by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / January 11th, 2022
August 2020 U.S. drone strike in Kabul killed 10 Afghan civilians. (Credit: Getty Images)
The Pentagon has finally published its first Airpower Summary since President Biden took office nearly a year ago. These monthly reports have been published since 2007 to document the number of bombs and missiles dropped by U.S.-led air forces in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria since 2004. But President Trump stopped publishing them after February 2020, shrouding continued U.S. bombing in secrecy.
Over the past 20 years, as documented in the table below, U.S. and allied air forces have …
Julian Assange in 2019. (photo: Matt Dunham/AP)
Any wishlist for the future is potentially infinite. My Wishlist for 2022 is finite, limited to the first several things that came to mind, more than can be expected to be fulfilled, but things to hope for in a year that is about as inauspicious as any we’ve had of late.
Global Wishlist for 2022
UKRAINE recedes into its proper status quo as a quasi-Nazi independent state that is neither a threat to Russia nor a pawn of the hegemonic forces of the US and …
The corporate media is not our friend. The aim of its coverage of the pandemic is not to promote the public good. It is there to feed our anxieties, keep us coming back for more and monetize that distress
by Jonathan Cook / January 11th, 2022
When I criticize meddling in Syria by Britain and America, or their backing of groups there that elsewhere are considered terrorists, it does not follow that I am, therefore, a cheerleader for the dictatorship of Bashar Assad or that I think that Syrians should be denied a better political system. Similarly, when I criticize Joe Biden or the Democratic party, it does not necessarily follow that I think Donald Trump would have made a better president.
A major goal of critical thinking is to stand outside tribal debates, where people are heavily invested in particular outcomes, and examine the ways debates …
January 10, 2022 will be remembered as one of the odder days in the annals of sport. For one, it had little to do with physical exertion. Tennis proved secondary to the claims of one Novak Djokovic, currently the world’s number one ranked player. Instead of finding himself training on court in preparation for the Australian Open, he found himself with a legal team in the recently created Federal Circuit and Family Court of Australia. His purpose: to challenge the decision to cancel his Temporary Activity visa (subclass 408 in bureaucratic lingo), after his arrival in Australia just prior to …
Rarely can the treatment of a grand sporting figure by officialdom have caused such consternation. Novak Djokovic, the tennis World Number One, has always had a tendency to get under skin and constitution, creating a large following of admirers and detractors. But his current treatment by Australian authorities, and his subsequent detention as an unlawful arrival despite being granted a visa to participate in the Australian Open, had the hallmarks of oppression and incompetent vulgarity. In time, it may well also prove to have been another example of provincial opportunism and crass stupidity.
In his time, the late 19th to mid-20th century, Pierre Janet was considered a great psychologist and rival to Freud. But in Yankeedom he is barely known today. I bring him up in this article, not only because his ideas are worthy of being known, but because in many ways his was a precursor to the work of the communist psychology built by Lev Vygotsky, Alexander Leontiev, and Alexander Luria. In the early …
Likewise, an incompetent, historically ignorant, politically naive, diplomatically challenged, shallow, impulsive, narcissistic reality show host elected by a conned citizenry to the highest office in the land can occasionally get a few things right as well.
I won’t get into a spitting contest over whether the election was rigged to an extent necessary to “steal” it from Trump. Every election is rigged, to varying degrees. To deny that is to be out of touch with how fundamentally corrupt our electoral system is at all levels, and what an abysmal state our last-gasp democracy …
Late January of this year will mark the first anniversary of the entry into force of the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. This momentous international agreement, the result of a lengthy struggle by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) and by many non-nuclear nations, bans developing, testing, producing, acquiring, possessing, stockpiling, and threatening to use nuclear weapons. Adopted by an overwhelming vote of the official representatives of the world’s nations at a UN conference in July 2017, the treaty was subsequently signed by 86 …
In the wake of the December 31 phone call between Presidents Biden and Putin, two very different perceptions of reality were brought into conflict which we can only pray will be resolved in the coming days and weeks of meetings between both sides.
Where one side sees itself committed to supporting Ukraine’s independent right to join NATO in order to help empower the trans Atlantic rules based order, the other side sees an encroaching military encirclement of its vast …
The Age of Rage and Rebellion: Fifty Years After the Spring Thunder
by Omar Rashid Chowdhury / January 8th, 2022
The words were red. And the rifles were red too. It was a time to win back everything that belonged to the people. A flame of rebellion raging against tyranny of the exploiting classes in remote Naxalbari in north-eastern India spread to different parts of the vast land of India, and in its neighboring countries. The uprising in Naxalbari that eventually embattled peasants and workers throughout the subcontinent against onslaught of moneyed classes still reverberates across decades.
