The Canadian government’s plan to double its semipermanent military force on Russia’s border ratchets up tensions that should be reduced. It highlights the West’s betrayal of promises made to Soviet officials and Canada’s addiction to stationing troops in Europe.
On Monday Justin Trudeau announced that Canada will ramp up its military presence in Latvia. The government will add about 1,200 military personnel to the nearly 1,000 Canadians already deployed on Russia’s border. As part of the announcement Trudeau committed $2.6 billion over three years to expand Latvia-focused Operation REASSURANCE. “Canada will also procure and pre-position critical weapon systems, enablers, supplies …
The stark difference in treatment of the two truth-tellers is a measure of how state criminality is now completely unchecked
by Jonathan Cook / July 14th, 2023
Rightly, there’s been an outpouring of tributes to Daniel Ellsberg following the announcement of his death last Friday, aged 92. His leaking of the Pentagon Papers in 1971 revealed that Washington officials had systematically lied for decades about US military conduct in Vietnam.
The disclosure of 7,000 pages of documents, and subsequent legal battles to stop further publication by the New York Times and Washington Post, helped to bring the war to a close a few years later.
As an adviser to US Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara in the 1960s, Ellsberg had seen first-hand the Pentagon’s brutal military operations …
World Wars I and II were contests between empires, and so America’s President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was determined that after WW II, all empires would be outlawed and all international relations (between nations) would be controlled only by a global all-inclusive federation of nations, which in 1941 he referred to would be called “the United Nations” and which would exclusively possess the Executive, Legislative, and Juridical, powers and authorities — to make and enforce the international laws that would be created by that international Legislature of all nations, subject to that Supreme Court which would interpret that Legislature’s constitution …
It should be called for what it is. The recent apoplectic, lurid coverage of what was, at best, a matter for a corporation’s human resources department dominating several news cycles even as drownings continued in the Mediterranean, war continued being waged in Ukraine and climate change continued issuing ominous reminders of its existence.
The issue at hand? Allegations that a BBC presenter, said to be a “household name”, had paid £35,000 to a youth over a period of several years in return for sexually explicit photos. The payments are said to have started when the young person in question was 17, …
Nothing said from the nuclear industry can or should be taken for face value. Be it in terms of safety, or correcting defects or righting mistakes; be it in terms of construction integrity, there is something chilling about reassurances that have been shown, time and again, to be hollow.
The 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP) disaster has forever stained the Japanese nuclear industry. Since then, the site has been marked by over 1,000 tanks filled with contaminated water that arises from reactor cooling. The attempts by the Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc (TEPCO) to decommission and clean the …
The Biden Administration’s recent decisions to send deadly cluster bombs to Ukraine and to appoint despicable imperialist Elliott Abrams to a State Department Commission on Public Diplomacy are the latest examples of how progressives just cannot trust them to do the right thing.
Who is Elliott Abrams? Here is how he was described in an article distributed by the Fellowship of Reconciliation:
Abrams was a defender in the 1980’s of the Guatemalan Montt government, a regime so brutal that its actions — mass murder, rape, and torture of the indigenous Ixil Mayan people — were later classified as genocide by the United …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / July 12th, 2023
We’re all being targeted now.
We’re all guilty until proven innocent now.
And thanks to the 24/7 surveillance being carried out by the government’s spy network of fusion centers, we are all now sitting ducks, just waiting to be tagged, flagged, targeted, monitored, manipulated, investigated, interrogated, heckled and generally harassed by agents of the American police state.
Although these pre-crime programs are popping up all across the country, in small towns and big cities, they are not making us any safer but they are endangering individual freedoms.
Caricature of the Third Estate carrying the First Estate (clergy) and the Second Estate (nobility) on its back. “You should hope that this game will be over soon.”
The Counter-Enlightenment is the name given to the oppositional forces that formed during the Enlightenment that fought against the philosophes‘ writings on democracy, republicanism and toleration. These forces were known as the anti-philosophes and sought to maintain the dominance of the monarchy and the church.
The philosophes (French for ‘philosophers’) were eighteenth century intellectuals who …
We find that you Romans have not got very good memories about the terms of treaties.
— Parthian general Surena, upon confronting Crassus and his invading legions.[efn_note]Plutarch. “Crassus.” In: Fall of the Roman Republic. Trans. Rex Warner, pps. 113-155, Penguin Classics; p. 153.[/efn_note]
Who was Marcus Licinius Crassus (ca. 112-53 BCE )? Like a modern-day financier, he was a predatory (usurious) lender; like a modern-day oligarch, he acquired vast real-estate holdings at bargain prices; but ultimately, like a modern-day warmaker, he prospered hugely from the “spoils of war.” The ugly truth, as the Greek historian Plutarch (ca. 46-120 CE) commented, was that …
On Monday the New York Timesargued in favor of continuing the war and supplying weapons for the war in Ukraine but not cluster bombs:
However compelling it may be to use any available weapon to protect one’s homeland, nations in the rules-based international order have increasingly sought to draw a red line against use of weapons of mass destruction or weapons that pose a severe and lingering risk to noncombatants. Cluster munitions clearly fall into the second category.
Since the end of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation has distinctly strayed from its original purpose. It has become, almost shamelessly, the vessel and handmaiden of US power, while its burgeoning expansion eastwards has done wonders to upend the applecart of stability.
