Latest articles
by Eric Zuesse / March 11th, 2024
Holocaust-deniers say that the Holocaust didn’t exist even though, according to historian Hans Müller, Hitler proudly told the Pope’s representative, Archbishop Berning, on 26 April 1933, “I am doing what the Church has done for 1,500 years. I am simply finishing the job.” Furthermore, Hitler, in the privacy of his bunker (as transcribed there by the lawyer Heinrich Heim during Hitler’s Table-Talk), concluded, on 21 October 1941, a lengthy tirade against Jews, with: “By exterminating this pest, we shall do humanity a service of which our soldiers can have no idea.”
So, too, and just as clearly, …
by Peter Bolton / March 11th, 2024
A United Nations (UN) report recently emerged making damning claims of sexual violence allegedly committed by Hamas. But not all is as it seems. The report has some glaring epistemological problems, all of which seem to serve the Israeli narrative that its genocide in Gaza is somehow justified. Moreover, the report fits within a wider modus operandi on the part of the world’s preeminent international institution. A more comprehensive examination of the history of the UN’s role in the conflict in Palestine reveals its supposed pro-Palestinian bias is not as clearcut as it’s commonly presented. Indeed, there is evidence that …
by Greg Godels / March 11th, 2024
Whither China? was the name of a widely circulated pamphlet authored by the respected Anglo-Indian Marxist author, R. Palme Dutt. Writing in 1966, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in the throes of the “Cultural Revolution,” the pamphlet sought to shed light on the PRC’s tortured road from liberation in 1949 to a vast upheaval disrupting all aspects of Chinese society as well as foreign relations. To most people — across the entire political spectrum — developments within this Asian giant were a challenge to understand. To be sure, there were zealots outside of the PRC who hung on …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 11th, 2024
The steady and ruthless campaign by Israel to internationally defund the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), is unravelling. The lynchpin in the effort was a thin, poison pen dossier making claims that 12 individuals were Hamas operatives who had been involved in the October 7 attacks. Within a matter of days, two internal investigations were commenced, various individuals sacked, and US$450 million worth of funding from donor states suspended.
As the head of the agency, Philippe Lazzarini, explained at a press conference on March 4, he has “never been informed” or received …
As the official case against Assange stagnates, an international movement to free him has only grown stronger
by Kevin Gosztola / March 11th, 2024
In March 2023, when my book on the case against Julian Assange was published, the detained WikiLeaks founder was waiting to find out if an appeals court in London would allow him to appeal extradition to the United States.
Now, Guilty of Journalism: The Political Case Against Julian Assange [review] has been available on bookshelves for one year—and Assange still does not know if he has permission to appeal.
Such limbo has developed into a feature of the prosecution against Assange. The march of time whittles away at Assange …
by Colin Todhunter / March 10th, 2024
The food transition, the energy transition, net-zero ideology, programmable central bank digital currencies, the censorship of free speech and clampdowns on protest. What’s it all about? To understand these processes, we need to first locate what is essentially a social and economic reset within the context of a collapsing financial system.
Writer Ted Reece notes that the general rate of profit has trended downwards from an estimated 43% in the 1870s to 17% in the 2000s. By late 2019, many companies could not generate enough profit. Falling turnover, squeezed margins, limited cash flows and highly leveraged balance sheets were prevalent.
Professor …
by Ellen Brown / March 9th, 2024
In 2017, Phil Murphy, a former Goldman Sachs executive, made the establishment of a public, state-owned bank a centerpiece issue during his run for New Jersey governor. He regularly championed public banking in speeches, town halls and campaign commercials. He won the race, and the nation’s second state-owned bank following the stellar model of the Bank of North Dakota (BND) appeared to be in view.
Due to the priority of other economic-policy goals, the initiative was largely kept on the back burner until November 2019. Then, in an article titled “Murphy Takes First Key Step Toward Establishing a Public Bank,” …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 9th, 2024
The town hall meeting is the last throbbing reminder of the authentic demos. People gather; debates held. Views converge; others diverge. Speakers are invited to stir the invitees, provoke the grey cells. Till artificial intelligence banishes such gatherings, and the digital cosmos swallows us whole, cherish these events.
And there was much to cherish about Night Falls in the Evening Lands: The Assange Epic, part of a global movement to publicise the importance of freeing WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who remains in the forbidding confines of Belmarsh Prison in London. Held on March 9 in Melbourne’s Storey Hall, it was …
by Dan Lieberman / March 9th, 2024
No evil in post-World War II history matches Israel in its genocide of the Palestinian people. The ultimate evil used the October 7 single attack on fortified Israel as an excuse to destroy a defenseless people ─ driving them from their homes, killing them in the open, limiting their access to water, making them susceptible to contagious diseases, moving them around into desperation, and terrifying the children into life-long traumas. Apparently, that evil-doing was insufficient for the morally bankrupt Israel; its government decided to turn a debilitated, shocked, and pleading population into starving corpses.
