Going to war and using expensive war machinery and missiles can be enticing and perversely exhilarating, but the lethality and devastation of war must not be downplayed as a game. The latest political maneuver by Russian president Vladimir Putin was a game-changing masterstroke to avoid the American war trap. At every step in the build-up of tensions surrounding Ukraine, Russia has foiled US enticements to attack. To understand it all, one needs to start further back in time.
9 February 1990 — US secretary-of-state James Baker promised USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would “not [move] one inch eastward” in exchange …
The question of Reparations for the historical crime of slavery is not primarily about money. Rather it is about spiritual cleansing and healing. It is about recognizing the fact that systemic physical and mental torture have long hands that stretch out across time and space. It is about acknowledging the attempted physical and spiritual destruction of a people and the prolonged pain and suffering that followed in its wake. It is time that the question of Reparations be put in its proper light; the light of recognition, forgiveness, and making whole.
When my grandmother received “compensation” from …
US President Theodore Roosevelt never had much time for peace, seeing its returns as distinctly less than those of war. Despite his love of military conflict and its touted benefits, he was rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in brokering peace in the Russo-Japanese War. But for old Teddy peaceniks were sissies, degenerates, and probably sexually dubious.
The intoxicant that is war tends to besot its promoters, however balanced they might claim to be. On February 21, the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, seemed to embrace a subliminal message in its programming, notably on the issue of war. …
China has long been the home of a dynamic and multi-varied culture. Ancient Han Chinese built up an agrarian civilization centered on the Yellow River Basin and called their country the “Middle Kingdom,” with varying relations of conflict and cooperation with the nomadic and pastoral cultures surrounding them. Ancient Chinese pioneered a tolerant, inclusive, multi-faith, culturally diverse society. Muslim and Jewish communities have existed there for over one thousand years, for example. People of any ethnicity were allowed to serve as government officials by passing exams, under a meritocratic civil service exam system that continued for over a millennium, up …
This is a little soft-shoe pissed off blathering from me, so apologies up front. No big news on the Ukraine Invasion front, or the Gates Owning All the Farms front, or the Climate-Wall Street-Chronic Illness front. Nothing related to the MICIMATT (Military-Industrial-Congressional-MEDIA-Academia-Think-Tank) front. Just plain old burnt toast and spilled milk from a radical who has to still be in the job market at the tender age of 65.
Never in my imagination, just five years ago even, would I have figured I’d be here, that is, stuck in the USA, blessed …
This article didn’t just arise from nowhere. It is preceded by decades of my researching and writing about America’s “corpocracy,” or what I call the “Devil’s Marriage” between the superior power elite of corporate America, particularly throughout eleven sectors of organized endeavor, and the subordinate power elite of government America in firstly its shadow government and secondarily in the Oval Office and in the other branches of the government. The corporate elite tell the government elite what to spend from the taxpayers’ pockets, what do with the money, and what to say.
I told you this part wasn’t going to be pretty. The collapse of fascist ideological movements and fanatical death cults never is. The New Normal is proving to be no exception.
After three weeks of non-violent civil disobedience outside the Canadian parliament in Ottawa by truckers and other Canadian citizens struggling to uphold their right to not be subjected to forced “vaccination,” Justin Trudeau unleashed the goon squads. Thousands of militarized riot police (and other unidentified heavily-armed operatives) swarmed the area, surrounded the protesters, started breaking into trucks and arresting people, and …
Nation states are habitually doomed to defeat their best interests. Conditions of mad instability are fostered. Arms sales take place, regimes get propped up or abandoned, and the people under them endure and suffer, awaiting the next criminal regime change.
Nothing is more counter-intuitive than the effort to isolate, cripple and strangulate the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. For all the talk about terrorism and concerns about failing regimes, the Biden Administration is doing every bit to make this regime fail and encourage the outcome it decries. Along the way, a humanitarian catastrophe is in the making.
The Threatened Peoples of East Asia and Europe Can Stop the U.S. Drive to Restore its Global Domination.
by John V. Walsh / February 20th, 2022
“This is not going to be a war of Ukraine and Russia. This is going to be a European war, a full-fledged war.” So spoke Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky just days after berating the U.S. for beating the drums of war.
