While the United States, along with its allies, left Afghanistan in August 2021 in spectacularly humiliating circumstances, the departure was never entirely complete, nor bound to be permanent. Since then, Washington has led the charge in handicapping those who, with a fraction of the resources, defeated a superpower and prevailed in two decades of conflict.
In a fit of wounded pride, the United States has, in turn, sought to strangulate and asphyxiate the Taliban regime, citing human rights and security concerns. The Taliban’s Interim Foreign Minister, Mawlawi Amir Khan Muttaqi, makes the not unreasonable point that “the ongoing crisis is …
Bassim Al Shaker (Iraq), Symphony of Death 1, 2019
The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) held its annual summit on 11–12 July in Vilnius, Lithuania. The communiqué released after the first day’s proceedings claimed that ‘NATO is a defensive alliance’, a statement that encapsulates why many struggle to grasp its true essence. A look at the latest military spending figures shows, to the contrary, that NATO countries, and countries closely allied to NATO, account for nearly three-quarters of the total annual global expenditure on weapons. Many …
I sit here in the silence of the awakening dawn’s stillness stunned by the realization that I exist. I wonder why. It is my birthday. The first rays of the rising sun bleed crimson over the eastern hills as I imagine my birth. The house and my family sleep.
Someday I will die and I wonder why. This is the mystery I have been contemplating since I was young. That and the fact that I was born in a time of war and that when my parents and sisters were celebrating my first birthday, my country’s esteemed civilian and military leaders …
On a trip to Japan in 2014, approaching the third anniversary of the Fukishima nuclear disaster, Noam Chomsky told an audience that:
‘Governments regard their own citizens as their main enemy.’
What he meant was that states do not wish their own populations to know and understand the details of government policies, for fear of provoking an adverse public reaction that would limit or derail the state’s ability to do whatever it wants.
Chomsky cited the example of the Iraqi city of Fallujah that was twice …
Nicholas Schou interviews Douglas Valentine about his new book, Pisces Moon: The Dark Arts of Empire, published in May of this year by Trine Day.
Listen To This Story
Introduction by Nicholas Schou:
In the early 1990s, when the US began to normalize relations with Vietnam, Douglas Valentine, then a young author and historian of US foreign policy based in New England, saw an opportunity to travel to Southeast Asia on a …
Hosting sporting events has always been a government’s formula to distract their seducible subjects. It’s the secular version of smells and bells, the warbling of the church choir turned into flesh and performance. If such occasions are of sufficient scale, they might even be political promotions, body beautiful types paraded and performing before clapping and glorifying spectators. Sponsors also have their share of exposure. Horrendous expenses can thereby be justified, raids on the treasury written off in the name of improving society’s spiritual being.
For all their heralded merits, mega sporting events usually have two clear outcomes: the budget blowout followed …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / July 18th, 2023
Get ready for the next phase of the government’s war on thought crimes: mental health round-ups and involuntary detentions.
Under the guise of public health and safety, the government could use mental health care as a pretext for targeting and locking up dissidents, activists and anyone unfortunate enough to be placed on a government watch list.
The Rise and Fall of Italy, The Netherlands, Britain and Yankeedom
by Bruce Lerro / July 18th, 2023
Orientation
How long has capitalism existed? Has it always been with us all the way back to tribal societies or is it a product of the modern age? Is there any pattern to its evolution? Is it cyclic, spiral-like or random? What is the nature of capitalist crises? Why does capitalism grow flush in certain parts of the world, die out in others and yet seemingly reignite itself in another part of the world? What can world-systems theory tell us about the current battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists of …
There’s only one plausible explanation for continuing silence on excess deaths: governments, media and regulators are frightened of what the research may uncover
by Jonathan Cook / July 18th, 2023
During the pandemic, the challenge for each of us was to maintain critical distance: spurning both the tribalism of those insisting Covid was a hoax and the counter-tribalism of those who demanded complete acquiesence to a corporate-political agenda dictated by Big Pharma under the mantle of “Follow the science”.
Fear of living under Big Brother or of dying from plague drove many people not only into the arms of one of these two oppositional camps but fuelled a pandemic mania in which reason and compassion were replaced with either extreme cynicism or …
In the intelligence business, every agent is assigned tasks by his or her handlers. In the case of Agent Zelensky, I’ve identified ten obligations that define his relationship with his foreign intelligence masters. Once you’ve examined each of these, it becomes clear why Zelensky the comedian said one thing, and Zelensky the President did another. What are the true reasons behind the current situation in Ukraine today? What kind of operation has the CIA been running in Ukraine over the course of many years? You will find the answers to these and other questions in Part 2 of my investigative …
As a former intelligence officer, I’ve been wondering why has no one done an investigation about Volodymyr Zelensky, the President of Ukraine? His rise to power, in my opinion, represents an incredible manipulation of world opinion that will go down in history as a classic case study in social psychological engineering: an ordinary comedian who came to power because he promised a long-awaited peace, who then dragged his fellow citizens into a bloody war that can only be described as a massacre. With the help of colleagues and experts with first-hand insights into Zelensky, I have poured over documents and …
With over 20 million inhabitants each, Shanghai and Beijing are among the “hypercities” of the Global South, including Delhi, São Paulo, Dhaka, Cairo, and Mexico City, far surpassing the “megacities” of the Global North like London, Paris, or New York.[efn_note]A metropolitan area that has a population between 20 million and 40 million is called a “hypercity,” and between 10 million and 20 million is a “megacity.”[/efn_note] Walking the streets in China’s cities, you will however, quickly notice one marked difference – the absence of large slums or pervasive homelessness that is so common …
Again, he was at it, that charming show on two legs, playful and coy. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been burning the charismatic fuel of late, making the necessary emissions in visiting friendly countries. Each time, he seems to be getting away with more and more, currying (pun intended) favour with his hosts and landing the necessary deals.
