Organizer, was set up to challenge the local daily press, which
was a mouthpiece for the bosses. Trotskyists worked with already established,
reform oriented local truckers’ leaders, winning them away from allegiance to
the conservative hierarchy of the international union, led by one of the most
reactionary trade union bureaucrats of the 1930s, Dan Tobin, who did everything
he could to thwart the workers initiatives in 1934. These CLA leaders, long
ensconced in the coal yards and trucking industry, worked patiently for more
than a half a decade to bring the workers in this sector to the point they
trusted their Trotskyist leaders AND were willing to take job action. Such job
actions were always undertaken with the responsible commitment to achieving the
ends of the workers’ strikes, which Cannon and the CLA understood were not about
revolution, but about achieving collective bargaining rights. They adjusted to
situations, and they kept their focus on what could be achieved and what was
winnable in the particular, and changing, circumstances of 1934, which witnessed
three separate working-class walkouts.

Dobbs in undated photo. Credit: Marxist Internet Archive.

The Trotskyist leadership in Minneapolis, supported by the national, New
York-based leadership of the CLA, which staffed and created the workers’
newspaper and advised the strike leadership on how to approach the struggle and
carry it to a successful end, became a power within the mainstream Trades and
Labor Council, and eventually led the organization of the IBT in an eleven-state
campaign of over the road truckers that at least doubled the national membership
of Tobin’s IBT to almost 400,000 by 1940. Jimmy Hoffa later confessed that he
learned everything he knew about organizing truckers from Farrell Dobbs, a
Minneapolis teamster leader recruited to Trotskyism in the midst of the 1934
strikes. Minneapolis signaled that a few well-placed trade unionists, with a
revolutionary organization behind them, could guide workers in struggle to
previously unanticipated successes. In Minneapolis Trotskyists proved that their
small numbers were not an impediment to them making great gains.

This established, also, that other ostensibly revolutionary groups, like A.J.
Muste’s American Workers Party, should align with the Trotskyists to create a
larger, more effective group. The Minneapolis strikes, led by Trotskyists with a
protracted understanding of class struggle and a principled commitment to
advancing the cause of collective bargaining, put the CLA on the map. It was
global Trotskyism’s finest achievement in the trade unions, and would guide and
influence Leon Trotsky in his preparation of the document that would serve as a
founding statement of the Fourth International in 1938, a draft program known
colloquially as the Transitional Program.

Echoing a few others, you point out the limitations of Roosevelt’s labor
policies during the First New Deal, writing that “Roosevelt and Section 7A [of
the National Industrial Recovery Act] actually provided little of material
substance to workers battling to build unions, offering mostly rhetorical
promise to those struggling to secure collective bargaining rights” (316). Can
you talk a bit about how Canon and his colleagues viewed Roosevelt and the New
Deal programs?

Cannon played a decisive role in shoring up the local Minneapolis Trotskyists to
resist the temptation to succumb to the liberal rhetoric of massaging class
struggle. This was, of course, the approach of the Minnesota Farmer-Labor
Governor, Floyd Olson, as well, who, like Roosevelt, was quite adept at
proclaiming himself the friend of the workers. Yet both Olson and Roosevelt were
more interested in containing workers’ upheavals than promoting them. When push
came to shove, Olson was willing to call in the National Guard, raid the strike
headquarters of the Drivers’ Union, and declare martial law to keep “order” and
trucks moving in the midst of a protracted confrontation. The entire New Deal
order, an administrative response to capitalist crisis that aimed to stave off
the upturn in class struggle and workers resistance of 1933-1934, was ultimately
more concerned with keeping the Democratic Party in power than in fundamentally
advancing working class entitlements and genuine trade unionism. Its rhetoric
may well have encouraged workers’ already committed to undertake militant
actions, but it was those actions, not the New Deal agenda, that staked out new
possibilities for labour’s advance. Cannon and the leadership of the CLA always
understood this and, indeed, their militant strikes in 1934 were a central
component of the working-class upheaval that dragged Roosevelt’s public
utterances and policy offerings more to the left, rather than those appeals and
legislative enactments pushing workers to struggle and build a more vibrant
labour movement.

> “The Minneapolis teamsters provided a textbook lesson of militant class
> struggle politics in their unambiguous refusal to knuckle under to politicians
> pleas to compromise, and the pressure put on them by mediators, arbitrators,
> and the like. The Trotskyist strike leadership in Minneapolis repudiated, time
> and time again, what they insisted were nothing less than strike-breaking
> ruses.”

One dimension of this was the extent to which Roosevelt and his officialdom in
Washington looked at the Minneapolis truckers’ militant actions and did their
utmost to bring their struggles to a close. A number of local and national
mediators tried to encourage workers to end their struggles before their victory
would be secured, just as Governor Olson encouraged strikers to get back to
work, promising them arbitration would work in their favor. Cannon was the most
resolute of all of the Trotskyist leadership, either inside or outside of the
local Drivers’ Union, in opposing these state initiatives to placate workers
with the false promises of what could be delivered by mediators and arbitrators.
He took this stand forcefully, for instance, even before the Minneapolis
strikes, arguing decisively against the inclination of B.J. Field in the
1933-1934 New York Hotel strike to rely on Labor Board officials tied to
Roosevelt to offer settlement terms to the striking workers. Those workers, it
should be known, were marching in the street while Roosevelt celebrated his
birthday in hotels where scab labor was providing the food and services to the
President’s fête. That minor event symbolized the Democratic President’s
relation to class struggle: a rhetorical proclamation that he stood with the
workers; and actual actions that indicated he did not. The Minneapolis teamsters
provided a textbook lesson of militant class struggle politics in their
unambiguous refusal to knuckle under to politicians pleas to compromise, and the
pressure put on them by mediators, arbitrators, and the like. The Trotskyist
strike leadership in Minneapolis repudiated, time and time again, what they
insisted were nothing less than strike-breaking ruses. They used what mediators
proposed that would advance the cause of the strikers to good effect, but when
mediators demanded the ultimate quid pro quo of a return to work without
guarantees of actual settlement terms, the Trotskyist-led teamsters sent these
emissaries from Roosevelt’s administration packing. Reports in the Trotskyist
press referred to mediators being “crucified by the rank-and-file” in mass
meetings of rejection, and Cannon noted that as one mediator, a Catholic priest,
left the union hall he was visibly shaken when a young worker ripped a crucifix
off of his neck and hurled it at the priest. In their steadfast stand,
Minneapolis’s unionists found that, in the end, the only way to get the
attention of Federal mediators, was to refuse to give in. Then, they found,
mediators were more likely to come around to seeing the value in taking a more
forceful stand on behalf of the workers and their demands.

In short, Cannon and other Trotskyists followed a course in Minneapolis that
promoted class struggle politics rather than reliance on New Deal legislation
and the officialdom associated with the state’s bureaucracies, committed as it
was to managing the Great Depression’s working-class discontent.

Briefly, what can you tell readers about the relationship between Trotsky and
Cannon? How did Trotsky view Cannon? How would you characterize their
relationship?

The point of departure is an elementary one. Cannon had considerable regard for
Trotsky, even reverence. He was aware of his significant role in the Revolution
of 1917, second only to Lenin. If, during the mid-1920s, when still a leading
figure in the Communist Party, he voted on motions critical of Trotsky, he did
so largely unaware of what was happening in the Communist International, and
with little enthusiasm. Brought out of his disillusionments with the trajectory
of the American Party in the late 1920s by reading Trotsky’s draft document at
the 1928 Congress, Cannon appreciated that Trotsky was the founder of the Left
Opposition with which he was aligned in his stand against the Comintern in
1928-1929. This led to his expulsion and the founding of the Communist League of
America, Opposition. One of the essential tasks of the CLA was a publication
program which struggled against all odds to place some of Trotsky’s key
political writings outlining the missteps of the Comintern before an American
readership.

Notwithstanding this high regard, Cannon also retained some suspicion of a
figure like Trotsky, wondering to himself if this revolutionary Bolshevik
pioneer would exhibit some of the same heavy-handed traits of a lesser
counterpart such as Stalin. Would Trotsky insist on riding rough-shod over the
national sections of the International Left Opposition?

Cannon also had no personal contact with Trotsky in the early days of the CLA,
and one of the grounds for figures like Shachtman and Glotzer maintaining their
personalized factional animosity to Cannon at the height of the dog days of the
movement in 1932, was that Cannon was insufficiently theoretical and arguably
too parochially embedded in the American movement to lead the Left Opposition in
the US. Cannon, unlike Shachtman and Glotzer, did not travel to Turkey or Europe
in the early days of the movement to meet with Trotsky, and was thus not
assigned by him, in this period, to important tasks of building the
International outside of the US, as, for instance, was Shachtman.

Cannon worried, in 1933-1934, if Trotsky, through meetings and, admittedly,
likings for, elements gravitating to the US movement like B.J. Field and Albert
Weisbord, might insist on the integration of such figures into the CLA. Both
were incapable of being assimilated to the politics of the revolutionary Left
Opposition,  each opting instead for a kind of freelancing foreign to the
discipline of a Bolshevik organization. Trotsky, however, was not heavy handed,
and he ended up agreeing with Cannon about people like Field and Weisbord.

Moreover, in his dealings with Shachtman internationally, at the same point that
Shachtman was leading the personalized attack on Cannon inside the American
movement, Trotsky came to appreciate that Shachtman simply could not be trusted
to adhere to the revolutionary resolve demanded in certain situations. He was
too prone to value journalistic felicity rather than programmatic clarity.  In a
number of instances, Trotsky was convinced that Shachtman compromised
revolutionary politics in his willingness to substitute chumminess with those
following a wrong course rather than offering a forthright critique. Shachtman
too often seemed unable to hold to the necessary political principles that
differentiated the International Left Opposition from an array of radical and
reformist positions. Cannon, more cautious, proved more steadfast.

Over time, then, Cannon became valued by Trotsky as the leading figure, not only
in the US section of the Left Opposition, but within the broader international
movement. Trotsky relied on Cannon, especially after the demonstrative example
of the Trotskyist Minneapolis strikes, as a foundational proletarian figure in
the potential vanguard. This was evident in 1937-1938, as Trotsky was drafting
the document that would serve as the guiding statement of the new Fourth
International, in which he relied on discussions with Cannon and others in
Mexico, particularly with respect to trade union questions and the orientation
of the new International to work in the labor movement. The Socialist Workers
Party that Cannon founded in 1938 became the flagship national section in the
New International, and while Shachtman, whose facility with languages was
considerable, played a role in the meetings convened to establish this body, it
was Cannon whom Trotsky trusted to try to bring together a deeply divided
British Trotskyist movement and to convince wavering delegates from other
European sections to join with Trotsky in the Fourth International. No figure in
the American movement was more highly regarded by Trotsky than Cannon, and
Trotsky was constantly urging Jim to participate in this or that development in
the United States, even as he was geographically distant from places where such
happenings were unfolding.

While you clearly admire Cannon, you are not guilty of hero-worship. You write,
“Cannon’s foibles and shortcomings as a leader, of which he was well aware, were
also on display in the mid-1930s.” Talk about some of his shortcomings.

The starting point is that Cannon himself recognized his shortcomings. He was
not unduly modest, but his self-reflection, and capacity to look at himself
critically, was decided different than others in the movement, among them
Shachtman or C.L.R. James. The latter, for instance, while talented,
cosmopolitan, and brilliant on the literary front, was given to egocentric
postures of grandeur that would have been entirely foreign to Cannon. Cannon
knew his limitations, and one of his favorite sayings was that, “He has the
merits of his defects.” Which meant that the subject was aware of his
shortcomings. Cannon, more than most revolutionary leaders was cognizant of
those areas where he was lacking. He once said, for instance, that he wanted
Sylvia Bleeker to give a eulogy at his funeral. “She will tell the truth,” he
said. Bleeker, a needle trades worker in New York, and long time CLA/SWP member,
was a friend of Rose Karsner’s, Cannon’s wife, and would, on occasion, be
dispatched to some saloon or Lower East Side restaurant to get Cannon home after
a night of drinking. She knew his shortcomings well.

Balanced against his accomplishments in the 1930s, Cannon’s personal failings
were hardly overwhelming, but they did exist. He had a tendency to retreat into
the bottle when the political movement that was so crucial in his life flagged,
as it did in the early 1930s, and younger comrades whom he had mentored
throughout the 1920s, like Shachtman, Abern, and Glotzer, turned against him. He
neglected his duties and responsibilities in the movement for a time, as it
flagged, although never to the extent suggested by his adversaries. They
exaggerated and blew things out of proportion, and themselves were guilty of
behaviors arguably as problematic.

Cannon also had to constantly shed his impatience with factional opponents,
reaching back to tendencies engrained in the Stalinist school of
bureaucratization that was the American CP in the mid-to-late 1920s. Trotsky
would routinely admonish Cannon to let the differences between majorities and
minorities in the dissident communist movement run their course, in debate and
open discussion, rather than resolve them through the exercise of organizational
power. Majorities and their leadership, Trotsky stressed, owed minorities more
leeway than they were likely to give those exercising majority authority.

Cannon’s great strength in helping to found both the Workers (Communist) Party
in the very early 1920s and the Communist League of America, Opposition, in the
late 1920s, was that, as his one-time comrade in the CP, Alexander Bittelman,
once said, he functioned like a mechanic, moving throughout a factory,
maintaining, oiling, and reviving the apparatus of production. Cannon did this
with the variegated personnel of the revolutionary movement, bringing together
various human components of the left, situating them amongst the larger body in
ways that led to enhancing their respective contributions. Cannon was an
architect of movements, an organizer of organizers, a party builder, mentoring
the young, and solidifying more senior cadre. This was a great strength, and
Cannon continued to function in this way in various endeavors of the 1930s.

On occasion, however, he faltered. By the 1930s, after decades devoted to
building the revolutionary movement, Cannon perhaps lost patience with some
older comrades, in whom he placed great faith that they would function, as he
did, in the best interests of the movement. But he was perhaps too insistent
that once a comrade reached a certain level of experience in the movement, they
should stand on their own, and come to the right conclusions. If they resisted
coming to such conclusions, Cannon was perhaps less than able to offer them the
comradely guidance they might well have benefitted from. There was a bit of this
in Cannon’s response to personalized attacks on him in the early 1930s by
Shachtman, Glotzer, Abern, and Maurice Spector. That said, this quartet gave as
good as they got. The same could be said of the split of Hugo Oehler and Tom
Stamm from Cannon later in the 1930s, over the question of entry into the
Socialist Party. Again, this duo and those they attracted to them in their
attack on what they considered the liquidationism of entry, violated discipline,
behaved in a reckless and irresponsible manner, and conducted themselves in ways
that certainly warranted expulsion from the body Cannon then headed, the Workers
Party. That said, Oehler and Stamm were dedicated revolutionists, with a long
history of functioning as Cannon’s trusted organizers, people whom he came to
rely on in difficult situations and could be counted on to embrace left-wing
stands. Might not Cannon have attempted to appease them somewhat as the decision
to enter the SP was made, draw them back into the revolutionary fold? Cannon,
however, at a certain point had had enough, and the split was irrevocable, as it
had been between Cannon’s oldest friend in the CP, Bill Dunne, and himself in
1928. Cannon long harbored regrets that he had been unable to win Dunne to his
positions at the end of the 1920s, and blamed himself for this failure. There
was something of that, as well, in his reflections on his break from Oehler and
Stamm in the mid-1930s, for he had great regard for both individuals.

> “When the Trotskyists secured a foothold in the early UAW, and Homer Martin, a
> right-winger who assumed the Presidency of the auto workers, battled the CP,
> Cannon operatives in the union like Bert Cochran, tended to be too uncritical
> of Martin. It was too easy, given the machinations of the CP and their fellow
> travelers inside the UAW, to want to strike blow after blow against the
> Stalinists. The enemy of their enemy, became, in some ways, too much the
> Trotskyists’ friend. But aligning with Martin to do this was inevitably going
> to end badly, as it did.”

A final shortcoming related to Stalinism. The revolutionary Left Opposition was
always threading a political needle when it came to Stalinism. It had to drive
its political message in a principled passage through the eye of a needle that
separated undue hatred and dismissal of Stalinism (Stalinophobia) and the danger
of taking an opportunistic path in reacting to Stalinist elements in the labor
movement. What had to be avoided, in the trade unions, for instance, was
pandering to the instinctual anti-communism of a mainstream officialdom,
accepting or acquiescing to elements of their program in order to curry favor
with them in legitimate struggles against the mistaken practice of the Communist
Party. For the most part, Cannon pursued such a principled course. But on
occasion, especially when confronted by slanderous attack and the worst (and
exceedingly vile) behavior and positions put forward by the CP, its leaders, and
even, sometimes its rank and file, Cannon faltered. He actually endorsed suing
the CP in the bourgeois courts, for instance, when the CP alleged that the
murder of a non-revolutionary trade unionist who worked with the Minneapolis
Trotskyist teamster leaders in the late 1930s was a consequence of the
Trotskyists facilitating the entry of gangsters into the Drivers’ Union. This
was of course a vicious lie, and much evidence existed to repudiate it, but
Cannon should not, along with all the rest of the SWP’s leadership, have opted
for a libel case. He should have pursued an open discussion and debate of the
issue, exposing Stalinist falsifications and the embittered irrationality that
drove such misleading accusations. When the Trotskyists secured a foothold in
the early UAW, and Homer Martin, a right-winger who assumed the Presidency of
the auto workers, battled the CP, Cannon operatives in the union like Bert
Cochran, tended to be too uncritical of Martin. It was too easy, given the
machinations of the CP and their fellow travelers inside the UAW, to want to
strike blow after blow against the Stalinists. The enemy of their enemy, became,
in some ways, too much the Trotskyists’ friend. But aligning with Martin to do
this was inevitably going to end badly, as it did. Cannon might even drift into
Stalinophobic statements that the Stalinists in the UAW were a greater danger to
the auto workers than the bosses. This hyperbole was unfortunate, a political
step backwards. Given the ugliness of Stalinist practices in the unions and
elsewhere, which most labor historians slide over, whitewashing a lot of dirty
behavior, Cannon’s unfortunate drift into Stalinophobia is understandable. We
must not forget that this was a period as well that, in spite of the Popular
Front’s class collaborationist unity with progressive bourgeois elements and all
others on the social-democratic, reformist left, Trotskyists were still
demonized by the CP. The Moscow Trials, at their height with the coming of the
Popular Front, claimed Trotsky himself had collaborated with fascists and
capitalists to sabotage the Soviet Union, and that Trotskyists were responsible
for terroristic acts against the workers’ state. Stalinism was murdering
left-wing dissidents in Europe, including in Spain, where the
Trotskyist-inflected POUM and anarchist battalions fighting Franco were being
sabotaged by Comintern agents. Cannon knew all this and had experienced
Stalinist gangsterism, thuggery, and personalized, calumnious attack. Throughout
all of this he often maintained a principled position on the place of the
Communist Party, but he could, and did, occasionally slip.

You conclude this volume with these words “… James P. Cannon helped transform
the development of the American left, leaving a militant, revolutionary
footprint on the landscape of class relations in the world’s most powerful
capitalist nation” (943). What key lessons can today’s activists draw from
Cannon?

The starting point for any answer to this question is an assessment of where the
left – a revolutionary left — is at right now, within the current conjuncture.
Many see the left as vibrant, a forceful presence in the politics of our time.
Much, however, depends on what we regard as left. I agree that in our time there
is broader acceptance of a range of important diversity issues that are
certainly necessarily included in any assessment of left-wing politics than
there has been in the past. Certainly anti-racism is more forceful in our times
than it has been in previous times. Basic commitments to women’s equality and
feminism, advocacy for the disabled, and acceptance of and defense of the rights
of various components of the LBGTQ2s+ communities are now very much in the
public eye, and gaining support among the general population and within
mainstream political culture in ways that were simply unimaginable in the 1930s
or even the 1960s. This is all to the good.

It is questionable, however, as to how much the widespread politics of
diversity, is aligned with a politics that seeks fundamental socio-economic
transformation, the replacement of capitalist with socialism.  A revolutionary
left that seeks a root-and-ranch repudiation of capitalism, and the
establishment of socialism, in spite of the growth of bodies like the Democratic
Socialists of America, seems to me weaker than at any point in United States
history, reaching back at least 150 years. And the labor movement, while it is
indeed showing signs of revival, and is the undeniable vehicle of defense of
working-class interests, has suffered blow after blow in the last 50 years,
losing much of the ground it secured through struggle in the course of the 1930s
and 1940s. The weakening of the trade unions and the evisceration of the
revolutionary left have been the decisive developments of the neoliberal era of
the last half century.

Rebuilding the labor movement and the left is the necessary political task of
our present, and that will not be done without an infusion of energy into
movements and mobilizations that are unambiguously anti-capitalist. Capitalism,
to my way of thinking, must be transcended if working-class exploitation is to
be brought to an end and a host of varied oppressions, associated with
colonialism, imperialism, racism, and the bigotry directed against so many
components of modern society, are to be dismantled and defeated.

Even if Cannon did not speak in the idiom of our present (he was the product of
a Victorian era, after all), his project was to bring capitalism to its knees
and build a socialist society. His embrace of revolutionary socialism, from a
young age, encompassed the ending of all oppressions, including, of course, the
decisively important material marker of social hierarchy, class. Cannon’s
anti-capitalist revolutionary politics must be revived if the left and its
organized presence in the world of the 21st century, including within the trade
unions and an array of social movements, is to pose a meaningful challenge to
entrenched authority and its varied sources of power.

We can appreciate that this kind of revolutionary left has been on a downward
slide for decades. Organizations and movements of the left that emerged out of
the 1960s and that occupied a significant place in the alternative political
universe of the 1970s have largely been either repressed by the state – Black
Panthers & American Indian Movement, for instance – or imploded, their internal
fragmentation encouraged and accelerated by that same apparatus of coercive
suppression. The times do not look good for the kind of revolutionary left
Cannon dedicated his life to building, in part because the Stalinism that he
lived through, broke from, and abhorred, has done so much to discredit the
revolutionary socialist project within which it grew and which it came to
undermine and eventually destroy within specific geographical boundaries.

If our times look inauspicious for the revival of the revolutionary left,
imagine how they looked to Cannon in 1928. When he embarked on creating an
alternative to a powerful Communist International that symbolized so much
positive possibility to peoples of the world gravitating, amidst capitalist
collapse, to the need to confront exploitation and oppression and establish
societies whose guiding light was not the profit motive, the task before Cannon
must have appeared especially daunting.

Yet with a small but committed group of like-minded men and women, Cannon built
a political organization that intervened in the American class struggle in an
amazingly effective way. That same group battled an entrenched Stalinist
left-wing that outstripped it in size and historic significance at the same time
as they aimed their sights at a political monolith, United States capitalism,
that appeared to be marching to global hegemony. War and fascism threatened,
racist segregation still governed much of the social relations of everyday life
in the United States. Yet into this context, Cannon and the American Trotskyists
jumped, exercising influence in trade unions, winning some (by no means all)
progressive intellectuals to their banner, forcing the recognition that a
society many on the left gravitated to instinctually had conducted show trails
that were nothing less than a judicial obscenity, exposing their murderous
outcomes as resting on nothing less than slander and falsehood. In the process a
workers’ revolutionary party, the Socialist Workers Party, was formed, occupying
the status as the flagship organization in a new revolutionary International.
All of this took place amidst arguably the longest and most intense capitalist
crisis in the history of modern political economy.

During the depths of this Great Depression, more and more people understood that
capitalism was no longer a progressive force, pushing societies forward. As the
crisis dragged on, some lost hope and became immobilized, but a militant
minority came to understand that it must fight back. Today, those militant
minorities tend to be hived off into their particularistic political silos.
Moreover, capitalist crisis tends to be more mercurial and much more insidious
in its continuities than was the Great Depression. We have witnessed, over the
course of the last half century, a commonplace routinizing of capitalist crisis
that manifests itself in an almost permanent state of crisis, so normalized that
the crisis becomes identifiable only as fresh moments of intensification push
people to the brink: currency breakdowns; financial meltdowns; pandemic panics.
Capitalism, once a progressive force bringing a new mode of production and its
class forces into being out of the ossified structures of an outmoded
feudalistic, aristocratic order, is now clearly a destructive force. Its
rapacious accumulative appetites have brought the planet closer and closer to an
apocalyptic end; its destruction of biodiversity has unleashed inter-species,
globally spread, viral pandemics. The reconfiguration of the transnational
political economy threatens war and destabilizes material life throughout the
world. Famine, drought, floods, pestilence, and destruction abound, cutting
swaths of catastrophe across both the already impoverished global South, where
the devastation is most acute, and the more developed and somewhat insulated
economies of western capitalism. Never have we needed more the generalized
perspective of the revolutionary anti-capitalist left, yet never has the voice
of such a left been weaker.

The key lesson that Cannon’s history of the 1930s imparts to today’s
revolutionaries is nothing less than the insistence that it can be done, that a
revolutionary organization can be built, and that in building such a body,
achievements can be realized. Capitalism is now an undeniably destructive brake
on humanity’s advance, even survival. A revolutionary opposition is vitally
necessary, now more so than ever. Cannon’s history is a reminder that this kind
of fighting, anti-capitalist political organization can be established and
nurtured, even in the worst of times, and that it can achieve tangible,
immediate effect. More than ever the rallying cry of “Socialism or barbarism,”
should be ringing in our ears. Cannon’s history provides us with a glimpse of
how that ringing can translate into actions and accomplishments.

……………………..

Source

Chad Pearson teaches history at University of North Texas. He is the author of
Capital’s Terrorists: Anti-Labor Violence in the Long Nineteenth Century (2022)
Reform or Repression: Organizing America’s Anti-Union Movement (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) and is co-editor with Rosemary Feurer of
Against Labor: How U.S. Employers Organized to Defeat Union Activism (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2017). book isl

| Tagged communism, russia, stalin, statements, theory


JAMES P. CANNON AND THE ORIGINS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY LEFT – BY BRYAN D.
PALMER – AUDIOBOOK PART 1 (13:55:19 MIN) AUDIO MP3

Posted on February 18, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
James P. Cannon – Audiobook Part 1 (13:55:19 min) Audio Mp3



TRANSCENDING ADVEEVKA – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 17 FEB 2024

Posted on February 17, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 900 WORDS • 

Of course the proxy war in Ukraine won’t end with Adveevka, and the battle
across the Donetsk foothills, nearly a decade old, will continue

All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home
Your empty-handed armies are going home

Bob Dylan, It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue

Avdeevka. The name sounds like an incantation. Like Debaltsevo, or Bakhmut. The
incantation summons the figure of a cauldron.

As it stands, and it’s all moving at lightning speed, it takes only 2 km for the
cauldron to be closed. Virtually all roads and muddy trails are under massive
Russian fire control. There may be up to 6,000 Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)
soldiers left. They have nowhere to go. They are already in – or are going
straight to – Hell.

“The Butcher” Syrsky, who has just been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the AFU
amidst a nasty dog fight in Kiev, immediately got himself a fresh cauldron. Old
habits die hard.

The morale and psychological state of AFU fighters is in tatters. Azov batallion
neo-nazis are being decimated by massive artillery, FPVs and FABs.

Still, AFU generals are setting up the P.R. stage for another “victory” – a
replay of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo, even as the actual retreat, evacuation or
“extraction” will proceed through the Corridors of Hell.

In fact, the only player who has successfully extracted himself from Hell, just
in time, was Gen Zaluzhny. To quote Dylan: “Strike another match/ go start
anew.”

The Axis of Resistance and its Slavic mirror

During my vertiginous journey across Donbass, only a few days ago, Avdeevka –
the incantation – was omnipresent. At a meeting in a secret compound plunged in
darkness in the western outskirts of Donetsk, two top commanders of Orthodox
Christian batallions, while discussing tactics, noted that the fall of Adveevka
would be a matter of days, maximum weeks

The symbology is quite transcendental. Kiev has been fortifying Adveevka
non-stop for nearly 10 years – essentially to keep shelling civilians in Donetsk
and other parts of Donbass with impunity, ad infinitum. Donetsk remains
extremely vulnerable – and the shelling persists. The strength, resilience and
faith of the residents of this historic mining town – and the surrounding
countryside – are deeply moving.

In a very special conversation with Alexander Dugin, we both made it clear,
directly and indirectly, that the working classes of Novorossiya are spiritual
brothers of the oppressed in Palestine and Yemen. Yes, the Axis of Resistance in
West Asia is mirrored by the Slavic Axis of Resistance in the black soil of the
steppes.

As much as Russia may have been drawn to a civilizational war against the
collective West, that is also a spiritual war. The proxy war by the Hegemon
against Russia in Ukraine is as much a geopolitical gamble as a war of Western
nihilism against Russian Orthodoxy.

I did mention the parallel between Orthodox Christianity and Shi’ism to a top
commander; he may have been bemused, but he definitely got the message.

After all, he must have instinctively noticed it was the rejected, harassed and
bombed in Orthodox Christianity and Islam who have re-awakened the Orthodox and
Islamic civilizations for a transcendental war of survival – supported by faith.

Way beyond the Adveevka incantation – a sort of catalyst of all these times of
trouble, as Mother Mary of God eventually comes offering solace – what struck me
in this vertiginous journey in Donbass is Almighty People Power. Civilians are
the true heroes of the full liberation of Novorossiya, as much as the people
scattered across Greater Syria – encompassing Palestine, Syria and Lebanon –
Iraq and Yemen.

These are the souls who have endured a Hell on Earth much more toxic and much
longer than the Adveevka cauldron, since Zionism and its subsequent
eschatological garrison-settler colonial offspring took over the Holy Land.

The people of Novorossiya, as much as Yemeni Houthis, have Faith imprinted in
their DNA. Those deeply committed commanders and soldiers that I met in
Novorossiya close to the front lines mirror the popular consensus.

Gamblers on the Highway of Hope

For a baby boomer Westerner, it’s inevitable to refer to Dylan when we’re back
on the road: “The highway is for gamblers / better use your sense”. Somehow the
ultimate gamblers across the black soil of Novorossiya are these volunteer,
contract-signed soldiers who summon the power of unbreakable Faith to defend
their land.

As for those pawns in the Western game who will perish or surrender when the
cauldron is boiling to the max, it’s a case of “the sky too is falling under
you”.

Shelley intuitively understood that we all rebel against oblivion – to which
death condemns us. Yet this rebellion can follow two completely different road
maps.

The man intoxicated with power wrecks everything before him, and is wrecked in
turn (that’s the fate of the current Empire of Lies).

Then there’s the road followed by the poet, or spiritual warrior, whose soul is
the Aeolian harp summoning vast, unseen, miraculous forces.

Of course the proxy war in Ukraine won’t end with Adveevka, and the battle
across the Donetsk foothills, nearly a decade old, will continue.

There will be more P.R. terror attacks, the civilian plight may be prolonged for
quite a while. But what’s already crystal clear is that any sub-par “rules-based
order” chess player who dreams of defeating the Russian soul on
thousand-year-old Russian lands is inexorably doomed.

…………………….

https://archive.ph/kkNP8

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged europe, nato, orthodoxy, russia, ukraine


US POLITICAL CARTOONIST ‘MR. FISH’ TARGETED BY COLLEGE BOSS – 16 FEB 2024

Posted on February 16, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESIDENT DENOUNCES LECTURER FOR ANTI-ISRAELI
CARTOONS

In a statement released on Sunday, 4 February 2024, University of Pennsylvania’s
interim president, Larry Jameson, denounced and smeared a lecturer at the
university over supposed “antisemitic” political cartoons. 

Jameson’s statement, published on the University of Pennsylvania’s Instagram
account, targets Dwayne Booth, known as “Mr. Fish” for his drawings and
political cartoons. Booth’s illustrations, using the traditional satiric methods
of the genre, have criticized Israel and the United States for the mass murder
of Palestinians in Gaza. 

In his statement, Jameson denounced the cartoons as “reprehensible, with
antisemitic symbols, and incongruent with our efforts to fight hate.” Jameson
proceeded to smear Booth’s cartoons by invoking the Holocaust. “They disrespect
the feelings and experiences of many people in our community and around the
world, particularly those only a generation removed from the Holocaust,” Jameson
said. 

Jameson is seizing on allegations against Booth originally made in
the Washington Free Beacon, which played a leading role in reporting on Harvard
University President Claudine Gay’s plagiarized ‘scholarship.’

Booth teaches courses at Penn on political cartoons. His web page at Penn’s
Annenberg School For Communication says his primary research area is political
communication. Booth is also a freelance writer and has published work which is
critical of American politics and has been particularly critical of Israel since
it launched its war in Gaza. 

One cartoon that has been singled out by the media is called “The Anti-Semite.”
This displays three men drinking from glasses of blood labeled “Gaza” in front
of American and Israeli flags, with one of the men saying to the others, “Who
invited that lousy anti-semite?” referring to a white dove in the distance meant
to symbolize those calling for a ceasefire. Those attacking Booth claim he is
invoking the “blood libel,” the infamous far-right lie that Jews drink the blood
of Christians.

This misses the point entirely. Instead of being antisemitic, the cartoon sends
up the manipulation of antisemitism to attack the opponents of
genocide—precisely what Jameson is now doing.

Another cartoon singled out by Booth’s critics is entitled “Slaughterhouse.” It
depicts Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in an apron covered in blood
with a bloody knife in one hand and a Palestinian flag in the other hand.
Another cartoon shows Netanyahu shoveling skulls into the engine of a train with
an ironic text saying that Netanyahu is “magnanimous enough to bring every last
Palestinian man, woman, and child in on the peace process.” 

Responding to the allegations against him made by the Washington Free Beacon,
Booth stated, “Being accused of anti-Semitism by a reporter who presents no
corroborating sources beyond her own misreading of my work is neither journalism
nor responsible reporting.” In his remarks Booth also rejected the idea that the
Zionist state of Israel is synonymous with Jews all around the world. Many
people have a similar strange belief in a quasi-religion of ‘journalism’ with
rules of honor and evidence that simply doesn’t exist in the real world. Why
constantly invoke this fantasy? Journalists must seek the truth? Ha. Write what
you want. Let the readers and market decide.

Penn President Jameson, it is clear, intends to use the episode to intimidate
not only opponents of the war, but advocates of academic freedom and freedom of
speech. His statement spelled this out in Orwellian fashion:

> At Penn, we have a bedrock commitment to open expression and academic freedom…
> [but] we also have a responsibility to challenge what we find offensive, and
> to do so acknowledging the right and ability of members of our community to
> express their views, however loathsome we find them.

There is an obvious difference between students and campus workers challenging
speech they “find offensive” and an attack on a faculty member by a university
president—an office that at Ivy League institutions like Penn pays more than $1
million per year.

Summing up his conception of freedom of speech, Jameson concluded, “Not
everything that can be said, should be said.”

The University of Pennsylvania has been at the center of the campaign targeting
opposition to Israel’s genocide. 

Back in November 2023, a Jewish student group, Chavurah, screened the
anti-Zionist film Israelism to an audience of Jewish and Muslim students. The
leaders of the student group were threatened by the university with disciplinary
action for showing the film. 

In spite of Penn’s efforts to quash opposition to Israel’s war drive, University
President Liz Magill was summoned to testify before a Congressional committee,
alongside Harvard President Claudine Gay and Massachusetts Institute of
Technology president Sally Kornbluth. During the testimony, the three were
ruthlessly berated by Elise Stefanik, Republican congresswoman, for the
presidents’ alleged “mishandling” of “antisemitic activity” on their campuses by
allowing peaceful anti-Israeli protests that made some Jewish students feel
‘threatened.’

Under heavy pressure from the university’s billionaire backers and the
Democratic and Republican parties, Magill was forced to resign her position as
president. Gay was later forced out at Harvard over plagiarism revealed in
absolutely shoddy academic ‘works.’

Jameson, who was brought on to replace Magill, was no doubt carefully vetted to
be sure he could be relied on to move against political speech that opposes US
imperialism and its Israeli proxy. In his bullying attack on Booth, Jameson has
already delivered. 

The conflation of opposition to Israeli and American sponsored war on a civilian
population with antisemitism has only one purpose. It is meant to confuse
popular consciousness and silence opposition.



………………….

https://archive.is/lSQW3

| Tagged antisemitism, israel, mit, politics, university-of-pennsylvania


FASCISM – WHAT IT IS AND HOW TO FIGHT IT – TROTSKY (RUMBLE) AUDIOBOOK
(1:28:54 MIN)

Posted on February 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Fascism – What It Is And How To Fight It – Trotsky – Audiobook Mp3 (1:28:54 min)

https://rumble. com
/v4dm8nq-fascism-what-it-is-and-how-to-fight-it-trotsky-1938.html




US FATAL FLAWS UNDERMINE AMERICA’S DEFENSE INDUSTRIAL BASE – BY BRIAN BERLETIC –
15 FEB 2024

Posted on February 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | 2 Comments

The first-ever US Department of Defense National Defense Industrial
Strategy (NDIS) confirms what many analysts have concluded in regard to the
unsustainable nature of Washington’s global-spanning foreign policy objectives
and its defense industrial base’s (DIB) inability to achieve them.

The report lays out a multitude of problems plaguing the US DIB including a lack
of surge capacity, inadequate workforce, off-shore downstream suppliers, as well
as insufficient “demand signals” to motivate private industry partners to
produce what’s needed, in the quantities needed, when it is needed.

In fact, the majority of the problems identified by the report involved private
industry and its unwillingness to meet national security requirements because
they were not profitable.

For example, the report attempts to explain why many companies across the US DIB
lack advanced manufacturing capabilities, claiming:

> Many elements of the traditional DIB have yet to adopt advanced manufacturing
> technologies, as they struggle to develop business cases for needed capital
> investment.

In other words, while adopting advanced manufacturing technologies would fulfill
the purpose of the US Department of Defense, it is not profitable for private
industry to do so.

Despite virtually all the problems the report identifies stemming from private
industry’s disproportionate influence over the US DIB, the report never
identifies private industry itself as a problem.

If private industry and its prioritization of profits is the central problem
inhibiting the DIB from fulfilling its purpose, the obvious solution is
nationalizing the DIB by replacing private industry with state-owned
enterprises. This allows the government to prioritize purpose over profits. Yet
in the United States and across Europe, the so-called “military industrial
complex” has grown to such proportions that it is no longer subordinated to the
government and national interests, but rather the government and national
interests are subordinated to it.

US Defense Industrial Strategy Built on a Flawed Premise 

Beyond private industry’s hold on the US DIB, the very premise the NDIS is built
on is fundamentally flawed, deeply rooted in private industry’s profit-driven
prioritization.

The report claims:

> The purpose of this National Defense Industrial Strategy is to drive
> development of an industrial ecosystem that provides a sustained competitive
> advantage to the United States over its adversaries.

The notion of the United States perpetually expanding its wealth and power
across the globe, unrivaled by its so-called “adversaries” is unrealistic.

China alone has a population 4-5 times greater than the US. China’s population
is, in fact, larger than that of the G7 combined. China has a larger industrial
base, economy, and education system than the US. China’s education system not
only produces millions more graduates each year in essential fields like
science, technology, and engineering than the US, the proportion of such
graduates is higher in China than in the US.

China alone possesses the means to maintain a competitive advantage over the
United States now and well into the foreseeable future. The US, attempting to
draw up a strategy to maintain an advantage over China (not to mention over the
rest of the world) regardless of these realities, borders on delusion.

Yet for 60 pages, US policymakers attempt to lay out a strategy to do just that.

Not Just China, But Also Russia 

While China is repeatedly mentioned as America’s “pacing challenge,” the ongoing
conflict in Ukraine is perhaps the most acute example of a shifting balance of
global power.

Despite a combined population, GDP, and military budget many times greater than
Russia’s, the collective West is incapable of matching Russian production of
even relatively simple munitions like artillery shells, let alone more complex
systems like tanks, aircraft, and precision-guided missiles.

While the US and its allies appear to have every conceivable advantage over
Russia on paper, the collective West has organized itself as a profit-driven
rather than purpose-driven society.

In Russia, the defense industry exists to serve national security. While one
might believe this goes without saying, across the collective West, the defense
industry, like all other industries in the West, exists solely to maximize
profits.

To best serve national security, the defense industry is required to maintain
substantial surge capacity – meaning additional, unused factory space, machines,
and labor on standby if and when large surges in production are required in
relatively short periods of time. Across the West, in order to maximize profits,
surge capacity has been ruthlessly slashed, deemed economically inefficient.
Only rare exceptions exist, such as US 155 mm artillery shell production.

While the West’s defense industry remains the most profitable on Earth, its
ability to actually churn out arms and ammunition in the quantities and quality
required for large-scale conflict is clearly compromised by its maximization of
profits.

The result is evident today as the West struggles to expand production of arms
and ammunition for its Ukrainian proxies.

The NDIS report would note:

> Prior to the invasion, weapon procurements for some of the in-demand systems
> were driven by annual training requirements and ongoing combat operations.
> This modest demand, along with recent market dynamics, drove companies to
> divest excess capacity due to cost. This meant that any increased production
> requirements would require an increase in workforce hours in existing
> facilities—commonly referred to as “surge” capacity. These, in turn, were
> limited further by similar down-stream considerations of workforce, facility,
> and supply chain limitations.

Costs are most certainly a consideration across any defense industry, but costs
cannot be the primary consideration.

A central element of Russia’s defense industry is Rostec, a massive state-owned
enterprise under which hundreds of companies related to national industrial
needs including defense are organized. Rostec is profitable. However, the
industrial concerns organized under Rostec serve purposes related to Russia’s
national interests first and foremost, be it national health, infrastructure or
security.

Because Russia’s defense industry is purpose-driven, it produced military
equipment because it was necessary, not because it was profitable. As a result,
Russia possessed huge stockpiles of ammunition and equipment ahead of the
Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022. In addition to this, Russia
maintained large amounts of surge capacity enabling production rates of
everything from artillery shells to armored vehicles to expand quickly over the
past 2 years.

Only relatively recently have Western analysts acknowledged this.

The New York Times in its September 2023 article, “Russia Overcomes Sanctions to
Expand Missile Production, Officials Say,” admits Russian arms production of not
only missiles, but also armored vehicles and artillery shells have exceeded
prewar levels. The article estimates that Russia is producing at least seven
times more ammunition than the US and its Western allies combined.

Despite this, Western analysts now claim Russian production will “plateau” as
the limits of surge capacity are reached and new facilities and sources of raw
materials are required.

The Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in a February 2024 article titled,
“Russian Military Objectives and Capacity in Ukraine Through 2024,” regarding
ammunition production would claim:

> …the Russian MoD does not believe it can significantly raise production in
> subsequent years, unless new factories are set up and raw material extraction
> is invested in with a lead time beyond five years.

But because Russia’s industrial base is purpose-driven rather than
profit-driven, additional facilities are already being built despite the
longer-term economic inefficiency of doing so.

US government-funded Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in a November
2023 article titled, “Satellite Images Suggest Russia Is Ramping Up Production
Capacity For Its War Against Ukraine,” reported that Russia was not only
expanding production at existing facilities but was also developing new
factories producing warplanes, combat helicopters, military drones, and guided
munitions.

US “Solutions” Fall Far Short

The 2023 NDIS cites the expansion of 155 mm artillery shell production as a
demonstration of the US DIB’s ability to “scale rapidly.”

The report claims:

> In response, the DoD has invested in expanding existing production facilities
> in Scranton, Pennsylvania and broke ground on a new production facility in
> Mesquite, Texas to respond to the higher demand signal. In addition to these
> investments made in December 2022, the U.S. Army awarded contracts worth $1.5
> billion in September 2023* to meet its goal of delivering more than 80,000
> projectiles per month by the end of FY2025.

However, this was only possible because the US Army owns the facilities
producing artillery shells. Increased rates of shell production were made
possible through existing surge capacity deliberately set up by the US Army
years before the Russian SMO began. This foresight in planning, unfortunately
for the United States, is a rare exception to the rule and cannot be applied
across the rest of US and European arms production.

The West’s profit-driven policies have created problems for the US DIB well
downstream of production lines for arms and ammunition. This includes America’s
decades of off-shoring production to maximize profits by taking advantage of
cheaper labor overseas. Many raw materials and components used across the US DIB
today come from overseas including from “adversarial” nations.

The NDIS report lamented:

> Over the last decade, the DoD has struggled to curtail adversarial sourcing
> and burnish the integrity of defense supply chains. Despite these efforts,
> dependence on adversarial sources of supply has grown. DoD continues to lack a
> comprehensive effort for mitigating supply chain risk. 

Profit-driven policies have also hurt the workforce. Decades of off-shoring US
manufacturing saw America transition to a primarily service-based economy. This
was reflected across education as well, where vocational skills were not only
neglected, they were stigmatized.

The NDIS report would explain that:

> The labor market lacks the required number of skilled workers to meet defense
> production demand while driving innovation at all levels. This shortfall is
> becoming exacerbated as baby boomers retire, and younger generations show less
> interest in manufacturing and engineering careers.

Beyond this problem, profit-driven policies have made education in the United
States inaccessible. The desire to profit from providing education has usurped
the actual purpose of providing education in the first place – the creation of
human resources required to run a functioning, prosperous society. Degrees and
training courses in the United States require loans that can take a lifetime to
pay off.

A lack of interest in skilled labor and the inaccessibility of education in the
United States has resulted in a skewed workforce relative to the rest of the
world. The number of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics)
graduates in the US, for example, is comparable to Russia despite Russia having
less than half the total population of the US. In 2016 there were 568,000 STEM
graduates in the US for Russia’s 561,000, according to Forbes. China produced
over 4.7 million graduates that same year.

US economic fundamentals altogether have created a skewed society and
correspondingly skewed DIB that is struggling to match that of nations smaller
in terms of population and GDP. But even if the US did address these fundamental
problems, the fact remains that China alone, saying nothing of the BRIC alliance
it is a part of, has both solid fundamentals and simply possesses a larger
population, economy, and industrial base.

The premise upon which US foreign policy is based is unrealistic. The
fundamentals of US economic power are fatally flawed.

The very notion of the US maintaining a competitive edge over the rest of the
world is only realistic if the rest of the world is suffering from significant
internal and/or regional instability.

This is precisely why the US has invested so heavily over the decades in
political interference, political capture, and even regional conflict around the
globe. However, the disparity between the US and the rest of the world in terms
of economic power, industrial strength, and military might be diminishing faster
than the US can impose its “international order” upon it.

A reemerging Russia alone has exceeded the US in terms of military industrial
production. China is surpassing the United States across a much wider multitude
of metrics. As long as the US pursues unsustainable policies based on an
unrealistic premise, it will not only find itself surpassed by a growing number
of nations, it will find itself isolated and unstable.

The difference between nations the US calls “adversaries” and the US itself, is
the difference between a farmer who cultivates his land in a sustainable,
purposeful way, and a predator who mindlessly consumes all in its path until
there is nothing left to consume, thus jeopardizing its own self-preservation.

At a time between now and then, more rational circles of interest may displace
those currently driving US economic and foreign policies, and transform the US
into a nation pursuing power proportional to its means and invested in working
together with the other nations of the world, rather than attempting to impose
itself upon them.

…………………

Source

Brian Berletic is a Bangkok-based geopolitical researcher and writer, especially
for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

Tags: China, Defense industry, International politics, Military
defense, Russia, USA

| Tagged china, nato, news, russia, ukraine


THE JEWISH LOBBY – LIST – BY JIM BRACCO – 16 JANUARY 2024

Posted on February 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 * Word count4,076

The Jewish Lobby

List of worldwide nongovernmental Jewish political organizations

The Jewish organizations listed here are political organizations devoted to
Jewish political concerns, the leaders of which make up the Jewish Lobby,
influencing the politics of their host countries. Such concerns include Israel,
legal aspects to the definition of “antisemitism,” the public perception of the
Judaism, how Judaism is treated in social interactions, and other parameters
that determine the role of a Jewish minority in a larger, non-Jewish population.
These leaders are the organized political arm of the Jewish community.

Not included here are other Jewish groups, such as religious and charitable
groups that are not directly politically oriented, even though much of Jewish
money that goes to Israel via such groups does technically contribute to the
political power of Israel. The vast majority of these organizations are in the
US and most the remainder are in England, France, Germany, and a few in Israel.

At the end of the list of Jewish groups are the relatively few non-Jewish groups
that are known to promote Israeli political interests.

Additional comments on funding levels and political influence appear after the
list.

Jewish Political Organizations

*Signifies US Political Action Committee (PAC)

#Signifies organizations in other countries

On this list, Current 2024: There are 354 total.

Number in the US: 274, of which 81 are PACS.

Number of foreign groups: 80.

Aish HaTorah

Academic Friends of Israel

Academic Study Group on Israel

Act.IL

Action PAC*

ActiveFence# (Israel)

Aleph Institute

Allies for Israel*

Am Yisrael Foundation

Ameinu

American Friends of Kohelet Policy Forum

American Friends of Likud

American Friends of NGO Monitor

American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF)

American Israeli Cooperative Enterprise

American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)

American Jewish Committee

American Jewish Congress

American Principles*

American Zionist Movement (comprised of 33 separate organizations)

American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise (AICE)

Americans for a Safe Israel

Americans for Good Government*

Americans for Tomorrow’s Future

Americans United in Support of Democracy*

Anchorage Charitable Fund

Anti-Defamation League (ADL)

American Principles*

Arizona Politically Interested Citizens*

Arutz Sheva

Asper Foundation

Atlantic Jewish Council

Avi Chai Foundation

Badger PAC*

B’nai B’rith International

B’nai B’rith Canada

Bard Center for the study of Hate

Bay Area Council for Soviet Jews

BAYPAC*

Because I Care PAC*

Betar

Bi-County PAC*

Birthright

Bnei Akiva

Board of Deputies of British Jews (affiliation with World Jewish Congress)#

Bodman Foundation

Breira (organization)

Bristol Jewish Society (J-Soc, UK)

Britain Israel Communications & Research Centre (UK)#

California Legislative Jewish Caucus

California PAC*

Canada-Israel Committee#

Canadian Centre of Israel and Jewish Affairs#

Canadian Jewish Congress#

Canadian Jewish Political Affairs Committee#

Canadian Zionist Federation#

Canary Mission

Capital PAC*

CEJI – A Jewish Contribution to an Inclusive Europe#

Center for Jewish Community Studies (part of JCPA)

Center for Middle East Policy (within Brookings Institution)

Center for Security Policy

Central Conference of American Rabbis

Central Council of Jews#

Central Fund of Israel (CFI)

Central Massachusetts Chabad

Centralverein Deutscher Staatsburger Judischen Glaubens#

Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA, Canada)

Chabad Lubavitch

Chabad of Westboro

Chai PAC*

Chicagoans for Better Congress*

Chili PAC*

Citizens Concerned for Natl Interest*

Citizens Organized PAC*

CityPAC*

Civil Society Forum

Cleveland Council of Soviet Anti-Semitism

Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV)

Combat Anti-Semitism Movement (CAM)

Combat Antisemitism Movement CAM (Itself around 300 organizations)

Commentary

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting (CAMERA),

Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA)

Community Security Trust

Community Relations Committee of the Jewish Community Federation of Richmond

Community Relations Council of the United Jewish Federation of Tidewater



Community Relations Council of the United Jewish Community of the Virginia
Peninsula

Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany#

Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations (unites 51 orgs)

Congressional Action Cmte of Texas*

Congressional Israel Allies Caucus (CIAC)

Congressional Jewish Congress

Connecticut Good Government PAC*

Conseil Reppresentatif des Institutions Juives de France#

Conservative Friends of Israel (UK)

Coordinating Council of Jerusalem

David Project

David Horowitz Freedom Center

David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies

Delaware Valley PAC*

Democratic Majority for Israel (DMFI)*

Democrats for Israel Committee*

Desert Caucus*

East Midwood PAC*

Emergency Committee for Israel

Emerson Family Foundation

Emgage

Eris & Larry Field Family Foundation

Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC)

European Jewish Association#

European Jewish Congress#

European Jewish Parliament#

European Union of Jewish Students#

Five Towns PAC*

Florida Congressional Committee*

Florida Jewish Democrats

Foreign Policy Initiative (PNAC 2.0)

Foreign Policy Research Institute

For Integrity in Govt PAC*

Foundation for the Defense of Democracies

Freedom Center

Friends of Ir David

Friends of Israel*

Friends of Israel (UK)#

Friends of Israel Initiative

Friends of Israeli Defense Forces

Garden State PAC*

Genesis Prize

Georgia Citizens for Good Government*

Georgia Peach*

German Committee for Ffeeing of Russian Jews#

German organization Honestly Concerned#

Gold Coast PAC*

Grand Canyon State Caucus*

Greater Los Angeles PAC*

Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry

Habonim Dror

Hadassah

Hadassah Women’s Zionist Organization of America

Hanoar Hatzioi (HH, Israel)#

Hasbara Fellowships

Heartland PAC*

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion

Hellen Diller Family Foundation

Heritage Foundation

Hertog Foundation

Herzl Institute in Jerusalem#

Histadrut

Hochberg Family Foundation

Holocaust Memorial Council

Honest Reporting Canada#

Hudson Institute

Hudson Valley PAC*

Independent Australian Jewish Voices#

Independent Jewish Voices (Canada) #

Independent Jewish Voices (US)

Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism: four centers:

Yale University

Tel Aviv University#

Hebrew University of Jerusalem#

Technical University of Berlin#

Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies

Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis

Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy

Institute for Zionist Strategies (Israel)#

Interdisciplinary Center (IDC Herzliya)#

International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians#

International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (aka Stand for Israel)

International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance#

International League Against Racism and Antisemitism#

International Legal Forum

Israel Allies Foundation

Israel Britain Alliance (UK)#

Israel Democracy Institute’s International Advisory Council#

Israel Hayom (biased newspaper in Israel, most widely distributed)#

Israel Land Fund (ILF)#

Israel on Campus Coalition#

Israel Policy Forum#

Israel Project

Israel Institute of New Zealand (IINZ)#

Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs#

J Street

J Street PAC*

Jacobson Family Foundation

Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs#

Jerusalem Post#

Jewish Agency for Israel#

Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee#

Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco

Jewish Community Foundation of Los Angeles

Jewish Community Relations Council of New York

Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington

Jewish Council for Education & Research*

Jewish Council for Public Affairs

Jewish Daily Forward

Jewish Defense League

Jewish Democratic Council of America (JDCA)

Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA)

Jewish Federation of Cincinnati Hillel

Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia

Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA)

Jewish Leadership Conference

Jewish Leadership Council (UK)#

Jewish Labor Movement (UK)#

Jewish National Fund (KKL-JNF, Israel)#

Jewish National Fund – USA

Jewish National Fund – Canada#

Jewish News Syndicate

Jewish Party (Czechoslovakia)#

Jewish Party (Romania)#

Jewish Socialists’ Group#

Jewish Virtual Library

Jewish Voice for Labour#

JewishOnCampus

Jewishwebsite.com

Jews for Israeli-Palestinian Peace#

Jim Joseph Foundation

JNF Charitable Trust (Jewish National Fund – UK)#

Joint Action Cmte for Political Affairs*

Kentucky-Israel Caucus

Keren Keshet Foundation

Klarman Family Foundation

Kohelet Policy Forum

Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law

Louisiana for American Security*

Magshimey Herut#

Maryland Assn For Concerned Citizens*

Massachusetts Congr Campaign Cmte*

Megamot Shalom

Mercaz-USA

Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus

Mida#

Middle East Forum

Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI)

Middle East & Central Asia Research Center (MECARC, at Aria University)#

Mid-Manhattan PAC*

Milstein Family Foundation

Ministry of Diaspora Affairs (Israel government)#

Ministry of Strategic Affairs (Israel government)#

MinnPAC*

MOPAC*

Mosaic Magazine

Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies#

Moskowitz Foundation

Multi-Issue PAC*

Muslim-Jewish Advisory Council

National Action Committee*

National Bipartisan PAC*

National Coalition Supporting Soviet Jewry

National Jewish Democratic Council*

National PAC*

NC Jewish Caucus

Nefesh B’Nefesh

Never Again Action

New Fraternal Jewish Association

New Jersey Democratic State Committee Jewish Caucus

New Jersey-Israel Commission

Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust

New York State Young Democrats Jewish Caucus

Nextbook

NGO Monitor#

nocamels.com

NorPAC

North Jersey PAC/ NorPAC*

Northern Californians for Good Govt*

Northwest PAC*

Office to Monitor and Combat Anti-Semitism (Official US Fed Gov Office!)