It is not hard to imagine how Zelensky’s words must have fallen on those European ears that were attentive. His warning surely conjured up images of World War II when tens of millions of Europeans and Russians perished.
Zelensky’s words echoed those of Philippine’s President Rodrigo Duterte on the other side of the world at the Eastern edge of …
Experienced foreign policy analysts such as Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, and Pepe Escobar, while agreeing that the Biden administration is clearly guilty of provoking Russia over Ukraine, are divided over whether it will lead to war. All agree that Russia has no intention of invading Ukraine and that it is clearly justified in demanding safe borders by insisting U.S./NATO withdraw troops and missiles from the countries surrounding it, stop NATO’s “open door” policy, stop putting nuclear weapons in Europe, etc.
Clearly such demands are consonant with the U.S.’s own historical demands for safe …
On Valentines’ Day 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared the 1988 Emergencies Act in response to the Trucker Freedom Convoy in Ottawa and US-Canada border protests in Windsor (ON), Emerson (MB), Coutts (AB), Osoyoos and Surrey (BC). This stunning political development ignored the House of Commons in favour of making the announcement at a press conference.
Prior to the September 2021 election, Trudeau spoke of “consequences” for the unvaccinated. He described vaccine passports as a reward for Canadians who “did the right thing,” and …
Diogenes, as you may know, was an ancient Greek philosopher “in search of an honest man.” He apparently never found one. Being a cynic and a moralist, he may never have expected to find one.
The Twist
In his book, Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Ralph Nader picked the wrong people. ((Nader, R. Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, Seven Stories Press, 2011.)) People like Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. Naively, I wrote the two and included my most recent book at that time in which I cited their philanthropic organization, “The Giving Pledge” as a source of the super-rich who …
Canada will always stand up for the right of peaceful protest anywhere around the world and we are pleased to see moves to deescalation and dialogue.
— Justin Trudeau
So said Canada’s prime minister Trudeau about the farmer protests in India. One assumes that “anywhere” includes Canada. Nonetheless, Trudeau has rejected dialogue with the peaceful trucker convoy, and instead of deescalation he turned to his “final option,” the Emergencies Act that seemingly permits police violence against Canadians.
It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples, one that understands that the constitutionally guaranteed rights of First …
Anti-Covid, anti-parasites, anti-cancer — for humans
by Mickey Z. / February 19th, 2022
A very recent article on The Defender began: “A peer-reviewed study published last month found the prophylactic use of ivermectin reduced COVID mortality by 90 percent among more than 223,000 study participants in a town in Southern Brazil. The study, published in the Cureus Journal of Medical Science, also found a 44 percent reduction in COVID cases among those who took the re-purposed drug.”
If you’ve trained yourself to see past corporate media fake news, none of the above will come as a surprise. Despite the widespread demonization of ivermectin, “officials” are …
When in opposition, Alexander Downer, destined to become Australia’s longest serving foreign minister in the conservative government of John Howard, was easy to savage. The Australian Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating was particularly keen to skewer an establishment individual prone to donning fishnet stockings and affecting a plummy disposition. Never, he suggested, had there been a more conceited piece of fairy floss ever put on a stick.
During the Howard years, Downer served in the role of a position that has become all but irrelevant, outsourced as it is to the US State Department and the fossil fuel lobby. It …
How a COVID outbreak in Hong Kong is being managed; a shift in Germany’s position toward China, as it classifies China as a “systemic rival”; a look at relationships in China; Red Star over China author Edgar Snow passed away 50 years ago.
Man-made chemicals have exceeded the limits of safety for the planet. This statement comes from the first-ever major scientific warning based upon a study of the dangers posed by the flood of chemicals across the globe as three hundred fifty thousand (350,000) chemicals slosh throughout the planet.
“We have overwhelming evidence of negative impacts on Earth systems, including biodiversity and biogeochemical cycles,” according to Bethanie Carney Almroth, University of Gothenburg. ((Marc Préel, “Plastic, Chemical Pollution beyond Planet’s Safe Limit: Study”, Phys.org, February 15, 2022, Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University.))
