Latest articles
Britain’s new prime minister has shown he is already an arch-exponent of the dark political arts of deceit, hypocrisy and bad faith
by Jonathan Cook / July 8th, 2024
By a crushing majority, the 17 judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled more than five months ago that Israel was “plausibly” committing genocide in Gaza.
The highest court in the world put Israel on trial, accused of the ultimate crime against humanity.
Much has happened since that decision – and all of it is even more incriminating against Israel than the evidence considered by the World Court back in January.
Tens of thousands more Palestinian civilians are dead or missing, most likely under rubble. Gaza is now a wasteland, one that will take many decades to …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 7th, 2024
“This is the inflection point,” warned Nigel Farage last month as he assumed the reins of power at the incarnated Reform UK party, standard bearer of the often inchoate group known as the hard right of British politics. “The only wasted vote is a Conservative one. We are the challengers to Labour. We are on our way.”
On July 4, an important stop was made on that way. A figure who had exerted more influence on British politics outside the houses of Parliament than any other this century, a figure who had conspicuously failed in getting elected despite seven previous …
Schizophrenia, Modern Art and Western History Part II
by Bruce Lerro / July 7th, 2024
Orientation
Power struggles between the two sides of the brain
In Part I of this article, I compared the left to the right side of the brain across many categories. One of the most interesting prospects in Iain McGilchrist’s great book The Master and His Emissary, is that the two sides of the brain functions do not work in a harmonious manner all the time. There is a power struggle between them. Just as we have accepted Freud’s depiction of the psyche as composed of a struggle between the id and the …
An Exchange Instead Would Have Foregone Much Sorrow
by Jay Janson / July 7th, 2024
Ever since October 7, 2023, NBC, ABC, CBS, FOX, CNN, PBS, along with BBC, DW, NHK other Western-aligned entertainment/news conglomerates and wire services like AP, UPI, Reuters and Israeli media have sought to keep their viewers, readers, and listeners attention on the hostages and away from any explanation, reason, or justification of Palestinians seeking to exchange the hostages for some of the thousands of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons.
This is of course consistent with the under-reporting of the Palestinians suffering the illegal military occupation, subjugation, and often murderous treatment from the Israeli military which operates largely with impunity within Gaza, …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 7th, 2024
Few would have staked their political fortune, let alone any other sort of reward, on a return of the British Conservatives on July 4. The polls often lie, but none suggested that outcome. The only question was the extent British voters would lacerate the Tories who have been in office for fourteen years, presiding over a country in divisive decline, aided by policies of austerity, the galloping cost of living and the lunatic tenures of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. Predicted numbers varied from a return of 53 seats to what was forecast in the more accurate Ipsos exit poll …
by Nauman Sadiq / July 6th, 2024
Despite losing the presidential debate to Republican candidate Donald Trump, President Joe Biden’s electoral campaign appears to be in full swing now. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has been set free after a plea deal in order to woo progressive voters. In Gaza, Biden is simultaneously playing the role of arsonist and the firefighter.
Last October, he sent aircraft-carriers and nuclear submarines in support of Israel and provided military assistance to the tune of billions of dollars, including bombs, missiles and aircraft, to slaughter hapless Palestinians. But at the same time, he built a shoddy pier to let humanitarian aid …
by Ted Glick / July 5th, 2024
Over 20 years ago I wrote one of these columns examining the issue of “purism” versus “pragmatism” when it comes to organizing for systemic and desperately needed change in this world. I wrote about two essential ingredients that are sometimes in conflict.
One essential is conscious political organization motivated by principles and a genuine desire and plan for improving the lives of the disenfranchised and downtrodden, ending militarism and war, and stopping and reversing environmental devastation. But this alone won’t bring about change.
As a once-great revolutionary once said, “the masses make history.”
by Black Alliance for Peace / July 5th, 2024
Today, the United States is leading the world’s largest multinational maritime war exercise from occupied Honolulu, Hawai’i. 25,000 personnel from 29 nations, including NATO allies and other strategic partners, are participating in the Rim of the Pacific, or RIMPAC, under the command of the US Pacific Fleet, a major component of the US Indo-Pacific Command (INDOPACOM).
With RIMPAC now underway, the lands and waters surrounding the Hawaiian Islands are being intensively bombed and shelled as participating forces practice amphibious landings and urban combat training, and the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) find their sovereignty once again violated after more than 130 years of …
by Randy Shields / July 4th, 2024
Decolonization is always a violent event.
– Frantz Fanon
From Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, I substituted Palestine and Palestinians for “colonized” and Israel and Israelis for “colonizers.”
For the Palestinians, to be a moralist quite plainly means silencing the arrogance of the Israelis, breaking (their) spiral of violence, in a word ejecting them from the picture. (page 9)
The Israelis are no longer interested in staying on and coexisting once the colonial context has disappeared. (page 9) (Me: it’s already happening as thousands of Israelis in the past nine months have gone back to their ancient homelands of Rockaway and Woodland Hills.)