One Jerusalem

The Public Diplomacy Directorate (Israeli office)

PAC of Cherry Hill, NJ*

Pacific PAC*

Palestinian Media Watch

Partners for Progressive Israel

Pax PAC*

Pennsylvania Jewish Legislative Caucus

Pinsker Center (at King’s College London)#

KCL Israel Society (at King’s College London)#

City Israel Society (at King’s College London)#

Pro-Israel America PAC*

Qahal

Religious Zionists of America

Republican Jewish Coalition*

Reut Group (formerly the Reut Institute, Israel)#

Rita & Irwin Hochberg Family Foundation (aka, Defense of Democracies)

Roundtable PAC*

Sacramento Area Good Govt Assn*

Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy Research#

San Diego Community PAC*

San Franciscans for Good Government*

Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME)#

Scottish Council of Jewish Communities#

Seph PAC*

Shalem Center in Jerusalem#

Shiloh Policy Forum

Shurat HaDin (aka. Israel Law Center ILC)#

Silver State PAC*

Simon Wiesenthal Center

Snider Foundation

South Carolinians for Representative Govt*

South Florida Caucus*

Stand With Us (aka, Israel Emergency Alliance)

St Louis PAC*

St Louisians for Better Government*

Stat PAC*

StopAntisemitism

Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry (SSSJ)

SunPAC*

Swedish Zionist Federation#

Sussex Friends of Israel (UK)#

Tehran Jewish Committee#

Tennesseans For Better Government*

The Coexistence Trust#

Tikvah

To Protect Our Heritage PAC*

TX PAC*

United PAC*

U.N. Watch#

Union des Progressistes Juifs de Belgique#

Union for Reform Judaism (URJ) (aka, Union of Amrcn Hebrw Congrtns UAHC)

Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion (arm of UAHC)



Central Conference of American Rabbis (second arm of UAHC)

Union of Councils for Soviet Jews (UCSJ)

Union of Jewish Students (UK)#

Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America

United Americans In Israel*

United Democracy Project (from AIPAC)*

United Jewish Israel Appeal#

United with Israel#

U.S. House of Representatives Jewish Caucus

US Israel PAC*

Virginia Congressional Committee*

Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP)

Washington PAC*

We Believe in Israel (UK)#

Westchester Allied PAC*

William Rosenwald Family Fund

Women’s Alliance for Israel / World Alliance for Israel*

Women’s International Zionist Organization (WIZO)#

Women’s Pro-Israel National PAC*

Women’s Zionist Organization of America

World Jewish Congress#

World Jewish Congress American Section (Fund raising arm)

World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ)# (Umbrella Organization)

World Union of Jewish Students#

World Zionist Organization#

Yehuda and Anne Neuberger Foundation

Yesha Council (in Israel)

Young Jewish Leadership PAC*

Zioness

Zionist Federation of Germany#

Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland (Reps over 30 organizations)#

Zionist General Council#

Zionist Organization of America*

Non-Jewish Political Organizations

Christian Broadcasting Network

Christian Television Network

Christians United for Israel (John Hagee)

Stand for Israel

Day of Prayer for the Peace of Jerusalem

Funding Levels of Organizations

Jewish Political Action Committees (PAC) contributed to a total of $71,300,000
to US elections from 1990 to 2020, with an average of $3,400,000 per year, and
in the years 2016 – 2020, the average was $8,300,000 per year:
https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/pro-israel-pacs-campaign-contributions

The term “Israel Lobby” that most writers use for this Lobby fails to do justice
to the extraordinary scope and composition of this special interest group, since
the Lobby addresses all Jewish political concerns, not just Israel, the leaders
of the US Jewish political organizations above are virtually all US Jewish
citizens, and the number and impact of non-Jewish organizations that support
Israel is minuscule compared to this huge block of Jewish organizations.



Shown below are funding levels of some of the above organizations, and
contributions to most them are tax-deductible donations (according to Allison
Weir). The above link to the Jewish Virtual Library provides funding levels for
some of the individually named PACs in the list.

• The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): $100s million endowment;
$100 million annual revenues.

• The American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF): $26 million annual revenues.

• The Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP): $23.5 million net
assets. $9.4 million annual revenues.

• Anti-Defamation League (ADL): $115 million net assets,[12] $60 million annual
revenues.

• International Fellowship of Christians and Jews (aka Stand for Israel): $100
million annual revenues.

• The Israel Project: $11 million annual budget.

• Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces (FIDF): $80 million net assets, $60
million annual revenues.

• Hadassah (Women’s Zionist Organization of America): $400 million net assets,
$100 million annual revenues.

• The Jim Joseph Foundation: $837 million net assets.

• The Avi Chai Foundation: $615 million total assets.

• Jewish Federations: $3 billion annual revenues.

• Jewish Community Relations Councils, in cities all over U.S.: Boston annual
revenues $2.5 million; Louisville annual revenues $7-10 million; Detroit
$734,000, New York $4.5 million, etc.

• Hillel: Over $26 million.

• JINSA Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs: $3 million annual
revenues.

• Center for Security Policy: $4 million annual revenues.



• Foreign Policy Initiative (PNAC 2.0): $1.5 million annual revenues.

• MEMRI Middle East Media Research Institute: $5.2 million.

• Birthright: $55 million.

• David Project: $4.4 million.

• CAMERA Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America: $3.5
million.

Various Facts and Comments

 1. Jewish Funding Levels of Politicians

As of January 2024, the top ten US politicians getting Jewish money since 1990
are:

#1 Joe Biden, $4,346,264

Biden is a key figure in securing record sums of U.S. aid to the Jewish state
and helped block a 1998 peace proposal with Palestine. He stated that there are
“no red lines” that Israel could cross that would result in a loss of American
support, giving Israeli Jews a carte blanche to break any rules, norms or laws
they want, resulting in Apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and war crimes such as the
bombing of schools, hospitals and places of worship, mass starvation, collective
deadly punishment, including the use of white phosphorous munitions on
civilians. Most all the arms Israel is using come supplied directly by the U.S.
In November, 2023, the Biden administration rubber-stamped another $14.5 billion
military aid package to Israel, ensuring the carnage would continue, and
enrolling themselves in likely war crimes, crimes against humanity, and
genocide.

#2 Robert Menéndez, $2,483,205

He claims that Israel, based on Zionism, a form of fascism, and the United
States are intrinsically linked and were founded on the same principles.

#3 Mitch McConnell, $1,953,160

He’s famous for his attempt to force through legislation criminalizing BDS, in
direct violation of our first Amendments rights to free speech.

#4 Chuck Schumer, $1,725,324

This long-time senator, a pillar of the US Jewish Community, has taken the lead
in steering the public conversation away from Israel’s crimes and towards a
supposed rise in antisemitism across America. “To us, the Jewish people, the
rise in antisemitism is a crisis. A five-alarm fire that must be extinguished,”
the New York Senator said, adding that “Jewish-Americans are feeling singled
out, targeted and isolated. In many ways, we feel alone.” Schumer is a skilled
obfuscator and propagandist for the Jewish Tribe, enhancing the propaganda
efforts that Israel funds with tens of millions of dollars annually for its
“Hasbara” efforts. The idea that antisemitic hate is exploding across the United
States comes largely from a report published by the Anti-Defamation League
(ADL), headed by Jonathan Greenblatt, which claims that antisemitic incidents
have risen by 337% since October 7. Buried in the small print, however, is the
fact that 45% of these “antisemitic” incidents the ADL has tallied are
pro-Palestine, pro-peace marches calling for ceasefires, including ones led by
Jewish groups like If Not Now or Jewish Voice for Peace. He writes:

“Today, too many Americans are exploiting arguments against Israel and leaping
toward a virulent antisemitism. The normalization and intensifying of this rise
in hate is the danger many Jewish people fear most.”

He labeled Dave Zirin, a Jewish journalist, as an antisemite for supporting
Palestinians. Schumer has led the US Senate to push through military aid
packages to Israel, even as it carries out actions many have labeled war crimes,
writing that:

“One of the most important tasks we must finish is taking up and passing a
funding bill to ensure we, as well as our friends and partners in Ukraine,
Israel, and the Indo-Pacific region, have the necessary military capabilities to
confront and deter our adversaries and competitors.”

#5 Steny Hoyer, $1,620,294

Hoyer demanded that “Congress must immediately and unconditionally fund Israel,”
and give Netanyahu the green light to do whatever he pleases. And referring to
Israel, which Jews established via settler colonization of Palestine, and in
which Jews maintain illegal occupations, “..this is your place of security, this
is your place of sovereignty, this is your place of safety.”

Hoyer also voted in favor of a bill stating that anti-Zionism is inherently
antisemitic, thereby declaring all criticism of Israel to be invalid and racist.

#6 Ted Cruz, $1,299,194

On an interview with Breaking Point on YouTube, Cruz said, “I don’t condemn
anything Israel does” just after the interviewer quoted an Israeli spokesman of
advocating the use of a nuclear bomb on Gaza.

#7 Ron Wyden, $1,279,376

In 2017, he co-sponsored a bill that made it a federal crime, punishable by a
maximum prison sentence of 20 years, for Americans to participate in or even
encourage boycotts against Israel and illegal Israeli settlements. Such a bill
would be in direct violation of the First Amendment.

#8 Dick Durbin, $1,126,020

He owes his political career to the Israel lobby. In 1982, the then-obscure
college professor benefitted enormously from AIPAC money to defeat incumbent
Paul Findley, a strong proponent of the Palestinian people. Recently, he called
for immediate military aid to Israel and co-signed a senate resolution
reaffirming Washington’s support for Israel’s “right to self-defense” in the
wake of October 7.

#9 Josh Gottheimer, $1,109,370

He co-sponsored a bill equating opposition to Israeli government policy with
antisemitism and introduced legislation to block and criminalize boycotting the
state of Israel. He tried to pressure Rutgers University into calling off an
event that protested for Palestinian rights. He wrote, “Last night, 15 of my
Democratic colleagues voted AGAINST standing with our ally Israel and condemning
Hamas terrorists who brutally murdered, raped, and kidnapped babies, children,
men, women, and elderly, including Americans. They are despicable and do not
speak for our party,”

#10 Shontel Brown, $1,028,686

She wrote, “Let’s be clear: Israel is not an apartheid state. Any
mischaracterizations otherwise attempt to delegitimize Israel, a robust
democracy, and will only serve to fuel rising antisemitism. I will always
advocate for a strong U.S.-Israel relationship founded on our shared values.”
She received more pro-Israel money than any other politician nationwide during
the 2021-2022 election cycle, helping her overcome a double-digit polling
deficit to defeat Nina Turner, a democratic socialist and former co-chair of
Bernie Sanders’ 2020 campaign.

 2. The Center for Responsive Politics

The Center for Responsive Politics, publisher of OpenSecrets.org, tracks all
lobbies and PACs, and describes the ‘background’ of those ‘Pro-Israel’ PACs as,
“A nationwide network of local political action committees, generally named
after the region their donors come from, supplies much of the pro-Israel money
in US politics. Additional funds also come from individuals who bundle
contributions to candidates favored by the PACs. The donors’ unified goal is to
build stronger Israel-United States relations and to support Israel in its
negotiations and armed conflicts with its Arab neighbors.”

The Center for Responsive Politics: 1990–2006 data shows that “pro-Israel
interests have contributed $56.8 million in individual, group and soft money
donations to federal candidates and party committees since 1990.” [$3.6 mpy] In
contrast, Arab-Americans and Muslims PACs contributed slightly less than
$800,000 during the same (1990–2006) period. In 2006, 60% of the Democratic
Party’s fundraising and 25% of that for the Republican Party’s fundraising came
from Jewish-funded PACs. According to a Washington Post estimate, Democratic
presidential candidates depend on Jewish sources for as much as 60% of money
raised from private sources.



AIPAC president Howard Friedman says “AIPAC meets with every candidate running
for Congress. These candidates receive in-depth briefings to help them
completely understand the complexities of Israel’s predicament and that of the
Middle East as a whole. We even ask each candidate to author a ‘position paper’
on their views of the US-Israel relationship – so it’s clear where they stand on
the subject.”

According to Mitchell Bard, Israel lobbyists also educate politicians by:

taking them to Israel on study missions. Once officials have direct exposure to
the country, its leaders, geography, and security dilemmas, they typically
return more sympathetic to Israel. Politicians also sometimes travel to Israel
specifically to demonstrate to the lobby their interest in Israel. Thus, for
example, George W. Bush made his one and only trip to Israel before deciding to
run for President in what was widely viewed as an effort to win pro-Israel
voters’ support.[24]

Mearsheimer and Walt quote Morris Amitay, former AIPAC director as saying, “It’s
almost politically suicidal … for a member of Congress who wants to seek
reelection to take any stand that might be interpreted as anti-policy of the
conservative Israeli government.”[83] They also quote a Michael Massing article
in which an unnamed staffer sympathetic to Israel said, “We can count on well
over half the House – 250 to 300 members – to do reflexively whatever AIPAC
wants.”[84] Similarly they cite former AIPAC official Steven Rosen illustrating
AIPAC’s power for Jeffrey Goldberg by putting a napkin in front of him and
saying, “In twenty-four hours, we could have the signatures of seventy senators
on this napkin.”[85]

American journalist Michael Massing argues that there is a lack of media
coverage on the Israel lobby and posits this explanation: “Why the blackout? For
one thing, reporting on these groups is not easy. AIPAC’s power makes potential
sources reluctant to discuss the organization on the record, and employees who
leave it usually sign pledges of silence. AIPAC officials themselves rarely give
interviews, and the organization even resists divulging its board of
directors.”[60] Massing writes that in addition to AIPAC’s efforts to maintain a
low profile, “journalists, meanwhile, are often loath to write about the
influence of organized Jewry. … In the end, though, the main obstacle to
covering these groups is fear.”[60] Steven Rosen, a former director of
foreign-policy issues for AIPAC, explained to Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker
that “a lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the
sun.”[118]

Why so much political activity by Jews?

Here’s the Jewish Manifesto:

The Jewish Manifesto

“We had enough. No more will we be victims. The Holocaust was the last straw.
Never again!

“We will fight for our existence, and too bad the Palestinians got in the way,
but our survival as a Tribe is at stake, and we will make sure our refuge, the
Jewish State, is restored to Eretz Yisrael and strong enough to forever ensure
our Tribal survival in this world that mostly hates us.



“G-d reserved this land for us and we are claiming it for the second time now.
The first time was from the Canaanites, and now it’s from the Palestinian Arabs.
This is what our G-d has promised us because we are the only ones chosen by the
Almighty.

“And we will lie and obfuscate and even resort to Biblical fairy tales as much
as necessary to fool both ourselves and everyone else, convincing everyone that
we have a valid moral argument to support our settler-colonialism, illegal
occupation, Apartheid System, theft of land, ethnic cleansing, daily murders,
dispossession, assassinations, and unjust imprisonment of our fellow Semites,
the Palestinian Arab people. And now, finally, we have shown that we will resort
to genocide of the Palestinians, once we feel confident enough that we can get
away with it, at least in the minds of our favorite superpower, the USA.

“We will not admit to lying and obfuscating, and the most we will admit is that
‘We do what we have to do.’

“We do not take prisoners and we will assassinate you if we deem that you’re too
much a threat to the Tribe, no matter who or where you are. We don’t recognize
any possible constraint another sovereign nation might attempt with us, and we
consider Israel above all other nations or human organizations. All other people
are individuals, not members of anything that has equal status to the Jewish
Tribe. Our morality is uniquely Jewish Morality and we acknowledge no higher
authority, either secular or moral.

“And we will violate democratic principles by means of our vast wealth in order
to ensure that the US superpower, along with the UK and key EU nations, will
provide unconditional political and military support for Israel, enrolling the
entire US citizenry into being accomplice and accessory to the actions Israeli
Jews take against the Palestinian peoples.

“We are in a constant state of war with the Gentiles, mostly below the surface,
because they can attempt our extermination anytime at the drop of a hat. The
Tribe is more important than any of us, or any other person, because of the
benefits our leaders derive from it, because of its proven success as their
business model. Although Jew Power benefits most of all our leaders, all Jews
should exercise it, because the Tribe must prevail forever and vanquish any
resisting individual, whether Jew or non-Jew.”e sun.”[118]

I’m one of many curious beings who try to explain the problematic nature of
tribalism, any kind of tribalism and hope that we humans learn to establish our
common humanity – now proven by DNA to be a scientific fact – as the basis for
all our institutions, groups, and dealings with one another.

………………………..

https://archive.ph/xXLkj

Article source: https://articlebiz.com



| Tagged antisemitism, israel, palestine, politics, zionism


LIFE DURING WARTIME – ON THE ROAD IN DONBASS – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 13 FEB 2024

Posted on February 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 2,700 WORDS • 

Pepe Escobar embarked on a journey across Donbass to share his thoughts on the
many first-hand encounters with the locals, who show unbreakable resilience.

> You are given a name by the War:/it’s a call sign, not nickname – much
> more./Lack of fancy cars here and iPads,/But you have APC and MANPADS./Social
> media long left behind,/Children’s drawings with “Z” stick to mind./’Likes”
> and “thumbs up” are valued as dust,/But the prayers from people you
> trust./Hold On, Soldier, my brother, my friend,/The hostility comes to an
> end./War’s unable to stop its decease,/Grief and suffering will turn into
> peace./Life returns to the placid format,/With your callsign, inscribed in
> your heart./ From the war, as a small souvenir:/Far away, but eternally near.
> 
> Inna Kucherova, Call Sign, in A Letter to a Soldier, published December 2022

It’s a cold, rainy, damp morning in the deep Donbass countryside, at a secret
location close to the Urozhaynoye direction; a nondescript country house,
crucially under the fog, which prevents the work of enemy drones.

Father Igor, a military priest, is blessing a group of local contract-signed
volunteers to the Archangel Gabriel battalion, ready to go to the front lines of
the US vs. Russia proxy war. The man in charge of the battalion is one of the
top-ranking officers of Orthodox Christian units in the DPR.

A small shrine is set up in the corner of a small, cramped room, decorated with
icons. Candles are lit, and three soldiers hold the red flag with the icon of
Jesus in the center. After prayers and a small homily, Father Igor blesses each
soldier.

Paying my respects to the children victims of Ukrainian shelling at a DIY
memorial off the ‘Road of Life’.

Quite an honor. This pic is now on the wall of the HQ of the Dmitry Donskoy
Orthodox Christian battalion in Donbass.

With the kamikaze drone and DIY mine-landing rover specialists at an undisclosed
location in Donetsk.

This is yet another stop in a sort of itinerant icon road show, started in
Kherson, then Zaporozhye and all the way to the myriad DPR front lines, led by
my gracious host Andrey Afanasiev, military correspondent for the Spas channel,
and later joined in Donetsk by a decorated fighter for the Archangel Michael
battalion, an extremely bright and engaging young man codename Pilot.

There are between 28 and 30 Orthodox Christian battalion fighting in Donbass.
That’s the power of Orthodox Christianity. To see them at work is to understand
the essentials: how the Russian soul is capable of any sacrifice to protect the
core values of its civilization. Throughout Russian history, it’s individuals
that sacrifice their lives to protect the community – and not vice-versa. Those
who survived – or perished – in the siege of Leningrad are only one among
countless examples.

So the Orthodox Christian battalion were my guardian angels as I returned to
Novorossiya to revisit the rich black soil where the old “rules-based” world
order came to die.

The Living Contradictions of the ‘Road of Life’

The first thing that hits you when you arrive in Donetsk nearly 10 years after
Maidan in Kiev is the incessant loud booms. Incoming and mostly outgoing. After
such a long, dreary time, interminable shelling of civilians (which
are invisible to the collective West), and nearly 2 years after the start of the
Special Military Operation (SMO), this is still a city at war; still vulnerable
along the three lines of defense behind the front.

The “Road of Life” has got to be one of the epic war misnomers in Donetsk.
“Road” is a euphemism for a dark, muddy bog plied back and forth virtually
non-stop by military vehicles. “Life” applies because the Donbass military
actually donate food and humanitarian aid to the locals at the Gornyak
neighborhood every single week.

The heart of the Road of Life is the Svyato Blagoveschensky temple, cared for by
Father Viktor – who at the time of my visit was away on rehabilitation, as
several parts of his body were hit by shrapnel. I am shepherded by Yelena, who
shows me around the impeccably clean temple bearing sublime icons –
including 13th century Prince Alexander Nevsky, who in 1259 became the supreme
Russian ruler, Sovereign of Kiev, Vladimir and Novgorod. Gornyak is a deluge of
black mud, under the incessant rain, with no running water and electricity.
Residents are forced to walk at least two kilometers, every day, to buy
groceries: there are no local buses.

Yelena, the caretaker of Father Michael’s temple at the ‘Road of Life’ in
Donetsk.

Alexander Nevsky’s icon at Father Michael’s temple.

In one of the back rooms, Svetlana carefully arranges mini-packages of food
essentials to be distributed every Sunday after liturgy. I meet Mother Pelageya,
86 years old, who comes to the temple every Sunday, and would not even dream of
ever leaving her neighborhood.

Svetlana organizing food packages out of donations by the DPR military to
civilians close to the front line.

Mother Pelageya, 86, at Father Michael’s temple in the ‘Road of Life’ in
Donetsk.

Gornyak is in the third line of defense. The loud booms – as in everywhere in
Donetsk – are nearly non-stop, incoming and outgoing. If we follow the road for
another 500 meters or so and turn right, we are only 5 km away from Avdeyevka –
which may be about to fall in days, or weeks at most.

At the entrance of Gornyak there’s the legendary DonbassActiv chemical factory –
now inactive – which actually fabricated the red stars which shine over the
Kremlin, using a special gas technology that was never reproduced. In a side
street to the Road of Life, local residents built an improvised shrine to honor
the child victims of Ukrainian shelling. One day this is going to end: the day
when the DPR military completely controls Avdeyevka.

The Donbass Activ chemical plant at the entrance of the ‘Road of Life’ in
Donetsk

‘Mariupol Is Russia’

The traveling priesthood exits the digs of the Archangel Gabriel battalion and
heads to a meeting in a garage with the Dmitry Donskoy orthodox battalion,
fighting in the Ugledar direction. That’s where I meet the remarkable Troya, the
battalion’s medic, a young woman who had a comfy job as a deputy officer in a
Russian district before she decided to volunteer.

Onwards to a cramped military dormitory where a cat and her kittens reign as
mascots, choosing the best place in the room right by the iron stove. Time to
bless the fighters of the Dimitri Zalunsky battalion, named after St. Dimitri of
Thessaloniki, who are fighting in the Nikolskoye direction.

At each successive ceremony, you can’t help being stricken by the purity of the
ritual, the beauty of the chants, the grave expressions in the faces of the
volunteers, all ages, from teenagers to sexagenarians. Deeply touching. This in
so many aspects is the Slavic counterpart of the Islamic Axis of
Resistance fighting in West Asia. It is a form of asabiyya – “community spirit”,
as I used it in a different context referring to the Yemeni Houthis supporting
“our people” in Gaza.

Mariupol. Destroyed to the left, rebuilt to the right.

’Mariupol is Russia’. The port is to the left.

Mariupol building

So yes: deep down in the Donbass countryside, in communion with those living
life during wartime, we feel the enormity of something inexplicable and vast,
full of endless wonder, as if touching the Tao by silencing the recurrent loud
booms. In Russian there is, of course, a word for it: “загадка“, roughly
translated as “enigma” or “mystery”.

Tweet

I left the Donetsk countryside to go to Mariupol – and to be hit by the
proverbial shock when one is reminded of the utter destruction perpetrated by
the neo-nazi Azov battalion* in the spring of 2022, from the city center to the
shoreline along the port then all the way to the massive Azovstal Iron and Steel
Works.

The theatre – rather the Donetsk Academic Regional Drama Theatre – nearly
destroyed by the Azov battalion is now being meticulously restored, and the next
in line are scores of classical buildings downtown. In some neighborhoods the
contrast is striking: on the left side of the road, a destroyed building; on the
right side, a brand new one.

At the port, a red, white and blue stripe lays down the law: “Mariupol is
Russia”. I make a point to go to the former entrance of Azovstal, where the
remaining Azov battalion fighters, around 1,700, surrendered to Russian soldiers
in May 2022. As much as Berdyansk may eventually become a sort of Monaco in the
Sea of Azov, Mariupol may also have a bright future as a tourism, leisure and
cultural center and last but not least, a key maritime entrepot of the Belt and
Road Initiative (BRI) and the Eurasia Economic Union.

The Mystery of the Icon

Back from Mariupol I was confronted with one of the most extraordinary stories
woven with the fabric of magic under war. In a nondescript parking lot, suddenly
I’m face to the face with The Icon.

The icon – of Mary Mother of God – was gifted to the whole of Donbass by
veterans of the Zsloha Spetsnaz, when they came in the summer of 2014. The
legend goes that the icon started to spontaneously generate myrrh: as it felt
the pain suffered by the local people, it started to cry. During the storming of
Azovstal, the icon suddenly made an appearance, out of nowhere, brought in by a
pious soul. Two hours later, the legend goes, the DPR, Russian and Chechen
forces found their breakthrough.

The icon is always on the move along the SMO hot spots in Donbass. People in
charge of the relay know one another, but they can never guess where the icon
heads next; everything develops as a sort of magical mystery tour. It’s no
wonder Kiev has offered a huge reward for anyone – especially fifth columnists –
capable of capturing the icon, which then would be destroyed.

Father Igor reciting prayers.

The Orthodox icon “Mary Mother of God”, gifted to the people of Donbass.

The shrine set up at one of the Orthodox Christian battalion, where Father Igor
blesses the soldiers.

The shrine set up at one of the Orthodox Christian battalion, where Father Igor
blesses the soldiers.

At a night gathering in a compound in the western outskirts of Donetsk – lights
completely out in every direction – I have the honor to join one of the
top-ranking officers of the Orthodox units in the DPR, a tough as nails yet
jovial fellow fond of Barcelona under Messi, as well as the commander of
Archangel Michael battalion, codename Alphabet. We are in the first line of
defense, only 2 km away from the front line. The incessant loud booms –
especially outgoing – are really loud.

The conversation ranges from military tactics on the battlefield, especially in
the siege of Avdeyevka, which will be totally encircled in a matter of days, now
with the help of Special Forces, paratroopers and lots of armored vehicles, to
impressions of the Tucker Carlson interview with Putin (they heard nothing new).
The commanders note the absurdity of Kiev not acknowledging their hit on the
Il-76 carrying 65 Ukrainian POWs – totally dismissing the plight of their own
PoWs. I ask them why Russia simply does not bomb Avdeyevka to oblivion:
“Humanism”, they answer.

The DIY Rover From Hell

In a cold, foggy morning at a secret location in central Donetsk – once again,
no drones overhead – I meet two kamikaze drone specialists, codename Hooligan
and his observer, codename Letchik. They set up a kamikaze drone demo – of
course unarmed – while a few meters away mechanical engineer specialist “The
Advocate” sets up his own demo of a DIY mine-delivery rover.

That’s a certified lethal version of the Yandex food delivery rovers now quite
popular around Moscow. “Advocate” shows off the maneuverability and ability of
his little toy to face any terrain. The mission: each rover is equipped with two
mines, to be placed right under an enemy tank. Success so far has been
extraordinary – and the rover will be upgraded.

’The Advocate’ setting up his DIY mine-delivering rover test

There’s hardly a more daring character in Donetsk than Artyom Gavrilenko, who
built a brand new school cum museum right in the middle of the first line of
defense – once again only 2 km or so away from the frontline. He shows me around
the museum, which performs the enviable task of outlining the continuity between
the Great Patriotic War, the USSR adventure in Afghanistan against the
US-financed and weaponized jihad, and the proxy war in Donbass.

At the school/museum in Donetsk only 2 km away from the front line

That’s a parallel, DIY version of the official Museum of War in central Donetsk,
close to the Shaktar Donetsk football arena, which features stunning memorabilia
from the Great Patriotic War as well as fabulous shots by Russian war
photographers.

So Donetsk students – emphasis in math, history, geography, languages – will be
growing up deeply enmeshed in the history of what for all practical purposes is
a heroic mining town, extracting wealth from the black soil while its dreams are
always inexorably clouded by war.

We went into the DPR using backroads to cross the border to the LPR not far
from Lugansk. This is a slow, desolate border which reminds me of the Pamirs in
Tajikistan, basically used by locals. In and out, I was politely questioned by a
passport control officer from Dagestan and his seconds-in-command. They were
fascinated by my travels in Donbass, Afghanistan and West Asia – and invited me
to visit the Caucasus. As we left deep into the freezing night for the long trek
ahead back to Moscow, the exchange was priceless:

“You are always welcome here.”

“I’ll be back.”

“Like Terminator!”

………………………………

https://archive.ph/9xDgA

*The Azov Battalion is a terrorist organization banned in Russia.

(Republished from Sputnik International )

| Tagged europe, nato, politics, russia, ukraine


MISSILE AND BOMB STRIKE WARFARE: AN AMERICAN FETISH AND A GLOBAL SCOURGE – BY
JAMES A. RUSSELL (RESPONSIBLE STATECRAFT) 24 JAN 2024

Posted on February 13, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


A COMMON THREAD THROUGH RECENT HISTORY IS THAT ‘HELLFIRE FROM ABOVE’ DOESN’T
REALLY WORK

It was hard to know whether to laugh or cry in response to recent press reports
suggesting that the Biden administration is gearing up for a “sustained bombing
campaign” against the Houthis in Yemen. Unsurprisingly, the initial coalition
strikes against the Houthis apparently did not destroy the Houthi arsenal being
launched at commercial vessels in the Red Sea.

As was the case in the great jihadi hunt across Southwest Asia stretching over
nearly a quarter century, the United States today finds itself at war in a
conflict with no defined political objective and a clearly unachievable military
objective against an enemy that is nested in a complex political and strategic
circumstance that is completely unfamiliar to the United States. Sound familiar?

It is also a war with no apparent timeline in which the application of force is
linked to ill-defined benchmarks, suggesting that we could launch our bombs and
missiles indefinitely or until we run out of ammunition — to no strategic
purpose.

Have we learned nothing from our follies of the last 25 years in which we proved
incapable of clearly relating ends, ways, and means in making decisions on when
and under what circumstances to use force?

For those states that can afford them, standoff weapons and bombs have become
the preferred method of policing the international system. Yet it’s hard to
remember any of these strikes having any sort of lasting positive impact once
the headlines and videos faded. Strangely, these tools of war maintain a hold on
government and the popular imagination as some sort of “decisive” action that
curiously demonstrates strength, commitment, and resolve.

The reality is that strike warfare — long range strikes by planes and missiles —
has rarely achieved its advertised political and strategic consequence. Yet it
remains a dangerous, drug-like chimera to countries like the United States
desperately searching for some sort of easy, low-cost way of maintaining global
influence, control, and primacy in a chaotic world. Like all drugs, the initial
rush feels great, but the long-range addiction is, in the end, far more
destructive, dangerous, and difficult (if not impossible) to kick.

We tell ourselves that the state/bad guy on the receiving end (in this case the
Houthis) will feel the wrath of our (duly proportionate) strikes and reconsider
continuing their attacks.

Yet, of course, the Houthis in public pronouncements seem to have welcomed the
chance to start shooting directly at the United States. Moreover, we have
limited knowledge of the Houthi anti-ship weapon arsenal in its entirety, let
alone the political motivations that surround their own use of force. The truth
is we have no knowledge or understanding of whether and under what circumstances
the Houthis will cease fire, but blithely assume that our missiles and bombs
will make them behave.


THE HISTORY OF AMERICA’S FETISH

Open-ended military strikes regrettably have become an ill-considered American
fetish. We told ourselves the same thing in December 1998, in the three-day
fusillade against Iraq known as Operation Desert Fox, when Washington wanted to
stress its disapproval of Saddam Hussein’s recalcitrance toward UN weapons
inspectors. And, of course, Desert Fox was really just the exclamation point on
a campaign of long-range strikes during the 1990s that sought to control the
Iraqi dictator’s non-existent WMD programs.

My favorite strike of the 1990s was the 1996 cruise missile strike to warn
Saddam off attacking the Kurds in northern Iraq. He did not. But the strategic
consequences of those strikes went unrecognized at the time, and they had little
to do with Saddam. Following those strikes, the U.S. took on the role of
protecting the Kurds and tacitly endorsed their dream of statehood — a decision
that today continues to shape the region in ways that may or may not support our
interests. In the end, the era of the 1990s culminating in Desert Fox proved to
be little else but the bridge to the next phase of the U.S. war on Iraq.

We told ourselves the same thing in the opening phases of the shock and awe
campaign of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as we blasted away in our creative
targeting against Saddam’s armies under the rubric of “shock and awe” and
“effects-based operations.” Sure enough, Saddam’s armies indeed melted away from
our initial bombing and our advancing armies, only to regroup and morph into
something much more dangerous and deadly that is still shaping the landscape of
the Middle East today.

We told ourselves that same thing in Afghanistan, as we unleashed a fusillade of
strikes called in by CIA jawbreaker teams that sent the Taliban scurrying over
the border into Pakistan in 2001 to rest and refit. Once they had done that,
they slipped back across the border to resume the war — a conflict they would
eventually win 20 years later — forcing the United States to retreat and leaving
the Taliban in control of the country.

We told ourselves the same thing in Libya in 2011, when we believed that a few
well-placed missiles and bombs would enable a peaceful transition of power from
Qadafi to someone more amenable to, well, us. Of course, as was the case in
Iraq, the strikes were only the opening round in an ongoing struggle for
political power and authority that continues to this day.

As was the case in Iraq and Afghanistan, the second-order effects of the strikes
in Libya ended up being of far greater strategic consequences than was
anticipated at the time. The current Biden national security team, which
engineered these strikes, obviously learned nothing from the experience.

We’ve told ourselves the same thing in the global war on terror, where we have
sent our robots and special forces hunting for sought-after “high value targets”
all over the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. We have surely rained death
and destruction on these enemies (and killed lots of innocent people who were at
the wrong place at the wrong time) with our Hellfire missiles, but did we win
any of these wars?


YET WE REMAIN ADDICTED 

Despite these uncertain results and even colossal failures, we remain addicted
to strike warfare, telling ourselves that we can police the politics on the
ground by dropping bombs from on high. The reality is, of course, different.
Targeting people and property with high explosives tends to make them angry and
fight harder. Just ask the Houthis, who have endured years of U.S.-sponsored and
supported airstrikes by the Saudis and others in the Yemeni civil war.
Obviously, the Houthis were not bombed into submission.

Therein lies the strategic dilemma for the West, which has invested billions in
the strike, information, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities designed
to blow things up at long range with little advertised collateral damage. The
revolution in military affairs (and billions of taxpayer dollars) indeed
delivered the strike complex — much to the delight of political leaders, who saw
in it a low-cost substitute for sending armies to the four corners of the globe
to police local political disputes. As described above, this is largely a myth.

The Houthis have indicated they’ll stop shooting when the Gaza War ends. Perhaps
Secretary Blinken should stop by Sana’a on his next trip to the region for
consultations. Even more importantly, maybe the Biden Administration should
listen to the Houthis and others and take decisive steps to end the war in Gaza
instead of becoming enmeshed in the conflict’s wider fires to no strategic
purpose.

Surrounded by the wreckage around the world wrought by strikes stretching back
over half a century, you’d think that it was time for us to get into the rehab
center and confront our addiction, yet this latest round of strikes tells us
that our habit depressingly remains as strong as ever.

……………………………………

James A. Russell

James Russell is an associate professor in the Department of National Security
Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. The views expressed
here are his own.

| Tagged iran, middle-east, news, world, yemen


GENOCIDE MEETS FRENCH DEVOTION TO ISRAEL – BY DIANA JOHNSTONE – 11 FEB 2024

Posted on February 13, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Israel’s loyal supporters in the West combat rising world indignation over the
suffering of the Palestinian people by changing the subject.

When Gazan families are buried under the rubble of their homes, it’s not about
the plight of the dispossessed Palestinians; it’s about eternal Jewish victims;
it’s about “Islamic terrorism;” or it’s about a threat to “Western values.”

That is the line taken by most of the French media and political class.

Or there is recourse to Biblical story-telling, featuring vengeance, ethnic
slaughter and prophecy of doom. In Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
declares a struggle between good and evil:

> “We are the people of the light, they are the people of darkness and light
> shall triumph over darkness . Now my role is to lead all Israelis to an
> overpowering victory… We shall realize the prophecy of Isaiah…”

In the United States of America, the crazed prophecies of the Israeli leader
find support from an American variant of Judeo-Christianity, more Judeo than
Christian, whose followers are taught to believe that gentle Jesus will zoom
back to earth as a murderous Avenger while his faithful float up to heaven.

France & the Shoah

Skeptical France is very far from such fantasies. French support to Israel is
longstanding and political, but tinged with semi-religious devotion rooted in
recent history.

France is officially, even ostentatiously, a secular nation, considerably
de-christianized over the past two hundred years.

To a unique extent, over the past half century, this religious void has been
filled by the sacred remembrance of the Shoah, as the Holocaust is usually
called here.

It all began in 1954 when 27-year-old Jewish journalist named Eliezer Wiesel met
the 70-year-old Catholic novelist François Mauriac in Paris.

Mauriac was deeply moved by Wiesel’s “resurrection” from his experience as a
prisoner in Auschwitz, seeing him as a Christ figure. For Mauriac, the sacrifice
of the Jews recalled the Crucifixion of Jesus.

With help from the prominent French writer, Wiesel transformed his copious
Yiddish notes into a French memoir, La Nuit (Night), the testimony that
transformed him into a major spiritual figure of the post-World War II era.

It was Mauriac, the devout Christian, who saw in Wiesel and his people the
parallels with Christianity, which as the Shoah was destined to take on the
attributes of a state religion in France as memories of the Nazi occupation were
transformed into sacred myth.

An Alliance Against Arab Nationalism

When the Nazis invaded France, there were approximately 320,000 Jewish people
living in France, including a large number of foreign nationals who had fled
from anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe.

Those unfortunate exiles made up the bulk of the 74,000 Jews who were brutally
rounded up and deported under German occupation. These deportations are the
principal factual basis for what developed into a sense of national
responsibility for the Shoah comparable to that of Germany itself.

However, of all Nazi-occupied countries, France is the country where the largest
percentage of Jews escaped Nazi deportations. An estimated 75 percent of Jews
survived the occupation without being deported, including around 90 percent of
Jews with French citizenship.

The reasons for this are controversial, but one result is that France has the
largest Jewish population in Europe today — around half a million, the third
largest Jewish population in the world, although far behind Israel or the United
States (with around 7 million each).

In recent years, many Jews have moved to Germany from Russia and from Israel
itself (118,000 altogether), making France and Germany the home to more Jews
than any other member state of the European Union. They are also the countries
where institutionalized repentance for the Shoah is most developed.

A difference is that a number of prominent Jews in Germany are sharply critical
of Israel (which may get them in trouble with the law), whereas the French
Jewish community is more solidly Zionist. The politically influential
Representative Council of Jewish Institutions in France (CRIF), a sort of French
AIPAC, fiercely defends Israeli interests.

A significant peculiarity of France is that Europe’s largest Jewish population
is cohabitating with continental Europe’s largest population of Muslim origin,
mostly Arab. Although France officially avoids ethnic or racial counting, this
population is estimated at around 15 million.

While politically disorganized, this community is assumed — especially by Jewish
community leaders — to be hostile to Israel. The potential for conflict between
these two communities — one very small and very influential, the other very
large and disparate — has for years haunted French political leaders.

France & Arab Nationalism

Guy Mollet, by then former prime minister of France, with his wife, on right,
and the Israeli politician Golda Meir, on left, during Israel’s Independence Day
Parade in Tel Aviv, May 13, 1959. (Wikimedia Commons, Public domain)

When the Jewish State was just a dream, it was seen by some as a sort of
socialist project, based on the kibbutz. Building on long standing friendly
relations between French Socialists and Zionism, France was the closest Western
ally of the new State of Israel.

In 1954, the government of Socialist Prime Minister Guy Mollet agreed to sell
Israel whatever military equipment it wanted. France even helped Israel develop
nuclear weapons.

At that time, Tel Aviv and Paris were allied against Arab nationalism, inasmuch
as secular, left-leaning Arab States (Egypt, Syria, Iraq) sympathized with both
the Palestinians and the rising national liberation movement in French Algeria.



But this changed under Charles De Gaulle, who conceded Algerian independence in
1962, put an arms embargo on the region in 1967 and sought to build balanced
relations with Arab States as part of an effort to develop friendly,
post-colonial relations with the Global South.

In June 1967, Israel’s lightning victory in the Six Days War was celebrated in
the streets of Paris by joyous horn honking. But President De Gaulle had opposed
the Israeli expansion and called for a sustainable peace based on evacuation of
territories conquered by Israel and mutual recognition by the belligerent
states.

In a remarkable press conference on Nov. 27, 1967 in Paris, De Gaulle expressed
ongoing support for the existence of Israel as a fait accompli while expressing
strong misgivings about the future of Jewish rule over Palestinian territories.

After recalling the shared admiration for the Jewish people and sympathy for
their suffering, De Gaulle observed, in respect to the creation of a Jewish
state, that:

> “Some even dreaded that the Jews, up to then dispersed, but who remained what
> they had always been, that is an elite people, self-confident and domineering,
> when once reunited on the site of their ancient greatness, might come to
> transform the highly moving wishes expressed for nineteen centuries into an
> ardent and conquering ambition.”

Charles de Gaulle in London delivering a BBC radio broadcast in 1941. (Wikimedia
Commons, Public domain)

De Gaulle recalled that he had promised that France would defend Israel from any
Arab attack, but implored Israel not to use its advantage to attack its Arab
neighbors.

> “We know that France’s voice was not heard. Israel having attacked, in six
> days of combat seized the objectives it wished to attain. Now, on the captured
> territories, it is organizing an occupation which cannot go on without
> oppression, repression, expulsions, and a resistance to all that which it will
> call terrorism.”

In response to these statements, prominent Jewish intellectuals and community
leaders ceased to revere De Gaulle as the leader of the Resistance. Around this
time, the Resistance itself as national patriotic myth was rapidly discredited
as the public imagination of Nazi Occupation came to center on the Holocaust.



Cinema played a role. In 1967, the documentary film by Marcel Ophuls, “The
Sorrow and the Pity”, convinced audiences that collaboration rather than
Resistance had overwhelmingly dominated occupied France. The film had a strong
impact on public opinion, not least on young leftists who the following year
carried out a libertarian revolt targeting the two political heirs to the
Resistance: the French Communist Party and President Charles De Gaulle.

In the revisionist mood of the time, national pride stemming from the Resistance
gave way to national shame over the deportation of Jews. This guilt became a
sort of public ritual for audiences who watched Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour long
documentary “Shoah,” released in 1985. In 1990, France adopted a measure called
the Gayssot law which can lead to heavy fines and even imprisonment for any
questioning of the official version of the Holocaust.

As I wrote in my book Circle in the Darkness, heresy defines religion. A French
citizen can deny the existence of Napoleon, or any other historic event, but any
questioning of the official version of the Shoah is blasphemy. Thus by
sacralizing a unique historic event, the Gayssot law in effect established the
Shoah as a state religion.

The Shoah is celebrated officially and unofficially, not only in the annual
Shoah commemoration but almost constantly in school rooms, trips to Auschwitz,
radio and television programs, books and films. It has de facto replaced
Christianity, which had succumbed to laïcité (secularism) over a century ago, as
the State religion. It has its martyrs and saints, its holy scripture, its
rituals, its pilgrimages, everything that Christianity had except redemption.

Expanding Role of Political Islam

Meanwhile, France’s post-war industrial buildup drew thousands of workers from
Algeria.

It wasn’t until new laws in the 1970s allowed “family reunion” that regrouping
of foreign workers with wives and children began to create large immigrant
neighborhoods, especially in the suburbs of Paris and other large cities, with
their own ethnically distinct religious practices, food and dress, especially
veiled women, clashing visibly with French customs.

The growth of these communities had a strong impact on the political
environment. The National Front, a coalition of far right groups led by
Jean-Marie Le Pen, called for stopping immigration, and the new left issued from
the May ’68 movement became their champions.

In the early 1980s, in order to accommodate European unification, Socialist
President François Mitterrand abandoned the program of nationalizations and
social measures for which he had been elected in coalition with the French
Communist Party (PCF).

The PCF left the coalition and subsequently lost its influential role both in
assimilating foreign workers and in opposing unlimited immigration. The
Socialists thereupon adopted human rights and antiracism as their defining
issues, condemning opposition to immigration as racist. Accused of
anti-Semitism, the National Front was condemned as a pariah with no fit place in
the Republic. This condemnation was ensured by Le Pen’s conviction under the
Gayssot law for having stated, in an interview, that gas chambers were “a detail
of World War II.”

While the left has increasingly adopted an “open border” acceptance of
immigration, it has increasingly advocated measures to ban Muslim customs seen
to violate the official French doctrine of laïcité.

French laïcité was institutionalized by the 1905 law on the separation of Church
and State, which finally deprived the Catholic Church of its traditional role in
education. In response to an apparent growth of religious practice among younger
Muslims, laïcité was revitalized by banning religious identity signaling in
public schools, notably by prohibiting school girls from wearing Muslim
headscarves to cover their hair. This focus on female dress later produced a ban
on wearing the burka in public. While intended to promote cultural assimilation,
such measures can also feed Muslim resentment at being a discriminated minority.

Western Schizophrenia Toward Islam

Palestinian protestors confront Israeli troops in Gaza City in 1987, during the
First Intifada. (Efi Sharir / Israel Press and Photo Agency, Wikimedia Commons,
CC BY 4.0)

In 1979, Western attitudes toward Islam entered their drastically schizophrenic
period, decrying the Islamic Revolution in Iran as a political and human rights
disaster, while giving full support to Islamic Mujahidin in neighboring
Afghanistan.

French political exhibitionist Bernard Henri Lévy was a most zealous supporter
of Afghan Muslims opposing the Russian incursion which failed to save
modernizing progressive forces in Kabul.

It was President Jimmy Carter’s chief strategist Zbigniew Brzezinski who saw the
potential of militant Islam to defeat Soviet influence in Central Asia. In the
1990s, the United States secretly backed illegal arming of Mujahideen to fight
on the Islamic side in Bosnia, against Serbia, considered in Washington a
miniature Russia. For leaders of the enlightened West, the most medieval
expressions of Islam were considered a useful tool against the rival
enlightenment in the East, based on Marxism.

Israel’s initial enemies were linked to secular Arab nationalism: the Popular
Liberation Forces (PLF), Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine (PFLP). In Gaza, the local branch of the Moslem Brotherhood, banned in
Egypt and hostile to secular groups, looked harmless, especially since its
leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin, was a quadriplegic confined to a wheelchair and
half blind.

Yassin built an Islamic center, called the Mujamma, which gained popularity by a
variety of social and charitable activities. The Israeli overlords favored this
development as it rivaled the secular resistance groups. Israel officially
recognized the Mujamma in 1979 and the number of mosques in Gaza doubled under
Israeli administration.

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“For leaders of the enlightened West, the most medieval expressions of Islam
were considered a useful tool against the rival enlightenment in the East, based
on Marxism.”

It was only during the Palestinian uprising of December 1987, known as the First
Intifada, that Sheikh Yassin created Hamas, dedicated to Islamist resistance.
Close to the people through its cultural and sports activities, the Islamic
organization had a popular base that eventually led to electoral success in Gaza
against the secular Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 2006.

The complicated U.S. instrumentalization of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the
Islamist revolution in Iran, U.S. support to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Iran
before waging war against Saddam Hussein, led in mysterious ways to the dramatic
Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon,
whose one clear political effect was to cement the U.S.-NATO-Israeli alliance
against “Islamic terrorism.”

This term has involved confounding different, often mutually hostile, groups
with each other as well as falsely associating peaceful Muslims with armed
groups. Israeli leaders had always denounced Palestine resisters as terrorists,
including those who were Christian. But Islamist terrorism was a threat that
made it easier to identify Israel as the front line in defense of Western
Judeo-Christian civilization.

Oct. 8, 2023: Ruins left by Israeli airstrikes in Khan Younis in the southern of
Gaza strip. (Mahmoud Fareed, Wafa for APAimages)

From then on, the United States and its NATO followers have ravaged the Middle
East, using Islamist extremism as official enemy or factual ally, to destroy the
three most secular and pro-Palestinian States in the region, Iraq, Libya and
Syria — executing Saddam Hussein, murdering Moammer Gaddafi and persisting in
illegal occupation and sanctions against Syria aimed at overthrowing Bashir al
Assad.

Terrorist Attacks in France



Following the Gaullist tradition, President Jacques Chirac kept France out of
the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. But subsequent governments aligned with the
United States, and Bernard-Henri Lévy ostentatiously goaded France into
assaulting Libya. France has paid a heavy price in blowback for its ambiguous
encounters with Islam. In the last 12 years, the country has experienced an
extraordinary number of authentic, Islamist, terrorist attacks against civilians
by fanatics shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

[Related: How the West’s War in Libya Spurred Terrorism in 14 Countries]

 * In March 2012, a man named Mohammed Merah shot dead seven people, including a
   French rabbi and three young Jewish children in southern France. His stated
   motives included Palestine and the French ban on the burka.
 * On Jan. 7, 2015, two coordinated attacks occurred, causing a major shock to
   the public. Gunmen entered the offices of the satirical journal Charlie
   Hebdo and murdered eight well-known cartoonists and two guards, in revenge
   for having published insulting cartoons of the Prophet. Meanwhile an
   accomplice killed several people in the course of taking hostages in a kosher
   grocery.
 * The deadliest attack took place in the evening of Nov. 13 the same year,
   killing 131 people and wounding 413 more when Islamist fanatics from Belgium
   blew themselves up outside a major sports event, sprayed gunfire and grenades
   into the theater during a rock concert and across café terraces in Paris. The
   Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) called the attacks retaliation for
   French bombing of Syria.

Civil service on Nov. 15, 2015, at the Place de la République in remembrance of
the victims of the attacks that took place two days earlier. (Mstyslav Chernov,
Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)

 * On Bastille day 2016, a Tunisian drove a 19-ton cargo truck into a holiday
   crowd on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, killing 86 people and injuring
   434 before being shot dead by police.
 * Twelve days later, an 86-year-old priest was stabbed to death while saying
   mass in a church in Normandy. ISIS claimed responsibility.
 * On Oct. 6, 2020, in the course of a class on freedom of expression,
   middle-school teacher Samuel Paty showed his class Charlie Hebdo cartoons of
   the Prophet, after permitting Muslim students to leave if they chose. Ten
   days later, in retribution, the teacher was stabbed and beheaded in the
   street by 18-year-old Abdullakh Anzorov, an Islamic Chechen refugee accorded
   political asylum from Russia. This caused an enormous shock in France, not
   least among the teaching profession.
 * On Oct. 13, 2023, a 20-year-old Chechen political refugee shouting Allahu
   Akbar attacked a school in the northern French city of Arras, stabbing to
   death French literature teacher Dominique Bernard.

In this context, people in France are particularly sensitive to the term
“Islamic terrorism,” [as if the entire religion of Islam was responsible, rather
than calling it Islamist terrorism, which refers to political Islam.]

When, on Oct. 7, fighters from Gaza succeeded in crossing into Israel, French
media and politicians instantly condemned the attack as “Islamic terrorism,”
implicitly relating it to the long chain of Islamist attacks in France.

Contrary to those attacks, the well organized Hamas fighters carried out a
successful military operation, breaching the Israeli wall that imprisons Gaza
and overrunning Israeli military bases. This operation had clear objectives, in
particular, the taking of hostages to exchange for some of the thousands of
Palestinian prisoners held by Israel. The hostage-taking was a clear invitation
to negotiations, but the Israeli regime loathes any negotiations that could
“legitimize” a Palestinian movement.

“When, on Oct. 7, fighters from Gaza succeeded in crossing into Israel, French
media and politicians instantly condemned the attack as ‘Islamic terrorism,’
implicitly relating it to the long chain of Islamist attacks in France.”

The government initially banned demonstrations protesting against Israel’s
massive attacks on the people of Gaza. Peaceful demonstrators were brutalized
and fined by police. However, bans have been dropped and pro-Palestinian
demonstrations have continued. Opposition to Israel’s genocidal retaliation
against the people of Gaza is surely strong throughout the French population,
especially among the youth, but it has very little political voice and so far,
no pollsters are measuring it.

French media echoed wildly exaggerated Israeli reports of Hamas atrocities and
the “rise of anti-Semitism.”

Newspapers featured growing Jewish fears of being attacked here in France. The
Israeli government has deliberately exploited fear of anti-Semitism to encourage
French Jews to move to Israel, but the success of the Hamas incursions risks
shaking confidence in Israel as Jews’ one safe refuge — cramming half the
world’s Jewish population into a small space surrounded by enemies.

Left & Right Switch Positions

Jean-Luc Mélenchon in 2019. (The Left, Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

In the days following Oct. 7, mainstream media interviewers tested every
politician with the demand to condemn Hamas as an “Islamist terrorist
organization.” Almost all enthusiastically complied, emphasizing their support
for “Israel’s right to exist” (whatever that might entail).

From Communist Party leader Fabien Roussel to Eric Zemmour, founder of a
nationalist party to the right of Marine Le Pen’s, French politicians were
unanimous in condemning Hamas’ “brutal terrorist attack” – with one exception.
The notable exception was the country’s leading leftwing politician, Jean-Luc
Mélenchon.

Mélenchon refused to denounce Hamas as a “terrorist organization.” Hamas
killings of civilians were “war crimes,” like any killing of civilians, he said.
The attacks, he tweeted, “prove only one thing: violence only produces and
reproduces itself. Horrified, our thoughts and our compassion go to all the
distressed populations, victims of it all. A ceasefire should be imposed .”

Many parliamentary members of Mélenchon’s party “La France Insoumise” (LFI,
France Unbowed) followed suit, contrary to other sections of the fragmented
left. Danièle Obono, an African-born LFI Paris MP was rudely goaded by a hostile
TV interviewer into saying that Hamas “is a resistance movement, that’s what it
calls itself…its objective is the liberation of Palestine… it resists
occupation.” Within a couple of hours, Interior Minister Gérard Darmanin
announced that he was having her charged with “apology for terrorism.”

Danièle Obono in March 2022. (DIE LINKE, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0)

A verbal lynch mob rose up against Mélenchon, a chorus vigorously joined not
only by his enemies on the right but also by rivals in smaller parties belonging
to the disintegrating leftist electoral coalition NUPES (Nouvelle Union
Populaire, Ecologique et Social) which he founded. Mélenchon and the LFI are
denounced as “Islamo-leftists,” flattering terrorists to win over the Muslim
vote.

Yonathan Arfi, the president of CRIF, angrily denounced Mélenchon as “an enemy
of the Republic.” Mélenchon, he raged, “chose not to express solidarity with
Israel but to legitimize terrorism by an equivalence between Israel and Hamas.”

Meanwhile Serge Klarsfeld, famous as a lifelong Nazi hunter and president of the
association Sons and Daughters of Deported Jews of France, rejoiced that Marine
Le Pen had completely changed the ideology of her party, the Rassemblement
National, from that of her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

Marine Le Pen led her party in a Nov. 12, 2023 Paris demonstration against
anti-Semitism while emphasizing her support for Israel. As a result, she has
“become respectable”, he concluded. Such approval will make it hard to demonize
her in future elections as in the past.

Referring to Jean-Luc Mélenchon, Klarsfeld expressed regret that “the far left
has abandoned its line of action against anti-Semitism,” while noting that “the
extreme left has always had an antisemite tradition.”

And thus a long brewing political reversal is being completed, not only in
France but across Europe and even America. Israel, whose early supporters were
on the left, from the Soviet Union to the French Socialists, is most vigorously
championed by the right, whereas more and more people (but rarely politicians)
on the left are joining the non-Western world’s shock and horror at the
genocidal actions of Israel against the Palestinian people.

The War of Civilizations

The most extreme champions of Israel, including numerous commentators and Eric
Zemmour, a journalist who founded a nationalist, anti-Muslim party called
Reconquest to the right of Marine Le Pen, merge the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
into a worldwide war of civilizations. For them, Hamas is just part of an
international Islamic war on Western civilization. In this view of things,
Israel is the vanguard of Western civilization whose main enemy is
anti-Semitism.

In the midst of this turmoil, President Emmanuel Macron follows the European
trends, but with notes of ambiguity confirming his position as a perfect
centrist. He hesitated before suspending funding to UNRWA, then did so claiming
his intention was to obtain a cease-fire. Such uncertainty can only displease
both sides of the embittered national division over Gaza.

He stayed away from the politically overcharged Nov. 12 demonstrations against
anti-Semitism, but compensated by leading a Feb. 7 commemoration in Paris of the
42 French and Franco-Israeli victims of the Oct. 7 attacks. The French
government chartered a plane to fly in relatives of the victims from Israel.
Participants booed and shouted “fascist!” and “terrorists!” at parliamentarians
from Mélenchon’s party who showed up to pay their respects.

In a cold rain, Macron read out the first names of the 42 victims whose lives,
he said, were “shattered by terrorist fury.”

“On October 7, at dawn,” he said, “the unspeakable resurfaced from the depths of
history,” producing “the greatest anti-Semitic massacre of our century.” So in
France, it seems, that what Oct. 7 was really about was not Gaza, nor Israel,
and certainly not about the Palestinians, but fundamentally about a resurgence
of the impunity wrought by the ever-present Shoah.

………………………

https://archive.is/OrmXD

Diana Johnstone was press secretary of the Green Group in the European
Parliament from 1989 to 1996. In her latest book, Circle in the Darkness:
Memoirs of a World Watcher (Clarity Press, 2020), she recounts key episodes in
the transformation of the German Green Party from a peace to a war party. Her
other books include Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western
Delusions (Pluto/Monthly Review) and in co-authorship with her father, Paul H.
Johnstone, From MAD to Madness: Inside Pentagon Nuclear War Planning (Clarity
Press). She can be reached at diana.johnstone@wanadoo.fr

(Republished from Consortium News)

| Tagged gaza, hamas, israel, palestine, politics


THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE: ISRAEL’S ATTACK DOG IN THE US – BY JAMES BAMFORD
(THE NATION) 31 JANUARY 2024

Posted on February 12, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

At about $60 a square foot, the 44-story skyscraper at 605 Third Avenue is one
of the priciest office buildings in Manhattan. And standing at the plate-glass
window of his 73,000-square-foot headquarters Jonathan Greenblatt knows the
value of projecting an image of wealth and power. On the street far below the
director of the Anti-Defamation League are his targets: Americans who need to be
educated and informed as to the growing dangers of antisemitism throughout the
country, whether in schools, at work, or in the community.

And for Greenblatt, the best way to get that message out is by working closely
with the friendly mainstream press, who typically accept the ADL’s data and
press releases at face value. After all, the ADL—founded in 1913 in the wake of
the controversial murder conviction of Leo Frank, who was later lynched by a
Georgia mob in 1915—has been around a long time, and has always had very close
relations with Congress, the White House, and the rest of the Washington
establishment.

On January 9, for example, a few weeks after a large pro-Palestinian
demonstration in New York City, Greenblatt released a report listing over 3,000
antisemitic incidents committed in the three months since the war in Gaza began.
“U.S. Antisemitic Incidents Skyrocketed 360% in Aftermath of Attack in Israel,”
warned the ADL press release. “The American Jewish community is facing a threat
level that’s now unprecedented in modern history,” said Greenblatt. “It’s
shocking.” As expected, the ADL report drew media coverage around the country.
“Antisemitic incidents in the U.S. surged after October 7 Hamas attack, advocacy
group says,” ran an NBC News headline. Similar titles headed stories by The
Hill, Axios, CNN, and many other sources.

