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<title>Nicaragua: The Good Shepherd</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/nicaragua-the-good-shepherd/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Becca Mohally Renk]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 24 Apr 2024 04:53:49 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Children/Youth]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Ecuador]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Germany]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[International Court of Justice]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Nicaragua]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United States]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149963</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Yesterday I attended mass. Instead of a priest, the mass was celebrated by Nicaraguan children – 10 fourth and fifth grade students. The kids led the congregation in prayers, passing of the peace, read the gospel and shared a homily. They invited congregants to share reflections on the reading – the Good Shepherd – and […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/nicaragua-the-good-shepherd/">Nicaragua: The Good Shepherd</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Yesterday I attended mass. Instead of a priest, the mass was celebrated by Nicaraguan children – 10 fourth and fifth grade students. The kids led the congregation in prayers, passing of the peace, read the gospel and shared a homily. They invited congregants to share reflections on the reading – the Good Shepherd – and they blessed wine and soda crackers and served communion.
As I watched, I thought, “This is the way it should always be, we should be following the children, not the other way around.” Why listen to old white men who stand behind so many pulpits the world over when the children can teach us so much more?
These kids have already learned all of life’s important lessons. They already love each other, they already recognize the divine in each other, they already respect each other. These kids won’t preach hate or war. In their homily, they tell us that their good shepherds are their parents and teachers; but I believe our good shepherds are these children.
I am struck by the hope that this model of the children leading the congregation is a reflection of a larger global shift. Worldwide, we have begun to see countries from the global south preaching from the pulpit, so to speak: South Africa taking Israel to the World Court for the genocide of the Palestinian people. Nicaragua taking Germany to the International Court of Justice for aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/04/a-chance-for-africa-to-counter-the-pitfalls-of-international-criminal-justice/">Namibia</a> arguing before the ICJ that because it has suffered occupation and colonialism Namibia “considers it a moral duty and sacred responsibility to appear before this court on the question of the indefensible occupation of Palestine by Israel.”
Just as these children shepherded us in a mass that was every bit as dignified as any mass ever said by a priest, so is Nicaragua shepherding the world. Nicaragua is a small country from the global south that is modeling consistency and dignity – and choosing peace every step of the way. Just in recent days, Nicaragua has:
<ul>
<li>Broken diplomatic ties with <a href="https://www.tortillaconsal.com/bitacora/node/3886">Ecuador</a> following its flagrant violation of international law and diplomatic norms when police raided the Mexican Embassy in Quito and forcibly removed former Vice President Jorge Glas, who had been granted political asylum by Mexico. In its statement, Nicaragua expressed “forceful, emphatic and irrevocable repulsion, in light of which we take our Sovereign Decision to break all diplomatic relations with the Ecuadoran Government, at the same time we express, once again, our warm and consistent consideration to the beloved Ecuadoran people, who are living through times of inconceivable brutality, and we ratify, once again, our adherence to International Law and the Conventions that govern civilized relations between the States and Governments of the World.”</li>
<li><a href="https://www.el19digital.com/articulos/ver/titulo:150767-entregamos-a-la-onu-nota-sobre-la-obligacion-de-eua-de-indemnizar-a-nicaragua">Reminded</a> the UN that the U.S. still owes Nicaragua reparations and requested that these now be paid. In 1986, Nicaragua won a case against the United States wherein the International Court of Justice <a href="https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/06/28/us-owes-nicaragua-reparations-1986-icj/">ruled</a> that the U.S. repeatedly violated international law by training, arming, equipping, financing, and supplying the Contra paramilitaries in Nicaragua; attacking Nicaraguan infrastructure; putting mines in Nicaragua’s ports; imposing an embargo on Nicaragua; and encouraging the Contras to commit atrocities that violate international humanitarian law. In 1988, the ICJ ordered the U.S. to pay $12 billion in reparations, which would be at least <a href="https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2023/06/28/us-owes-nicaragua-reparations-1986-icj/">$31 billion</a></li>
<li><a href="https://www.tortillaconsal.com/bitacora/node/3950">Brought</a> Germany to the ICJ for aiding and abetting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people. Given its experience in the court successfully arguing the above case against the U.S. as well as many other cases in the intervening years, Nicaragua wanted to use its experience at the ICJ to benefit of the Palestinian people in an attempt to stop the genocide being perpetrated against them.</li>
<li>Summed up its consistent and dignified approach in its <a href="https://www.canal4.com.ni/mensaje-de-nicaragua-en-el-foro-del-consejo-economico/">message</a> at the Economic and Social Council Forum on monitoring financing for development at the UN: “We reaffirm Nicaragua’s commitment…to reducing poverty and inequality; to multilateralism, international law, and the assertion, exercise and defense of our sovereignty; and to the relationships of equality based on friendship, mutual respect, cooperation and solidarity.”</li>
</ul>
With Nicaragua leading and the global south now lending its voice, it seems clear that the world will pivot on Palestine. While the U.S. and Europe continue to facilitate genocide by arming Israel; the global south calls for ceasefire and stands in solidarity with Palestine. As the children conclude mass with hugs and high fives all around, it seems especially fitting to me that the trajectory of the world be determined by our response to the genocide in Palestine. After all, Jesus was a <a href="https://engage.squarespace-mail.com/r?m=662794ca5f3516735ddd449f&u=https%3A%2F%2Fsojo.net%2Farticles%2Fwhat-does-it-mean-say-jesus-palestinian&w=5cd9ac9bfd67933f3379f912&c=b_6626d1bfb2d2b25eaf481646&l=en-US&s=7A5OmTUxLz3DbFP8bIeASEaGvUY%3D">Palestinian</a> living under occupation, and he taught us that, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-04-21-Mass-CEB-San-Pablo-Apostle-Managua-scaled-e1713933610100.jpg"><img fetchpriority="high" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-149965" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-04-21-Mass-CEB-San-Pablo-Apostle-Managua-scaled-e1713933610100.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="533" /></a>2024-04-21 Mass CEB San Pablo Apostle Managua (Photo Credit: Becca Mohally Renk)
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-04-21-Mass-CEB-San-Pablo-Apostle-Managua-2-scaled-e1713933859430.jpg"><img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-149968" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/2024-04-21-Mass-CEB-San-Pablo-Apostle-Managua-2-scaled-e1713933859430.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="533" /></a>2024-04-21 Mass CEB San Pablo Apostle Managua 2 (Photo Credit: Becca Mohally Renk) The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/nicaragua-the-good-shepherd/">Nicaragua: The Good Shepherd</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
</item>
<item>
<title>Warring Against Encryption: Australia is Coming for Your Communications</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/warring-against-encryption-australia-is-coming-for-your-communications/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Binoy Kampmark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 24 Apr 2024 02:52:40 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Anthony Albanese]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Australia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Censorship]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Elon Musk]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Encryption]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Internet]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Social media]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[X (formerly Twitter)]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149957</guid>
<description><![CDATA[On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued with authoritarian glee legal notices to X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to remove material within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”. The relevant material featured a […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/warring-against-encryption-australia-is-coming-for-your-communications/">Warring Against Encryption: Australia is Coming for Your Communications</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, issued with authoritarian glee legal notices to X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, to remove material within 24 hours depicting what her office declared to be “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”. The relevant material featured a livestreamed video of a stabbing attack by a 16-year-old youth at Sydney’s Assyrian Orthodox Christ the Good Shepherd Church the previous day. Two churchmen, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and Rev. Isaac Royel, were injured.
Those at X, and its executive, Elon Musk, begged to differ, choosing to restrict general access to the graphic details of the video in Australia alone. Those outside Australia, and those with a virtual private network (VPN), would be able to access the video unimpeded. Ruffled and irritated by this, Grant rushed to the Australian Federal Court to secure an interim injunction requiring X to hide the posts from global users with a hygiene notice of warning pending final determination of the issue. While his feet and mind are rarely grounded, Musk was far from insensible in <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1781394185951563973">calling</a> Grant a “censorship commissar” in “demanding *global* content bans”. In court, the company will argue that Grant’s office has no authority to dictate what the online platform posts for global users.
This war of grinding, nannying censorship – which is what it is – was the prelude for other agents of information control and paranoia to join the fray. The Labour Albanese government, for instance, with support from the conservative opposition, have rounded on Musk, blurring issues of expression with matters of personality. “This is an egotist,” <a href="https://www.afr.com/companies/telecommunications/safe-room-for-terrorists-asio-warns-big-tech-on-encryption-20240423-p5fm1j">fumed</a> Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “someone who’s totally out of touch with the values that Australian families have, and this is causing great distress.”
The values game, always suspicious and meretricious, is also being played by law enforcement authorities. It is precisely their newfound presence in this debate that should get members of the general public worried. You are to be lectured to, deemed immature and incapable of exercising your rights or abide by your obligations as citizens of Australian society.
We have the spluttering worries of Australian Police Commissioner Reece Kershaw in claiming that children (always handy to throw them in) and vulnerable groups (again, a convenient reference) are “being bewitched online by a cauldron of extremist poison on the open and dark web”. These muddled <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-24/social-media-companies-blamed-for-extremism-by-law-enforcement/103760706">words in his address</a> to the National Press Club in Canberra are shots across the bow. “The very nature of social media allows that extremist poison to spray across the globe almost instantaneously.”
Importantly, Kershaw’s April 24 address has all the worrying signs of a heavy assault, not just on the content to be consumed on the internet, but on the way communications are shared. And what better way to do so by using children as a policy crutch? “We used to warn our children about stranger danger, but now we need to teach our kids about the digital-world deceivers.” A matronly, slightly unhinged tone is unmistakable. “We need to constantly reinforce that people are not always who they claim to be online; and that also applies to images and information.” True, but the same goes for government officials and front-line politicians who make mendacity their stock and trade.
Another sign of gathering storm clouds against the free sharing of information on technology platforms is the appearance of Australia’s domestic espionage agency, ASIO. Alongside Kershaw at the National Press Club, the agency’s chief, Mike Burgess, is also full of grave words about the dangerous imperium of encrypted chatter. There are a number of Australians, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-24/social-media-companies-blamed-for-extremism-by-law-enforcement/103760706">warns</a> Burgess, who are using chat platforms “to communicate with offshore extremists, sharing vile propaganda, posting tips about homemade weapons and discussing how to provoke a race war”.
The inevitable lament about obstacles and restrictions – the sorts of things to guard the general citizenry against encroachments of the police state – follows. “ASIO’s ability to investigate is seriously compromised. Obviously, we and our partners will do everything we can to prevent terrorism and sabotage, so we are expending significant resources to monitor the Australians involved.” You may count yourselves amongst them, dear reader.
Kershaw is likewise not a fan of the encrypted platform. In the timeless language of paternal policing, anything that enables messages to be communicated in a public sense must first receive the state’s approval. “We recognise the role that technologies like end-to-end encryption play in protecting personal data, privacy and cyber-security, but there is no absolute right to privacy.”
To make that very point, Burgess declares that “having lawful and targeted access to extremist communications” would make matters so much easier for the intelligence and security community. Naturally, it will be up to the government to designate what it deems to be extremist and appropriate, a task it is often ill-suited for. Once the encryption key is broken, all communications will be fair game.
When it comes to governments, authoritarian regimes do not have a monopoly on suspicion and the fixation on keeping populations in check. In an idyll of ignorance, peace can reign among the docile, the unquestioning, the cerebrally inactive. The Australian approach to censorship and control, stemming from its origins as a tortured penal outpost of the British Empire, is drearily lengthy. Its attitude to the Internet has been one of suspicion, concern, and complexes.
Government ministers in the antipodes see a world, not of mature participants searching for information, but inspired terrorists, active paedophiles and noisy extremists carousing in shadows and catching the unsuspecting. Such officialdom is represented by such figures as former Labor Communications Minister Stephen Conroy, who <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/technology/conroy-backs-away-from-internet-filter-20121108-290ym.html">thankfully failed</a> to introduce a mandatory internet filter when in office, or such nasty products of regulatory intrusion as the Commonwealth Online Safety Act of 2021, zealously overseen by Commissar Grant and the subject of Musk’s ire.
The age of the internet and the world wide web is something to admire and loathe. Surveillance capitalism is very much of the loathsome, sinister variety. But ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, and the Australian government and other agencies do not give a fig about that. The tech giants have actually corroded privacy in commodifying data but many still retain stubborn residual reminders of liberty in the form of encrypted communications and platforms for discussion. To have access to these means of public endeavour remains the holy grail of law enforcement officers, government bureaucrats and fearful politicians the world over.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/warring-against-encryption-australia-is-coming-for-your-communications/">Warring Against Encryption: Australia is Coming for Your Communications</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
</item>
<item>
<title>Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/divide-and-conquer-the-governments-propaganda-of-fear-and-fake-news/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 24 Apr 2024 02:35:12 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Critical Thinking]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Deep State]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Disinformation]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Freedom of Thought]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Mind Control]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Propaganda]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Totalitarianism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Tyranny]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[reality TV]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149959</guid>
<description><![CDATA[“Nothing is real,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics. Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/divide-and-conquer-the-governments-propaganda-of-fear-and-fake-news/">Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[“<a href="https://www.thebeatles.com/strawberry-fields-forever">Nothing is real</a>,” observed John Lennon, and that’s especially true of politics.
Much like the fabricated universe in Peter Weir’s 1998 film <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120382/">The Truman Show</a>, in which a man’s life is the basis for an elaborately staged television show aimed at selling products and procuring ratings, the political scene in the United States has devolved over the years into a carefully calibrated exercise in how to manipulate, polarize, propagandize and control a population.
Take the media circus that is the Donald Trump <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cable-news-coverage-trump-trial-reflects-us-divided-2024-04-23/">hush money trial</a>, which panders to the public’s voracious <a href="https://www.inverse.com/article/13603-psychology-tv-how-reality-programming-impacts-our-brains">appetite for titillating, soap opera drama</a>, keeping the citizenry <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/cable-news-coverage-trump-trial-reflects-us-divided-2024-04-23/">distracted, diverted and divided</a>.
This is the magic of the reality TV programming that passes for politics today.
Everything becomes entertainment fodder.
As long as we are distracted, entertained, occasionally outraged, always polarized but largely uninvolved and content to remain in the viewer’s seat, we’ll never manage to present a unified front against tyranny (or government corruption and ineptitude) in any form.
Studies suggest that the more reality TV people watch—and I would posit that it’s all reality TV, entertainment news included—the <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/08/24/342429563/viewer-beware-watching-reality-tv-can-impact-real-life-behavior">more difficult it becomes to distinguish</a> between what is real and what is carefully crafted farce.
“We the people” are watching a lot of TV.
On average, <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watches-5-hours-tv-day-article-1.1711954">Americans spend five hours a day</a> watching television. By the time we reach age 65, we’re watching <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/average-american-watches-5-hours-tv-day-article-1.1711954">more than 50 hours of television a week</a>, and that number increases as we get older. And reality TV programming consistently captures the <a href="http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/news/2011/10-years-of-primetime-the-rise-of-reality-and-sports-programming.html">largest percentage of TV watchers</a> every season by an almost 2-1 ratio.
This doesn’t bode well for a citizenry able to sift through masterfully-produced propaganda in order to think critically about the issues of the day.
Yet look behind the spectacles, the reality TV theatrics, the sleight-of-hand distractions and diversions, and the stomach-churning, nail-biting drama that is politics today, and you will find there is a method to the madness.
We have become guinea pigs in a ruthlessly calculated, carefully orchestrated, chillingly cold-blooded experiment in how to control a population and advance a political agenda without much opposition from the citizenry.
This is how you persuade a populace to voluntarily march in lockstep with a police state and police themselves (and each other): by ratcheting up the fear-factor, meted out one carefully calibrated crisis at a time, and teaching them to distrust any who diverge from the norm through elaborate propaganda campaigns.
Unsurprisingly, one of the <a href="http://www.salon.com/2016/10/03/u-s-paid-p-r-firm-540-million-to-make-fake-al-qaida-videos-in-iraq-propaganda-program/">biggest propagandists</a> today is the U.S. government.
Add the government’s inclination <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-is-dhs-disinformation-governance-board-and-why-is-everyone-so-mad-about-it/">to monitor online activity and police so-called “disinformation,”</a> and you have the makings of a restructuring of reality straight out of Orwell’s 1984, where the Ministry of Truth polices speech and ensures that facts conform to whatever version of reality the government propagandists embrace.
This “policing of the mind” is exactly the danger author Jim Keith warned about when he predicted that “information and communication sources are gradually being linked together into a single computerized network, providing an opportunity for unheralded control of what will be broadcast, what will be said, and ultimately what will be thought.”
You may not hear much about the government’s role in producing, planting and peddling propaganda-driven fake news—<a href="http://www.ronpaullibertyreport.com/archives/revealed-the-real-fake-news-list">often with the help of the corporate news media</a>—because the powers-that-be don’t want us skeptical of the government’s message or its <a href="https://www.rt.com/usa/367557-ron-paul-fake-news/">corporate accomplices in the mainstream media</a>.
However, when you have social media giants colluding with the government in order to censor so-called disinformation, all the while the mainstream news media, which is supposed to act as a bulwark against government propaganda, has instead become the mouthpiece of the world’s largest corporation (the U.S. government), the <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/articles/a-hidden-world-growing-beyond-control/">Deep State has grown dangerously out-of-control</a>.
This has been in the works for a long time.
Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein, in his expansive 1977 Rolling Stone piece <a href="http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php">“The CIA and the Media,”</a> reported on Operation Mockingbird, a CIA campaign started in the 1950s to plant intelligence reports among reporters at more than 25 major newspapers and wire agencies, who would then regurgitate them for a public oblivious to the fact that they were being fed government propaganda.
In some instances, as Bernstein <a href="http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php">showed</a>, members of the media also served as extensions of the surveillance state, with reporters actually carrying out assignments for the CIA. Executives with CBS, the New York Times and Time magazine also worked closely with the CIA to vet the news.
If it was happening then, you can bet it’s still happening today, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/09/24/the-new-propaganda-how-the-american-government-is-trying-to-control-what-you-think/">only this collusion has been reclassified, renamed and hidden behind layers of government secrecy, obfuscation and spin</a>.