Israel …
Thoughts on the 248th birthday of the United States
by Robert Malone / July 4th, 2024
It is our true policy to steer clear of permanent alliance with any portion of the foreign world.
— George Washington, Farewell Address to the People of the United States, 19 September 1796
American Exceptionalism
There is an argument that, from post-WWII to the present, international relations and the state of the world would be in a far worse condition except for the actions and forces of the United States’ foreign and military policy. Despite this or that excess, transgression, strategic blunder, or self-serving activity of post-war American international activities, the United States …
by Kim Petersen / July 4th, 2024
In a 3 July interview, judge Andrew Napolitano asked the University of Chicago political scientist, John Mearsheimer: “Why would the United States be putting missiles in the Philippines but to be provocative toward China?”
Mearsheimer: “I don’t think that the United States is trying to be provocative. I think what the United States is interested to do, doing is improving its deterrence capability in East Asia. The fact is that if you put the United States up against China in East Asia, and if you include the United States’ allies with …
The colonial application of digital technologies spurs Palestinian resistance
by Omar Zahzah / July 4th, 2024
It’s an increasingly familiar contradiction: digital platforms that position themselves as an accessible alternative to corporate media emerge as new censors in their own right. Social media and the internet make it possible to disseminate material that would otherwise have been suppressed, thereby helping to bring alternative conversations to the fore of mainstream awareness. And yet, for all of their hype and propaganda, the parent companies of these popular digital platforms are no less dedicated to the preservation of an imperialist status quo than their …
by David Penner / July 4th, 2024
Due to the growing neoliberal antipathy towards the First Amendment American poetry finds itself in a conundrum, as all who submit their work to literary reviews are straitjacketed by the same censorship constraints as those who write for the mainstream press. Consequently, those who regularly contribute to these publications have long since abandoned any effort at saying something meaningful about the world in which we live. As poetry is as old as humanity and cannot be extinguished without the destruction of human life, the art form has found new ways to …
The Twenty-Seventh Newsletter (2024)
by Vijay Prashad / July 4th, 2024
Jardy Ndombasi (DRC), Soulèvement populaire et souveraineté (‘Popular Uprising and Sovereignty’), 2024.
On 20 June, the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) condemned the attacks on civilians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) ‘in the strongest terms’. In its press statement, the UNSC wrote that these attacks – by both the DRC’s armed forces and various rebel groups supported by neighbouring countries such as Rwanda and Uganda – ‘are worsening the volatile security and stability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and in the …
by Edward Curtin / July 3rd, 2024
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.
— Lewis Carroll, Through The Looking-Glass, December 1871
Once you understand that profound poem, you are ready to fathom the great debate between our dumb and dumber candidates for the Highchair in the Oval Office.</
In light of Julian Assange’s release from an English prison and President Biden’s dementia-riddled debate performance against dumb-mouthed Donald Trump – Tweedledum and Tweedledee, whom Alice, when through the looking-glass, said looked exactly like a couple of schoolboys – I have been thinking about a famous proverb – …
by ShanghaiEye / July 3rd, 2024
According to CCTV’s latest investigative report, the US troops in Syria have been smuggling local wheat crops out of Syria, using more than 10 trucks every day. To cover the smuggling activity, local checkpoints would stop all passers-by and check their phones to delete any related photos. What’s your comment?
Mao Ning: Once a wheat exporter, Syria now finds around 55 percent of its population facing food insecurity. The US is undeniably responsible for this. The US says it’s there to fight terrorism, but the reality says it’s there to plunder. The US keeps emphasizing human rights, but the reality abounds …
The Answer is No
by Kathleen Ruff / July 3rd, 2024
The Canadian government repeatedly tells the world that Canada upholds an international rules-based order that is the basis of democracy.
What the Canadian government says is not true. The evidence that it is not true is indisputable.
There is widespread concern that social media is putting out disinformation, that this practice is dangerous and harmful and should be challenged. What about when our government puts out serious disinformation that is dangerous and harmful? Should that not be challenged? What do you think?
I’m not talking about trivial matters. I’m talking about extremely serious issues where the health and survival of people and the …
by Nauman Sadiq / July 3rd, 2024
Most geopolitics’ nerds know George C. Marshall as President Harry S. Truman’s Secretary of State, 1947-49, and Secretary of Defense, 1950-51, credited with initiating $13 billion Marshall Plan for rebuilding European economies devastated by the war.
But few people know that as Chief of Staff of the US Army during World War II, Gen. George C. Marshall organized the largest military expansion in the US history, inheriting an outmoded, poorly equipped army of 189,000 men that grew into a force of over eight million soldiers by 1942, a forty-fold increase within the short span of three years.
Rumors circulated by the end …
by Binoy Kampmark / July 2nd, 2024
The US Supreme Court has much to answer for. In the genius of republican government, it operates as overseer and balancer to the executive and legislature. Of late, the judges have seemingly confused that role.
