Colonialism, neo-colonialism, wars, mass mortality & genocide
by Gideon Polya / September 21st, 2022
Queen Elizabeth II has died, and there is immense public affection for the Queen for her dignified but warm conduct in 70 years of dedicated service as a constitutional monarch. That affection is most marked among her pro-Apartheid Israel and hence pro-Apartheid British, Australian, Canadian and New Zealand Subjects, as well as among some other British Commonwealth loyalists. However resolutely ignored is the Royal heading of British imperialism, slavery, colonialism, neo-colonialism, war and genocide for centuries up to the present.
The English have invaded 193 of the world’s present-day countries over the …
On November 24, 2007, September 11th widow Lorie Van Auken whose husband Kenneth W. Van Auken had died in the North Tower spoke before an audience at the Episcopal Church-in-the-Bowery. In support of a campaign for the City of New York to investigate the ‘attacks,’ she remarked:
It turns out almost everything about 9/11 was out of the ordinary, including the fact that it was never properly investigated…. The reason that we need an investigation into 9/11 is because we never actually had one. The 9/11 Commission was not a real investigation. It …
For the most part, contraception and abortion voices come from two prominent camps. Pro-Life advocacy is primarily championed from a religious base, while Pro-Choice argument is voiced from a secular position. That said, Pro-Life does have a small secular faction and the Pro-Choice voice receives some amplification from a religious base. It should also be noted that while the secular Pro-Choice camp does not position God in its argument, it does not necessarily follow that its constituency is largely atheistic or agnostic.
For both Pro-Life groups, the moment of conception is definitive. For the Pro-Choice voices, the moment of conception is …
“Emotions” are one of those words that everyone thinks they understand until you press them with questions. Broadly speaking, Western philosophers have not thought well of emotions. It was not until the time of the Romantics at the end of the 18th century that the tide turned in favor of the emotions. Here is a history of how the leading lights of the West thought of emotions. For most of Western history:
Emotions were thought of as coming from supernatural forces outside the psyche. It was only in …
After 12 bleak years of various Conservative governments, led by inadequate Prime Ministers, the UK is on its knees. Democracy is under attack like never before; the disaster of Brexit, which has resulted in a catalogue of negatives including social polarization, isolationism and rabid tribalism.
Years of grinding austerity, underinvestment in public services, frozen wages and staggering levels of incompetence have culminated in the unmitigated mess we see before us: A country in terminal decline, poverty growing, inequality entrenched, and to cap it all The Wicked Witch of the raving Right, Liz Truss, has now been elected leader of the Conservatives, …
** Originally written by Paul Haeder and published in The Defender, September 19, 2022 Supporters of Shell’s Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex allege it will revive the region’s economy, but critics say it will pollute the environment and harm human health — especially children’s health.
Along the banks of the Ohio River, some residents of Pennsylvania towns like Beaver, Vanport, Brighton and Monaca are hoping a $6 billion ethane cracker plant in Potter Township will deliver positive economic benefits, including new jobs.
But others who live in the region are skeptical the …
The recent meeting in Samarkand of the leaders of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, both actual and prospective, received little coverage in the Western media. This was a great pity because this organisation is one of the most important groupings of nations in the world. The meeting was notable on a number of points. It clearly spelt out for example, that notwithstanding the present conflict in Ukraine, Russia remains an important force in the world and if anything, its position has strengthened in the seven months since it took action in Ukraine.
Despite desperate attempts by the Western media that bothered to …
When it was revealed that former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison had not only shown contempt for his own government in secretly appointing himself, via the Governor-General’s approval, to five portfolios, the depths of deception seemed to be boundless. His tenure had already been marked by a spectacular, habitual tendency to conceal matters. What else would come out?
The latest revelation in the Morrison Mendacity Roadshow came in a leaked document authored by a former Department of Defence deputy secretary, Kim Gillis, a key figure in submarine contract negotiations with the French Naval Group. The contract to build twelve French-made …
Cloudless contentment is not open to man, and if he trades his freedom or integrity for it, the time will come when he feels cheated.
— Walter Kaufmann ((Without Guilt and Justice: From Decidophobia to Autonomy. Peter Wyden, Inc., 1973.))
In his early Paris manuscripts (1844), the young Karl Marx defined “alienation” as an estrangement from the product of one’s labor. The modern factory, with its specialized division-of-labor (which even Adam Smith deplored as necessary but dehumanizing), exponentially increased productive output–but at the price of deskilling and condemning the worker to a single, repetitive …
In recent years, governments have been demonstrating their subservience to their billionaire masters in Big Finance, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, BlackRock and the entire gamut of forces in the military-financial-industrial complex behind the ‘Great Reset’, ‘New Normal’ or whichever other benign-sounding term is used to disguise the crisis and current restructuring of capitalism and the brutal impacts on ordinary people.
In late 2019 and early 2020 (due to collapsing financial markets immediately prior to COVID) and during COVID (via COVID-relief packages), trillions of dollars were handed over to elite interests while lockdowns and restrictions were imposed on ordinary people and small …
Under capitalism, political violence is not constantly required for the extraction of surplus-value and the maintenance of capitalist social relations. The separation of direct producers from the means of production in capitalist social formations means that surplus-value can be appropriated by economic mechanisms without the repeated deployment or threat of deployment of politico-military force in the battle between classes. In Mute Compulsion: A Theory of the Economic Power of Capital, Søren Mau writes: “The characteristic thing about the power of capital is precisely that it has an ability to reproduce itself …
On September 13th, two very grim reports about the world’s future were published, one by America’s Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation, and the other by America’s Gallup polling organization; and both are data-based — as Melinda and Bill Gates expressed it in their joint Introduction to their new report, which is titled “The Future of Progress”: “We are data people, and this is a data report.”