In its article, “How the American government is trying to control what you think,” the Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/09/24/the-new-propaganda-how-the-american-government-is-trying-to-control-what-you-think/">points out</a> “Government agencies historically have made a habit of crossing the blurry line between informing the public and propagandizing.”
This is mind-control in its most sinister form.
The end goal of these mind-control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.
The government’s fear-mongering is a key element in its mind-control programming.
It’s a simple enough formula. National crises, global pandemics, reported terrorist attacks, and sporadic shootings leave us in a constant state of fear. The emotional panic that accompanies fear actually shuts down the prefrontal cortex or the rational thinking part of our brains. In other words, <a href="https://reason.com/archives/2011/04/12/fear-itself">when we are consumed by fear, we stop thinking</a>.
A populace that stops thinking for themselves is a populace that is easily led, easily manipulated and <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/true-story-brainwashing-and-how-it-shaped-america-180963400/">easily controlled</a> whether through propaganda, brainwashing, mind control, or just plain fear-mongering.
This unseen mechanism of society that manipulates us through fear into compliance is what American theorist Edward L. Bernays referred to as “<a href="https://bit.ly/3DMHjub">an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country</a>.”
To this invisible government of rulers who operate behind the scenes—the architects of the Deep State—we are mere puppets on a string, to be brainwashed, manipulated and controlled.
Yet as I make clear in my book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-America-War-American-People/dp/1590795229/">Battlefield America: The War on the American People</a> and in its fictional counterpart <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Erik-Blair-Diaries-Battlefield-Dead/dp/1954968027/">The Erik Blair Diaries</a>, it’s time to change the channel, tune out the reality TV show, and push back against the real menace of the police state.
If not, if we continue to sit back and lose ourselves in political programming, we will remain a captive audience to a farce that grows more absurd by the minute.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/unnamed-1-2.jpg"><img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-147510" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/unnamed-1-2.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="371" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/unnamed-1-2.jpg 250w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/unnamed-1-2-202x300.jpg 202w" sizes="(max-width: 250px) 100vw, 250px" /></a>The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/divide-and-conquer-the-governments-propaganda-of-fear-and-fake-news/">Divide and Conquer: The Government’s Propaganda of Fear and Fake News</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Last Nation Standing ─ Iran</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/last-nation-standing-%e2%94%80-iran/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dan Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2024 22:05:04 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Egypt]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Human Rights Watch]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Imperialism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Iraq]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Libya]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Middle East]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Sudan]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[David Wurmser]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Douglas Feith]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Richard Perle]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149954</guid>
<description><![CDATA[By not responding to decades of Israel’s provocations with an attack on Israeli soil, Iran displayed patience. The Islamic Republic rulers realized the provocations were becoming harsher, more damaging, and without stopping; it was time to respond. Their response was notable; a mild rebuke that showed power and unwillingness to harm civilians, unlike the offensive […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/last-nation-standing-%e2%94%80-iran/">Last Nation Standing ─ Iran</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[By not responding to decades of Israel’s provocations with an attack on Israeli soil, Iran displayed patience. The Islamic Republic rulers realized the provocations were becoming harsher, more damaging, and without stopping; it was time to respond. Their response was notable; a mild rebuke that showed power and unwillingness to harm civilians, unlike the offensive attacks by Israel’s military and intelligence that have killed Iranian civilians and military personnel.
Israel’s worldwide propaganda mechanism omits the tens of previous illegal and damaging attacks inflicted upon Iran and charges Iran with cruel and threatening behavior that requires a strong reply. Already, members of England’s parliament (MP) obeyed the Zionist call for action with outrageous pleas to assist Israel against “Iran’s genocidal actions,” and “attempt to interrupt the peace.”
One person is injured and that is genocide. Tens of thousands of Gazans killed and no reference to genocide. Mayhem in the Middle East since the first Zionist set foot in Palestine and one relatively harmless attack disturbed the peace. Are these MPs real people or artificial intelligence? How can they run for office and be elected?
A common thread exists in US actions of aggressive behavior toward nations that have not threatened the security of the United States, such as 21st-century Iraq and Iran. The common thread weaves nations that were or are antagonists of apartheid Israel. All, except Iran, have been subdued by the U.S. What Israel wants, Israel gets, and Israel convinced the United States to eliminate the foes of the Zionist Republic. Americans died and Americans paid for efforts that had scarce benefits to U.S. citizens. Iran is now the last nation standing and Israel is coercing the U.S. to perform its usual duty — get rid of Iran. Look at the record.
Sudan
Deposed Sudan leader, Omar al-Bashir, made it clear. “Israel is our enemy, our number one enemy, and we will continue calling Israel our enemy.” Israel also made its relationship with Bahir clear by destroying a Sudanese arms factory suspected of producing chemical weapons for Hamas. <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/453ed361-4477-4f6a-b5f9-97c9e6f69bfe?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/453ed361-4477-4f6a-b5f9-97c9e6f69bfe?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1713994761693000&usg=AOvVaw3CuRRqFpg4OdBGqVTVqnDr">Times of Israel</a> reports that “Over the years, there have been reports of the Israelis continuing to aid South Sudanese rebels during Sudan’s second civil war, which lasted from 1983 to 2005.” Israel’s assistance to the rebels enabled South Sudan to secede and weaken Bashir. The <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/453ed361-4477-4f6a-b5f9-97c9e6f69bfe?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/453ed361-4477-4f6a-b5f9-97c9e6f69bfe?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1713994761693000&usg=AOvVaw3CuRRqFpg4OdBGqVTVqnDr">Times of Israel</a> also reports that “Miniature Israeli flags hang from car windshields and flutter at roadside stalls, and at the Juba souk in the city’s downtown, you can buy lapel pins with the Israeli flag alongside its black, red and green South Sudanese counterpart.”
Link of a car bomb at the World Trade Center in New York to Osama bin Laden, who resided in Sudan, prompted the US State Department to add Sudan to its list of state sponsors of terrorism. In October 1997, the U.S. imposed economic, trade, and financial sanctions on Sudan. These sanctions occurred despite none of the extremists engaging in terrorist activities while in Sudan. Bashir offered extradition or interviews of arrested al-Qaeda operatives and allowed access to the extensive files of Sudanese intelligence. According to a CIA source, reported in the Guardian, Sept 30, 2001, “This represents the worst single intelligence failure in this whole terrible business. It is the key to the whole thing right now. It is reasonable to say that had we had this data we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks.”
The U.S. Congress heightened the insurrection in Sudan’s Darfur province by passing amendment H.Con.Res.467 — 108th Congress (2003-2004), amended 07/22/2004, which “States that Congress declares that the atrocities unfolding in Darfur, Sudan, are genocide, and urges the Administration to refer to such atrocities as genocide.” The amendment gathered world opinion against the Sudanese government. Although the public accepted the figure of 400,000 killings of people in Darfur, this genocide had no verification of the number of killings, no displayed mass graves, and no images of a great number of bodies.
Before he left the U.S. State Department, former US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick stated on ABC News online, November 9, 2005, “It’s a tribal war. And frankly I don’t think foreign forces want to get in the middle of a tribal war of Sudanese.”
A peace agreement ended the second Sudanese civil war in 2005. On July 9, 2011, South Sudan became independent and reduced Sudan to a pipeline for South Sudan oil. After Sudan became a diminished state, barely able to survive, the United States lifted economic and trade sanctions. Independent South Sudan fared worse — involved in its civil war, human rights violations, and social and economic turmoil. <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/8bb0aa8f-61da-4b86-b76f-94f4affbb36d?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/8bb0aa8f-61da-4b86-b76f-94f4affbb36d?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1713994761693000&usg=AOvVaw1NPsZzIPFmjCq8x22sTi8-">Human Rights Watch</a> (HRW) claimed [South Sudan] “Government security forces and armed groups perpetrated serious human rights abuses, including killings, acts of sexual violence, abductions, detention, torture and other ill-treatment, the recruitment and use of children, and destruction of civilian property.” The U.S. government did not criticize the human rights violations of the friend of Israel.
On October 23, 2020, Israel and Sudan agreed to normalize relations 
On April 6, 2021, the Sudanese cabinet approved a bill abolishing the 1958 law on boycotting Israel.
The once wealthy Sudan, flowing with minerals and gushing with oil had the possibility of becoming a strong and vibrant African nation. US policies of countering terrorism, assisting South Sudan rebels, and interfering in the Darfur civil war contributed to preventing that outcome and provided Israel with a friendly Sudan that no longer assisted the Palestinians.
Libya
<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/383f4eac-47ac-442d-bcf9-8504f4016939?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/383f4eac-47ac-442d-bcf9-8504f4016939?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1713994761693000&usg=AOvVaw1kVwzVfSs19TtKeAFynsLY">Libya’s leader, Mohammar Qadhafi, has been quoted as saying</a> on April 1, 2002, “Thousands of Libyans are ready to defend the Palestinian people.” In that speech he called for a Pan-Arab war against the state of Israel’s existence and demanded “other Arab leaders open their borders to allow Libyans to march into Palestine, to join the Palestinian uprising.” In the speech, Gaddafi claimed he would not recognize Israel as a state.
The United States used Gadhafi’s support for radical revolutions as a reason to have strained relations with Libya. Sanctions soon followed. In March 1982, the U.S. Government prohibited imports of Libyan crude oil into the United States and expanded the controls on U.S. originated goods intended for export to Libya. Licenses were required for all transactions, except food and medicine. In April 1985, all Export-Import Bank financing was prohibited.
On April 14, 1986, the United States launched air strikes against Libya in retaliation for “Libyan sponsorship of terrorism against American troops and citizens.” Five military targets and “terrorism centers” were hit, including Gadhafi’s headquarters.
After Libya halted its nuclear program, renounced terrorism, accepted responsibility for inappropriate actions by its officials, and paid appropriate compensation to the victims’ families for the bombing of a US commercial airplane over Lockerbie, Scotland, the United Nations (UN) lifted sanctions, the U.S. terminated the applicability of the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act to Libya, and President Bush signed an Executive Order terminating the national emergency, which ended economic sanctions. All was going well until 2011.
Despite the lack of clarity of the 2011 rebellion against Gadhafi and specious reasons for NATO and US roles to defend the rebels, the U.S. government cut ties with the Gadhafi regime, sanctioned senior regime members, and, together with several European and Arab nations, managed to convince the UN Security Council to authorize intervention in the conflict. The intervention demolished the Gadhafi regime and enabled the rebels to obtain victory, another fallen nation that was an outspoken antagonist of Israel, and, still, in 2024, an embattled nation.
Egypt
On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack on Israel to reclaim territories they had lost in the Six-Day War. With Israeli troops seriously outnumbered and facing near-certain defeat at the hands of the Soviet-backed nations, President Nixon ordered an emergency airlift of supplies and materiel. “Send everything that will fly,” Nixon told Henry Kissinger. The American airlift enabled Israel to launch a decisive counterattack that pushed the Egyptians back across the Suez Canal.
In a briefing, Scuttle Diplomacy: Henry Kissinger and Arab-Israeli Peacemaking, by Salim Yaqub, Woodrow Wilson Center, Dr. Yaqub argued that “Kissinger’s pivotal role as the intermediary allowed him to feign neutrality while secretly supporting the Israelis, and to turn the peace negotiations into a long series of small confidence building steps which would give the appearance of progress that Egypt required to come to an agreement with Israel, but which would allow Israel to keep most of the Syrian and Palestinian land gained after the 1967 Six-Day War.”
Prime Minister of Egypt, Anwar Sadat, signed a peace treaty with Israel, and the U.S. normalized relations with previously combative Egypt. The most populous and leading nation of the Arab world, the principal defender of Arab rights, which had waged several wars with Israel, no longer posed a threat to Israel and became a weakened observer to the hostilities affecting the Middle East.
Syria
Israel and Syria battled from day one of the UN 181 Proclamation that recommended partition of the British Mandate.
The U.S. never favored the Assad regime and cut relations. After the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. soil, the Syrian Government tried limited cooperation with the U.S. War on Terror. Syrian intelligence alerted the U.S. of an Al-Qaeda plan to fly a hang glider loaded with explosives into the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Bahrain. Syria was also a destination for U.S. captives outside of its borders in its rendition program. According to U.S. officials, as reported by Nicholas Blanford, in a Special to The Christian Science Monitor, May 14, 2002, ”Syrian information was instrumental in catching militant Islamists around the world.”
Syria’s descent into near oblivion started with its civil wars, in which foreign fighters (ISIS and al-Nusra) entered Syria from NATO’s Turkey (no retribution to Turkey for allowing ISIS to enter Syria), and a multitude of insurgents fought with and against one another until Assad, with assistance from Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah, overcame the insurgencies. WikiLeaks, in 2011, released diplomatic cables between the U.S. embassy in Damascus and the State Department, which revealed the U.S. had given financial support to political opposition groups and their related projects through September 2010.
ISIS is defeated and a limping Assad government barely survives as a splintered nation. Bombed almost daily by Israeli missiles and planes, the hopelessly weak Syria cannot retaliate. With assistance from the U.S., Syria’s threat to Israel has been neutralized.
Iraq
Justifying the U.S. invasion of Iraq with a spurious reason that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and needed to be silenced was so absurd that another reason was sought. Security school scholars argued a joint threat of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and links to terrorist groups. Hegemony school scholars argued preservation and extension of U.S. hegemony, including the spread of liberal democratic ideals. When in doubt bring in liberal democratic ideals.
The interventionists conveniently forgot that Saddam Hussein was a restraint to Iran and a deterrent to Radical Islamists. With Hussein removed, Iran lost its restraint. Bordering on Iraq and spiritually attached to Iraq’s Shi’a population, Iran became involved in the commercial, economic, and political future of Iraq, an event that U.S. strategists should have known.
The invasion of Iraq and disposal of a Saddam Hussein regime, which had prevented al-Qaeda elements from establishing themselves, exposed Iraq’s porous borders to Radical Islamic fighters. Founded in October 2004, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) emerged from a transnational terrorist group created and led by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. His cohorts entered through Jordan, while al-Qaeda forced out of Waziristan in Pakistan found a haven in Iraq. Meanwhile, fighters trained in and wandering through the deserts of Saudi Arabia hopped planes to Istanbul and Damascus and worked their way across Syria into Iraq. Disturbed by the U.S. invasion and military tactics, Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim al-Badri al-Samarrai, later known as Al Baghdadi, founder of the Islamic Caliphate, transformed himself from a fun-loving soccer player into a hardened militant and helped found the militant group Jamaat Jaysh Ahl al-Sunnah wa-l-Jamaah (JJASJ), which countered the U.S. military in Iraq.
Spurious reasons and obvious counterproductive results leave doubts that the original explanation and rationales for the invasion were correct. A more valid reason involves the neocons in the Bush administration who were closely identified with Israel in the Pentagon, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, and the office of the vice president, Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby, who aggressively advanced the case for the invasion. Some backups to that theory,
Haaretz, Apr 03, 2003, “White Man’s Burden,” Ari Shavit, “The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish (ED: Avid Israel supporters), who were pushing President Bush to change the course of history.”
In The Road to Iraq: The Making of a Neoconservative War, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad echoes the case.
<blockquote>The road to Iraq was paved with neoconservative intentions. Other factions of the US foreign policy establishment were eventually brought around to supporting the war, but the neocons were its architects and chief proponents.</blockquote>
<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/f45bb28e-cd5a-47c5-825b-0d571a901bb5?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/f45bb28e-cd5a-47c5-825b-0d571a901bb5?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1713994761693000&usg=AOvVaw3JpRygn6g_fIs028b8DSHF">Ahmad quotes a remark attributed to British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw</a>. “It’s a toss-up whether Libby is working for the Israelis or the Americans on any given day.” <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/bbf38741-7967-4fe5-ba86-4fad5b975e5e?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/bbf38741-7967-4fe5-ba86-4fad5b975e5e?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1713994761693000&usg=AOvVaw2NsAoQ5ZBgd_fO98cm9Zte">He also quotes former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan who contended</a>, “The closer you examine it, the clearer it is that neoconservatism, in large part, is simply about enabling the most irredentist elements in Israel and sustaining a permanent war against anyone or any country who disagrees with the Israeli right.”
A 1996 report, <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/abd53b1f-c890-4ff3-91d6-0528cd12d125?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/abd53b1f-c890-4ff3-91d6-0528cd12d125?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1713994761693000&usg=AOvVaw2Et0xPuAWxWGiv-5UmXChj">Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm</a>, prepared by neoconservatives at the Jerusalem-based think tank, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, many of whom held vital positions in the George W. Bush administration, lends substance to the charge that the invasion of Iraq served Israel’s interests.
<blockquote>We must distinguish soberly and clearly friend from foe. We must make sure that our friends across the Middle East never doubt the solidity or value of our friendship….Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions.</blockquote>
<blockquote>Israel can make a clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity and mutuality — not one focused narrowly on territorial disputes. Israel’s new strategy — based on a shared philosophy of peace through strength — reflects continuity with Western values by stressing that Israel is self-reliant, does not need U.S. troops in any capacity to defend it, including on the Golan Heights, and can manage its own affairs. Such self-reliance will grant Israel greater freedom of action and remove a significant lever of pressure used against it in the past.</blockquote>
Participants in the Study Group included Richard Perle, American Enterprise Institute, Study Group Leader, James Colbert, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Charles Fairbanks, Jr., Johns Hopkins University/SAIS, Douglas Feith, Feith and Zell Associates, Robert Loewenberg, President, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, Jonathan Torop, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, David Wurmser, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, and Meyrav Wurmser, Johns Hopkins University.
Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser later served in high positions in the George W. Bush administration at the time of the Iraq invasion. The others were allied with organizations that promoted Israel’s interests.
Two observations: 
(1) Why were Americans prominent in an Israeli Think Tank and why were they advising a foreign nation? 
(2) Note that the thrust of the report is to advise Israel to have a “clean break from the past and establish a new vision for the U.S.-Israeli partnership based on self-reliance, maturity, and mutuality.” This has been the modus operandi of the Netanyahu administrations.
