Latest articles
by Roger D. Harris / January 17th, 2024
Now, 200 years after President James Monroe first promulgated his dictate giving the Yankees dominion of the rest of the hemisphere, a congressional resolution calls for annulling the Monroe Doctrine and replacing it with a “new good neighbor” policy. The intent is to “foster improved relations and deeper, more effective cooperation” with our neighbor nations.
Led by Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) and cosponsored by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Delia Ramirez (D-IL), Chuy García (D-AZ), and Greg Casar (D-TX), House Resolution 943 notably calls for ending unilateral coercive economic measures against Cuba and other regional states. Initially introduced on December 19, 2023, …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / January 17th, 2024
What’s to stop the U.S. government from throwing the kill switch and shutting down phone and internet communications in a time of so-called crisis?
After all, it’s happening all over the world.
Communications kill switches have become tyrannical tools of domination and oppression to stifle political dissent, shut down resistance, forestall election losses, reinforce military coups, and keep the populace isolated, disconnected and in the dark, literally and figuratively.
In an internet-connected age, killing the internet is tantamount to bringing everything—communications, commerce, travel, the power grid—to a standstill.
In Myanmar, for example, the internet shutdown came on the day a newly elected …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 17th, 2024
What a cowardly act it was. A national broadcaster, dedicated to what should be fearless reporting, cowed by the intemperate bellyaching of a lobby concerned about coverage of the Israel-Gaza war. The investigation by The Age newspaper was revealing in showing that the dismissal of broadcaster Antoinette Lattouf last December 20 was the nasty fruit of a campaign waged against the corporation’s management. This included its chair, Ita Buttrose, and managing director David Anderson.
The official reason for that dismissal was disturbingly ordinary. Lattouf had not, for instance, decided to become a flag-swathed bomb thrower for the Palestinian cause. She …
by Allen Forrest / January 17th, 2024
Not everybody clues in at the same rate. Unfortunately some never will clue in.
by C.J. Hopkins / January 17th, 2024
So, my trial for thoughtcrimes in New Normal Germany takes place next Tuesday, January 23rd. It will likely be a one-day affair. It’s open to the public, so, if you’re in Berlin, you can come and watch at the Berlin District Court, Turmstraße 91, Room 371. The proceedings are scheduled to begin at 12:00 noon.
Yes, that’s right, the German authorities are actually putting me on trial for my thoughtcrimes. I stand accused of criminal tweeting because I mocked the New Normal German authorities and pointed out one of their many lies. Here are the two thoughtcrime Tweets at issue.
…
by David Penner / January 16th, 2024
Poor Ophelia divided from herself and her fair judgment
Without the which we are pictures, or mere beasts….
— Hamlet (IV.v.)
As was the case with the British and Roman empires that preceded it, Washington has long had a fondness for the divide and conquer paradigm and has ruthlessly fomented sectarianism in the post-Cold War era. This frenetic push towards sectarianization has ushered in a new dark age of socio-economic chaos and failed states, an amenable environment for rapacious corporate entities to ravage and plunder. Furthermore, in neoliberal ideology US-backed extremists are invariably hailed as the guardians of tolerance and reason locked in …
South Africa and Israel bear the trauma of Europe’s long history of racial supremacism, but each has drawn precisely opposite lessons
by Jonathan Cook / January 16th, 2024
It should surprise no one that the prize-match fight for the rule of international law has pitted Israel and South Africa against each other at the International Court of Justice at The Hague.
The world is split between those who have crafted a self-serving global and regional order that guarantees them impunity whatever their crimes, and those who pay the price for that arrangement.
Now the long-time victims are fighting back at the so-called World Court.
Last week, each side presented its arguments for and against whether Israel has implemented a genocidal policy in Gaza over the past three …
The renunciation of war in international law
by T.P. Wilkinson / January 16th, 2024
At regular intervals the high representatives of the Allied Powers (West) congregate to commemorate the “kick-off” that led we are told to victory in Europe ending part of the hostilities in the Second World War. They meet on the often-cold beaches of Normandy, the western coastal region of France from which William the Conqueror led his hordes to decimate what became Great Britain and establish the monarchy and aristocracy, which until the end of 1947 comprised rulers of the most extended imperial state in history. There, the successors to the temporary autocrats of the US, Britain and France, engage in …
by Allen Forrest / January 16th, 2024
But what’s happened has happed.
by Colin Todhunter / January 16th, 2024
The modern food system is being shaped by the capitalist imperative for profit. Aside from losing their land to global investors and big agribusiness concerns, farmers and ordinary people are being sickened by corporations and a system that thrives on the promotion of ‘junk’ (ultra-processed) food laced with harmful chemicals and cultivated with the use of toxic agrochemicals.