But much of the report was hype. Rather than attacks against Jews due to their
religious or ethnic identity, many of the cited “incidents” were actions
directed against Israel to protest the conduct of its war in Gaza—incidents the
ADL would later admit made up nearly half of the total. “Overall, a large share
of the incidents appear to be expressions of hostility toward Israel, rather
than the traditional forms of antisemitism that the organization [ADL] had
focused on in previous years,” noted Arno Rosenfeld in The Forward. Many of the
incidents were simply protests by civil rights organizations such as Students
for Justice in Palestine.

Earlier this month, a number of former ADL staffers confided to Jewish
Currents “that in the past months, Greenblatt has redirected the ADL’s
day-to-day work to target pro-Palestine activism rather than focusing on
antisemitism in American life, a shift they say seriously undermines the
organization’s credibility.” Another was quoted saying that Greenblatt is
“waging war on pro-Palestinian activists,” while a third asserted that “there
are a lot of people of all political stripes at ADL who believe what Jonathan is
doing is reprehensible.” According to the magazine, Greenblatt has even battled
against the ADL’s own civil rights office over legislation targeting criticism
of Israel, “choosing repeatedly to privilege Israel advocacy over the protection
of civil liberties.”

Even before the war in Gaza, there had been concern by many progressive
organizations about the legitimacy of the ADL’s alarmist claims regarding
antisemitism. In 2020, more than 100 such groups, including the Center for
Constitutional Rights and the Movement for Black Lives, signed a “#DropTheADL”
open letter requesting that members of the progressive community not partner
with the ADL. The organization, it said, “has a history and ongoing pattern of
attacking social justice movements led by communities of color, queer people,
immigrants, Muslims, Arabs, and other marginalized groups, while aligning itself
with police, right-wing leaders, and perpetrators of state violence.”

The problem is that The New York Times, PBS, and other mainstream outlets that
reach millions are constantly and uncritically promoting the ADL and amplifying
the group’s questionable charges. At the same time, they regularly fail to
inform their readers, viewers, and listeners either about the organization’s
current shift towards silencing Israel’s critics or its long history of
deception, lying, and corruption—including covert operations and illegal spying
on innocent Americans. A greater awareness of this history—and of the ADL’s
ongoing attempts to silence critics of the war in Gaza via slanderous and often
untrue charges—might suggest that, instead of simply repeating those charges, a
less-credulous media might want to examine the group’s long-standing (but
carefully hidden) links to the Israeli government. And whether the ADL’s spying
and covert operations are really all in the past.

For much of its history, the ADL has operated in the United States as if it were
a hostile intelligence organization—which, in essence, it was. The
organization’s spymaster was Irwin Suall, who from the 1960s to 1997 ran his
nationwide network of agents and informants from the ADL’s New York City
headquarters. As millions of dollars in donations flowed into the “civil rights”
organization, tens of thousands of dollars flowed out to Suall’s clandestine
operatives in the field, actively engaged in violating the civil rights of
thousands of Americans. Among his agents was Roy Bullock, a beefy San Franciscan
with the codename “Cal” who posed as a small-time art dealer in the Castro
District and spied undercover in the US for the ADL. To hide the ADL’s
involvement, Bullock’s payments were laundered through a Beverly Hills attorney
who, Bullock would later tell authorities, never missed a payment in more than
three decades. Bullock said he would submit his reports to the ADL’s executive
director in San Francisco, Richard Hirschhaut, now the regional director of the
American Jewish Committee for Los Angeles.

A July 1992 internal ADL memo from Suall praised Bullock as “our number one
investigator.” It would eventually be discovered his network of spies secretly
collected information on more than 12,000 individuals and more than 950 American
religious, labor, peace, and human rights groups. His targets included the
NAACP, the Rainbow Coalition, ACLU, ACT UP, the American Indian
Movement, Greenpeace, the Northern California Ecumenical Council, the United
Farm Workers, reporters from the Los Angeles Times and KQED public television,
and at least eight Jewish peace groups, as well as an assortment of
pro-Palestinian organizations. A key target was the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee.



Working clandestinely with Bullock was Thomas Gerard, a detective with the San
Francisco Police Department’s Intelligence Unit, and a three-year veteran of the
CIA. Gerard would illegally supply Bullock with confidential data from police
and FBI computer files about Americans, many of them pro-Palestinian activists,
that were targets of the ADL. Eventually, investigators would discover that
Gerard kept files on 7,011 people.

Bullock and Gerard also targeted Americans on behalf of the apartheid government
of South Africa—an extremely close ally of Israel at the time. Bullock and
Gerard would meet clandestinely with agents from the brutal and notorious Bureau
of State Security (BOSS), including one using the name “Humphries,” in the
Travelodge motel in San Francisco’s Fisherman Wharf area. “Humphries said he was
interested in acquiring information on anti-apartheid activities in the United
States,” Bullock later confessed to the FBI agents, as well as “any sexual
impropriety” they could dig up on the well-known anti-apartheid activist Bishop
Desmond Tutu. Even details about members of Congress—including House Armed
Services Committee Chairman Ron Dellums, a powerful critic of the South African
government—were passed on by the ADL agents to BOSS.

The ADL’s spying operations began to unravel in October 1992, when Detective
Gerard was brought into the FBI’s San Francisco office for questioning. Shortly
thereafter, to avoid arrest, he fled to Palawan, a remote jungle island in the
Philippines that had no extradition treaty with the United States. At the time,
I was the Washington investigative producer for ABC News, and after discovering
where Gerard was hiding, I flew to Palawan along with a colleague, James Walker.
When we arrived, Gerard agreed to an interview, in which he admitted knowing
Bullock but denied giving him the confidential police files, even though Bullock
had already confessed to the FBI and many of the documents were recovered.

We also interviewed David Gurvits, the ADL’s former operative in Los Angeles,
who told us that he informed authorities that his job was to collect
information—some of it illegal—and to maintain files on thousands and thousands
of people. “Other codenames for other investigators included Flipper, Chi-1,
Chi-3, Chi-2,” he told us. “Flipper,” it turns out, was the codename for an ADL
operative who worked out of the organization’s Atlanta office. Chi-1, 2, and 3
worked out of the ADL’s Chicago office. Gurvits told investigators with the San
Francisco Police Department that the ADL kept records on any Arab-American who
had “anti-Israel leanings” or wrote a letter to a newspaper expressing such
feelings. Just as today, criticism of Israel—not antisemitism—was the ADL’s true
concern.

The investigation also clearly showed how closely the ADL and its spying
operation collaborated with the Israeli government and its intelligence
organizations. According to court documents, “Bullock and/or Hirschhault
admitted that ADL or its agents gave information to the Government of Israel.”
Also, Suall “had met with the Israeli intelligence officials in Israel.” And in
an interview with the FBI, a former employee of the Los Angeles ADL office
“provided confirmation of direct, regular contacts between employees of the ADL
and Israeli officials.” Bullock, according to the reports, “also testified to
the FBI that the ADL paid for Gerard to fly to Israel,” likely to also meet with
senior Israeli intelligence, military and political officials. Palestinians and
Arab-Americans in the United States were the main targets of the spying.

And it turns out the ADL had been spying in the US and passing the data to the
Israeli government for a very long time. “[T]he Anti-Defamation League for many
years has maintained a very important, confidential investigative coverage of
Arab activities and propaganda,” said a 1961 internal ADL document. “Our
information, in addition to being essential for our own operations, has been of
great value and service to both the United States State Department and the
Israeli Government. All data have been made available to both countries with
full knowledge to each that we were the source.” It would seem, therefore, that
ADL’s intelligence gathering activities against American citizens have long been
well known to Washington.

Exposing this secret and long-standing collaboration between the ADL and Israel,
with the US fully on board, would have been deeply embarrassing to both
countries. Israel, therefore, may have attempted to quickly shut it down.
According to a secret March 29, 1993, FBI memorandum, “SFPD [The San Francisco
Police Department] has received information from a reliable source that two
persons, described as ‘Israeli generals,’ are in, or are about to travel to,
Washington, D.C., in regard to captioned matters [i.e., the ADL case]. The
purpose of their travel is to try to visit the attorney general, to press for an
end to the FBI’s investigations concerning [redacted] and [redacted] [likely
Bullock and Gerard]. According to the SDPD, the FBI’s investigation of these
matters are causing a great deal of interference in the U.S. activities of the
Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), and so Israel is seeking to
intercede on the ADL’s behalf.”

The FBI quickly dropped the case and washed its hands of it—as it does with
virtually all cases involving Israel. That left prosecution to the San Francisco
district attorney’s office which, armed with a search warrant, carried out a
surprise raid on the ADL’s San Francisco office on April 8, 1993. Local
television stations aired video of investigators lugging out evidence boxes full
of files. But in the end, the DA’s office also wanted to drop the political hot
potato. Thus, the DA agreed to forgo prosecution of the ADL and Bullock in
exchange for a pledge not to engage in improper information gathering
activities—i.e., spying—in California. And a payment of up to $75,000 to fight
hate crimes, which is what they were supposed to have been doing all along.
Because the FBI refused to provided documents in his case, Gerard was allowed to
plead no contest to the lesser charge of illegal access to a police computer
system. He was sentenced to three-years of probation, 45 days on the sheriff’s
work crew, and a $2,500 fine.

With barely a slap on the wrist, and a wink from Washington, the ADL continued
as if nothing had happened, even continuing to employ its star spy Bullock. At
the time the spying was exposed, the head of the organization was Greenblatt’s
immediate predecessor, Abraham Foxman—known in the community as the “Jewish
pope” because of his power, having served as president for 28 years until his
retirement in 2015. The ADL board did not dump Foxman after the embarrassing spy
scandal; instead, the organization greatly rewarded him: in addition to being
kept on for another decade, he received a $1.5 million retirement package above
and beyond his salary. And at his retirement party, then–Vice President Joe
Biden—who received more pro-Israel cash than any other member of Congress—sang
“Happy Birthday” to Foxman. All of which sent a clear message to Greenblatt that
no matter what his organization does, Washington will happily close its eyes.
The ADL’s priority today remains—as it has for decades—going after Americans who
are simply opposed to Israel’s endless occupation and oppression of
Palestinians. The group’s preferred targets are students, professors, activists,
and demonstrators—rather than antisemites, especially those on the far right.
But the group’s reckless bullying ought to also act as a wake-up call to the
media to take a closer look at the ADL’s long history of corruption, spying, and
covert links to Israel before blindly publishing the next breathless handout.

………………

Source

One Hour of Hebrew Communist Music (1:01:05 min) Audio Mp3 One Hour of Yiddish
Communist Music (1:00:35 min) Audio Mp3

The Birth of the Zionist State – A Marxist Analysis (Workers Vanguard)

https://archive.ph/rEq21

| Tagged anti-semitism, israel, news, palestine, world


HEMINGWAY – LE PAPILLON ET LE CHAR – GUERRE CIVILE ESPAGNOLE – 1937

Posted on February 9, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Je voulais lire un court article d’Hemingway pour avoir une histoire pour
accompagner une vidéo de cheminée. Je n’ai jamais vu beaucoup de politique dans
les histoires qu’Hemingway a écrites sur la guerre civile espagnole des années
1930. Il était proche en tant que correspondant de guerre et avait une sympathie
ouverte pour les gauchistes luttant pour une certaine version du contrôle
ouvrier et populaire de la société par le biais de la démocratie directe et de
la coopération. Mais je n’ai pas vu grand-chose sur les idées de gauche dans
certains de ses articles dans « La Cinquième Colonne » et dans d’autres récits
sur la guerre civile espagnole. J’ai lu le plus court. “Le papillon et le char”
semblait être une pièce jetable à laquelle Hemingway avait téléphoné pour
respecter un délai. Je pensais qu’il ne s’était pas passé grand-chose dans la
brève histoire. Mais après l’avoir enregistré et mis sur une vidéo avec une
cheminée, puis mis sur Dailymotion, Youtube et Vimeo, j’ai entendu l’histoire
encore et encore. J’ai pensé au nombre de fois où j’étais allé dans des bars
pour avoir des conversations politiques. Tout comme dans l’histoire. Certains
hommes brutaux réagissent de manière excessive à un geste insensé dans
l’histoire. En écoutant, j’ai réalisé qui ils étaient. Stalinistes. Je ne suis
pas sûr qu’Hemingway réalise qui il décrit comme étant les tireurs du bar, mais
ils correspondent à la description et travaillent à l’aéroport lorsque les
staliniens dirigeaient la Russie. La Russie était le seul pays à « aider »
l’Espagne de gauche avec des « experts » et des agents de la police secrète.

Les histoires sont nées de l’expérience d’Hemingway pendant la guerre civile
espagnole en tant que correspondant de l’Alliance des journaux nord-américains
et en tant que participant au tournage d’une œuvre pro-loyaliste/de gauche « La
Terre espagnole ». Cette histoire et d’autres sont nées d’aventures dans et
autour de Madrid assiégée, en particulier à l’hôtel Florida et dans un bar
appelé Chicote’s. Le livre se distingue par la présence dominante de l’auteur,
que l’on retrouve vivant à chaque page. Cette présence oriente l’attention,
c’est Hemingway immédiat et indubitable.

L’expérience derrière les histoires était quasiment réelle. La question se pose
de savoir en quoi la fiction autobiographique diffère du journalisme
autobiographique – c’est-à-dire la meilleure des dépêches que le correspondant a
envoyées d’Espagne et qui ont été réimprimées il y a quelques années dans «
By-Line : Ernest Hemingway ». La réponse est que la différence réside davantage
dans la qualité que dans la nature. Aussi bonne que soit une partie de cette
correspondance, ces quatre histoires sont meilleures que n’importe laquelle
d’entre elles.

Hemingway était un si bon journaliste qu’il pouvait révéler la vérité sur les
raisons de la défaite de la gauche espagnole – même s’il travaillait avec le
Parti communiste stalinien. Il a été assez honnête pour écrire simplement sur ce
qu’il a vu. Certains l’ont exhorté à ne pas signaler un meurtre dans un bar dans
un quartier de gauche parce que « les mauvaises nouvelles nuisent à la lutte ».
Il m’a donné une leçon qu’il n’a peut-être pas apprise lui-même. Quel genre de
gauchiste quitte le Cuba révolutionnaire et se rend dans l’Idaho pour se cacher
du FBI ? Celui qui s’est échappé au bout d’un fusil de chasse. Demande en rythme
et en amore.

| Tagged art, blog, culture, francais, french


EINE PFLICHT GEGENÜBER DEN UNTERDRÜCKTEN – HEMINGWAY

Posted on February 9, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

In Hemingways Roman „Für wen die Stunde schlägt“ aus dem Jahr 1940 spricht der
linke Charakter Robert Jordan von seiner Hingabe an die linke Sache der
Spanischen Republik und der Unterdrückten auf der ganzen Welt. Die Figur spricht
über die Stimmung in den anarchistischen und sowjetisch-stalinistischen
Hoteltreffpunkten, in denen sich Aktivisten, Parteimitglieder und Kämpfer
versammelten.





An jedem dieser Orte hatte man das Gefühl, an einem Kreuzzug teilzunehmen. Das
war das einzige Wort dafür, obwohl es ein Wort war, das so abgenutzt und
missbraucht worden war, dass es nicht mehr seine wahre Bedeutung hatte. Sie
verspürten trotz aller Bürokratie, Ineffizienz und Parteistreitigkeiten etwas,
das dem Gefühl ähnelte, das Sie erwartet hatten, aber nicht hatten, als Sie Ihre
Erstkommunion feierten. Es war ein Gefühl der Hingabe an eine Pflicht gegenüber
allen Unterdrückten der Welt, über die man genauso schwer und peinlich sprechen
konnte wie über religiöse Erfahrungen, und doch war es authentisch wie das
Gefühl, das man hatte, wenn man Bach hörte oder in der Kathedrale von Chartres
stand oder die Kathedrale von León und sah das Licht durch die großen Fenster
fallen; oder als Sie Mantegna und Greco und Brueghel im Prado sahen. Es gab
einem einen Anteil an etwas, an das man ganz und gar glauben konnte und in dem
man eine absolute Brüderlichkeit mit den anderen verspürte, die daran beteiligt
waren. Es war etwas, das Sie noch nie zuvor gewusst hatten, das Sie aber jetzt
erlebt hatten, und Sie legten so viel Wert darauf und auf die Gründe dafür, dass
Ihr eigener Tod völlig unwichtig erschien; Sie sollten nur etwas vermeiden, weil
es die Erfüllung Ihrer Pflicht beeinträchtigen würde. Aber das Beste war, dass
man gegen dieses Gefühl und auch gegen diese Notwendigkeit etwas tun konnte. Du
könntest kämpfen.

| Tagged allgemein, deutsch, kurzgeschichte, reisen, reisetagebuch


对受压迫者的责任 – 海明威

Posted on February 9, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

在海明威 1940 年的小说《丧钟为谁而鸣》中，左派人物罗伯特·乔丹谈到了对西班牙共和国左翼事业的奉献，并在世界各地受到压迫。
这个角色讲述了在无政府主义和苏联斯大林主义酒店会议中心的感受，活动人士、党员和战士都在那里组织活动。

………………

在任何一个地方，你都会感觉自己正在参加一场十字军东征。 这是唯一的词来形容它，尽管这个词已经被磨损和滥用，不再给出它的真正含义。
尽管存在官僚作风、效率低下和党派斗争，但你的感觉就像你在第一次圣餐时所期望的那样，却没有。
这是一种对世界上所有受压迫者的责任的奉献感，这种感觉就像宗教体验一样困难和尴尬，但它却是真实的，就像你听到巴赫或站在沙特尔大教堂时的感觉一样
或者莱昂大教堂，看到光线从大窗户透进来； 或者当你在普拉多看到曼特尼亚、格列柯和勃鲁盖尔时。
它让你参与到你可以完全相信的事情中，并且让你感受到与其他参与其中的人绝对的兄弟情谊。
这是你以前从未了解过的事情，但你现在已经经历过，并且你如此重视它及其原因，以至于你自己的死亡似乎完全不重要; 只是要避免的事情，因为它会干扰你履行职责。
但最好的事情是，你也可以为这种感觉和这种必要性做点什么。 你可以战斗。




ISRAEL TELLS GAZA – EAT DIRT – BY CHRIS HEDGES – 8 FEB 2024

Posted on February 9, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

The final stage of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, an orchestrated mass starvation,
has begun. The international community does not intend to stop it.

There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a
pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a
ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on
Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term
“absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in
1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw
Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.

Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East
(UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war
crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ).
The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included
statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by
six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian
catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate
and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in
Gaza.

UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven
years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that,
as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere
in Gaza is safe.”

UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to
the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the
ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which
supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics,
schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a
political as well as material objective.

The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000
employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7,
which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors,
including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria,
Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend
financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in
Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and
damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA
relief trucks.

More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been
wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the
rubble.

More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza,
according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza,
at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only
sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or
vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese
and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils
and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the
black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in
Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has
largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets
of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has
begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools
of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been
driven from their homes.

“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population
has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex
de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University
and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the
Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it
has been so clear.”

The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million
to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food
deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will
largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March.

Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.

I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks
in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of
tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were
weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as is in Gaza, did
little to intervene.

The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most
Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain
themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves,
insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory
infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.

Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells
that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that
provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1 , they
become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is
impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems
crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood
circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as
typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the
thousands.

It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and
emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The
heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart
failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the
young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This
process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick
expire at faster rates.

I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly
at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to
eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters
of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too
weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the
remains of entire families.

In the abandoned town of Maya Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted
Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The
dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of
iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattering strips of clothing. The
palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp
inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had
walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane
arrived. No one buried the dead.

Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I
know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms
the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count.
They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster.
It is Israel’s masterplan.

There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely
believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history
can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic
conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being
more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new
genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry
like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s
poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.

……………………………

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign
correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times , where he served as the
Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously
worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News , The Christian Science Monitor ,
and NPR . He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report .

(Republished from Scheerpost)

| Tagged gaza, human-rights, israel, palestine, politics


WHY MEDVEDEV IS FREE TO GO FULL ‘BORN TO BE WILD’ – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 8 FEB 2024

Posted on February 8, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 1,900 WORDS • 

Washington is actively splitting the EU in favor of a rabidly Russophobic
Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis.

Yeah, darlin’ gonna make it happen
Take the world in a love embrace
Fire all of your guns at once
And explode into space

Steppenwolf, Born to be Wild, 1967

The world has got to be thankful to the deputy chairman of the Russian Security
Council Dimitri Medvedev. Paraphrasing that iconic Cold War era string of
ads about a beer that refreshes the parts other beers cannot each, Medvedev
refreshes those – sensitive – parts the Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, for diplomatic reasons, cannot reach.

As astonishing tectonic shifts keep turning geopolitics and geoeconomics upside
down, and the Angel of History looks East while the United States, corroded from
the inside, desperately clings to scraps of its dwindling Full Spectrum
Dominance, Medvedev makes no bones about how much he enjoys “smoke and
lighting”, not to mention “heavy metal thunder”.

Exhibit One is something for the ages. It deserves a full quote – complete with
colorful English translation:

> “Western politicians who have shat their pants and their mediocre generals in
> NATO have once again decided to scare us. They launched the largest military
> exercises since the Cold War.
> 
> These involve 90,000 soldiers from 31 countries of the Alliance and ‘almost
> block’ Sweden, about 50 warships, 80 aircraft, 1,100 ground combat vehicles,
> including 133 tanks.
> 
> Some stages are expected to take place in the most blatantly Russophobic and
> most disgusting countries to us, such as Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and
> Estonia, that is, in close proximity to Russia’s borders.
> 
> The NATO blabbers were afraid to directly say who these exercises are aimed
> against, and limited themselves to empty chatter about ‘practicing defense
> plans and deterring potential aggression from the nearest opponents’.
> 
> But it is quite obvious that this convulsion of flabby Western muscles is a
> warning to our country. It’s like they’re saying, shouldn’t we properly
> threaten Russia and show the Russian hedgehog a fat transgender European ass.
> 
> It turned out not scary, but very significant.
> 
> After all, if the Alliance itself decided to conduct exercises of this level,
> it means they are really afraid of something.
> 
> And even more so, they do not believe not only in victory but in any military
> successes of the rotten neo-Nazi regime in Kiev. Plus, of course, they are
> working out the anti-Russian agenda for domestic political purposes,
> consolidating their dissatisfied electorate.
> 
> Overall this is a very dangerous play with fire.
> 
> Significant forces have been assembled. And exercises of this scale have not
> been conducted since the last century. So they are a well-forgotten old thing.
> 
> We are not going to attack any country in this bloc. All reasonable people in
> the West understand this. But if they play too hard and encroach on the
> integrity of our country, they will instantly receive an adequate response.
> 
> This will mean only one thing – a big war, from which NATO will no longer turn
> away.
> 
> The same thing will happen if any NATO country begins to provide its airfields
> to Bandera’s supporters or quarters its troops with neo-Nazis. They will
> certainly become a legitimate target for our Armed Forces and will be
> mercilessly destroyed as enemies.
> 
> All those wearing helmets with NATO symbols, who today swaggeringly rattle
> their weapons not far from our borders should remember this”.

Humiliating defeat or Totalen Krieg

Heavy metal thunder Medvedev is complemented by a superb analysis by Rostislav
Ishchenko, who I had the pleasure to meet in Moscow years ago.

These are two key takeaways:

 1. “Today, the readiness of the armies of European NATO members for a real war
    is lower than that of the Russian army in the most difficult time ‘of the
    90s’”.
 2. Ishchenko neatly draws the West’s choice, “between recognition of a shameful
    defeat, with a defeat on the battlefield of NATO units proper, and the
    beginning with Russia of a full-fledged war, which the European armies
    cannot wage, and the Americans have no strength for, for they are going to
    engage in China.”

The inevitable conclusion: the whole U.S. architecture of “Russian containment”
is “crumbling”.

Ishchenko correctly notes that “the West is not able to wage a proxy war against
Russia beyond 2024” (Defense Minister Shoigu, on the record, already said last
year that the SMO will end in 2025).

Ishchenko adds, “Even if they manage to hold out not only until the fall, but
until December 2024 (which is very doubtful), the end of Ukraine is still near,
and to replace them, the West was not able to prepare yet another one who wanted
to die for the United States in a proxy war with Russia.”

Well, they are trying. Hard. For instance by regimenting a bunch of hyenas for
the Three Seas scam. And by giving the CIA’s darling Budanov in Kiev free reign
to stage serial terror attacks inside the Russian Federation.

Meanwhile, a confidential memo designed at the London School of Economics
suggests close cooperation between the German government, USAID and the
Friedrich Ebert Foundation to build a sort of “new Singapore in Kiev”: that is,
a “reconstruction” profiting corporate Germany out of a low-wage hellhole.

Well, no one knows what sort of “Kiev” will survive, and in what form. So there
won’t be any remixed “Singapore”.

There will be no compromise

German analyst Patrik Baab has offered a meticulous breakdown of the key facts
underlying Medvedev’s outburst.

Of course he needs to quote NATO’s Stoltenberg, who has already elliptically
confirmed, on the record, that this is not an “unprovoked” war of aggression –
NATO in fact provoked it; moreover it’s a proxy war, essentially about NATO’s
eastward expansion.

Baab also correctly acknowledges that after the peace negotiations in Istanbul
in March/April 2022, imploded by U.S. and UK, there is zero trust in the Kremlin
– and in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – of collective West politicos.

Baab also refers to one of Sy Hersh’s Deep State sources:

“The war is over. Russia has won.”

Still, the key point – which does not escape Medvedev’s attention – is that “no
concessions are to be expected in Washington. The military confrontation
continues. The war has become a battle of attrition.” That ties in with Medvedev
already making it explicit that Odessa, Dnipropetrovsk, Kharkov, Mykolaev and
Kiev are “Russian cities.”

Hence, “a compromise is therefore de facto ruled out.”

Russia’s Security Council clearly understands how the strategic concept adopted
by NATO at the 2022 summit in Madrid totally militarizes Europe. Baab: “It
proposes multi domain warfighting against a nuclear-armed peer-competitor. In
other words, nuclear war. It says: ‘NATO enlargement has been a historic
success.’”

That’s the rhetoric parroted non-stop by Stoltenberg straight out of NATO’s
think tank, the Atlantic Council.

Feeling the pulse in Moscow, in a series of in-depth exchanges, it becomes clear
that the Kremlin is prepared for a nasty war of attrition that could last years
– beyond the current Raging Twenties. As it stands, the song remains the same in
Ukraine: a crossover of snail technique and the ineluctable meat grinder.

The endgame, as Baab clearly understands, is that “Putin is seeking
a fundamental security agreement with the West.” Even as we all know it’s not
gonna happen with Straussian neocons dictating policies in the Beltway, the
facts on the – geoeconomic – ground are unmistakable: sanctioned-to-death Russia
already surpassed Germany and the UK and is now the strongest economy in Europe.

It’s refreshing to see a German analyst quoting historian Emmanuel Todd (“WW III
has already begun”) and crack Swiss military analyst Jacques Baud, who explained
how there has been “a sophisticated philosophy of war in Russia since Soviet
times”, including economic and political considerations.

Baab also refers to the inimitable Security Council’s Scientific Council
stalwart Sergei Karaganov in an interview with Rossiyskaya Gazeta: “Russia has
completed its European journey… The European and especially the German elites
are in a state of historical failure. The foundation of their 500-year dominance
– the military superiority on which the West’s economic, political, and cultural
dominance was built – has been stripped away from them (…) The European Union is
moving… slowly but surely towards disintegration. For this reason, European
elites have shown a hostile attitude towards Russia for about 15 years. They
need an external enemy.”

When in doubt, read Shelley

It’s now crystal clear how Washington is actively splitting the EU in favor of a
rabidly Russophobic Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis.

Meanwhile, the “no compromise” in Ukraine is deeply determined by geoeconomics:
the EU desperately needs access to Ukraine’s lithium for the “decarbonization”
scam; the vast mineral wealth; the rich black-earth soil (now mostly property of
BackRock, Monsanto and co.); the sea routes (assuming Odessa does not revert to
its status of “Russian city”); and most of all, the ultra-cheap workforce.

Whatever happens next, Baab’s diagnosis for the EU and Germany is gloomy: “The
European Union has lost its central function”, and “historically, it has failed
as a peace project.” After all now it’s the Washington-Vilnius-Warsaw-Kiev axis
that “sets the tone.”

And it gets worse: “We are becoming not only the backyard of the United States,
but also the backyard of Russia. The energy flows and container traffic, the
economic centers are moving eastwards, forming along the
Budapest-Moscow-Astana-Beijing axis.”

So as we crisscross Medvedev, Ishchenko and Baab, the inevitable conclusion is
that the proxy war on country 404 will keep going on and on and on – in myriad
levels. “Peace” negotiations are absolutely out of the question – certainly not
before the November elections in the U.S..

Ishchenko understands how “this is a civilizational catastrophe” – perhaps not
“the first since the fall of the Roman Empire”: after all, several civilizations
collapsed across Eurasia since the 4th century. What is blatantly clear is that
the collective West as we know it is fast flirting with a one-way ticket to the
dustbin of History.

And that brings us to the genius of Shelley encapsulated in one of the most
devastating sonnets in the history of literature, Ozymandias, published in 1818:

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

As we keep searching for light in the darkness of insanity – complete with a
genocide running 24/7 – we may visualize the pedestal standing in the middle of
a vast desert, painted by Shelley with a couple of sublime alliterations,
“boundless and bare” and “lone and level.”

This is all about a vast empty space mirroring a political black void: the only
thing that matters is the blind obsession for Total Power, the “sneer of cold
command” asserting the perpetuity of a hazy “rules-based international order”.

Oh yes, this a heavy metal thunder sonnet that outlasts Empires – including the
“colossal wreck” vanishing in front of our eyes.

……………………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged nato, politics, russia, ukraine, war


ПУТЕШЕСТВИЕ К ЦЕНТРУ СОЛНЦА – ВИНТАЖ ВЕРН

Posted on February 7, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

«Путешествие к центру Солнца» — научно-фантастический роман Жюля Верна 1868
года. Он последовал успеху своего более раннего приключенческого романа
«Путешествие к центру Земли» и использовал тех же главных героев. В этой истории
снова участвует немецкий профессор Отто Лиденброк, который считает, что к центру
Солнца идут плазменные трубки. Профессор предположил, что в недрах Солнца баланс
гравитации и антигравитации создаст пространство, по сути напоминающее Землю, с
умеренным климатом и воздухом, пригодным для дыхания. Он, его племянник Аксель и
их гид Ганс используют паровую ракету американской конструкции, предназначенную
для самой большой в мире пушки, и запускаются к планете Меркурий, чтобы
приблизиться к Солнцу.

Команда сталкивается со множеством приключений, в том числе с нелепыми животными
и потусторонними опасностями, прежде чем в конечном итоге возвращается на Землю,
где они совершают аварийную посадку на Луне и строят воздушный шар, который
позволяет им протянуть стальной трос от Земли к Луне. Последний кусочек
антиматерии, который есть у профессора в табакерке, обеспечивает полет на 250
000 миль. В космическом вакууме искатели приключений просто затаили дыхание в
ожидании скорого путешествия. Мужчины едут домой в соломенной корзине-гондоле,
доедая последние кусочки французского хлеба и допивая последнюю бутылку вина.
Гондолы причаливают на юге Италии, у вулкана Стромболи, где они оказались в
последней книге.

Жанр космической фантастики существовал уже задолго до Верна. Однако
«Путешествие» значительно увеличило популярность этого жанра и повлияло на
последующие подобные произведения. Например, Эдгар Райс Берроуз открыто признал
влияние Верна на свою собственную серию «Пеллюсидар».




MILITARY DRAFT? – NO, WE DON’T NEED CONSCRIPT ARMIES – BY NATHAN AKEHURST
(JACOBIN) 5 FEB 2024

Posted on February 6, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Early in January, Britain’s Telegraph revealed that the once-mighty Royal Navy
was running out of sailors and would have to decommission two recently
refurbished frigates to staff its new ships.

Reporting on a naval “recruitment crisis” exploded. The alleged posting on
LinkedIn of a senior submarine job was widely ridiculed. Right-wing reporters
blamed shortages on a “woke generation” not wanting to join — yet somehow also
blamed the Navy’s inclusion staff for appealing to diverse recruits.

This was mostly a media circus — until another branch of the armed forces
escalated it. General Sir Patrick Sanders, head of the British Army, warned that
Britons would need to prepare to “place society on a war footing,” even hinting
at the possibility of a return to conscription in the event of war with Russia.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak swiftly ruled out a draft, but the general’s speech
already had media and politicians at fever pitch. “Gen Z has had it too easy for
too long,” thundered one Independent column.

Several Tory MPs lined up to welcome a draft, with Boris Johnson laughably
claiming he’d happily report for frontline service. Outrage met a poll claiming
that over a third of under-forties would refuse to serve in a hypothetical world
war.

The culture wars had begun colliding with real wars. Yet what the controversy
really showed was Western elites’ increasing obsession with using jingoistic
rhetoric to cover for structural decline.


UNWILLING SOLDIERS

Western militaries are suffering from personnel shortages well beyond Britain,
and many commentators see some form of draft as a solution. It’s not just a
confected media row; since the Ukraine war, states across Europe are
considering hardening their draft laws.

Draft armies today are unpopular outside extreme situations. But even setting
aside the ethics of coercing teenagers to fight, it’s simply bad policy. General
Sanders aside, most mainstream military opinion does not view conscript armies
as effective in most circumstances — perhaps helping to explain why so few NATO
countries have them. Unwilling soldiers rarely make good ones.

Israel’s war in Gaza offers a grim contemporary example. The Israel Defense
Forces’ devastating firepower has been highly effective at razing homes and
infrastructure — with a death toll sufficient for the International Court of
Justice to hear a “plausible” case of genocide. But its ground forces, reliant
on small elite units bulked out by conscripts for mass, have struggled to
achieve their objectives.

Israel’s reliance on conscription is usually framed as a response to operational
needs, but in fact reflects the outsized centrality of the armed forces in
public life, with immense power over land, business, politics, and society. It
is “an army with a state rather than a state with an army,” as Israeli scholar
and former air force pilot Haim Bresheeth-Zabner and others have persuasively
argued.

This demonstrates a further point: that military doctrine is produced by social
and political conditions. While militaries retain significant cultural power and
popularity, notably in the United States, the relative unpopularity of service
itself reflects deeper political realities.Issues like stagnating pay,
substandard living conditions, and veteran homelessness are further increasing
the unattractiveness of service careers.

From what we know, soldiers do not sign up solely for either cultural or
material reasons. But the personnel shortage issue does have material roots as
much as cultural ones.

Enlisted service ranks still recruit disproportionately from working-class
backgrounds, and still face charges of exploitative practices in doing so, while
US forces exploit the student debt crisis to boost their numbers. But issues
like stagnating pay, substandard living conditions, and veteran homelessness are
both common and commonly reported, further increasing the unattractiveness of
service careers.

But above all the decline of the mass army has limited its role as a means of
working-class income maximization. Despite post 9/11 rearmament, there are still
a million fewer US service personnel than in the 1980s.

In 2015, the German army was a quarter of the size of West Germany’s 1990
numbers alone, with Italian forces shrinking by 67 percent in the same period
and British ones by half. This tracks the deindustrialization of the late
twentieth century as much as it does a post–Cold War “peace dividend.”

Even these shrunken armies, though, still struggled to recruit. The US military,
for example, has been at pains to shake off a reputation gained in the 1990s and
2000s for lowering standards in order to encourage people through the door.

This is where a truth may lurk in the right-wing carping about “woke millennials
not wanting to fight” (even if neoliberalism has probably done more than the
antiwar left to erode the sense of communal obligation that states use to compel
service).

Service has limited appeal to a generation that is not only generally less
nationalistic but has grown up with wars that were self-evidently stupid,
vicious, counterproductive, and undertaken largely without public consent.
Afghanistan and Iraq hardly made good advertisements for service.

The demand for conscription in this context is reminiscent of pandemic-era moral
panics about people quitting jobs and demanding better pay, responding to the
reality of shrinking desire with coercion. This also contextualizes the other
mooted solution to recruitment shortages, where US forces are mulling
offering citizenship for service to migrants.

The glaring ethical issues of militarizing a group with limited rights, in an
army where racial minorities already disproportionately bear the consequences of
war, do not need too much expounding. In any case, its likely political
unpopularity and inefficiency makes such a plan difficult to implement at a
large scale.Military service has limited appeal to a generation that is not only
generally less nationalistic but has grown up with wars that were self-evidently
stupid, vicious, and counterproductive.

Conversations about conscription do not persist as realistic discussions of
national strategy. They are a salve applied by warmonger columnists who do not
wish to admit that we are simply not capable of wielding the force we once did.
Interrogating the reasons why is far less attractive to highly online war hawks
than rooting for a quick fix that satisfies their desire to make young people
suffer more.


SHRUNKEN POWER

US military spending surged throughout the Global Financial Crisis, while
British forces were shrunk but insulated from the worst of austerity; there is
always more money for hypothetical foreign threats than for education, health,
or welfare. This did not, however, make armies completely immune from the
cancerous effects of a neoliberal model that has seen public services auctioned
off and short-termist profit chasing infect government and business alike, with
disastrous results.

Another factor in the British Army’s recruitment shortage is probably that
outsourcing giant Capita, renowned for its public sector screwups, took over
recruitment just before it dramatically fell. Both UK and US forces have faced
scandals from price inflation to the provision of dangerously substandard
equipment under a regime of outsourcing and corporate incursion.

As Western societies have become less labor-intensive and more service-based,
military doctrine and procurement have followed reform in other public services.
States have sought to project global power with less manpower, more tech, and
lower budgets. This involves retaining deployments around the world, but with
smaller ground forces reliant on a high-tech network of surveillance, airpower,
and smart munitions that act as force multipliers.

Small-unit operations save on political as well as financial costs. The smallest
ones don’t need to be accountable at all — hence Western states’ increasing
reliance on special forces acting under a blanket of national security secrecy.
The UK’s 2021 Defence Review called for more forces stationed around the world,
in a show of neoimperial bravura, but the size of the deployments made many
little more than Potemkin units — there for show.As Western societies have
become less labor-intensive and more service-based, military doctrine and
procurement have followed reform in other public services.

Even larger wars like Afghanistan and Iraq had a much less intense footprint
than their antecedents, allowing for American and British imperial commitments
while minimizing public outcry over casualties. This was not entirely
successful, and Donald Trump’s (cynical) antiwar stance played an
often-underrated role in his success.

The “budget imperialism” model came apart for Russia in Ukraine in the early
months of its 2022 invasion. Operating under systems constructed for sweeping
defense cuts earlier in Vladimir Putin’s presidency, Russian formations quickly
became degraded. They survived only by reorganizing in ways analogous to older
Soviet structures, mobilizing reservists, and increasing arms production.

This probably also helped reenergize the conscription discourse in the West, as
defense apparatchiks looked to counter Russia’s recovery. But even assuming that
public consent could be acquired for assembling the personnel required to
sustain brutal attritional warfare like that in Ukraine, that would also require
the industry to back it.

The US military-industrial complex is huge, and those of the UK and European
Union are also competitive. They supply the world’s most expensive armies
(although as discussed, neoliberal capitalism plays a role in vastly inflating
those costs relative to output) as well as exporting them around the world,
sometimes to both sides of the same conflicts.

It has, however, become clear that they cannot sustain war production to the
degree that manufacturing-intensive economies like Russia and China do.
Attempting to supply Israel and Ukraine with ammunition
simultaneously short-circuited US abilities. Huge rearmament programs are
underway across the West to compensate. But such work takes a long time, tacks
against the prevailing winds of modern economies, and saps resources from other
investment-starved areas.

And with new technologies exerting complex effects on the nature of war, it is
not entirely clear what battlefield we are supposedly preparing for.


DAMAGED PRESTIGE

This wider malaise provides a backdrop to Operation Prosperity Guardian, the
US-led attempt to prevent Yemen’s de facto government from seizing Israel-bound
shipping in the Red Sea.

The operation was launched in January to great fanfare, and promptly came apart
as US allies refused to send ships under American command. Two British warships
colliding in port, and the reported deaths of two US Navy SEALs by falling from
a ladder while seizing a boat, did not help perceptions that the operation was
floundering.

The United States and UK escalated with dozens of air strikes on positions
across Yemen. Asked if they were working, Joe Biden replied “No,” but then
added, “Are they going to continue? Yes.”

The United States and Europe spent a decade arming and backing a Saudi-led war
in Yemen that brought an already desperately poor and troubled country to its
knees, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. For forces operating from
such a country to deal such blows to US prestige is remarkable.

Days later, Islamic Resistance in Iraq militia took credit for a drone attack at
a US base near the Jordan-Iraq border that killed three US soldiers. The White
House blamed Iran and vowed a “very consequential response.” Senator Lindsey
Graham was among those calling to “hit Iran hard, now.”Germany’s Social
Democratic defense minister recently called for the German armed forces to
become war ready.

Reporters once again leaped on and fueled rumors that the Biden administration
planned to reinstate a draft, even though it had signaled no such thing. Again,
calls for conscription and rearmament serve as a quick fix to avoid serious
questions.

This is not the only motivation, though. Even before Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine, arms CEOs were celebrating a world in chaos. These firms in turn
pour funding into the circuit of security and defense think tanks that fan the
flames of war in the media.


WAR DRUMS

Seemingly everywhere, the war drums are beating. Germany’s Social Democratic
defense minister recently called for the German armed forces to become war
ready, amid a €100 billion rearmament program. France last year
began rehearsing its first high-intensity war drills. The European Union
recently held its first live military exercise, and is now cutting climate
spending and foreign aid to finance war and border control.

A return to the era of mass mobilization is not yet here and not entirely
viable. Britain, for instance, recently dispatched an aircraft carrier with no
aircraft to signal its much-vaunted “pivot to the Asia-Pacific,” yet the ghosts
of past glory are no substitute for serious engagement with the challenges of
the present.

But a deliberate attempt to mobilize public opinion behind military adventurism
is underway, and in some places may even be working. It is also inextricable
from attempts by the United States and allies to tear apart the very
international order they set up to defend their own interests and security.

The “rules-based international order” of the United Nations (UN) system,
international law, and multilateral institutions is often weak or lenient on
great powers, but it remains a significant guarantor of an (in relative terms)
long peace that has endured since 1945.

The United States and its allies are busy tearing such bulwarks apart. Whether
it is defunding UN agencies, arming allies as they carpet bomb civilians,
maintaining the right to unlimited extrajudicial drone strikes or special
operations, or dismantling the Refugee Convention, a new strain of militarism
across the Western mainstream political spectrum is scorning the international
order in full view of the world.

This is an international corollary of a domestic politics that demands the
return of draft armies, unlimited funding for weaponry in a period of soaring
inequality and collapsing social safety nets, the gearing of economies towards
war production, the creeping militarization of civilian functions like policing
and borders, and the placing of a cordon sanitaire around dissenters to such an
approach.

We are not yet at war. But hawks around the world are trying very hard to push
us closer. And as they do, the real threats to our security — climate change,
gaping inequality, and resource depletion, all of which also help drive conflict
— go neglected.

As Biden’s comments on the Yemen air strikes encapsulated, the “security”
circuit is unyielding in its claim to be acting in the “national interest” —
regardless of whether their military initiatives work.

……………….

https://archive.ph/j64fq

Source

| Tagged history, military, politics, russia, ukraine


WHAT’S LEFT? – BY TED RALL – 2 FEB 2024

Posted on February 3, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,000 WORDS • 



We Americans are repeatedly told that the United States is a conservative
country in which the 50-yard line of ideology is situated significantly to the
right of the Western European representative democracies from which our
political culture derives and to which we are most often compared. But there is
a gaping chasm between the policy orientation of the two major parties that
receive mainstream-media coverage and the leanings of the American people they
purport to represent.

Gallup’s decade-plus poll of basic opinions consistently finds that 4 in 10
Americans have a positive view of socialism. (Half of these are also favorably
predisposed toward capitalism.) When given a chance to demonstrate that, they
do. Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described “democratic socialist,” received 43%
of the Democratic primary popular vote in 2016 and 26% in 2020. Four members of
the Democratic Socialists of America are currently serving in Congress. Despite
a century of reactionary Cold War suppression and McCarthyite propaganda, U.S.
voters have moved more left since the heyday of the old Socialist Party, whose
four-time presidential standard-bearer Eugene Debs peaked at 6% in 1912.

History is punctuated by periodic spasms of protest that reveal Americans’
yearning for a world with greater economic equality, a merciful justice system,
increased individual rights and the prioritization of human needs over corporate
profits: the Black Lives Matter demonstrations and riots of 2020, Occupy Wall
Street in 2011, marches against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 1999 Battle of
Seattle, etc., all the way back to the women’s suffrage and abolitionist
movements at the dawn of the republic. These leftist movements were ruthlessly
crushed by state violence and marginalization by the media before, in some
instances, ultimately achieving their goals. Like streetcar tracks that keep
having to be repaved over as asphalt erodes, however, fundamental human cravings
for fairness and equality always reemerge despite the U.S. political system’s
suppression.

I write this at one of those times between uprisings, when the presence of the
Left in Americans’ lives feels irrelevant. (We’re talking here about the actual,
socialist/communist-influenced Left of the sort we find in Europe, not the
corporate “liberal” Democratic Party.) The Green Party, the nation’s biggest
Left party, received 0.2% of the vote in the last presidential election; it will
probably not appear on the ballot in many states, including New York, this year.
There are no sustained street protests about any issue, including the Supreme
Court’s radical repeal of abortion rights. Israel’s war against Gaza inspired
one major (over 100,000 attendees) anti-war demonstration, in Washington, and it
was matched in size by an opposing march in favor of Israel. Sanders and his
fellow socialists have been absorbed into the Democratic Borg.

What’s Left?

There is no organized Left in the U.S. We are pre-organized. We are bereft of
leaders. We have no presence in the media. We have no realistic prospect of
having our positions aired, much less seriously considered and debates or
enacted into law.

The Left may not exist as a political force. Yet we exist. Polls show that there
are tens of millions of individual leftists here in the United States. Sanders’
massive campaign rallies, with tens of thousands of attendees in numerous
cities, proved that we’re able and willing to mobilize when we feel hope. Our
record of taking to the streets to fight racist cops and warmongers and
strikebreakers and gay bashers, despite formidable risks, point to our
revolutionary spirit.

Four out of 10 Americans view socialism favorably. How many more would feel the
same way if they were exposed to leftist ideas? What if there was a socialist
party that might possibly win?

Some readers criticized my 2011 book “The Anti-American Manifesto” because it
called for revolution, or more accurately for opening rhetorical space for
revolution as a viable political option, without laying out a step-by-step path
for organizing a revolutionary organization. My omission was intentional.
Allowing ourselves psychological access to the R-word must precede organization,
revolution must be led by the masses rather than an individual, and in any case,
I am not blessed with the gifts of an organizer and wouldn’t know where to begin
to build a grassroots movement. Still, no doubt about it, we have a lot to do.
We must agitate and confront and organize and work inside electoral politics and
out in the streets.

But for what?

What do we want?

What should we fight for?

Karl Marx and his socialist contemporaries would call this a programme — a list
of demands and desires, like a political party platform in the not-so-distant
past, which confronts the biggest problems facing us and lays out specific ways
to solve them if and when we win power at the ballot box or seize power at the
point of a gun as the culmination of a revolutionary movement.

The Communist Manifesto – 1848 – Audiobook (1:22:03 min) Audio Mp3

We need a coherent vision for the country. We must build credibility by
demonstrating that we know what has people worried, terrified and merely
annoyed; successfully identifying people’s concerns shows that we get it, that
we get them. We need solutions to their problems. We need to walk people through
our ideas, listen to their thoughts and adjust our programme in response to
their feedback.



What is the Left?

The Left is the idea that everyone is entitled to the good things in life by
virtue of existing, that we should all have equal rights and opportunities and
that the basic necessities of life like food, shelter, health care, education
and transportation should be guaranteed by the government.

In this richest nation that has ever existed anywhere, albeit the one with the
biggest wealth gap, we can get there. But we will never accomplish anything
within the constructs of the electoral politics trap. Never has the dysfunction
and uselessness of the duopoly been clearer than in this election cycle, when
most voters say they wish neither of the two major-party candidates were
running.

Let’s figure out how.

……………………

| Tagged communism, history, politics, socialism, war


WHAT THE FIRST WEEK OF WAR WITH IRAN COULD LOOK LIKE – BY MATTHEW HOH – 1
FEB 2024

Posted on February 1, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

When Logic and Proportion Have Fallen Sloppy Dead – by Matthew Hoh 

Posted on 1 February 2024

I was asked for my thoughts on what most concerned me about the expected US
attacks on Iran following the death of three American soldiers over the weekend
in Jordan. Some of those thoughts made it into Newsweek. 

Below, I’ve provided an extended set of thoughts on what we could expect from US
attacks against Iran. It’s divided into best and worst-case scenarios. Not
surprisingly, the worst-case scenario is longer:

Most concerning would be an attack on Iran itself that would put the same types
of domestic political pressure on Iran to respond that President Biden is
facing. It’s hard to see the Iranians, or any nation, being overtly attacked by
a foreign country and not responding in some equivalent manner. I think limited
attacks on targets in Iran would see commensurate Iranian reprisals. So attacks
on Iranian Republican Guard facilities or air and naval bases would see return
attacks on US bases in Iraq and Syria.

BEST CASE:

The Iranian response to the assassination of General Qasem Soleimani by the US
in January 2020 is a good example. Hopefully, that is where it would end.
However, there is the danger of it not ending and an escalating tit-for-tat
cycle taking hold – insisted upon by internal US and Iranian political
pressures. There is also the danger that a US attack on Iran would see groups
allied with Iran increase their attacks on US targets in response, including
against targets such as the US Embassies in Baghdad and Beirut. Further,
anti-Iran groups such as the Islamic State and Kurdish and Baluchi separatist
groups could see an opportunity to attack Iranian targets, including civilian
targets, as happened earlier this month in Iran. That’s what I see as the
dangers of a “best case” from a US attack against Iranian territory; again,
hopefully, it’s a replay of January 2020.

WORST CASE:

The worst case is the US decides to launch significant attacks on Iranian
targets in Iran, including Iranian political and military leadership, and
indicates that the attacks will be wide-ranging and lasting, i.e., a military
campaign that seeks to destroy Iranian military capacity and presages regime
change (whether or not that is the actual intent doesn’t matter, what matters is
what the Iranians perceive). Such intensive attacks give the Iranians a
political motivation and a practical reason to launch full-scale attacks in
return.

Iran, with a “use it or lose it” mentality, could launch large-scale attacks on
US bases, especially air and naval bases and command headquarters in Saudi
Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Bahrain, damaging or destroying the US ability to conduct
operations with US Air Force ground-based aircraft. Iranian attacks on US naval
ships, focusing primarily on the US aircraft carrier in the region, the USS
Eisenhower, using anti-ship missiles, drones and diesel submarines, could not
just cause losses and casualties but could, along with the loss of airfields in
the Gulf monarchies, prevent US airpower from defending US troops on the ground
in Iraq and Syria. US forces in Iraq and Syria, with limited American air
support (US ground-based air support would still come from Turkey, as well as
long-range bombers from Europe, Diego Garcia and the US), might then be overrun
by large numbers of Iranian-allied Iraqi and Syrian units (the same experienced
and very competent troops that defeated the Islamic State in both Iraq and
Syria). I don’t believe we would see long-range Iranian missile strikes on
Israeli targets out of fear of an Israeli nuclear response, but that would not
stop Hezbollah from launching tens of thousands of missiles against Israeli
bases, ports, airfields, infrastructure and cities.

Cyberattacks are probable, as cyberattacks have already been conducted over the
last two decades. So, despite the 7,000-mile distance to the Persian Gulf from
the US East Coast, the US public would feel the war in some hard and costly ways
if cyberattacks are not limited to government and military targets (if they can
even be confined to specific targets).

It must be said that the Iranians are assumably well prepared for this war.
Forty-five years of US regime change efforts, including the 1980s war,
sanctions, assassinations, bullying, and threats, have left no doubt in most
Iranian minds that they must be prepared for war with the US. No nation is
immune from incompetence and corruption in its leadership, military, and
industry, and the Iranians may be as bad off as the Americans are in that
regard. Regardless, the expectation should be that the Iranians have taken the
threat from the US seriously and are ready for it.

Questions then abound as to how other nations would respond. Likely, Hezbollah
and Ansar Allah would enter the war. Syria and Russia would seemingly be eager
to quietly help, or at least not get in the way of the destruction of US forces
in Syria. What would the Kurds, in both Iraq and Syria, do watching US forces
attacked and destroyed and the Kurdish positions in Iraq and Syria now
dramatically affected? Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE and Bahrain would have difficult
decisions to make as their populations would possibly see the attacks not
against them but against the Americans (the Iranian attacks, though significant,
would presumably be confined to the US bases). The entire region, minus Israel,
along with much of the world, would see the Iranian actions, as they do the
Yemenis and Iraqis, as being done in defense of the Palestinians.

At a minimum, within the week, we would then witness a prolonged US air, drone
and missile campaign against Iran; a Hezbollah-Israel war that might spill into
Syria; US prisoners in Syria and Iraq; and a plunging world economy. Turkey,
China and Russia would see a great opportunity in an eventual reduced presence
of the US in the Middle East, essentially the US in an isolated alliance with
a Fortress Israel. Turkey, Russia and China would present themselves in
juxtaposition as calm and reliable partners. Ukraine would need to sue for
peace.

The political pressure on the US to “win” in the Middle East would be enormous,
the ghost of John McCain would haunt the 2024 elections, and while I don’t think
we would see American ground troops in large numbers like in the Iraq and Afghan
wars, the idea of a US invasion and occupation of Iran is terrifyingly absurd,
the resulting war would make those previous American wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq seem like provincial affairs.

…………………………

Reprinted from Matt’s Thoughts on War and Peace.

Matthew Hoh is the Associate Director of the Eisenhower Media Network. Matt is a
former Marine Corps captain, Afghanistan State Department officer, a disabled
Iraq War veteran and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus with the Center for
International Policy. He writes at Substack.

One Hour of Iranian Communist Music (1:00:13 min) Audio Mp3

……………………..

https://archive.ph/E1IKk

| Tagged hamas, iran, israel, middle-east, syria


WILL THE HEGEMON EVER ACCEPT A NEW WESTPHALIAN WORLD ORDER? – BY PEPE ESCOBAR –
31 JAN 2024

Posted on January 31, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 1,500 WORDS • 

There will be no peaceful road towards to Westphalian world order. Fasten your
seat belts – it’s gonna be a bumpy ride.

A new book by scholar Glenn Diesen, The Ukraine War & The Eurasian World
Order, out in mid-February, asks the make-or-break question of the young
21st century: will the Hegemon accept a new geopolitical reality, or will it go
Captain Ahab on Moby Dick and drag us all to the depths of a – nuclear – abyss?

An extra touch of poetic beauty is that the analysis is conducted by a
Scandinavian. Diesen is a professor at the University of Southeast Norway (USN)
and an associate editor at the Russia in Global Affairs journal. He had a stint
at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, working closely with the inimitable
Sergey Karaganov.

It goes without saying that European MSM won’t touch him; rabid yells –
“Putinista!” – prevail, including in Norway, where he’s been a prime target of
cancel culture.

That’s irrelevant, anyway. What matters is that Diesen, an affable, unfailingly
polite man and an ultra-sharp scholar, is aligned with the rarified cream of the
crop who is asking the questions that really matter; among them, whether we are
heading towards a Eurasian-Westphalian world order.

Apart from a meticulous deconstruction of the proxy war in Ukraine that
devastatingly debunks, with proven facts, the official NATOstan narrative,
Diesen offers a concise, easily accessible mini-history of how we got here.

He starts to make the case harking back to the Silk Roads: “The Silk Road was an
early model of globalization, although it did not result in a common world order
as the civilizations of the world were primarily connected to nomadic
intermediaries.”

The demise of the Heartland-based Silk Road, actually roads, was caused by the
rise of the thalassocratic European powers reconnecting the world in a different
way. Yet the hegemony of the collective West could only be fully achieved by
applying Divide and Rule across Eurasia.

We did not in fact had “five centuries of western dominance”, according to
Diesen: it was more like three, or even two (see, for instance, the work of
Andre Gunder Frank). In a historical Long View that barely registers.

What is indeed The Big Picture now is that “the unique world order” produced by
controlling “the vast Eurasian continent from the maritime periphery is coming
to an end”.

Mackinder is hit by a train

Diesen hits the nail on the head when it comes to the Russia-China strategic
partnership – on which the overwhelmingly majority of European intellectuals is
clueless (a crucial exception is French historian, demographer and
anthropologist Emmanuel Todd, whose latest book I analyzed here.)

With a lovely on the road formulation, Diesen shows how “Russia can be
considered the successor of the Mongolian nomads as the last custodian of the
Eurasian land corridor”, while China revives the Ancient Silk Roads “with
economic connectivity”. In consequence, “a powerful Eurasian gravitational pull
is thus reorganizing the supercontinent and the wider world.”

Poviding context, Diesen needs to engage in an obligatory detour to the basics
of the Great Game between the Russian and British empires. What stands out is
how Moscow already was pivoting to Asia all the way to the late 19th century,
when Russian Finance Minister Sergei Witte started to develop a groundbreaking
road map for a Eurasia political economy, “borrowing from Alexander Hamilton and
Friedrich List.”

Witte “wanted to end Russia’s role as an exporter of natural resources to Europe
as it resembled ‘the relations of colonial countries with their metropolises’”.

And that implies going back to Dostoyevsky, who argued that “Russians are as
much Asiatics as European. The mistake of our policy for the past two centuries
has been to make the people of Europe believe that we are true Europeans (…) It
will be better for us to seek alliances with the Asiatics.” Dostoyevsky meets
Putin-Xi.

Diesen also needs to go through the obligatory references to Mackinder’s
“heartland” obsession – which is the basis of all Anglo-American geopolitics for
the past hundred and twenty years.

Mackinder was spooked by railway development – especially the Trans-Siberian by
the Russians – as it enabled Moscow to “emulate the nomadic skills of the
Scythians, Huns and Mongols” that were essential to control most of Eurasia.