From that upending, the alliance started bungling. It engaged, without the authorisation of the UN Security Council, in a 78-day bombing campaign of Yugoslavia – at least what was left of it – ostensibly to protect the lives of Kosovar Albanians. Far from dampening the tinderbox, the Kosovo affair continues to be an explosion in the …
There is a certain desperation in the logic of those who argue that a depraved solution has merit because it’s only slightly less depraved than that of the opponent. Torture is bad but should still be used because your adversary feels free to resort to it. Only do so, however, via judicial warrant. Bombing hospitals is terrible, but when done, select those with military personnel. Before long, one’s moral compass does not so much adjust as vanish into a horizon of relativist horror.
Much of this is evident in the Ukraine War, notably regarding weapons supply and deployment. Ukraine, the Biden …
China recently passed the Foreign Relations Law, which lays out foreign policy with an aim to “multipolarity.” The West is freaking out about it saying that it is a power grab. We have a guest to break down the anti-China rhetoric today. Carl Zha is the host of the “Silk and Steel Podcast” focusing on China, history, culture and politics. He explains how this is a reaction to Western sanctions and why the West is having a fit about it.
You may or may not like pizza. You may not eat it for health reasons or personal dietary reasons. I’m not here right now to debate anyone’s eating choices.
Among the most dangerous people in the US are those who actually once fervently believed the foundational myths of the country’s social and political order.
It’s the true believers — we who are schooled on republican virtues, democratic procedures, universal equality, and fair play that are said to be deeply embedded in the US experience — who become radical crusaders when their beliefs are shattered by the truth.
The true believers are cast as traitors to humanity, nation, race, or creed when they turn on those who foster a false loyalty or cheap patriotism based on lies or deception.
Though reluctant to admit it publicly, for the sake of morale and status, progressive citizen group leaders taking on the corporate supremacists and their political lackeys are in hard times. With few exceptions, they are neither adjusting with bolder strategies and tactics nor growing fast enough to spin off new divisions and groups. On the other hand, corporatists, driven by profits, have constant motivation and measurable yardsticks for defining their success. Corporatists, with their monetized minds, are not seized by internal worries and debates about how to address climate catastrophes, addicted customers (tobacco) and patients (Opioids). They are corrupting governments or …
Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research releases a new dossier on the need to revitalize theories of social development in the face of mounting human misery.
by Vijay Prashad / July 8th, 2023
Over the course of the past century, substantial changes have taken place in debates about social development. Dossier no. 66, The World Needs a New Socialist Development Theory, examines the historical evolution of development theory over four distinct eras, analyses the obstacles that stand in the way of development today, identifies processes that have the potential to advance genuine alternatives, and offers an outline of a new socialist development theory.
Enduring neocolonial structures in the world economy have made it difficult for countries in the Global South to pursue …
The internet was flooded with alarming images, showcasing an unprecedented backlash against the military establishment. Supporters of Imran from the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, known as PTI supporters, engaged in destructive activities such as storming the General Headquarters and causing havoc at the Lahore Corps Commander’s residence. They also defaced military monuments and properties across the country. These actions were a stark contrast to the peaceful protests conducted by Mr. Khan and his party in the past, despite facing significant political harassment for over a year. In response, the military crackdown, fueled by anger, was …
If ever there was an instance of such a hideous failing in government policy and its cowardly implementation by the public service, Australia’s cruel, inept and vicious Robodebt program would have to be one of them.
Robodebt was a scheme developed by the Department of Human Services (DHS) and submitted as a budget measure by the then Minister for Social Services, Scott Morrison, in 2015. Its express purpose: to recover claimed overpayments from welfare recipients stretching back to the 2010-11 financial year. The automated scheme used a deeply flawed “income averaging” method to assess income and benefit entitlements, yielding inaccurate results. …
Will the world’s major coastal cities, such as NYC, survive escalating global heat conditions in Greenland? And what if both Greenland and Antarctica follow the recent very disturbing pattern of the world’s oceans? For the first time that scientists can recall, sea surface temperatures that always recede from annual peaks are failing to do so, staying high.
Climate change is getting dangerously worse, which is becoming a more common statement among scientists. Ecosystems are starting to fail right before our eyes. For example, in 2022 Europe experienced a big scare with temporary loss of full service for navigable commercial waterways, …
Social psychosis is widespread. In the words of the British psychiatrist, R. D. Laing, “The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man.”
He was not referring to raving, drooling, hitting-your-head-against-the-wall lunacy but a taken-for-granted acceptance of a world long teetering on the edge of nuclear extinction, to take the most extreme example, but surely only one of many. The insouciant acceptance and support of psychotic rulers who promote first-strike nuclear war is very common. First strike nuclear policy is United States policy.
Review of Tom Swanky's The Smallpox War against the Haida
by Kim Petersen / July 7th, 2023
[S]ettlers in thrall to colonial ideology saw every unfenced meadow as waste land free for the taking, especially the most fertile land supporting native self-sufficiency.
— Tom Swanky, The Smallpox War against the Haida (p 67).
July 1, was recently celebrated in “Canada” as Canada Day by “Canadians.” The Dominion of Canada was formed by the joining of three British North American colonies in 1867. It would serve as an Anglo bulwark against the French presence, and a bulwark against the American presence to the south. Over subsequent years, settler-colonialists spread from the …
Fan Wennan (China), 中国 2098: 太阳照常升起 (‘China 2098: The Sun Rises Just the Same’), 2019–2022.
At the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development held in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), member states decided to replace the Millennium Development Goals (established in 2000) with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The first SDG was to ‘end poverty in all its forms everywhere’. Despite the enthusiastic verbiage, it was clear that poverty was simply not going to be ended across the world. …
