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.”
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 …
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.)
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 – …
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 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 …
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.
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. …
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 …
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.
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
... 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 …
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 …
Twelve buildings are destroyed every hour in Gaza. (Hadi Daoud APA images)
When you’re in Gaza and see the destruction firsthand, the clearest conclusion is that Israel’s stated goals are an epic lie, on a par with “a people without a land for a land without a people,” packaged and sold to the world.
The Israelis are not targeting Hamas, nor are they interested in returning their captives, who pose tremendous liability upon their release, as they often have good things to say about their captors.
Erik Bulatov (USSR), People in the Landscape, 1976.
There was a time when calls for a nuclear-free Europe rang across the continent. It began with the Stockholm Appeal (1950), which opened with the powerful words ‘We demand the outlawing of atomic weapons as instruments of intimidation and mass murder of peoples’ and then deepened with the Appeal for European Nuclear Disarmament (1980), which issued the chilling warning ‘We are entering the most dangerous decade in human history’. Roughly 274 million people signed the Stockholm Appeal, including – as is often …
The WikiLeaks project was always going to put various noses out of joint in the journalistic profession. Soaked and blighted by sloth, easily bought, perennially envious, a good number of the Fourth Estate have always preferred to remain uncritical of power and sympathetic to its brutal exercise. For those reasons, the views of Thomas Carlyle, quoting the opinion of Edward Burke in his May 1840 lecture that “there were Three Estates in Parliament; but in the Reporters’ Gallery yonder, there sat a Fourth Estate more important far than they all” seem quaintly misplaced, certainly in a modern context.
The civil war in Myanmar is set to become a lot more bloody and chaotic – if the United States follows through on plans to massively intervene in this conflict.
by Finian Cunningham / June 27th, 2024
A civil war has been raging for three years, although the nation has always been gripped by inter-ethnic violence since independence in 1948 as a legacy of British colonialist abuse.
KJ Noh is a seasoned political analyst and commentator on the Asia-Pacific region. He says the U.S. is already heavily involved in fanning the civil war in this Southeast Asian nation because Washington views it as a critical opportunity to destabilize China’s strategic interests.
Someone, whose cousin was friendly with White House (WH) correspondent, Helen Thomas, related to me the anguish that the dean of WH correspondents suffered after being accused of anti-Semitism. Helen was born in Lebanon and consistently favored the Palestinian cause. Having been the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and the first female member of the Gridiron Club, the pro-Israel contingent found it difficult to silence her. When she was at the advanced age of 90, they leaped to the …
The future of Venezuela’s Bolivarian Revolution, a target of US imperial power since its inception in 1998, may be decided on July 28, the date of their presidential election.
Incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and seven other presidential candidates pledged to abide by the choice of the electorate. Edmundo González, promoted by the US, and another candidate have not signed the pledge, consistent with the far right only accepting contest results where they win. Likewise, a bipartisan and bicameral resolution was introduced on June 18 to the US Congress not to recognize a “fraudulent” Maduro victory.