Mackinder was particularly focused on railways acting “chiefly as feeders to
ocean-going commerce”. Ergo, being a thalassocratic power was not enough: “The
heartland is the region to which under modern conditions, sea power can be
refused access.”

And that’s what leads to the Rosetta Stone of Anglo-American geopolitics: to
“prevent the emergence of a hegemon or a group of states capable of dominating
Europe and Eurasia that could threaten the dominant maritime power.”

That explains everything from WWI and WWII to the permanent NATO obsession in
preventing a solid rapprochement between Germany and Russia, by any means
necessary.

The Little Multipolar Helmsman

Diesen offers a succinct perspective of Russian Eurasianists of the 1920s such
as Trubetskoi and Savitsky, who were promoting an alternative path to the USSR.

They conceptualized that with Anglo-American thalassocracy applying Divide and
Rule in Russia, what was needed was a Eurasian political economy based on mutual
cooperation: a stark prefiguration of the Russia-China drive to multipolarity.

Savitsky in fact could have been writing today: “Eurasia has previously played a
unifying role in the Old World. Contemporary Russia, absorbing this tradition”,
must abandon war as a method of unification.

Cue to post-Maidan in 2014. Moscow finally got the message that trying to build
a Greater Europe “from Lisbon to Vladivostok” was a non-starter. Thus the new
concept of Greater Eurasian Partnership was born. Sergey Karaganov, with whom
Diesen worked at the Higher School of Economics, was the father of the concept.

Greater Eurasia Partnership repositions Russia “from the periphery of Europe and
Asia to the center of a large super-region.” In short, a pivot to the East – and
the consolidation of the Russia-China partnership.

Diesen dug up an extraordinary passage in the Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping,
proving how the Little Helmsman in 1990 was a visionary prefiguring multipolar
China:

“In the future when the world becomes three-polar, four-polar or five-polar, the
Soviet Union, no matter how weakened it may be and even if some of its republics
withdraw from it, will still be one pole. In the so-called multipolar world,
China too will be a pole (…) Our foreign policies remain the same: first,
opposing hegemonism and power politics and safeguarding world peace; and second,
working to establish a new international political order and a new international
economic order.”

Diesen breaks it down, noting how China has to a certain extent “replicated the
three-pillared American System of the early 19th century, in which the U.S.
developed a manufacturing base, physical transportation infrastructure, and a
national bank to counter British economic hegemony.”

Enter China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI); the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO); the AIIB; the de-dollarization drive; the China
International Payment System (CIPS); increased use of yuan in international
trade; the use of national currencies; Made in China 2025; The Digital Silk
Road; and last but not least, BRICS 10 and the NDB, the BRICS development bank.

Russia matched some of it – as in the Eurasia Development Bank (EDB) of the
Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and in advancing the harmonization of financial
arrangements of BRI and EAEU projects via the SCO.

Diesen is one of the very few Western analysts who actually understands the
drive to multipolarity: “BRICS+ is anti-hegemony and not anti-Western, as the
objective is to create a multipolar system and not assert collective dominance
over the West.”

Diesen also contends that the emerging Eurasian World Order is “seemingly based
on conservative principles.” That’s correct, as the Chinese system is drenched
in Confucianism (social integration, stability, harmonious relationships,
respect for tradition and hierarchy), part of the keen sense of belonging to a
distinct, sophisticated civilization: that’s the foundation of Chinese
nation-building.

Can’t bring Russia-China down

Diesen’s detailed analysis of the Ukraine proxy war, “a predictable consequence
of an unsustainable world order”, is extrapolated to the battleground where the
future, new world order is being decided; it is “either global hegemony or
Westphalian multipolarity.”

Everyone with a brain by now knows how Russia absorbed and re-transformed
everything thrown by the collective West after the start of the Special Military
Operation (SMO). The problem is the rarified plutocracy that really runs the
show will always refuse to acknowledge reality, as Diesen frames it:
“Irrespective of the outcome of the war, the war has already become the
graveyard of liberal hegemony.”

The overwhelming majority of the Global South clearly sees that even as what Ray
McGovern indelibly defined as MICIMATT
(military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank
complex) cast the Russia-China partnership as the main “threats” – in reality
those that created the “gravitational pull to reorganize the world order towards
multipolarity” – they can’t bring Russia-China down geoeconomically.

So there’s no question “the conflicts of the future world order will continue to
be militarized.” That’s where we are at the crossroads. There will be no
peaceful road towards to Westphalian world order. Fasten your seat belts – it’s
gonna be a bumpy ride.

………………………..

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged brics, china, geopolitics, politics, russia


THE TOWER-22 STRIKE IN JORDAN TRIGGERS US, ISRAEL INTO ALL-FRONT WAR – BY JOHN
HELMER – 29 JAN 2024

Posted on January 31, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 • 1,900 WORDS • 

The Arabs and Iran Are Ready, the Russians Too

The Hamas offensive of October 7 caught the Israel Defence Forces asleep at
their posts. This weekend’s drone strike against Tower-22, a US troop base in
northeastern Jordan, caught the US Army troops asleep.

The response, according to President Joseph Biden’s statement, is that “we will
hold all those responsible to account at a time and in a manner our choosing….we
know it was carried out by radical Iran-backed militant groups operating in
Syria and Iraq.” General Lloyd Austin, the US Secretary of Defense, repeated:
“Iran-backed militias are responsible for these continued attacks on U.S.
forces, and we will respond at a time and place of our choosing.”

Donald Trump, campaigning to defeat Biden in the November election, declared in
an election statement, reported in full by a Russian military blogger, “this
brazen attack on the United States is yet another horrific and tragic
consequence of Joe Biden’s weakness and surrender. Three years ago, Iran was
weak, broke, and totally under control. Thanks to my Maximum Pressure
policy…This attack would NEVER have happened if I was President, not even a
chance. Just like the Iranian-backed Hamas attack on Israel would never have
happened, the war in Ukraine would never have happened, and we would right now
have peace throughout the World. Instead, we are on the brink of World War 3.”

This is how the psychopathic liar now fights the demented on behalf of the
genocidalists to trigger all-fronts war in the Middle East.

The details of the Tower-22 attack, and Iran’s reinforcement at the Strait of
Hormuz, reveal that the Arabs and the Iranians are ready and waiting. The
Russians too.

The drone attack on the US troop base known as Tower-22, in the northeastern
corner of Jordan, caught the US forces, reportedly reservists, asleep. The base
reportedly holds 350 Army and Air Force personnel. At least three have been
confirmed killed; eight have been evacuated with life threatening injuries,
according to US Central Command (CENTCOM); about three dozen have
been counted as wounded.

Source of map: https://www.abc.net.au/

The distance between the two American bases is about 30 kilometres. The location
of Tower-22 on Jordanian territory has been confirmed by CENTCOM. This flatly
contradicts claims on Jordanian state television by a government spokesman; he
announced that the base is outside Jordanian territory in Syria. This lie
indicates how fearful Jordanian officials are of the majority Palestinian
community in Jordan who are hostile to the Jordan king’s collaboration with the
Israelis, as well as with the US and British forces. To date, the Palestinians
in Jordan have organized crowd protests in Amman in support of the Gaza and West
Bank fights, but they have not yet taken their protests to the foreign bases on
Jordanian territory.

Satellite image of the Tower-22 base, including helicopter pads.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/

With a 350-man complement, Tower-22 is a bigger base than Al-Tanf, which has
about 200 special forces.

The operational success of the strike for the attackers is strategic. Tower-22
is a logistics, supply, and rear guard post for the Al-Tanf base which US troops
are operating thirty kilometres north across the border in Syria. The attack
demonstrates that both Tower-22 and Al-Tanf, Jordan and Syria, are newly
vulnerable to weapons which the US forces have failed to detect and neutralize.
Just as significantly, the massive US airbase called Muwaffaq Salti, 230
kilometres west across Jordan, is also vulnerable now.

For analysis of how these bases, and other anti-Palestinian targets in Jordan,
are connected and targeted by the Axis of Resistance, read this from October.

Biden’s statement said only “we are still gathering the facts of this attack”.

The USAF base at Muwaffaq Salti in Jordan. Source: https://johnhelmer.net/

The aircraft visible in the satellite image of the base include USAF F-15Es,
which were redeployed there in October from the RAF Lakenheath base in England;
read more here.

Reporters of the New York Times were told by their official briefers that “the
drone strike in Jordan on Sunday demonstrated that the Iran-backed militias —
whether in Iran or Syria, or the Houthis in Yemen — remained capable of
inflicting serious consequences on American troops despite the U.S. military’s
efforts to weaken them and avoid tumbling into a wider conflict, possibly with
Iran itself.”

The newspaper added a warning against escalation from the Joint Chiefs of Staff
at the Pentagon: “ ‘We don’t want to go down a path of greater escalation that
drives to a much broader conflict within the region,’ Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr.,
the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Sunday. Asked in a
pre-recorded session on ABC News’s This Week whether he thought Iran wanted war
with the United States, General Brown, echoing assessments from the U.S.
intelligence agencies, said, ‘No, I don’t think so.’ ”

Brown is also believed to have been one of the prompters for public release of
the Pentagon warnings against the Ukrainian “counteroffensive” in the so-called
social media releases published by Jack Texeira in April of 2023.

The official line in Washington on Sunday evening, according to its New York
platform, is that “the Americans killed on Sunday were the first known
fatalities from hostile fire in the region since the Oct. 7 attacks by Hamas…It
was unclear on Sunday why air defences at the outpost failed to intercept the
drone, which former military commanders said appeared to be the first known
assault on the location since attacks on U.S. forces began soon after the Oct. 7
incursion.”

Well-informed military sources are emphatic that the Tower-22 operation has
strategic significance in quite another way. They believe Pentagon officials
have already told the White House.

“This is a significant accomplishment,” one of the sources said. “Was the
bypassing of the US air defence system at Tower-22 pulled off with Russian
assistance? US bases generally rely on the C-RAM [Counter Rocket, Artillery and
Mortar] system. It was sent to Ukraine last year where the Russians have been
learning to defeat it. What now of American EW [electronic warfare]? They’ve
been doing a fair job of knocking drones down up to now. It seems a
‘coincidence’ that, not a week after the meetings in Moscow with Arabs and
Iranians, we see this success. It’s a success the circumstances of which, we can
be sure, Biden and Austin are not keen to advertise.”

Confirmation that C-RAM units are the principal air defence systems operating at
US bases in Syria and Iraq, including Al-Tanf and Tower-22, came last October
from former Pentagon official, Stephen Bryen. Bryen claimed at the time “for
years I have complained that vulnerable American bases in Iraq and Syria lacked
adequate air defenses. Bottom line: they still do.” When Bryen was at the
Pentagon, he was also unusually close to the Israeli government.

For details of the C-RAM system, its US Army development history and its allied
counterparts, click to read this. The evidence that C-RAM was delivered to Kiev
last October, test-fired, and then installed to become part of Kiev’s air
defence supporting the Patriot missile units, can be viewed in this 10-minute
video from Night Hawk Veterans.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aty7XuYO-9I

Starting last May, there have been several effective Russian missile attacks
against the Patriot batteries in Kiev. At the start of this month, there were
fresh Russian missile and drone attacks across Kiev.

While there has been no announcement from the Russian Defense Ministry of a
successful hit against C-RAM in Kiev, military sources believe Russia’s General
Staff have acquired the technical capability to neutralize the American system,
allowing drones through to hit their ground targets, including the C-RAM mounted
truck unit.

The Iranians have been observing, as have the Arab forces planning and executing
drone attacks against C-RAM defended US bases. How much of the Russian
intelligence on C-RAM is being shared with them?

For details of last week’s detailed talks in Moscow with visiting delegations
from the Yemen Ansarallah government (Houthis) and the Iranian Security Council,
read this.

Left, Russian Security Council, headed by Nikolai Patrushev (ring), at plenary
session, with Ali-Akbar Ahmadian, head of the counterpart Iranian Security
Council.

Apart from US reports of the Tower-22 drone attack striking the troop living
quarters, there is no information yet on how many drones detonated, and what
equipment at the base may also have been hit.

The military source again: “If there’s no coincidence, and if this isn’t a lucky
strike for the Arabs, then this may reflect a step-change up in Russian military
assistance to the Iranians. Maybe Tower-22 was selected as a small target for
demonstration effect, so as to send a message about the bigger targets, Al-Tanf
and Muwaffaq Salti. Hitting them next makes ‘regional war’, and then US ground
forces are going to be in the thick of it — the Biden Administration will have a
new war on its hands — and bodybags, instead of votes, for Election Day. “

For the time being, Russian military bloggers – the only open-source reporters
of Russian military operations in the Ukraine and worldwide – are not analyzing
the implications of the Tower-22 operation.

However, Militarist has reported the deployment of the Iranian naval drone
carrier and electronic warfare vessel, the Shah Mahdavi, in the Gulf of Oman.
There is no open-source western vessel tracking source for this report and the
map.

Source: https://t.me/infantmilitario/118465

US Navy and other western media have been reporting for almost a year the
conversion of the older container carrier into a warship by the Iranian
Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

The current positioning of the Shah Mahdavi is a signal that if the Biden
Administration, or the Trump election campaign, or their claques in the US
Congress decide on making a direct, retaliatory strike against Iranian targets —
military personnel, territorial units, or naval vessels — the IGRC will close
the Strait of Hormuz. Iran will then be at war with the US, and so will the rest
of the world which, until Israel started its war against the Palestinians,
depended on the Suez Canal, Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and the Indian Ocean for its
energy supply and trade lifelines.

Left, the angled-deck air-launch structure of the Shah Mahdavi. Right: deck
cranes visible for launch of surface and submarine drones.
Source: https://news.usni.org/

“This is a major embarrassment and a message for the US and its allies”, the
military source concludes. “It should resonate with all of them. It’s the
conclusion to be drawn from the fact that the systems they have relied on have
been defeated on land [in the Ukraine] and are now defending their ships on the
Red Sea, and being defeated there too. The implications of all of this are
enormous. Now, even the smallest maritime country, at a relatively low cost, can
project force and inflict harm on the traditionally dominant actors. No need for
expensive fighter or strike aircraft, let alone the pilots to operate them, or
technicians and facilities to maintain them. No need for specialized military
ship-building facilities. Any bulk transport, cheaply got, will do.”

………………………..

https://archive.ph/U2L7U

(Republished from Dances with Bears)

| Tagged iran, israel, middle-east, syria, war


WHY MODERN RUSSIA CAN’T CONSIGN LENIN TO HISTORY – BY BORIS BONDAREV (MOSCOW
TIMES) 30 JAN 2024

Posted on January 31, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
State And Revolution – Lenin – Audiobook (4:13:57 min) Audio Mp3

There are few figures in Russian history that are as controversial as the figure
of Vladimir Lenin. For some, he is a hero, a luminary of progress. Among
supporters of democracy in Russia, he is seen as a symbol of totalitarianism and
a direct predecessor to the modern Russian dictatorship.



He is often perceived as a symbol of the error of the Soviet experiment, which
some argue should be forgotten as a tragic chapter of history. They see Lenin as
the perpetrator of atrocities and the cause of the suffering of millions. But
erasing such a hugely influential figure from history would be a mistake.

Since the time of Peter the Great, Russia has been closely linked to European
cultural discourse. The works of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Tchaikovsky, developed
naturally and harmoniously from the European cultural tradition. Russia also
received scientific and philosophical concepts, including Marxism, from outside.
The Russian intellectual and creative elite existed purely within the orbit of
European culture, enriching but not going beyond it.

The October Revolution, which changed the course of the twentieth century, was a
new development. It was the most daring attempt in history to create paradise on
Earth and build a new classless society. Lenin and his associates sought to
implement Marxist ideas in what they believed to be Russia’s monstrously unjust
society with a fanatical conviction in their rightness and unwillingness to
negotiate with anyone. The Russian opposition movement behaves similarly today.


Imperialism The Highest Stage of Capitalism – Lenin – Audiobook (5:18:50 min)
Audio Mp3

However, as we know, instead of the equality and freedom the Bolsheviks
promised, a totalitarian system emerged. This was the natural result of an
attempt to implement Marxist ideas in conditions that were unsuitable for a
successful proletarian revolution. Although Russia was undergoing
industrialization, its proletariat – the driving force of the revolution – was
still very small. The workers – yesterday’s peasants – largely retained peasant
views of the world and social order, which were very far from the ideals of the
industrial proletariat.

Obviously, it was much more difficult to build communism under such conditions,
which were very different from those described by Marx. Russia had to improvise
by trying to create an industrial base and proletariat, which eventually
destroyed the peasantry during the collectivization of agriculture.





The Bolsheviks’ brutality and their desire to impose their vision on the country
at all costs, leading to enormous losses of life, was nothing new in Russia’s
history. On the contrary, Lenin and his comrades were following the old
tradition of the state monopoly of power that had existed in Russia for
centuries. Peter the Great, whom the great Russian poet Maximilian Voloshin
aptly called “the first Bolshevik,” was similarly uncompromising in his methods
of reforming Russia.

What the Bolsheviks did was raise the bar of state violence to a new height.
They probably saw this as logical in light of the ruthless class struggle
against reactionary social strata.

At that time, Europe tried to respond to new social challenges not from the
left, as the Communists did, but by experimenting with fascism. It is not
without reason that fascism draws inspiration from a fictionalized past. Adolf
Hitler weaponized images of Germanic mythology and Wagnerian fantasies, while
Benito Mussolini exploited the legacy of Rome. Their ideological successor,
President Vladimir Putin, also constantly refers to the past, namely the victory
in the Great Patriotic War, looking there for grounds to legitimize his
policies.

Meanwhile, Russia sought to shake off the ashes of the old world and cut a
window into the beautiful world of the future. It was truly daring and
innovative, though doomed to failure. In 1917, hardly anyone foresaw what the
idea of building the kingdom of God on earth would really entail.

It would be categorically wrong to erase Lenin from history by declaring the
entire Soviet period to have been one big mistake.

First, for the simple reason that it is part of our history. Pretending that it
has nothing to do with us is yet another symptom of the forgetfulness that has
afflicted Russian society. To be ashamed of one’s history is a sign of a shallow
mind. Recognizing one’s history and drawing lessons from it is what allows
society to overcome the past and move forward. Germany, which refuses to forget
the lessons of the Third Reich, can serve as a good example.

Lenin’s Wife

Second, Lenin is Russia’s most recognizable brand. The huge number of countries
affected by Lenin’s legacy is an asset to Putin, allowing him to seek allies
among the countries of the Global South that still have sympathy for the Soviet
Union. This asset can and should be used even after Putin’s departure to develop
the new Russia’s relations with these states. The Leninist brand and its instant
recognizability can be useful tools of foreign policy and soft power regardless
of who sits in the Kremlin.

Second, Lenin is Russia’s most recognizable brand. The huge number of countries
affected by Lenin’s legacy is an asset to Putin, allowing him to seek allies
among the countries of the Global South that still have sympathy for the Soviet
Union. This asset can and should be used even after Putin’s departure to develop
the new Russia’s relations with these states. The Leninist brand and its instant
recognizability can be useful tools of foreign policy and soft power regardless
of who sits in the Kremlin.

It is both a reminder that nothing in politics is impossible for people united
by

It is both a reminder that nothing in politics is impossible for people united
by common goals who are ready to fight for them and proof that those who believe
in nothing and call on others to do nothing because “nothing will ever work”
will sooner or later be shamed.

Lenin is rightly regarded as one of the greatest figures in political history
because he possessed a phenomenal flair and tactical genius. He boldly changed
his policies without hesitation when the old ones became irrelevant without ever
losing sight of his strategic goal. This one of Lenin’s traits could be of great
use to the Russian politicians of today.

Finally, the Soviet experiment is Russia’s unique gift to humanity. Lenin’s
legacy serves as a warning to the world about the dangers of pursuing utopian
aspirations at any cost, regardless of circumstances, resources, and people’s
fates.

It is also a warning to all political elites. If you cling to your power and
privileges, ignoring the public demand for change, change will still happen, you
will have to pay for your short-sightedness. And the longer those in power
resist those challenges, the more costly they will be.



……………………

https://archive.ph/Ohz0B

………………..

Two Hours of Communist Music Dedicated To Lenin (2:00:12 min) Audio Mp3

……………….

Source

| Tagged communism, history, lenin, russia, russian-revolution


THE 19TH-CENTURY NOVEL THAT REAFFIRMED MY ZIONISM – BY JUDITH SHULEVITZ (THE
ATLANTIC) JANUARY 2024

Posted on January 30, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

 Online Text Free – Project Gutenberg https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7469

I’m a Zionist who often walks through the campus of Columbia University, which
since October 7 means I feel like Dr. Evil in a frumpy sweater. The protest
chant du jour is “Min el-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya” (“From water to
water, Palestine will be Arab”);  a recent sign of note expresses support for
the Houthis, the terrorist group whose motto includes the phrase “Death to
America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews.” I put myself through this
because I write in the Columbia library and you court bad luck when you change a
writing routine. But the slogans get to me. So recently I decided to boost my
morale with Zionist works of art, preferably of the escapist variety. I thought
about binge-watching Fauda, but the hairbreadth escapes from Hamas arch-villains
are too stressful. As it happens, though, I was already reading a Zionist novel.
It dates from 1876, and I was vaguely aware that it had a Zionist angle but
hadn’t anticipated just how soaring its vision of Jewish ingathering would be.
The novel had none of the ambivalence that hedges so many discussions about
Israel today, even the friendly ones.

Audiobook Reading Free on Librivox
https://librivox.org/daniel-deronda-by-george-eliot/



I belong to a book group that usually reads a novel a year. (I know.) One year
we tried to get through all of Virginia Woolf, but that was cramming. We try not
to read ahead, so that we all stay on the same page, as it were. This year we’re
doing the Victorian novelist George Eliot’s last novel, Daniel Deronda. It’s her
Jewish novel, also her problem novel—two novels in one that seem to jostle
against each rather than cohere. One of the half novels offers a familiar, wryly
satirical portrait of callow members of the British gentry. The second is a fond
depiction of London’s lower-middle-class Jews—fond, that is, for its time. As
the saying goes, a philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who likes Jews. Eliot’s
genuine affection for the chosen people doesn’t preclude a certain obsession
with their mercantile instincts or the length of their noses.  

By the 1870s, Victorian England was no longer formally anti-Semitic; Jews could
vote and hold office. Benjamin Disraeli, who was born Jewish, though he later
converted to Anglicanism, was prime minister. But British people just didn’t
like Jews very much. Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s hero, is an appealing young
gentleman with an open mind and an instinctive affinity with the oppressed. When
he finds himself drawn to a beautiful Jewish girl, Mirah, and undertakes to
search for her family on her behalf, he realizes that his assumptions about Jews
require some revision. Deronda, “like his neighbors,” Eliot writes, “had
regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form.” As for Jews
themselves, he found them repugnant: Either they dressed too conspicuously, or
they lurked in grimy streets. He had heard about the better sort of Jew, the
learned and accomplished ones, but always assumed they had sloughed off their
Jewishness.

Eliot was considered the greatest English novelist of her day. She came from an
evangelical-Christian family and was pious in childhood, though secular as an
adult. That she would write a Jewish novel, or half a Jewish novel, surprised
her readers, and none more than the Jewish ones. Jewish critics rhapsodized over
the Jewish narrative—“a glorious exaltation,” said one. Daniel Deronda was
quickly brought out in Hebrew, purged of most of the English chapters. The
English critics, for their part, loved the English story but found the Jewish
one preposterous. Many said it should be lopped off. Half a century later, the
great English critic F. R. Leavis was still using the language of excision, so
evocative of, well, castration. There was nothing to be done about the
“astonishing badness of the bad half,” he wrote, except “cut it away.”

If Eliot’s philo-Semitism was unexpected, her Zionism came out of nowhere. I
should say her proto-Zionism. Eliot never uses the term Zionism, because it
wouldn’t be coined for another 14 years. The historic First Zionist Congress
took place seven years after that, in 1897, and, in fact, though she had died in
1880, Eliot had something to do with making it happen. At the time she was
writing, talk of a Jewish state in historical Judea was confined to Jewish
elites—intellectuals, politicians, philanthropists. Eliot’s fame and reach
spread the message throughout Europe. “The story presented, for the first time,
the possibility of a return to Zion,” writes Paul Johnson in his History of the
Jews. A Russian translation of Daniel Deronda inspired Eliezer Ben Yehuda, a
linguist trying to revive Hebrew as a spoken language, to move to
Ottoman-controlled Palestine, where he succeeded in his endeavor. Theodor Herzl
credited the novel with encouraging him to write one of the foundational
documents of Zionism, The Jewish State. (Recent scholarship suggests he may have
exaggerated Eliot’s direct effect on that book, but she clearly made an
impression on him.) Lord Balfour, the author of England’s famous 1917 Balfour
Declaration, the first and most important statement of support for “a home for
the Jewish people” in the land of their birth, visited Eliot a year after the
novel came out, which may have  instilled or deepened sympathy for the Zionist
cause. She was there before the creation.



Eliot uses Deronda to give her readers an introduction to Jewish nationalism.
When he begins his Jewish journey, he’s a soul adrift. Without quite realizing
it, he seeks a cause, in part because he lacks an identity. He doesn’t know who
his parents are; he does know that he’s not the legitimate son of his wealthy
guardian. He may be the illegitimate one, or something worse. Deronda finds
purpose, if not the secret of his ancestry, in a man he meets in the course of
tracking down Mirah’s relatives: Mordecai, a fiery, possibly crazy Jewish
scholar and poet and a radically original apostle of Jewish nationalism.  

In one scene, Deronda joins Mordecai and a group of working-class intellectuals
in a pub, the Hand and Banner, where they debate what they call “the law of
progress.” This turns out to be a version of the “Jewish question,” a dispute,
dating back to the French Revolution, over what to do about the Jews. The
question addressed by the revolutionary government was the emancipation of the
Jews. Should they be granted égalite–equality? Their chief advocate in the
National Assembly vowed that if the Jews were emancipated, they’d have to give
up their peculiar rites and clannishness and behave like other French citizens.
(“We must refuse to give anything to the Jews as a people and grant everything
to them as individuals,” he famously declared.) Now Jews had legal and political
rights, but the question of assimilation remained. Should they in fact be
integrated into the general population, or would their malign presence corrupt
British society? Mordecai changes the terms. Jews should not assimilate, he
says; instead, they should return to Zion and create a Jewish state, where they
would regain a spiritual and moral greatness that had been crushed in their long
exile.

Mordecai, I have to say, embodies everything Daniel Deronda’s critics hated
about the novel. He sermonizes in a strange, orotund mix of biblical imagery and
German syntax; Eliot borrows some of her nationalism from Hegel, whose writings
on the awakening and development of national consciousness were almost as
messianic as the prophets’. Mordecai packs all of the above into sentences that
somehow wind up sounding Wordsworthian: “The soul of Judaism is not dead,”
Mordecai declares. “The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions;
it lives in their veins as a power without understanding, like the morning
exultation of herds … Let the torch of visible community be lit!” Only gathered
on their own land as citizens of their own polity would the dispersed people 
recover the “dignity of a national life.” And of course, a Jewish state would
protect the Jews.

Mordecai’s adversaries are cheerful, friendly liberals, believers in the
brotherhood of man.  History bends toward universalism, they tell him. “The
sentiment of nationality” is dying out, says one: “The whole current of progress
is setting against it.” Religion is a superstition, explains another, who calls
himself a “rational Jew,” and Jews should stop being so insular, exclusionary.
“There’s no reason now why we shouldn’t melt gradually into the populations we
live among,” he says. “That’s the order of the day in point of progress.”



The Hand and Banner scene lays out the poles of the “Jewish question” as it
would be debated for the century and a half to come: cosmopolitanism versus
nationalism, universalism versus particularism, tradition versus modernity,
assimilation versus separatism. The “Jewish question” would mutate into the
problem of Zionism, but the issues would remain the same. Today,
transnationalists hold that globalization, migration, and mass communication
have rendered the nation-state obsolete. Anti-nationalists feel that a state
like Israel, predicated on ethnicity or religious tradition, reeks of a
determined rejection of modernity, even blood-and-soil fascism. As for
post-colonialism, in the foundational 1979 essay “Zionism From the Standpoint of
Its Victims,” the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said—who, as it happens,
taught at Columbia for four decades—avails himself of Daniel Deronda to expose
what he deems the Orientalist and imperialist premises of early Zionism. Eliot,
he says, romanticizes the exotic East and effaces its people, just as the actual
Zionists would do in order to justify their land grab. She displays “a total
absence of any thought about the actual inhabitants” of Arab lands, he writes,
those of “Palestine in particular.”

Said has a point. Eliot doesn’t bother to imagine what Deronda will do when he
gets to Palestine. The narrative ends when he boards ship, and the land of
Israel never rises above the level of abstraction. That’s because Eliot wasn’t
writing about colonization, exactly, or Palestine, either. She was making use of
Jewish nationalism to make the case for nationalism itself. The novel channels
her “liberal-conservative love for the national tradition,” as the historian
Bernard Semmel puts it in his George Eliot and the Politics of National
Inheritance. By “tradition,” he means what Benedict Anderson called “imagined
community”—the reservoir of national memories, national heroes, a common past.

Eliot’s other foray into proto-Zionism is an essay titled “The Modern Hep! Hep!
Hep!”( hep was the Crusaders’ hunting cry when they went looking for Jews),
included in her very last book, a collection of essays written in the voice of
an eccentric scholar, The Impressions of Theophrastus Such. In “The Modern Hep!
Hep! Hep!,” Eliot makes clear what is at stake in the preservation of national
identity: moral character. The “dignity or rectitude” of the individual citizens
of a nation, she says, is a function of their “relationship with something
great, admirable, pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice.”
Without ideals, their ambitions would be limited to “the securing of personal
ease or prosperity.” In a neat trick, Eliot makes the case for Zionism both
philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic at the same time. A Jewish state would preserve
the Jews from cosmopolitan capitalism and save the world from the venality of
cosmopolitan Jews.

The essay is a key to the novel, for better or worse. It helps explain why Eliot
juxtaposed British swells and Jewish dreamers. Nicely inverting a common
anti-Semitic trope, she turns the English half of the novel into a cautionary
tale of rootless cosmopolitanism. The narrative revolves around Gwendolyn
Harleth, a selfish, spoiled young beauty. The narrator is quite specific about
the causes of the girl’s character flaws: She was raised without moral
instruction or sense of place. Her mother shamelessly favors Gwendolyn, the
eldest daughter, over her four half sisters, and drags all five of them “from
one foreign watering-place or Parisian apartment to another.” The narrator
disapproves: “A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a
native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of the
earth.” In that spot, a child gets to know her “kindly neighbors,” and they
teach her the necessary principles of mutual affection. “At five years old,”
Eliot concludes, “mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world.”
Gwendolyn reveals an innate potential for moral growth, but social circumstances
preclude it. She marries a decadent aristocrat—not because she particularly
wants to, but because her family needs the money. The marriage is horrific.

I’m afraid I’m making Eliot sound like a propagandist. She’s not. Eliot is a
novelist, even when writing a preachy novel. She courts ambivalence, and Daniel
Deronda is full of competing perspectives and voices. Cosmopolitanism gets its
due. Eliot contrasts the deracinated Gwendolyn with the foreigner Herr Klesmer,
who is, somehow unsurprisingly, at least part Jewish, “a felicitous combination
of the German, the Sclav, and the Semite, with grand features, brown hair
floating in artistic fashion and brown eyes in spectacles.” Herr Klesmer is an
itinerant pianist who has been engaged by a wealthy family as a live-in tutor to
their daughter. Gwendolyn’s lack of native ties damages her; Klesmer’s precarity
is admirable because it is in service of his art. Besides, as he informs one
poor philistine who has failed to show the proper respect for his talent, a
great musician (which Klesmer will prove to be) is a citizen of a great nation,
perhaps even of a supranational state, that of art. “A creative artist is no
more a mere musician than a great statesman is a mere politician,” he says. “We
help to rule the nations and make the age as much as any other public men. We
count ourselves on level benches with legislators.” His pupil apologizes for
Klesmer’s hectoring tone: “‘Herr Klesmer has cosmopolitan ideas,’ said Miss
Arrowpoint, trying to make the best of the situation. ‘He looks forward to a
fusion of races.’”

And when Deronda discovers that he is himself a Jew and devotes himself to
bettering the lot of his people, he doesn’t blindly accept Mordecai’s nostalgic
traditionalism. Judaism need not reject modernity, Deronda says: “I will not say
that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed. Our fathers
themselves changed the horizon of their belief and learned of other races.” His
ideal Jewish life would combine “separateness with communication”—particularism
and universalism, the nation-state secure in its own identity but in dialogue
with other nations, other stories, other cultures.

I can’t claim that soaking in the warm bath of Daniel Deronda’s nationalist
uplift makes me less likely to shrivel in the face of the hatred I encounter on
campus. When Eliot was writing, Israel had never exercised power for good or for
bad, because it didn’t exist; Mordecai’s Zionist dreams seem very remote.
Moreover, speaking purely as a reader, I prefer Gwendolyn—not what she
represents, but her vitality as a character. The pro-English critics called her
one of Eliot’s greatest creations, which is true, though they also called
Deronda a dislikeable prig, which is unfair. I love them both, but I like her
more. I think Eliot venerated the good Daniel and pitied poor Gwendolyn, which
redounds to Gwendolyn’s advantage, from the literary point of view. Eliot turns
Daniel into a moral cudgel to beat us up with. She leaves Gwendolyn to struggle
like a creature in a trap.

What I find most poignant about Gwendolyn is that she mourns her plight in
language clearly meant to echo Deronda’s Zionist aspirations. When she has to
choose between getting married and going to work as a governess, she says she’d
rather “emigrate” than be a governess. As a child, she says, she “used to fancy
sailing away into a world where people were not forced to live with any one they
did not like.” The similarity underscores their difference: He can sail away and
she can’t. Just before Deronda leaves, he pays Gwendolyn a last visit and offers
some anodyne words of comfort. She turns to him like “one athirst toward the
sound of unseen waters,” and Deronda suddenly has an image of her “stretching
her arms toward him from a forsaken shore.”

There was no homeland for women. There still isn’t. It is, admittedly,
implausible. But I think Gwendolyn’s inexpressible longing for something like
one imparts Daniel Deronda’s most Zionist lesson. With an actually existing
Zion, the Jewish man need not suffer in exile. He has a place to call his own,
however vague and utopian. But the Englishwoman has nowhere to go. Perhaps
Gwendolyn’s spiritual homelessness is the more honest representation of the
human condition. It’s certainly the more modern one. But she doesn’t make me
eager to give up on Zionism.

………………………

One Hour of Yiddish Communist Music (1:00:35 min) Audio Mp3

…………………..

One Hour of Hebrew Communist Music (1:01:05 min) Audio Mp3

…………………………………

Source

| Tagged israel, middle-east, palestine, politics, zionism


FIVE VARIABLES DEFINING OUR FUTURE – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 26 JAN 2024

Posted on January 28, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

In the late 1930s, with WWII in motion, and only months before his
assassination, Leon Trotsky already had a vision of what the future Empire of
Chaos would be up to.

> “For Germany it was a question of ‘organizing Europe’. The United States must
> ‘organize’ the world. History is bringing mankind face to face with the
> volcanic eruption of American imperialism…Under one or another pretext and
> slogan the United States will intervene in the tremendous clash in order to
> maintain its world dominion.”

We all know what happened next. Now we are under a new volcano that even Trotsky
could not have identified: a declining United States faced with the Russia-China
“threat”. And once again the entire planet is affected by major moves in the
geopolitical chessboard.

The Straussian neocons in charge of US foreign policy could never accept
Russia-China leading the way towards a multipolar world. For now we have NATO’s
perpetual expansionism as their strategy to debilitate Russia, and Taiwan as
their strategy to debilitate China.

Yet in these past two years, the vicious proxy war in Ukraine only accelerated
the transition towards a multipolar, Eurasia-driven world order.

With the indispensable help of Prof. Michael Hudson, let’s briefly recap the 5
key variables that are conditioning the current transition.




LOSERS DON’T DICTATE TERMS


1.THE STALEMATE:

That’s the new, obsessive US narrative on Ukraine – on steroids. Confronted with
the upcoming, cosmic NATO humiliation in the battlefield, the White House and
the State Dept. had to – literally – improvise.

Moscow though is unfazed. The Kremlin has set the terms a long time ago: total
surrender, and no Ukraine as part of NATO. To “negotiate”, from the Russia point
of view, is to accept these terms.

And if the deciding powers in Washington opt for turbo-charging the
weaponization of Kiev, or to unleash “the most heinous provocations in order to
change the course of events”, as asserted this week by the head of the SVR,
Sergey Naryshkin, fine.

The road ahead will be bloody. In case the usual suspects sideline popular
Zaluzhny and install Budanov as the head of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the AFU
will be under total control of the CIA – and not NATO generals, as it’s still
the case.

This might prevent a military coup against the sweaty sweatshirt puppet in Kiev.
Yet things will get much uglier. Ukraine will go Total Guerrilla, with only two
objectives: to attack Russian civilians and civilian infrastructure. Moscow, of
course, is fully aware of the dangers.

Meanwhile, chatterbox overdrive in several latitudes suggest that NATO may even
be getting ready for a partition of Ukraine. Whatever form that might take,
losers do not dictate conditions: Russia does.

As for EU politicos, predictably, they are in total panic, believing that after
mopping up Ukraine, Russia will become even more of a “threat” to Europe.
Nonsense. Not only Moscow couldn’t give a damn to what Europe “thinks”; the last
thing Russia wants or needs is to annex Baltic or Eastern European hysteria.
Moreover, even Jens Stoltenberg admitted “NATO sees no threat from Russia toward
any of its territories.”


2.BRICS:

Since the start of 2024, this is The Big Picture: the Russian presidency of
BRICS+ – which translates as a particle accelerator towards multipolarity. The
Russia-China strategic partnership will be increasing actual production, in
several fields, while Europe plunges into depression, unleashed by the Perfect
Storm of sanctions blowback against Russia and German de-industrialization. And
it’s far from over, as Washington is also ordering Brussels to sanction China
across the spectrum.

As Prof. Michael Hudson frames it, we are right in the middle of “the whole
split of the world and the turning towards China, Russia, Iran, BRICS”, united
in “an attempt to reverse, undo, and roll back the whole colonial expansion
that’s occurred over the last five centuries.”

Or, as Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov defined at the UN Security Council this
process of BRICS leaving Western bullies behind, the changing world order is
like “a playground scuffle – which the West is losing.”


BYE BYE, SOFT POWER


3.THE LONE EMPEROR:

The “stalemate” – actually losing a war – is directly linked to its
compensation: the Empire squeezing and shrinking a vassalized Europe. But even
as you exercise nearly total control over all these relatively wealthy vassals,
you lose the Global South, for good: if not all their leaders, certainly the
overwhelming majority of public opinion. The icing in the toxic cake is to
support a genocide followed by the whole planet in real time. Bye bye, soft
power.


4.DE-DOLLARIZATION:

All across the Global South, they did the math: if the Empire and its EU vassals
can just steal over $300 billion in Russian foreign reserves – from a top
nuclear/military power – they can do it to anyone, and they will.

The key reason Saudi Arabia, now a BRICS 10 member, is being so meek on the
genocide in Gaza is because their hefty US dollar reserves are hostage to the
Hegemon.

And yet the caravan moving away from the US dollar will only keep growing in
2024: that will depend on crucial crossover deliberations inside the Eurasia
Economic Union (EAEU) and BRICS 10.


5.GARDEN AND JUNGLE:

What Putin and Xi have essentially been telling the Global South – including the
energy-rich Arab world – is quite simple. If you want improved trade and
economic growth, who’re you gonna link to?

So we’re back to the “garden and jungle” syndrome – first coined by imperial
Britain orientalist Rudyard Kipling. Both the British concept of “white man’s
burden” and the American concept of “Manifest Destiny” derive from the “garden
and jungle” metaphor.

NATOstan, and hardly all of it, is supposed to be the garden. The Global South
is the jungle. Michael Hudson again: as it stands, the jungle is growing, but
the garden isn’t growing “because its philosophy is not industrialization. Its
philosophy is to make monopoly rents, meaning rents that you make in your sleep
without producing value. You just have a privilege of a right to collect money
on a monopoly technology that you have.”

The difference now, compared to all those decades ago of an imperial free lunch,
is “an immense shift of technological advance”, away from North America and the
US, to China, Russia and selected nodes across Asia.


FOREVER WARS. AND NO PLAN B

If we combine all these variants – stalemate; BRICS; the Lone Emperor;
de-dollarization; garden and jungle – in search of the most probable scenario
ahead, it’s easy to see that the only “way out” for a cornered Empire is, what
else, the default modus operandi: Forever Wars.

And that brings us to the current American aircraft carrier in West Asia,
totally out of control yet always supported by the Hegemon, aiming for a
multi-front war against the whole Axis of Resistance: Palestine, Hezbollah,
Syria, Iraqi militias, Ansarullah in Yemen, and Iran.

In a sense we’re back to the immediate post-9/11, when what the neocons really
wanted was not Afghanistan, but the invasion of Iraq: not only to control the
oil (which in the end they didn’t) but, in Michael Hudson’s analysis, “to
essentially create America’s foreign legion in the form of ISIS and al-Qaeda in
Iraq.” Now, “America has two armies that it’s using to fight in the Near East,
the ISIS/al-Qaeda foreign legion (Arabic-speaking foreign legion) and the
Israelis.”

Hudson’s intuition of ISIS and Israel as parallel armies is priceless: they both
fight the Axis of Resistance, and never (italics mine) fight each other. The
Straussian neocon plan, as tawdry as it gets, essentially is a variant of the
“fight to the last Ukrainian”: to “fight to the last Israeli” on the way to the
Holy Grail, which is to bomb, bomb, bomb Iran (copyright John McCain) and
provoke regime change.

> As much as the “plan” did not work in Iraq or Ukraine, it won’t work against
> the Axis of Resistance.

What Putin, Xi and Raisi have been explaining to the Global South, explicitly or
in quite subtle ways, is that we are right in the crux of a civilizational war.

Michael Hudson has done a lot to bring down such an epic struggle to practical
terms. Are we heading towards what I described as techno-feudalism – which is
the AI format of rent-seeking turbo-neoliberalism? Or are we heading to
something similar to the origins of industrial capitalism?

Michael Hudson characterizes an auspicious horizon as “raising living standards
instead of imposing IMF financial austerity on the dollar block”: devising a
system that Big Finance, Big Bank, Big Pharma and what Ray McGovern memorably
coined as the MICIMATT
(military-industrial-congressional-intelligence-media-academia-think tank
complex) cannot control. Alea jacta est.

………………

| Tagged brics, china, nato, russia, ukraine


GERMANY: MASK-WEARING GERMAN JUDGE ACQUITS CJ HOPKINS IN ‘NAZI-PROMOTING TWEETS’
CASE – BY TYLER DURDEN (ZERO HEDGE) 27 JAN 2024

Posted on January 28, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Six months after renowned American author and satirist CJ Hopkins was first
charged (and found guilty and sentenced) for daring to dissent against the
state’s increasing authoritarianism (by tweeting an image of a mask with a
swastika image shining through), he finally had his day in (German) court…



…and, in his own words “it went pretty well.”

We have followed this grotesque ‘legal’ drama closely over the months, as
Hopkins exposed “Thought-Crimes As The Road To Totaliarianism“, discussed the
“Continued Criminlization of Dissent“, and warned Americans that “The 1st
Amendment Won’t Save You.“

> “I don’t mean to imply that fighting this global crackdown on dissent in the
> courts is futile. On the contrary, it’s one of the only strategies we have,
> and I will certainly be doing that vigorously here in Germany…
> 
> I’m just trying to dissuade my fellow Americans from feeling immune or… well,
> superior, on account of the US 1st Amendment and misconceptions about Germany
> and Europe.”

And fight he did – with, ironically, a mask-wearing judge begrudgingly
acquitting him this week of the charge of “disseminating the emblems of a
National Socialist organisation.”

“I was acquitted. Technically, it isn’t all over, because the prosecutor has a
week to appeal the decision, but, given the circumstances, I doubt he will. He
made a total fool of himself in front of a large audience yesterday. I can’t
imagine that he will want to do that again.”

As Aya Velazquez reported, in her reasons for the judgement, the judge stated
that the “acquittal counteracts your (Mr Hopkins) statements that you live here
in a totalitarian state”.

> She sensed “a certain arrogance in his statement”, along the lines of “only he
> would have understood it, everyone else is stupid sheep”.
> 
> The others may have been convinced by scientists. After all, it was a
> completely new situation. The “subjective feeling that you see the new Nazi
> Germany emerging… you may already have something totalitarian about you.”
> 
> She herself was the granddaughter of Nazi victims, so he didn’t need to put on
> airs here.
> 
> In her opinion, Hopkins’ statements were – she said verbatim – “ideological
> drivel”, but that was “not punishable by law”.

You can read Aya’s full detailed breakdown of the court appearance here.

We look forward to CJ’s full report on his substack of how it all went down, but
for now we congratulate him on beating this highly-politicized show-trial and
scoring what is becoming less and less frequent – a win for free-speech against
the state.

Until that report, here is Hopkins’ fantastic closing statement – we can only
imagine the looks on the judge’s and prosecutor’s faces as Hopkins unleashed his
acerbic wit on their version of reality. (emphasis ours)

> CJ Hopkins Court Statement, Berlin District Court, January 23, 2024
> 
> My name is CJ Hopkins. I am an American playwright, author, and political
> satirist. My plays have been produced and received critical acclaim
> internationally. My political satire and commentary is read by hundreds of
> thousands of people all over the world. 20 years ago, I left my own country
> because of the fascistic atmosphere that had taken hold of the USA at that
> time, the time of the US invasion of Iraq, a war of aggression based on my
> government’s lies. I emigrated to Germany and made a new life here in Berlin,
> because I believed that Germany, given its history, would be the last place on
> earth to ever have anything to do with any form of totalitarianism again.
> 
> The gods have a strange sense of humor. This past week, thousands of people
> have been out in the streets all over Germany protesting against fascism,
> chanting “never again is now.” Many of these people spent the past three
> years, 2020 to 2023, unquestioningly obeying orders, parroting official
> propaganda, and demonizing anyone who dared to question the government’s
> unconstitutional and authoritarian actions during the so-called Covid
> pandemic. Many of these same people, those who support Palestinian rights, are
> now shocked that the new form of totalitarianism they helped usher into
> existence is being turned against them. And here I am, in criminal court in
> Berlin, accused of disseminating pro-Nazi propaganda in two Tweets about mask
> mandates. The German authorities have had my speech censored on the Internet,
> and have damaged my reputation and income as an author. One of my books has
> been banned by Amazon in Germany. All this because I criticized the German
> authorities, because I mocked one of their decrees, because I pointed out one
> of their lies.
> 
> This turn of events would be absurdly comical if it were not so infuriating. I
> cannot adequately express how insulting it is to be forced to sit here and
> affirm my opposition to fascism. For over thirty years, I have written and
> spoken out against fascism, authoritarianism, totalitarianism etc. Anyone can
> do an Internet search, find my books, read the reviews of my plays, read my
> essays, and discover who I am and what my political views are in two or three
> minutes. And yet I am accused by the German authorities of disseminating
> pro-Nazi propaganda. I am accused of doing this because I posted two Tweets
> challenging the official Covid narrative and comparing the new, nascent form
> of totalitarianism it has brought into being — i.e., the so-called “New
> Normal” — to Nazi Germany.
> 
> Let me be very clear. In those two Tweets, and in my essays throughout 2020 to
> 2022, and in my current essays, I have indeed compared the rise of this new
> form of totalitarianism to the rise of the best-known 20th-Century form of
> totalitarianism, i.e., Nazi Germany. I have made this comparison, and analysed
> the similiarities and differences between these two forms of totalitarianism,
> over and over again. And I will continue to do so. I will continue to analyze
> and attempt to explain this new, emerging form of totalitarianism, and to
> oppose it, and warn my readers about it.
> 
> The two Tweets at issue here feature a swastika covered by one of the medical
> masks that everyone was forced to wear in public during 2020 to 2022. That is
> the cover art of my book. The message conveyed by this artwork is clear. In
> Nazi Germany, the swastika was the symbol of conformity to the official
> ideology. During 2020 to 2022, the masks functioned as the symbol of
> conformity to a new official ideology. That was their purpose. Their purpose
> was to enforce people’s compliance with government decrees and conformity to
> the official Covid-pandemic narrative, most of which has now been proven to
> have been propaganda and lies.
> 
> Mask mandates do not work against airborne viruses. This had been understood
> and acknowledged by medical experts for decades prior to the Spring of 2020.
> It has now been proven to everyone and acknowledged by medical experts again.
> The science of mask mandates did not suddenly change in March of 2020 and
> change back again in 2023. The official narrative changed. The official
> ideology changed. The official “reality” changed. Karl Lauterbach was
> absolutely correct when he said, “The masks always send out a signal.” They
> signal they sent out from 2020 to 2022 was, “I conform. I do not ask
> questions. I obey orders.”
> 
> That is not how democratic societies function. That is how totalitarian
> systems function.
> 
> Not every form of totalitarianism is the same, but they share common
> hallmarks. Forcing people to display symbols of conformity to official
> ideology is a hallmark of totalitarian systems. Declaring a “state of
> emergency” and revoking constitutional rights for no justifiable reason is a
> hallmark of totalitarian systems. Banning protests against government decrees
> is a hallmark of totalitarian systems. Inundating the public with lies and
> propaganda designed to terrify people into mindless obedience is a hallmark of
> totalitarian systems. Segregating societies is a hallmark of totalitarian
> systems. Censoring dissent is a hallmark of totalitarianism. Stripping people
> of their jobs because they refuse to conform to official ideology is a
> hallmark of totalitarianism. Fomenting mass hatred of a “scapegoat” class of
> people is a classic hallmark of totalitarianism. Demonizing critics of the
> official ideology is a hallmark of totalitarianism. Instrumentalizing the law
> to punish dissidents and make examples of critics of the authorities is a
> hallmark of totalitarian systems.
> 
> I have documented the emergence of all of these hallmarks of totalitarianism
> in societies throughout the West, including but not limited to Germany, since
> March of 2020. I will continue to do so. I will continue to warn readers about
> this new, emerging form of totalitarianism and attempt to understand it, and
> oppose it. I will compare this new form of totalitarianism to earlier forms of
> totalitarianism, and specifically to Nazi Germany, whenever it is appropriate
> and contributes to our understanding of current events. That is my job as a
> political satirist and commentator, and as an author, and my responsibility as
> a human being.
> 
> The German authorities can punish me for doing that. You have the power to do
> that. You can make an example of me. You can fine me. You can imprison me. You
> can ban my books. You can censor my content on the Internet, which you have
> done. You can defame me, and damage my income and reputation as an author, as
> you have done. You can demonize me as a “conspiracy theorist,” as an
> “anti-vaxxer,” a “Covid denier,” an “idiot,” and an “extremist,” which you
> have done. You can haul me into criminal court and make me sit here, in
> Germany, in front of my wife, who is Jewish, and deny that I am an anti-Semite
> who wants to relativize the Holocaust. You have the power to do all these
> things.
> 
> However, I hope that you will at least have the integrity to call this what it
> is, and not hide behind false accusations that I am somehow supporting the
> Nazis by comparing the rise of a new form of totalitarianism to the rise of an
> earlier totalitarian system, one that took hold of and ultimately destroyed
> this country in the 20th Century, and murdered millions in the process,
> because too few Germans had the courage to stand up and oppose it when it
> first began. I hope that you will at least have the integrity to not pretend
> that you actually believe I am disseminating pro-Nazi propaganda, when you
> know very well that is not what I am doing.
> 
> No one with any integrity believes that is what I am doing. No one with any
> integrity believes that is what my Tweets in 2022 were doing. Every journalist
> that has covered my case, everyone in this courtroom, understands what this
> prosecution is actually about. It has nothing to do with punishing people who
> actually disseminate pro-Nazi propaganda. It is about punishing dissent, and
> making an example of dissidents in order to intimidate others into silence.
> 
> That is not how democratic nations function. That is how totalitarian systems
> function.
> 
> What I hope even more is that this court will put an end to this prosecution,
> and apply the law fairly, and not allow it to be used as a pretext to punish
> people like me who criticize government dictates, people who expose the lies
> of government officials, people who refuse to deny facts, who refuse to
> perform asburd rituals of obedience on command, who refuse to unquestioningly
> follow orders.
> 
> Because the issue here is much larger and much more important than my little
> “Tweet” case.
> 
> We are, once again, at a crossroads. Not just here in Germany, but throughout
> the West. People went a little crazy, a little fascist, during the so-called
> Covid pandemic. And now, here we are. There are two roads ahead. We have to
> choose … you, me, all of us. One road leads back to the rule of law, to
> democratic principles. The other road leads to authoritarianism, to societies
> where authorities rule by decree, and force, and twist the law into anything
> they want, and dictate what is and isn’t reality, and abuse their power to
> silence anyone who disagrees with them.
> 
> That is the road to totalitarianism. We have been down that road before.
> Please, let’s not do it again.

After Hopkins’ closing statement, there was clapping from the packed courtroom,
which the judge acknowledged with the visibly displeased warning that she would
“send everyone out” if such expressions of opinion did not cease.

At the end of the hearing, the judge left the courtroom wearing an FFP2 mask…

If that doesn’t sum it all up perfectly, we don’t know what does…

…………………

Source

| Tagged germany, history, holocaust, politics, totalitarianism


ISRAEL’S DAY OF RECKONING – ACCUSED OF GENOCIDE FOR LEVELING WHOLE CITIES – BY
JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER – 27 JAN 2024

Posted on January 28, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) issued its Order yesterday (26 January
2024) on the South African case against Israel involving possible genocide in
Gaza.

Predictably, the coverage of the Order in the mainstream media in the West aims
to spin the story in ways that are most favorable to Israel, which means
minimizing or omitting those elements of the story that make Israel look bad and
emphasizing that the ICJ did not order Israel to cease all military operations
in Gaza.

Hardly anyone expected the ICJ to rule that Israel would have to stop all
military operations in Gaza, since it is at war with Hamas, and the court cannot
order Hamas to cease its military operations against Israel. What the ICJ did
tell Israel, however, is that it must focus its offensive on Hamas, and not
target the civilian population. After all, the genocide charge revolves around
what Israel is doing to the civilian population in Gaza, not Hamas.

What really matters in the Order is what it says about Israel committing
genocide. How could it be otherwise? Genocide is the crime of all crimes.

The Order clearly states that there is: 1) plausible evidence that Israel has
the intent to commit genocide; and 2) there is plausible evidence that Israel is
committing genocide.

In response to that dire situation the court ordered Israel to stop committing
those acts that appear to be genocidal, and to preserve any evidence that bears
on this matter, obviously for the trial ahead.

In short, the ICJ did not make a final decision on the charge of genocide
against Israel, but said there is sufficient evidence at this point to believe
there is a “real and imminent risk” of genocide, and therefore Israel must
fundamentally alter its conduct of the war in Gaza.

I think this is a stunning outcome, especially when you consider the votes among
the 17 members of the ICJ.

There were six separate votes on six provisional measures that Israel was
instructed to obey.

Four of the votes were 15-2.

Two of the votes were 16-1.

Amazingly, the Israeli judge — who was recently appointed by Prime Minister
Netanyahu — voted in favor of two of the measures.

The American judge, who is also the head of the ICJ, voted in favor of all 6 of
the measures.

The only judge who voted against all six measures is from Uganda. 

I watched the ICJ proceedings on 11-12 January 2024, and they were conducted in
a professional and fair-minded manner.

Both the Israelis and the South Africans sent their “A” teams to the
proceedings, and each took over three hours to lay out its arguments
systematically and comprehensively.

Finally, I have read the ICJ’s 27-page Order, and it is an impressive document,
which is not to say one must agree with all its conclusions.

This was not a kangaroo court.

It seems clear that yesterday was a black day for Israel, as the ICJ Order will
leave a deep and lasting stain on its reputation.

…………………

https://archive.ph/ERmOr

| Tagged gaza, genocide, israel, palestine, south-africa


GORE VIDAL HISTORY OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE – AUDIOBOOK (3:17:36 MIN)
AUDIO MP3

Posted on January 27, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
Gore Vidal History of The National Security State – Audiobook (3:17:36 min)
Audio Mp3

In Gore Vidal: History of the National Security
State & Vidal on America, TRNN Senior Editor
Paul Jay and the acclaimed essayist, screenwriter
and novelist Gore Vidal discuss the historical
events that led to the establishment of the
massive military-industrial-security complex
and the political culture that gave us the
“Imperial Presidency.”

……………………

The book Julian Assange clutched to display as a message when he was arrested
and dragged out of the Embassy of Ecuador in London, UK.

……………….

I remember a while back one Left group criticized another Left newspaper for
calling Gore Vidal “a great writer.” The newspaper editors responded, “We wrote
he was a good writer, isn’t that good enough?” 

I recently read and listened to audiobooks of Gore Vidal’s novels of the Ancient
Middle East and Roman Empire. I knew Vidal had been in a political family and
around Washington DC. When I read Vidal’s description of the back-stabbing in
the Roman Emperor’s court I know that Vidal has seen or heard about similar
political dealings in Washington in the Twentieth Century. Gore Vidal wrote
novels and then worked in Hollywood on movie scripts and also for
television. The man had a sense of timing and the writers craft that I think
makes his stories move along. 

I was listening to Herodotus on audiobook. A long work that shows that
apparently people in the Ancient World had the understanding that of
six-year-olds and the story sounds like Jack and the Beanstalk. Someone steals a
princess, so the countries go to war and thousands of men are willing to die or
risk becoming slaves because a noble prince was insulted. Okay. Is that how the
world works. In Gore Vidal’s “Creation” a grandson of the religious leader
Zoroaster of Persia travels the world and sees many things from Greece to
China. Gore Vidal gives a realistic treatment of some of the scenes in
Herodotus. 

In “Julian” Gore Vidal depicts the attempts of the last Pagan Emperor to resist
the totalitarian Christians and restore Hellenistic Philosophy and Gods as state
protected and promoted as opposed to recently dominant Christians after
Constantine. 