Another ember that warmed the neocon’s heartfelt devotion to Israel; <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/f5c5a722-82d8-4219-b518-a57aaed6ea09?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/f5c5a722-82d8-4219-b518-a57aaed6ea09?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1713994761693000&usg=AOvVaw2lydH1AT4pdgP0OwLiMtDc">The Project for the New American Century urged an invasion of Iraq throughout the Clinton years</a>. “Bombing Iraq Isn’t enough. Saddam Hussein must go,” William Kristol and Robert Kagan, PNAC neocon directors wrote in the 1998 New York Times.
No “smoking gun” firmly ties the neocons devoted to Israel together with using the United States military to eliminate another Israel antagonist. The argument is based upon it being the best, most factual, and only reason the war could have been wanted.
Iran – Last Nation Standing
The Islamic Republic may not be an exemplary nation, but there is no evidence or reason for the U.S. accusations that Iran is a destabilizing, expansionist nation, or leading sponsor of international terrorism. Why would it be – there are no external resources or land masses that would be helpful to Iran’s economy, Iran has not invaded any nation, and its few sea and drone attacks on others are reactions from a perception that others have colluded in harming the Islamic Republic and its allies. Ayatollah Khomeini’s vision of expanding his social ideology never got anywhere and died with him. Subsequent leaders have been forced to reach out to defend their interests and those of their friends, but none of these leaders has pursued an expansionist philosophy or wants the burden that accompanies the task — enough problems at home.
No matter what Iran does, the US perceives Iran as an enemy and a threat to not only the Middle East but to world order. All this hostility, despite the facts that (1) the Iranians showed willingness to create a new Afghanistan by pledging $560 million worth of assistance, almost equal to the amount that the United States pledged at the Tokyo donors’ conference in January 2002, (2) according to the U.S. envoy to Afghanistan, Richard Dobbins, played a “decisive role in persuading the Northern Alliance delegation to compromise its demands of wanting 60 percent of the portfolios in an interim government,” (3) Iran arrested Al-Qaeda agents on its territory and, because Al-Qaeda linked the Shiite Muslims, represented by Iran and Hezbollah, with Crusaders, Zionists, and Jews as its most bitter enemies, had ample reason to combat terrorist organizations, and (4) Iran has no reason for or capability of attacking the U.S .or its western allies.
Being vilified for inadequate reasons is followed by Iran not being praised for significant reasons. President Trump, in his January 8, 2020 speech, argued the U.S. had been responsible for defeating ISIS and the Islamic Republic should realize that it is in their benefit to work with the United States in making sure ISIS remains defeated. Trade the U.S. with Iran and Trump’s speech would be correct.
The U.S. spent years and billions of dollars in training an Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left it to a small contingent of ISIS forces. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. Events energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces, which, with cooperation from Iran and leadership from its Major General Qasem Soleimani, recaptured Tikrit and Ramadi, pushed ISIS out of Fallujah, and played a leading role in ISIS’ defeat at Mosul. Iran and Soleimani were key elements in the defeat of ISIS.
What reward did Solemani receive for his efforts? When his convoy left Baghdad airport, a drone strike, perpetrated by U.S. military, assassinated Major General Solemani and nine other innocent people on January 3, 2002. UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Agnes Callamard, reported the U.S. had not provided sufficient evidence of an imminent threat to life to justify the attack.
As usual, Israel used the U.S. to satisfy its desires. “Israel was going to do this with us, and it was being planned and working on it for months,” President Trump said about the coordination to kill Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force. “We had everything all set to go, and the night before it happened, I got a call that Israel will not be participating in this attack. I’ll never forget that Bibi Netanyahu let us down. We were disappointed by that. Very disappointed…But we did the job ourselves, with absolute precision … and then Bibi tried to take credit for it.”
Why do these protectors of the realm want Iran destroyed — they fear Iran may act as a deterrent to their future aggression. Iran cannot win a war with a nuclear weapon or any weapons; it can only posture and threaten use of nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Its principal antagonists, Israel, United States, and Saudi Arabia have elements that shield themselves from a nuclear attack by Iran. Israel’s small size makes it likely that fallout from a nuclear weapon will endanger the entire region, especially Iran’s allies. Any nuclear strike on Israel will be countered with a torrent of nuclear missiles that will completely wipe large Iran off the map and without fallout causing harm to neighboring nations. With little to gain and everything to lose, why would Iran engage in nuclear aggression?
Netanyahu’s scenario follows a pattern of using American lives and clout to further Israel’s interests and decimate its adversaries. Survey the record — destruction of Iraq, destruction of Sudan, destruction of Libya, destruction of Egypt, destruction of Syria. and now Iran. Only Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries will be left standing, remaining in that position as long as they show no threat to Israel.
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The destructions visited upon the described nations have done little to advance US security and economy. Therefore, the reason for the actions and US support of Israel must be political —politicians coopted by catering to the religious right community and other Israel defenders. US administrations are willing to sacrifice American lives and give exorbitant financial assistance to Israel in trade for electoral support from Israel’s backers.
</div>
The present confrontations between Iran and Israel have escalated. Those who believe Israel’s few drones over Isfahan concluded retaliation for Iran’s excessive number of missiles and harmless result in the attack on Israel might be mistaken. The drones may have only tested Iranian defensive capability. More, much more provocations may happen.
Due to US aggressive tactics, the antagonists to Israel have fallen and Iran is the last nation standing.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/last-nation-standing-%e2%94%80-iran/">Last Nation Standing ─ Iran</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Will the Freedom Flotilla Sail to Gaza?</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/will-the-freedom-flotilla-sail-to-gaza/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Medea Benjamin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2024 13:58:09 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA["Aid"]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Freedom Flotilla to Gaza]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Humanitarianism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Hunger/Famine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israeli Defense Force (IDF)]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United States]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149926</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The flotilla waits to sail from Istanbul. Photo credit: Medea Benjamin The non-violence training to join the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s ships to Gaza has been intense. As hundreds of us from 32 countries gathered in Istanbul, we were briefed about what we might encounter on this voyage. “We have to be ready for every […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/will-the-freedom-flotilla-sail-to-gaza/">Will the Freedom Flotilla Sail to Gaza?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/mail-e1713835050881.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-149927" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/mail-e1713835050881.png" alt="" width="600" height="334" /></a>The flotilla waits to sail from Istanbul. Photo credit: Medea Benjamin
The non-violence training to join the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s ships to Gaza has been intense. As hundreds of us from 32 countries gathered in Istanbul, we were briefed about what we might encounter on this voyage. “We have to be ready for every possibility,” our trainers insisted.
The best scenario, they said, is that our three ships–one carrying 5,500 tons of humanitarian aid and two carrying the passengers–will reach Gaza and accomplish our mission. Another scenario would be that the Turkish government might cave to pressure from Israel, the United States and Germany, and prevent the boats from even leaving Istanbul. This happened in 2011, when the Greek government buckled under pressure and ten boats were stalled in Greece. With our boats docked in Istanbul today, we fear that Turkish President Erdogan, who recently suffered a crushing blow in local elections, is vulnerable to any economic blackmail the Western powers might be threatening.
Another possibility is that the ships take off but the Israelis illegally hijack us in international waters, confiscate our boats and supplies, arrest and imprison us, and eventually deport us.
This happened on several other voyages to Gaza, one of them with deadly consequences. In 2010, a flotilla of six boats was stopped by the Israeli military in international waters. They boarded the biggest boat, the Mavi Marmara. According to a UN report, the Israelis opened fire with live rounds from a helicopter hovering above the ship and from commando boats along the side of the ship. In a horrific display of force, nine passengers were killed, and one more later succumbed to his wounds.
To try to prevent another nightmare like that, potential passengers on this flotilla have to undergo rigorous training. We watched a video of what we might face—from extremely potent tear gas to ear-splitting concussion grenades—and we were told that the Israeli commandos will be armed with weapons with live rounds. Then we divided up into small groups to discuss how best to react, non-violently, to such an attack. Do we sit, stand, or lie down? Do we link arms? Do we put our hands up in the air to show we are unarmed?
The most frightening part of the training was a simulation replete with deafening booms of gunfire and exploding percussion grenades and masked soldiers screaming at us, hitting us with simulated rifles, dragging us across the floor, and arresting us. It was indeed sobering to get a glimpse of what might await us. Equally sobering are Israeli media reports indicating that the Israeli military has begun “security preparations,” including preparations for taking over the flotilla.
That’s why everyone who has signed up for this mission deserves tremendous credit. The largest group of passengers are from Turkey, and many are affiliated with the humanitarian group, IHH, an enormous Turkish NGO with 82 offices throughout the country. It has consultative status at the UN and does charity work in 115 countries. Through IHH, millions of supporters donated money to buy and stock the ships. Israel, however, has designated this very respected charity as a terrorist group.
The next largest group comes from Malaysia, some of them affiliated with another very large humanitarian group called MyCARE. MyCARE, known for helping out in emergency situations such as floods and other natural disasters, has contributed millions of dollars in emergency aid to Gaza over the years.
From the U.S., there are about 35 participants. Leading the group, and key to the international coalition, is 77-year-old retired U.S. Army colonel and State Department diplomat Ann Wright. After quitting the State Department in protest over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Wright has put her diplomatic skills to good use in helping to pull together a motley group of internationals. Her co-organizer from the U.S. is Huwaida Arraf, a Palestinian American attorney who is a co-founder of the International Solidarity Movement and who ran for congress in 2022. Arraf was key to organizing the very first flotillas that started in 2008. So far, there have been about 15 attempts to get to Gaza by boat, only five of them successful.
The incredible breadth of participants is evident in our nightly meetings, where you can hear clusters of groups chatting away in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Malay, French, Italian, and English in diverse accents from Australian to Welsh. The ages range from students in their 20s to an 86-year-old Argentine medical doctor.
What brings us together is our outrage that the world community is allowing this genocide in Gaza to happen, and a burning desire to do more than we have been doing to stop people from being murdered, maimed and starved. The aid we are bringing is enormous–it is the equivalent of over 100 trucks—but that is not the only purpose of this trip. “This is an aid mission to bring food to hungry people,” said Huwaida Arraf, “but Palestinians do not want to live on charity. So we are also challenging Israeli policies that make them dependent on aid. We are trying to break the siege.”
Israel’s vicious attacks on the people of Gaza, its blocking of aid deliveries and its targeting of relief organizations have fueled a massive humanitarian crisis.  The killing of seven World Central Kitchen workers by Israeli forces on April 1 highlighted the dangerous environment in which relief agencies operate, which has forced many of them to shut down their operations.
The U.S. government is building a temporary port for aid that is supposed to be finished in early May, but this is the same government that provides weapons and diplomatic cover for the Israelis. And while President Biden expresses concern for the suffering Palestinians, he has suspended aid to UNRWA, the main UN agency responsible for helping them, after Israel made unsubstantiated claims that 12 of its 13,000 employees in Gaza participated in the October 7 attacks.
Given the urgency and danger this moment presents, the Freedom Flotilla Coalition is entering rough and uncharted waters. We are calling on countries around the world to pressure Israel to allow us “free and safe passage” to Gaza. In the U.S., we are asking for help from our Congress, but having just approved another $26 billion to Israel, it is doubtful that we can count on their support.
And even if our governments did pressure Israel, would Israel pay attention? Their defiance of international law and world opinion during the past seven months indicates otherwise. But still, we will push forward. The people of Gaza are the wind in our sails. Freedom for Palestine is our North Star. We are determined to reach Gaza with food, medicines and, most of all, our solidarity and love.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/38122556-e1713838766805.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-149933" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/38122556-e1713838766805.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="423" /></a>The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/will-the-freedom-flotilla-sail-to-gaza/">Will the Freedom Flotilla Sail to Gaza?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Censorship Wars: Elon Musk, Safety Commissioners and Violent Content</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/censorship-wars-elon-musk-safety-commissioners-and-violent-content/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Binoy Kampmark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2024 00:40:46 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Australia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Censorship]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Elon Musk]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Facebook]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Social media]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Violence]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[X (formerly Twitter)]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149922</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The attitudes down under towards social media have turned barmy. While there is much to take Elon Musk to task for his wrecking ball antics at the platform formerly known as Twitter, not to mention his highly developed sense of sociopathy, the hysteria regarding the refusal to remove images of a man in holy orders […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/censorship-wars-elon-musk-safety-commissioners-and-violent-content/">Censorship Wars: Elon Musk, Safety Commissioners and Violent Content</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[The attitudes down under towards social media have turned barmy. While there is much to take Elon Musk to task for his wrecking ball antics at the platform formerly known as Twitter, not to mention his highly developed sense of sociopathy, the hysteria regarding the refusal to remove images of a man in holy orders being attacked by his assailant in Sydney suggests a lengthy couch session is in order. But more than that, it suggests that the censoring types are trying, more than ever, to tell users what to see and under what conditions for fear that we will all reach for a weapon and go on the rampage.
It all stems from the April 15 incident that took place at an Assyrian Orthodox service conducted by Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and the Rev. Isaac Royel at Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, Sydney. A 16-year-old youth, captured on the livestream of the surface, is shown heading to the bishop before feverishly stabbing him, speaking Arabic about insults to the Prophet Muhammed as he does so. Rev. Royel also received injuries.
Up to 600 people subsequently gathered around the church. A number demanded that police surrender the boy. In the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/australia-church-stabbing-0fd1e9d4ae21915d16318456d1e58bc7">hours of rioting</a> that followed, 51 police officers were injured. Various Sydney mosques received death threats.
The matter – dramatic, violent, raging – rattled the authorities. For the sake of appearance, the heavies, including counter-terrorism personnel, New South Wales police and members of the Australian domestic spy agency, ASIO, were brought in. The pudding was ready for a severe overegging. On April 16, the NSW Police Commissioner Karen Webb deemed the stabbing a “terrorist incident”. NSW Premier Chris Minns stated that the incident was being investigated as a “terrorist incident” given the “religiously motivated” language used during the alleged attack.
After conducting interviews with the boy while still in his hospital bed on April 18, the decision was made to charge him with the commission of an alleged act of terrorism. This, despite a behavioural history consistent with, as The Guardian <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/apr/19/sydney-church-stabbing-charges-terroism-offences-mental-illness-christ-the-good-shepherd-church-wakeley-ntwnfb">reports</a>, “mental illness or intellectual disability.” For their part, the boy’s family <a href="https://apnews.com/article/church-stabbing-sydney-australian-assyrian-orthodox-d0930e270b8059b3a1d9d3cba7e1d407">noted</a> “anger management and behavioural issues” along with his “short fuse”, none of which lent themselves to a conclusion that he had been radicalised. He did, however, have a past with knife crime.
Assuming the general public to be a hive of incipient terrorism easily stimulated by images of violence, networks and media outlets across the country chose to crop the video stream. The youth is merely shown approaching the bishop, at which point he raises his hand and is editorially frozen in suspended time.
Taking this approach implied a certain mystification that arises from tampering and redacting material in the name of decency and inoffensiveness; to refuse to reveal such details and edit others, the authorities and information guardians were making their moralistic mark. They were also, ironically enough, lending themselves to accusations of the very problems they seek to combat: misinformation and its more sinister sibling, disinformation.
Another telling point was the broader omission in most press reporting to detail the general background of the bishop in question. Emmanuel is an almost comically conservative churchman, a figure excommunicated for his theological differences with orthodoxy. He has also adopted fire and brimstone views against homosexuality, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-16/who-is-bishop-mar-mari-emmanuel-wakeley-church-attack/103728808">seeing</a> it as a “crime in the eyes of God”, attacked other religions of the book, including Judaism and Islam, and sees global conspiracies behind the transmission of COVID-19. Hardly, it would seem, the paragon of mild tolerance and calm acceptance in a cosmopolitan society.
On April 16, Australia’s eSafety commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, got busy, announcing that X Corp and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, had been issued with legal notices to remove material within 24 hours depicting “gratuitous or offensive violence with a high degree of impact and detail”. The material in question featured the attack at the Good Shepherd Church.
Under the <a href="https://www.legislation.gov.au/C2021A00076/latest/text">Online Safety Act 2021</a> (Cth), the commissioner is granted various powers to make sure the sheep do not stray. Internet service providers can be requested or required to block access to material that promotes abhorrent violent conduct, incites such conduct, instructs in abhorrent violent conduct or depicts abhorrent violent conduct. Removal of material promoting, instructing, or depicting such “abhorrent violent conduct”, including “terrorist acts” can be ordered for removal if it risks going “viral” and causing “significant harm to the Australian community”.
X took a different route, preferring to “geoblock” the content. Those in Australia, in other words, would not be able to access the content except via such alternative means as a virtual private network (VPN). The measure was regarded as insufficient by the commissioner. In response, a shirty Musk <a href="https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1781394185951563973">dubbed</a> Grant Australia’s “censorship commissar” who was “demanding *global* content bans”. On April 21, a spokesperson for X <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-22/esafety-commissioner-seeks-injunction-against-x/103755874">stated</a> that the commissioner lacked “the authority to dictate what content X’s users can see globally. We will robustly challenge this unlawful and dangerous approach in court.”
In court, the commissioner argued that X’s interim measure not to delete the material but “geoblock” it failed to comply with the Online Safety Act. Siding with her at first instance, the court’s interim injunction requires X to hide the posts in question from all users globally. A warning notice is to cover them. The two-day injunction gives X the opportunity to respond.
There is something risible in all of this. From the side of the authorities, Grant berates and intrudes, treating the common citizenry as malleable, immature and easily led. Spare them the graphic images – she and members of her office decide what is “abhorrent” and “offensive” to general sensibilities.