It’s a highly profitable situation for investment firms like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity and Capital Group and the food and agribusiness conglomerates they invest in. But BlackRock and others are not just heavily invested in the food industry. They also profit from …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 15th, 2024
There is something distinctly revolting and authoritarian about the royal prerogative. It reeks of clandestine assumption, unwarranted self-confidence and, most of all, a blithe indifference to accountability before elected representatives. That prerogative, in other words, is the last reminder of divine right, the fiction that a ruler can have powers vested by an unsubstantiated deity, the invisible God, and a punishing force beyond the reach of human control. It is anathema to democracy, a stain on republican models of government, a joke on any political system that has some claim on representing what might be called the broader citizenry.
On January …
by Mistahi Corkill / January 15th, 2024
The launch was Pyongyang’s first weapons test this year amid growing tensions with Seoul
by RT / January 15th, 2024
by Allen Forrest / January 15th, 2024
What the collapsed people have in common.
by Binoy Kampmark / January 15th, 2024
Israel’s relationship with the United Nations, international institutions and international law has at times bristled with suspicion and blatant hostility. In a famous cabinet meeting in 1955, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion famously knocked back the suggestion that the United Nations 1947 plan for partitioning Palestine had been instrumental in creating the State of Israel. “No, no, no!” he roared in demur. “Only the daring of the Jews created the state, and not any oom-shmoom resolution.”
In the shadow of the Holocaust, justifications for violence against foes mushroom multiply. Given that international law, notably in war, entails restraint and limits on …
A glorious moment against tyranny shadowed by an ignominy of helping tyranny
by Dan Lieberman / January 13th, 2024
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill desperately tried to persuade United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to declare war on Germany and enter World War II. The U.S. president recognized Nazi Germany’s threat to Western civilization and U.S. interests but his intuition told him that the American people were not ready for battle. Complicating a proposed alliance was FDR’s critical attitude toward the British Prime Minister; they had met at a 1919 post-World War I conference, where Roosevelt considered Churchill a heavy drinker who behaved in a superior manner. The British PM also represented the colonialists of the British Empire and …
Have We just Witnessed a Sea Change in American Racial Propaganda?
by Dave Fryett / January 13th, 2024
For most of American history the dominant racist line was that of the Great White Benefactor bringing the gifts of civilization and abundance to the backward, immiserate peoples of the world; to liberate them from idolatry, want and depravity. All nonsense, of course, but it served its perception management purpose and helped to garner the necessary support for the global pillage it was intended to camouflage. I came of age in the 1960s when that fictive narrative, its bankruptcy no longer concealable, began to invert. President Kennedy, in a nationally televised address, stated that “The treatment of the American Indian …
by Allen Forrest / January 13th, 2024
The world that new world elitists wish to usher in.
by Robert Hunziker / January 13th, 2024
Three years ago, 15,000 scientists declared a climate emergency by signing onto a State of the Climate Report. That signing led to annual updates, for example, the most recent version: The 2023 State of the Climate Report: Entering Uncharted Territory, Bioscience, vol. 73, issue 12, December 2023, Oxford Academic (aka: “The Report”).
The initial paragraph of The Report suggests a planetary juggernaut of cascading ecosystems altering life systems: “Life on planet Earth is under siege. We are now in uncharted territory… a situation no one has ever witnessed firsthand in the history of humanity.” Therefore, it’s fair to say nobody really …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / January 12th, 2024
When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal.
— Richard Nixon
Many years ago, a newspaper headline asked the question: “What’s the difference between a politician and a psychopath?”
The answer, then and now, remains the same: None.
There is no difference between psychopaths and politicians.
Nor is there much of a difference between the havoc wreaked on innocent lives by uncaring, unfeeling, selfish, irresponsible, parasitic criminals and elected officials who lie to their constituents, trade political favors for campaign contributions, turn a blind eye to the wishes …
by Ted Glick / January 12th, 2024
A solution of the present crisis will not take place unless men and women work for it. Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable. Even a superficial look at history reveals that no social advance rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals. Without persistent effort, time itself becomes an ally of the insurgent and primitive forces of irrational emotionalism and social destruction. This is no time for apathy or complacency. This is a time for vigorous and positive action.