So… When I listened to Gore Vidal’s last interview I am thinking of his scripts
for the Ancient World. Vidal spoke of FDR as the American Agustus, a fair minded
far sighted benign ruler in an American Republic. But, he died. His successor
was unluckily a little emperor who set the US on a bad path of Imperialism and
Militarism. Harry Truman changed American history. Vidal’s last message. 

So random individuals who stumble into power are the motive force of history. 

If Mussolini was killed in World War One there never would have been a fascist
movement in Italy, and then in Germany? 

The book that Julian Assange was holding when he was arrested with Gore Vidal’s
picture on the cover was based on recorded interviews with Vidal when George
Bush was president in 2005. Vidal says that both the 2000 and the 2004 elections
were fraudulent and had cheating to win unfairly by the Republicans. Gore Vidal
says he has to get back to America from his longtime home on the Mediterranean
to help the leftist Democrats resist the fascistic Republicans. For Gore Vidal
the lesson of a lifetime in politics where he said “I am not a conspiracy
theorist, I am a conspiracy observer,” was to “Vote Democrat the lesser of two
evils.” That’s it. What is to be done. Vote Biden 2024?

Thanks for the stories Mr. Vidal. 






HOW YEMEN’S ‘ASABIYYA’ IS RESHAPING GEOPOLITICS – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 25 JAN 2024

Posted on January 26, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


HOW YEMEN’S ‘ASABIYYA’ IS RESHAPING GEOPOLITICS

The Arabic word Asabiyya, or ‘social solidarity,’ is a soundbite in the west,
but taken very seriously by the globe’s new contenders China, Russia, and Iran.
It is Yemen, however, that is mainstreaming the idea, by sacrificing everything
for the world’s collective morality in a bid to end the genocide in Gaza.

Photo Credit: The Cradle

> When there is a general change of conditions,
> 
> It is as if the entire creation had changed
> 
> and the whole world been altered,
> 
> as if it were a new and repeated creation,
> 
> a world brought into existence anew. 

— Ibn Khaldun 

Yemen’s Ansarallah resistance forces have made it very clear, right from the
start, that they set up a blockade in the Bab el-Mandeb and the southern Red Sea
only against Israeli-owned or destined shipping vessels. Their single objective
was and remains to stop the Gaza genocide perpetrated by the Israeli biblical
psychopathy. 

As a response to a morally-based call to end a human genocide, the United
States, masters of the Global War Of Terror (italics mine), predictably
re-designated Yemen’s Houthis as a “terrorist organization,” launched a serial
bombardment of underground Ansarallah military installations (assuming US intel
know where they are), and cobbled together a mini-coalition of the willing that
includes its UK, Canadian, Australian, Dutch, and Bahraini vassals.   

Without missing a beat, Yemen’s Parliament declared the US and UK governments
“Global Terrorist Networks.”

Now let’s talk strategy. 

With a single move, the Yemeni resistance seized the strategic advantage by de
facto controlling a key geoeconomic bottleneck: the Bab el-Mandeb. Hence, they
can inflict serious trouble on sectors of global supply chains, trade, and
finance. 

And Ansarallah has the potential to double down — if need be. Persian Gulf
traders, off the record, have confirmed insistent chatter that Yemen may
consider imposing a so-called Al-Aqsa Triangle — aptly named after the 7 October
Palestinian resistance operation aimed at destroying the Israeli military’s Gaza
Division and taking captives as leverage in a sweeping prisoner swap deal. 

Such a move would mean selectively blocking not only the Bab el-Mandeb and the
Red Sea route to the Suez Canal, but also the Strait of Hormuz, cutting off oil
and gas deliveries to Israel from Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE – although
the top oil suppliers to Israel are in fact Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. 

These Yemenis are afraid of nothing. Were they able to impose the triangle – in
this case only with direct Iranian involvement — that would represent the
US-assassinated Quds Force General Qassem Soleimani’s Grand Design on cosmic
steroids. This plan holds the realistic potential of finally bringing down the
pyramid of hundreds of trillions of dollars in derivatives — and consequently,
the whole western financial system. 

And yet, even as Yemen controls the Red Sea and Iran controls the Strait of
Hormuz, Al-Aqsa Triangle remains just a working hypothesis. 

Welcome to the Hegemon’s blockade

With a simple, clear strategy, the Houthis perfectly understood that the deeper
they draw the strategy-deprived Americans into the West Asian geopolitical
swamp, in a sort of “undeclared war” mode, the more they’re able to inflict
serious pain on the global economy, which the Global South will blame on the
Hegemon.   

Today, Red Sea shipping traffic has plunged in half, compared to the summer of
2023; supply chains are wobbly; ships carrying food are forced to circumnavigate
Africa (and risk delivering cargo after its expiry date); predictably, inflation
across the vast EU agricultural sphere (worth €70 billion) is rising fast. 

Yet, never underestimate a cornered Empire. 

Western-based insurance giants perfectly understood the rules of Ansarallah’s
limited blockade: Russian and Chinese ships, for instance, have free passage in
the Red Sea. Global insurers have only refused to cover US, UK, and Israeli
ships — exactly as the Yemenis intended. 

So the US, predictably, changed the narrative into a big, fat lie: ‘Ansarallah
is attacking the whole global economy.’ 

Washington turbo-charged sanctions (not a big deal as the Yemeni resistance uses
Islamic financing); increased the bombing, and in the name of sacrosanct
“freedom of navigation” – always applied selectively — placed its bets on the
“international community,” including leaders of the Global South, begging for
mercy, as in please keep the shipping lanes open. The goal of the new, reframed
American deceit is to elbow the Global South into ditching its support for
Ansarallah’s strategy. 

Pay attention to this crucial US sleight of hand: Because, from now on, in a new
perverse twist of Operation Genocide Protection, it is Washington that will be
blockading the Red Sea for the entire world. Washington itself, mind you, will
be spared: US shipping depends on Pacific trade routes, not West Asian ones.
This will ratchet up the pain on Asian customers and especially on Europe’s
economy – which already took the heavies blows from Ukraine-associated Russian
energy sanctions.

As Michael Hudson has interpreted it,  there is a strong possibility that the
neocons in charge of US foreign policy actually want (italics mine) to have
Yemen and Iran implement the Al-Aqsa Triangle: “It will be the main energy
buyers in Asia, China, and other countries that are going to be hurt. And that
(…) will give the United States even more power to control the oil supply of the
world as a bargaining chip in trying to renegotiate this new international
order.”

That, in fact, is the classic Empire of Chaos modus operandi.   

Calling attention to “our people in Gaza”

There is no solid evidence the Pentagon has the slightest clue about what its
Tomahawks are hitting in Yemen. Even several hundred missiles won’t change a
thing. Ansarallah, which has already endured eight years of nonstop
US-UK-Saudi-Emirati firepower — and basically won — will not relent today over a
few missile strikes.

Even the proverbial “unnamed officials” informed the New York Times that
“locating the Houthi targets has proven more difficult than expected,”
essentially because of lousy US intel on Yemeni “air defense, command centers,
ammunition depots, and drone and missile storage and production facilities.” 

It’s quite enlightening to listen to how Yemeni Prime Minister Abdulaziz bin
Saleh Habtoor frames Ansarallah’s Israel-blockade initiative decision as “based
on humanitarian, religious and moral aspects”. He refers, crucially, to “our
people in Gaza.” And the overall vision, he reminds us, “stems from the vision
of the Axis of Resistance.”

It is a reference smart onlookers will recognize as General Soleimani’s
ever-lasting legacy. 

With a keen historical sense — from the creation of Israel to the Suez crisis
and the Vietnam war — the Yemeni prime minister recalls how “Alexander the Great
reached the shores of Aden and Socotra island but was defeated (…) Invaders
tried to occupy the capital of the historical state of Shebah and failed (…) How
many countries throughout history have tried to occupy the west coast of Yemen
and failed? Including Britain.”

It’s absolutely impossible for the west and even the Global Majority to
understand the Yemeni mindset without learning a few facts from the Angel of
History. 

So let’s go back to the 14th century universal history master Ibn Khaldun — the
author of The Muqaddimah. 

Ibn Khaldun cracks the Ansarallah Code 

Ibn Khaldun’s family was a contemporary to the rise of the Arab Empire, on the
move alongside the first armies of Islam in the 7th century, from the austere
beauty of the Hadramawti valleys in what is now southern Yemen all the way to
the Euphrates.

Ibn Khaldun, crucially, was a precursor of Kant, who offered the brilliant
insight that “geography lies at the basis of history.” And he read the
12th century Andalusian philosophy master Averroes – as well as other writers
exposed to Plato’s works and understood how the latter referred to the moral
strength of “the first people” in the Timaeus, in 360 B.C.

Yes, this boils down to “moral strength” — for the west, a mere soundbite; for
the east, an essential philosophy. Ibn Khaldun grasped how civilization began
and was constantly renewed by people with natural goodness and energy; people
who understood and respected the natural world, who lived light, united by blood
or brought together by a shared revolutionary idea or religious drive.

Ibn Khaldun defined asabiyya as this force that binds people together. 

Like so many words in Arabic, asabiyya exhibits a range of diverse, loosely
connected meanings. Arguably, the most relevant is esprit de corps, team spirit,
and tribal solidarity – just as Ansarallah exhibits. 

As Ibn Khaldun demonstrates, when the power of asabiyya is fully harnessed,
reaching way beyond the tribe, it becomes more powerful than the sum of its
individual parts, and can become a catalyst to reshape history; to make or break
Empires; to encourage civilizations; or force them to collapse. 

We are definitely living an asabiyya moment, brought about by the Yemeni
resistance’s moral strength.   

Solid as a rock

Ansarallah innately understood the threat of eschatological Zionism — which
happens to mirror the Christian Crusades a millennium ago. And they are
virtually the only ones, in practical terms, trying to stop it. 

Now, as an extra bonus, they are exposing the plutocratic Hegemon, once again,
as bombers of Yemen, the poorest Arab nation-state, where at least half the
population remains “food-insecure.”    

But Ansarallah is not heavy-weapons-free like the Pashtun mujahideen who
humiliated NATO in Afghanistan. 

Their anti-ship cruise missiles include the Sayyad and the Quds Z-O (range up to
800 km) and the Al Mandab 2 (range up to 300 km). 

Their anti-ship ballistic missiles include the Tankil (range of up to 500 km);
the Asef (range of up to 450 km); and the Al-Bahr Al-Ahmar (range of up to 200
km). That covers the southern part of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, but not,
for instance, the islands of the Socotra archipelago. 

Accounting for roughly one-third of the country’s population, Yemen’s Houthis,
who form the backbone of the Ansarallah resistance, do have their own internal
agenda: gaining fair representation in governance (they launched Yemen’s Arab
Spring); protecting their Zaydi (neither Shia nor Sunni) faith; fighting for the
autonomy of the Saada governorate; and working for the revival of the Zaydi
Imamate, which was up and running before the 1962 revolution.

Now, they are making their mark on The Big Picture. It’s no wonder Ansarallah
fiercely fights the Hegemon’s vassal Arabs – especially those who signed a deal
to normalize relations with Israel under the Trump administration.

The Saudi-Emirati war on Yemen, with the Hegemon “leading from behind,” was a
quagmire that cost Riyadh at least $6 billion a month for seven years. It ended
with a wobbly 2022 truce in a de facto Ansarallah victory. A signed peace
agreement, it should be noted, has been disallowed by the US, despite Saudi
efforts to seal a deal.

Now, Ansarallah is turning geopolitics and geoeconomics upside down with not
just a few missiles and drones but also oceans of craftiness and strategic
acumen. To invoke Chinese wisdom, picture a single rock changing the course of a
stream, which then changes the course of a mighty river. 

Epigones of Diogenes can always remark, half in jest, that the Russia-China-Iran
strategic partnership may have contributed with their own well-placed rocks in
this path to a more equitable order. That’s the beauty of it: we may not be able
to see these rocks, only the effects they cause. What we do see, though, is the
Yemeni resistance, solid as a rock. 

The record shows the Hegemon, once again, reverting to auto-pilot mode: Bomb,
Bomb, Bomb. And in this particular case, to bomb is to redirect the narrative
from a genocide committed in real time by Israel, the Empire’s aircraft carrier
in West Asia. 

Still, Ansarallah can always increase the pressure by sticking firmly to its
narrative and, driven by the power of asabiyya, deliver to the Hegemon a second
Afghanistan, compared to which Iraq and Syria will look like a weekend at
Disneyland. 

……………………..

| Tagged iran, israel, middle-east, news, yemen


RT – RUSSIA TODAY NEWS OUTLET – FEATURES LENIN LETTER TO US WORKERS – 22
JAN 2024

Posted on January 23, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


‘WAGE-SLAVERY TO A HANDFUL OF MULTIMILLIONAIRES’: VLADIMIR LENIN’S LETTER TO
AMERICAN WORKERS

Lenin’s Letter to American Workers (39:05 min) Audio Mp3

On the 100th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Lenin, RT re-publishes his
legendary article addressed to US citizens

By Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin ©  Hulton-Deutsch Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images

On the centenary of the death of the leader of the world proletariat and founder
of the Soviet Union, Vladimir Lenin, RT is re-publishing his article addressed
to the workers of the United States. In the late 1910s, the document played a
major role in changing public opinion in the US and intensified the mass
movement in defense of Soviet Russia.

Comrades! A Russian Bolshevik who took part in the 1905 Revolution, and who
lived in your country for many years afterwards, has offered to convey my letter
to you. I have accepted his proposal all the more gladly because just at the
present time the American revolutionary workers have to play an exceptionally
important role as uncompromising enemies of American imperialism — the freshest,
strongest and latest in joining in the world-wide slaughter of nations for the
division of capitalist profits. At this very moment, the American
multimillionaires, these modern slaveowners, have turned an exceptionally tragic
page in the bloody history of bloody imperialism by giving their approval —
whether direct or indirect, open or hypocritically concealed, makes no
difference — to the armed expedition launched by the brutal Anglo-Japanese
imperialists for the purpose of throttling the first socialist republic.

The history of modern, civilized America opened with one of those great, really
liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared
to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war,
were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners or capitalists over the
division of usurped lands or ill-gotten gains. That was the war the American
people waged against the British robbers who oppressed America and held her in
colonial slavery, in the same way as these “civilized” bloodsuckers are still
oppressing and holding in colonial slavery hundreds of millions of people in
India, Egypt, and all parts of the world.

About 150 years have passed since then. Bourgeois civilization has borne all its
luxurious fruits. America has taken first place among the free and educated
nations in level of development of the productive forces of collective human
endeavor, in the utilization of machinery and of all the wonders of modern
engineering. At the same time, America has become one of the foremost countries
in regard to the depth of the abyss which lies between the handful of arrogant
multimillionaires who wallow in filth and luxury, and the millions of working
people who constantly live on the verge of pauperism. The American people, who
set an example for the world in waging a revolutionary war against feudal
slavery, now find themselves in the latest, capitalist stage of wage-slavery to
a handful of multimillionaires, and find themselves playing the role of hired
thugs who, for the benefit of wealthy scoundrels, throttled the Philippines in
1898 on the pretext of “liberating” them, and are throttling the Russian
Socialist Republic in 1918 on the pretext of “protecting” it from the Germans.

The four years of the imperialist slaughter of nations, however, have not passed
in vain. The deception of the people by the scoundrels of both robber groups,
the British and the German, has been utterly exposed by indisputable and obvious
facts. The results of the four years of war have revealed the general law of
capitalism as applied to war between robbers for the division of spoils: the
richest and strongest profited and grabbed most, while the weakest were utterly
robbed, tormented, crushed, and strangled.

The British imperialist robbers were the strongest in number of “colonial
slaves”. The British capitalists have not lost an inch of “their” territory
(i.e., territory they have grabbed over the centuries), but they have grabbed
all the German colonies in Africa, they have grabbed Mesopotamia and Palestine,
they have throttled Greece, and have begun to plunder Russia.

Vladimir Lenin ©  Hulton Archive / Getty Images

The German imperialist robbers were the strongest in organization and discipline
of “their” armies, but weaker in regard to colonies. They have lost all their
colonies, but plundered half of Europe and throttled the largest number of small
countries and weak nations. What a great war of “liberation” on both sides! How
well the robbers of both groups, the Anglo-French and the German capitalists,
together with their lackeys, the social-chauvinists, i.e., the socialists who
went over to the side of “their own ” bourgeoisie, have “defended their
country”!

The American multimillionaires were, perhaps, richest of all, and geographically
the most secure. They have profited more than all the rest. They have converted
all, even the richest, countries into their tributaries. They have grabbed
hundreds of billions of dollars. And every dollar is sullied with filth: the
filth of the secret treaties between Britain and her “allies”, between Germany
and her vassals, treaties for the division of the spoils, treaties of
mutual “aid” for oppressing the workers and persecuting the internationalist
socialists. Every dollar is sullied with the filth of “profitable” war
contracts, which in every country made the rich richer and the poor poorer. And
every dollar is stained with blood — from that ocean of blood that has been shed
by the ten million killed and twenty million maimed in the great, noble,
liberating and holy war to decide whether the British or the German robbers are
to get most of the spoils, whether the British or the German thugs are to
be foremost in throttling the weak nations all over the world.

While the German robbers broke all records in war atrocities, the British have
broken all records not only in the number of colonies they have grabbed, but
also in the subtlety of their disgusting hypocrisy. This very day, the
Anglo-French and American bourgeois newspapers are spreading, in millions and
millions of copies, lies and slander about Russia, and are hypocritically
justifying their predatory expedition against her on the plea that they want
to “protect” Russia from the Germans!

It does not require many words to refute this despicable and hideous lie; it is
sufficient to point to one well-known fact. In October 1917, after the Russian
workers had overthrown their imperialist government, the Soviet government, the
government of the revolutionary workers and peasants, openly proposed a just
peace, a peace without annexations or indemnities, a peace that fully guaranteed
equal rights to all nations — and it proposed such a peace to all the
belligerent countries.

It was the Anglo-French and the American bourgeoisie who refused to accept our
proposal; it was they who even refused to talk to us about a general peace! It
was they who betrayed the interests of all nations; it was they who prolonged
the imperialist slaughter!

It was they who, banking on the possibility of dragging Russia back into the
imperialist war, refused to take part in the peace negotiations and thereby gave
a free hand to the no less predatory German capitalists who imposed the
annexationist and harsh Brest Peace upon Russia!

It is difficult to imagine anything more disgusting than the hypocrisy with
which the Anglo-French and American bourgeoisie are now “blaming” us for the
Brest Peace Treaty. The very capitalists of those countries which could have
turned the Brest negotiations into general negotiations for a general peace are
now our “accusers”! The Anglo-French imperialist vultures, who have profited
from the plunder of colonies and the slaughter of nations, have prolonged the
war for nearly a whole year after Brest, and yet they “accuse” us, the
Bolsheviks, who proposed a just peace to all countries, they accuse us, who tore
up, published and exposed to public disgrace the secret, criminal treaties
concluded between the ex-tsar and the Anglo-French capitalists.

The workers of the whole world, no matter in what country they live, greet us,
sympathize with us, applaud us for breaking the iron ring of imperialist ties,
of sordid imperialist treaties, of imperialist chains — for breaking through to
freedom, and making the heaviest sacrifices in doing so — for, as a socialist
republic, although torn and plundered by the imperialists, keeping out of the
imperialist war and raising the banner of peace, the banner of socialism for the
whole world to see.

Small wonder that the international imperialist gang hates us for this, that
it “accuses” us, that all the lackeys of the imperialists, including our Right
Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, also “accuse” us. The hatred these
watchdogs of imperialism express for the Bolsheviks, and the sympathy of the
class-conscious workers of the world, convince us more than ever of the justice
of our cause.

A real socialist would not fail to understand that for the sake of achieving
victory over the bourgeoisie, for the sake of power passing to the workers, for
the sake of starting the world proletarian revolution, we cannot and
must not hesitate to make the heaviest sacrifices, including the sacrifice of
part of our territory, the sacrifice of heavy defeats at the hands of
imperialism. A real socialist would have proved by deeds his willingness
for “his” country to make the greatest sacrifice to give a real push forward to
the cause of the socialist revolution.

Vladimir Lenin addresses a crowd during the unveiling of the monument to Karl
Marx in Moscow. ©  Getty Images / Bettmann

For the sake of “their” cause, that is, for the sake of winning world hegemony,
the imperialists of Britain and Germany have not hesitated to utterly ruin and
throttle a whole number of countries, from Belgium and Serbia to Palestine and
Mesopotamia. But must socialists wait with “their” cause, the cause of
liberating the working people of the whole world from the yoke of capital, of
winning universal and lasting peace, until a path without sacrifice is found?
Must they fear to open the battle until an easy victory is “guaranteed”? Must
they place the integrity and security
of “their” bourgeois-created “fatherland” above the interests of the world
socialist revolution? The scoundrels in the international socialist movement who
think this way, those lackeys who grovel to bourgeois morality, thrice stand
condemned.

The Anglo-French and American imperialist vultures “accuse” us of concluding
an “agreement” with German imperialism. What hypocrites, what scoundrels they
are to slander the workers’ government while trembling because of the sympathy
displayed towards us by the workers of “their own” countries! But their
hypocrisy will be exposed. They pretend not to see the difference between an
agreement entered into by “socialists” with the bourgeoisie (their own or
foreign) against the workers, against the working people, and an agreement
entered into for the protection of the workers who have defeated their
bourgeoisie, with the bourgeoisie of one national colour against the
bourgeoisie of another colour in order that the proletariat may take advantage
of the antagonisms between the different groups of bourgeoisie.

In actual fact, every European sees this difference very well, and, as I shall
show in a moment, the American people have had a particularly
striking “illustration” of it in their own history. There are agreements and
agreements, there are fagots et fagots, as the French say.

When in February 1918 the German imperialist vultures hurled their forces
against unarmed, demobilized Russia, who had relied on the international
solidarity of the proletariat before the world revolution had fully matured, I
did not hesitate for a moment to enter into an “agreement” with the French
monarchists. Captain Sadoul, a French army officer who, in words, sympathised
with the Bolsheviks, but was in deeds a loyal and faithful servant of French
imperialism, brought the French officer de Lubersac to see me. “I am a
monarchist. My only aim is to secure the defeat of Germany,” de Lubersac
declared to me. “That goes without saying (cela va sans dire ),” I replied. But
this did not in the least prevent me from entering into an “agreement” with de
Lubersac concerning certain services that French army officers, experts in
explosives, were ready to render us by blowing up railway lines in order to
hinder the German invasion. This is an example of an “agreement” of which every
class-conscious worker will approve, an agreement in the interests of socialism.
The French monarchist and I shook hands, although we knew that each of us would
willingly hang his “partner”. But for a time our interests coincided. Against
the advancing rapacious Germans, we, in the interests of the Russian and the
world socialist revolution, utilised the equally rapacious counter-interests
of other imperialists. In this way we served the interests of the working class
of Russia and of other countries, we strengthened the proletariat and weakened
the bourgeoisie of the whole world, we resorted to the methods, most legitimate
and essential in every war, of maneuver, stratagem, retreat, in anticipation of
the moment when the rapidly maturing proletarian revolution in a number of
advanced countries completely matured.

However much the Anglo-French and American imperialist sharks fume with rage,
however much they slander us, no matter how many millions they spend on bribing
the Right Socialist-Revolutionary, Menshevik and other social-patriotic
newspapers, I shall not hesitate one second to enter into a similar
“agreement” with the German imperialist vultures if an attack upon Russia by
Anglo-French troops calls for it. And I know perfectly well that my tactics will
be approved by the class-conscious proletariat of Russia, Germany, France,
Britain, America — in short, of the whole civilized world. Such tactics will
ease the task of the socialist revolution, will hasten it, will weaken the
international bourgeoisie, will strengthen the position of the working class
which is defeating the bourgeoisie.

The American people resorted to these tactics long ago to the advantage of their
revolution. When they waged their great war of liberation against the British
oppressors, they had also against them the French and the Spanish oppressors who
owned a part of what is now the United States of North America. In their arduous
war for freedom, the American people also entered into “agreements” with some
oppressors against others for the purpose of weakening the oppressors and
strengthening those who were fighting in a revolutionary manner against
oppression, for the purpose of serving the interests of the
oppressed people. The American people took advantage of the strife between the
French, the Spanish and the British; sometimes they even fought side by side
with the forces of the French and Spanish oppressors against the British
oppressors; first they defeated the British and then freed themselves (partly by
ransom) from the French and the Spanish.

Historical action is not the pavement of Nevsky Prospekt, said the great Russian
revolutionary Chernyshevsky. A revolutionary would not “agree” to a proletarian
revolution only “on the condition” that it proceeds easily and smoothly, that
there is, from the outset, combined action on the part of the proletarians of
different countries, that there are guarantees against defeats, that the road of
the revolution is broad, free and straight, that it will not be necessary during
the march to victory to sustain the heaviest casualties, to “bide one’s time in
a besieged fortress”, or to make one’s way along extremely narrow, impassable,
winding and dangerous mountain tracks. Such a person is no revolutionary, he has
not freed himself from the pedantry of the bourgeois intellectuals; such a
person will be found constantly slipping into the camp of the
counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie, like our Right Socialist-Revolutionaries,
Mensheviks and even (although more rarely) Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.

Strikers storming horse-drawn car. ©  Wikipedia

Echoing the bourgeoisie, these gentlemen like to blame us for the “chaos” of the
revolution, for the “destruction” of industry, for the unemployment and the food
shortage. How hypocritical these accusations are, coming from those who welcomed
and supported the imperialist war, or who entered into an “agreement” with
Kerensky who continued this war! It is this imperialist war that is the cause of
all these misfortunes. The revolution engendered by the war can not avoid the
terrible difficulties and suffering bequeathed it by the prolonged, ruinous,
reactionary slaughter of the nations. To blame us for the “destruction” of
industry, or for the “terror”, is either hypocrisy or dull-witted pedantry; it
reveals an inability to understand the basic conditions of the fierce class
struggle, raised to the highest degree of intensity that is called revolution.

Even when “accusers” of this type do “recognize” the class struggle, they limit
themselves to verbal recognition; actually, they constantly slip into the
philistine utopia of class “agreement” and “collaboration”; for in revolutionary
epochs the class struggle has always, inevitably, and in every country, assumed
the form of civil war, and civil war is inconceivable without the severest
destruction, terror and the restriction of formal democracy in the interests of
this war. Only unctuous parsons — whether Christian or “secular” in the persons
of parlor, parliamentary socialists — cannot see, understand and feel this
necessity. Only a lifeless “man in the muffler” can shun the revolution for this
reason instead of plunging into battle with the utmost ardor and determination
at a time when history demands that the greatest problems of humanity be solved
by struggle and war.

The American people have a revolutionary tradition which has been adopted by the
best representatives of the American proletariat, who have repeatedly expressed
their complete solidarity with us Bolsheviks. That tradition is the war of
liberation against the British in the eighteenth century and the Civil War in
the nineteenth century. In some respects, if we only take into consideration
the “destruction” of some branches of industry and of the national economy,
America in 1870 was behind 1860. But what a pedant, what an idiot would anyone
be to deny on these grounds the immense, world-historic, progressive and
revolutionary significance of the American Civil War of 1863-65!

The representatives of the bourgeoisie understand that for the sake of
overthrowing Negro slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the slaveowners, it was
worth letting the country go through long years of civil war, through the
abysmal ruin, destruction and terror that accompany every war. But now, when we
are confronted with the vastly greater task of overthrowing
capitalist wage-slavery, of overthrowing the rule of the bourgeoisie — now, the
representatives and defenders of the bourgeoisie, and also the reformist
socialists who have been frightened by the bourgeoisie and are shunning the
revolution, cannot and do not want to understand that civil war is necessary and
legitimate.

Vladimir Lenin giving a speech to Vsevobuch servicemen on the first anniversary
of the foundation of the Soviet armed forces, Red Square, Moscow, 25th May 1919.
©  Getty Images / Bettmann

The American workers will not follow the bourgeoisie. They will be with us, for
civil war against the bourgeoisie. The whole history of the world and of the
American labour movement strengthens my conviction that this is so. I also
recall the words of one of the most beloved leaders of the American proletariat,
Eugene Debs, who wrote in the Appeal to Reason, I believe towards the end of
1915, in the article “What Shall I Fight For” (I quoted this article at the
beginning of 1916 at a public meeting of workers in Berne, Switzerland) — that
he, Debs, would rather be shot than vote credits for the present criminal and
reactionary war; that he, Debs, knows of only one holy and, from the proletarian
standpoint, legitimate war, namely: the war against the capitalists, the war to
liberate mankind from wage-slavery.

I am not surprised that Wilson, the head of the American multimillionaires and
servant of the capitalist sharks, has thrown Debs into prison. Let the
bourgeoisie be brutal to the true internationalists, to the true representatives
of the revolutionary proletariat! The more fierce and brutal they are, the
nearer the day of the victorious proletarian revolution.

We are blamed for the destruction caused by our revolution. Who are the
accusers? The hangers-on of the bourgeoisie, of that very bourgeoisie who,
during the four years of the imperialist war, have destroyed almost the whole of
European culture and have reduced Europe to barbarism, brutality and starvation.
These bourgeoisie now demand we should not make a revolution on these ruins,
amidst this wreckage of culture, amidst the wreckage and ruins created by the
war, nor with the people who have been brutalised by the war. How humane and
righteous the bourgeoisie are!

Their servants accuse us of resorting to terror. The British bourgeoisie have
forgotten their 1649, the French bourgeoisie have forgotten their 1793. Terror
was just and legitimate when the bourgeoisie resorted to it for their own
benefit against feudalism. Terror became monstrous and criminal when the workers
and poor peasants dared to use it against the bourgeoisie! Terror was just and
legitimate when used for the purpose of substituting one exploiting minority for
another exploiting minority. Terror became monstrous and criminal when it began
to be used for the purpose of overthrowing every exploiting minority, to be used
in the interests of the vast actual majority, in the interests of the
proletariat and semi-proletariat, the working class and the poor peasants!

The international imperialist bourgeoisie have slaughtered ten million men and
maimed twenty million in “their” war, the war to decide whether the British or
the German vultures are to rule the world.

If our war, the war of the oppressed and exploited against the oppressors and
the exploiters, results in half a million or a million casualties in all
countries, the bourgeoisie will say that the former casualties are justified,
while the latter are criminal.

The proletariat will have something entirely different to say.

Now, amidst the horrors of the imperialist war, the proletariat is receiving a
most vivid and striking illustration of the great truth taught by all
revolutions and bequeathed to the workers by their best teachers, the founders
of modern socialism. This truth is that no revolution can be successful
unless the resistance of the exploiters is crushed. When we, the workers and
toiling peasants, captured state power, it became our duty to crush the
resistance of the exploiters. We are proud we have been doing this. We regret we
are not doing it with sufficient firmness and determination.

We know that fierce resistance to the socialist revolution on the part of the
bourgeoisie is inevitable in all countries, and that this resistance
will grow with the growth of this revolution. The proletariat will crush this
resistance; during the struggle against the resisting bourgeoisie it will
finally mature for victory and for power.

Let the corrupt bourgeois press shout to the whole world about every mistake our
revolution makes. We are not daunted by our mistakes. People have not become
saints because the revolution has begun. The toiling classes who for centuries
have been oppressed, downtrodden and forcibly held in the vice of poverty,
brutality and ignorance cannot avoid mistakes when making a revolution. And, as
I pointed out once before, the corpse of bourgeois society cannot be nailed in a
coffin and buried. The corpse of capitalism is decaying and disintegrating in
our midst, polluting the air and poisoning our lives, enmeshing that which is
new, fresh, young and virile in thousands of threads and bonds of that which is
old, moribund and decaying.

For every hundred mistakes we commit, and which the bourgeoisie and their
lackeys (including our own Mensheviks and Right Socialist-Revolutionaries) shout
about to the whole world, 10,000 great and heroic deeds are performed, greater
and more heroic because they are simple and inconspicuous amidst the everyday
life of a factory district or a remote village, performed by people who are not
accustomed (and have no opportunity) to shout to the whole world about their
successes.



Crowd of strikers going to a meeting, Philadelphia. ©  Wikipedia

But even if the contrary were true — although I know such an assumption is wrong
— even if we committed 10,000 mistake for every 100 correct actions we
performed, even in that case our revolution would be great and invincible,
and so it will be in the eyes of world history, because, for the first time, not
the minority, not the rich alone, not the educated alone, but the real people,
the vast majority of the working people, are themselves building a new life,
are by their own experience solving the most difficult problems of socialist
organisation .

Every mistake committed in the course of such work, in the course of this most
conscientious and earnest work of tens of millions of simple workers and
peasants in reorganizing their whole life, every such mistake is worth thousands
and millions of “lawless” successes achieved by the exploiting minority —
successes in swindling and duping the working people. For only through such
mistakes will the workers and peasants learn to build the new life, learn to
do without capitalists; only in this way will they hack a path for themselves —
through thousands of obstacles — to victorious socialism.

Mistakes are being committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our
peasants, who at one stroke, in one night, October 25-26 (old style), 1917,
entirely abolished the private ownership of land, and are now, month after
month, overcoming tremendous difficulties and correcting their mistakes
themselves, solving in a practical way the most difficult tasks of organizing
new conditions of economic life, of fighting the kulaks, providing land for
the working people (and not for the rich), and of changing
to communist large-scale agriculture.

Mistakes are being committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our
workers, who have already, after a few months, nationalized almost all the
biggest factories and plants, and are learning by hard, everyday work the new
task of managing whole branches of industry, are setting the nationalized
enterprises going, overcoming the powerful resistance of inertia,
petty-bourgeois mentality and selfishness, and, brick by brick, are laying the
foundation of new social ties, of a new labor discipline, of a new influence of
the workers’ trade unions over their members.

Mistakes are committed in the course of their revolutionary work by our Soviets,
which were created as far back as 1905 by a mighty upsurge of the people. The
Soviets of Workers and Peasants are a new type of state, a new and
higher type of democracy, a form of the proletarian dictatorship, a means of
administering the state without the bourgeoisie and against the bourgeoisie. For
the first time democracy is here serving the people, the working people, and has
ceased to be democracy for the rich as it still is in all bourgeois republics,
even the most democratic. For the first time, the people are grappling, on a
scale involving one hundred million, with the problem of implementing the
dictatorship of the proletariat and semi-proletariat — a problem which, if not
solved, makes socialism out of the question.

Let the pedants, or the people whose minds are incurably stuffed with
bourgeois-democratic or parliamentary prejudices, shake their heads in
perplexity about our Soviets, about the absence of direct elections, for
example. These people have forgotten nothing and have learned nothing during the
period of the great upheavals of 1914-18. The combination of the proletarian
dictatorship with the new democracy for the working people — of civil war with
the widest participation of the people in politics — such a combination cannot
be brought about at one stroke, nor does it fit in with the outworn modes of
routine parliamentary democracy. The contours of a new world, the world of
socialism, are rising before us in the shape of the Soviet Republic. It is not
surprising that this world does not come into being ready-made, does not spring
forth like Minerva from the head of Jupiter.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin delivers a speech on Sverdlov Square in front of troops
going to the front against the White Poles. ©  Sputnik / Gregory Goldstein

The old bourgeois-democratic constitutions waxed eloquent about formal equality
and right of assembly; but our proletarian and peasant Soviet Constitution casts
aside the hypocrisy of formal equality. When the bourgeois republicans
overturned thrones they did not worry about formal equality between monarchists
and republicans. When it is a matter of overthrowing the bourgeoisie, only
traitors or idiots can demand formal equality of rights for the bourgeoisie.
“Freedom of assembly” for workers and peasants is not worth a farthing when the
best buildings belong to the bourgeoisie. Our Soviets have confiscated all the
good buildings in town and country from the rich and have transferred all of
them to the workers and peasants for their unions and meetings. This is
our freedom of assembly — for the working people! This is the meaning and
content of our Soviet, our socialist Constitution!

That is why we are all so firmly convinced that no matter what misfortunes may
still be in store for it, our Republic of Soviets is invincible.

It is invincible because every blow struck by frenzied imperialism, every defeat
the international bourgeoisie inflict on us, rouses more and more sections of
the workers and peasants to the struggle, teaches them at the cost of enormous
sacrifice, steels them and engenders new heroism on a mass scale.

We know that help from you will probably not come soon, comrade American
workers, for the revolution is developing in different countries in different
forms and at different tempos (and it cannot be otherwise). We know that
although the European proletarian revolution has been maturing very rapidly
lately, it may, after all, not flare up within the next few weeks. We are
banking on the inevitability of the world revolution, but this does not mean
that we are such fools as to bank on the revolution inevitably coming on
a definite and early date. We have seen two great revolutions in our country,
1905 and 1917, and we know revolutions are not made to order, or by agreement.
We know that circumstances brought our Russian detachment of the socialist
proletariat to the fore not because of our merits, but because of the
exceptional backwardness of Russia, and that before the world revolution breaks
out a number of separate revolutions may be defeated.

In spite of this, we are firmly convinced that we are invincible, because the
spirit of mankind will not be broken by the imperialist slaughter. Mankind will
vanquish it. And the first country to break the convict chains of the
imperialist war was our country. We sustained enormously heavy casualties in the
struggle to break these chains, but we broke them. We are free from imperialist
dependence, we have raised the banner of struggle for the complete overthrow of
imperialism for the whole world to see.

We are now, as it were, in a besieged fortress, waiting for the other
detachments of the world socialist revolution to come to our relief. These
detachments exist, they are more numerous than ours, they are maturing, growing,
gaining more strength the longer the brutalities of imperialism continue. The
workers are breaking away from their social traitors—the Gomperses, Hendersons,
Renaudels, Scheidemanns and Renners. Slowly but surely the workers are adopting
communist, Bolshevik tactics and are marching towards the proletarian
revolution, which alone is capable of saving dying culture and dying mankind.

In short, we are invincible, because the world proletarian revolution is
invincible.

Vladimir Lenin

August 20, 1918

…………………..

https://archive.is/SsE06

One Hour of Soviet Communist Music – Sung in English (1:02:09 min) Audio Mp3
| Tagged communism, english, imperialism, russia, theory


US WARMONGERS – THE FOUR HORSEMEN OF GAZA’S APOCALYPSE – BY CHRIS HEDGES – 21
JAN 2024

Posted on January 23, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 2,800 WORDS • 

Blood Brothers – by Mr. Fish

Joe Biden relies on advisors who view the world through the prism of the West’s
civilizing mission to the “lesser breeds” of the earth to formulate his policies
towards Israel and the Middle East.

Joe Biden’s inner circle of strategists for the Middle East — Antony Blinken,
Jake Sullivan and Brett McGurk — have little understanding of the Muslim world
and a deep animus towards Islamic resistance movements. They see Europe, the
United States and Israel as involved in a clash of civilizations between the
enlightened West and a barbaric Middle East. They believe that violence can bend
Palestinians and other Arabs to their will. They champion the overwhelming
firepower of the U.S. and Israeli military as the key to regional stability — an
illusion that fuels the flames of regional war and perpetuates the genocide in
Gaza.

In short, these four men are grossly incompetent. They join the club of other
clueless leaders, such as those who waltzed into the suicidal slaughter of World
War One, waded into the quagmire of Vietnam or who orchestrated the series of
recent military debacles in Iraq, Libya, Syria and Ukraine. They are endowed
with the presumptive power vested in the Executive Branch to bypass Congress, to
provide weapons to Israel and carry out military strikes in Yemen and Iraq. This
inner circle of true believers dismiss the more nuanced and informed counsels in
the State Department and the intelligence communities, who view the refusal of
the Biden administration to pressure Israel to halt the ongoing genocide as
ill-advised and dangerous.

Biden has always been an ardent militarist — he was calling for war with Iraq
five years before the U.S. invaded. He built his political career by catering to
the distaste of the white middle class for the popular movements, including the
anti-war and civil rights movements, that convulsed the country in the 1960s and
1970s. He is a Republican masquerading as a Democrat. He joined Southern
segregationists to oppose bringing Black students into Whites-only schools.
He opposed federal funding for abortions and supported a constitutional
amendment allowing states to restrict abortions. He attacked President George H.
W. Bush in 1989 for being too soft in the “war on drugs.” He was one of
the architects of the 1994 crime bill and a raft of other draconian laws that
more than doubled the U.S. prison population, militarized the police and pushed
through drug laws that saw people incarcerated for life without parole. He
supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, the greatest betrayal of
the working class since the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. He has always been a
strident defender of Israel, bragging that he did more fundraisers for the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) than any other Senator.

“As many of you heard me say before, were there no Israel, America would have to
invent one. We’d have to invent one because… you protect our interests like we
protect yours,” Biden said in 2015, to an audience that included the Israeli
ambassador, at the 67th Annual Israeli Independence Day Celebration in
Washington D.C. During the same speech he said, “The truth of the matter is we
need you. The world needs you. Imagine what it would say about humanity and the
future of the 21st century if Israel were not sustained, vibrant and free.”

The year before Biden gave a gushing eulogy for Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli
prime minister and general who was implicated in massacres of Palestinians,
Lebanese and others in Palestine, Jordan and Lebanon — as well as Egyptian
prisoners of war — going back to the 1950s. He described Sharon as “part of one
of the most remarkable founding generations in the history not of this nation,
but of any nation.”

While repudiating Donald Trump and his administration, Biden has not reversed
Trump’s abrogation of the Iran nuclear deal negotiated by Barack Obama, or
Trump’s sanctions against Iran. He has embraced Trump’s close ties with Saudi
Arabia, including the rehabilitation of Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed
bin Salman, following the assassination of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi
in 2017 in the consulate of Saudi Arabia in Istanbul. He has not intervened to
curb Israeli attacks on Palestinians and settlement expansion in the West Bank.
He did not reverse Trump’s moving of the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, although the
embassy includes land Israel illegally colonized after invading the West Bank
and Gaza in 1967.

As a seven-term senator of Delaware, Biden received more financial support from
pro-Israel donors than any other senator, since 1990. Biden retains this record
despite the fact that his senatorial career ended in 2009, when he became
Obama’s vice president. Biden explains his commitment to Israel as “personal”
and “political.”

He has parroted back Israeli propaganda — including fabrications about beheaded
babies and widespread rape of Israeli women by Hamas fighters — and asked
Congress to provide $14 billion in additional aid to Israel since the Oct. 7
attack. He has twice bypassed Congress to supply Israel with thousands of bombs
and munitions, including at least 100 2,000-pound bombs, used in the scorched
earth campaign in Gaza.

Israel has killed or seriously wounded close to 90,000 Palestinians in Gaza,
almost one in every 20 inhabitants. It has destroyed or damaged over 60
percent of the housing. The “safe areas,” to which some 2 million Gazans were
instructed to flee in southern Gaza, have been bombed, with thousands of
casualties. Palestinians in Gaza now make up 80 percent of all the people facing
famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, according to the U.N. Every person in
Gaza is hungry. A quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find
food and drinkable water. Famine is imminent. The 335,000 children under the age
of five are at high risk of malnutrition. Some 50,000 pregnant
women lack healthcare and adequate nutrition.

And it could all end if the U.S. chose to intervene.

“All of our missiles, the ammunition, the precision-guided bombs, all the
airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S.,” retired Israeli Major General
Yitzhak Brick told the Jewish News Syndicate. “The minute they turn off the tap,
you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability… Everyone understands that we
can’t fight this war without the United States. Period.”

Blinken was Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser when Biden was the ranking
Democrat on the Foreign Relations Committee. He, along with Biden, lobbied for
the invasion of Iraq. When he was Obama’s deputy national security advisor, he
advocated the 2011 overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. He opposed withdrawing
U.S. forces from Syria. He worked on the disastrous Biden Plan to partition
Iraq along ethnic lines.

“Within the Obama White House, Blinken played an influential role in the
imposition of sanctions against Russia over the 2014 invasion of Crimea and
eastern Ukraine, and subsequently led ultimately unsuccessful calls for the U.S.
to arm Ukraine,” according to the Atlantic Council, NATO’s unofficial think
tank.

When Blinken landed in Israel following the attacks by Hamas and other
resistance groups on Oct. 7, he announced at a press conference with Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “I come before you not only as the United States
Secretary of State, but also as a Jew.”

He attempted, on Israel’s behalf, to lobby Arab leaders to accept the 2.3
million Palestinian refugees Israel intends to ethnically cleanse from Gaza, a
request that evoked outrage among Arab leaders.

Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, and McGurk, are consummate
opportunists, Machiavellian bureaucrats who cater to the reigning centers of
power, including the Israel lobby.

Sullivan was the chief architect of Hillary Clinton’s Asia pivot. He backed
the corporate and investor rights Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement, which was
sold as helping the U.S. contain China. Trump ultimately killed the trade
agreement in the face of mass opposition from the U.S. public. His focus is
thwarting a rising China, including through the expansion of the U.S. military.

While not focused on the Middle East, Sullivan is a foreign policy hawk who has
a knee jerk embrace of force to shape the world to U.S. demands.
He embraces military Keynesianism, arguing that massive government spending on
the weapons industry benefits the domestic economy.

In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published five days before
the Oct. 7 attacks, which left some 1,200 Israelis dead, Sullivan exposed his
lack of understanding of the dynamics of the Middle East.

“Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he writes in
the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for
decades,” adding that in the face of “serious” frictions, “we have de-escalated
crises in Gaza.”

Sullivan ignores Palestinian aspirations and Washington’s rhetorical backing for
a two-state solution in the article, hastily rewritten in the online version
after the Oct. 7 attacks. He writes in his original piece:

> At a meeting in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, last year, the president set forth his
> policy for the Middle East in an address to the leaders of members of the Gulf
> Cooperation Council, Egypt, Iraq, and Jordan. His approach returns discipline
> to US policy. It emphasizes deterring aggression, de-escalating conflicts, and
> integrating the region through joint infrastructure projects and new
> partnerships, including between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

McGurk, the deputy assistant to President Biden and the coordinator for the
Middle East and North Africa at the White House National Security Council, was a
chief architect of Bush’s “surge” in Iraq, which accelerated the bloodletting.
He worked as a legal advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority and the U.S.
ambassador in Baghdad. He then became Trump’s anti-ISIS czar.

He does not speak Arabic — none of the four men does — and came to Iraq with no
knowledge of its history, peoples or culture. Nevertheless, he helped draft
Iraq’s interim constitution and oversaw the legal transition from the Coalition
Provisional Authority to an Interim Iraqi Government led by Prime Minister Ayad
Allawi. McGurk was an early backer of Nouri al-Maliki, who was Iraq’s prime
minister between 2006 and 2014. Al-Maliki built a Shi’ite-controlled sectarian
state that deeply alienated Sunni Arabs and Kurds. In 2005, McGurk transferred
to the National Security Council (NSC), where he served as director for Iraq,
and later as special assistant to the president and senior director for Iraq and
Afghanistan. He served on the NSC staff from 2005 to 2009. In 2015, he
was appointed as Obama’s Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to
Counter ISIL. He was retained by Trump until his resignation in Dec. 2018.

An article in April 2021 titled “Brett McGurk: A Hero of Our Times,” in New
Lines Magazine by former BBC foreign correspondent Paul Wood, paints a scathing
portrait of McGurk. Wood writes:

> A senior Western diplomat who served in Baghdad told me that McGurk had been
> an absolute disaster for Iraq. “He is a consummate operator in Washington, but
> I saw no sign that he was interested in Iraqis or Iraq as a place full of real
> people. It was simply a bureaucratic and political challenge for him.” One
> critic who was in Baghdad with McGurk called him Machiavelli reincarnated.
> “It’s intellect plus ambition plus the utter ruthlessness to rise no matter
> the cost.”
> 
> [….]
> 
> A U.S. diplomat who was in the embassy when McGurk arrived found his steady
> advance astonishing. “Brett only meets people who speak English. … There are
> like four people in the government who speak English. And somehow he’s now the
> person who should decide the fate of Iraq? How did this happen?”
> 
> Even those who didn’t like McGurk had to admit that he had a formidable
> intellect — and was a hard worker. He was also a gifted writer, no surprise as
> he had clerked for Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist. His rise
> mirrored that of an Iraqi politician named Nouri al-Maliki, one careerist
> helping the other. That is McGurk’s tragedy — and Iraq’s.
> 
> [….]
> 
> McGurk’s critics say his lack of Arabic meant he missed the vicious, sectarian
> undertones of what al-Maliki was saying in meetings right from the start.
> Translators censored or failed to keep up. Like many Americans in Iraq, McGurk
> was deaf to what was happening around him.
> 
> Al-Maliki was the consequence of two mistakes by the U.S. How much McGurk had
> to do with them remains in dispute. The first mistake was the “80 Percent
> Solution” for ruling Iraq. The Sunni Arabs were mounting a bloody insurgency,
> but they were just 20% of the population. The theory was that you could run
> Iraq with the Kurds and the Shiites. The second error was to identify the
> Shiites with hardline, religious parties backed by Iran. Al-Maliki, a member
> of the religious Da’wa Party, was the beneficiary of this.

In a piece in HuffPost in May 2022 by Akbar Shahid Ahmed, titled “Biden’s Top
Middle East Advisor ‘Torched the House and Showed Up With a Firehose,’” McGurk
is described by a colleague, who asked not to be named, as “the most talented
bureaucrat they’ve ever seen, with the worst foreign policy judgment they’ve
ever seen.”

McGurk, like others in the Biden administration, is bizarrely focused on what
comes after Israel’s genocidal campaign, rather than trying to halt it.
McGurk proposed denying humanitarian aid and refusing to implement a pause in
the fighting in Gaza until all the Israeli hostages were freed. Biden and his
three closest policy advisors have called for the Palestinian Authority — an
Israeli puppet regime that is reviled by most Palestinians — to take control of
Gaza once Israel finishes leveling it. They have called on Israel — since Oct. 7
— to take steps towards a two-state solution, a plan rejected in an humiliating
public rebuke to the the Biden White House by Netanyahu.

The Biden White House spends more time talking to the Israelis and Saudis, who
are being lobbied to normalize relations with Israel and help rebuild Gaza, than
the Palestinians, who are at best, an afterthought. It believes the key to
ending Palestinian resistance is found in Riyadh, summed up in a top-secret
document peddled by McGurk called the “Jerusalem-Jeddah Pact,” the
HuffPost reported. It is unable or unwilling to curb Israel’s bloodlust, which
included missile strikes in a residential neighborhood in Damascus, Syria, on
Saturday that killed five military advisors from Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps, and a drone attack in South Lebanon on Sunday, which killed two
senior members of Hezbollah. These Israeli provocations will not go unanswered,
evidenced by the ballistic missiles and rockets launched on Sunday by militants
in western Iraq that targeted U.S. personnel stationed at the al-Assad Airbase.

The Alice-in-Wonderland idea that once the slaughter in Gaza ends a diplomatic
pact between Israel and Saudi Arabia will be the key to regional stability is
stupefying. Israel’s genocide, and Washington’s complicity, is shredding U.S.
credibility and influence, especially in the Global South and the Muslim world.
It ensures another generation of enraged Palestinians — whose families have been
obliterated and whose homes have been destroyed — seeking vengeance.

The policies embraced by the Biden administration not only blithely ignore the
realities in the Arab world, but the realities of an extremist Israeli state
that, with Congress bought and paid for by the Israel lobby, couldn’t care less
what the Biden White House dreams up. Israel has no intention of creating a
viable Palestinian state. Its goal is the ethnic cleansing of the 2.3 million
Palestinians from Gaza and the annexation of Gaza by Israel. And when Israel is
done with Gaza, it will turn on the West Bank, where Israeli raids now occur on
an almost nightly basis and where thousands have been arrested and
detained without charge since Oct. 7.

Those running the show in the Biden White House are chasing after rainbows. The
march of folly led by these four blind mice perpetuates the cataclysmic
suffering of the Palestinians, stokes a regional war and presages another tragic
and self-defeating chapter in the two decades of U.S. military fiascos in the
Middle East.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign
correspondent for fifteen years for The New York Times , where he served as the
Middle East Bureau Chief and Balkan Bureau Chief for the paper. He previously
worked overseas for The Dallas Morning News , The Christian Science Monitor ,
and NPR . He is the host of show The Chris Hedges Report.

…………………………

https://archive.ph/jXuO7

(Republished from Scheerpost)

| Tagged gaza, israel, news, palestine, politics


TEN NOTABLE BOOKS BY SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR – BY PAUL MCQUEEN

Posted on January 23, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Collage of Simone de Beauvoir book covers


10 BOOKS BY SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR YOU SHOULD READ

12 April 2022

ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL THINKERS OF THE 20TH CENTURY, SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR,
THE FRENCH WRITER, EXISTENTIALIST PHILOSOPHER, POLITICAL ACTIVIST, AND FEMINIST,
PUBLISHED DOZENS OF REMARKABLE NOVELS, ESSAYS, AND AUTOBIOGRAPHIES IN HER
LIFETIME. AFTER HER DEATH, HER DIARIES, WHICH OFFER INVALUABLE INSIGHT INTO THE
DEVELOPMENT OF HER THEORIES AND ATTITUDES, CAME TO LIGHT. BELOW ARE TEN OF HER
BEST WORKS THAT YOU NEED TO ADD TO YOUR READING LIST.

She Came To Stay (1943)


NOVELS



She Came To Stay (1943): De Beauvoir’s first novel takes place in Paris during
the build up to and early days of the Second World War. The central characters,
Françoise and Pierre, enjoy an open relationship, however, this is tested when
the couple enter into a ménage à trois with a younger woman, Xavière. The plot
is generally considered to be based on de Beauvoir and Sartre’s own experiences
with Olga and Wanda Kosakiewicz. Freedom, angst, and the other are concepts
which the author set out to explore.





…………………




The Blood of Others (1945): Set in the same location and time as her debut, this
novel reveals in a series of flashbacks the formation of a relationship between
Jean, a bourgeois boy turned Resistance fighter, and Hélène, a young designer
and frustrated bride-to-be. Freedom, again, is a central theme as is the
existentialist perspective on resistance versus collaboration, namely that
failure to refuse something (in this case Nazi occupation) is the equivalent of
choosing it. Although de Beauvoir later criticized her own work here, it remains
an essential piece of WWII fiction.

………………



The Mandarins (1954): De Beauvoir won France’s most prestigious literary prize,
the Prix Goncourt, with this novel from 1954. Set in the aftermath of the Second
World War, the plot concerns the personal lives of a close-knit group of French
intellectuals as they attempt to establish their place in the new political
landscape of a post-war Europe. It is generally believed that the characters are
based on members of de Beauvoir and Sartre’s own circle of friends at the time,
including Albert Camus and Arthur Koestler.

……………………..




The Woman Destroyed (1967): This is a collection of three novellas, entitled The
Age of Discretion, Monologue, and A Woman Destroyed respectively. In the first
of these, a woman in her sixties loses confidence in her own ability to navigate
her personal and professional life; the second contains the rantings of a woman
who has suffered numerous tragedies for which she holds society responsible; and
the last is epistolary, the diary entries of a housewife whose adult children
have left her and whose husband, she discovers, has been unfaithful.

………………….





The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947)


ESSAYS

The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947): De Beauvoir’s second major non-fiction work
arose from a lecture she gave in 1945 challenging the ability of Sartre’s Being
and Nothingness to support an ethical system. The work in three parts sets out
the author’s stance on ethics, outlines the ways in which people deny their own
freedom, and examines the true nature of free action in the world. The book
closes with a statement on human freedom – ‘We are absolutely free today if we
choose to will our existence in its finiteness, a finiteness which is open on
the infinite’ – and a call to action to this end.

…………………….




The Second Sex (1949): Probably the best-known of de Beauvoir’s books, The
Second Sex is a landmark work of 20th-century feminist philosophy, dealing with
women’s position in society throughout history. In 1960, 11 years after its
publication, de Beauvoir wrote that it had been an attempt to explain ‘why a
woman’s situation, still, even today, prevents her from explaining the world’s
basic problems.’ Amongst numerous contributions to human knowledge, it helped
establish a distinction between sex and gender. Though it has come in for
significant criticism over the past seven decades, it remains essential reading.

Simone de Beauvoir – Le Deuxieme Sexe – Audiolivre (5:02 min) Audio Mp3

……………………………


AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958): This book provides an intimate portrait of
de Beauvoir growing up in a bourgeois French family. It depicts her adolescent
rebellion against the conventional expectations of her parents and her class and
her determination to establish herself in her own intellectual right. The
existentialist ambition she felt, and which she poignantly portrays, was, of
course, far from the norm for a young woman in the 1920s. Friendship, love, and
learning are all key elements of the story, as is the forging of a lifelong
relationship with a fellow student, Jean-Paul Sartre.

…………………………………..



Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981)


Adieux: A Farewell to Sartre (1981): This autobiographical work depicts the
final decade of Sartre’s life and offers insight into one of the greatest minds
of the 20th century. The book contains both a historical account of the
philosopher’s final years and a conversation between the most famous
intellectual couple of the last 100 years. While it is, as you’d expect, filled
with philosophical examination, it is also an open, honest dialogue between two
people who chose to share their lives in a way that reflected their individual
perspective on the world and its workings.

………………………………


POSTHUMOUS PUBLICATIONS



Wartime Diary (2009) │ Courtesy of University of Illinois Press

Diary of a Philosophy Student (2006): This diary from 1926-27 documents de
Beauvoir’s time as a student of philosophy at the Sorbonne, one of the oldest
and most prestigious universities in France, located on Paris’ Left Bank. It
reveals aspects of the writer’s personal life and early thinking that was
unknown during her lifetime. To complete the edition, essays by Barbara Klaw and
Margaret A. Simons address its significance from a historical, philosophical,
and literary point of view.
Wartime Diary (2009): Written between September 1939 and January 1941, these
diary entries helped overturn the traditional notion of de Beauvoir as the
devoted companion of Sartre, revealing a woman with her own complex, and at the
time controversial, relationships. It also helps separate her own literary and
philosophical accomplishments from Sartre’s, which often threatened to
overshadow hers during their lifetimes. Importantly, it traces her development
as a politically engaged actor. De Beauvoir, ever so helpfully, also provides
reading lists as she goes.

………………….