Platforms such as Meta and X engage in their own forms of censorship and information curation, their agenda algorithmically driven towards noise, shock and indignation. All the time, they continue to indulge in surveillance capitalism, a corporate phenomenon the Australian government shows little interest in battling. On both sides of this coin, from the bratty, petulant Musk, to the teacherly manners of the eSafety Commissioner, the great public is being mocked and infantilised.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/censorship-wars-elon-musk-safety-commissioners-and-violent-content/">Censorship Wars: Elon Musk, Safety Commissioners and Violent Content</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>The Empire Owns Us</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-empire-owns-us/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Philip A. Faruggio]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Apr 2024 18:59:26 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Culture]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Labor]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Unions]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149901</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In today’s America there is no need for a contract for millions of my fellow working stiffs. With many states like mine (Florida) having “Right to work laws,” unions are few and far between. Duh, like not even 10% of private sector workers are unionized. So, you work for a boss on hourly, weekly, or […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-empire-owns-us/">The Empire Owns Us</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[In today’s America there is no need for a contract for millions of my fellow working stiffs. With many states like mine (Florida) having “Right to work laws,” unions are few and far between. Duh, like not even 10% of private sector workers are unionized. So, you work for a boss on hourly, weekly, or on commission (as this writer still does for over 40 years) you can be replaced or as the Brits say “redundanized” just like that! And they complain, the Fat Cats who own industry, about slow motion or uncaring employees. Well, like with the guy who put in our laminate floors told me several years ago: “At the place I work, with three of us wood craftsmen, the owner just bought himself, his wife and his two children new BMWs. Yet, never a thought to give us raises or a nice bonus at Christmas.”
Let’s not just obsess over the shitty work climate for blue and white collar working stiffs. No, check this out: I used my smart TV and found many “Free Channels” meaning no cost to watch. I got into a three season series and was really hooked on the storyline etc. Well, with this channel, TUBI, they have more commercials than I have ever experienced. The way things are set up if you try to leave the show you may lose where you are in it, so I had to sit through the ****. Most of the commercials were geared for young millennials (20s to early 30s) or the Medicare age folks like myself. I could not believe commercials pushing “Up to $500 cash NOW with no hassles.” Then you have the ones like Credit Karma whereupon the guy wants to rent this apartment and his credit score is low. So, with Credit Karma you see the guy signing for the “way too costly for my budget” apartment as the For Rent sign is taken down. God bless finance capitalism! How about this one, again geared for that 20 to 30+ age group. It’s so easy to buy a new car or sell your old one. With the app in hand this young woman bought the car online… having never test driven it. No bargaining on the price, and who cares, this is modern America! The other young woman is bragging about selling her car online, and how much she got for it. Again, no bargaining. Obviously, those transactions were through some corporation that has the analytics down to a science… for them!
Twelve years ago, I decided to go back to doing stand-up comedy after a hiatus of 40 years. There was a comedy contest at some club in St Augustine, about 50 miles away. I signed up by computer and wrote a nice bit for myself. It was primary election season, so I focused on that and my other major peeve: Dental charges for most Americans with no dental insurance. When I arrived at the club, we contestants met with the MC. He was a regular comic at the place, maybe early 30s. Nice guy. I drew the short stick so I had to go on first. He told me that he would warm the audience up and then introduce me. The rule was to go for 8 minutes. I sat offstage by the bar to observe him. He spent his entire warm up time of 10 minutes with Fart, Tit and Dick jokes. They were laughing hysterically while I was sighing. “I’m dead!” Before he introduced me I did a quick study of the audience. Thirty five people, mostly two tops, a few fours. Their ages varied from mid twenties all the way up to the lady sitting by herself who looked my age. I started out with the Republican primary contenders. “It’s funny folks but if you think about it anyone can kind of look like someone else. Look at the Republicans running for president in 2012. You have Newt Gingrich who looks like a pedophile Bishop.” [Only the lady right below me is really laughing.] “Then you have Rick Santorum, Senator from PA, who looks like he belongs under a car changing the oil with Gomer and Goober.” [Silence] “Or Sarah Palin, who looks like a very attractive Drag Queen.” [Oh boy, tough crowd]. So I changed gears and did my dental bit. “How many of you folks have dental insurance, raise your hands.” Two thirds of the audience raised hands… are these people from earth? I went on anyway. “With the way things are nowadays here is how a first visit to a dentist will look like. You’re in the chair, he probes your mouth with his assistant taking notes. “OK # 17, $2200- root canal and crown. # 6 and #7 both have cavities, $600 total. # 21 $1100” [The lady below is laughing through it all, while with the other 34 people a silence there’s that can kill.] My mouth became as dry as a desert and I prayed the 8 minutes would come… and they did! I walked right out and drove home and never looked back.
During the Vietnam debacle in the 60s and early 70s many of us college students and young working stiffs got out and protested. Even before and after the Bush/Cheney illegal (and immoral) invasion of Iraq, we had many young folks joining us on the street corner. Perhaps not as many as when we had the military draft, but still enough to give us some hope. Well, since that time, where in the hell are the majority of our young Americans? Nowhere to be found, except in the bars and clubs doing what we all did at some time: partying. The difference is that my generation of young Americans who saw through the **** found time to both protest and party. Not anymore. The empire now owns us. As far as those senior citizens like yours truly, well, too many of my fellow baby boomers are more concerned about their next Social Security check, investments, and personal health care. No room for the people of Gaza or the dead-end job workers throughout this nation. No room for the blatant racism, homophobia, etc.
Finally, this Military Industrial Empire actually loves it when working stiffs and retired working stiffs are divided by issues their embedded media and politicos embellish. We have finally become, for certain, the permanent consumer society we always were, especially after WW2. Those commercials reflect just how far down the rabbit hole we landed. When the choices continue to be presented to us of who should rule us, between a Clinton and Bush Sr., a Gore or a Bush Jr., and Obama or a McCain, a Hillary or a Trump, and then (twice, mind you) a Biden or a Trump, we are lost as a culture. And they laugh at the other “Banana Republics”.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-empire-owns-us/">The Empire Owns Us</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Israel Faces Its Detractors</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/israel-faces-its-detractors/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dan Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Apr 2024 16:49:38 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Archaeology/Archaeologists]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Judaism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Zionism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[ISIL]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel Finkelstein]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Margreet Steiner]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Nehardea]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Pumbadita]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Surah]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[William Dever]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Ze'ev Herzog]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149905</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The Israel that many admired through a myopic lens has been brought into improved focus, a ruthless state that has similar characteristics to the Nazi state — virulent nationalist, irredentist, militarist, racist, repressive in occupied territories, ethnic superiority, thought control, and genocidal. One major difference between the Nazi Germany and apartheid Israel is that Nazi […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/israel-faces-its-detractors/">Israel Faces Its Detractors</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
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The Israel that many admired through a myopic lens has been brought into improved focus, a ruthless state that has similar characteristics to the Nazi state — virulent nationalist, irredentist, militarist, racist, repressive in occupied territories, ethnic superiority, thought control, and genocidal. One major difference between the Nazi Germany and apartheid Israel is that Nazi Germany had no religious attachment; Israel is emerging as a theocracy. This difference solicits a comparison between Israel as a Jewish theocratic state and the now defunct Islamic Caliphate, known as Islamic State in Iraq and Levant (ISIL).
The need to compare Israel with ISIS comes from Israel’s attempt to associate Hamas with ISIS. Israel’s worldwide propaganda machine (Hasbara) previously ordered that references to Hamas be preceded by the word terrorist, as if the two words were one word. After decades, the Pavlovian response to the characterization assured that when hearing the word Hamas the adjective terrorist naturally flows to the brain. The terrorism that Israel and its Mossad have inflicted on the Palestinian Lebanese, Syrian, and Iranian people, as well as hundreds of innocents from several nations throughout the world, are never discussed. After the October 6 Hamas attack on southern Israel, which incorporated unnecessary excesses, Hasbara issued a new link for attachment to Hamas, “Hamas is ISIS,” declared Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. When uttering those words, Netanyahu should have looked in the mirror. A comparison determines that the founding of the Israeli and short-lived ISIS state and securing themselves as unique and dominant authorities have similarities.
Foreigners created the lands
Foreign fighters entered Syria and Iraq and allied with domestic populations to gain territory and incorporate the territory into the Islamic State (IS). Many of the fighters were from the Caucasus and Europe, were not Arab nationals, and sympathized with the ISIL cause.
In 1948, the Israeli forces contained few fighters who were born in the British Mandate; most were immigrants from previous decades and volunteers from Western nations. Foreigners to Palestine engaged in the capture of Palestinian land that enabled the creation of the enlarged Israel and the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians.
Uniting the people
The Islamists spoke of uniting the Arab Muslim people and inaugurating another Golden Age of Arab civilization in the Levant. Out of what? Just as the elements that produced the great Hellenist civilizations no longer exist for the Greek people, the elements for reviving an Arab civilization no longer exist for the Arab people. The Mongol onslaught broke the ties that bound the Arab peoples — devotion to the same religion, a House of Wisdom that contained the first university, which translated Greek and Indian texts and became a center for advancements in humanities, sciences, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, and governance of Muslim Arabs for Muslim Arabs. The modern Muslim Arabs have more in conflict than in solidarity and no longer pursue the uniquely creative efforts of their ancestors. Go through the numbers and we find that ISIL appeals to a small disaffected group who define for others what is Muslim and who is Arab.
The Zionists spoke of uniting world Jewry and recreating a homeland for all Jews in a land they claim was once a home and empire for Jews. Because Judaism is not a religion that governs or attracts those who need strong devotion, religion originally did not play a role in their mission. Nor were the Zionists uniting a people — Jews around the globe did not share a common language, history, or culture and could not be classified as a nation any more than the Mennonites and Jehovah Witnesses can be considered peoples. The Zionists’ thrust was one of narrow disaffection, of belief that Jews would never be accepted in any nation. Its appeal, minuscule to Jews at the time of its beginnings, tended to unify Jews by sharing woe, harm, and victimization, a process of uniting psyches by trauma. Present-day Israel still clings to the traumas and uses the Old Testament to give it legitimacy and a focus for all Jews.
Recreating the ancient empire
The previous Golden Age of the Arab world lasted for 600 from 622 AD to 1258 AD, and, as happened to other civilizations, capitulated to superior military forces. The use of the term Caliphate and its designation as an incorporation of the Arab people into a unified body is an exaggeration. Competing dynasties — Umayyad in Damascus and later Iberia, Abbasid in Baghdad, Fatamid in Egypt, and the Turkish Ottoman Empire, Muslim but not Arab — can claim the term Caliphate, but all have disappeared from history and so has the Caliphate. The Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Mongols, and a host of other civilizations had several dynasties, but neither the Italians, Greeks, Egyptians, nor other communities of today are considered heirs or recreations of these previous civilizations. The Golden Age of Arab domination of the Levant is not myth; the modern Caliphate is myth, has no definition in the present, and no return to the past.
History, archaeology, and anthropology dispute the assertion that the Jews of today have a unique relation to the wandering Hebrew tribes and that these tribes secured a foundation as a civilization or an empire. There might be some slight genetic connection but the dispersal of the original tribes and Jews throughout the world, together with conversions, have modified the DNA and a new genetic pool has arisen. There are no significant traces — administration, monuments, buildings, weapons, accepted history, independent writings, tools, implements, or structures — to substantiate that the ancient Hebrews were other than wandering and hilltop tribes, with some communities having periods of urban concentration. No history or records by other civilizations during the time of the Israelites mention the supposed accomplishments of David and Solomon.
History of the ancient Hebrew people rests on the acceptance of the Old Testament as a historical narrative. The Bible resembles literature by a people and not an authentic history of a people — a saga with historical occurrences. <a href="https://substack.com/redirect/573d6e28-cbb1-409a-b1a2-0a20de7435ee?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/573d6e28-cbb1-409a-b1a2-0a20de7435ee?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1713882084304000&usg=AOvVaw2oKEIG25vrxNS5rUeqhGI7">Its tone, language and stories are mainly derived from Ugaritic literature</a> of the 12th century B.C. Canaanite city-state of Ugarit and from previous Sumerian, Egyptian, Akkadian, and other ancient texts, stories, and legends. Listen to these other voices and we find echoes of the Old Testament. Several of the Psalms were adapted from Ugaritic sources; the story of the flood has a near mirror image in Ugaritic literature.
Recognized archaeologists (Israel Finkelstein, the director of the Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University, William Dever, professor of Near Eastern archeology and anthropology at the University of Arizona, Ze’ev Herzog of Tel Aviv University, and Margreet Steiner, University of Leiden) have shown that the biblical history of an ancient Israel is mostly myth until the era of Omri in the 9th century B.C., and any attempt to refer to the myth has no definition in the present and no relation to the past.
Descendants of those who owned the land
ISIL claimed they were descendants of those who had close attachment to the lands and cultivated and possessed the soil. For centuries, mainly Arabs occupied the Levant, including historical Palestine, and, except for Israel, they now firmly control all of the Middle East and North Africa. The problem in the Arab nations is that the land and resources are controlled by few and are not properly distributed. Resolving that situation did not need an Islamic state; it needs more democratic states.
Can Jews correctly claim they are descendants of those who had close attachment to the lands, cultivated the soils, and owned them? The biblical twelve tribes of Israel retreat from history is presented as a mystery; described as the “Lost tribes of Israel.” Did they fall into a crack? How does this ridiculous description survive normal thought?
By 500 BC, the agrarian and pastoral Hebrew tribes had been absorbed into other empires — Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and later Greek and Roman. They formed a new group of Jews, who pursued urban trades throughout Mesopotamia and the Roman Empire. In the Persian Parthian and Sasanian Empires (248 B.C. to 641 A.D.), which housed the three great Jewish academies of Surah, Pumbadita, and Nehardea, the legacy and heritage of modern Jews and Judaism are best expressed. These academies codified the oral and written laws and produced the Babylonian Talmud, which became the central text of Rabbinic Judaism and the basis for all Jewish law.
Although Jews lived in the Levant and controlled a small portion of the area during the short reigns of the Hasmonean kings, Jewish prominence and physical attachments to the ancient land of Israel and Jerusalem were not great and were mostly spiritual. Some remains of Jewish dwellings, burial grounds, and ritual baths can be found, but few, if any, major Jewish monuments, buildings, or institutions from the Biblical era exist within the “Old City” of today’s Jerusalem. The oft-cited Western Wall is the supporting wall for Herod’s platform and is not directly related to the Second Temple. No remains of that Temple have been located. This portion of the Western Wall lacks absolute proof of its being close to the “holiest of the holies,” and therefore has religious significance by default ─ there is no other apparent religious construction from ancient Hebrew’s Jerusalem.
In an attempt to connect ancient Israel to present-day Jerusalem, Israeli authorities apply spurious labels to Holy Basin landmarks.
Neither King David’s Tower nor King David’s Citadel relate to the time of King David.
Neither the Pools of Solomon nor the Stables of Solomon relate to the time or life of King Solomon.
Absalom’s Tomb is an obvious Greek sculptured edifice and therefore cannot be the tomb of David’s son.
Securing themselves as the unique and dominant authority
Troubling reports had the Islamic State destroying Christian churches and relics, most prominently those of the Assyrian Church of the East. Other destruction included the Temple of Baalshamin, one of the best-preserved ruins at the Syrian site of Palmyra, Mar Elian Christian Monastery, and The Imam Dur Mausoleum, an example of medieval Islamic architecture and decoration, and ancient sites, museums and libraries in Nineveh, Mosul, Hatra, Mari, and Nimrud.
Israel also consolidated its ethnic appearance.
Meron Rapaport, History Erased, Haaretz, July 5, 2007 reports that “during the 1950s, the nascent state and IDF set about destroying historical sites left behind by other cultures, particularly Muslims. This policy was so indiscriminate that even synagogues were destroyed.” Rappaport continues with information from Dr. Meron Benvenisti, Sacred Landscape, The Buried History of the Holy Land. since 1948 that said, “of the 160 mosques in the Palestinian villages incorporated into Israel under the armistice agreements, fewer than 40 remained standing. New Hebrew nomenclature replaced the Arabic names of more than 9,000 natural features, villages, and ruins.”
Conclusion
Equating Hamas, an organization that together with Iran has fought ISIS in its territory, has not been well received and is deliberately false. The Financial Times, John Reed in Gaza City JUNE 1 2015, “Hamas seeks to stamp out Isis in Gaza,” reports,
<blockquote>Night-time security checkpoints have gone up around Gaza City over the past month — the most visible sign of a crackdown by the ruling Islamist movement Hamas on local followers of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (or ISIS). In recent weeks, supporters of Isis have claimed credit for several bombings and Hamas has rounded up and imprisoned dozens of people, officials and analysts in Gaza say.</blockquote>
The Associated Press, as well as other news sources and institutions, explain why Hamas is not ISIS.
<blockquote>In contrast, Hamas is an exclusively Palestinian movement. Its members are Palestinian and its ideology, albeit violent, is focused on liberating what it says is occupied land through the destruction of Israel. While branded a terrorist group by Israel and its Western allies, its deadly attacks have been focused on Israeli targets.</blockquote>
<blockquote>During its 16 years of rule, Hamas built up a system of government that includes not only its military wing, but also tens of thousands of teachers, civil servants and police. The group also has significant support inside the West Bank and an exiled leadership spread out across the Arab world.</blockquote>
The Islamic State is no longer a caliphate and has little possibility of ever becoming a big “C again!” Examine carefully and focus intensely and soon the apparition becomes clear — if Israel is known as the Jewish state, then ISIL was unknowingly patterning its development (not its behavior) with similar principles to those of the Zionists. The rise of the nation-state under monarchs, which began in the 1500s and developed into nations guided by native people, has entered a new phase ─ get a group together, invade a weak foreign land, provide a false history to authenticate claims, and establish a new nation. The crushing similarity that seals the issue ─ ISIL had no defined borders and neither does Israel.
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</div>The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/israel-faces-its-detractors/">Israel Faces Its Detractors</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Universities for AUKUS: The Social License Confidence Trick</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/universities-for-aukus-the-social-license-confidence-trick/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Binoy Kampmark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 21 Apr 2024 18:01:19 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[AUKUS Security Pact]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Australia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United Kingdom]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United States]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Universities/Colleges]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149898</guid>
<description><![CDATA[“Can we still see universities as places to learn and produce knowledge that, at the risk of sounding naïve, is for the greater good of humanity, independently transient of geopolitical skirmishes?” Wanning Sun from the University of Technology, Sydney, asks in hope. “The history of universities during the Cold War era tells us that it […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/universities-for-aukus-the-social-license-confidence-trick/">Universities for AUKUS: The Social License Confidence Trick</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[“Can we still see universities as places to learn and produce knowledge that, at the risk of sounding naïve, is for the greater good of humanity, independently transient of geopolitical skirmishes?” Wanning Sun from the University of Technology, Sydney, <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/12/07/aukus-australian-universities-academic-freedom-political-agenda/">asks</a> in hope. “The history of universities during the Cold War era tells us that it is precisely at such times that our government and our universities need to fight tooth and nail to preserve the precarious civil society that has taken millennia to construct.”