Young individualist-anarchists, for more than a century, have been powerfully drawn to the highly original, often poetically exultant writings of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). The quintessential free spirit, Nietzsche effectively used paradox, playful irony and wordplay to heap scorn on life-hating (Judeo-Christian) morality, with its sex-negative ideas of “sin” and its condemnation of healthy human desire and self-assertion. In Nietzsche’s time and place, Calvinist-Lutheran morality warned of hellfire for the many, predestined salvation for only a few. As a psychologically crippling ideology, it produced obedient, moralistic and loyal subjects to the authoritarian …
In Vienna, China’s permanent mission to the United Nations has been rather exercised of late. Members of the mission have been particularly irate with the International Atomic Energy Agency and its Director General, Rafael Grossi, who addressed the IAEA’s Board of Governors on September 12.
Grossi was building on a confidential report by the IAEA which had been circulated the previous week concerning the role of nuclear propulsion technology for submarines to be supplied to Australia under the AUKUS security pact.
When the AUKUS announcement was made in September last year, its significance shook security establishments in the Indo-Pacific. It was also …
When Congress directs the White House Office of Science and Technology (OSTP) to coordinate with other relevant federal agencies to research a five-year scientific assessment of solar and other rapid climate interventions, it’s only too apparent that the highest levels of government have gotten the internal memo that the climate is in trouble. Even so, they are still fashionably late to the party.
Scientists have been warning about the consequences of excessive levels of CO2 and urging both Congress and the White House to take action for decades.
Now that the broken climate system has been recognized as a serious threat, as …
Once the fixated adoration with the late Queen Elizabeth II starts cooling, the accountants of public welfare and decency will be stunned to realise the costs and wealth associated with the royal institution. Her successor, Charles III, is continuing in that vein, a jarring note of wealth and pomp even as prices rise and the hefty bills for citizens (should we say subjects?), bite.
The argument that the monarchy makes money for the British state and others in the Commonwealth starts to seem shallow the more one looks at the accounts and the standing of the institution. But nonetheless, individuals such …
What we are living these days – the last 2 1/2 years – may be culminating in the “Corona Crisis” and what follows the corona crisis during the coming some eight years to completion of UN Agenda 2030, alias the Great Reset.
It started out with a fake virus, never isolated, a tremendous fear campaign, lockdowns, forced wearing of dangerous, denigrating, face-disfiguring masks, social separation and division of societies, families and kins, followed by a coerced “vaccination” campaign, better called forced “vaxxing” – injection of a poisonous killer substance under the pretext of preventing a pandemic that never was a pandemic, …
Events continue to unfold at a quickening pace. Facing an alarming escalation in tensions around the world, we asked Colonel Larry Wilkerson for his current thoughts.
Colonel Wilkerson is a renowned defense analyst and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor of Government & Public policy at the College of William and Mary. He is a retired United States Army colonel and was the former Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson
We focus on the realities of the international power struggle unfolding in real time, specifically addressing the role of …
Recent data shows that between 2019 and 2021, life expectancy (LE) in the US plunged almost three years while for Cuba it edged up 0.2 years. Yet, in 1960, the year after its revolution, Cuba had a LE of 64.2 years, lower by 5.6 years than that in the US (69.8 years). As I document in Cuban Health Care, the island quickly caught up to the US and, from 1970 through 2016, the two countries were nip and tuck, with some years Cuba and other years the US, having a longer LE. But neither country was ever as …
The midterm congressional elections will soon be upon us. We are again told, as we are every two years, that the most important election of our lifetimes is impending. However, this year the stakes appear to be even higher.
President Biden instructs us, we are “in a battle for the soul of this nation…the breath, the life, and the essence of who we are.” He intones: “There is nothing more important, nothing more sacred, nothing more American. That’s our soul.”
In the fall of 2012, I was involved with some of the remaining offshoots of Occupy Wall Street (OWS). This ongoing network reached its peak performance directly after Hurricane Sandy struck New York City a few days before Halloween.
Calling upon connections forged over the previous year, “Occupy Sandy” (OS) sprung into action. The volunteer network covered a lot of ground — literally and figuratively. Our primary focus was on tangible, short-term, direct relief, e.g.
Delivering food, clothing, and supplies
Coordinating with and supporting local groups
Checking on elderly, disabled, and other …
One-third of Pakistan is under water. Record heat waves blanket the globe driving up temperatures beyond what humans can survive. Polar glaciers are melting much faster than scientists predicted. Droughts, fires and floods are ravaging the planet, forcing the displacement of tens of millions of people. And this is just the beginning.
It’s time to tell the truth. We can’t afford to wait any longer. We can’t afford to pretend that the same political-economic system that has caused the most historic levels of ecological destruction in human history is the same system that is going to fix it. Here, in the …
If every single high-profile journalist, politician and priest is currently expressing heartfelt devotion to Britain’s deceased, 96-year-old monarch, it is not because she ‘served’ her country diligently in doing her ‘duty’ for 70 years. The powerful interests that determine Britain’s political and media agenda are not sentimentalists; they do not impose ‘managed democracy’ as a kind of game. Propaganda blitzes are always pragmatic.
It could hardly be more obvious that earlier propaganda campaigns defining the Iraq war, the Libya war, the Syria war, Jeremy Corbyn, and now NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine, …
September 16 marks the 40th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the killing of around 3,000 Palestinians at the hands of Lebanon’s Phalangist militias operating under the command of the Israeli army.
Four decades have passed, yet no measure of justice has been received by the survivors of the massacre. Many of them have died, and others are aging while they carry the scars of physical and psychological wounds, in the hope that, perhaps, within their lifetime they will see their executioners behind bars.
However, many of the Israeli and Phalange commanders who had ordered the invasion of Lebanon, …