— …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 12th, 2024
What a show! As US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was promoting a message of calm restraint and firm control in limiting the toxic fallout of Israel’s horrific campaign in Gaza, a decision was made by his government, the United Kingdom and a few other reticent collaborators to strike targets in Yemen, including the capital Sana’a. These were done, purportedly, as retribution for attacks on international commercial shipping in the Red Sea by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels.
The wording in a White House media release mentions the operation’s purpose and the relevant participants. “In response to continued illegal, dangerous, and …
by Allen Forrest / January 12th, 2024
The irony of where calling out a certain racist war criminal country gets you branded a racist.
by Media Lens / January 12th, 2024
Last week, the Observer reported that the slogan ‘united we will win’ is a fixture on Israeli screens ‘for most TV news and talk shows’. Raviv Drucker, one of Israel’s leading investigative journalists, commented:
In general, the Israeli media is drafted to the main goal of winning the war, or what looks like trying to win the war…
The shock [of 7 October] was so brutal, and the trauma is so hard that journalists see their role now, or part of their role, to help the state to win …
Israel’s allies aren’t just turning a blind eye to Gaza’s killing fields. They have cheered on the bloodshed, provided diplomatic cover and supplied the arms
by Jonathan Cook / January 12th, 2024
Israel is urging western states to rally to its side as the International Court of Justice prepares to hear this week South Africa’s case that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
The court is being asked by Pretoria to issue an immediate injunction ordering Israel to halt its military assault on the tiny enclave, to avoid further casualties.
Some 23,000 Palestinians are known to have been killed by Israel so far, a majority of them women and children, and many thousands more are believed to be lying under the rubble. Tens of thousands are seriously wounded. …
by Paul Larudee and Calvin Larudee / January 11th, 2024
If the International Court of Justice, AKA the World Court, convicts Israel of genocide or enjoins it from committing acts that contribute to genocide, it will not be on the basis of evidence or law. There will be deliberation before the fifteen judges announce their decision, but it will have little to do with the reason South Africa is requesting a judgment.
The fifteen judges that will meet in the Hague are eminent jurists, but their role is political, not legal. They will vote the way their country tells them to vote, not upon conclusions drawn from the proceedings. They were …
The Second Newsletter (2024)
by Vijay Prashad / January 11th, 2024
Liu Hongjie (China), Skyline, 2021.
Late last year, a colleague sent me a letter decrying some of my writings about China, notably the last newsletter of 2023. This newsletter is my response to him.
**
The situation in China is the cause of a great deal of consternation amongst the left. I am glad you have raised the issue of Chinese socialism with me directly.
We are living in very dangerous times, as you know. The United States’ accelerating tension with other powerful nations threatens the planet more now than …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / January 11th, 2024
The International Court of Justice. Photo credit: ICJ
On January 11th, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague is holding its first hearing in South Africa’s case against Israel under the Genocide Convention. The first provisional measure South Africa has asked of the court is to order an immediate end to this carnage, which has already killed more than 23,000 people, most of them women and children. Israel is trying to bomb Gaza into oblivion and scatter the terrorized survivors …
by Binoy Kampmark / January 11th, 2024
The role of the US State Department regarding Israel’s continued obliteration of Gaza is becoming increasingly clear. As the actions of the Israeli Defence Forces continue, the Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, is full of meaningless statements about restraint and control, the protection of civilians, the imperatives of humanitarianism in war. As the war continues, so do those statements.
As the new year began, an official from the White House expressed satisfaction at what appeared “to be the start of the gradual shift to lower-intensity operations in the north that we have been encouraging”. But the revised Israeli approach did …
by B.J. Sabri / January 10th, 2024
Yeah, because investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea. You should feel the same.
— Congressman Dan Crenshaw
Premise
Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell introduce their book, Hiroshima in America, with this imposing statement, “You cannot understand the twentieth century without Hiroshima.” Equally, we cannot understand the twenty-first century without knowing why Russia intervened in Ukraine.
Introduction
The U.S. proxy war with Russia by way of Ukraine is intensifying and maybe reaching a critical mass for direct war. Despite its military intervention, Russia was not seeking confrontation with …