History can be a useful, if imperfect guide, but as its teary muse, Clio, will tell you, its lessons are almost always ignored. A recent <a href="https://declassifiedaus.org/2024/04/18/revealed-the-pentagons-infiltration-of-australian-universities/">investigative report</a> published in Declassified Australia gives us every reason to be pessimistic about Sun’s green pastured hopes for universities untethered from compromise and corruption. Far from preserving civil society, the Australian university sector is going the way of the US model of linking university research and innovation directly to a gluttonous military industrial complex. More importantly, these developments are very much on the terms of the US imperium, in whose toxic embrace Australia finds itself.
Over 17 years, the authors of the report found, US defence funding to Australian universities had risen from (A)$1.7 million in 2007 to (A)$60 million annually by 2022”. The funds in question “are backing research in fields of science that enhance US military development and the US national interest.”
To justify this effort, deskbound think tankers and money chasing propagandists have been enlisted to sanitise what is, at heart, a debauching enterprise. Take, for example, the <a href="https://www.ussc.edu.au/the-university-sectors-value-proposition-for-aukus">views</a> of the United States Studies Centre (USSC), based at the University of Sydney, where university-military collaboration under the shoddy cover of learning and teaching are being pursued in reverie. For those lovely types, universities are “drivers of change within society.”
The trilateral security pact of AUKUS, an anti-China enterprise comprising Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States, has added succour to the venture, drawing in wide-eyed university administrators, military toffs and consultancy seeking politicians keen to rake in the defence scented cash.
With salivating enthusiasm, a <a href="https://www.ussc.edu.au/the-university-sectors-value-proposition-for-aukus">report</a> by members of the USSC and the University of Nottingham from March 2024, noting the findings of a joint University of Sydney and Times Higher Education World Academic Summit, opens with a frank enlisting of the education and research sector “as enablers of operationalising the strategic intent around AUKUS.” No less than a propagandising effort, this will entail “building social license for AUKUS” through “two primary inputs: (1) educating the workforce; and (2) Pillar II advanced capability research.”
This open embrace of overt militarisation entails the agreement of universities “across the three countries” to “add value to government through strategic messaging and building social license for AUKUS.” This is no less an attempt to inculcate and normalise what is, at heart, a warring facility in the making.
The authors admit their soiling task is a challenging one. “Stakeholders agree the challenge of building social license for AUKUS is particularly acute in the Australian context, where government discourse has been constrained by the need to reestablish diplomatic relations with China.” Diplomacy is such a trying business for those in the business of conflict.
The raw note here is that the Australian populace is ignorant of the merits of the belligerent, anti-Beijing bacchanal between Canberra, Washington and London. They are ignorant of “the nature of strategic competition in the Indo-Pacific and its place in Australian regional strategy for AUKUS”. Concern is expressed about that most sensible of attitudes: a decline of popularity for the proposed and obscenely expensive acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines, costing A$368 billion. “USSC’s own polling, released in late 2023, finds that support for Australia acquiring nuclear-powered submarines has fallen below majority (49 per cent).”
Such terrifying findings – at least from the USSC’s barking mad perspective – had also been “corroborated by other major Australian polls, including the Lowy Institute and The Guardian, which find that support has weakened, rather than firmed since the optimal pathway announcement.” The Australian public, it would seem, know something these wonks don’t.
When the warmongers worry that their wares are failing to sell, peacemakers should cheer. It then falls on the warmongers to think up a strategy to reverse the trend. An imperfect, though tried method is to focus on the use of that most hideous of terms, “social license”, to bribe the naysayers and sceptics.
The notion of “social license”, framed in fictional, social contract terms, should propel those with a scintilla of integrity and wisdom to take arms and rage. The official literature and pamphleteering on the subject points to its benign foundations. The Ethics Centre, for instance, <a href="https://ethics.org.au/ethics-explainer-social-license-to-operate/">describes</a> it as an informal arrangement whereby an informal license is “granted to a company by various stakeholders who may be affected by the company’s activities.” Three requirements must be accordingly satisfied in this weasel-worded effort: legitimacy, by which the organisation “plays by the ‘rules of the game’”; credibility, by which the company furnishes “true and clear information to the community”; and trust, where the entity shows “the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another.” These terrible fictions, as they come together, enable the veil to be placed over the unspeakable.
When the flimsy faeces encasing such a formulation is scraped away, the term becomes more sinister. Social licensing is nothing less than a tool of deceit and hoodwinking, a way for the bad to claim they are doing good, for the corrupt to claim they are clean. Polluting entities excuse what they do by suggesting that the returns for society are, more broadly speaking, weightier than the costs. Mining industries, even as they continue to pillage the earth’s innards, claim legitimacy for their operations as they add an ecologically friendly wash to them. We all benefit in the harm and harming, so why fuss?
To reverse this trend, a few measures should be enacted with urgent and acceptable zeal. Purging university vice chancellors and their simpering toadies is a healthy start. Trimming the universities of the spreadsheeting grafters and the racketeers, percolating through departments, schools and colleges, would be another welcome measure. All are accomplices in this project to destroy the humane mission of universities, preferring, in their place, brands, diluted syllabi, compliant staff, and morons for students. All in all, a clear wall of separation between the civic goals of learning and knowledge should be built to shield students and staff from the rapacious, murderous goals of the military industrial complex that continues to draw sustenance from deception, delusion and fear.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/universities-for-aukus-the-social-license-confidence-trick/">Universities for AUKUS: The Social License Confidence Trick</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>US Reimposes Illegal and Inhumane Oil Sanctions on Venezuela</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/us-reimposes-illegal-and-inhumane-oil-sanctions-on-venezuela/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Roger D. Harris]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 20 Apr 2024 18:33:37 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Imperialism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Oil, Gas, Coal, Pipelines]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Sanctions]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United States]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149892</guid>
<description><![CDATA[A minute after midnight on April 18, the US reimposed coercive economic measures designed to cripple Venezuela’s oil industry. Later that day, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a new sanctions bill on Nicaragua. Meanwhile, Cuba protested the US’s six-decade blockade as talks resumed between the two countries on migration. At a time of […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/us-reimposes-illegal-and-inhumane-oil-sanctions-on-venezuela/">US Reimposes Illegal and Inhumane Oil Sanctions on Venezuela</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[A minute after midnight on April 18, the US reimposed coercive economic measures <a href="https://original.antiwar.com/roger_harris/2024/02/05/why-the-us-is-reimposing-sanctions-on-venezuela/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://original.antiwar.com/roger_harris/2024/02/05/why-the-us-is-reimposing-sanctions-on-venezuela/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw2_KH-mmNbkzO0viM_GL5bC">designed</a> to cripple Venezuela’s oil industry. Later that day, the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved a new sanctions bill on Nicaragua. Meanwhile, Cuba <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-calls-us-ease-sanctions-eve-migration-talks-2024-04-15/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/cuba-calls-us-ease-sanctions-eve-migration-talks-2024-04-15/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw3K6oiUMUBIS8Wqe9CWCGso">protested</a> the US’s six-decade <a href="https://resumen-english.org/2024/02/what-62-years-of-the-blockade-of-cuba-feels-like/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://resumen-english.org/2024/02/what-62-years-of-the-blockade-of-cuba-feels-like/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw06p5LrmZ9OGLlLiyNvRrmf">blockade</a> as talks resumed between the two countries on migration.
At a time of <a href="https://theintercept.com/2023/06/07/intercepted-podcast-us-dollar-dedollarization/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://theintercept.com/2023/06/07/intercepted-podcast-us-dollar-dedollarization/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw0AWwrQakYqK5YCpMyLCl1l">challenged</a> US dollar hegemony and questioning of the neoliberal order, the three countries striving to build socialist societies in the Americas pose a “threat of a good example.”
Also on April 18, Biden <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/18/world/iran-israel-gaza-war-news#new-us-sanctions-target-irans-drone-manufacturers-and-steel-industry" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/18/world/iran-israel-gaza-war-news%23new-us-sanctions-target-irans-drone-manufacturers-and-steel-industry&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw3JHPhrpyx2hdTGqkcN_F3F">announced</a> new sanctions on Iran. Globally, Washington has imposed sanctions on some <a href="https://sanctionskill.org/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://sanctionskill.org/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw1Caz87XQdrl56ayA1vYR5C">forty countries</a>. Because these unilateral coercive measures are a form of collective punishment, they are considered <a href="https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/US-Sanctions-on-Venezuela-Illegal-Under-UN-OAS-and-US-Law-20190605-0031.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/US-Sanctions-on-Venezuela-Illegal-Under-UN-OAS-and-US-Law-20190605-0031.html&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw3Lpe27bNDnHo6nlJETpgkC">illegal</a> under international law.
Even the US Congressional Research Service <a href="https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10715#:~:text=Treasury%20has%20imposed%20asset%20blocking,1901%20et%20seq.)." data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF10715%23:~:text%3DTreasury%2520has%2520imposed%2520asset%2520blocking,1901%2520et%2520seq.).&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw2_-zQU6Jgr-1dl91EHic30">recognizes</a> sanctions have “failed” to achieve their regime-change goals. Yet the empire’s perverse response is to do more of the same rather than reverse course. “Once they are imposed, they become politically impossible to lift without getting something in return,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/opinion/venezuela-oil-sanctions.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/opinion/venezuela-oil-sanctions.html&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw0QAXMwJm0BlC13-xqw3qNl">observed</a> The New York Times.
 Times runs cover for US sanctions on Venezuela
The empire’s “newspaper of record” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/opinion/venezuela-oil-sanctions.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/opinion/venezuela-oil-sanctions.html&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw0QAXMwJm0BlC13-xqw3qNl">bewailed</a> that Uncle Sam had “no choice” but to reign more misery on the people of Venezuela even though sanctions do not achieve their purported purpose.
Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, according to the Times, had “promised to take steps toward holding free elections… with the lifting of some American sanctions as an incentive. But the ink was hardly dry before his government upheld a ban on running for office that had been placed on María Corina Machado.”
In fact, the Barbados agreement, negotiated last October, said nothing about Ms. Machado, who had been proscribed from holding public office for fifteen years back in 2015 for financial and treasonous <a href="https://ultimasnoticias.com.ve/noticias/politica/expediente-de-maria-corina-machado-justifica-su-inhabilitacion/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ultimasnoticias.com.ve/noticias/politica/expediente-de-maria-corina-machado-justifica-su-inhabilitacion/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw1fLIjlBbHLfFQv8xg10cP5">misconduct</a>. There was little chance that the <a href="https://twitter.com/upholdreality/status/1752356167798632578" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/upholdreality/status/1752356167798632578&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw3hLm29Cu9RozqRTHKxkokQ">notorious</a> politico would have her <a href="https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-u-s-wages-campaign-of-slander-against-venezuelas-election/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.liberationnews.org/psl-statement-u-s-wages-campaign-of-slander-against-venezuelas-election/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw1Ct1hjcTNdy0Z46mxld7Vs">conviction</a> reversed by Venezuela’s supreme court which, as in the US, is an independent branch of government not under the dictates of the president.
The US <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/eliasferrerbreda/2024/01/29/after-maria-corina-machado-interview-with-luis-vicente-leon/?sh=3df545bf13fd&emci=c1f836e5-83c0-ee11-b660-002248223197&emdi=4dd6f7c5-87c0-ee11-b660-002248223197&ceid=9473275" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.forbes.com/sites/eliasferrerbreda/2024/01/29/after-maria-corina-machado-interview-with-luis-vicente-leon/?sh%3D3df545bf13fd%26emci%3Dc1f836e5-83c0-ee11-b660-002248223197%26emdi%3D4dd6f7c5-87c0-ee11-b660-002248223197%26ceid%3D9473275&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw13jhCFehRngRAMbcVR8wWg">knew this</a> when the agreement was signed, but has subsequently used it as an excuse to <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/13/washington-promotes-opposition-candidate-setting-the-stage-for-delegitimizing-the-venezuelan-presidential-election/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/02/13/washington-promotes-opposition-candidate-setting-the-stage-for-delegitimizing-the-venezuelan-presidential-election/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw1vIQ1du9QlOCB5Lqxufxsf">delegitimize</a> the upcoming Venezuelan presidential election. Why? One reason may be that the US Intelligence Community’s Annal Threat Assessment <a href="https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/US-Sanctions-on-Venezuela-Illegal-Under-UN-OAS-and-US-Law-20190605-0031.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.telesurenglish.net/analysis/US-Sanctions-on-Venezuela-Illegal-Under-UN-OAS-and-US-Law-20190605-0031.html&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw3Lpe27bNDnHo6nlJETpgkC">anticipates</a> that Maduro will win the contest on July 28.
The article correctly reports that Machado was the “overwhelming victor” of a primary, but omits that her incredulous 93% margin in a crowded and highly contested field raised doubts about its credibility. Another leading opposition figure in the primary <a href="https://twitter.com/prospericarlos/status/1716428091172536659" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://twitter.com/prospericarlos/status/1716428091172536659&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw0Ub5FedMZ6Fvw2vxQKXeV2">accused</a> the process of being a fraud.
The primary was held privately, not by the official election authority as other primaries were. Machado’s own NGO, one that had <a href="https://www.laiguana.tv/articulos/1174190-verdad-sumate-maria-corina-machado/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.laiguana.tv/articulos/1174190-verdad-sumate-maria-corina-machado/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw0sQVVZT1M4TjeNapCbu0aR">received funds</a> from the CIA front group, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), had administered the primary. And after Machado was declared the winner, the ballots were <a href="https://orinocotribune.com/fraud-alert-concerns-about-voting-centers-voters-data-for-opposition-primaries/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://orinocotribune.com/fraud-alert-concerns-about-voting-centers-voters-data-for-opposition-primaries/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw3sm4M6jn0gY6peOQmuyoid">destroyed</a>. This news, apparently, was not “fit to print” in the Times.
 Times laments the downsides of US sanctions…to the US
The article raises a concern dear to the Times, which is that the “immigration crisis,” precipitated by the US sanctions, pose “a major political problem for Mr. Biden during an election year.” In addition, the Times noted, the sanctions “pushed Venezuela further into the arms of Russia and China.”
The article, concluding with a hackneyed observation that “dictators do dictatorship,” gripes that “US sanctions can do great harm but rarely delivers the political results that American officials seek.”
However, the US didn’t completely close the door on Venezuelan oil industry for select corporations in the US and abroad. The new policy, while <a href="https://ofac.treasury.gov/media/932826/download?inline" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://ofac.treasury.gov/media/932826/download?inline&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw09L-H0lT1DwPk6Paj5_tW4">revoking</a> the general license, will allow companies to seek individual licenses. The change, the <a href="https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/u-s-says-oil-companies-in-venezuela-can-still-operate-despite-regime-oppression-551d62b0?mod=americas_news_article_pos1&emci=003032dd-88fd-ee11-aaf0-7c1e52017038&emdi=a38f5cb7-8afd-ee11-aaf0-7c1e52017038&ceid=9473275" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.wsj.com/world/americas/u-s-says-oil-companies-in-venezuela-can-still-operate-despite-regime-oppression-551d62b0?mod%3Damericas_news_article_pos1%26emci%3D003032dd-88fd-ee11-aaf0-7c1e52017038%26emdi%3Da38f5cb7-8afd-ee11-aaf0-7c1e52017038%26ceid%3D9473275&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw2oi9SClG_jFN7gHreYa4X6">Wall Street Journal</a> noted, “is likely to benefit large oil companies with lobbying power in Washington.”
More distortions
A second Times editorial on Venezuela appeared the next day, this time <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/world/americas/us-oil-sanctions-venezuela-maduro.html?emci=003032dd-88fd-ee11-aaf0-7c1e52017038&emdi=a38f5cb7-8afd-ee11-aaf0-7c1e52017038&ceid=9473275" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/world/americas/us-oil-sanctions-venezuela-maduro.html?emci%3D003032dd-88fd-ee11-aaf0-7c1e52017038%26emdi%3Da38f5cb7-8afd-ee11-aaf0-7c1e52017038%26ceid%3D9473275&source=gmail&ust=1713722627228000&usg=AOvVaw0KX1luJWEb9utQd9yjxe6y">masquerading</a> as a news story. “One opposition party was allowed to officially register” in the presidential race, the article reads, inferring that there is only one opposition candidate on the ballot, when Reuters <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/what-is-happening-with-venezuelas-election-2024-03-27/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/what-is-happening-with-venezuelas-election-2024-03-27/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627229000&usg=AOvVaw0_OR59hdxW3QT2h2Og2zux">reports</a> there are eleven others.
“Many Venezuelans living abroad,” carps the Times, “have been unable to register to vote because of expensive and cumbersome requirements.” Unreported is the biggest barrier for Venezuelans living in the US to vote remotely in their country’s election. Washington does not recognize the legitimate Venezuelan government, which means no functioning consular services and, therefore, no way to vote.
The Times reporter also complained that deportation of Venezuelan migrants were suspended “without explanation.” While the newspaper’s articles are protected behind a paywall, one would think that staff would have access to a February Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/07/world/americas/migrant-crisis-deport-venezuela-flights.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/07/world/americas/migrant-crisis-deport-venezuela-flights.html&source=gmail&ust=1713722627229000&usg=AOvVaw2SZUpurI19XceoLjognvAl">report</a> that Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez warned that the flights would be discontinued in response to the US’s reimposition of sanctions on Venezuelan gold sales.
Times acknowledges the purpose of US sanctions
 The Times at least no longer blames the “economic free fall” of the Venezuelan economy on the socialist government but fully admits the economic sanctions have “crippled the country’s crucial oil industry.” Further, the Times acknowledges that the Biden administration’s action, “could carry significant consequences for the future of Venezuela’s democracy, for its economy, and for migration in the region.”
In short, the Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/opinion/venezuela-oil-sanctions.html" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/17/opinion/venezuela-oil-sanctions.html&source=gmail&ust=1713722627229000&usg=AOvVaw25Mei7nMmUERj7Px4NxfaA">reported</a> that US sanctions, “intensified…the single largest peacetime collapse of any country in at least 45 years.”