The Naxalbari uprising and ensuing rebellion, led by Charu Majumdar, a simple man, had always …
With Syria still embroiled in its own war, Israel has been actively rewriting the rule book regarding its conduct in this Arab country. Gone are the days of a potential return of the illegally occupied Golan Heights to Syrian sovereignty in exchange for peace, per the language of yesteryears. Now, Israel is set to double its illegal Jewish settler population in the Golan, while Israeli bombs continue to drop with a much higher frequency on various Syrian targets.
Indeed, a one-sided war is underway, casually reported as if a routine, everyday event. In the last decade, many ‘mysterious’ attacks on Syria …
The progressive citizen groups, that in the sixties and seventies, drove through Congress the key environmental, worker, and consumer legislation, since unmatched, must feel nostalgic. Those were the years when legislation throwing cruel companies on the defensive was signed by arch-corporatist, President Richard Nixon, because he read the political tea leaves.
These bills included the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and environmental laws, the establishment of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) for worker health and safety, the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and worker pension protection, among others.
During the month of December 2021 two warnings of impending sea level rise were issued by highly respected groups of climate scientists. These are professional scientists who do not deal in hyperbole. Rather, they are archetypical conservative serious-minded scientists who follow the facts.
The most recent warning on December 30th is of deteriorating conditions at the Arctic and Greenland. The second warning is the threatening collapse in Antarctica of one of the largest glaciers in the world. As these events unfortunately coincide so close together, one at the top of the world, the other at the bottom, should coastal cities plan …
With Biden increasingly treating Taiwan as an independent country, is he provoking a military response from China that could go nuclear? Larry Wilkerson joins Paul Jay on theAnalysis.news.
The Green Knight, written and directed by David Lowery, is undoubtedly one of the most original and interesting films of the previous year. The film, adapted from the 14th-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, tells the story of Gawain, a medieval Knight in Camelot, the castle of legendary King Arthur, who sets out on a journey to test his courage and face the Green Knight. ((There exist in fact two earlier movies based on the same poem, Gawain and the Green Knight (1973), Sword of the Valiant: The Legend of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1984), both …
“It’s never enough” said former Prime Minister Jean Chrétien about military spending. “They always want more.” ((Jay Hill, in the House of Commons, quoting then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien from an article by Stephanie Rubec in the Ottawa Sun, October 20, 2003.))
Canada shouldn’t spend huge sums on 88 new fighter jets incapable of protecting the population against pressing security threats. The warplanes will simply strengthen Canada’s powerful, offensive air force.
Amidst a pandemic and climate crisis the security argument for spending $19 billion – $77 billion over their life cycle – on fighter jets is extremely weak. New warplanes …
As we enter the new year almost two years after the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared a pandemic on 11 March 2020, the official death toll from COVID-19 sits just below 5.5 million people. WHO Director-General Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus says that there is a ‘tsunami of cases’ due to the new variants. The country with the highest death toll is the United States, where …
These are snooping, snitching, massive canceling, censorious times.
I just talked with a friend who is in San Francisco who has been working hard as a science teacher. He has opened up the curriculum, has worked to be in his school’s union and he has just gotten married. That’s 55, now, and he has to step down from teaching since the school teacher mandates for California are going into effect January 4 or thereabouts.
He might be against mandates because a mandate is oppressive, a dead-end to critical thinking, critical engagement. The mandates, the masking, the social distancing, the forced PCR tests, …
During the 21st century, the US, working with corporate elites, traditional oligarchies, military, and corporate media, has continually attempted coups against Latin American governments which place the needs of their people over US corporate interests. US organized coups in Latin American countries is hardly a 20th century phenomenon.
However, this century the US rulers have turned to a new coup strategy, relying on soft coups, a significant change from the notoriously brutal military hard coups in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and other countries in the 1970s. One central US concern in these new coups has been to maintain a legal and democratic …
Awards and honours bestowed by States or private committees, republican or monarchical, are bound to be corrupted by considerations of hypocrisy, racketeering and general, chummy disposition. From the Nobel Peace Prize to the range of eccentric and esoteric orders bestowed each year in Britain by Her Majesty, diddling and manipulating is never far behind. You are bestowed such things as a reminder of your worth to the establishment rather than your unique contribution to the good quotient of humanity. Flip many a peace prize over and you are bound to find the smouldering remains of a war criminal’s legacy.