Added to this evil are its allies …
The 2024 Oscars
by William Kaufman / March 9th, 2024
The annual rites of Oscar are nigh (Sunday, March 10), in case you hadn’t noticed—and given the sharply declining trend of the show’s ratings over the past decade, you probably hadn’t. Once a momentous occasion of national mind-melding of near-Super Bowl proportions, this increasingly tedious exercise in tacky self-aggrandizement and PC hectoring from gazillionaire celebrities now barely registers a blip on the radar of national consciousness, with scarcely a bounce for its winners at the sacred box office.
But the woke overlords of showbiz aren’t getting the message. Ever since the bold and the beautiful of Hollywood paraded before …
And its partner groups
by Stuart Littlewood / March 9th, 2024
Mass marches, chanting and banner waving are essential to the campaign but it’s also important to challenge UK Government policy and actions through ALL democratic channels, especially now that Lord Walney recommends that political leaders ban their MPs from engaging with PSC and suchlike. Lord Walney, aka John Woodcock, is a former chairman of Labour Friends of Israel but PSC and mainstream media, strangely, don’t mention this important fact.
Meanwhile, UKGov (Department for Business and Trade) have dismissed a petition calling for all licences for arms to Israel to be revoked. Their excuse is that “we rigorously assess every application on …
by Allen Forrest / March 9th, 2024
Propaganda and Possibilities
by Paul Larudee / March 9th, 2024
The airdrops in Gaza began as a Jordanian project to resupply its small field hospital, established in 2009, in Tel al-Hawa in northern Gaza in early November, 2023. Toward the end of November, Jordan established a second field hospital in Khan Younis, southern Gaza, also supplied by airdrops. At least 21 airdrops have been made to these two facilities until now.
Several have been made in cooperation with France, the UK and the UAE.
The Jordanian airdrops demonstrate that they need not be ineffectual. While they are costly, often wasteful (due to inaccuracies in the drop location and other factors) and thus …
by Edward Curtin / March 8th, 2024
Sometimes it takes our bodies to return us to our souls. And our little pains to remind us of the indescribable pain of the savage killing and dismemberment of innocent children and adults in Gaza and many other places by U.S. weapons produced in clean factories by people just doing their jobs and collecting their pay at “defense” contractors Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Pfizer, etc. Abstraction is the name of the game as human bodies are torn to pieces “over there” and the obscene profits are transferred at the computer terminals day and night.
Living in a technological world of the internet …
by Robert Hunziker / March 8th, 2024
Antarctica, the massive continent of ice, the size of the continental US and Mexico combined, is breaking apart more and more as a recent scientific expedition discovered unambiguous signals of considerably more danger than previously realized.
“The changes to the sea-ice indicate that in the coming decades coastal cities will need to be reconfigured because of sea level rise,” according to Craig Stevens, Auckland, Professor of Physical Oceanography. (“Signs Found of Worryingly Fast Antarctic Ice Melt – New Zealand Expedition”, RNZ, March 3, 2024.)
Sea level rise for coastal cities, the world’s worst nightmare, is coming within indeterminate decades but probably sooner …
by Michael K. Smith / March 8th, 2024
We will destroy everything not Jewish.
— Theodore Herzl [1]
We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads . . . . You Palestinians, as a nation, don’t want us today, but we’ll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you.
— Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan [2]
The common denominator amongst all the American peace efforts is their abysmal failure.
— Cheryl A. Rubenberg [3]
USrael’s disgraceful conduct in Gaza goes on, and on and on. Leveling hospitals, shooting children in the head; gunning down a surgeon …
by Melissa Garriga / March 8th, 2024
President Biden’s State of the Union address made one thing clear: war, genocide, and militarism remains the Amercian way. From Gaza to Ukraine, from the Middle East to the borders of our own nation, the toll of violence from militarism is immeasurable. Will we ever see an end to the cycle of destruction fueled by capitalism and U.S. imperialism?
Firstly, let’s address the white elephant in the war. Before the speech started, Democratic women leaders were shown wearing white in honor of women and feminism. But let’s be very clear, whether it’s women sending bombs or men, the result remains …
by Vijay Prashad / March 8th, 2024
A Red Books Day event at the May Day Bookstore in Delhi (India), 2024.
It is nearly impossible to think of joy while Israel continues its genocidal violence against Palestinians and while the terrible war escalates in the eastern flank of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Tens of thousands of people have been killed and injured and millions displaced in Gaza and near Goma (DRC). In both these places, the immediate demand must be to end the …
by Dan Lieberman / March 8th, 2024
Military strategists, foreign policy experts, and Russian dissidents have analyzed the Russian invasion of Ukraine for Western audiences. How accurate are pundits who always introduce a slight slant to please a specific audience? Read between the lines, choose the best fit and two years of Putin’s “special military operation” looks like this…to me.
Initially, Russia sought to extend its borders to the Dnipro River, a natural dividing line, that would have incorporated Kyiv, Kharkiv, and possibly Odessa into the motherland.