Finally, the Times implicitly acknowledged that the sanctions were never to promote democracy, but were “meant to force the Maduro government from power.” An earlier 2019 Times opinion piece included the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/23/opinion/sunday/venezuela-us-sanctions.html?pgtype=Article&action=click&module=RelatedLinks" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/23/opinion/sunday/venezuela-us-sanctions.html?pgtype%3DArticle%26action%3Dclick%26module%3DRelatedLinks&source=gmail&ust=1713722627229000&usg=AOvVaw2pXWtDuUsanG8wjL2jnibR">suggestion</a> that while sanctions “may make the humanitarian crisis worse” they are still desirable as a “source of leverage to remove Maduro.”
Venezuela’s response
The week before the oil sanctions were reimposed, Venezuelans <a href="https://resumen-english.org/2024/04/venezuela-coup-detat-of-the-surnames/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://resumen-english.org/2024/04/venezuela-coup-detat-of-the-surnames/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627229000&usg=AOvVaw2WTVOoafXSCtj7YYlQnvjC">celebrated</a> the anniversary of the defeat of the 2002 unsuccessful 48-hour US-backed coup. Neither the tactics – the continuing <a href="https://orinocotribune.com/venezuelas-national-assembly-president-jorge-rodriguez-we-will-send-evidence-of-coup-attempts-to-opposition-politicians-who-signed-barbados-agreement/" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://orinocotribune.com/venezuelas-national-assembly-president-jorge-rodriguez-we-will-send-evidence-of-coup-attempts-to-opposition-politicians-who-signed-barbados-agreement/&source=gmail&ust=1713722627229000&usg=AOvVaw1Br0AoLNweCKk-jigihetq">coup attempts</a> – nor the US policy of regime-change have changed. The Venezuelan president’s <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/17/venezuela-oil-sanctions-biden/?isMobile=1" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/04/17/venezuela-oil-sanctions-biden/?isMobile%3D1&source=gmail&ust=1713722627229000&usg=AOvVaw2oceG48V9FiHGJwfARV6P6">response</a>: “We are going to keep moving forward with a license or without a license…we are not your colony.”The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/us-reimposes-illegal-and-inhumane-oil-sanctions-on-venezuela/">US Reimposes Illegal and Inhumane Oil Sanctions on Venezuela</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>The Myth of the Marshall Plan and US Imperialism</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-myth-of-the-marshall-plan-and-us-imperialism/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Greg Godels]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 20 Apr 2024 18:24:41 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Colonialism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Imperialism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[World War Two]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Annie Lacroix-Riz]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Eugen Varga]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Jacques R. Pauwels]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Kwame Nkrumah]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Les Origines du Plan Marshall: Le Mythe de “l’Aide” Américaine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Marshall Plan]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[neo-colonialism]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149886</guid>
<description><![CDATA[One of the signal events of the post-World War II era– an event that helped shape the subsequent course of US imperialism– was the implementation of the European Recovery Act of 1948, the so-called Marshall Plan. Not only was the Marshall Plan a maneuver to tie Western Europe economically to the US– though Europe would […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-myth-of-the-marshall-plan-and-us-imperialism/">The Myth of the Marshall Plan and US Imperialism</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[One of the signal events of the post-World War II era– an event that helped shape the subsequent course of US imperialism– was the implementation of the European Recovery Act of 1948, the so-called Marshall Plan. Not only was the Marshall Plan a maneuver to tie Western Europe economically to the US– though Europe would play a subordinate role– but it also served in the early days of the Cold War as a massive propaganda triumph for the US ruling class. Every US school girl and school boy marveled at the generosity and selflessness of the US government’s assistance to the impoverished people of Europe. The fact that the Eastern European people’s democracies refused US magnanimity only underscored the stubbornness of the Cold War antagonists.
Of course, there have been alternative accounts of the intent and efficacy of the Marshall Plan from its very beginning– skeptical accounts that challenged US motives, questioned attached terms and conditions, and offered alternative schemes for European recovery. As early as 1947, Henry Wallace, former US Vice-President, for example, sought to remove aid to Europe from Cold War politics by creating a UN-administered reconstruction fund, prioritizing financial aid according to the recipient countries’ war-related needs regardless of ideology before or after the war, guaranteeing that no political or ideological strings were attached, and ensuring that aid not be used for military or aggressive intent. His proposals were met hostilely in the escalating confrontational climate pursued by the Truman administration.
Genuflecting to ‘victory’ in the Cold War, Western commentators have largely accepted the Marshall Plan as the profound act of sacrifice and generosity portrayed by its creators.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/armand-colin.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-149890" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/armand-colin-194x300.jpg" alt="" width="194" height="300" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/armand-colin-194x300.jpg 194w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/armand-colin.jpg 646w" sizes="(max-width: 194px) 100vw, 194px" /></a>Thus, an alternative perspective on the Marshall Plan is both essential and welcome. A new book by French Communist historian Annie Lacroix-Riz, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/2200634579/dissivoice-20" target="_blank" rel="noopener nofollow">Les Origines du Plan Marshall: Le Mythe de “l’Aide” Américaine</a> promises to address that shortcoming.
Thanks to a thorough and well-argued appreciation of Lacroix-Riz’s book by Jacques R. Pauwels in <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/04/americanizing-france-the-marshall-plan-reconsidered/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/03/04/americanizing-france-the-marshall-plan-reconsidered/&source=gmail&ust=1713722633527000&usg=AOvVaw2iPnO3JdNXcEANqDdsk1DL">Counterpunch</a>, those of us with rusty French reading skills do not have to sit with our copy of Collins Robert French Dictionary in our lap and struggle through a translation.
Pauwels is a discerning critic of the many myths that abound in the history of the US, including the Marshall Plan. He describes the myth thusly:
<blockquote>… after defeating the nasty Nazis, presumably more or less singlehandedly, and preparing to return home to mind his own business, Uncle Sam suddenly realized that the hapless Europeans, exhausted by six years of war, needed his help to get back on their feet. And so, unselfishly and generously, he decided to shower them with huge amounts of money, which Britain, France, and the other countries of Western Europe eagerly accepted and used to return not only to prosperity but also to democracy.</blockquote>
Simplistic as it reads, this is certainly the prevailing understanding of the 1948 European Recovery Act and its motivation. But as Pauwels acknowledges, the Marshall Plan was actually a door opener for US capital, US products, and US political influence.
Pauwels credits Lacroix-Riz with explaining US imperialist outreach as a long process, rooted in the late-nineteenth-century scramble for colonies by the great powers, as described by Lenin in his pamphlet, Imperialism. He writes: “The imperialist powers thus became increasingly competitors, rivals, and either antagonists or allies in a ruthless race for imperialist supremacy, fueled ideologically by the prevailing social-Darwinist ideas of ‘struggle for survival.’” (It should be noted the US was the first economic power to attempt to acquire colonies in an already divided world, according to prominent Soviet economist, Eugen Varga).
Thanks to war-time loans to belligerents, exploding military production, and immunity to invasion, the US economy leap-frogged ahead of its European counterparts after World War I. As a result, US economic ascendency was rewarded with new markets, new targets for investment, and a strong commitment to open doors and free markets: “…American industrialists were henceforth able to outperform any competitors in a free market. It is for this reason that the US government… morphed into a most eager apostle of free trade, energetically and systematically seeking ‘open doors’ for its exports all over the world.”
With all its industrial might, the late-to-the-colonial-game US pioneered a new form of imperialism: neo-colonialism. The former first president of independent Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah — himself a victim of imperialist intrigue — conceived of neo-colonialism this<a href="http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/neo-colonialism/ch01.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/neo-colonialism/ch01.htm&source=gmail&ust=1713722633527000&usg=AOvVaw0ejKzExjE534BzAt_5mpC4"> way</a>:
<blockquote>Faced with the militant peoples of the ex-colonial territories in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America, imperialism simply switches tactics. Without a qualm it dispenses with its flags, and even with certain of its more hated expatriate officials. This means, so it claims, that it is ‘giving’ independence to its former subjects, to be followed by ‘aid’ for their development. Under cover of such phrases, however, it devises innumerable ways to accomplish objectives formerly achieved by naked colonialism. It is this sum total of these modern attempts to perpetuate colonialism while at the same time talking about ‘freedom,’ which has come to be known as neo-colonialism.</blockquote>
With the world already divided among great powers, it was natural for the US to fight to loosen the stranglehold of its rivals by advocating national self-determination (Woodrow Wilson), decolonization, and free trade after World War I (I have written about this “new” imperialism<a href="https://philosophersforchange.org/2015/02/17/the-new-imperialism/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://philosophersforchange.org/2015/02/17/the-new-imperialism/&source=gmail&ust=1713722633527000&usg=AOvVaw0qJwDECCd2ahQioQUiL76V"> here</a>). This was the US answer to a world divided into colonial empires and it became the template for the future of imperialism.
This US neo-colonial offensive in the interwar period gives the lie to the popular impression of an indifferent, isolationism fostered by many historians. As Calvin Coolidge boasted at his 1928 Memorial Day address at Gettysburg: “Our investments and trade relations are such that it is almost impossible to conceive of any conflict anywhere on earth which would not affect us injuriously.”
Pauwels confirms this offensive:
<blockquote>In the 1920s, the unprecedented profits generated by the Great War had allowed numerous US banks and corporations such as Ford to start up major investments in [Germany]. The “investment offensive” is rarely mentioned in history books but is of great historical importance in two ways: it marked the beginning of transatlantic expansion of US capitalism and it determined that Germany was to serve as the European ‘bridgehead’ of US imperialism.</blockquote>
This “new” imperialism allowed the US to dominate other economies without the immense costs of stationing troops, administrators, and overseers in restive colonies or bearing the responsibility for infrastructure in dependencies. Also, without formal colonies, the US could continue to laud its commitment to Wilsonian self-determination. This proved to be an enormous propaganda asset during the Cold War. Quoting historian William Appleman Williams referencing our ruling elites, “These men were not imperialist in the traditional sense.…” But they were imperialist nonetheless.
The “new” imperialism engaged the historical great powers. Pauwels notes the interwar US investment in Nazi Germany: “The United States had no desire to go to war against Hitler, who proved to be so ‘good for business.’”
Likewise, Britain was as much an investment target as an ally:
<blockquote>The first country to be turned into a vassal of Uncle Sam was Britain. After the fall of France in the summer of 1940, when left alone to face the terrifying might of Hitler’s Reich, the former Number One of industrial powers had to go cap in hand to the US to loan huge sums of money from American banks and use that money to buy equipment and fuel from America’s great corporations. Washington consented to extend such “aid” to Britain in a scheme that became known as “Lend-Lease”. However, the loans had to be paid back with interest and were subject to conditions such as the promised abolition of “imperial preference”, which ensured that Britain and its empire would cease to be a “closed economy” and instead open their doors to US export products and investment capital. As a result of Lend-Lease, Britain was to morph into a “junior partner”, not only economically but also politically and militarily, of the US. Or, as Annie Lacroix-Riz puts it in her new book, Lend-Lease loans to Britain spelled the beginning of the end of the British Empire.</blockquote>
Eugen Varga, in his 1960 Twentieth Century Capitalism, makes the same point, but in the context of inter-imperialist rivalries:
<blockquote>The struggle between the imperialists of each of the belligerent blocs did not cease during the war. Italy, Hitler’s chief European ally, practically did not take part in the war before the defeat of France, she carried on “her own” war with Greece for the conquest of Albania. Japan had “her own” war in East Asia and against the U.S.A.; although Japan had been a party to the “anti-Comintern pact”, she concluded a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union. The chief U.S. aim in the anti-fascist alliance was to defeat Japan and, parallel, to defeating Hitler, to weaken Britain and abolish the British colonial empire. With this aim in view the U.S.A. at first supplied Britain with war materials for cash (i.e., for gold), thus taking away from Britain her gold reserve and her American securities. The U.S.A. went over to the lend-lease system only when Britain’s reserves were exhausted and then stopped the lend-lease at the end of the war without any warning. During the war Roosevelt took advantage of every opportunity to demand the abolition of the British system of preferential tariffs, one of the main economic supports of the British Empire, the granting of political independence to India, and so on. (p. 49-50)</blockquote>
So, by the end of World War II, the US had an established policy and practice of using its economic strength and free-trade advocacy to impose its dominance over weaker, vulnerable countries– a form of streamlined, but opaque neo-colonialism suited for the post-colonial era to come. Would it come as a surprise that the US continued, refined, and expanded its imperial designs?
<center>*****</center>Pauwels spells out the architecture for the US postwar neocolonial advance: the Bretton Woods agreement, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank– all supportive of US economic interests and designed to create subordination to US political and economic goals.
For a detailed look at how these policies were implemented, we have Lacroix-Riz’s account of their French application. We learn that the US threw its support behind corrupted, thoroughly anti-Communist Vichy officials, rather than the London-based exiles around Charles de Gaulle, a strongly nationalist, independent figure untarnished by collaboration. Pauwels writes: “[T]he Americans understood only too well that these former Pétainists [Vichyites] would be agreeable partners, ignored or forgave the sins the latter had committed as collaborators, labelled them with the respectable epithet of ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal,’ and arranged for them, rather than Gaullists or other leaders of the Resistance, to be placed in positions of power.”
Establishing Vichy Admiral Darlan, a born-again anti-fascist, as the leader of a provisional French government served US purposes. As Pauwels retells:
<blockquote>The American “appointment” of Darlan paid off virtually immediately, namely on September 25, 1943, when the French provisional government signed a Lend-Lease deal with the US. The conditions of this arrangement were similar to those attached to Lend-Lease with Britain and those that were to be enshrined one year later at Bretton-Woods, namely, an “open door” for US corporations and banks to the markets and resources of France and its colonial empire. That arrangement was euphemistically described as “reciprocal aid” but was in reality the first step in a series of arrangements that were to culminate in France’s subscription to the Marshall Plan and impose on France what Lacroix-Riz describes as a “dependency of the colonial type.”</blockquote>
As matters developed, the Vichyite-heavy government was too much for anti-fascist French and the active Resistance to stomach, and the sufficiently anti-Communist de Gaulle became acceptable to US elites. The problem with de Gaulle, however, was that he agreed with the Soviets that reparations should be extracted from Germany, contrary to the wishes of the US. US industrial and financial interests were too deeply embedded in Germany to force them to pay for their aggression. Quoting Pauwels:
<blockquote>Thus we can understand the stepmotherly treatment Washington meted out in 1944-1945 to a France that was economically in dire straits after years of war and occupation. Already in the fall of 1944, Paris was informed that there were to be no reparations from Germany, and it was in vain that de Gaulle responded by briefly flirting with the Soviet Union, even concluding a “pact” with Moscow that would prove to be “stillborn”, as Lacroix-Riz puts it… As for France’s urgent request for American credits as well as urgently needed food and industrial and agricultural supplies, they did not yield “free gifts” of any kind, as is commonly believed, …but only deliveries of products of which there was a glut in the US itself and loans, all of it to be paid in dollars and at inflated prices. Lacroix-Riz emphasizes that “free deliveries of merchandise to France by the American army or any civil organization, even of the humanitarian type, never existed….”</blockquote>
Foretelling the future of US-France relations, the Blum-Byrnes Agreement of 1946 “was widely perceived as a wonderful deal for France… and was proclaimed by Blum himself as ‘an immense concession’ from the Americans.”
Instead, it was a surrender to US demands, involving agreement to purchase left-over military equipment and other products that US capitalists were anxious to get off their books. Payment for these goods were to be in dollars, hard to acquire without bargain-basement prices for French goods exported to the US. The French were made to compensate US corporations for their losses on French soil (ironically, losses most often the result of US bombing). Lacroix-Riz maintains that, in fact, lend-lease loans were not forgiven and that the Agreement “produced no credits whatsoever.”
When de Gaulle left the government in early 1946, his successors followed the US lead in attacking the French Communist Party, the most popular political group in the immediate aftermath of the war. With their expulsion from the French government in 1947, the road ahead was cleared of a powerful obstacle to the further penetration of US capital, exports, and culture.
The conclusion to be drawn, according to Pauwels and Lacroix-Riz:
<blockquote>That France’s postwar economic recovery was not due to US “aid” is only logical because, from the American perspective, the aim of the Blum-Byrnes Agreements or, later, the Marshall Plan, was not at all to forgive debts or help France in any other way to recover from the trauma of war, but to open up the country’s markets (as well as those of her colonies) and to integrate it into a postwar Europe — for the time being admittedly only Western Europe — that was to be capitalist, like the US, and controlled by the US from its German bridgehead. With the signing of the Blum-Byrnes Agreements, which also included a French acceptance of the fact that there would be no German reparations, that aim was virtually achieved. The conditions attached to the agreements did indeed include a guarantee by the French negotiators that France would henceforth practice free-trade policy and that there would be no more nationalizations like the ones that, almost immediately after the country’s liberation, befell car manufacturer Renault as well as privately owned coal mines and producers of gas and electricity…</blockquote>
The Marshall Plan repeats the template established with the Blum-Byrnes Agreement, which itself was a consistent development of the US neo-colonial program created in the aftermath of the First World War. Thus, we see the continuous development of a US imperialist strategy. What was unique at each step was the growing scale of the project. Later elaborations of this initiative, like the Point Four Program, the Alliance for Progress, USAID, and a host of other agencies and plans spread US corporate tentacles throughout the rest of the world.
As I <a href="https://philosophersforchange.org/2015/02/17/the-new-imperialism/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://philosophersforchange.org/2015/02/17/the-new-imperialism/&source=gmail&ust=1713722633527000&usg=AOvVaw0qJwDECCd2ahQioQUiL76V">wrote</a> in 2015: “In the post-World War II era, the Marshall Plan and The Point Four program were early examples of neo-colonial Trojan Horses, programs aimed at cementing exploitative capitalist relations while posturing as generosity and assistance. They, and other programs, were successful efforts to weave consent, seduction, and extortion into a robust foreign policy securing the goals of imperialism without the moral revulsion of colonial repression and the cost of vast colonies.”