Some peoples possess shamans to explain how the world works. We have charlatan economists and politicians posing as intellectuals who claim to be able to reveal the mystery of running society.
The ideas of Marx did not arise out of thin air but grew from the works of many others before him. But the purpose of this short essay is not to explore his Young Hegelian philosophical roots or to expound on the influence of earlier economists such as Ricardo had on Marx but to focus upon the independent thought that developed within the working class which Marx would incorporate into his own conception of …
The Doomsday Clock has been sitting the past year at 100 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been to civilization-ending apocalypse. The United States has done little to quell doomsday apprehensions by ratcheting up tensions with China over Taiwan and its warships in the South China Sea, as well as with Russia over Ukraine, further NATO expansion, and missile deployment in eastern Europe. Will the first-ever Joint Statement of the Leaders of the Five Nuclear-Weapon States on Preventing Nuclear War and Avoiding Arms Races help …
If you set to work to believe everything,
you will tire out the believing-muscles of your mind,
and then you’ll be so weak you won’t be able
to believe the simplest true things.
— Lewis Carroll ((In Morton N. Cohen, The Selected Letters of Lewis Carroll (London: Palgrave, 1982): 28.))
Capitalists—qua owners of capital—are dispensable, but laborers are not.
This thesis flows from a neglected asymmetry between capitalists and laborers. The capitalist does not stand in the same relation to capital and the services of capital as a laborer does with respect to his laboring capacities and the services of these capacities. …
The US presidential doctrine is an odd creature. Usually summoned up by security wonks and satellite personnel who revolve around the President, these eventually assume the name of the person holding office. They are given the force of a Papal bull and treated by the priest pundits as binding, coherent and sound.
Much of this is often simple mythmaking for the imperial minder in the White House, betraying what are often shallow understandings about global politics and movements. Clarity and details are often found wanting. Variety in such doctrinal matters, the Soviet Union’s veteran diplomat Andrei Gromyko noted in casting …
A review of Bright Green Lies by authors Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert
by Robert Hunziker / January 4th, 2022
Bright Green Lies (Monkfish Book Publishing, 2021) grumbles and growls like a rambunctious thunderstorm on an early spring day opening up darkened clouds of acid rain across the world of environmentalism, including celebrated personalities.
According to Bright Green Lies authors Derrick Jensen, Lierre Keith, and Max Wilbert: “We are writing this book because we want our environmental movement back.” As such, they charge ahead with daggers drawn, similar to Planet of the Humans (2019-20), nobody spared.
As explained therein, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) brought on the environmental movement …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / January 4th, 2022
Despotism has become our new normal.
Digital tyranny, surveillance. Intolerance, cancel culture, censorship. Lockdowns, mandates, government overreach. Supply chain shortages, inflation. Police brutality, home invasions, martial law. The loss of bodily integrity, privacy, autonomy.
These acts of tyranny by an authoritarian government have long since ceased to alarm or unnerve us. We have become desensitized to government brutality, accustomed to government corruption, and unfazed by the government’s assaults on our freedoms.
This present trajectory is unsustainable. The center cannot hold.
The following danger points pose some of the greatest threats to our collective and individual …
The only place I want to hear him speak is in the dock at the Hague at the International Criminal Court facing trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Canada’s head of state, also the queen of Canada, has made the war criminal Tony Blair a “Sir.”
Many will ask, “Isn’t prime minister Justin Trudeau Canada’s head-of-state?” No, he isn’t. Queen Elizabeth is Canada’s head-of-state. No, she isn’t a Canadian. So a Brit is Canada’s head-of-state. That elitist, …
In this video I speak about the illogicality of the modern day human rights activist, particularly those funded by the US government. In many of my videos I debunk much of the anti-China narrative being pushed globally, but in this video, I take a step back, use a different approach, and explore the idea of targeting China from the perspective of accepting these narratives at face value.
This video was inspired by DiEM25’s Christmas special with Noam Chomsky and Yanis Varoufakis. I’ll also address the fact that they seem to accept the narratives against China as truth. Their …