According to Bethanie Carney Almroth: “The impacts that we’re starting to see today …
For the most part socialists and members of organized religion seem to be opposites. After all, didn’t Marx say religion was the opium of the people, the heart of a heartless world? But has it always been this way? Socialists in the 19th century had very different ideas about the importance of mythology, ritual, and art. But could19th century socialist engage in these activities without getting caught up in supernatural ideas and reified images? This article discusses the efforts of William Morris, Walter Crane, and the Knights of Labor to bring …
No, there is a limit to the tyrant’s power!
When the oppressed man finds no justice,
When the burden grows unbearable, he appeals
With fearless heart to Heaven,
And thence brings down his everlasting rights,
Which there abide, inalienably his,
And indestructible as stars themselves.
— Friedrich Schiller, Wilhelm Tell’s Rutli Oath, from Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell, 1804
Who would have thought that Canada would ever be a spark plug for a freedom movement against tyranny?
On 16 February 2015, Govind and Uma Pansare went for a morning walk near their home in Kolhapur, in the western state of Maharashtra, India. Two men on a motorcycle stopped them and asked for directions, but the Pansares could not help them. One of the men laughed, pulled out a gun, and shot the two Pansares. Uma Pansare was hit but survived the attack. Her husband, Govind Pansare, died in a hospital shortly thereafter on 20 February at age 82.
Raised in poverty, Govind Pansare was fortunate to …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / February 17th, 2022
People gather in Rome to call for peace, February 15, 2022 | Photo Credit: Reuters
Every day brings new noise and fury in the crisis over Ukraine, mostly from Washington. But what is really likely to happen?
There are three possible scenarios:
The first is that Russia will suddenly launch an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine.
The second is that the Ukrainian government in Kyiv will launch an escalation of its civil war against the self-declared People’s Republics of Donetsk (DPR) and Luhansk (LPR), provoking various possible reactions from other …
by Dissident Voice Communications / February 17th, 2022
The Ontario Civil Liberties Association (OCLA) condemns the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act (formerly the War Measures Act) to dispel peaceful protests in Canada.
Peaceful protest and civil disobedience are essential in a democratic society – without these mechanisms of peaceful expression, demonstration, and opposition there can be no democracy.
There is no national emergency caused by the Freedom Convoy protesters. Therefore, the government’s use of the Emergencies Act can only be understood as an opportunistic political act intended to eliminate protest that opposes the policies of the sitting government, to manipulate public opinion by further demonizing “the unvaccinated”, and …
I’ve written dozens and dozens of articles and recorded several podcasts informing readers and listeners that they have been duped for nearly two years. The lockdowns, the masks, the social distancing, the PCR test, the jabs, and more — all of them are nothing more than manipulations and deceptions. Now comes some “official” news on a related topic.
Jonas Herby is a special advisor at the Center for Political Studies in Copenhagen, Denmark. He and two other economists recently completed a meta-analysis (a survey of previous studies) for Johns Hopkins University. They were looking …
Even though they make up less than 7% of all schools in the U.S., every year hundreds of news articles highlight the persistent lack of transparency and accountability in the crisis-prone charter school sector.
Even worse, everyone is under pressure to stand passively on the sidelines and watch as these outsourced privatized schools, which siphon billions of dollars a year from public schools, operate with impunity.
Nearly 31 years after they first appeared in the U.S., privately-operated charter schools remain immune to pro-social reform and are plagued by endless problems. Ceaseless reports from the mainstream press and the alternative press on the …
The current split in the African Union (AU) over Israel’s Observer membership status is emblematic of a larger conflict that could potentially split the African continent’s largest political institutions.
Africa is currently facing one of its most crucial decisions regarding Palestine and Israel. The repercussions of this decision could be as significant as the 1975 Resolution 77 (XII) by the Organization of African Unity – the precursor to the African Union – which recognized Zionism, Israel’s founding ideology, as a form of racism. This time around, however, it is Palestine, not Israel, that stands to lose.
Incompetent politicians and diplomats are on the level with ill-prepared generals fighting current wars with dated methods. They err, they stumble, and they may well be responsible for the next idiotic slander, misfire or misunderstanding. UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss is synonymous with Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s idea of groping diplomacy. Graceless, all confusion, and much ignorance besides, she has been given the task of howling in the Kremlin’s direction, warning that no invasion of Ukraine will be tolerated by Global Britain.
Truss, former international trade secretary known for her “goofy public persona”, took over from the less goofy and …