Source

| Tagged books, essay, feminism, philosophy, simone-de-beauvoir


HOW THE WEST WAS DEFEATED – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 18 JAN 2024

Posted on January 22, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,800 WORDS • 

Emmanuel Todd, historian, demographer, anthropologist, sociologist and political
analyst, is part of a dying breed: one of the very few remaining exponents of
old school French intelligentzia – a heir to those like Braudel, Sartre, Deleuze
and Foucault who dazzled successive young Cold War generations from the West
down to the East.

The first nugget concerning his latest book, La Défaite de L’Occident (“The
Defeat of the West”) is the minor miracle of actually being published last week
in France, right within the NATO sphere: a hand grenade of a book, by an
independent thinker, based on facts and verified data, blowing up the whole
Russophobia edifice erected around the “aggression” by “Tsar” Putin.

At least some sectors of strictly oligarch-controlled corporate media in France
simply could not ignore Todd this time around for several reasons. Most of all
because he was the first Western intellectual, already in 1976, to have
predicted the fall of the USSR in his book La Chute Finale, with his research
based on Soviet infant mortality rates.

Another key reason was his 2002 book Apres L’Empire, a sort of preview of the
Empire’s Decline and Fall published a few months before Shock & Awe in Iraq.

Now Todd, in what he has defined as his last book (“I closed the circle”) allows
himself to go for broke and meticulously depict the defeat not only of the US
but of the West as a whole – with his research focusing in and around the war in
Ukraine.

Considering the toxic NATOstan environment where Russophobia and cancel culture
reign supreme, and every deviation is punishable, Todd has been very careful not
to frame the current process as a Russian victory in Ukraine (although that’s
implied in everything he describes, ranging from several indicators of social
peace to the overall stability of the “Putin system”, which is “a product of the
history of Russia, and not the work of one man”).

Rather, he focuses on the key reasons that have led to the West’s downfall.
Among them: the end of the nation-state; de-industrialization (which explains
NATO’s deficit in producing weapons for Ukraine); the “degree zero” of the
West’s religious matrix, Protestantism; the sharp increase of mortality rates in
the US (much higher than in Russia), along with suicides and homicides; and the
supremacy of an imperial nihilism expressed by the obsession with Forever Wars.

The Collapse of Protestantism

Todd methodically analyses, in sequence, Russia, Ukraine, Eastern Europe,
Germany, Britain, Scandinavia and finally The Empire. Let’s focus on what would
be the 12 Greatest Hits of his remarkable exercise.

1. At the start of the Special Military Operation (SMO) in February 2022, the
combined GDP of Russia and Belarus was only 3.3% of the combined West (in this
case the NATO sphere plus Japan and South Korea). Todd is amazed how these 3.3%
capable of producing more weapons than the whole Western colossus not only are
winning the war but reducing dominant notions of the “neoliberal political
economy” (GDP rates) to shambles.

2. The “ideological solitude” and “ideological narcissism” of the West –
incapable of understanding, for instance, how “the whole Muslim world seems to
consider Russia as a partner rather than an adversary”.

3. Todd eschews the notion of “Weberian states” – evoking a delicious
compatibility of vision between Putin and US realpolitik practitioner John
Mearsheimer. Because they are forced to survive in an environment where only
power relations matters, states are now acting as “Hobbesian agents.” And that
brings us to the Russian notion of a nation-state, focused on “sovereignty”: the
capacity of a state to independently define its internal and external policies,
with no foreign interference whatsoever.

4. The implosion, step by step, of WASP culture, which led, “since the 1960s”,
to “an empire deprived of a center and a project, an essentially military
organism managed by a group without culture (in the anthropological sense)”.
This is Todd defining the US neocons.

5. The US as a “post-imperial” entity: just a shell of military machinery
deprived of an intelligence-driven culture, leading to “accentuated military
expansion in a phase of massive contraction of its industrial base”. As Todd
stresses, “modern war without industry is an oxymoron”.

6. The demographic trap: Todd shows how Washington strategists “forgot that a
state whose population enjoys a high educational and technological level, even
if it is decreasing, does not lose its military power”. That’s exactly the case
of Russia during the Putin years.

7. Here we reach the crux of Todd’s argument: his post-Max Weber
reinterpretation of The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published
a little over a century ago, in 1904/1905: “If Protestantism was the matrix for
the ascension of the West, its death, today, is the cause of the disintegration
and defeat.”

Todd clearly defines how the 1688 English “Glorious Revolution”, the 1776
American Declaration of Independence and the 1789 French Revolution were the
true pillars of the liberal West. Consequently, an expanded “West” is not
historically “liberal”, because it also engineered “Italian fascism, German
Nazism and Japanese militarism”.

In a nutshell, Todd shows how Protestantism imposed universal literacy on the
populations it controlled, “because all faithful must directly access the Holy
Scriptures. A literate population is capable of economic and technological
development. The Protestant religion modeled, by accident, a superior, efficient
workforce.” And it is in this sense that Germany was “at the heart of Western
development”, even if the Industrial Revolution took place in England.



Todd’s key formulation is undisputable: “The crucial factor of the ascension of
the West was Protestantism’s attachment to alphabetization.”

Moreover Protestantism, Todd stresses, is twice at the heart of the history of
the West: via the educational and economic drive – with fear of damnation and
the need to feel chosen by God engendering a work ethic and a strong, collective
morality – and via the idea that Men are unequal (remember the White Man’s
Burden).

The collapse of Protestantism could not but destroy the work ethic to the
benefit of mass greed: that is, neoliberalism.

Transgenderism and the Cult of the Fake

8. Todd’s sharp critique of the spirit of 1968 would merit a whole new book. He
refers to “one of the great illusions of the 1960s – between Anglo-American
sexual revolution and May 68 in France”; “to believe that the individual would
be greater if freed from the collective”. That led to an inevitable debacle:
“Now that we are free, en masse, from metaphysical beliefs, foundational and
derived, communist, socialist or nationalist, we live the experience of the
void.” And that’s how we became “a multitude of mimetic midgets who do not dare
to think by themselves – but reveal themselves as capable of intolerance as the
believers of ancient times.”

9. Todd’s brief analysis of the deeper meaning of transgenderism completely
shatters the Church of Woke – from New York to the EU sphere, and will provoke
serial fits of rage. He shows how transgenderism is “one of the flags of this
nihilism that now defines the West, this drive to destroy, not just things and
humans but reality.”

And there’s an added analytical bonus: “The transgender ideology says that a man
may become a woman, and a woman may become a man. This is a false affirmation,
and in this sense, close to the theoretical heart of Western nihilism.” It gets
worse, when it comes to the geopolitical ramifications. Todd establishes a
playful mental and social connection between this cult of the fake and the
Hegemon’s wobbly behavior in international relations. Example: the Iranian
nuclear deal clinched under Obama becoming a hardcore sanctions regime under
Trump. Todd: “American foreign policy is, in its own way, gender fluid.”

10. Europe’s “assisted suicide”. Todd reminds us how Europe at the start was the
Franco-German couple. Then after the 2007/2008 financial crisis, that turned
into “a patriarchic marriage, with Germany as a dominant spouse not listening to
his companion anymore”. The EU abandoned any pretention of defending Europe’s
interests – cutting itself off from energy and trade with its partner Russia and
sanctioning itself. Todd identifies, correctly, the Paris-Berlin axis replaced
by the London-Warsaw-Kiev axis: that was “the end of Europe as an autonomous
geopolitical actor”. And that happened only 20 years after the joint opposition
by France-Germany to the neocon war on Iraq.

11. Todd correctly defines NATO by plunging into “their unconscious”: “We note
that that its military, ideological and psychological mechanism does not exist
to protect Western Europe, but to control it.”

12. In tandem with several analysts in Russia, China, Iran and among
independents in Europe, Todd is sure that the US obsession – since the 1990s –
to cut off Germany from Russia will lead to failure: “Sooner or later, they will
collaborate, as “their economic specializations define them as complementary”.
The defeat in Ukraine will open the path, as a “gravitational force”
reciprocally seduces Germany and Russia.

Before that, and unlike virtually any Western “analyst” across the mainstream
NATOstan sphere, Todd understands that Moscow is set to win against the whole of
NATO, not merely Ukraine, profiting from a window of opportunity identified by
Putin in early 2022. Todd bets on a window of 5 years, that is, an endgame by
2027. It’s enlightening to compare with Defense Minister Shoigu, on the record,
last year: the SMO will end by 2025.

Whatever the deadline, inbuilt in all this is a total Russia victory – with the
winner dictating all terms. No negotiations, no ceasefire, no frozen conflict –
as the Hegemon is now desperate spinning.

Davos enacts The Triumph of the West

Todd’s ample merit, so evident in the book, is to use history and anthropology
to take Western society’s false consciousness to the divan. And that’s how,
focusing for instance in the study of very specific family structures in Europe,
he manages to explain reality in a way that totally escapes the brainwashed
collective West masses lingering under turbo-neoliberalism.

It goes without saying that Todd’s reality-based book will not be a hit among
the Davos elites. What’s happening this week in Davos has been immensely
enlightening. Everything is out in the open.

From all the usual suspects – the toxic EU Medusa von der Leyen; NATO’s
warmongering Stoltenberg; BlackRock, JP Morgan and assorted honchos shaking
hands with their sweaty sweatshirt toy in Kiev – the “Triumph of the West”
message is monolithic.

War is Peace. Ukraine is not (italics mine) losing and Russia is not winning. If
you disagree with us – on anything – you will be censored for “hate speech”. We
want the New World Order – whatever you lowly peasants think – and we want it
now.

And if all fails, a pre-fabricated Disease X is comin’ to get you.

………………………….

https://archive.ph/NXzUw

(Republished from Sputnik International)

| Tagged nato, politics, russia, ukraine, war


GONZALO LIRA AND THE DISSIDENT POPULIST RIGHT’S MARTYRDOM COMPLEX – BY ROBERT
STARK – 19 JAN 2024

Posted on January 20, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,100 WORDS • 



About a week ago, Chilean American independent journalist, Gonzalo Lira, died in
a Ukrainian prison. Gonzalo Lira certainly had bravado, charisma, and a big ego,
and was constantly reinventing himself. For instance, from a filmmaker to
libertarian financial journalist, to PUA/passport bro, to geopolitical
correspondent, and finally a POW/prisoner of conscious. Regardless, I found him
fascinating and enjoyed his geopolitical YouTube videos. Plus his original Coach
Red Pill videos were hilarious. He didn’t deserve his fate and its especially
tragic, considering he had kids.

While Gonzalo Lira’s case eventually garnered the attention of Tucker Carlson,
by then it was too little too late. It was primarily the alternative media that
spoke out when he previously went missing. Ideally the US government should have
done something to save Lira, free speech should be protected, and I shilled for
him when he went missing. However, he should have tried to escape when he had
the chance, rather than staying in place, and then speaking out against the
Ukrainian regime. Whether Lira sacrificing himself to get his message out is
admirable and courageous or foolish is up for debate. One could make the case
that he had a death wish, and there is some speculation that he had some
terminal illness, and wanted to go out with a banger, and not be forgotten.

Martial Law during wartime is often exploited to get rid of dissidents. For
instance, Israel using the war in Gaza to take out Palestinian journalists and
intellectuals. However, a regime does not need to execute or assassinate a
dissident. Rather it can just imprison them, deny them healthcare, and just
allow them to die, thus denying any culpability. This is especially the case if
one is already in poor health, as Lira likely was. Lira also said that the
Ukrainian prison guards incited other prisoners to attack him. These are common
tactics in authoritarian regimes, though are also not uncommon in the US.

Though Gonzalo Lira is technically GenX, he had a boomer mentality in that he
operated under the “End of History” paradigm. Basically where one could just
travel anywhere and do as one pleases, as one would at home, while taking for
granted the protections of a US citizen. Now dissidents are even getting
arrested for thought crimes in Western European nations. One has to be extremely
cautious about getting politically involved and criticizing foreign governments
while abroad. Not to mention when it’s in a hostile regime, like Zelensky’s
regime was to Lira.

The same applies to outspoken anti-Putin Americans, living in or visiting
Russia, though the State Department is more likely to help them. While it is
harder to rescue someone from an adversarial regime, the irony is that Ukraine
is a staunch US ally. Thus the Biden admin and Deep State likely intended Lira’s
fate, or at the very least were indifferent. There is a paradigm shift where the
State Department can no longer guarantee protection to all US passport holders.
Perhaps Trump would have been more likely to save Lira, but Trump has
disappointed plenty of times.

While Richard Spencer’s shilling for Biden was cringe, from a Nietzschean
perspective, he was right in much of his harsh critique of the populist right.
If you look at Jan 6th, those involved LARPed as revolutionaries, like the
Founding Fathers, but then once caught they were just trespassing while
peacefully protesting. Many of the Jan6th protesters wanted to be martyrs rather
than having a plan. Certainly many were just protesting and got caught up in the
moment. Even though the Left and establishment overblow Jan 6th, the Right wants
to have it both ways. They desperately want to be martyrs but are not willing to
accept the fate of a martyr. LARPing and living in hyperreality can lead to real
life ramifications, though Lira had much more real life experience than most on
the dissident right.

Certainly many of those in positions of political power are scum. However, the
populist right lacks consistency in how they try to hold their adversaries to
some idealistic moral standards, and expect them to be beholden to Classical
Liberal principles. Hypocrisy is just power, so there is no point in trying to
moralize one’s adversary’s motives, in the way one would with an ally or someone
you can negotiate a deal with.

While Classical Liberal principles, like Human Rights, free speech, freedom of
the press, and civil liberties, are precious and something to strive for, they
are not guaranteed, and are specific to the right circumstances. Those being
reciprocity and or a society made up of people with shared values. Civil
liberties are increasingly conditional upon which side one is on, and both sides
now want to imprison their political opponents. While accelerationists and
neo-reactionaries might see the demise of 20th Century Liberalism as something
to celebrate, what replaces it could end up being much worse and more
oppressive.

The dissident right hates liberalism but then tries to outflank the Left using
liberal arguments. For instance, the dissident right will go back and forth
between memes about helicopter rides for liberal journalists to protesting that
freedom of the press is sacred and must be protected under all circumstances.
Another example is Russian shills attacking Ukraine using Western liberal
arguments. Liberalism is so ingrained, that all political sides still reply upon
liberal arguments.

Much of the Right operates by how things should ideally be, based upon the
liberalism that they were brought up in. While it’s one thing for normie and
boomer conservatives, a lot of these arguments are made by the radically
anti-liberal, dissident right. Basically those who believe that might makes
right and that only ingroup vs outgroup distinctions and ethnocentrism matter.
Though Gonzalo Lira, being older, did have more Classical Liberal and
libertarian leanings.

The allegations that Gonzalo Lira was some kind of Russian plant or paid Russian
shill are nonsense. Western media smears likely contributed to his demise.
However, he did come across as having a pro-Russian slant. For instance, he said
that the Russians would steamroll Ukraine, when it has been more of a stalemate,
with Russia seizing about 20% of Ukraine’s territory.

The Ukrainian military has performed stronger, and has shown itself to be more
competent than a lot of the anti-Ukraine dissident right assumed. Not to mention
that Russia is much larger and more powerful than Ukraine. Lira would say how
much respect he had for the Ukrainian people, including their soldiers’ courage.
There is also a case that the US and NATO prolonging the war has gotten a lot
more Ukrainians killed, in order to weaken Russia. This is a kind of old school
liberal argument, of loving a people and hating their government, which
increasingly has less legitimacy, especially in times of war and
hyper-polarization.

………………..

https://archive.ph/r7up7

(Republished from Substack)

Requiescat in pace et in amore….

| Tagged geopolitics, politics, russia, ukraine, war


THE UKRAINE CHARADE, REVISITED – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 19 JAN 2024

Posted on January 20, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,000 WORDS • 

Selected players scattered around the Beltway silos of power, diligently working
as messengers for the people who really run the show in the Hegemon, have
concluded that a no holds barred confrontation with Russia would lead to the
collapse of all of NATO; undo decades of US iron grip on Europe; and ultimately
cause the Empire’s downfall.

Playing brinkmanship games sooner or later would meet the indestructible red
lines inbuilt in the unmovable Russian object.

US elites are smarter than that. They may excel on calculated risk. But when the
stakes are this high, they know when to hedge and when to fold.

The “loss” of Ukraine – now a graphic imperative – is not worth risking the loss
of the whole Hegemonic ride. That would be too much for the Empire to lose.

So even as they get increasingly desperate with the accelerated imperial plunge
into a geopolitical and geoeconomic abyss, they’re frantically changing the
narrative – a domain in which they excel.

And that explains why discombobulated European vassals in NATO-controlled EU are
now in total panic.

Davos this week offered bucketloads of Orwellian salad. The key, frantic
messages: War is peace. Ukraine is not (italics mine) losing and Russia is not
winning. Hence Ukraine needs way more weaponizing.

Yet even Norwegian Wood Stoltenberg was told to toe the new line that matters:
“NATO is not moving into Asia. It’s China that is coming close to us.” That
certainly adds a new wacky meaning to the notion of moving tectonic plates.

Keep the Forever Wars engine running

There is a total void of “leadership” in Washington. There is no “Biden”. Just
Team Biden: a corporate combo featuring low-rent messengers such as de facto
neocon Little Blinkie. They do what they’re told by wealthy “donors” and the
financial-military interests that really run the show, reciting the same old
cliché-saturated lines day after day, bit players in a Theatre of the Absurd.

Only one exhibit suffices.

Reporter: “Are the airstrikes in Yemen working?”

The President of the United States: “Well, when you say working, are they
stopping the Houthis? No. Are they gonna continue? Yes.”

The same in what passes for “strategic thinking” applies to Ukraine.

The Hegemon is not being lured into fighting in West Asia – as much as the
genocidal arrangement in Tel Aviv, in tandem with US Zio-cons, wants to drag it
into a war on Iran.

Still, the imperial machine is being steered to keep the Forever Wars engine
running, non-stop, at varying speeds.

The elites in charge are way more clinical than the whole Team Biden. They know
they will not win in what will soon be country 404. But the tactical victory, so
far, is massive: enormous profits out of the frantic weaponizing; totally
gutting European industry and sovereignty; reducing the EU to the sub-status of
a lowly vassal; and from now on plenty of time to find new proxy warriors
against Russia – from Polish and Baltic fanatics to the whole Takfiri-neo ISIS
galaxy.

From Plato to NATO, it may be too early to state it’s all over for the West.
What is nearly over is the current battle, centered on country 404. As Andrei
Martyanov himself stresses, it was up to Russia, once again, “to start
dismantling what today has become the house of demons and horror in the West and
by the West, and she is doing it again in a Russian way – by defeating it on the
battlefield.”

That complements the detailed analysis expressed on the new hand grenade of a
book by French historian Emmanuel Todd.

Yet the war is far from over. As Davos once again made it quite clear, they will
not give up.

Chinese wisdom rules that, “when you want to hit a man with an arrow, first hit
his horse. When you want to capture all the bandits, first capture their chief.”

The “chief” – or chiefs – certainly are far from being captured. BRICS+ and
de-dollarization may have a shot at it, starting this year.

The plutocratic endgame

Under this framework, even massive US-Ukraine corruption involving rings and
rings of theft from lavish US “aid”, as recently revealed by former Ukrainian MP
Andrey Derkach, is a mere detail.

Nothing has been done or will be done about it. After all, the Pentagon itself
fails every audit. These audits, by the way, did not even include the income
from the massive multi-billion dollar heroin operation in Afghanistan – with
Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo set up as the distribution center for Europe. The
profits were pocketed by US intel operatives off the books.

When fentanyl replaced heroin as a domestic US plague, it was pointless to
continue occupying Afghanistan – subsequently abandoned after two decades in
pure Helter Skelter mode, leaving behind over $7 billion in weapons.

It’s impossible to describe all these Empire-centric concentric rings of
corruption and institutionalized organized crime to a brainwashed collective
West. The Chinese, once again, to the rescue. Taoist Zhuangzi (369 – 286 B.C.):
“You can’t talk about the ocean to a frog living in a well, you can’t describe
ice to a summer midge, and you can’t reason with an ignoramus.”

NATO’s cosmic humiliation in Ukraine notwithstanding, this proxy war against
Russia, against Europe and against China remains the fuse that could light up a
WWIII before the end of this decade. Who will decide it is an extremely rarefied
plutocracy. No, not Davos: these are only their clownish mouthpieces.

Russia has reactivated a military factory system at lightning speed – now
standing at about 15 times the capacity of January 2022. Along the front line
there are about 300,000 troops, plus in the back two pincer armies of hundreds
of thousands of mobile troops in each pincer being prepared to create a double
envelopment of the Ukrainian Army and annihilate it.

Even if country 404 is utterly defeated in 2024, once again it’s imperative to
stress it: this is far from over. The leadership in Beijing fully understands
that the Hegemon is such a disintegrating wreck, on the way to secession, that
the only way to hold it together would be a world war. It’s time to re-read T.S.
Eliot in more ways than one: “We had the experience but missed the meaning, /
and approach to the meaning restores the experience.”

…………………………..

https://archive.ph/VGPk5

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)




NYC SOCIALIST DEBATE – SPARTACIST VERSUS INTERNATIONALIST GROUP – VIDEO PART 2
(1:33:20 MIN) 13 JAN 2024

Posted on January 19, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




NYC SOCIALIST DEBATE – SPARTACIST VERSUS INTERNATIONALIST GROUP – VIDEO PART ONE
(3:24:57 MIN) 13 JAN 2024

Posted on January 19, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




WHO ARE THE HOUTHIS, AND WHY ARE WE AT WAR WITH THEM? – BY BRUCE RIEDEL
(BROOKINGS) 18 DEC 2017

Posted on January 15, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

For over two-and-a-half years, the United States has supported Saudi Arabia in a
war against the Houthi movement in Yemen. The war has created the worst
humanitarian catastrophe in the world and threatens to turn into the largest
famine in decades.

Yet very few Americans know who the Houthis are, what they stand for, and why
they are our de facto enemies. Two administrations have backed the war against
the Houthis without a serious campaign to explain why Americans should see them
as our enemies.

Yemeni politics are incredibly complex and volatile—rather than get drawn into a
quagmire against an enemy they hardly know, the United States and its partners
should get serious about finding a political solution.


WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

First and foremost, the Houthis are Zaydi Shiites, or Zaydiyyah. Shiite Muslims
are the minority community in the Islamic world and Zaydis are a minority of
Shiites, significantly different in doctrine and beliefs from the Shiites who
dominate in Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere (often called Twelvers for their belief in
twelve Imams).

The Zadiyyah take their name from Zayd bin Ali, the great grandson of Ali,
Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, whom all Shiites revere. Zayd bin Ali led an
uprising against the Umayyad Empire in 740, the first dynastic empire in Islamic
history, which ruled from Damascus. Zayd was martyred in his revolt, and his
head is believed to be buried in a shrine to him in Kerak, Jordan. Zaydis
believe he was a model of a pure caliph who should have ruled instead of the
Umayyads.

> The Houthis have made fighting corruption the centerpiece of their political
> program, at least nominally.

The distinguishing feature of Zayd’s remembered biography is that he fought
against a corrupt regime. Sunnis and Shiites agree that he was a righteous man.
The Zaydi elevate him to be the epitome of a symbol of fighting corruption. The
Houthis have made fighting corruption the centerpiece of their political
program, at least nominally. The Zaydi do not believe in ayatollahs like the
Twelver Shiites—who are the Shiite sect in Iran and most of the Muslim world—nor
do they practice the other Twelver doctrine of taqqiyah (dissimulation), which
permits one to disguise his or her faith for self-protection.

In short, they are a very different sect than the Iranian version of Shiism that
Americans have come to know since the 1979 Iranian revolution.

Followers of Zayd established themselves in north Yemen’s rugged mountains in
the ninth century. For the next thousand years, the Zaydis fought for control of
Yemen with various degrees of success. A succession of Zaydi Imams ruled the
community and Zaydis were the majority of the population in the mountains of the
north. They fought against both the Ottomans and the Wahhabis in the 18th and
19th centuries.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, a Zaydi monarchy took power in
North Yemen called the Mutawakkilite Kingdom. The ruler, or imam, was both a
secular ruler and a spiritual leader. Their kingdom fought and lost a border war
with Saudi Arabia in the 1930s, losing territory to the Saudi state. They also
enjoyed international recognition as the legitimate government of North Yemen.
Their capital was in Taiz.

Source: CIA World Factbook.

In 1962, an Egyptian-backed revolutionary military cabal overthrew the
Mutawakkilite king and established an Arab nationalist government with its
capital in Sanaa. With Soviet assistance, Egypt sent tens of thousands of troops
to back the republican coup. The Zaydi Royalists fled to the mountains along the
Saudi border to fight a civil war for control of the country. Saudi Arabia
supported the royalists against Egypt. Israel also clandestinely backed the
Zaydi Royalists. The war ended in a republican victory after the Saudis and
Egyptians resolved their regional rivalry after the 1967 war with Israel and
lost interest in the Yemen civil war.

A Zaydi republican general named Ali Abdullah Saleh came to power after a
succession of coups in 1978. Saleh ruled—or misruled—Yemen for the next 33
years. He united north and south Yemen in 1990, tilted toward Iraq during the
1991 Kuwait war, and survived a Saudi-backed southern civil war in 1994. He had
complicated relations with both Riyadh and Washington, but by the late 1990s was
generally aligned with both against al-Qaida. The al-Qaida attack on the USS
Cole in late 2000 in Aden drew the Americans closer to Saleh, although his
cooperation against al-Qaida was always incomplete.

The Houthis emerged as a Zaydi resistance to Saleh and his corruption in the
1990s led by a charismatic leader named Hussein al Houthi, from whom they are
named. They charged Saleh with massive corruption to steal the wealth of the
Arab world’s poorest country for his own family, much like other Arab dictators
in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria. They also criticized Saudi and American backing
for the dictator.


2003: THE TIPPING POINT 

The American invasion of Iraq in 2003 deeply radicalized the Houthi movement,
like it did many other Arabs. It was a pivotal moment. The Houthis adopted the
slogan: “God is great, death to the U.S., death to Israel, curse the Jews, and
victory for Islam,” in the wake of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. The group also
officially called itself Ansar Allah, or supporters of God. It was a turning
point largely unrecognized outside Yemen, another unanticipated consequence of
George Bush’s Iraq adventures.

Hezbollah, the Shiite movement in Lebanon which successfully expelled the
Israeli army from the country, became a role model and mentor for the Houthis.
Although different kinds of Shiites, the two groups have a natural attraction.
Hezbollah provided inspiration and expertise for the Houthis. Iran was a
secondary source of support, especially since the Houthis and Iranians share a
common enemy in Saudi Arabia.

After 2003, Saleh launched a series of military campaigns to destroy the
Houthis. In 2004, Saleh’s forces killed Hussein al Houthi. The Yemeni army and
air force was used to suppress the rebellion in the far north of Yemen,
especially in Saada province. The Saudis joined with Saleh in these campaigns.
The Houthis won against both Saleh and the Saudi army, besting them both again
and again. For the Saudis, who have spent tens of billions of dollars on their
military, it was deeply humiliating.

> The Houthis won against both Saleh and the Saudi army, besting them both again
> and again.

The Arab Spring came to Yemen in 2011. The Houthi movement was one part of the
wide national uprising against Saleh. It was primarily concerned with advancing
the narrow interests of the Zaydi community, not surprisingly. When Saleh was
replaced by a Sunni from the south—Abdrabbuh Mansour Hadi, who had been Saleh’s
vice president at the behest of the Saudis—the Houthi response was predictable.
They were critical of the process and of Hadi.

A national dialogue was instituted to address the future of Yemen after Saleh,
with regional and international assistance. It proposed a federal solution with
six provinces with some autonomy. The Zaydi-dominated north got two landlocked
entities, which the Houthis argued was gerrymandered against them.

In 2014, they began colluding with Saleh against Hadi secretly. Even by the
standards of Middle East politics, it was a remarkable and hypocritical reversal
of alliances by both the Houthis and Saleh. Much of the army remained loyal to
Saleh and his family, so together with the Houthis the two had a preponderance
of force in the country. Hadi was deeply unpopular and seen as a Saudi stooge.


THE WAR

After months of gradually moving into the capital Sanaa, it fell to the rebel
alliance in January 2015, just as King Salman ascended to the throne in Riyadh.
The Houthis opened direct civilian air traffic between Sanaa and Tehran, Iran
promised cheap oil for Yemen, and rumors of more Iran-Houthi cooperation spread
quickly. The main port at Hodeidah fell to the Houthi forces and they began
marching to take Aden, the capital of the south and the largest port on the
Indian Ocean.

RELATED BOOKSKings and Presidents





For the Saudi king and his 29-year-old defense minister and son Prince Muhammad
bin Salman (MBS), it was a nightmare. A traditional enemy with ties to their
regional foe was taking over the country on their southern belly. The strategic
straits at the Bab al Mandab could be in the Houthis’ hands. It was a very
difficult challenge for an untried team in the royal palace.

For the Obama administration, the picture was more complicated. American
intelligence officials said that Iran was actually trying to discourage the
Houthis from seizing Sanaa and openly toppling Hadi. Iran preferred a less
radical course, but the Houthi leadership was drunk with success. Moreover,
Undersecretary of Defense Michael Vickers said on the record in January that
Washington had a productive informal intelligence relationship with the Houthis
against al-Qaida. He suggested that the cooperation could continue.

The Saudis chose to go to war to support Hadi and prevent the Houthi-Saleh
rebellion from consolidating control of the country. Operation Decisive Storm
began in March 2015, MBS taking the public lead in promising early victory for
the Saudis. They forged a coalition to back them including the United Arab
Emirates, Bahrain, and other traditional Saudi allies. Two refused to join:
Oman, Yemen’s neighbor, and Pakistan, whose parliament voted unanimously against
the war.

Obama backed the Saudi war. In the choice between the Saudi ally and the
Houthis, the president—not surprisingly—took the side of a 70-year old alliance.
U.S. and U.K. support is essential to the Royal Saudi Air Force (RSAF), which is
equipped with American and British aircraft. The RSAF has dropped tons of
American and British munitions on Yemen since.



Almost three years later, the Saudi air and naval blockade of Houthi-controlled
territory has created a humanitarian disaster, with millions of Yemenis at dire
risk of starvation and disease. The Saudi-led coalition has tightened the
blockade and gradually gained more territory, although Hadi has little if any
control over the territory recovered from the rebels. He resides in Riyadh. All
sides are credibly accused of war crimes.

Saleh broke with his putative ally this month, signaled to Riyadh that he was
flipping sides again, and was killed days later. The Houthis won the battle for
Sanaa but are isolated from the rest of Yemeni politics and political parties.
Riyadh portrays them as Iranian puppets, but many Yemenis see them as patriots
fighting the country’s traditional enemy Saudi Arabia and America, Israel’s
defender. Houthi propaganda plays to the line that Yemen is under attack by a
Saudi-American-Israeli conspiracy.

A major consequence of the war is to push the Houthis and Iran and Hezbollah
closer together. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nikki Haley underscored that point,
perhaps unintentionally, when she presented compelling evidence of Iranian
support for the Houthis missile attacks on Saudi and Emirati targets last week.
With their own cities under constant aerial bombardment, the Houthis are firing
missiles at Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, with Tehran’s technological assistance. The
war costs Tehran a few million dollars per month, while it costs Riyadh $6
billion per month.

Tehran and the Houthis are playing with fire, of course. If a missile hits
Riyadh, Jeddah, or Abu Dhabi and kills dozens or more, the pressure for
retaliation against Iran will be significant. The Trump administration is poorly
designed to provide cooling counsel.

This brief and simplified account of the background of the Houthis should
underscore how complex Yemeni politics are and how volatile they can be. Saleh
called running Yemen to be akin to dancing on the heads of snakes. It is a
foolish place for Americans to be drawn into a war and a quagmire against an
enemy they hardly know. The administration has recently called for an easing of
the blockade. It’s time to get serious about a political solution, not to wade
deeper into quicksand.

…………………

https://archive.ph/9PIgf

Source

| Tagged iran, middle-east, saudi-arabia, world, yemen


DESTROYING YEMEN: WHAT CHAOS… – BY ISA BLUMI – AUDIOBOOK PART ONE (8:58:46 MIN)
AUDIO MP3

Posted on January 13, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment
Destroying Yemen: What Chaos… – by Isa Blumi – Audiobook Part One (8:58:46 min)
Mp3



IDF MASS MURDER – BRICS MEMBER SOUTH AFRICA TAKES ZIONISM TO COURT – BY PEPE
ESCOBAR – 10 JAN 2024

Posted on January 11, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,200 WORDS • 

Pretoria’s genocide case against Israel is crucial, not just to stop Tel Aviv’s
carnage in Gaza, but to plant the first flag of mutipolarism in the globe’s
courtrooms: this is the first case of many that will seek to halt western
impunity and restore international law as envisioned in the UN Charter.

Nothing less than the full concept of international law will be on trial this
week in The Hague. The whole world is watching.

It took an African nation, not an Arab or Muslim nation, but significantly a
BRICS member, to try to break the iron chains deployed by Zionism via fear,
financial might, and non-stop threats, enslaving not only Palestine but
substantial swathes of the planet.

By a twist of historical poetic justice, South Africa, a nation that knows one
or two things about apartheid, had to take the moral high ground and be the
first to file a suit against apartheid Israel at the International Court of
Justice (ICJ).

The 84-page lawsuit, exhaustively argued, fully documented, and filed on 29
December 2023, details all the ongoing horrors perpetrated in the occupied Gaza
Strip and followed by everyone with a smartphone around the planet.

South Africa asks the ICJ – a UN mechanism – something quite straightforward:
Declare that the state of Israel has breached all its responsibilities under
international law since 7 October.

And that, crucially, includes a violation of the 1948 Genocide Convention,
according to which genocide consists of “acts committed with intent to destroy,
in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.”

South Africa is supported by Jordan, Bolivia, Turkiye, Malaysia, and
significantly the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), which combines the
lands of Islam, and constitutes 57 member states, 48 of these harboring a Muslim
majority. It’s as if these nations were representing the overwhelming majority
of the Global South.

Whatever happens at The Hague could go way beyond a possible condemnation of
Israeli for genocide. Both Pretoria and Tel Aviv are members of the ICJ – so the
rulings are binding. The ICJ, in theory, carries more weight than the UN
Security Council, where the US vetoes any hard facts that tarnish Israel’s
carefully constructed self-image.

The only problem is that the ICJ does not have enforcement power.

What South Africa, in practical terms, is aiming to achieve is to have the ICJ
impose on Israel an order to stop the invasion – and the genocide – right away.
That should be the first priority.

A specific intent to destroy

Reading the full South African application is a horrifying exercise. This is
literally history in the making, right in front of us living in the young,
tech-addicted, 21st century, and not a science fiction account of a genocide
taking place in some distant universe.

Pretoria’s application carries the merit of drawing The Big Picture, “in the
broader context of Israel’s conduct towards Palestinians during its 75-year-long
apartheid, its 56-year-long belligerent occupation of Palestinian territory, and
its 16-year-long blockade of Gaza.”

Cause, effect, and intent are clearly delineated, transcending the horrors that
have been perpetrated since the Palestinian resistance’s Operation Al-Aqsa Flood
on 7 October, 2023.

Then there are “acts and omissions by Israel which are capable of amounting to
other violations of international law.” South Africa lists them as “genocidal in
character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent (dolus
specialis) to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian
national, racial and ethnic group.”

‘The Facts,’ introduced from page 9 of the application, are brutal – ranging
from the indiscriminate massacre of civilians to mass expulsion: “It is
estimated that over 1.9 million Palestinians out of Gaza’s population of 2.3
million people – approximately 85 percent of the population – have been forced
from their homes. There is nowhere safe for them to flee to, those who cannot
leave or refuse to be displaced have been killed or are at extreme risk of being
killed in their homes.”

And there will be no turning back: “As noted by the Special Rapporteur on the
human rights of internally displaced persons, Gaza’s housing and civilian
infrastructure have been razed to the ground, frustrating any realistic
prospects for displaced Gazans to return home, repeating a long history of mass
forced displacement of Palestinians by Israel.”

The complicit Hegemon

Item 142 of the application may encapsulate the whole drama: “The entire
population is facing starvation: 93 percent of the population in Gaza is facing
crisis levels of hunger, with more than one in four facing catastrophic
condition” – with death imminent.

Against this backdrop, on 25 December – Christmas day – Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu doubled down on his genocidal rhetoric, promising: ‘We are
not stopping, we are continuing to fight and we are deepening the fighting in
the coming days, and this will be a long battle and it is not close to being
over.”

So, “as a matter of extreme urgency,” and “pending the Court’s determination of
this case on the merits,” South Africa is asking for provisional measures, the
first of which will be for “the state of Israel to immediately suspend its
military operations in and against Gaza.”

This amounts to a permanent ceasefire. Every grain of sand from the Negev to
Arabia knows that the neocon psychos in charge of US foreign policy, including
their pet, remote-controlled, senile occupant of the White House are not only
complicit in the Israeli genocide but oppose any possibility of a ceasefire.

Incidentally, such complicity is also punishable by law, according to the
Genocide Convention.

Hence, it is a given that Washington and Tel Aviv will go no-holds-barred to
block a fair trial by the ICJ, using every means of pressure and threat
available. That dovetails with the extremely limited power exercised by any
international court to impose the rule of international law on the
exceptionalist Washington–Tel Aviv combo.

While an alarmed Global South is moved to action against Israel’s unprecedented
military assault on Gaza, where over 1 percent of the population has been
murdered in less than three months, the Israeli Foreign Ministry has regimented
its embassies to arm-twist host country diplomats and politicians to swiftly
issue an “immediate and unequivocal statement along the following lines: To
publicly and clearly state that your country rejects the outrageous, absurd, and
baseless allegations made against Israel.”

It will be quite enlightening to see which nations will abide by the order.

Whether Pretoria’s current efforts succeed or not, this case is likely to be
only the first of its kind filed in courts around the world in the months and
even years ahead. The BRICS – of which South Africa is a crucial member state –
are part of the new swell of international organizations challenging western
hegemony and its ‘rules-based order.’ These rules mean nothing; nobody has even
seen them.

In part, multipolarism has emerged to redress the decades-long shift away from
the UN Charter and rush toward the lawlessness embodied in these illusory
‘rules.’ The nation-state system that underpins the global order cannot function
without the international law that secures it. Without the law, we face war,
war, and more war; the Hegemon’s ideal universe of endless war, in fact.

South Africa’s genocide case against Israel is blatantly necessary to reverse
these flagrant violations of the international system, and will almost certainly
be the first of many such litigations against both Israel and its allies to
shift the world back to stability, security, and common sense.

……………………

https://archive.ph/uf7RV

(Republished from The Cradle)

| Tagged gaza, genocide, human-rights, israel, palestine


GORE VIDAL STILL HOLDS UP – BY STAN PERSKY – 3 AUG 2013

Posted on January 6, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment


I WON’T ATTEMPT TO JUSTIFY HIS TENDENTIOUS POLITICAL RAMBLINGS, BUT “SELECTED
ESSAYS” REMAINS ESSENTIAL READING



(AP)

Gore Vidal still holds up – by Stan Persky – 3 Aug 2013 (25:03 min) Audio Mp3

This article originally appeared on the L.A. Review of Books.

THE DAY AFTER Gore Vidal’s death (a year ago, July 31, 2012), I was prepared to
go on in a world that was slightly sadder, a tad more lonely, and, as Vidal
himself had said about the perfunctoriness of death notices and the fleeting
fame of literary figures these days, “that would be that.” Instead, the next
morning, I stumbled into a Facebook catfight. One of my FB friends (who I’ll
leave nameless) was having a conniption fit about, of all people, Gore Vidal. It
was one of those intemperate “I’m glad the bastard’s dead” kind of eruptions.

Along with the unkind posthumous sentiment, there was a string of adjectives
ticking off Vidal’s alleged failings. I don’t have the verbatim list at hand
(it’s kind of technically difficult to dredge up old Facebook conversation
threads, but I’m sure the remarks are safely stored on some Internet “cloud” or
deep in the bowels of the National Security Agency’s Prism program computers).
As I recall, the litany included most of the standard jibes about Vidal:
elitist, patrician snob, conspiracy theorist, racist, and oddly, “judeophobe.”

My friend, who was an actual friend and not just the barbarous FB version of
“friend,” which includes total strangers, vague acquaintances, and anyone within
six degrees of separation, was apparently having a bad day (in a bad world). It
was obvious that this temporarily ill-tempered pal of mine neatly fit within the
category Vidal had once sneeringly characterized as a “journalist or other
near-writer who has not actually read any of the dead author’s work” who had
been more or less randomly assigned to come up with a literary obit. Still, I
was struck by the contrast between my friend’s cold-light-of-day animosity and
the warmth of the mainstream obituary encomiums of the evening before. My
attention was also caught by the unusual usage of the term “judeophobe,” which
I’ll get to in a moment.

Vidal (1925-2012) was, as most readers know, America’s pre-eminent literary
essayist in the second half of the 20th century (he was also an interesting
novelist, playwright, memoirist, screenwriter, and all-round public figure). He
died at his home in the Hollywood Hills section of Los Angeles (where he had
relocated in 2003, after decades of living in Ravello, Italy) at the
appropriately ripe old age of 86 — appropriate, that is, for dagger-tongued
curmudgeons.

Vidal had indirectly predicted how his own obituary might be handled a
quarter-century before the event in an essay about the death of his friend, the
renowned Italian writer Italo Calvino, which had ignited national mourning in
that country. Vidal was interested in cultural differences and accepted that
“unlike the United States, Italy has both an educational system (good or bad is
immaterial) and a common culture, both good and bad.” Vidal then noted that “in
recent years Calvino had become the central figure in Italy’s culture,” and
couldn’t resist plugging his own role in spreading Calvino’s fame:

> Italians were proud that they had produced a world writer whose American
> reputation began, if I may say so, since no one else has, when I described all
> of his novels as of May 30, 1974 in The New York Review of Books. By 1985,
> except for England, Calvino was read wherever books are read.

The acerbity, hyperbole, self-deprecating self-promotion, even the name-dropping
all come with the (Vidal) territory — and anyway, when Vidal drops a name, it’s
the name of someone he actually knows (and he knows a lot of people).

Vidal ultimately comes to the point and the intimation of un-immortality, as
Facebook might say. “For an American,” he says,

> the contrast between them and us is striking. When an American writer dies,
> there will be, if he’s a celebrity (fame is no longer possible for any of us),
> a picture below the fold on the front page; later a short appreciation on the
> newspaper’s book page (if there is one), usually the work of a journalist or
> other near-writer who has not actually read any of the dead author’s work [. .
> .]; and that would be that.

In fact, when the moment came, Vidal received far more generous treatment than
he might have anticipated. The day that Vidal died, his picture promptly popped
up on the “front page” of The New York Times website, and even though there are
no longer paper “folds” in the online world, I’d say it was above rather than
below where the fold used to be. The lengthy obituary (which could be accessed
not only from the book pages, but from obits and other portals) was written by
Charles McGrath, The New York Times Book Review’s long-time senior editor,
hardly a mere “journalist or other near-writer who has not actually read any of
the dead author’s work.” (See, Charles McGrath, “Gore Vidal Dies at 86;
Prolific, Elegant, Acerbic Writer,” The New York Times, Aug. 1, 2012.) Nor was
that all.



Perhaps surprisingly, on two of the national network evening newscasts that I
caught (even though far fewer people watch network news today than in the past),
there were prominent obituaries of Vidal, complete with pics, video clips, and
sombre voice-overs. I remember thinking to myself that probably a lot of viewers
would be puzzled about the fuss being made over the late Vidal or, more likely,
asking each other and/or their Google search engine, “Who’s he?” Vidal’s death
was also reported on CNN, and there was a tribute on its website by fellow
novelist Jay Parini, who’s also the editor of Vidal’s Selected Essays, which
I’ve recently been re-re-reading, as I’ll explain shortly.

That night, when I went to bed, I took with me Vidal’s 1981 historical
novel, Creation, his very under-rated tale of the classical world told from the
point of view of an elderly, blind Persian ambassador to Athens, whose
adventures and memories include encounters with Herodotus, Thucydides, Socrates,
Zoroaster, Buddha, and Confucius. Vidal was not exactly shy about doing virtuoso
turns. I wanted to re-read a chapter or two in memory of its late author, and as
on previous occasions I found the story and bravura writing as satisfying as
ever. As I nodded off, I put the book not on the bedside table, but on the empty
pillow next to mine, indulging in the terribly sentimental conceit that perhaps
the book would be a little less lonely tonight, given that from now on it had to
make its way in the world without its deceased scribe. As far as I know, that’s
the only time I’ve slept with Mr. Vidal.

The next day, though, we were back to the blogosphere (or, in its nightmare
mode, the flogosphere). The reason that the term “judeophobe,” which had
probably not been included in Vidal’s expectations when he was contemplating his
obits, caught my attention was no doubt because I’m also a descendent of the
famous “Chosen People,” though admittedly I’m what’s known in the trade as a
“bad Jew.” Surely, my however feeble anti-semitic radar should have picked up
on, over the many years, Vidal’s alleged loathing of Jews, if it existed.

That’s what led me, a month or so later, to download Vidal’s Selected Essays. I
wanted to check for any evidence of judeophobia and, more important, to see
whether the essays were as scintillating as I remembered from reading them at
the time of publication in various magazines, mainly The New York Review of
Books over many years. The charge of judeophobia seemed prima facie unlikely,
given that Vidal had lived for some 50 years with a Jewish companion, Howard
Auster (now deceased). And, as I quickly re-discovered, there was absolutely
nothing in the essays, including one of Vidal’s best-known essays that
explicitly discusses Jews and homosexuals, “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star”
(1981), to substantiate the claim of judeophobia.

As a by the by, I should note that although Vidal’s early novel about
homosexuality, The City and the Pillar (1948), wasn’t very good, Vidal’s
subsequent writings on homosexuality, of which “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star”
is a paradigm example, were almost  always on the mark (and almost always bitchy
and funny). Not bad for a thinker whose starting position is that there is no
such thing as “a homosexual,” there are only “homosexualist” acts or “same-sex”
sex. Vidal thought “gays” and “straights” were fake constructed categories to
divert attention from the remarkable fluidity of sexuality, as reported in Dr.
Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male (1948), which claimed that
about a third of American males had had at least one same-sex encounter to the
point of orgasm. All in all, Vidal probably did as much to advance the argument
about homosexuality as any of the better known “gay liberationists.”



It took only a couple of minutes of Internet rummaging-around to get to the
source of the judeophobia charge. My Facebook friend, it turned out, had been
reading a batch of pro-Zionist blogs that slagged the recently-departed
polemicist Vidal for his views on Israel. Since my friend was a fervent
anti-Islamicist-terrorist (a perfectly respectable view), he had lately acquired
a rather indiscriminate corollary affection for my Jewish compatriots who were
citizens of Israel, especially the more militant right-wing members of that
category (a not-so-respectable fondness).

The blogs and flogs, which had names like “Harry’s Place” and “The Socialism of
Fools” (I’ll spare you the hyperlinks) both quoted from a 2010 Christopher
Hitchens essay, written more in sorrow than in anger as they say, about the
crankiness of Late Vidal and included the observation that Vidal had

> a very, very minor tendency to bring up the Jewish question in contexts where
> it didn’t quite belong. [. . .] But these tics and eccentricities, which I did
> criticize in print, seemed more or less under control, and meanwhile he kept
> on saying things one wished one had said oneself.

The late Hitchens, who was no slouch as an essayist himself, was probably right
about many of Late Vidal’s political failings, and no doubt it was true, as
Hitchens pointed out, that Vidal got worse after age 75 (i.e., after Sept. 11,
2001).

While many criticisms of Vidal, both personal and political, are justified, the
judeophobe charge doesn’t stick. In the end, it was just another complicated
dispute about Israel, Zionism, and some American Jewish supporters of Israel,
disputes of which there is no end. So, “judeophobe” is just exaggerated code for
“anti-Zionist.” Phew! Enough of that. On to something more interesting, namely,
how Vidal holds up as a writer.



My initial reaction to reading (or is it re-reading?) the Selected Essays a
month or so after Vidal died was unexpected. I remembered the tremor of
anticipation in picking up a new issue of New York Review and seeing that Vidal
had an essay, and was about to say something-bound-to-be-interesting about
Calvino, Updike, Mailer, Montaigne, Tennessee Williams, or, say, Frederic
Prokosch, to pick a name out of a hat. Reading them now, there was a little
ripple of disappointment that the essays on second, third, or umptieth reading
weren’t as exciting as the first time around.

Second, I felt a tinge of melancholy about the disappearing world that Vidal
limned. Who today cares about what Nathalie Sarraute or Alain Robbe-Grillet
thought about the Nouveau Roman (“French Letters: Theories of the New Novel,”
1967)? Or what Vidal thought about their thoughts back in the day, or what he
teasingly thought about the serious “Miss Sontag’s” thoughts about their
thoughts (at least Vidal credits Susan Sontag with being the only American
cultural commentator back then “to make a sustained effort to understand what
the French are doing”)?



Doesn’t Vidal himself begin the essay on a grim note?: “To say that no one much
likes novels is to exaggerate very little. The large public which used to find
pleasure in prose fictions prefers movies, television, journalism, and books of
‘fact’.” As in his essay about “Calvino’s Death,” referred to above, wasn’t
Vidal always lamenting the decline or absence of culture and education in
America? Yes, he was quick to point out that the novel hadn’t disappeared; what
had disappeared was the reader of serious novels (a point Philip Roth frequently
reiterated in the 1990s). A half-century on, when the “large public” prefers
Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, texting, and the rest to reading at all, is there
any reason to reverse Vidal’s gloomy verdict?

Maybe I was feeling gloomy myself, or sadder and lonelier to live in a world
without Vidal’s presence, or sorrowful over time’s erosion of our old passions
and other freshnesses. In any case, I duly read the Selected Essays, not quite
as passionate about Vidal as I’d been when his critics were denouncing him for
crankiness and judeophobia. Good essayist, certainly, but maybe not as
indispensable as I once thought. And would “that be that”?

It seemed like a slightly deflated response to a writer who had had as
remarkable a writing life as anyone in the latter half of the 20th century.
Vidal, born in 1925 at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where his father
Eugene worked as an aviation instructor, and later went on to be an aviation
pioneer in the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, was raised in the heart of
the Republic that would be a substantial part of his literary territory. His
maternal grandfather was Thomas Gore, a senator from Oklahoma, with whom young
Gore spent considerable time in Washington. When his mother remarried, it was to
wealthy stockbroker Hugh Auchincloss, who later became the stepfather of
Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Through the latter connection, Vidal’s Washington
ties were corresponding deepened, and his political interests were come by
honestly (if that notion isn’t an oxymoron).

During World War II, Vidal served in the army, as a first mate on a freight
supply ship in the Aleutian Islands. Upon demobilization the young veteran began
writing Williwaw, a novel set on a troopship, which was published in 1946, when
Vidal was 20. Two years later, in 1948, Vidal’s The City and the
Pillar appeared, one of the first serious post-war novels about homosexuality, a
subject Vidal would intermittently address for the rest of his writing life. The
resultant career-damaging scandal caused by that early gay novel led Vidal to a
clever profile-lowering end-around for the next decade or so: a series of
detective novels written under a pseudonym, and then a lot of very successful
writing for television, stage, and the movies, including Visit to a Small
Planet, the hit Broadway play The Best Man, and the screenplay for the movie
version of his friend Tennessee Williams’sSuddenly, Last Summer.

In the 1960s, a shrewder and more accomplished Vidal returned to writing
novels. Julian (1964), Washington, D.C. (1967), and the best-selling Myra
Breckinridge (1968) relaunched his fiction career and indicated his
range.Julian signalled Vidal’s interest in the classical world, and perhaps came
to fruition in the previously mentioned Creation (1981); Washington, D.C. was
the beginning of a several volume American history cycle known as “Narratives of
Empire” that included Burr (1973) and Lincoln (1984); and Myra Breckinridge
began a line of satiric post-modernish confections, among them Duluth (1983),
and Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal (1992).

Equally important, Vidal simultaneously began writing literary and political
essays on a regular basis. The essays became volumes, a dozen or so books, and
garnered such prizes as the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Second
American Revolution (1982) and the National Book Award for United States (1993).
Finally, but not to be forgotten, is Vidal’s own memoir,Palimpsest (1995), in
which he recounts the tale of his teenaged, same-sex, one “true love” affair and
all the rest that became history. Even with all of the above duly catalogued,
there was much more; for those requiring the details of Vidal’s public life, his
quarrels with Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, William Buckley et al., his film and
cartoon appearances (on The Simpsons, where else?), as well as his political
interventions and private life, Fred Kaplan’s biography, Gore Vidal (1999) will
do.



Still, despite that nonpareil C.V., re-reading Vidal shortly after his death, I
wondered what had happened to the magic.

Last month, as the first anniversary of Vidal’s passing approached, The New
York  Review, celebrating its 50th anniversary in print, reprinted a brief
excerpt from one of Vidal’s essays that had first appeared in its pages, “The
Ashes of Hollywood” (New York Review of Books, May 17 and May 31, 1973). I had
completely forgotten that Vidal’s hilarious excoriation of the ten best sellers
of one week’s listing many yesteryears ago didn’t begin with a discussion of the
books at hand, but opened with a slightly garrulous reminiscence of Vidal’s days
as a Hollywood screenwriter back in the mid-20th century:

> “Shit has its own integrity.” The Wise Hack at the Writers’ Table in the MGM
> commissary used regularly to affirm this axiom for the benefit of us alien
> integers from the world of Quality Lit. It was plain to him (if not to the
> front office) that since we had come to Hollywood only to make money, our
> pictures would lack the one homely basic ingredient that spells boffo
> world-wide grosses. The Wise Hack was not far wrong. He knew that the sort of
> exuberant badness which so often achieves perfect popularity cannot be faked
> even though, as he was quick to admit, no one ever lost a penny
> underestimating the intelligence of the American public. He was cynical (so
> were we); yet he also truly believed that children in jeopardy always hooked
> an audience, that Lana Turner was convincing when she rejected the advances of
> Edmund Purdom in The Prodigal ‘because I’m a priestess of Baal,’ and he
> thought that Irving Thalberg was a genius of Leonardo proportion because he
> made such tasteful ‘products’ as The Barretts of Wimpole Street and Marie
> Antoinette.
> 
> In my day at the Writers’ Table (mid-fifties) television had shaken the
> industry and the shit-dispensers could now, well, flush their products into
> every home without having to worry about booking a theater. In desperation,
> the front office started hiring alien integers whose lack of reverence for the
> industry distressed the Wise Hack who daily lectured us as we sat at our long
> table eating the specialty of the studio, top-billed as the Louis B. Mayer
> Chicken Soup with Matzoh Balls (yes, invariably, the dumb starlet would ask,
> What do they do with the rest of the matzoh?). Christopher Isherwood and I sat
> on one side of the table; John O’Hara on the other. Aldous Huxley worked at
> home. Dorothy Parker drank at home.

On and on it goes, until Vidal is good and ready to explain what this preface
about the movies has to do with the top ten best sellers. Not to keep us in
suspense:

> [. . .] since most of these books reflect to some degree the films each author
> saw in his formative years,  while at least seven of the novels apear to me to
> be deliberate attempts not so much to re-create new film product as to suggest
> old movies that will make the reader (and publisher and reprinter and, to come
> full circle, film-maker) recall past success and respond accordingly [. . .]

And now, without further ado, we’re on to Number Ten on the best seller
list, Two from Galilee by Marjorie Holmes, a novel about the biblical Mary and
Joseph.

This is what it sounds like when the sashimi-master is flipping his knives:
“Since Miss Holmes is not an experienced writer, it is difficult to know what,
if anything, she had in mind when she decided to tell the Age-Old Story with
nothing new to add.” Well, there’s some fun, Vidal allows, in reading an account
of “a Jewish mother as observed by a gentile housewife in McLean, Virginia, who
has seen some recent movies on the subject and heard all the jokes on
television.” You can imagine the rest of the savaging.

Which is to say, I suddenly remembered what the Vidal magic was all about.
Since The NYRB had only published an anniversary snippet, when I climbed into
bed that evening, I took my Kindle along and went straight to the rest of
Vidal’s “Top Ten Best Sellers” essay.  And soon I was re-re-reading Gore Vidal.

There’s a temptation here to go on and on and on, which is the way the elderly
Vidal once described himself to Christopher Hitchens. But as we know from the
obituaries, that’s just not possible. So I’ll refrain from quoting each and
every juicy passage, echoing all the quotable quotes, citing the famous quips
(well, I may allow myself a quip). I’ll leave aside the crankiness of Late
Vidal, and I won’t attempt to justify the tendentious political ramblings, other
than to note they often start from more than a grain of truth, and that the
critique of empire that motivates them has a genuine historical basis. I’ll try
to remember that this is just a little requiem, not a night at the opera. The
main thing at a requiem or a literary re-appraisal is to stick with remembering.

For instance, I also remembered that I, after all, was indeed interested in what
Sarraute and Robbe-Grillet thought of “the novel,” and of what “Miss Sontag”
thought, and especially of what Gore Vidal skeptically, mockingly, but seriously
thought about the whole thing, and I didn’t really care if no one else cared.
And ditto for his thoughts about Calvino; his portrait of the Glorious Bird,
Tennessee Williams; his musings on Updike; and his perfectly sensible suggestion
in “Pink Triangle and Yellow Star” that gays, Jews, blacks, and any other
would-be outcasts make common cause, as well as his parallel detestation of
particular homophobic neo-conservative Jews; and I was perfectly willing to
peruse whatever else his editor, Jay Parini, had selected for the re-read. The
particular homophobic neo-conservatives Vidal names and rails against, by the
way, are Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Dector, prominent American Jewish
supporters of Israel (which is probably how the whole “judeophobe” slur got
started in the first place).

Most of all, I remembered that I cared about the state of the culture, and the
relationship between that culture and the possibility of democracy, which is
ultimately Vidal’s subject. Or as Vidal once quipped (I paraphrase): Fifty per
cent of Americans don’t read newspapers; fifty per cent don’t vote — let’s hope
they’re the same fifty per cent. And finally, I remembered to put the Kindle
with Vidal’s Selected Essays in it on the bedside table, rather than on the
pillow next to mine.