In contrast to its other Anglophone counterparts, the highest tribunal in the US professes an open brand of politics, with its occupants blatantly expressing views that openly conform to one side of the political aisle or the other. Not that the idea of a conservative or liberal judge necessarily translates into opposite rulings. Agreement and common ground can be reached, however difficult the exercise might be. …
AFRICOM Watch Bulletin #52
by Black Alliance for Peace / July 2nd, 2024
As anti-imperialist sentiment gains momentum in Africa, the Alliance of Sahelian States has demonstrated a clear resolve to reclaim sovereignty from foreign powers. The backlash against Western presence, and French presence in particular, has ignited a broader conversation about the future of foreign intervention and the true path to self-determination for African nations. Yet, while AFRICOM and Western military forces are being pushed out of the Sahel by people’s movements, we see a much different relationship elsewhere on the continent taking note, in particular, of the ongoing close coordination between the US and Botswana Defense Forces as well as the …
by Charles Pierce / July 2nd, 2024
Joe Biden and other Democrat politicians portray the 2024 Presidential election as a choice between fascism and democracy. Many avowed “socialists” echo that assertion. Are they correct; or, are they misguided (given that the Party, which they back, is dominated by politicians who primarily serve capital and monstrous empire)?
Palestine. Biden and most Congress people of both parties evade the facts of Israeli persecution of Palestinians. For them: Israeli lives (seen as worthy) matter, Palestinian lives (seen as other) don’t. In fact, the Zionist colonial-settler state (which Biden and nearly all of Congress supports) entitles Jewish Israelis to liberal civil rights such that …
by John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead / July 2nd, 2024
The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.
— Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissenting in Trump v. United States
The U.S. Supreme Court has made it official: the president of the United States can now literally get away with murder.
In a devastating 6-3 ruling in Trump v. United States that is equal parts politically short-sighted, self-servingly partisan, and utterly devoid of any pretense that the president is anything other than a dictator, the Supreme Court has validated what Richard …
by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J.S. Davies / July 2nd, 2024
Anti-NATO protest in Chicago, 2012. Photo credit: Julie Dermansky.
After NATO’s catastrophic, illegal invasions of Yugoslavia, Libya and Afghanistan, on July 9th NATO plans to invade Washington DC. The good news is that it only plans to occupy Washington for three days. The British will not burn down the U.S. Capitol as they did in 1814, and the Germans are still meekly pretending that they don’t know who blew up their Nord Stream …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 30th, 2024
Julian Assange of WikiLeaks fame is now back in the country of his birth, having endured conditions of captivity ranging from cramped digs in London’s Ecuadorian embassy to the maximum-security facilities of Belmarsh Prison. His return to Australia after striking a plea deal with the US Department of Justice sees him in a state with some of the most onerous secrecy provisions of any in the Western world.
As of January 2023, according to the Attorney-General’s Department, the Australian Commonwealth had 11 general secrecy offences in Part 5.6 of the Criminal Code, 542 specific secrecy offences across 178 Commonwealth laws …
by Roger D. Harris / June 30th, 2024
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
— Emma Lazarus’s inscription on the Statue of Liberty
The contestants squared off in the first of the US presidential debates of 2024. Both wore identical white shirts and navy suits with American flag lapel pins. One wore a red tie; the other a blue one. There were other differences, but none quite so substantive.
The immigration issue dominated the debate. The challenger claimed that the country was being menaced by immigrants …
by Binoy Kampmark / June 29th, 2024
It was cruel. Sinister cruel. While Donald Trump was always going to relish the chance to be not only economical with the truth but simply inventive about it, Joe Biden, current Commander in Chief of the United States, leader of the self-described Free World, seemed a vanishing shadow, longing for soft slippers and the fireplace with cocoa, a case of comfort rather than the battling rage of politics.
It need never have happened, and certainly not so early. But the earliest-ever US Presidential election debate, held even before both candidates had been formally confirmed at their party conventions, did much to …
by Allen Forrest / June 29th, 2024
... for Instituting Laws that Copy U.S. Legislation and Were Designed to Ward Off Coups
by John Perry / June 28th, 2024
Source: Georgia Today
Politicians in the small Caucasian nation of Georgia have been sanctioned by Washington for “undermining democracy” and depriving Georgian people of “fundamental freedoms,” simply because its parliament has passed a law to control foreign influence over Georgian politics.
Politicians in another small country, Nicaragua, were subjected to U.S. sanctions for doing the same. Although the two countries are very different, there are striking similarities in the ways that Washington and its allies have striven to undermine their sovereignty.
In both cases, legislation to limit foreign influence …
by Robert Hunziker / June 28th, 2024
It was only two years ago that studies of the infamous Thwaites Glacier, aka: the Doomsday Glacier located in West Antarctica, found rapid melting. At the time, scientists said it was “hanging on by its fingernails.” (Source: “Doomsday Glacier”, Which Could Raise Sea Level by Several Feet, is “Hanging by its Fingernails”, Scientists Say”, CNN, September 6, 2022.)
Since that warning was issued the planet has vastly exceeded global warming expectations. A new study raises the bet on sea level rise, maybe by a lot. The study warns that the Antarctic ice sheet is melting in a “new, worrying way” that …
by Allen Forrest / June 28th, 2024