The initial thrust brought a caravan of Russian tanks to the gates of Kyiv. Special forces entered Kyiv and Kharkiv …
by Allen Forrest / March 8th, 2024
by Robert Jensen / March 8th, 2024
“Where do you find hope?”
“How do you sustain hope?”
Those are probably the most common questions in response to more than three decades of writing and lecturing about today’s multiple cascading social and ecological crises.
For years I struggled with how to answer, wanting to be honest but sensitive to the anxiety that typically motivates questioners. My answers have changed over the years, but my various responses always seemed inadequate to me.
In the past few years, after much reflection about my life, I have settled on a simple response: I do not find hope anywhere, and I …
"I'm full of grief that Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful people in the government, continues to fund lethal weapons to kill Children in Gaza with our tax dollars"
by Codepink / March 8th, 2024
WASHINGTON – Two CODEPINK members from California were arrested outside Rep Nancy Pelosi’s office today in D.C. after Pelosi refused to talk with them. They have been requesting meetings for months to speak with the California representative about the urgent need for a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and that her constituents do not want their tax dollars going to Israel to sustain the genocide and occupation of Gaza.
“I’m full of grief that Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful people in the government, continues to fund lethal weapons to kill Children in Gaza with our tax dollars,” said Cynthia Papermaster, …
by Allen Forrest / March 7th, 2024
Can the masses benefit when a few people hoard the wealth?
by Binoy Kampmark / March 6th, 2024
The spectacle, if it did not say it all, said much of it. Planes dropping humanitarian aid to a starving, famine-threatened populace of Gaza (the United Nations warns that 576,000 are “one step from famine”), with parachuted packages veering off course, some falling into the sea. Cargo also coming into Israel, with bullets, weaponry and other ordnance to kill those in Gaza on the inflated premise of self-defence. Be it aid or bullets, Washington is the smorgasbord supplier, ensuring that both victims and oppressors are furnished from its vast commissary.
This jarring picture, discordant and hopelessly at odds, is increasingly …
by Jonathan Cook / March 6th, 2024
We all understand that, shamefully, a number of Zionist Jews and non-Jews identify so completely with Israel that they are not only willing to excuse the mass slaughter and starvation of civilians in Gaza but think others should not even be allowed to express disquiet at the slaughter.
Hardline Zionists tell us they find concern for the welfare of Palestinians “offensive”, and that they feel “unsafe” when others raise such concerns or call for a ceasefire to end the bloodshed.
The question for the rest of us is: How do we deal with those “sensitivities”, and how much do we prioritise …
by William Kaufman / March 6th, 2024
The annual rites of Oscar are nigh (Sunday, March 10), in case you hadn’t noticed—and given the sharply declining trend of the show’s ratings over the past decade, you probably hadn’t. Once a momentous occasion of national mind-melding of near-Super Bowl proportions, this increasingly tedious exercise in tacky self-aggrandizement and PC hectoring from gazillionaire celebrities now barely registers a blip on the radar of national consciousness, with scarcely a bounce for its winners at the sacred box office.
But the woke overlords of showbiz aren’t getting the message. Ever since the bold and the beautiful of Hollywood paraded before …
by Allen Forrest / March 6th, 2024
by Binoy Kampmark / March 5th, 2024
The history of such experiments is not promising. Why would those in the US like the game of rugby league, when an established code of superficial similarity already exists? Fundamental differences, for one thing, abound. The US NFL Superbowl tries to keep blood and violence off the pitch. Force, when exercised, is chivalric, the moves ceremonially packaged. Such contests are astonishingly contained, hemmed in by a distinct netting of protocol and protections. These US padded gladiators remain calm, composed and, when irate, kept within the confines of expected conduct.
Rugby league extols speed, the violent tackle, the brutish push, the military …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / March 5th, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court was right to keep President Trump’s name on the ballot.
The high court’s decree that the power to remove a federal candidate from the ballot under the Constitution’s “insurrectionist ban” rests with Congress, not the states, underscores the fact that in a representative democracy, the citizenry—not the courts, not the corporations, and not the contrived electoral colleges—should be the ones to elect their representatives.
Unfortunately, what is being staged is not an election. It is a mockery of an election, a manufactured, contrived “pseudo-event” devoid of any intrinsic value save the value of being advertised.
For …
by Binoy Kampmark / March 4th, 2024
It can take much bruising, much ridicule, and much castigation to eventually reach the plateau of wisdom. Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim, who took office in November 2022, is one such character. Like a hero anointed by the gods for grand deeds and fine achievements, he was duly attacked and maligned, accused of virtually every heinous crime in the criminal code. Sodomy and corruption featured. Two prison spells were endured.
His whole fall from grace as deputy-prime minister was all the more revealing for being instigated by his politically insatiable mentor, Mahathir bin Mohammed, Southeast Asia’s wiliest, and most ruthless politician. …