MORE LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

 * Michael Kammen on I Told You So: Gore Vidal Talks Politics. Interviews with
   Jon Wiener
   Gore Vidal ReduxMichael Kammen November 6, 2012
 * Gore Vidal on Advertisements For Myself“The Norman Mailer Syndrome” by Gore
   VidalGore Vidal August 3, 2012

……………

https://archive.ph/Pn2AX

Source

| Tagged books, history, reading, reviews, writing


AD ASTRA – 1961 – РЕТРОФАЙР – 1 JAN 2024

Posted on January 1, 2024 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

1961 – Ретрофайр (3:52 min) Audio Mp3



HOW YEMEN CHANGED EVERYTHING – ANSARALLAH HAS CHECKMATED THE WEST – BY PEPE
ESCOBAR – 28 DEC 2023

Posted on December 30, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

In a single move, Yemen’s Ansarallah has checkmated the west and its rules-based
order.

 • 1,300 WORDS • 

Whether invented in northern India, eastern China or Central Asia – from Persia
to Turkestan – chess is an Asian game. In chess, there always comes a time when
a simple pawn is able to upset the whole chessboard, usually via a move in the
back rank whose effect simply cannot be calculated.

Yes, a pawn can impose a seismic checkmate. That’s where we are, geopolitically,
right now.

The cascading effects of a single move on the chessboard – Yemen’s Ansarallah
stunning and carefully targeted blockade of the Red Sea – reach way beyond
global shipping, supply chains, and The War of Economic Corridors. Not to
mention the reduction of the much lauded US Navy force projection to
irrelevancy.

Yemen’s resistance movement, Ansarallah, has made it very clear that any
Israel-affiliated or Israel-destined vessel will be intercepted. While the west
bristles at this, and imagines itself a target, the rest of the world fully
understands that all other shipping is free to pass. Russian tankers – as well
as Chinese, Iranian, and Global South ships – continue to move undisturbed
across the Bab al-Mandeb (narrowest point: 33 km) and the Red Sea.

Only the Hegemon is disturbed by this challenge to its ‘rules-based order.’ It
is outraged that western vessels delivering energy or goods to law-breaking
Israel can be impeded, and that the supply chain has been severed and plunged
into deep crisis. The pinpointed target is the Israeli economy, which is already
bleeding heavily. A single Yemeni move proves to be more efficient than a
torrent of imperial sanctions.

It is the tantalizing possibility of this single move turning into a paradigm
shift – with no return – that is adding to the Hegemon’s apoplexy. Especially
because imperial humiliation is deeply embedded in the paradigm shift.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, on the record, is now sending an unmistakeable
message: Forget the Suez Canal. The way to go is the Northern Sea Route – which
the Chinese, in the framework of the Russia-China strategic partnership, call
the Arctic Silk Road.

Map of North-East and North-West Passage shipping routes

For the dumbfounded Europeans, the Russians have detailed three options: First,
sail 15,000 miles around the Cap of Good Hope. Second, use Russia’s cheaper and
faster Northern Sea Route. Third, send the cargo via Russian Railways.

Rosatom, which oversees the Northern Sea Route, has emphasized that
non-ice-class ships are now able to sail throughout summer and autumn, and
year-round navigation will soon be possible with the help of a fleet of nuclear
icebreakers.

All that as direct consequences of the single Yemeni move. What next? Yemen
entering BRICS+ at the summit in Kazan in late 2024, under the Russian
presidency?

The new architecture will be framed in West Asia

The US-led Armada put together for Operation Genocide Protection, which
collapsed even before birth, may have been set up to “warn Iran,” apart from
giving Ansarallah a scare. Just as the Houthis, Tehran is hardly intimidated
because, as West Asia analyst ace Alastair Crooke succinctly put it:
“Sykes-Picot is dead.”

This is a quantum shift on the chessboard. It means West Asian powers will frame
the new regional architecture from now on, not US Navy “projection.”

That carries an ineffable corollary: those eleven US aircraft carrier task
forces, for all practical purposes, are essentially worthless.

Everyone across West Asia is well aware that Ansarallah’s missiles are capable
of hitting Saudi and Emirati oil fields, and knocking them out of commission. So
it is little wonder that Riyadh and Abu Dhabi would never accept becoming part
of a US-led maritime force to challenge the Yemeni resistance.

Add to it the role of underwater drones now in the possession of Russia and
Iran. Think of fifty of these aimed at a US aircraft carrier: it has no defense.
While the Americans still have very advanced submarines, they cannot keep the
Bab al-Mandeb and Red Sea open to western operators.

On the energy front, Moscow and Tehran don’t even need to think – at least not
yet – about using the “nuclear” option or cutting off potentially at least 25
percent, and up, of the world oil supply. As one Persian Gulf analyst succinctly
describes it, “that would irretrievably implode the international financial
system.”

For those still determined to support the genocide in Gaza there have been
warnings. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani has mentioned it
explicitly. Tehran has already called for a total oil and gas embargo against
nations that support Israel.

A total naval blockade of Israel, meticulously engineered, remains a distinct
possibility. Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Commander Hossein Salami
said Israel may “soon face the closure of the Mediterranean Sea, the Strait of
Gibraltar, and other waterways.”

Keep in mind we’re not yet even talking about a possible blockade of the Strait
of Hormuz; we’re still on Red Sea/Bab al-Mandeb.

Because if the Straussian neo-cons in the Beltway get really unhinged by the
paradigm shift and act in desperation to “teach a lesson” to Iran, a chokepoint
Hormuz-Bab al-Mandeb combo blockade might skyrocket the price of oil to at least
$500 a barrel, triggering the implosion of the $618 trillion derivatives market
and crashing the entire international banking system.

The paper tiger is in a jam

Mao Zedong was right after all: the US may be in fact a paper tiger. Putin,
though, is way more careful, cold, and calculating. With this Russian president,
it’s all about an asymmetric response, exactly when no one is expecting it.

That brings us to the prime working hypothesis perhaps capable of explaining the
shadow play masking the single Ansarallah move on the chessboard.

When Pulitzer-winning investigative journalist Sy (Seymour) Hersh proved how
Team Biden blew up the Nord Stream pipelines, there was no Russian response to
what was, in effect, an act of terrorism against Gazprom, against Germany,
against the EU, and against a bunch of European companies. Yet Yemen, now, with
a simple blockade, turns global shipping upside down.

So what is more vulnerable? The physical networks of global energy supply
(Pipelineistan) or the Thalassocracy, states that derive their power from naval
supremacy?

Russia privileges Pipelineistan: see, for instance, the Nord Streams and Power
of Siberia 1 and 2. But the US, the Hegemon, always relied on its thalassocratic
power, heir to “Britannia rules the waves.”

Well, not anymore. And, surprisingly, getting there did not even entail the
“nuclear” option, the blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which Washington games
and scaremongers like crazy.

Of course we won’t have a smoking gun. But it’s a fascinating proposition that
the single Yemeni move may have been coordinated at the highest level between
three BRICS members – Russia, China, and Iran, the neocon new “axis of evil” –
plus other two BRICS+, energy powerhouses Saudi Arabia and the UAE. As in, “if
you do it, we’ve got your back”.

None of that, of course, detracts from Yemeni purity: their defense of Palestine
is a sacred duty.

Western imperialism and then turbo-capitalism have always been obsessed with
gobbling up Yemen, a process that Isa Blumi, in his splendid book Destroying
Yemen, described as “necessarily stripping Yemenis of their historic role as the
economic, cultural, spiritual, and political engine for much of the Indian Ocean
world.”

Yemen, though, is unconquerable and, true to a local proverb, “deadly” (Yemen
Fataakah). As part of the Axis of Resistance, Yemen’s Ansarallah is now a key
actor in a complex Eurasia-wide drama that redefines Heartland connectivity; and
alongside China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), the India-Iran-Russia-led
International North-South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), and Russia’s new
Northern Sea Route, also includes control over strategic chokepoints around the
Mediterranean Seas and the Arabian peninsula.

This is another trade connectivity paradigm entirely, smashing to bits western
colonial and neocolonial control of Afro-Eurasia. So yes, BRICS+ supports Yemen,
who with a single move has presented Pax Americana with The Mother of All
Geopolitical Jams.

……………………………

https://archive.ph/Rghpp

(Republished from The Cradle)

| Tagged iran, israel, middle-east, palestine, yemen


RUSSIA – CHINA ARE ON A ROLL – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 26 DEC 2023

Posted on December 29, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,700 WORDS • 

While the dogs of war bark, lie and steal, the Russia-China caravan strolls on.

2023 may be defined for posterity as The Year of the Russia-China Strategic
Partnership. This wonder of wonders could easily sway under a groove by – who
else – Stevie Wonder: “Here I am baby/ signed, sealed, delivered, I’m yours.”

In the first 11 months of 2023, trade between Russia and China exceeded $200
billion; they did not expect to achieve that until 2024.

Now surely that’s One Partnership Under a Groove. Once again signed, sealed and
delivered during the visit of a large delegation to Beijing last week, led by
Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, who met with Chinese President Xi Jinping and
revisited and upgraded the whole spectrum of the comprehensive
partnership/strategic cooperation, complete with an array of new, major joint
projects.

Simultaneously, on the Great Game 2.0 front, everything that need to be
reaffirmed was touched by Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s detailed interview to
Dimitri Simes on his Great Game show.

Add to it the carefully structured breakdown written by head of the SVR Sergey
Naryshkin, defining 2024 as “the year of geopolitical awakening”, and coming up
with arguably the key formulation following the upcoming, cosmic NATO
humiliation in the steppes of Donbass: “In 2024, the Arab world will remain the
main space in the struggle for the establishment of a new order.”

Confronted with such detailed geopolitical fine-tuning, it’s no wonder the
imperial reaction was apoplexy – revealed epidermically in long, tortuous
“analyses” trying to explain why President Putin turned out to be the
“geopolitical victor” of 2023, seducing vast swathes of the Arab world and the
Global South, solidifying BRICS side by side with China, and propelling the EU
further into a black void of its own – and the Hegemon’s – making.

Putin even allowed himself, half in jest, to offer Russian support for the
potential “re-annexation” of country 404 border regions once annexed by Stalin,
eventually to be returned to former owners Poland, Hungary & Romania. He added
that he is 100% certain this is what residents of those still Ukrainian borders
want.

Were that to happen, we would have Transcarpathia back to Hungary; Galicia and
Volyn back to Poland; and Bukovina back to Romania. Can you feel the house
already rocking to the break of dawn in Budapest, Warsaw and Bucharest?

Then there’s the possibility of the Hegemon ordering NATO’s junior punks to
harass Russian oil tankers in the Baltic Sea and “isolate” St. Petersburg. It
goes without saying that the Russian response would be to just take out Command
& Control centers (hacking might be enough); burn electronics across the
spectrum; and blockade the Baltic at the entrance by running a “Freedom of
Navigation” exercise so everyone becomes familiar with the new groove.

That China-Russian Far East symbiosis

One of the most impressive features of the expanded Russia-China partnership is
what is being planned for the Chinese northeastern province of Heilongjiang.

The idea is to turn it into an economic, scientific development and national
defense mega-hub, centered on the provincial capital Harbin, complete with a
new, sprawling Special Economic Zone (SEZ).

The key vector is that this mega-hub would also coordinate the development of
the immense Russian Far East. This was discussed in detail at the Eastern
Economic Forum in Vladivostok last September.

In a unique, startling arrangement, the Chinese may be allowed to manage
selected latitudes of the Russian Far East for the next 100 years.

As Hong Kong-based analyst Thomas Polin detailed, Beijing is budgeting no less
than 10 trillion yuan ($1.4 trillion) for the whole thing. Half of it would be
absorbed by Harbin. The blueprint will reach the National People’s Congress next
March, and is expected to be approved. It has already been approved by the lower
house of the Duma in Moscow.

The ramifications are mind-boggling. We would have Harbin elevated to the status
of direct-administered city, just like Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin and Chongqing.
And most of all a Sino-Russian Management Committee will be established in
Harbin to oversee the whole project.

Top flight Chinese universities – including Peking University – would transfer
their main campuses to Harbin. The universities of National Defense and National
Defense Technology would merge with Harbin Engineering University to form a new
entity focused on defense industries. High-tech research institutes and
companies in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen would also move to Harbin.

The People’s Bank of China would establish its HQ for northern China in Harbin,
complete with markets trading stocks and commodities futures.

Residents of Heilongjiang would be allowed to travel back and forth to
designated Russian Far East regions without a visa. The new Heilongjiang SEZ
would have its own customs area and no import taxes.

That’s the same spirit driving BRI connectivity corridors and the International
North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC). The underlying rationale is wider
Eurasia integration.

At the recent Astana Club meeting in Kazakhstan, researcher Damjan
Krnjevic-Miskovic, Director of Policy Research at the ADA University in Baku,
gave an excellent presentation on connectivity corridors.

He referred for instance to the C5+1 (five Central Asian “stans” plus China)
meeting three months ago in Dushanbe joined by Azerbaijan’s president Aliyev:
that translates as Central Asia-Caucasus integration.

Miskovic is paying due attention to everything that is evolving in what he
defines, correctly, as “the Silk Road region” – interlinking the Euro-Atlantic
with Asia-Pacific and interconnecting West Asia, South Asia and wider Eurasia.

Strategically, of course, that’s the “geopolitical hinge where NATO meets the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and where the Belt and Road Initiative
(BRI) connects with Turkiye and the territory of the EU.” In practical terms,
Russia-China know exactly what needs to be done to propel economic connectivity
and “synergistic relationships” all across this vast spectrum.

The War of Economic Corridors heats up

The fragmentation of the global economy is already polarizing the expanding
BRICS 10 (starting on January 1st, under the Russian presidency, and without
flirting-with-dollarization Argentina) and the shrinking G7.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrey Rudenko – a key Asia hand -, talking to
TASS, once again reaffirmed that the key drive for the Greater Eurasia
Partnership (official Russian policy) is to connect the Eurasia Economic Union
(EAEU) with BRI.

As Russia develops a carefully calibrated balance between China and India, the
same drive applies to developing the INSTC, where Russia-Iran-India are the main
partners, and Azerbaijan is also bound to become a crucial player.

Add to it vastly improved Russian ties with North Korea, Mongolia, Pakistan (a
BRI and SCO member) and ASEAN (except Westernized Singapore).

BRI, when it comes down to the nitty-gritty, is on a roll. I’ve just been to
Moscow, Astana and Almaty for three weeks, and it was possible to confirm with
several sources that trains in all connectivity corridors are packed to the
hilt; via the Trans-Siberian; via Astana all the way to Minsk; and via Almaty to
Uzbekistan.

Russian International Affairs Council Program Manager Yulia Melnikova adds that
“Moscow can and should integrate more actively into transit operations along the
China – Mongolia – Russia route” and accelerate the harmonization of standards
between the EAEU and China. Not to mention invest further in Russia-China
cooperation in the Arctic.

Enter President Putin, at a Russian Railways meeting, unveiling an ambitious,
massive 10-year infrastructure expansion plan encompassing new railways and
improved connectivity with Asia – from the Pacific to the Arctic.

The Russian economy has definitely pivoted to Asia, responsible for 70% of trade
turnover amid the Western sanctions dementia.

So what’s on the menu ahead is everything from modernization of the
Trans-Siberian and establishing a major logistical hub in the Urals and Siberia
to improving port infrastructure in the Azov, Black, and Caspian Seas and faster
INSTC cargo transit between Murmansk and Mumbai.

Putin, once again, almost as an afterthought, recently remarked that trade
through the Suez Canal cannot be considered effective anymore, compared to
Russia’s Northern Sea Route. With a single, sharp geopolitical move, Yemen’s
Ansarullah has made it graphic – for everyone to see.

Russian development of the Northern Sea Route happens to run in total synergy
with the Chinese drive to develop the Arctic leg of BRI. On the oil front,
Russian shipments to China via its Arctic coast takes only 35 days: 10 days less
than via Suez.

Danila Krylov, researcher with the Department of the Middle East and Post-Soviet
Asia at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, offers a straightforward insight:

“I view the fact that the Americans are getting involved in Yemen as part of a
great game [scenario]; there is more to it than just a desire to punish the
Houthis or Iran, as it is more likely driven by a desire to prevent the
monopolization of the market and hinder Chinese export deliveries to Europe. The
Americans need an operational Suez Canal and a corridor between India and
Europe, while the Chinese don’t want it because these are two direct
competitors.”

It’s not that the Chinese don’t want it: with the Northern Sea Route up and
running, they don’t need it.

Now freeze!

In sum: in the ongoing, ever more fractious War of Economic Corridors, the
initiative is with Russia-China.

In desperation, and no more than an option-deprived, headless chicken victim in
the War of Economic Corridors, the Hegemon’s EU vassals are resorting to
twisting the Follow the Money playbook.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has defined the freezing of Russian assets – not
only private, but also state-owned – by the EU as pure theft. Now Russian
Finance Minister Anton Siluanov is making it very clear that Moscow will react
symmetrically to the possible use of income from these frozen Russian assets.

Paraphrasing Lavrov: you confiscate, we confiscate. We all confiscate.

The repercussions will be cataclysmic – for the Hegemon. No Global South nation,
outside of NATOstan, will be “encouraged” to park its foreign currency/reserves
in the West. That may lead, in a flash, to the whole Global South ditching the
U.S.-led international financial system and joining a Russia-China-led
alternative.

The peer-competitor Russia-China strategic partnership is already directly
challenging the “rules-based international order” on all fronts – improving
their historical spheres of influence while actively developing vast,
interconnected connectivity corridors bypassing said “order”. That precludes, as
much as possible, direct Hot War with the Hegemon.

Or to put it on Silk Road terms: while the dogs of war bark, lie and steal, the
Russia-China caravan strolls on.

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)

| Tagged china, geopolitics, india, russia, xi-jinping


STOP THE ISRAELI WAR MACHINE – THE JEWISH STATE’S REVENGE THEORY AGAINST
‘AMALEK’ – BY KAHANE

Posted on December 27, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

The three fundamental pillars of Meir Kahane’s theory of revenge.

First:

> The people of Israel are a collective mythical being ontologically rooted in
> divinity, that together with God faced a mythical enemy from its early days.
> This mythical enemy, “Amalek,” is embodied in different actual enemies
> throughout Jewish history, and the various persecutions and ordeals the Jews
> have suffered throughout history are manifestations of the same mythical
> struggle. Furthermore, there is an ontological difference between the mythical
> nation of Israel and the Gentiles, especially Israel’s enemies. The
> ontological difference between the Jewish and Gentile soul overrides the
> Jewish principle that all of humanity was created in the image of God. The
> belief that Gentiles are inferior and embody the demonic powers of history
> justifies acts of deadly violence and revenge.

Second:

> …Thus, the argument proceeds, the people of Israel are religiously obliged to
> use all means possible to take revenge against their mutual enemies and to
> rehabilitate their mutual pride and status. Whether or not they realize it,
> the Palestinians and other forces fighting Israel are part of a mythical,
> religious battle that seeks the destruction of the people of Israel and its
> God. These factors permit the use of any and all measures to overcome the
> enemies.

Third:



> The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, shortly after the Holocaust,
> must serve one purpose: to facilitate redemptive revenge against the Gentiles.
> The establishment of the modern Jewish state in the historical land of Israel
> is an instrument for activating the redemptive process, rather than a result
> or a sign of such a process.

Summing up the three pillars, the Aftermans explain that

> …Kahane argues that carrying out vengeance against the metaphysical enemy
> “Amalek” (hostile Gentiles) is fundamental to saving God and his people, both
> of whom almost ceased to exist as a result of the Holocaust. The establishment
> of the Jewish state, with its institutionalized power and military might,
> should, in Kahane’s view, be placed at the service of redemption-bound
> revenge. Kahane goes so far as to justify acts of vengeance even against
> innocent people by arguing that they belong to the mythical enemy that must be
> eradicated as a condition for the redemption of Israel and its God. In his
> view, the loss of innocent lives, if necessary, is a justifiable sacrifice.

Kahane interpreted the doctrine of the “chosen people” as a comprehensive
repudiation of all association with traditional Western values. He wrote in his
book, Or Ha’Raayon:

> This is a Jewish state. It bows in front of Judaism and does not contradict
> it. It acts in accordance with Jewish values and Jewish commandments even if
> these contradict international law and diplomacy, even if they contrast the
> normal Western and democratic lifestyle; this is so even if this puts its
> interests under risk and threatens to isolate it from the civilized gentiles.
> … The duty of Judaism is to be separate, unique, different and chosen. This is
> the role of the Jewish people and their instrument, the State … We have no
> part in the standard values of the nations. Assimilation does not begin with
> mixed marriages, but in copying and adopting foreign values, alien and
> non-Jewish concepts and ideas.

Kahane’s theory of revenge was identified in Hebrew as the concept of what he
called Kiddush Hashem. He wrote:

> A Jewish fist in the face of an astonished gentile world that had not seen it
> for two millennia, this is Kiddush Hashem. Jewish dominion over the Christian
> holy places while the Church that sucked our blood vomits its rage and
> frustration, this is Kiddush Hashem.

Actually, notwithstanding its semi-deranged invocation of a supposedly unique
Jewish philosophy, Kahane’s Kiddush Hashem can be described as a Hebrew-language
variant of nationalist and even tribalist calls to label enemies as ‘not
human.’ Not novel, if inspired by God, the product is the same thing again and
again. How human if not humane.

| Tagged acts, israel, jesus, religion, romans


SPINOZA READS MOSES AS CHILDISH FAIRYTALE – GETS EXCOMMUNICATED –
NETHERLANDS 1650

Posted on December 27, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

As Israel makes war on Gaza in 2023, for some the complete separation of the
term “antisemitism” from its actual historical and political meaning is fully
achieved in its use against those who are Jewish who have protested in their
thousands against the deadly war policies of the Israeli regime. A particularly
vile phrase is used against them: “self-hating Jews.” The gist of this insult is
that opposition by those who are Jewish to Israeli policies, and to the entire
Zionist project, can only be explained as the manifestation of some sort of
psychological problem, a pathological rejection of one’s own identity.

This diagnosis proceeds from the complete dissolution of Judaism as a specific
religious identity into the Israeli state and the nationalist ideology of
Zionism. An individual’s religious affiliation—which may, in the life of one or
another Jewish person, be of limited or even no special importance—is endowed
with a vast metaphysical significance.

(Ban in Portuguese of Baruch Spinoza by his Portuguese Jewish synagogue
community of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, (27 July 1656)

This ideological concoction is based not on history, but on biblical mythology.
Indeed, the legitimacy of the Zionist project proceeds from the claim that the
creation of Israel just 75 years ago marked the so-called “return” of the Jewish
people after 2,000 years of exile to their ancestral home “promised” to them by
God.

This mythological nonsense has no basis in historical reality. More than 350
years have passed since Spinoza demolished, in his Theological-Political
Treatise, the claim that the Pentateuch was dictated by God to Moses. The Bible
was the work of many authors. As the historian Steven Nadler, an authority on
Spinoza, has explained:

> Spinoza denies that Moses wrote all, or even most, of the Torah. The
> references in the Pentateuch to Moses in the third person; the narration of
> his death; and the fact that some places are called by names that they did not
> bear in the time of Moses all “make it clear beyond a shadow of doubt” that
> the writings commonly referred to as “the Five Books of Moses” were, in fact,
> written by someone who lived many generations after Moses.
> 
> 
> 
> (Spinoza’s Study)

Proceeding from his repudiation of the authority of the Bible, Spinoza further
enraged the elders of Amsterdam and provoked his excommunication by denying the
claim—which was central to Judaism as a religion and Zionism as a political
ideology—that Jews are a “chosen people.” As Nadler writes:

> If the origins and authority of Scripture are now suspect, then so must its
> grand claims about the “vocation” of the Hebrews. It is “childish,” Spinoza
> insists, for anyone to base their happiness on the uniqueness of their gifts;
> in the case of the Jews, it would be the uniqueness of their being chosen
> among all people. The ancient Hebrews, in fact, did not surpass other nations
> in their wisdom or in their proximity to God. They were neither intellectually
> nor morally superior to other peoples.

Spinoza’s apostasy was informed by the rapid advance of science in the 17th
century and rooted in philosophical materialism, and cleared the path for the
most progressive and radical political tendencies. It brought down upon his head
the wrath of the rabbinical enforcers of orthodoxy. The excommunication of
Spinoza was proclaimed in language that was without precedent in its harshness.
The excommunication read in part:

> Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down
> and cursed be he when he rises up. Cursed be he when he goes out and cursed be
> he when he comes in. The Lord will not spare him, but then the anger of the
> Lord and his jealousy will smoke against that man, and all the curses that are
> written in this book shall lie upon him, and the Lord shall blot out his name
> from under heaven.

Notwithstanding this denunciation, the name of Spinoza could not be blotted out.
The influence of his heretical conceptions has persisted over centuries,
contributing profoundly to the development of Enlightenment thought—including
the Jewish Enlightenment known as the Haskalah—and its revolutionary political
consequences in the 18th, 19th and even 20th centuries.

The political theology of contemporary Zionism represents the extreme
counterrevolutionary antithesis and repudiation of the progressive, democratic
and socialist tradition derived from Spinozist and, later, Marxist thought among
generations of Jewish workers and intellectuals. Reinterpreting religious myth
in the spirit of extreme national chauvinism, contemporary Zionist theology
imparts to the concept of a “chosen people” a thoroughly racist and fascistic
character.

……………….

Project Gutenberg Spinoza – Ethics – https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3800

| Tagged history, philosophy, religion, spinoza, zionism


THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AMERICAN BUSINESSES SUPPORTING PALESTINE (UAE MOMENTS)

Posted on December 25, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

To help all of you celebrate the time of giving (because, essentially, that is
what we all want to be: giving) in the best way possible, we have scoured the US
of A for homegrown businesses that will not just serve as better alternatives
for the corporations we’re no longer including, but they also happen to be
massive supporters for the Palestinian cause. Without further ado, here are your
new fave American brands. 


FOOD & BEVERAGE  


MALEK AL-KABOB

The restaurant has been reigning supreme over Michigan’s Arab food scene for the
past 17 years (yes, you read that right). Their fattoush, loaded shawerma and
lamb liver are to die for. You’re welcome. 


RAISING CANE’S

What began as a college dream for the founder transformed into an eatery that
revolves around chicken fingers and only that. Founded in 1996, Raising Cane’s
has grown to become an icon in the US’ culinary scene. The restaurant have also
taken to social media to show solidarity for the Palestinian cause, and we’re
absolutely here for it.




QAHWAH HOUSE

The Yemeni-American family business was established in 2017 with the sole
purpose of making everyone live their best coffee life, and they did exactly
that.


DELLAH 

There’s brunch, and then there’s Yemeni-American brunches at Dellah that will
ruin regular brunches for you. We recommend having the Michigan-based spot’s
fattah with dates that will, undoubtedly, improve your life by 120%. 


ANWAR’S KITCHEN 

A hidden gem in LA, this spot will transport you to the heart of a Palestinian
home. With each dish inspired by cherished family recipes, Anwar’s Kitchen
brings the true essence of Palestinian hospitality to life. By dining here, you
support the preservation of authentic flavors and the continuation of treasured
traditions.


BURGERATTI  

Just like the name of the restaurant suggests, Burgeratti is your friendly
neighborhood halal burger food.


JABAL

Embark on an adventure to experience Yemen’s rich coffee flavors that will make
you totally forget about Starbucks ever existing. If you’re unsure what to
order, their iced brown sugar latte is a customer-favorite. 


BLAZIN COOP

Nashville hot chicken but make it halal 100%. That is what you sign up for when
you deal with Blazin Coop.


AL BASHA 

A beloved culinary hotspot in Paterson, NJ, this restaurant will take you on a
flavorful journey through Palestine. Indulge in the vibrant heart of the cuisine
without leaving Texas. Discover the magic of family recipes that have delighted
generations and relish in the country’s rich cultural heritage.


TREAT YOU BATTER

Located on Mason Street and Greenfield Road in Michigan, this shop will most
certainly treat you batter with their cookies and lattes.


BOOZA DELIGHT

What more would one want than homemade Mediterranean ice cream and sweets that
also happen to support our Palestinians brothers and sisters.


HOLY LAND DATES

If you reside in the States, then you can have premium Palestinian medjool dates
at any time of the year. If that’s not sliving, we don’t know what is.


KNAFEH QUEENS 

The five-time award-winning dessert shop is here with one mission: putting
knafeh on the American map, and indeed, it succeeded at doing so. Knafeh Queens
broke the culinary internet so many times that it was covered on Forbes, LA
Times, Vogue, and many other mammoth platforms.


DIASPORA CO. SPICES 

Grown for flavor and rooted for equity, this adorbz brand has been building a
better spice trade for everyone since 2017. Whatever spice you could think of,
you’ll find it at Diaspora Co. Spices.


DUZAN

This New York eatery’s vibe will automatically invite you on a tantalizing
journey to Palestine, where fragrant spices and warm hospitality create a
culinary experience like no other. Immerse yourself in the essence of
Palestinian culture from the heart of Queens as you savor delectable meals and
create cherished memories in this cultural oasis.


BABA’S OLIVES 

Not only is this a woman-led business, but their whole schtick is that they
provide life-changing Palestinian olives. Need we say more? 


AYAT 

Ayat is a Palestinian restaurant that only opened its doors in Manhattan a
couple of months ago during a deeply fearful time. Can we also tell you that
their menus, pizza boxes and take-out bags all have an iconic “END THE
OCCUPATION” sign on them? Make sure to support them by letting them elevate your
life with their food. 


AL BAWADI GRILL

Located in Illinois, the restaurant thrives on zabiha halal Mediterranean
grills. If that’s your game, then they’re the name you need to know quite well. 


TAZA 

Experience more than just coffee at Taza, a spot where community and connection
thrive. With its inviting atmosphere and authentic Palestinian brew, Taza
creates the perfect setting for meaningful conversations and shared experiences.
Support a business that unites people, one sip at a time.


BIG DASH

The vibrant flavors of Palestine will shine through their menu that celebrates
culinary traditions from the entire region…except it’s in Texas. Experience the
stories behind each dish, where local ingredients and aromatic spices come
together in perfect harmony. 


FASHION & BEAUTY



The Ultimate Guide for American Businesses Supporting Palestine© e7awi


HUDA BEAUTY

It’s no surprise that the Wonder Woman behind the brand Huda Kattan has been
vocal about her support for the Palestinian people for a very long time. If you
want makeup this holiday season, this is where you need to shop from. 


LUSH COSMETICS

You probably don’t know this but Lush Cosmetics revolutionized the game when
they invented the bath bomb. Them being Pro-Palestinian is also a plus. It’s
win-win for everyone.  


SUVA BEAUTY

The founder of the brand is not only a former journalist, but they also happen
to be a human rights activist who have been supporting the Palestinian cause for
a long time. Suva Beauty also donates all its proceeds to the Palestine
Children’s Relief Fund, so there’s that!


STUDIO TANAIS

Think surreal and psychedelic perfumes that are heavily inspired by mother
nature, the cosmos, and the divine. That is the vibe here at Studio Tanais! 


NATIVE THREADS

Make way for the multifunctional organization that celebrates the rich history
and culture of Islam and the Arab world in the form of clothes and spread
awareness.


LUBNA 

The brand’s mission is to employ Palestinian women artisans and introduce the
world to the beauty of Palestinian culture and design, whether with tatreez or
anything else. 


WEST BANK HOODIE

The name of the he brand suggests they make hoodies, and that’s pretty much what
they do. They, however, donate 100% of all proceeds to the Humanitarian Relief
in Gaza. Oh, and you get free shipping over $60 orders, which means, you should
get your Christmas shopping game on! 


YALLA DETROIT

Founded in 2021, the clothing brand aims to elevate streetwear to new heights
while repping Arab culture at the same time. 


WEAR THE PEACE

The iconic brand has helped the Palestinian people ever since it has been
founded. They once had two designs raise over $60,000 where all proceeds went to
aiding the people of Palestine. 


ZAYTOONA STITCHES

Showcasing Arab culture, one stitch at a time. Every item at Zaytoona Stitches
is 100% handmade. 


FLSTIN FITS

From the Gaza Strip to Detroit, this brand is preserving the Palestinian
identity with their cutes tees and sweatshirts. 


TRASHY CLOTHING

Using art and fashion to showcase the voices in Palestinian society and make
sure they’re heard, tRASHY’s illustrates the challenges Palestinians face in
freely expressing their identities to the world. They shot to fame when
Palestinian-American supermodel Bella Hadid was seen sporting their “FREE
PALESTINE” vest. 


DIEUX SKIN

This brand prides itself on making rituals, not miracles. Basically, you will be
able to fulfill your skincare fantasy while supporting Palestine at the same
time.


NOUN NATURALS

Self care has never felt so good. Not only does this brand thrive on making
products with stuff you can actually pronounce (lol), but they cover a wide
range of hair, body, and unisex items. 


DEARBORN JEWELRY

This showroom happens to be the largest Arab jewelry showroom in the US. They’re
also coming to Houston quite soon with another showroom. Each item you buy, you
get Palestinian olive oil with it. You don’t even have to buy anything, they
will still give you some of that oil!


NATURELLE 961 

If you’re thinking of getting organic cosmetics, this is where you need to
shop. 


MOCHI

Born in 2013, this brand is not only about striking colors, patterns, and
upcycling, but they also stan Palestine as much as you.


TATREEZ & TEA

Founded by Wafaa Ghnaim who happens to be a Palestinian dress historian,
researcher, archivist, writer, curator, educator, and most importantly, an
embroiderer. Tatreez & Tea come equipped with so many unique pieces that will
have you shook by how beautiful they are. 


FURNITURE & DECOR


THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AMERICAN BUSINESSES SUPPORTING PALESTINE© E7AWI


DETROIT FURNITURE 

They, hands down, have the best deals on home furnishings in Michigan.


TOTAH STUDIO

Handcrafted ceramics that are inspired by Palestinian embroidery is the energy
you need to expect here, and what a beautiful energy that is.


FARAH MERHI

The Lebanese-American business specializes in home furniture and design that
will help transform your house into your Pinterest dream home. 


BUILDERS HARDWARE

The company has been providing fine finish hardware for the people of the US
(Michigan, to be specific) since 1946. They also support Palestine while doing
it. 


MISCELLANEOUS


THE ULTIMATE GUIDE FOR AMERICAN BUSINESSES SUPPORTING PALESTINE© E7AWI


RED EMMA’S

Think vegan cafe meets bar meets and wow-inducing bookstore. This Baltimore spot
is definitely one you need to explore! 


MAKTABA

The concept bookshop and boutique creates space for people to come together and
vibe over topics that people tend to stay away from. 


UNCLE BOBBIE’S

Cool people. Great books. Hot coffee. Strong Palestinian solidarity. This is the
tea around here! 


EDUCARE STUDENT SERVICES 

Whatever you want to learn, this online tutoring business will teach you. 


HILWEH MARKET

A gift shop that features rare curated goods from Palestine and the greater Arab
world.

……………..

https://archive.ph/xQbpj

Source

This article was posted on UAE Moments

One Hour of Palestinian Communist Music (1:01:02 min) Audio Mp3

……………….




THE U.S. NAVY IS UNPREPARED FOR A PROLONGED WAR WITH YEMEN – BY LARRY JOHNSON –
19 DEC 2023

Posted on December 21, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,200 WORDS • 



Aegis Missile Defense System

It looks like the United States, along with 9 allies — Great Britain, Italy,
Bahrain, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Seychelles and Spain — are on
the verge of entangling itself in a new Middle East quagmire as an international
armada assembles in the international waters around Yemen. The mission? Stop
Yemen from threatening cargo and oil tankers headed to Israel.

Tiny Yemen has surprised the West with its tenacity and ferocity in attacking
ships trying to ferry containers and fuel to Israel. Yes, this is a violation of
international law and the West is fully justified in trying to thwart Yemen. On
paper it would appear that Yemen is outnumbered and seriously outgunned. A sure
loser? Not so fast. The U.S. Navy, which constitutes the majority of the fleet
sailing against Yemen, has some real vulnerabilities that will limit its
actions.

Before explaining the risks, you must understand that the U.S. Navy is
configured currently as a “Forward-Based Navy” and is not an “Expeditionary
Navy.” Anthony Cowden, writing for the Center for International Maritime
Security in September, examined this issue in his article, REBALANCE THE FLEET
TOWARD BEING A TRULY EXPEDITIONARY NAVY.

> Today we have a forward-based navy, not an expeditionary navy. This
> distinction is important for remaining competitive against modern threats and
> guiding force design.
> 
> Due to the unique geographical position of the U.S., the Navy has the luxury
> of defending the nation’s interests “over there.” Since World War II, it
> developed and maintained a navy that was able to project power overseas; to
> reconstitute its combat power while still at sea or at least far from national
> shores; and continuously maintain proximity to competitors. This expeditionary
> character minimized the dependence of the fleet on shore-based and
> homeland-based infrastructure to sustain operations, allowing the fleet to be
> more logistically self-sufficient at sea.
> 
> However, late in the Cold War, the U.S. Navy started to diminish its
> expeditionary capability, and became more reliant on allied and friendly
> bases. A key development was subtle but consequential – the vertical launch
> system (VLS) for the surface fleet’s primary anti-air, anti-submarine, and
> land-attack weapons. While a very capable system, reloading VLS at sea was
> problematic and soon abandoned. While an aircraft carrier can be rearmed at
> sea, surface warships cannot, which constrains the ability of carrier strike
> groups to sustain forward operations without taking frequent trips back to
> fixed infrastructure. The Navy is revisiting the issue of reloading VLS at
> sea, and those efforts should be reinforced.
> 
> The next step the Navy took away from an expeditionary capability was in the
> 1990s, when it decommissioned most of the submarine tenders (AS), all of the
> repair ships (AR), and destroyer tenders (AD), and moved away from
> Sailor-manned Shore Intermediate Maintenance Centers (SIMA). Not only did this
> eliminate the ability to conduct intermediate maintenance “over there,” but it
> destroyed the progression of apprentice-to-journeyman-to-master technician
> that made the U.S. Navy Sailor one of the premier maintenance resources in the
> military world. Combat search and rescue, salvage, and battle damage repair
> are other areas in which the U.S. Navy no longer has sufficient capability for
> sustaining expeditionary operations.

So what? Each U.S. destroyer carries an estimated 90 missiles (perhaps a few
more). Their primary mission is to protect the U.S. aircraft carrier they are
shielding. What happens when Yemen fires 100 drones/rockets/missiles at a U.S.
carrier? The U.S. destroyer, or multiple destroyers will fire their missiles to
defeat the threat. Great. Mission accomplished! Only one little problem, as
described in the preceding quote — the U.S. Navy got rid of the ship tenders,
i.e. those vessels capable of resupplying destroyers with new missiles to
replace the expended rounds. In order to reload, that destroyer must sail to the
nearest friendly port where the U.S. has stockpiled missiles for resupply.

Got the picture? If the destroyer must sail away then the U.S. carrier must
follow. It cannot just sit out in the ocean without its defensive screen of
ships. The staying power of a U.S. fleet in a combat zone, like Yemen, is a
function of how many missiles the Yemenis fire at the U.S. ships.

But the problems do not stop there. Each of the Aegis missiles, as I noted in my
previous post, cost at least $500,000 dollars. A retired U.S. DOD official told
me today that the actual cost is $2 million dollars. If Yemen opts to use drone
swarms to saturate the battle space around a carrier, then the United States
will firing very expensive missiles to destroy relatively inexpensive drones.
This brings up another critical vulnerability — the U.S. only has a limited
supply of these air defense missiles and does not have the industrial capability
in place and operating to produce new ones rapidly to make up the deficit.

Getting the picture now? The U.S. Navy may find itself having to sail away
without finishing the job of eliminating the drone/missile threat from Yemen.
How do you think that will play in the rest of the world? The mighty Super Power
having to retreat to rearm because it could not sustain intense combat
operations. This is not classified information. It is published all over the
internet. If I can figure this out then I am certain that U.S. adversaries, not
just Yemen, realize they have a way to give the U.S. a very bloody nose in terms
of damaged prestige.

What happens if Yemen is able to sink one or two U.S. Navy ships? Then the shit
really hits the fan. The United States does not have a magical supply of
missiles squirreled away to deal with this contingency. The U.S. ships would
have to sail away to rearm after picking up the survivors from a sundered ship.

Then there is the problem of finding the mobile missile platforms in Yemen.
Remember the problems the United States had in Iraq in 1991 trying to find and
destroy SCUD missile launch systems? While ISR systems are better today, there
is still no guarantee of being able to locate and destroy in a timely manner.
The Yemenis have more than 8 years experience dealing with U.S. ISR and U.S.
drone attacks. On November 9th the Yemenis shot down a MQ-9 Reaper drone. That
baby costs a little more than $30 million dollars.

Here is the bottomline. The United States flotilla, along with its allies, can
do some damage to Yemen but are unlikely to achieve a decisive victory. Yemen,
for its part, can inflict some serious damage to some of the ships — maybe even
sink one or two — and by doing so, score a moral victory that will fuel doubts
about America’s naval capabilities and staying power. Perhaps this explains why
the U.S. has been so slow to respond to the attacks launched by Yemen.

…………………….



(Republished from Sonar21)

| Tagged middle-east, news, u-s-navy, world, yemen


BLOOD MONEY: THE TOP TEN POLITICIANS TAKING THE MOST ISRAEL LOBBY CASH – BY
ALAN MACLEOD

Posted on December 20, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

As the Israeli attack on Gaza, Lebanon and Syria intensifies, the U.S. public
watch on aghast. A new poll finds that Americans support a permanent ceasefire
by a more than 2:1 ratio (including the vast majority of Democrats and a
plurality of Republicans).

And yet, despite this, only 4% of elected members of the House support even a
temporary ceasefire, and the United States continues to veto U.N. resolutions
working towards ending the violence. Walter Hixson, a historian concentrating on
U.S. foreign relations, told MintPress News:

> Unfettered support for Israel and the lobby consistently puts the United
> States at odds with international human rights organizations and the vast
> majority of nations over Israel’s war crimes and blatant violations of
> international law. The current U.N. vote on a ceasefire in Gaza [which the
> U.S. vetoed] is just the latest example.”

Here, Hixson is referring to the pro-Israel lobby, a loose connection of
influential groups that spend millions on pressure campaigns, outreach programs,
and donations to American politicians, all with one goal in mind: making sure
the United States supports the Israeli government’s policies full stop,
including backing Israeli expansion, blocking Palestinian statehood and opposing
a growing boycott divestment and sanctions movement (BDS) at home.

Internationally, Israel has lost virtually all its support. But it still has one
major backer: the United States government. Part of this is undoubtedly down to
the extraordinary lengths the lobby goes to secure backing, including showering
U.S. politicians with millions of dollars in contributions. In this
investigation, MintPress News breaks down the top ten currently
serving politicians who have taken the most pro-Israel cash since 1990.


#1 JOE BIDEN, $4,346,264

The largest recipient of Israel lobby money is President Joe Biden. From the
beginning of his political career, Biden, according to his biographer Branko
Marcetic, “established himself as an implacable friend of Israel,” spending his
Senate career “showering Israel with unquestioning support, even when its
behavior elicited bipartisan outrage.” The future president was a key figure in
securing record sums of U.S. aid to the Jewish state and helped block a 1998
peace proposal with Palestine.

The support for Israeli policies has continued into the present, with his
administration insisting that there are “no red lines” that it could cross that
would cause it to lose American support. In essence, Biden has given Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a carte blanche to break any rules, norms or laws he
wishes to.

Biden runs up a set of stairs to address the 2016 American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) Conference in Washington. Cliff Owen | AP

This has included ethnic cleansing and war crimes such as the bombing of
schools, hospitals and places of worship using banned weapons like white
phosphorous munitions. The arms Israel is using come supplied directly by the
U.S. In November, the Biden administration rubber-stamped another $14.5 billion
military aid package to Israel, ensuring the carnage would continue.

For his staunch support, Biden has received more than $4.3 million from
pro-Israel groups since 1990.


#2 ROBERT MENÉNDEZ, $2,483,205

The New Jersey senator has received nearly $2.5 million in contributions and, in
the wake of the Hamas attack on October 7, has been a key figure in drumming up
support for Israel. Describing Operation Al-Aqsa Flood as “barbaric atrocities”
that were an “affront to humankind itself,” Menéndez gave an impassioned speech
on the Senate floor where he addressed Biden directly, stating:

> Mr. President, in the face of unspeakable evil, we must not mince words. We
> must not waver in our resolve. Every single one of us in this chamber has a
> moral responsibility to speak out — unequivocally and unapologetically — as we
> stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Israel and her people. I’ve been staunchly
> devoted to this cause for 31 years in Congress.”



He went on to claim that Israel and the United States are intrinsically linked
and were founded on the same principles.

Menéndez also courted controversy after he demanded that the U.S. help Israel
“wipe Hamas from the face of the Earth,” even as Israel was leveling Gaza by
carpet bombing it.

In October, he co-sponsored a Senate resolution “standing with Israel against
terrorism” that passed unanimously, without dissent.


#3 MITCH MCCONNELL, $1,953,160

The Senate Minority Leader is one of the most powerful politicians in America
and has used his influence to attempt to force through legislation criminalizing
BDS. He has described the peaceful tactic as “an economic form of anti-Semitism
that targets Israel.”

McConnell is known to be very close to Prime Minister Netanyahu and supported a
bill condemning the United Nations and calling on the U.S. to continue to veto
any U.N. resolution critical of Israel. Last month, he strongly opposed steps
taken towards applying basic U.S. and international law on weapons shipments to
Israel.

Under current U.S. law, Washington is duty-bound to stop supplying arms to
nations committing serious human rights violations. McConnell, however, said
that applying these standards to Israel would be “ridiculous,” explaining that:

> Our relationship with Israel is the closest national security relationship we
> have with any country in the world, and to condition, in effect, our
> assistance to Israel to their meeting our standards it seems to me is totally
> unnecessary… This is a democracy, a great ally of ours, and I do not think we
> need to condition the support that hopefully we will give to Israel very
> soon.”

McConnell has received nearly $2 million from pro-Israel groups.


#4 CHUCK SCHUMER, $1,725,324

Next on the list is McConnell’s Democratic opponent, Senate Majority Leader
Chuck Schumer, who had taken over $1.7 million from Israel lobbying groups. In
recent weeks, Schumer has taken the lead in steering the public conversation
away from Israel’s crimes and towards a supposed rise in anti-Semitism across
America. “To us, the Jewish people, the rise in anti-semitism is a crisis. A
five-alarm fire that must be extinguished,” the New York Senator said, adding
that “Jewish-Americans are feeling singled out, targeted and isolated. In many
ways, we feel alone.”

The idea that anti-Semitic hate is exploding across the United States comes
largely from a report published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which
claims that anti-Semitic incidents have risen by 337% since October 7. Buried in
the small print, however, is the fact that 45% of these “anti-Semitic” incidents
the ADL has tallied are pro-Palestine, pro-peace marches calling for ceasefires,
including ones led by Jewish groups like If Not Now or Jewish Voice for Peace.
(MintPress recently published an investigation into the ADL’s fudged numbers and
its history of working for Israel and spying on progressive American groups.)

Schumer, right, speaks as Republican Mike Johnson, left, and Democrat Hakeem
Jeffries, listen at a pro-Israel march in D.C., Nov. 14, 2023. Mark Schiefelbein
| AP

Schumer, however, has deliberately tried to conflate opposition to Israel’s
bombardment of its neighbors with anti-Jewish racism, writing:

> Today, too many Americans are exploiting arguments against Israel and leaping
> toward a virulent antisemitism. The normalization and intensifying of this
> rise in hate is the danger many Jewish people fear most.”

He has even gone so far as to label Dave Zirin – a Jewish journalist who
supports justice for Palestinians – as an anti-Semite.

As Senate Majority Leader, Schumer has used his influence to push through
military aid packages to Israel, even as it carries out actions many have
labeled war crimes, writing that:

> One of the most important tasks we must finish is taking up and passing a
> funding bill to ensure we, as well as our friends and partners in Ukraine,
> Israel, and the Indo-Pacific region, have the necessary military capabilities
> to confront and deter our adversaries and competitors.”

He added that “Senators should be prepared to stay in Washington until we finish
our work” and that they should expect to work “long days and nights, and
potentially weekends in December,” until the deal was done.

https://iframely.net/zxD8k3k?card=small&v=1&app=1


#5 STENY HOYER, $1,620,294

The former House Majority Leader is one of Israel’s most vocal supporters in the
House of Representatives. Hoyer has demanded that “Congress must immediately and
unconditionally fund Israel,” thereby giving the Netanyahu administration the
green light to do whatever it pleases.

An ardent Zionist, the Maryland native explained that he believes it is:

> …[T]he world’s duty that set aside a land, a land that Israel has occupied for
> millennia, and said: this is your place of security, this is your place of
> sovereignty, this is your place of safety.”

Hoyer speaks at the Jewish Community Relations Council’s Stand with Israel event
on October 13, 2023. Photo | House.gov

Earlier this month, Hoyer also voted in favor of a bill stating that
anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic, thereby declaring all criticism of
Israel to be invalid and racist.

Hoyer has received more than $1.6 million in donations from pro-Israel lobbying
groups.


#6 TED CRUZ, $1,299,194

Over his career, the Texas Republican has received $1.3 million from the Israel
lobby. After October 7, Cruz sprang into action, announcing that it was
“critical” that every American supports Israel “100 percent.” “Israel is going
to be demonized by Democrats in the current corrupt corporate media. We need to
make clear that Hamas is using human shields and Israel has a right to defend
itself,” Cruz said, hitting many of the classic pro-Israel talking points.

Cruz also went above and beyond in his defense of Israeli crimes in a bizarre
interview with Breaking Points’ Ryan Grim. When asked if he opposes Israeli
officials suggesting a nuclear attack on Gaza, Cruz replied:

> I condemn nothing that the Israeli government is doing. The Israeli government
> does not target civilians; they target military targets… There is no military
> on the face of the planet, including the U.S. military, that goes to the
> lengths that the Israeli military goes to avoid civilian casualties.

When confronted with statements from the IDF directly refuting his point, noting
that their focus is on damage, not precision, Cruz flipped his answer around,
replying, “Yes, damage to Hamas, to terrorists.” And when Grim gave him more
statements from senior IDF officials explicitly contradicting his previous
statement, Cruz retorted, “That’s simply not true. They are targeting the
terrorists,” thereby defending the IDF even from itself.


#7 RON WYDEN, $1,279,376

Senator Ron Wyden (D—OR) has long been one of Israel’s staunchest advocates in
Washington, supporting President Trump’s decision to move the U.S. Embassy to
Jerusalem and opposing BDS in all its forms.

In 2017, he co-sponsored a bill that made it a federal crime, punishable by a
maximum prison sentence of 20 years, for Americans to participate in or even
encourage boycotts against Israel and illegal Israeli settlements.

On the settlements, he was one of the most vigorous opponents of UN Security
Council Resolution 2334, which describes them as a “flagrant violation” of
international law.

For his troubles, Wyden has received $1,279,376 from pro-Israel groups.


#8 DICK DURBIN, $1,126,020

In some ways, Dick Durbin owes his political career to the Israel lobby. In
1982, the then-obscure college professor benefitted enormously from AIPAC money
to defeat incumbent Paul Findley, a strong proponent of the Palestinian people.

The Illinois Democrat has called for immediate military aid to Israel and
co-signed a Senate resolution reaffirming Washington’s support for Israel’s
“right to self-defense” in the wake of October 7.

Despite this, he has angered some in the pro-Israel crowd by supporting
President Obama’s initiatives to reduce tensions with Iran and has now come out
in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza.


#9 JOSH GOTTHEIMER, $1,109,370

Despite only being in office since 2017, Gottheimer has already received more
than $1.1 million from pro-Israel lobbying groups. The New Jersey Congressman
has served as a pro-Israeli attack dog in Washington, co-sponsoring the bill
equating opposition to Israeli government policy with anti-Semitism and
introducing legislation to block and criminalize boycotting the state of Israel.

In the wake of October 7, Gottheimer has attempted to cancel a number of public
figures. Earlier this month, for instance, he tried to pressure Rutgers
University into calling off an event on Palestine featuring former CNN anchor
Marc Lamont Hill and organizer and journalist Nick Estes, both of whom support
Palestinian rights and statehood.

Gottheimer speaks at the American Zionist Movement / AZM in Washington, DC on
December 12, 2018. Michael Brochstein | Sipa via AP Images

Gottheimer has even caused rifts within his own party, attacking the small,
progressive wing of Democrats who have failed to toe the line on Israel and
Hamas. “Last night, 15 of my Democratic colleagues voted AGAINST standing with
our ally Israel and condemning Hamas terrorists who brutally murdered, raped,
and kidnapped babies, children, men, women, and elderly, including Americans.
They are despicable and do not speak for our party,” he wrote, making a number
of highly incendiary and questionable assertions.


#10 SHONTEL BROWN, $1,028,686

Perhaps no other political case reveals the power of the Israel lobby than
Shontel Brown. In 2021, Nina Turner, a democratic socialist, national co-chair
of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 election campaign, and an outspoken advocate for justice
in Palestine, ran for election in Ohio’s 11th congressional district. Her
opponent was the little-known but strongly pro-Israel Brown.

Brown received more pro-Israel money than any other politician nationwide during
that two-year election cycle, helping her overcome a double-digit polling
deficit to defeat Turner. Over $1 million was spent plastering Cleveland with
attack ads against Turner. In her acceptance speech, Brown praised Israel and
later thanked the Jewish community for “help[ing] me get over the finish line”

Since then, she has supported Israeli actions in Gaza and rejected the idea of
Israel as an apartheid state, writing:

> Let’s be clear: Israel is not an apartheid state. Any mischaracterizations
> otherwise attempt to delegitimize Israel, a robust democracy, and will only
> serve to fuel rising antisemitism. I will always advocate for a strong
> U.S.-Israel relationship founded on our shared values.”

Tweet


A DARK FORCE IN US POLITICS

The most well-known and likely most influential group in the loose coalition
referred to as the Israel lobby is AIPAC. With a staff of around 400 people and
annual revenues that frequently top over $100 million, the organization is a
huge, conservative force in American politics, flooding the system with gigantic
amounts of money. Worse still, the group does not disclose the sources of its
funding.

AIPAC’s stated goal is:

> To make America’s friendship with Israel so robust, so certain, so broadly
> based, and so dependable that even the deep divisions of American politics can
> never imperil that relationship and the ability of the Jewish state to defend
> itself.”

Yet Israel is widely recognized by international bodies such as the United
Nations and human rights groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights
Watch as an apartheid state. It has near total control over the Gaza Strip,
which, even before the latest attack, was an “unlivable” “open-air prison.” It
is this state and these injustices that AIPAC and others seek U.S. support for.

American intransigence on Israel has helped make it a pariah nation, one that
constantly has to veto U.N. resolutions and has lost its voting rights at
UNESCO.

Not only does it give more money to Republicans than Democrats, but AIPAC also
floods conservative Democrats’ coffers with funds, especially when they are up
against progressive, pro-Palestine challengers.

In 2022, it spent $2.3 million in a (failed) bid to stop leftist Summer Lee from
being elected to Congress. However, it fared better in North Carolina, where $2
million was given to Valeria Foushee over Nida Allam, the director of Sanders’
2016 campaign. Meanwhile, $1.2 million in donations to Henry Cuellar might have
been the deciding factor in an extremely close win over progressive activist
Jessica Cisneros in Texas’ 28th congressional district. And a number of
prominent Michigan Democrats have come forward claiming that AIPAC offered them
$20 million each to primary Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian-American in
Congress.

“Certainly the lobby can influence elections, but it doesn’t win them all,”
Hixson, the author of “Architects of Repression: How Israel and Its Lobby Put
Racism, Violence and Injustice at the Center of US Middle East Policy,” said,
adding:

> It targets the aforementioned House progressives every two years but can’t
> always dictate the outcome of localized elections. They do better with broader
> canvasses; hence, no one in the Senate other than Bernie takes them on. When
> it comes to Israel, most American politicians are craven hypocrites.”

Yet Sanders’ recent refusal to endorse a permanent ceasefire (a position held by
virtually the entire world) has earned him AIPAC’s praise.

Tweet


IS THE TAIL WAGGING THE DOG?

As such, AIPAC acts as a bulwark against progressive political change. In such a
divisive political environment, few political issues unite Democrats and
Republicans, as well as Israel and shutting down anti-establishment figures. As
Hixson told MintPress:

> Other than a handful of progressives (Bernie Sanders, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan
> Omar, etc.), the U.S. Congress invariably gives the lobby everything it wants,
> namely massive regular funding for Israeli militarism and an endless series of
> resolutions condemning Israel’s international foes and domestic critics.”

The question that arises from this is why? Why does Israel always seem to
receive full support from Washington? Is the lobby really that effective? Why do
so many U.S. politicians go along with it? Mazin Qumsiyeh, a professor at
Bethlehem University, characterized Washington as full of amoral careerists,
telling MintPress that:

> They [Senators and Congresspersons] do not buy the Zionist argument. It is
> strictly personal interest: money and good media coverage and avoiding
> blackmail, as the Zionists have their dirty secrets which they could expose if
> they step out of line.”

Yet Israel also serves a vital purpose for the American empire. The region is
not only geographically strategic but home to the world’s largest resources of
hydrocarbons. Washington has always made it a top priority to control the flow
of oil around the world, and Israel helps them do this. Militarily, Israel
serves as a conduit the U.S. can work through, farming out its dirty work to Tel
Aviv. It, therefore, represents an unofficial and beneficial “51st state.” As
Joe Biden said in 1986 and has regularly repeated, Israel is the best investment
the U.S. makes. “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would
have to invent an Israel to protect our interests in the region,” he added.