For all the excitement of going to a fellow cricket loving state such as Australia, no one was under any illusion about the prize. Easy gains there on matters of commerce, education and security: a pliant PM, a pliant Cabinet, a political …
• CATL develops and researches electric batteries in Germany
• More support measures for the real estate sector
• Clean energy targets achieved 5 years ahead of schedule
• China Railway completes 453 km/h train tests
Julian Assange is a journalist who’s been imprisoned for doing journalism on war crimes, by an empire that claims to defend journalists and oppose war crimes.
Assange and his persecution expose the giant plot holes in every story the western power structure tells about itself. About its love of free speech and the free press. About its opposition to tyranny. About its wars and why it wages them. Assange exposes the empire’s true face.
Battered, bruised, razed, raped, drawn and quartered by Our Masters
by Paul Haeder / July 15th, 2023
No words for emotions — alexithymia
New psychology research shows maltreatment in childhood is linked to alexithymia in adulthood. Its etymology comes from Ancient Greek. The word is formed by combining the alpha privative prefix ἀ- (a-, meaning ‘not’) with λέξις (léxis, referring to ‘words’) and θῡμός (thȳmós, denoting ‘disposition,’ ‘feeling,’ or ‘rage’). The term can be likened to “dyslexia” in its structure.
Hang on now. In this Anglo American culture, in this 1492 culture, in this Manifest Destiny Culture, a trail of tears is that history, compounded by the rapidity of media and lies and secrecy …
by Ariel Gold and Rev. Graylan Scott Hagler / July 15th, 2023
It was a bright sunny March morning in 1980. Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero was saying mass at a church hospital in San Salvador when a bullet from a sniper rifle ripped through his heart. He stumbled and fell to the ground, dead.
Romero started life and ministry as a conservative. But, after his friend Rev. Rutilio Grande was assassinated to discourage other faith leaders from supporting Salvadorian peasants, Romero underwent a political and theological conversion. Picking up where Grande left off, Romero embraced a “theology of liberation,” a perspective that espouses G-d’s …
Having dispatched Corbyn, the smear industry is targeting icons like Ken Loach and Roger Waters over their support for Palestinian rights and opposition to Nato’s war machine
by Jonathan Cook / July 15th, 2023
What does it mean to be antisemitic in modern Britain? The answer seems ever more confusing.
We have reached the seemingly absurd point that a political leader famed for his anti-racism, a rock star whose most celebrated work focuses on the dangers of racism and fascism, and a renowned film maker committed to socially progressive causes are all now characterised as antisemites.
And in a further irony, those behind the accusations do not appear to have made a priority of anti-racism themselves – not, at least, until it proved an effective means of defeating their political enemies.
As most compare Putin to Hitler, turn a blind eye to the U.S. sending cluster bombs to Zelenskyy the grifter, and witness the latest madness about Ukraine and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), please remember:
During the 1990 discussions to re-unify East and West Germany, the Western parties sought to defuse Moscow’s fears that a reunified state in the heart of Europe would present a threat to the Soviet Union.
Mikhail Gorbachev only accepted German reunification — over which the Soviet Union …
Religious conversions later in life are generally greeted as evidence that something terrible must have happened to the converter. The Onion published a satire in 2016, ridiculing Paul D’Amatol, who took up a life of Christian piety in late middle age. It must be ‘drugs or maybe he killed someone in a car accident. Something super messed up.’
No room in satire for something good as the cause. Interestingly, it’s not Protestant evangelical born-again-ism but the Catholic bells-and-smells and Islamic mysticism that attract those interested in spiritual growth as they approach the …
“Rather than collecting taxes from the wealthy,” wrote the New York Times Editorial Board in a July 7 opinion piece, “the government is paying the wealthy to borrow their money.”
Titled “America Is Living on Borrowed Money,” the editorial observes that over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), annual federal budget deficits will average around $2 trillion per year. By 2029, just the interest on the debt is projected to exceed the national defense budget, which currently eats up over half of the federal discretionary budget. In …
Republican lawmakers in the US Congress are unabashedly pro-global warming: “Bring it on! We’ve got air conditioners in our cars, offices, and homes… no sweat!” Not one Republican in Congress voted for the nation’s most inclusive climate bill of all time, the Inflation Reduction Act, not one Republican vote.
Meanwhile, here we go again, this coming fall, with Congress in another deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown. They must pass several spending bills by September 30th when current funding expires or face another ugly quasi-default situation. Leading up to this white-knuckle drop-dead deadline, Republican lawmakers have armed themselves with a …
Let’s be frank: watching Utopia hurts. It involves stinging your eyeballs, tearing your hair, and taking yourself to the ledge of a skyscraper to call the whole thing off. The fact that the characters are meant to be faux pleasing is no excuse not to loathe them.
This Australian satire on bureaucracy, specifically featuring the bureaucracy of infrastructure development, displays buffoonery, stupidity, and workplace retardation of hideous scale. It is a micro snapshot of the public service and its poisonous symbiosis with the political class, an insight into virtually any modern organisation in retreat from its principles. In it, we see …
Coverage of the destruction of the Kakhovka dam and Nord Stream pipelines shows a western media willing to prioritise anti-Russian propaganda over facts
by Jonathan Cook / July 14th, 2023
The hypocrisy gets starker by the day. The same western media that strains to warn of the dangers of disinformation – at least when it comes to rivals on social media – barely bothers to conceal its own role in purveying disinformation in the Ukraine war.
In fact, the propaganda peddled by the media grows more audacious by the day – as two stories last week from the frontlines illustrate only too clearly.
Dominating headlines has been the environmental catastrophe created by the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam under Russian control. Flood waters from the Dnipro river have ruined …