Pauwels and Lacroix-Riz add to our understanding of this critical juncture in the elaboration of US neo-colonial policies. Puncturing the Marshall Plan myth, Pauwels concludes:
<blockquote>The integration of France into a postwar (Western) Europe dominated by Uncle Sam would be completed by the country’s acceptance of Marshall Plan “aid” in 1948 and its adherence to NATO in 1949. However, it is wrong to believe that these two highly publicized events occurred in response to the outbreak of the Cold War, conventionally blamed on the Soviet Union, after the end of World War II. In reality, the Americans had been keen to extend their economic and political reach across the Atlantic and France had been in their crosshairs at least since their troops had landed in North Africa in the fall of 1942. They took advantage of the weakness of postwar France to offer “aid” with conditions that, like those of Lend-Lease to Britain, were certain to turn the recipient country into a junior partner of the US. This became a reality, as Lacroix-Riz demonstrates in her book, not when France subscribed to the Marshall Plan, but when her representatives signed the agreements that resulted from the unheralded Blum-Byrnes Negotiations. It was then, in the spring of 1946, that France, unbeknownst to the majority of its citizens, waved adieu to her status of great power and joined the ranks of the European vassals of Uncle Sam.</blockquote>
One can hope that Lacroix-Riz’s important book will find an English translator and publisher.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-myth-of-the-marshall-plan-and-us-imperialism/">The Myth of the Marshall Plan and US Imperialism</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Private Security Firm Attacks the Sihlalangenkani Occupation in Umhlali</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/private-security-firm-attacks-the-sihlalangenkani-occupation-in-umhlali/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Abahlali baseMjondolo]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 20 Apr 2024 14:51:30 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Elitism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Land]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Police]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Prejudice]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Security]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[South Africa]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149838</guid>
<description><![CDATA[On 7 April the notorious private security firm IPSS, with support from the SAPS, launched an attack on the Sihlalangenkani Occupation in Umhlali, on the North Coast. The occupation is affiliated to our movement. The attack was unlawful and violent. People’s doors were kicked in and people were assaulted, insulted, and threatened by men wielding […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/private-security-firm-attacks-the-sihlalangenkani-occupation-in-umhlali/">Private Security Firm Attacks the Sihlalangenkani Occupation in Umhlali</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[On 7 April the notorious private security firm IPSS, with support from the SAPS, launched an attack on the Sihlalangenkani Occupation in Umhlali, on the North Coast. The occupation is affiliated to our movement. The attack was unlawful and violent.
People’s doors were kicked in and people were assaulted, insulted, and threatened by men wielding automatic weapons. Many people were kicked, including women. The police fired rubber bullets at the residents. Money was also stolen. People who tried to film the attack were threatened. The police boasted that they have been instructed by police minister Bheki Cele to shoot and kill. The residents were dehumanised and the whole community criminalised.
The residents of Sihlalangenkani refused to accept that they were now being policed by a private security company hired by the rich, demanded to know why they were under attack from a private security company, and why this company was taking over the work of the police. They successfully resisted the attack. After this they moved to the Umhlali police station where they protested against the attack and demanded to know why IPSS Security was now doing the work of the police. The IPSS website shows that the company is actively involved in “thwarting land invasions”.
In terms of the law the actions of IPSS and the police were unlawful and criminal but of course IPSS Security and the police will be treated as if they are above the law and poor black people are always treated as if we are beneath the law. Our mere presence on this land in an elite area is taken as a crime, a crime that legitimates unlawful and violent behaviour from IPSS Security and the police.
The real ‘crime’ of the Sihlalangenkani residents is that they have occupied and held ‘prime land’, land where very rich people, most of them white, live in gated communities.
On Friday 12 April the police returned to the community and arrested Fezile Gosa and Bongeka Gazu, the chairperson and deputy chairperson of the Abahlali baseMjondolo branch. Bongeka is pregnant and was kept in very bad conditions while she was under arrest. These were obviously political targeted arrests.
The community protested against the arrests while they were being carried out and then again outside the police station. Fezile and Bongeka were released on Monday. Their case was not even placed on the role in the court as there was no evidence against them and no case to make against them. Our lawyers expressed their shock at the conditions under which the Deputy Chairperson was detained.
We note that in both of the media reports in Independent Online on the attack on Sihlalangenkani and the arrests of the community leaders only IPSS Security and the police are quoted. Not a single resident of Sihlalangenkani is given an opportunity to speak in either of the two articles. We also not that both articles contain statements that are not true. Perhaps the most important of these is the claim that residents fired on IPSS Security and the police. 
Both articles take the statements from IPSS security and the police as fact despite the long and well known history of both the police and security companies lying to the media after they have committed violence against poor black people, including murder. 
We would like to remind the media that after the police murders of Nqobile Ngcobo in 2013 and Zamekile Shangase in 2021 the media uncritically repeated false claims by the police that they had had to open fire while under attack as if these claims were true. In the case of the murder of Zamekile Shangase the police claimed that they were “coming under fire from all sides” when, as was later shown, no shots were fired at them. In both cases the media did not ask eyewitnesses for comment or ask for comments from the communities that had come under police attack or from our movement. In both cases they did not withdraw or correct their articles when the facts came to light, or even make an apology.
 We would like to thank the lawyers from the Right to Protest for representing our comrades in the KwaDukuza Magistrate’s Court on Monday. 
Our comrades spent three days in police cells for the ‘crime’ of being elected leaders of the residents of a land occupation. The ‘crime’ of the residents of the occupation is being poor and black and residing on land near to where very rich people live.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/private-security-firm-attacks-the-sihlalangenkani-occupation-in-umhlali/">Private Security Firm Attacks the Sihlalangenkani Occupation in Umhlali</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Disintegration and Choice</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/disintegration-and-choice/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Graham Peebles]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 20 Apr 2024 12:55:25 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Consumerism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Militarism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Propaganda]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[The "West"]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149864</guid>
<description><![CDATA[With regular maintenance stuff lasts longer, but eventually, in spite of every effort, things break down: the washing machine stops washing, the car won’t start, the mobile phone refuses to connect to the internet. Socio-economic-political systems also collapse; shaped by an ideology of some kind, they are, like all ‘isms’, limited, and divisive. Looking at […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/disintegration-and-choice/">Disintegration and Choice</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[With regular maintenance stuff lasts longer, but eventually, in spite of every effort, things break down: the washing machine stops washing, the car won’t start, the mobile phone refuses to connect to the internet.
Socio-economic-political systems also collapse; shaped by an ideology of some kind, they are, like all ‘isms’, limited, and divisive. Looking at The State of the World it is clear that the systems that govern our lives and the modes of living they support are breaking down, fragmenting. The signs are many and varied.
Autocratic regimes are on the rise and many democratic governments, influenced by right wing extremism, are adopting policies and attitudes more usually associated with autocracies.
The values and moral codes that have been in place for generations, some unspoken, culturally shared and absorbed, others formally enshrined in international law, are being ignored, discarded or distorted. The ‘Rules Based International Order’, so-called, is made up of a range of laws or conventions, which underpin geo-political engagement: The UN Charter, the UN Declaration of Human Rights, Geneva Conventions and UN General Assembly Resolutions among other texts.
Self righteous hypocritical western politicians routinely refer to the Rule of Law or International Humanitarian Law, particularly when criticising their enemies (Russia, Iran, China etc), not so much when they or their allies act illegally. The double standards of western governments knows no limits and is a major cause of global destabilisation.
As systems, structures and animating principles disintegrate, extremism and intolerance grow, polarities intensify, the threat of armed conflict and fragmentation expands; fear and uncertainty increases.
And while the underlying causes remain unchecked, the everyday consequences of disintegration deepen and become more pronounced: the environmental emergency, armed conflict/war, poverty/hunger, displacement of people, social alienation and economic inequality, are some of the major effects. Interconnected complex issues resulting from behaviour and attitudes flowing from The Ideology of Greed, which underpins the socio-political systems and the institutions of control; creaking outdated models that are incapable of creating solutions to the crises, no matter how much they are manipulated.
Take climate change for example, clearly the greatest challenge facing humanity. Climate change is the consequence of the fossil fuel economy and endless consumerism; overwhelmingly rich western nations consumerism. Along with the wider environmental emergency, climate change is caused by behavior flowing from a reductive view of life that prizes individual happiness above all else; happiness, which is, in fact, nothing more than pleasure, that can be achieved, the advocates preach, through the accumulation of things or experiences.
This deeply materialistic approach to life, which, far from bringing happiness, actually guarantees discontent, is integral to the socio-economic system. Constant consumption is demanded, and it is consumption, with its insatiable sucking in of energy (and people) and churning out of waste, that is fuelling climate change, has polluted the air, water and soil, and contributed to the creation of societies rife with unhealthy unhappy people.
Curbing climate change, reducing waste and curtailing pollution requires an economy of sufficiency not excess as we have now. An economy, rooted in social justice and environmental responsibility. A dramatic reduction in consumption is essential – in rich nations at least – and a shift to ethical business practices. All of which is incompatible within the suffocating web of Neo-Liberalism.
If reducing climate change and saving the planet is not reason enough to change the socio-economic-political order, how about ending war?
In order for peace to be realised, social justice and freedom must prevail; this means ending all forms of exploitation and discrimination, inequality and injustice. Such sane measures are impossible within a system wedded to money, to competition and greed, and unthinkable while short-term self-interest is the driving factor behind the actions of governments, corporations and many individuals.
Peace also requires that the Military Industrial Complex and all military alliances, including Nato, be dismantled, again unimaginable within the confines of the current economic order.
As everything breaks down and frays, including the nervous systems and mental health of many people, the inadequacies of the present structures become increasingly apparent. This includes the existing forms of parliamentary democracy, which is non-representative, particularly within societies that are increasingly diverse.
If the slide into further chaos, including the possibility of a major war and complete environmental collapse is to be avoided, fundamental change is desperately needed. Both structural change and a change in values and attitudes, which will lead to changes in behaviour. Systemic changes designed with the aim of achieving universally championed principles: peace, social justice, real democracy and freedom.
People throughout the world are desperate for such changes, the men and women in power, less so. Their resistance comes from the recognition that such a shift would inevitably result in the privilege and power they currently enjoy being swept aside.
The choice before us is clear: maintain the status quo, continue along the existing path, which is narrowing to a point of greater extremism, intolerance and conflict and suffer, or unite, reject all forms of division and re-imagine society.
Humanity has faced such choices many times over long ages, has routinely made the wrong decisions and we are living with the disastrous effects. But now, at this moment in time, the consequences of our collective decisions are far reaching in a way that was not the case in the recent or distant past.
These are extremely uncertain dangerous times. Transitional times for sure, but transitioning to what, to a more extreme, dystopian version of the present, or transitional towards a more just peaceful world?The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/disintegration-and-choice/">Disintegration and Choice</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Herbert Marcuse: New Left Revival?</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/herbert-marcuse-new-left-revival/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Hunziker]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 19 Apr 2024 20:37:00 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Book Review]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Herbert Marcuse]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149860</guid>
<description><![CDATA[World events serve as a stage of constant search for how best to construct and maintain society, which is an underlying theme of some decades ago found in the works of Herbert Marcuse, 1898–1979, German-American philosopher of prominent fame during the 1960s considered an intellectual giant of his time. Charles Reitz, widely recognized as a […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/herbert-marcuse-new-left-revival/">Herbert Marcuse: New Left Revival?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[World events serve as a stage of constant search for how best to construct and maintain society, which is an underlying theme of some decades ago found in the works of Herbert Marcuse, 1898–1979, German-American philosopher of prominent fame during the 1960s considered an intellectual giant of his time.
Charles Reitz, widely recognized as a scholar of Herbert Marcuse, has brought to life his ideology for a prosperous healthy society, proposing that “nature is an ally” in his book <a href="https://darajapress.com/publication/the-revolutionary-ecological-legacy-of-herbert-marcuse-2nd-edition">The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse</a>, 284 pgs. Daraja Press, 2023.
Today, it can be argued that a byzantine world of discordant parties; i.e., (1) global ultra-high-end capitalism (2) neofascism (3) racism (4) anti-establishmentarianism (5) flagging democracy are converging altogether at an explosive point in time in a new chapter of human history, and hopefully, as an aside, everlasting fusion technology (that really works) to take the heat off global warming but still decades in the making.
The works of Herbert Marcuse in the spirit of a hearty revival of the New Left are timely and may be necessary in today’s world to re-establish some semblance of sanity by offering balance to a geopolitical order that seems utterly confused and directionless and at each other’s throats. 
Author of Eros and Civilization (1955) and One-Dimensional Man (1964) Marcuse was thrust onto the big stage as the preeminent theorist of the New Left, arguably more relevant today than during the 1960s. His widely read One-Dimensional Man exposes the inherent weaknesses in capitalism and communism found in a stifling conformity of life (somewhat in the spirit of Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World) via modern modes of domination and social control but hopeful of human freedom and happiness by way of liberation, as expressed in Eros and Civilization.
“The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation.” (One-Dimensional Man, pg. 7)
Charles Reitz’s comprehensive study of Marcuse: “These works challenged corporate capitalism’s illusions of democracy characterized by consumerism, cultural anaesthetization, intellectual compliance, environmental degradation, and war as untenable forms of wasted abundance and political freedom.”
Accordingly, “If the New Left emphasizes the struggle for the restoration of nature, for public parks and beaches, for spaces of tranquility and beauty; if it demands a new sexual morality, the liberation of women, then it fights against material conditions imposed by the capitalist system and reproducing this system. (Marcuse 1972, 17) Marcuse’s political-philosophical vision continues to offer intelligent strategic perspectives on current concerns—especially issues of neofascist white supremacy, hate speech, hate crimes, police brutality, environmental destruction, and education as monocultural social manipulation. These troubles are profound, yet they can be countered through a Marcusean strategy of revolutionary ecological liberation and women’s emancipation— radical socialism as I will attempt to show in my concluding chapter 10 below. Marcuse’s posthumously published Paris Lectures at Vincennes University, 1974 underscored his belief that the women’s movement was one of the most important political forces for system change.” (The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse, pg. 145)
Marcuse’s work lays the groundwork for the 99% to be awakened, politically prepared, and strengthened, calling for a new ecosocialist world system Charles Reitz refers to as “EarthCommonWealth” with emphasis on equality and liberation of labor in a world of nature’s restoration. He interconnects the basic elements of a good life by removing the rotting influence of capitalistic excesses that stealthily brainwash the subconscious, by-the-hour, day-in, day-out via television, social networking galore, city bus posters, blaring radio ads, freeway billboards, insolent mobile phone ads, subway wall glitterati of comparables for purchase, on credit, over time.
As explained by Reitz, EarthCommonWealth is a revolutionary alternative to the “misuse of limited natural resources for profit.” Accordingly, this misuse is at the heart of a disruptive world climate system and disadvantaged lifestyle for labor throughout the world.
In the context of Marcuse’s criticisms of contemporary society, Reitz zeroes in on America: “Racial animosity, anti-immigrant scapegoating, and a resurgent nationalism/ patriotism are being orchestrated today in the troubled system of American/ global capitalism. These are neo-populist/neo-fascist instrumentalities of social control and economic stabilization… All this is said without mentioning the name of Donald Trump, though it has clear relevance to recent political developments in terms of a resurgence of reactionary rhetoric and racist tendencies on the right.”
“One-dimensional thought is systematically promoted by the makers of politics and their purveyors of mass information. Their universe of discourse is populated by self-validating hypotheses, which, incessantly and monopolistically repeated, become hypnotic definitions or dictations.” (One-Dimensional Man, pg. 14)
Underlying America’s extreme racial animosity used as a political weapon, radicalization of education provides a contemptuous convenience that “Marcuse anticipated back in the 1960s of counterrevolutionary tendencies now raging in higher education to reduce the liberal arts in American general education to the conservatively filtered monocultural residue of an elitist, Anglocentric curriculum.”
Reitz defines democracy’s experiment with capitalism, especially in the eyes of younger generations, portending a different future that older generations should contemplate: “Given today’s workforce discontent and destabilization, it is no wonder that an openness to socialist alternatives is taking hold among younger people. An opinion piece in The New York Times, (Goldberg 2017) carried the heading “No Wonder Millennials Hate Capitalism.” Millennials are the “older cousins” of Generation Z (Volpe 2). The piece concludes that the “rotten morality” behind today’s intensifying inequalities is more apparent than ever, hence radicalizing young people. This reflects the steady growth among the youth of what Marcuse called the “New Sensibility”—new needs, generated under capitalism, but which capitalism cannot fulfill, for gender equality, ecological economics, and anti-racism.”
“New needs unfulfilled by the current system” are fully exposed for all to see by America’s broken-down dysfunctional politics of infighting as a normal course of governing, failing to address “new needs.” How is it possible to take this seriously?
“Today the 1% is armed with its own theory; the 99% is not. A fundamentally different outlook is necessary. The main problem, as I see it, is to develop an incisive vision for humanity as sensuous living labor. I have developed in this volume a labor theory of ethics, an ethical realism grounded on the mutual respect, cooperation, and reciprocity of commonwealth labor… EarthCommonWealth envisions the displacement and transcendence of capitalist oligarchy as such, not simply its most ugly and destructive components. This is a green economic alternative because its ecological vision sees all living things and their non-living earthly surroundings as a global community capable of a dignified, deliberate coexistence,” pg. 257.
T<a href="https://darajapress.com/publication/the-revolutionary-ecological-legacy-of-herbert-marcuse-2nd-edition">he Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse</a> by Charles Reitz with an afterword by Nnimmo Bassey is an antidote, a breath of fresh air, to society’s state of confusion and misdirection, and above all else, a sense of relief knowing there is another way that is much better.
This short review does not come close to doing justice to Reitz’s remarkable work that shines a beam of enlightenment, with impressive detail and brilliant source material, on a better course for the world’s 99%. It should be in the library of every serious advocate for a better ecologically safe existence, a much better existence.