Many other nations or industries have lobbied in Washington, D.C. But few have
proven to be as organized or effective as the pro-Israel one. Nevertheless,
public opinion, particularly among young people, has begun to drift away from
it. The Overton Window is shifting; Professor Qumsiyeh told MintPress. “When I
first went to the U.S. in 1979, the average citizen did not know anything about
Palestine or knew only a negative, distorted picture driven by Hollywood and
biased media. Things [have] changed,” he said.

Things have indeed changed. The streets of America have been filled with
demonstrations against Israeli aggression. Millions of Americans have
participated in Palestine solidarity protests, including hundreds of thousands
in Washington, D.C. alone. Celebrities have spoken out against injustice. And
social media is filled with posts showing sympathy for Gazans. There, too,
Israel and pro-Israel groups have attempted to use their financial clout
to influence the conversation, but to limited effect.

Fortunately for Israel, for now, at least, they can still rely on the unwavering
support of senior American politicians, their pockets filled with AIPAC money,
turning the other way as Israel carries out another genocide against Palestine.

Feature photo | Joe Biden, projected on screens, gestures as he addresses the
American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) 2013 Policy Conference, March
4, 2013, at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington. Susan
Walsh | AP

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD
in 2017, he published two books, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake
News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing
Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed
to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common
Dreams.

Republish our stories! MintPress News is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 International License.

https://archive.ph/4UrSm

| Tagged aipac, anti-semitism, israel, palestine, palestinians


YEMEN READY TO STARE DOWN A NEW IMPERIAL COALITION – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 20
DEC 2023

Posted on December 20, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,400 WORDS • 

No one ever lost money betting on the ability of the Empire of Chaos, Lies and
Plunder to construct a “coalition of the willing” whenever faced with a
geopolitical quandary.

In every case, duly covered by the reigning “rules-based international order”,
“willing” applies to vassals seduced by carrots or sticks to follow to the
letter the Empire’s whims.

Cue to the latest chapter: Coalition Genocide Prosperity, whose official –
heroic – denomination, a trademark of the Pentagon’s P.R. wizards, is “Operation
Prosperity Guardian”, allegedly engaged in “ensuring freedom of navigation in
the Red Sea.”

Translation: this is Washington all but declaring war on Yemen’s Ansarullah. An
extra US destroyer has already been dispatched to the Red Sea.

Ansarullah sticks to its guns and is by no means intimidated. The Houthi
military have already stressed that any attack on Yemeni assets or Ansarullah
missile launch sites would color the entire Red Sea literally Red.

The Houthi military not only reaffirmed it has “weapons to sink your aircraft
carriers and destroyers” but made a stunning call to both Sunnis and Shi’ites in
Bahrain to revolt and overthrow their King, Hamad al-Khalifa.

As of Monday, even before the start of the operation, the Eisenhower aircraft
carrier was around 280 km off the closest Ansarullah controlled latitudes.
Houthis have Zoheir and Khalij-e-Fars anti-ship ballistic missiles with a range
of 300 to 500 km.

Ansarullah Supreme Political Council member Muhammad al-Bukhaiti felt compelled
to re-stress the obvious: “Even if America succeeds in mobilizing the entire
world, our operations in the Red Sea will not stop unless the massacre in Gaza
stops. We will not give up the responsibility of defending
the Moustazafeen (oppressed ones) of the Earth.”

The world better get ready: “Aircraft carrier sunk” may become the new 9/11.


SHIPPING IN THE RED SEA REMAINS OPEN

Weapons peddler Lloyd “Raytheon” Austin, in his current revolving door position
as head of the Pentagon, is visiting West Asia – mostly Israel, Qatar and
Bahrain – to promote this new “international initiative” for patrolling the Red
Sea, the Bab al-Mandeb strait (which links the Arabian Sea to the Red Sea) and
the Gulf of Aden.

As al-Bukhaiti remarked, Ansarullah’s strategy is to target any ship navigating
the Red Sea linked to Israeli companies or supplying Israel – something that for
the Yemenis demonstrates their complicity with the Gaza genocide. That will only
stop when the genocide stops.



With a single move – a de facto maritime blockade – Ansarullah proved that
the King is Naked: Yemen has done more in practice to defend the Palestinian
cause than most of the key regional players put together. Incidentally, they
were all ordered by Netanyahu in public to shut up. And they did.

It’s quite instructive to once again follow the money. Israel has been hit very
hard. The port of Eilat is virtually closed, and its income fell by 80%.

For instance, Taiwanese shipping giant Yang-Ming Marine Transport Corporation
originally planned to re-route its Israel-bound cargo to the port of Ashdod.
Then it cut off any shipments to any Israeli destination.

It’s no wonder Yoram Sebba, President of the Israel Chamber of Shipping,
revealed himself to be puzzled by Ansarullah’s “complex” tactics and
“unrevealed” criteria that have imposed “total uncertainty”. Saudi Arabia, Egypt
and Jordan have also been caught in the Yemeni net.

It’s crucial to keep in perspective that Ansarullah only blocks ships that are
going to Israel. The bulk of maritime shipping in the Red Sea remains wide open.

So shipping giant Maersk’s decision not to use the Red Sea, alongside other
global shipping behemoths, may be pushing the envelope too fast – as in nearly
begging for a US-led patrol to be in effect.

So far, on one side we have Yemen virtually ruling the Red Sea. On the other
side, we find UAE-Saudi-Jordan tandem, in the form of an – alternative – cargo
land corridor set up from the port of Jebel Ali in the Persian Gulf across Saudi
Arabia to Jordan and then Israel.

The corridor uses logistical tech from Trucknet: that’s truck-based overland
connectivity in practice, reducing transport time from 14 days via the Red Sea
to a maximum of 4 days on the road, 300 trucks a day, everyday.

Jordan of course is in, operating the trans-shipment from the UAE and Saudi
Arabia.

The overarching framework for all this is the

One Israel plan, enthusiastically promoted by Netanyahu, whose key aim is a link
with the Arabian peninsula and most of all the NEOM tech metropolis to be built
theoretically up to 2039 in the northwestern Tabuk province in Saudi Arabia,
north of the Red Sea, east of Egypt across the Gulf of Aqaba, and south of
Jordan.

NEOM is MbS’s project to modernize the country, which is incidentally bound to
feature Israel-operated AI cities.

This is what Riyadh is really betting on, much more than developing closer
relations with Iran under the framework of BRICS+. Or to care about the future
of Palestine.

On the planned naval blockade of Yemen though, the Saudis were way more
circumspect. Even as Tel Aviv directly asked the White House to do something,
anything, Riyadh “advised” Washington to exercise some restraint.

Yet as few things matter most for the Straussian neocon psychos who currently
direct US policy than to protect the trade interests in the Red Sea of its
aircraft-carrier in West Asia, the decision to set up a “coalition” was all but
inevitable.

Enter the latest – actually fourth – incarnation of the Combined Maritime
Force (CMF): a multinational coalition from 39 nations established in 2002 and
led by the US Fifth Fleet in Bahrain.

The task force already exists: it’s CTF 153, focusing on “international maritime
security and capacity building efforts in the Red Sea, Bab al-Mandeb and Gulf of
Aden”. That’s the basis for Coalition Genocide Prosperity.

Members of CTF 153 include, apart from the usual suspects US, UK, France and
Canada, Europeans such as Norway, Italy, Netherlands and Spain, superpower
Seychelles and Bahrain (the Fifth Fleet element).

Saudi Arabia and UAE, crucially, are not members. They know, after a seven-year
war, when they were part of another “coalition” (the US was sort of “leading
from behind”) what it means to fight Ansarullah.

All Aboard the Northern Sea Route

If the Red Sea situation turns really red, it will instantly shatter the
Riyadh-Sanaa ceasefire. The White House and the US Deep State simply do not want
a peace deal. They want Saudi Arabia at war with Yemen.

The Red Sea turned red will also send the global energy crisis into a tailspin.
After all at least four million barrels of oil and 12% of total global
seaborne-trade to the West transits the Bab al-Mandeb every single day.

So once again we have graphic confirmation that the Empire of Chaos, Lies and
Plunder only calls for ceasefires when it’s losing badly: see the Ukraine case.

Yet no ceasefire in Gaza – supported by the overwhelming majority if UN
member-states – runs the risk of metastasizing into an expansion of the war in
West Asia.

That may fit into the clumsy imperial rationale of setting West Asia on fire to
disturb China’s commercial BRI drive and the entry of Iran, Saudi Arabia and UAE
into the expanded BRICS next month. Simultaneously, and in tune with the absence
of real strategic planning in Washington, that does not take into consideration
an array of appalling, unintended consequences.

So according to imperial optics, the only path ahead is further militarization –
from the Mediterranean to the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Aqaba, the Red Sea, the
Gulf of Aden, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf. That fits exactly into the
framework of the War of Economic Corridors.

An axiom should be set in stone: Washington would rather bet on a possible, deep
global recession than simply allowing a humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza. The
recession may well turbo-charge a widespread economic collapse of the collective
West, and an even more rapid rise of multipolarity.

To offer much needed relief of so much insanity: almost casually, President
Putin recently remarked that the Northern Sea Route is now becoming a more
efficient maritime trade corridor than the Suez Canal.

…………….

https://archive.ph/Dy3FV

(Republished from Sputnik International )

| Tagged iran, middle-east, saudi-arabia, world, yemen


CANADIAN COVID DICTATORSHIP ADVOCATE DIES SUDDENLY AT 33 – RIP IAN VANDAELLE – 5
DEC 2023

Posted on December 14, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | 1 Comment

Canadian Journalist, Who Pushed Vaccine Mandates and Concentration Camps, Dead
at 33
SLAY News ^ | Frank Bergman – December 13, 2023 – 8:15 am



A controversial Canadian corporate media journalist has died at just 33 years
old, according to reports.

Ian Vandaelle has died after being hospitalized and “declared neurologically
dead,” his family revealed.

Vandaelle was a business journalist who worked as a reporter and editor at the
Financial Post.

He was also previously a producer at BNN Bloomberg for over a decade.

However, he was known to many on social media for his pro-Covid vaccine posts on
Twitter/X.

Vandaelle advocated for vaccine passports and mandates and called for the firing
of anyone who refused the injections.

He also suggested that unvaccinated people should be arrested and taken away to
concentration camps.

Stephanie Hughes, Vandaelle’s partner, revealed that he died on December 5,
2023.

“I haven’t been on Twitter for a while because my partner, @IanVandaelle, has
been in the hospital since Nov. 18,” she said in a post on X.

“It’s with a heavy heart today that I say he was declared neurologically
deceased this week and taken off life support this morning.



“He was 33 years old.”

Vandaelle had taken to social media multiple times to advocate for incentives to
encourage Covid vaccination.

He also demanded the implementation of vaccine passports and the termination of
those who refused the jab.

In one social media post, Vandaelle stated:

“I, for one, advocate we bring the carrot and the stick. Incentivize getting the
vaccine however we like – ice cream, lotteries, literally whatever, I don’t care
– and require vaccination to do non-essential things.

“Wanna go to a bar to watch the game? Passport.”

In another post, he urged the Toronto Police to terminate members who declined
the jab, saying:

“Take the jab or resign; anything else is moral and ethical cowardice.

“You take an oath to protect citizens?

“You get vaxxed. Shameful that we have to say this.”

As indicated by various social media posts before his hospitalization, Vandaelle
seemed in good health and actively engaged in work.

The cause of Vandaelle’s sudden fatal condition has not been made public.

……………………

RFKjr – The Real Anthony Fauci – Sample (4:52 min) Audio Mp3 RFKjr – The Real
Anthony Fauci – Long Excerpt (38:03 min) Audio Mp3

Source

https://archive.ph/13bLf

| Tagged covid, covid-19, health, news, vaccine


ISRAEL’S LITANI ULTIMATUM – RUSSIAN REACTION IS THAT IT’S BLUFF – BY JOHN HELMER
– 12 DEC 2023

Posted on December 14, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,500 WORDS • 

Arab, Russian, and international media are reporting the Israeli government has
issued an ultimatum that if Hezbollah does not withdraw its army and arms from
their positions in southern Lebanon, between the Litani River and the Blue Line
(lead image), and redeploy north of the Litani, Israel will launch an air and
ground attack on the region of southern Lebanon, and also on Beirut. The Israeli
ultimatum reportedly sets a 48-hour time limit.

There is no official Israeli record of this ultimatum. In the non-Israeli press,
it is attributed to remarks on local television made on Saturday night, December
9, by Israel’s National Security Advisor, Tzachi Hanegbi. However, in the
version reported by Times of Israel, Hanegbi did not set any time limit.

Instead, Hanegbi claimed that “Hezbollah’s Radwan force could attempt a similar
murderous invasion from the north, targeting civilians in communities near the
border. Israel, he acknowledged, was tackling Hamas ‘17 years too late,’ and it
could no longer dare to tolerate the danger of the prevailing situation in the
north, with Hezbollah’s forces at the border. Some 60,000 residents of border
communities have been evacuated from the north since October 7, amid relentless
and sometimes deadly clashes across the border between Hezbollah and Israel.
‘Residents will not return if we don’t do the same thing’ in the north against
Hezbollah as is being done in the south against Hamas…”

“‘We can no longer accept [Hezbollah’s] Radwan force sitting on the border. We
can no longer accept Resolution 1701 not being implemented,’ he added, referring
to a UN Security Council resolution from 2006, at the end of the Second Lebanon
War, that barred any Hezbollah presence within almost 30 kilometres of the
border with Israel. Asked directly if there would be a war in the north, Hanegbi
said: ‘The situation in the north must be changed. And it will change. If
Hezbollah agrees to change things via diplomacy, very good. But I don’t believe
it will.’ Therefore, he said, ‘when the day comes,’ Israel will have to act to
ensure that residents of the north are no longer ‘displaced in their land, and
to guarantee for them that the situation in the north has changed.’

“Hanegbi noted that while many countries have missiles pointed at Israel,
including Iran, Syria and Iraq, ‘Israel doesn’t invade them’. The fear regarding
Hezbollah’s Radwan force is that ‘within minutes’, it could cross the border and
begin a murderous rampage in northern communities as Hamas did in the south on
October 7. Israel cannot tolerate this threat any longer, he said. Hanegbi said
Israel does not want to fight simultaneously on two fronts, and indicated it
would therefore tackle Hezbollah after Hamas is defeated. He said Israel has
been ‘making clear to the Americans that we are not interested in war [in the
north], but that we will have no alternative but to impose a new reality’ if
Hezbollah remains a threat.’”

The Russian Foreign Ministry is reporting no reaction to these claims, nor any
ministry contact in Moscow with a Lebanese government official. None of the
mainstream Russian newspapers nor the media specializing on military and
security affairs are reporting the remarks of Hanegbi as a signal of imminent
Israeli air and ground attack against Hezbollah.

The Russian reaction is that the Israelis are bluffing.

Over the past twenty years, the Russian government policy has been to condemn
Hezbollah operations against Israel as “terrorist”, and Israeli attacks on
Lebanon as “disproportionate”.

In the last official communication at the foreign minister level with Lebanon in
November 2021, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov didn’t mention Hezbollah.

Lavrov did mention Russian interest in investing in offshore oil exploration of
the Mediterranean seabed claimed by Lebanon. “We discussed our cooperative
efforts, including our companies’ [Novatek and Rosneft] activities, to develop
Lebanon’s energy sector. Among other things, we focused on drilling in Lebanon’s
continental shelf, which Novatek engages in, and expanding a petroleum product
storage terminal at a Rosneft-owned port in Lebanon…As for oil and gas
production, I have already mentioned that Russian hydrocarbon exploration and
production companies, in particular, Novatek, are planning to sink another
offshore well in early 2022. Rosneft, which is implementing a major project, has
a contract on the operational management of [an oil products terminal] in the
port of Tripoli.”

RUSSIA SUPPORTS LEBANON IN EXPLORATION OF DISPUTED OFFSHORE OIL AND GAS

For a detailed analysis of the legal and diplomatic issues, read this. For the
potential targeting by Hezbollah of the Israeli gas fields identified in the
map, if fighting on the northern front escalates, read this.

Since the Gaza war began on October 7, Israeli threats to cross the Blue Line
and attack southern Lebanon and Beirut are not new.

On November 11, Yoav Gallant, the Israeli Defense Minister, said: “‘What we can
do in Gaza, we can also do in Beirut…Our pilots are sitting in their cockpits,
their aircraft facing north,’ Gallant said, stressing that the IDF [Israel
Defence Forces] already has mobilized enough forces for its goals in the South
against Hamas, and the Israel Air Force has plenty of power to spare. ‘We
haven’t even used 10% of the IAF’s power in Gaza.’”

On December 6 Gallant added: “We’ll push Hezbollah beyond Litani River before
residents of northern Israel return home”.

Last Friday, the day before he took a telephone call from President Vladimir
Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced: “ ‘If Hezbollah
chooses to start an all-out war then it will, by its own hand, turn Beirut and
southern Lebanon, not far from here, into Gaza and Khan Younis,’ Netanyahu said
while visiting troops near the border.”

In the Kremlin report of Netanyahu’s telephone conversation with Putin on
Saturday, December 9, the communiqué omits to reveal what Netanyahu said.
Instead, it is reported “the discussion focused on the critical situation in the
Palestine-Israel conflict zone, in particular, the disastrous humanitarian
situation in the Gaza Strip. Vladimir Putin reaffirmed his principled position
of rejecting and condemning terrorism in all its manifestations. At the same
time, it is of the essence to avoid such grave consequences for the civilian
population while countering terrorist threats. Russia is ready to provide all
possible assistance to alleviate the suffering of civilians and de-escalate the
conflict. In addition, the parties expressed mutual interest in further
cooperation on the evacuation of Russian citizens and their families, as well as
the release of Israelis held in Gaza.”



In Moscow Boris Rozhin (right), who publishes the Colonel Cassad military blog,
has reported the Israeli ultimatum without expressing scepticism towards the
48-hour deadline. Instead, he is sceptical that the Israeli forces have the
capability to achieve what they threaten. “The Middle East is characterized by
loud statements, issuing ultimatums, and exchanging threats, which are not
always followed by concrete actions,” Rozhin commented through republishing a
partner blog.

“It is obvious that the Lebanese government does not have the levers of
influence that can force the leadership of Hezbollah to make concessions to the
enemy. If Israel makes the announced decision, it will have at least two
consequences: Any act of military aggression against Lebanese territory by the
IDF will create conditions for Iran’s involvement in the conflict. Israel is now
launching air and artillery strikes against Hezbollah targets, but does not have
the necessary capability to conduct ground operations. Most of the IDF’s
combat-ready units are concentrated in the Gaza Strip. So far, units of the
300th Baram Brigade of the 91st Galilee Division, as well as the 75th battalion
of the 7th Armored Brigade, are fixed on the border. Given the information about
Hezbollah’s deployment of a full-fledged air defense system in southern Lebanon,
Israel risks multiplying losses in aviation, while the account of armoured
vehicles destroyed in the Gaza Strip has already in the dozens. If Israel does
decide, it is worth expecting an attack by Iranian ‘proxy groups’ in the area of
the occupied Golan Heights.”

The lead image map illustrates the Blue Line as the demarcation between the
Israeli and Hezbollah forces after their withdrawal at the ceasefire of the 2006
war. It is a line of force unresolved by continuing fighting. Read more.

The terms of the Security Council Resolution 1701 of August 2006, to which the
Hanegbi ultimatum refers, can be read here.

Source: http://unscr.com/en/resolutions/doc/1701

Hezbollah accuses Israel of repeatedly violating Point 1, as Israel makes the
same allegation against Hezbollah. They invalidate the two sides’ undertaking
in Point 8(2) to implement “security arrangements to prevent the resumption of
hostilities, including the establishment between the Blue Line and the Litani
river of an area free of any armed personnel, assets and weapons other than
those of the Government of Lebanon and of UNIFIL as authorized in paragraph 11,
deployed in this area.”

International lawyers dispute Hanegbi’s claim that the disputed terms of
Resolution 1701 would make legal the threatened IDF air and ground attack on
Lebanon.

………………….

(Republished from Dances with Bears)

| Tagged hezbollah, iran, israel, lebanon, politics


DEATH AND DESTRUCTION IN GAZA – BY JOHN J. MEARSHEIMER – 11 DEC 2023

Posted on December 13, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

I do not believe that anything I say about what is happening in Gaza will affect
Israeli or American policy in that conflict. But I want to be on record so that
when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some
Americans were on the right side of history.

What Israel is doing in Gaza to the Palestinian civilian population – with the
support of the Biden administration – is a crime against humanity that serves no
meaningful military purpose. As J-Street, an important  organization in the
Israel lobby, puts it, “The scope of the unfolding humanitarian disaster and
civilian casualties is nearly unfathomable.”[1]

Let me elaborate.

First, Israel is purposely massacring huge number of civilians, roughly 70
percent of whom are children and women. The claim that Israel is going to great
lengths to minimize civilian casualties is belied by statements from high level
Israeli officials. For example, the IDF spokesman said on 10 October 2023 that
“the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” That same day, Defense Minister
Yoav Gallant announced: “I have lowered all the restraints – we will kill
everyone we fight against; we will use every means.”[2]

Moreover, it is clear from the results of the bombing campaign that Israel is
indiscriminately killing civilians. Two detailed studies of the IDF’s bombing
campaign – both published in Israeli outlets – explain in detail how Israel is
murdering huge numbers of civilians. It is worth quoting the titles of the two
pieces, which succinctly capture what each has to say:

“‘A Mass Assassination Factory’: Inside Israel’s Calculated Bombing of Gaza”[3]

“The Israeli Army Has Dropped the Restraint in Gaza, and the Data Shows
Unprecedented Killing.”[4]

Similarly, the New York Times published an article in late November 2023 titled:
“Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace.”[5]
Thus, it is hardly surprising that the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres,
said that “We are witnessing a killing of civilians that is unparalleled and
unprecedented in any conflict since” his appointment in January 2017.[6]

Second, Israel is purposely starving the desperate Palestinian population by
greatly limiting the amount of food, fuel, cooking gas, medicine, and water that
can be brought into Gaza. Moreover, medical care is extremely hard to come by
for a population that now includes approximately 50,000 wounded civilians. Not
only has Israel greatly limited the supply of fuel into Gaza, which hospitals
need to function, but it has targeted hospitals, ambulances, and first aid
stations.

Defense Minister Gallant’s comment on 9 October captures Israeli policy: “I have
ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no
food, no fuel, everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we are
acting accordingly.”[7] Israel has been forced to allow minimal supplies into
Gaza, but the amounts are so small that a senior UN official reports that “half
of Gaza’s population is starving.” He goes on to report that, “Nine out of 10
families in some areas are spending ‘a full day and night without any food at
all’.”[8]

Third, Israeli leaders talk about Palestinians and what they would like to do in
Gaza in shocking terms, especially when you consider that some of these leaders
also talk incessantly about the horrors of the Holocaust. Indeed, their rhetoric
has led Omar Bartov, a prominent Israeli-born scholar of the Holocaust, to
conclude that Israel has “genocidal intent.”[9] Other scholars in Holocaust and
genocide studies have offered a similar warning.[10]

To be more specific, it is commonplace for Israeli leaders to refer to
Palestinians as “human animals, ”human beasts,” and “horrible inhuman
animals.”[11] And as Israeli President Isaac Herzog makes clear, those leaders
are referring to all Palestinians, not just Hamas: In his words, “It is an
entire nation out there that is responsible.”[12] Unsurprisingly, as the New
York Times reports, it is part of normal Israeli discourse to call for Gaza to
be “flattened,” “erased,” or “destroyed.”[13] One retired IDF general, who
proclaimed that “Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist,” also
makes the case that “severe epidemics in the south of the Gaza Strip will bring
victory closer.”[14] Going even further, a minister in the Israeli government
suggested dropping a nuclear weapon on Gaza.[15] These statements are not being
made by isolated extremists, but by senior members of Israel’s government.

Of course, there is also much talk of ethnically cleansing Gaza (and the West
Bank), in effect, producing another Nakba.[16] To quote Israel’s Agriculture
Minister, “We are now rolling out the Gaza Nakba.”[17]Perhaps the most shocking
evidence of the depths to which Israeli society has sunk is a video of very
young children singing a blood-curdling song celebrating Israel’s destruction of
Gaza: “Within a year we will annihilate everyone, and then we will return to
plow our fields.”[18]

Fourth, Israel is not just killing, wounding, and starving huge numbers of
Palestinians, it is also systematically destroying their homes as well as
critical infrastructure – to include mosques, schools, heritage sites,
libraries, key government buildings, and hospitals.[19] As of 1 December 2023,
the IDF had damaged or destroyed almost 100,000 buildings, including entire
neighborhoods that have been reduced to rubble.[20] Consequently, a stunning 90
percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million Palestinians have been displaced from their
homes.[21] Moreover, Israel is making a concerted effort to destroy Gaza’s
cultural heritage; as NPR reports, “more than 100 Gaza heritage sites have been
damaged or destroyed by Israeli attacks.”[22]

Fifth, Israel is not just terrorizing and killing Palestinians, it is also
publicly humiliating many of their men who have been rounded up by the IDF in
routine searches. Israeli soldiers strip them down to their underwear, blindfold
them, and display them in a public way in their neighborhoods – sitting them
down in large groups in the middle of the street, for example, or parading them
through the streets – before taking them away in trucks to detention camps. In
most cases, the detainees are then released as they are not Hamas fighters.[23]

Sixth, although the Israelis are doing the slaughtering, they could not do it
without the Biden administration’s support. Not only was the United States the
only country to vote against a recent UN Security Council resolution demanding
an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, but it has also been providing Israel with the
weaponry necessary to wage this massacre.[24] As one Israeli general (Yitzhak
Brick) recently made clear: “All of our missiles, the ammunition, the
precision-guided bombs, all the airplanes and bombs, it’s all from the U.S. The
minute they turn off the tap, you can’t keep fighting. You have no capability.…
Everyone understands that we can’t fight this war without the United States.
Period.”[25] Remarkably, the Biden administration has sought to expedite sending
Israel additional ammunition, by-passing the normal procedures of the Arms
Export Control Act.[26] 

Seventh, while most of the focus is now on Gaza, it is important not to lose
sight of what is simultaneously going on in the West Bank. Israeli settlers,
working closely with the IDF, continue to kill innocent Palestinians and steal
their land. In an excellent article in the New York Review of Books describing
these horrors, David Shulman relates a conversation he had with a settler, which
clearly reflects the moral dimension of Israeli behavior toward the
Palestinians. “What we are doing to these people is actually inhuman,” the
settler freely admits, “But if you think about it clearly, it all follows
inevitably from the fact that God promised this land to the Jews, and only to
them.”[27] Along with its assault on Gaza, the Israel government has markedly
increased the number of arbitrary arrests in the West Bank. According to Amnesty
International, there is considerable evidence that these prisoners have been
tortured and subjected to degrading treatment.[28]

As I watch this catastrophe for the Palestinians unfold, I am left with one
simple question for Israel’s leaders, their American defenders, and the Biden
administration: have you no decency?

NOTES

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[1] https://jstreet.org/press-releases/moment-of-truth-for-israels-government/

[2] Both quotes can be found
in: https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-09/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/the-israeli-army-has-dropped-the-restraint-in-gaza-and-data-shows-unprecedented-killing/0000018c-4cca-db23-ad9f-6cdae8ad0000

[3] https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

[4] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-12-09/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/the-israeli-army-has-dropped-the-restraint-in-gaza-and-data-shows-unprecedented-killing/0000018c-4cca-db23-ad9f-6cdae8ad0000

[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-death-toll.html

[6] https://www.un.org/sg/en/content/sg/press-encounter/2023-11-20/secretary-generals-press-conference-unep-emissions-gap-report-launch

[7] https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/defense-minister-announces-complete-siege-of-gaza-no-power-food-or-fuel/

[8] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67670679

Also
see: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/opinion/international-world/us-government-gaza-humanitarian-aid.html

[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/opinion/israel-gaza-genocide-war.html

Also
see: https://www.nybooks.com/online/2023/11/20/an-open-letter-on-the-misuse-of-holocaust-memory/

[10] https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/statement-of-scholars-7-october/

[11]

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Fr24GcCDgyM?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

[12] https://news.yahoo.com/israeli-president-says-no-innocent-154330724.html#:~:text=“It%20is%20an%20entire%20nation,It%27s%20absolutely%20not%20true.

[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/15/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-war-rhetoric.html

[14] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/10/opinion/israel-gaza-genocide-war.html

https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2023-11-23/ty-article-opinion/.premium/giora-eilands-monstrous-gaza-proposal-is-evil-in-plain-sight/0000018b-f84b-d473-affb-f9eb09af0000

> Influential Israeli national security leader makes the case for genocide in
> Gaza

[15] https://www.timesofisrael.com/far-right-minister-says-nuking-gaza-an-option-pm-suspends-him-from-cabinet-meetings/

[16] https://mondoweiss.net/2023/10/israeli-think-tank-lays-out-a-blueprint-for-the-complete-ethnic-cleansing-of-gaza/

[17] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-12/ty-article/israeli-security-cabinet-member-calls-north-gaza-evacuation-nakba-2023/0000018b-c2be-dea2-a9bf-d2be7b670000

[18] https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/watch-israeli-children-sing-we-will-annihilate-everyone-gaza

[19] https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-gaza-public-library-destroyed-bombing

………….

One Hour of Hebrew Communist Music (1:01:05 min) Audio Mp3 One Hour Of
Palestinian Communist Music (1:01:02 min) Audio Mp3 One Hour of Yiddish
Communist Music (1:00:35 min) Audio Mp3

https://archive.ph/L8t6v




SPARTACIST LEAGUE VERSUS BOLSHEVIK TENDENCY – UKRAINE WAR: WHAT STRATEGY FOR
MARXISTS? 11 NOV 2023

Posted on December 11, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

The Bolshevik Tendency speaker observes that a Russian defeat of the NATO backed
regime in Kiev will give US Imperialism a bloody nose and help weaken Western
Imperialism in a confrontation with the deformed workers state of China which
would be a good thing for workers around the world. The Spartacist speaker calls
for workers in Ukraine and workers in Russia to oppose their own rulers and not
to fight against each other. Russia is called a large nation, while not
imperialist yet, that has invaded a smaller neighboring nation. While both
speakers might call for dock workers in the West to refuse to load NATO weapons
going to Ukraine, the Spartacists might also call for Russian workers to refuse
to load weapons going to Russian Army forces fighting in Russian annexed Ukraine
and Ukraine.

…………….






WEST’S “NEW” STRATEGY FOR UKRAINE VICTORY: SAME AS THE OLD ONE AND WHY IT CAN’T
WORK – BRIAN BERLETIC – 11 DEC 2023

Posted on December 11, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment




WHY DOES GERMANY CONTINUE TO SELF-DESTRUCT? – BY CONOR GALLAGHER (NAKED
CAPITALISM) 10 DEC 2023

Posted on December 10, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

Germany’s Left Party dissolved its faction in the German Bundestag as of
December 6. In October, prominent politician and former party parliamentary
co-chair Sahra Wagenknecht announced that she was founding a new party focused
on working class issues, which includes repairing ties with Russia and examining
whether German interests are congruous with those of Washington.

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party overlaps with Wagenknecht on those
issues while also containing strong strains of ethnonationalism and
euroscepticism. The AfD has had recent strong showings in local elections and
maintains its second place in national polls, consistently coming in above 20
percent.

Both the breakdown of the Left Party, which is considered a direct descendant of
the Socialist Unity Party that ruled East Germany until reunification, and the
rise of the AfD are the political signs of an upheaval occurring in Germany
caused by  the willingness of the country’s elites to impose economic decline on
the vast majority of its citizens.

Aside from Ukrainians, the German people are among the biggest losers from the
ongoing war against Russia. While support for Project Ukraine slowly evaporates,
the damage to the German economy will not end with the war effort. Inflation
continues to be problematic, the energy outlook remains dire, the economy is
stagnating, exports to China are declining and there is constant pressure from
Atlanticists to self-impose a further reduction, living standards are declining,
political paralysis reigns on most matters except social cuts and more military
spending, and wealth inequality grows.

The German government is struggling to figure out a budget that deals with so
many costly crises at the same time. A recent ruling by the country’s highest
court said that the 2024 fiscal plan broke rules enshrined in the constitution
by attempting to repurpose 60 billion euros left over from an emergency COVID-19
fund in order to fill budget holes. The ruling also limits the government’s
ability to dip into special funds that were set up to get around the outlawing
of deficit spending, and Germany simply doesn’t have the money to fund increased
military spending, support for industry hammered by the loss of cheap Russian
energy, and the country’s social programs. Despite Chancellor Olaf
Scholz’s promise to the contrary, harsh austerity is likely coming for the
German people.

The point of this piece is not to rehash all the ways the New Cold War is doing
outsized harm to Germany. Instead, it is an attempt to nail down some of the
why. There is a common assumption that Germany, as a vassal of the US, had to be
strong-armed or tricked into supporting Project Ukraine against its own
interests, but is that really the case? And if not, why did German decision
makers pursue such a course of action? Why is Germany, which has already lost so
much with Project Ukraine, continuing down this ruinous path? And why has it
tethered itself to a US declining in relative power? Here are some possibilities
(and please add any I’ve missed in comments).

One potential reasin is the US military and intelligence agencies factor. As NC
reader divadabpointed out recently: 

> Start with an army of occupation, 50,000 US troops still there iirc, almost
> eighty years after Nazi Germany’s defeat. Add a comprador elite, beholden to
> the US and its media and secret service tentacles, and you get weaklings like
> Scholtz, utterly without agency, insulted in public by Emperor Joe, and acting
> directly against the interests of his countrymen. It’s hard to believe that
> this supine, defeated nation, was once the terror of the world, and only the
> forces of the USA and its imperial vassals, and the USSR could defeat them.

On the intelligence front, NC reader JohnnyJames adds:

> …documents published by Wikileaks showed that the NSA had tapped Angela
> Merkel’s phone for many years. The BND [German Federal Intelligence Service]
> had knowledge of it, yet did not inform their own Chancellor. The BND was
> largely created by the CIA in the first place. The mass media even reported on
> it.

No doubt the US uses certain tactics to keep its “allies” in line, such as
bribery and coercion. NC reader CatBurglar comments:

> “Bags and bags of money” has been adduced as one reason the US can control
> German politicians. It wouldn’t be surprising if US surveillance has
> discovered things to blackmail the politicians with — it is their job!

As just one example, it would be irresponsible not to speculate about Scholz
being compromised over his past entanglement with the Cum Ex affair that is
constantly being dangled about, the threat of which could theoretically be used
to influence his decisions on other matters.

Bribery and coercion are no doubt part of the US toolbox to maintain order much
the same way organized crime networks expand their reach, but could the
overarching alignment be the result of something much more insidious?  While on
its face it appears like subservience or blackmail, could it not instead be that
the German elite simply identify more with their American counterparts than the
working class in their own country?

If it’s the case that decades of training in the WEF-style transnational
capitalism mindset has finally come to fruition, it’s likely that the German
elite saw their potential monetary reward for helping to bring Russia under the
US-run neoliberalized and financialized global economy.

If they acknowledged the risks at all of the plan not succeeding, they likely
would have realized that the brunt of the economic pain would fall on Germany
(and Europe’s) working class, and does anyone really believe that the likes of
Scholz, Macron, and other European figureheads care at all about the working
class in their country?

German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock who frequently blurts out the quiet
part, said as much last year in the perfect summation of the “leaders’”
mindsets: Tweet



Politicians like Baerbock do not need to be persuaded to act against the
interests of the majority of citizens in countries they purportedly represent.

Retired General H. Kujat and Professor Emeritus H. Funke’s report on how the
chance was lost for Ukraine peace settlement showed that Germany was involved in
efforts to torpedo early peace efforts in Operation Ukraine – not a wavering
participant that needed to be cajoled along as Chancellor Olaf Scholz often
pretended to be.  It isn’t just Russia, either, but increasingly China, Iran,
Azerbaijan, and elsewhere – basically anywhere the US is targeting, the Germans
are now right there beside them. Scholz has said Germany will take a more active
role throughout the world alongside Washington, as has foreign minister Baerbock
who pushes a “feminist” foreign policy using human rights as a justification for
more aggression.

Despite all the outsized risks it posed to the German nation as a whole, the
German elite apparently wanted the war. It’s a strong possibility that for them
the potential payoff outweighed the negligible risks for themselves.

A brief look at the class divide and polling along those lines in Germany and
Europe as a whole shows that that repercussions of the war have not reached the
elite – at least so far. First, a brief summary of the extreme wealth inequality
in Germany: 

> Despite many years of social-democratic rule and an extensive welfare state,
> German wealth inequality is very high. According to SOEP survey, 39 percent of
> the German population has zero (or quasi zero) net financial wealth, and
> almost 90 percent of the population has negligible net financial wealth
> (reflected in the fact that monthly income received from property is less than
> 100 euros per person). This makes German wealth inequality (depending on the
> metric one uses) equal or even greater than the very high US wealth
> inequality.  A feeling that many large fortunes are hidden or enjoy tax
> shelters thanks to different European schemes and tax competition between the
> EU countries, adds to the feeling of unfairness.

The story is the same across the EU, with the 2010s’ austerity policies playing
a major role in widening the gap. And the Ukraine war has only accelerated this
process. Real minimum wages declined in nearly all of the 21 EU countries with a
minimum wage since the start of the war, and real wages fell at record speed in
Germany last year. There is no plan to fix this.

Let’s look at some of the most recent Europe-wide polling from the European
Commission, which handily breaks down results along class lines, to see a
complete divergence between the European elite and working class on economic
issues and the fallout from the war against Russia.

European polls show major divergence on labor issues, such as 52 percent of the
working class rating fair working conditions as the most important to the EU’s
social and economic development. Only 30 percent of the upper class feels the
same way. And 66 percent of the EU working class feel their quality of life is
getting worse; only 38 percent of the upper class feel the same way.

On this issue of whether the war in Ukraine has serious financial consequences
for you personally, 47 percent of Germans agree; 52 disagree while the remainder
don’t know. 61 percent of Europeans as a whole agree.

The EU-wide division along class lines remains clear. 71 percent of the working
class feel the war hurts them financially. Only 40 percent of the upper class
feels the same way. 71 percent of those struggling financially say their
situation has deteriorated in the past year. 26 percent of the well-off feel
similarly.

More generally, the working class is more suspicious of the undemocratic
institutions at the heart of the war efforts:

 * Only 35 percent of the working class trusts the European Commission 68
   percent of the upper class does.
 * 33 percent of the working class trusts the European Central Bank; 67 percent
   of the upper class does.
 * More people who often struggle to pay bills have a negative view of the EU
   than positive. It’s completely flipped for those who don’t have to worry
   about bills.
 * A much higher percentage of the upper class wants more decisions made at the
   EU level.
 * The working class is much more pessimistic about the future of the EU.
 * 58 percent of those who struggle with finances distrust NATO. Only 15 percent
   of the “upper class” has the same misgivings.
 * When it comes to the EU spending more money on defense, once again the
   further you climb up the class lines, the more support there is.

For now, the European Commission seems satisfied enough with the level of
disenchantment coming from the lower rungs of society. The first paragraph of
its conclusion to the polling results:

> The results from the Standard Eurobarometer 99 conducted in May-June 2023 show
> that Europeans remain satisfied with the response of the EU and their national
> government to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There has been little change
> since January-February 2023: satisfaction levels have remained relatively
> stable since June-July 2022.

If this is what “satisfied” looks like, it’s abundantly clear von Der Leyen’s
commission could care less about the European working class. Yet, the commission
does note that, “Respondents who have difficulties paying bills at least some of
the time, and those who consider they belong to a lower social class are less
satisfied with the EU and national responses to the war and are more likely to
report serious personal financial consequences as a result of the invasion of
Ukraine. They are also less supportive of proposed defence co-operation and
spending measures, and less supportive of the energy policy directions presented
in the survey.”

So what’s the commission to do? It could admit the war was and is a disaster. It
could try to improve the living standards of more citizens so they’re more
likely to support the EU, NATO, militarization, etc. Or it could try to assume
more powers and become more authoritarian.

The questions the Commission is asking give a sense of which direction it
prefers:

 * Does the EU have sufficient power and tools to defend the economic interests
   of Europe?
 * Does the EU need to reinforce its capacity to  produce military equipment?
 * Do you agree with banning state-owned media such as Sputnik and Russia Today
   from broadcasting in the EU?

***

So while the weight of the war falls most heavily on the working class, what of
the motivations of the German and European elite? What is the ideology that
drives the support for war? Colonel Smithers sums up:

> I think the European PMC / leadership class has its own reasons to adopt this
> position / policy towards Russia (and others like China and Iran). Vide Uschi
> von der Leyen. This deracinated elite has its own agency and does not need
> Uncle Sam’s direction / instruction. From experience, the financialisation of
> the past five decades has helped to facilitate the Atlanticist positioning
> and, due to the prominence of US firms in managing the wealth of that elite,
> bridged the Atlantic and given the impression of the US doing the bidding.
> 
> This said, and this is where your and similar questions may arise, it’s very
> rewarding professionally, politically and financially to do (or be seen by the
> US, a short hand, to be seen to do its bidding. I have observed British and
> EU27 politicians and officials build their retirement nest eggs by favouring
> US firms in government and join them at the earliest opportunity. They were
> already corrupt, but Uncle Sam’s money has turbo charged that process. US
> firms and think tanks pay very well. In addition, working with US firms and
> think tanks is like going out with a glamed up Hollywood star, not plain Jane
> next door.

To add to that, in my experience anecdotal evidence shows that PMC Europeans
view the US as more “dynamic” and want their workplaces to function more like
those in the US. What do they mean by dynamism? When you get down to it, it
means less worker protections in exchange for potentially higher salaries for
highly educated workers like themselves. Many are well acquainted with the US
having studied there for at least a semester and see the US as having many more
high-paying job opportunities as it’s easier in the US to get rid of the old and
bring in the new. There are also higher salaries in the US – not just for
CEOs but “skilled” and high-paying jobs tend to be higher than those in Europe,
where collective bargaining agreements between unions and employers are often
used to set salaries.

The German and European PMC want to earn more money like their American
counterparts, and they resent the modest brakes that unions put on corporate
power in Europe even if it provides more stability for the whole but less upside
for them individually.

In essence, it is a similar mindset that leads to higher support from European
elites and the professional class in war against Russia; there were potential
benefits for themselves while the majority of the risk falls most heavily on the
working class.

According to NC reader MD in Berlin, a major reason behind German elites’s
support for regime change efforts in Moscow was the potential payoff should
Russia implode from the weight of sanctions and war spending:

> Do “we” need to worry about loss of cheap gas? No, we are going to “ruin
> Russia” (Baerbock), and it will only take a matter of months. And then we get
> a big share of the plunder. And our client governments in the broken-up
> remnants of Russia will restore our cheap gas.
> 
> No need for anyone to yank a chain. The assessment of the prospects of success
> may have been faulty, but the decision made on its basis was rational.

Germany could have also felt pressure to make a move, so to speak, as their
economic model was faltering after years of mismanagement. According to Yanis
Varoufakis:

> The tables have been turned on Germany because its economic model relied
> on repressed wages, cheap Russian gas, and excellence in mid-tech mechanical
> engineering – particularly manufacturing cars with internal combustion
> engines. Germans are now slowly coming to terms with the demise of their
> economic model and are beginning to see through the multifaceted Big Lie their
> elites were repeating for three decades: Fiscal surpluses were not prudence in
> action, but rather a monumental failure, during the long years of ultra-low
> interest rates, to invest in clean energy, critical infrastructure, and the
> two crucial technologies of the future: batteries and artificial intelligence.
> Germany’s dependence on Russian gas and Chinese demand was never sustainable
> in the long term; and they are not mere bugs that can be ironed out.

Essentially Germany’s elite relied for too long on wage suppression and fell
behind in the innovation race. As Irrational points out:

> …after reunification real wages stagnated and under the governments led by
> Gerhard Schröder in the late 90s-early 00s, they declined as this chart shows.
> But the extent is of course far greater now – loss of 4% in real terms last
> year. If they were trying to preemptively head off economic decline, well,
> grabbing Russian and Ukrainian resources makes more sense.

The House Always Wins?

We need only look back to the European polling quoted above to show that the
well-off aren’t all that worried about inflation and other economic
inconveniences for themselves from the war with Russia. So what if industry
is relocated to “low-cost” regions of the Balkans or the US?. So what about
paying higher energy bills? This is a positive for the bourgeoisie Greens
steering the ship in Germany as they’re enacting many of their environmental
policies despite the damage to the working class.

There is also evidence that the German elite are using the crisis to push
right-wing neoliberal ideology and strengthen its chokehold over the German
economy. Michael Hudson summarizes:

> The economy is to be Thatcherized – all by riding the crest of the American
> anti-Russian sanctions and claiming that this creates a crisis requiring
> dismantling of public infrastructure and its privatization and
> financialization.

So it goes. This is on display in German budget plans currently in disarray for
2024, which impose deep austerity everywhere except the military. It’s evident
in the growth of Germany’s private equity and venture capital industry,
which tripled in size from 2012-2021, and that trend is picking up
steam. According to Reuters, International and U.S. law firms continue to invest
in Germany, with international mergers and acquisitions, finance and private
equity hires driving legal market growth in the country:

> Reed Smith is the latest to add to its Munich office, roping in two partners
> from U.S. rival McDermott Will and Emery, including its German private equity
> group leader, Nikolaus von Jacobs, the firm said last week.
> 
> Other U.S. law firms have also grown in Munich, most notably Morgan, Lewis &
> Bockius, which opened its second German office there in March with a
> 19-attorney group from rival Shearman & Sterling, including its country head
> and M&A leader Florian Harder.
> 
> Kirkland & Ellis, McDermott, Dechert, DLA Piper, Allen & Overy, Ashurst and
> Dentons all added transactional partners in the Bavarian capital this year.
> Goodwin Procter, which launched a Munich office last year, called the city “a
> private equity hub.”

And from Deutsche Welle:

> A study published in May by the financial research collective
> Finanzwende found that private equity firms bought 174 German doctors’
> practices in 2022, up from 140 in 2021 and just two in 2010. And, according to
> research by the public broadcaster NDR, such firms now own hundreds of
> practices across Germany, to the extent that single chains have a monopoly in
> certain regions and towns.

The financialization of Germany is also showing up in how the German people are
getting squeezed and are increasingly angry. From Reuters:

> Some 80% said they considered the economic situation in Germany as unjust, up
> 32 percentage points from 2021, and 60% of Germans said they saw society as
> divided – principally between rich and poor – up 20 percentage points compared
> with May 2022, according to the More in Common research organization. …
> 
> Low and middle income households have been generally hit harder by inflation,
> Florian Dorn, a researcher at Ifo told Reuters. Workers in Germany, Europe’s
> biggest economy, lost around 4.1% of their purchase power in 2022, research by
> the WSI institute published in July showed.
> 
> Although higher energy import prices initially drove inflation in Europe and
> Germany, companies were also putting up prices beyond their cost inflation,
> WSI analysis showed. Companies’ profit inflation rose by 7% in 2022 compared
> to an only 3.3% rise in labour costs.

Living standards are expected to continue to decline as due to social programs
losing out to industry aid and/or military spending. Economics minister Habeck
says he wants a subsidized electricity price for industry of 6 eurocents per
kilowatt-hour. Germans are currently paying about 40 eurocents for their retail
electricity supply. Industries in the US or France enjoy prices as low as 4
eurocents.

The problem is Habeck’s plan is opposed by members in his own Green party who
don’t want to subsidize heavy industry that uses gas and oil, and deficit hawks
don’t want to spend the money. The higher energy prices for now are falling most
heavily on smaller firms that cannot absorb the cost. From Deutsche Welle:

> The Deputy Chairman of the powerful metalworkers’ union IG Metall, Jürgen
> Kerner, added that medium-sized, family-owned companies currently have “no
> prospects of continuing their business.” There’s great uncertainty, he said,
> as “aluminum smelters cease production, and foundries and forges are losing
> orders.” IG Metall’s local branches were increasingly reporting insolvency
> administrators in the companies, planning “layoffs, insolvencies, and business
> closures.”

The fact is Germany just doesn’t have enough money to ramp up military spending
and subsidize energy costs for industry. As a result, it is becoming more like
the US –  more financialization, more outsourcing, and more military spending.

Foreign policy-wise, the bumbling Scholz, the former trampoline athlete foreign
minister, and the children’s book author economics minister running the show
have volunteered all of Germany to lead the ongoing charge against Russia in
Europe while Washington focuses on China. Simultaneously, Germany must scale
back remaining economic ties with China and ramp up military spending against
Russia. Like a gambler on a losing streak, the German elite is unwilling to walk
away now. From German Foreign Policy:

> The German government seeks to adapt and upgrade the German army for possible
> war with Russia, according to the New Defense Policy Guidelines presented by
> German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius last week. Berlin remains committed to
> increasing its military strength and declares “deterrence” of Moscow as the
> Bundeswehr’s core task. In the guidelines, there is no mention of possible
> negotiated solutions and de-escalation. Ignoring NATO’s war of aggression
> against Yugoslavia in 1999, the authors claim that Russia brought war back to
> Europe in early 2022. Germany must therefore become “combat-ready” as quickly
> as possible. The two focal points of the document – the expansion of national
> military capabilities and the orientation of the Bundeswehr towards war with
> Russia – do not represent a “Zeitenwende” in German military policy. They have
> been continuously promoted by German governments for years, throughout several
> legislative terms. On the basis of new military clout, Berlin is seeking a
> leading military role in Europe and a “creative power” within NATO.

In a certain light, you can see the rationale for keeping up the New Cold War
with Russia. If not, people are going to start asking a lot more questions about
just what Berlin gets out of the relationship with the US, how Scholz and
company were so derelict in duty, what exactly happened with the Nord Streams,
why their living standards have plummeted, what about the diverging fortunes of
Germany and Russia (as Gilbert Doctorow writes, “Russia is transitioning to gas
heating in the countryside – Europe is moving to log fireplaces in the city”).

If elections were held today in Germany it looks like they would be dominated by
the center-right CDU and the AfD: Tweet

Readers, please correct me if I’mm wrong, but wouldn’t a CDU government be
largely a continuation of current policies.

It remains to be seen for how long the German elite can escape the effects of
the widespread anger among the citizenry and rising nationalists who want to put
Germany first, but their conception of Germany often excludes the country’s
roughly 19 million people who either immigrated to the country since 1950 or are
the children of immigrants. The AfD is especially wary of Muslims that now make
up nearly seven percent of the German population.

Another factor that contributes to Germany’s worsening predicament is just plain
inertia, as Aurelian described in a recent comment here:

> …After WW2, Germany was understandably a little unpopular with its immediate
> neighbours. The Adenauer generation recognised that the only way back to
> international respectability was through membership of multilateral
> institutions and through, effectively, giving much of its sovereignty away to
> others, such that it was not seen as a threat. Germany was therefore a member
> of the European Coal and Steel Community from 1951, and of the EEC from the
> start in 1958. German remilitarisation, grudgingly accepted by other European
> states, actually turned out to be a better solution than the original idea of
> a Western Treaty Organisation as a permanent military alliance against
> Germany. All German troops were put under NATO control, and the Bundeswehr was
> not allowed to have its own operational HQ, and so could not conduct national
> missions. This, together with the subordinate relationship to France under the
> 1962 Elysée Treaty, was a kind of voluntary masochism, which helped to deflect
> very real fears of German revanchism. (Those fears, incidentally, are a large
> part of the explanation of why European states were keen to continue with NATO
> after the end of the Cold War). This subservience produced several generations
> of German diplomats and military officers (and I met many of them) whose
> greatest concern was to be seen as “good Europeans” and “good members of
> NATO.” Whilst they didn’t agree with the US on everything, a German government
> which followed the US lead could never be criticised.
> 
> It’s changed a lot since then, of course, with the change in the balance of
> the Franco-German relationship and the complete transformation of the European
> security scene. It’s been observed especially that, on the rebound after
> decades of good behaviour, the Germans don’t have the diplomatic reflexes they
> really need, and risk getting themselves into an incredible mess. The
> existential problem of what Germany even is, never solved in its history,
> means that for many in positions of authority, the best and easiest solution
> is to follow the US, because that worked well in the past.

But when that habit of following the US is eventually upset, it could come
quickly and unleash unforeseen consequences. For how long will Germany (and
Europe) continue to become more authoritarian in effort to preserve this
inertia?

All it might take would be a German government that starts pursuing policies
that are in the interest of the majority of Germans, and Europe’s role as the
frontline in the New Cold War could collapse like a house of cards.

………………

Source

…………….



One Hour of German Communist Music (1:13:35 min) Audio Mp3

…………………

One Hour of DDR German Communist Music (1:02:33 min) Audio Mp3

…………………….

One Hour of Anti-Fascist Resistance Music (1:00:16 min) Audio Mp3

…………………

https://archive.ph/Zkbe3



| Tagged afd, elections, germany, libertarian, political-clout, repeal,
social-media


MOSCOW ON THE ROCKS – BY PEPE ESCOBAR – 9 DEC 2023

Posted on December 10, 2023 by xenagoguevicene | Leave a comment

• 1,000 WORDS • 

And then, casually, almost as an afterthought while meeting Donbass heroes,
Putin announces he will run for President again in next March’s elections.
Considering his massive popularity – at least 80% nationally – he’s bound to
remain in power until 2030.

Welcome to VVP-2024. Plenty of time for serial meetings with his dear friend Xi
Jinping. The Russia-China strategic partnership – in charge of paving the road
to multipolarity – is scheduled to be rocking more progressively than Emerson,
Lake and Palmer in Tarkus (“Have you walked in the stones of years?”)

These have been heady days in dazzling, snowy Moscow. To start with, let’s go on
a roll call of all those indicators which are being reluctantly admitted even by
rabid NATOstan media.

A manufacturing boom is in effect in a semi war economy. Investments are up, up
and away – including by dodgy Russian oligarchs who can’t park their funds in
the West anymore.

Tourism is up and up – including legions of Chinese tour groups and everyone and
his neighbor from West, Central and South Asia. There’s an oil and gas export
boom – as EU clients continue to buy gas via Turkey or to the delight of New
Delhi, Repackaged in India oil.

The yuan replaces the U.S. dollar and the euro.

Import substitution rules – while in parallel Made in Turkey or Made in China
products replace Europeans.

Last January, the IMF was betting that the Russian economy would shrink by 2.3%.
Now this outpost of the Treasury Department admits Russian GDP will grow by
2.2%. Actually it’s 3%, according to Putin himself, based on figures provided by
the “Disrupter” (as described by a Western rag), Madame Elvira Nabiullina.

Behind the Moveable Feast’s curtains

I have been privileged to be part of key meetings on everything from the latest
in the Ukraine-Belarus front to still secret, top-flight studies on the ideal
mechanism to bypass the U.S. dollar in payment settlements.

A small group of us, invited by the International Russophile Movement (MIR),
were treated to a detailed visit to the astonishing Sretensky monastery complex,
defined by mega cool guy Larry Johnson as an unparalleled architectural jewel
where one may experience “the palpable presence of God.”

Then there was the requisite ritual, long, languid dinner with a stunning
Princess in unmatchable Patriarch’s Ponds – Moscow’s Soho; talking to the young,
future generation planning a new ground-breaking think tank in St. Petersburg;
the mesmerizing Russia exhibition at the VDNKh – complete with a four-story
underground bunker built by Rosatom to highlight the history of the Russian
nuclear program.

Yes: there are replicas of the supersonic TU-144, the K3 Leninsky Komsomol
nuclear submarine and even the Tsar Bomba. Not to mention Gagarin’s rocket
lighted as if it’s starring on a psychedelic trip.

The spirit of Christmas in on at Red Square – complete with skating rink and
countless Christmas trees from every Russian region displayed at GUM.

Welcome to the true multipolar Moveable Feast; and in the era of genocide in
every smartphone, unlike Hemingway’s time a century ago, that’s not exactly
taking place in gloomy and fearful Paris.

Dialogue at the highest diplomatic level, coordinated by MIR, followed Chatham
House rules: we may talk about the – priceless – information debated and
disclosed, but identities and affiliations should not be revealed.

That allows us to stress a few crucial points.

High-level Russian diplomacy was stunned to discover that Europe was much more
dogmatic than many believed. “A new generation” is needed for dialogue to resume
– but that does not seem to be in the cards anytime soon.

Embassies should work as mediators. Yet that’s not the case – especially when it
comes to the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

Russia will not (italics mine) initiate a diplomatic dialogue. A sense of threat
is very real in Russia. Diplomatic channels conveyed this message to the
Americans, behind closed doors.

On the wishful thinking by has-beens such as former NATO secretary-general
Anders “Fogh of War” Rasmussen, bragging on blocking St. Petersburg out of the
Baltic Sea: “This is something that may end up very badly.”

The abyss of NATO’s humiliation



Amidst what has been correctly described as “sovereign- organized hypocrisy”,
there were glimpses of a possible united intellectual initiative between Russia,
the Global South and a few dissident Americans and Europeans to steer the
collected West into accepting multipolarity. Yet what reigns for now is what was
defined as “dark patterns” – including a question still without an answer, posed
by the gold, platinum and rare earth analytical standard, Alastair Crooke: how
come the West was so supine to Woke-ism?

Much was learned about Russian adaptability to sanctions and the strengthening
of the national character, parallel to the economy. So Nabiullina was right
after all: no wonder Russians feel more self-confident than before.

Still there are no illusions when it comes to the multi-layered Hegemon-led
Hybrid War: “Russia must be punished – and for many generations. Russians should
know their place”. That mindset is not going away. So it takes a unified Russia
under Putin and the Orthodox Church to fight something so “existentially
serious”.

And then there’s the deep dimension of the Special Military Operation. What’s
going on in the Donbass steppes is seen as a spiritual challenge as well. So the
Hegelian spirit had to be evoked: people as a whole committed to victory – even
more now as the Hegemon is completely freaking out staring at the abyss of
NATO’s cosmic humiliation.

Considering all of the above, no wonder in each of my long walks in the middle
of the Moscow night there was always a Milky Way of thought swirling by. Then
I’d stop in one of my favorite digs, pour the last chilled vodka, and toast to
galactic multipolarity. Far away but yet within reach.

……………….

(Republished from Strategic Culture Foundation)




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