The Revolutionary Ecological Legacy of Herbert Marcuse needs to be studied, reread, and then reread and studied again, and then shared. It’s worth it!The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/herbert-marcuse-new-left-revival/">Herbert Marcuse: New Left Revival?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>The Australian Defence Formula: Spend! Spend! Spend!</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-australian-defence-formula-spend-spend-spend/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Binoy Kampmark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 19 Apr 2024 01:03:53 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Australia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Weaponry]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149843</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The skin toasted Australian Minister of Defence, Richard Marles, who resembles, with each day, the product of an overly worked solarium, was adamant. Not only will Australians be paying a bill up to and above A$368 billion for nuclear powered submarines it does not need; it will also be throwing A$100 billion into the coffers […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-australian-defence-formula-spend-spend-spend/">The Australian Defence Formula: Spend! Spend! Spend!</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[The skin toasted Australian Minister of Defence, Richard Marles, who resembles, with each day, the product of an overly worked solarium, was adamant. Not only will Australians be paying a bill up to and above A$368 billion for nuclear powered submarines it does not need; it will also be throwing A$100 billion into the coffers of the military industrial complex over the next decade to combat a needlessly inflated enemy. Forget diplomacy and funding the cause (and course) of peace – it’s all about the weapons and the Yellow Peril, baby.
On April 18, Marles and Defence Industry Pat Conroy <a href="https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2024-04-17/2024-integrated-investment-program">barraged the press</a> with announcements that the defence budget would be bulked by A$50.3 billion by 2034, with a A$330 billion plan for weapons and equipment known as the <a href="http://www.defence.gov.au/nds">Integrated Investment Program</a>. The measures were intended to satisfy the findings of the Defence Strategic Review. “This is a significant lift compared to the $270 billion allocated for the 10-year period to 2029-30 as part of the 2020 Defence Strategic Update and 2020 Force Structure Plan,” crowed a <a href="https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2024-04-17/2024-integrated-investment-program">statement</a> from the Defence Department.
Such statements are often weighed down by jargon and buoyed by delusion. The press were not left disappointed by the insufferable fluff. Australia will gain “an enhanced lethality surface fleet and conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarines”, an army with “littoral manoeuvre” capabilities “with a long-range land and maritime strike capability”, an air force capable of delivering “long-range intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance” with “an enhanced maritime, land and air-strike capability” and “a strengthened and integrated space and cyber capability”. The glaring omission here is the proviso that all such policies are being essentially steered by Washington’s defence interests, with Canberra very much the obedient servant.
The defence minister was firmly of the view that all this was taking place with some speed. “We are acting very quickly in relation to [challenges],” Marles <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/navy-raaf-face-cuts-to-pay-for-330b-in-new-weapons-20240418-p5fkrj">insists</a>. “I mean, the acquiring of a general-purpose frigate going forward, for example, will be the most rapid acquisition of a platform that size that we’ve seen in decades.” Anyone who uses the term “rapid” in a sentence on military acquisition is clearly a certified novice.
The ministers, along with the department interests they represent, are certainly fond of their expensive toys. They are seeking a fourth squadron of F-35 Joint Strike Fighters as replacements for the F/A-18 Super Hornets. The EA-18G Growler jets are also being replaced. (That said, both sets of current fighters will see aging service till 2040.) Three vessels will be purchased to advance undersea war capabilities, including the <a href="https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2024-04-18/first-autonomous-undersea-vehicle-ghost-shark-prototype-ready">undersea drone prototype</a>, the Ghost Shark.
The latter hopes to equip the Royal Australian Navy “with a stealthy, long-range autonomous undersea warfare capability that can conduct persistent intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and strike.” Importantly, such acquisitions and developments are always qualified by how well they will work in tandem with the imperial power in question. The <a href="https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2024-04-18/first-autonomous-undersea-vehicle-ghost-shark-prototype-ready">media release</a> from the Department of Defence prefers a more weasel-worded formula. The Ghost Shark, for instance, “will also enhance Navy’s ability to operate with allies and partners.”
The new militarisation strategy is also designed to improve levels of recruitment. Personnel have been putting down their weapons in favour of other forms of employment, while recruitment numbers are falling, much to the consternation of the pro-war lobby. A suggested answer: recruit non-Australian nationals. This far from brilliant notion will, Marles suggests, take some years. But a good place to start would be the hundreds of thousands of New Zealanders resident in Australia. Sheer genius.
The announcement was also meant to offer budget trimmers a barely visible olive branch, <a href="https://www.minister.defence.gov.au/media-releases/2024-04-17/2024-integrated-investment-program">promising</a> “to divest, delay or re-scope projects that do not meet our strategic circumstances.” (They could start with the submarines.) A$5 billion, for instance, <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/navy-raaf-face-cuts-to-pay-for-330b-in-new-weapons-20240418-p5fkrj">will be saved</a> from terminating naval transport and replenishment ships intended to refuel and resupply war vessels at sea.
Hardly appropriate, opined some military pundits keen to keep plucking the money tree. Jennifer Parker of the National Security College <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/navy-raaf-face-cuts-to-pay-for-330b-in-new-weapons-20240418-p5fkrj">suggested</a> that, “The removal of the Joint Support ship means there is no future plan to expand Australia’s limited replenishment capability of two ships – which will in turn limit the force projection capability and reach of the expanded surface combatant fleet if the issue is not addressed.”
The focus, as ever, is on Wicked Oriental Authoritarianism which is very much in keeping with the traditional Australian fear of slanty-eyed devils moving in on the spoils and playground of the Anglosphere. Former RAAF officer and executive director of the Air Power Institute, Chris McInnes, <a href="https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/navy-raaf-face-cuts-to-pay-for-330b-in-new-weapons-20240418-p5fkrj">barks</a> in aeronautical terms that Australia’s air power capability risks being “put in a holding pattern for the next 10 years.” Despotic China, however, was facing no such prospects. “There is a risk of putting everything on hold. The People’s Liberal Army is not on hold. They are going to keep progressing their aircraft.” (The air force seems to do wonders for one’s grammar.)
China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian was <a href="https://www.aap.com.au/news/non-citizens-joining-adf-years-away-marles/">cool in his response</a> to the latest promises of indulgent military spending Down Under. “We hope Australia will correctly view China’s development and strategic intentions, abandon the Cold War mentality, do more things to keep the region peaceful and stable and stop buzzing about China.” No harm in hoping.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-australian-defence-formula-spend-spend-spend/">The Australian Defence Formula: Spend! Spend! Spend!</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>The Immense Hunger</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-immense-hunger/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Curtin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 19 Apr 2024 00:31:27 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[England]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Hunger/Famine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Ireland]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United States]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149841</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live. Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance. All across the world people are starving because the powerful and wealthy create economic and political conditions that allow their wealth to be built on the backs of the […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-immense-hunger/">The Immense Hunger</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Like all living creatures, people need to eat to live. Some people, eaten from within by a demonic force, try to deny others this basic sustenance. All across the world people are starving because the powerful and wealthy create economic and political conditions that allow their wealth to be built on the backs of the world’s poor. It is an old story, constantly updated. It is one form of official terrorism.
From the Irish famine with its terrible aftermath created by the imperialist British government in the nineteenth century that caused the death of between one and two million Irish and the forced emigration of more than a million more between 1846 and 1851 alone, to today’s savage Israeli genocide and forced starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, the stories of politically motivated famine are legion.
In their wake, as the historian Woodham-Smith <a href="https://www.transceltic.com/irish/great-hunger-ireland-cecil-woodham-smith">wrote</a> in 1962 of the Irish famine, it “left hatred behind. Between Ireland and England the memory of what was done and endured has lain like a sword.” This Irish bitterness toward the English was strong even in my own Irish-American childhood in the northern Bronx more than a century later. Ethnic cleansing has a way of leaving a livid legacy of rage toward the perpetrators, especially in the Irish case when talk of one’s ancestors’ perilous forced emigration on the Coffin Ships was ever broached.
Today’s Israeli government leaders must be historically ignorant or suicidal, for the Irish rage at the British led to the Easter Rebellion of 1916 and the eventual establishment of the Republic of Ireland, where today in Dublin, its capital, huge throngs march in support of the Palestinian people and their fight against Israel. Do the Israeli leaders think that they can evade the lessons of history, lessons that oppressed people everywhere learned from the irrepressible Irish rebels? Like their arrogant British imperialist counterparts, they have self-anointed themselves a chosen people so they can inflict death and suffering on the unchosen ones, the animal people, those disgusting creatures not deserving of life, land, or liberty.
But starve, torture, and slaughter people enough and the flaming sword of revenge will exact a heavy price. Dark furies will descend.
Dehumanize people enough, take their land, and the day always comes when the wretched of the earth rise up against their racist colonialist settlers.
Deny the bread of life to people long enough so that they watch their emaciated children die in their arms or search for their body parts beneath the bombed rubble and you will find that the terrified have become terrifying.
Frantz Fanon wrote accurately about the link between bread and land: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”
Without bread to eat, as Marx and Victor Hugo told us in their different ways, the desperate become desperadoes.
The poet Patrick Kavanaugh, in his haunting long poem, “The Great Hunger,” concluded it thus: “The hungry fiend/Screams the apocalypse of clay/In every corner of this land.” Lines that with a slight difference pertain to every land where famine is used as a weapon of war.
But why is this so? What is this demonic force that drives some human animals to oppress others?
I think we can agree that humans have animal needs of hunger, thirst, sex, etc. that need to be satisfied, but that we also are symbolic creatures – angels with anuses as Ernest Becker has said so pungently in his classic book, <a href="https://ratical.org/PandemicParallaxView/Denial-Of-Death-Ernest-Becker-1973.pdf">The Denial of Death</a>. We live in a world of symbols, not merely matter. Unlike other animal species, we have made death conscious and must deal with that consciousness one way or another. We have beliefs, ideas, symbol systems and get our sense of self-worth symbolically. Of course, the anuses are the problem because they remind us that despite all our highfalutin fantasies of omnipotence of the symbolic sort, what goes in one hole comes out the other and like those backdoor hole deposits we too are destined for underground holes in the earth.
But this is unacceptable. The thought of it drives many savagely crazy – individuals, groups, and nations. So, as Becker writes, “An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn’t come off second best.” Herein lies the root of competition and the desire to be successful and hoist the symbolic trophies that declare us winners. And if there are winners, there must be losers. If I win and you lose, then I can feel superior to you and “good about myself,” at least in the realm where we compete. Equality is a problem for humans, whom Nietzsche termed “the disease called man.” This sense of competition can be relatively harmless or deadly.
History is replete with the latter type, where the fear of not being immortal leads to the extermination of others, as if to say: “See, we are number one.” You die but we live. This is the case with the present Israeli policy of genocide of the Palestinians through famine, bombs, and guns. The chosen enemy is always considered dirt, pigs, reduced to animal status not worthy to exist, and in a transference of existential trepidation emanating from a deep sense of insecurity masked as triumphalism, must be eliminated because their very existence threatens the oppressors God-like sense of themselves.
There is physical hunger and there is symbolic hunger. Each needs satisfaction. In a just and equitable world, the hunger for bread would be easy to satisfy. It is the symbolic hunger for an answer to death that poses the deeper problem and causes the former. For in a world where people could recognize their fears and deep-seated anxieties and stop transferring them to others, the bread of truth might reign. We might stop slaughtering and starving others to purge ourselves of the self-hate and insecurity that drives us to feel the love of our fellow victimizers but the hate of our victims. No one would be Number One. All would be chosen and feast as equals at the table of the bread of life.
If only the Israeli and U.S. government leaders were wise enough to read, they might read Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and turn from the path of their joint obsession to obliterate the world for a trophy that they will never hoist. Ishmael might reach them with his words: “For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.” And they might seek peace, not an expansion of war.
If only. . . . but I dream, for they have chosen war, and the dark furies lay in wait.
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</div>The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-immense-hunger/">The Immense Hunger</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>The Two-state Solution Lives Only in the Delusions and Cynicism of Western Politicians and Diplomats</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-two-state-solution-lives-only-in-the-delusions-and-cynicism-of-western-politicians-and-diplomats/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Larudee]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Apr 2024 17:45:43 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Statism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Zionism]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149834</guid>
<description><![CDATA[My wife is currently cancer free, but her chemotherapy caused her to gain a lot of weight, which she wants to lose. She says that she doesn’t have the will and self-discipline to change her diet or start an exercise routine. Instead, she seeks cures and promises from advertisers on social media for expensive fake […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-two-state-solution-lives-only-in-the-delusions-and-cynicism-of-western-politicians-and-diplomats/">The Two-state Solution Lives Only in the Delusions and Cynicism of Western Politicians and Diplomats</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/israel-palestine_map-e1665872696273.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-58309" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/israel-palestine_map-e1665872696273.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="333" /></a>
My wife is currently cancer free, but her chemotherapy caused her to gain a lot of weight, which she wants to lose. She says that she doesn’t have the will and self-discipline to change her diet or start an exercise routine. Instead, she seeks cures and promises from advertisers on social media for expensive fake remedies in a bottle. Of course, these never work as advertised. I warn her that, “If it sounds too good to be true, it is.”
Such is the two-state solution. It has been a fake and a fantasy built on a contradiction from the day that Theodore Herzl proposed a Jewish state in Der Judenstaat in 1895. The contradiction is based on the fact that in order to create a Jewish state, enough Jews needed to be gathered in one place in order to create it.
How many is enough? According to Herzl, enough would be when Jews become the dominant ethnicity in the territory designated for the state. He recognized that this would mean not only gathering Jews, but also removing or otherwise reducing the non-Jewish population. Later Zionist leadership defined it as an 80% or more proportion of the desired ethnicity and a 20% or less proportion of the undesired ethnicity in the population. This is never workable in the long run without perpetual ethnic cleansing, because whenever the Jewish state is in danger of including too many non-Jews, it must find a way to reduce the number. In practice, this means that even the smaller remaining non-Jewish minority must also be repressed, so as to limit both their numbers and their power within the Jewish state.
How does this fit into the two-state solution? The answer is that it does not, no more than a “separate but equal” apartheid policy was a solution for preserving a white state in South Africa. Or, as articulated by US president Abraham Lincoln in 1858, such a state “…cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” A supremacist state cannot endure anywhere; not in South Africa, not in the US, not in Nazi Germany and not in Palestine. It will always regard the non-members of the preferred population as a threat.
Israeli proponents of the two-state solution have always required the Palestinian state to have less sovereignty than the Jewish state. To the extent that such a state was acceptable at all, it needed to be disarmed and controlled, and its territory severely compromised. But in fact, Israel never accepted a Palestinian state. The most it accepted was a “road map” to a state, which allowed Israel to pay lip service to the idea while gobbling up Palestinian land, moving Zionist settlers onto it, strangling Palestinian movement and development, and stealing the natural resources. The negotiations were merely a ruse to displace Palestinians while gradually taking more of everything they had.
Of course, even that wasn’t enough. Although the land held by Palestinians was being confiscated, their population kept increasing, eventually motivating the current Israeli genocide. Israel was simply unable to control Palestinian numbers any other way. As Arnon Sofer expressed it in 2004, ” …if we want to remain alive, we will have to kill and kill and kill. All day, every day.”
This will not change with a two-state solution. If one of the two is a supremacist state — which is central to the ideology of political Zionism — then there will never be equality between the two, because the Zionist state will not permit it, and the non-Zionist Palestinian state and its citizens will always be considered a threat. But Israel has become more honest. It now openly rejects a Palestinian state of any kind, while the UN and most of its member states continue to insist upon the two-state fantasy, the only function of which is to prevent any solution at all, and to continue to enable Israel to implement its conquest of the rest of Palestine, as well as all or parts of Lebanon, Syria, the Sinai (Egypt), the East Bank (Jordan), and even parts of Saudi Arabia.
The two state “solution” to which every western politician pledges allegiance is a worse than useless quest for a fantasy that cannot be maintained because none of the concerned population really wants it. There are no Palestinians who would not prefer a one-state solution without Zionism, only a minority willing to accept half a loaf for fear of losing the other half. The Zionist two-staters, on the other hand, are either among the dwindling number of peaceniks, or cynical negotiators, making sure that Palestinians never quite concede enough to satisfy them, thus keeping the solution just out of reach while Israel completes its ethnic cleansing. Most Zionists would prefer no state except theirs, and no Palestinians at all.
If this is reminiscent of South Africa, it is because Israel also is also an exclusivist state based on racial or ethnic identity. The solution is the same: to abolish the offending racist ideology – whether apartheid or Zionism – and create one state with equal rights for all, and restoration or compensation to Palestinians for their losses. The nonviolent 2018-19 Great March of Return attempt to move toward such a solution was thwarted by Israel’s murderous reaction to it and the world’s indifference. The October 7, 2023 armed initiative by Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance is therefore the predictable (but unpredicted) Clausewitzian reaction, and it appears to be succeeding, despite the enormous sacrifices of the Palestinian people. In fact, it is hard to imagine how this is not the beginning of the end for the Zionist dream. The genocidal horrors that Israel is committing will isolate it from most of the world for the foreseeable future, and even much of the world Jewish community will also abandon it, if they have not done so already. A racist supremacist Jewish colonial state is an anachronism that belongs in the past. Only the restoration of a Palestinian state for all who consider it their home and are willing to respect its laws and standards can be the future.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-two-state-solution-lives-only-in-the-delusions-and-cynicism-of-western-politicians-and-diplomats/">The Two-state Solution Lives Only in the Delusions and Cynicism of Western Politicians and Diplomats</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/warrantless-surveillance-makes-a-mockery-of-the-constitution/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[John W. Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Apr 2024 17:32:01 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Espionage/"Intelligence"]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Police]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Privacy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Surveillance]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[FISA]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Ron Wyden]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149831</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference … The Thought Police would get him just the same … the arrests invariably happened at night … In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/warrantless-surveillance-makes-a-mockery-of-the-constitution/">Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<blockquote>Whether he wrote DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER, or whether he refrained from writing it, made no difference … The Thought Police would get him just the same … the arrests invariably happened at night … In the vast majority of cases there was no trial, no report of the arrest. People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
— George Orwell, 1984</blockquote>
The government long ago sold us out to the highest bidder.
The highest bidder, by the way, has always been the Deep State.
What’s playing out now with the highly politicized tug-of-war over <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/what-is-fisa-surveillance-law-in-spotlight/story?id=109138345">whether Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act gets reauthorized</a> by Congress doesn’t just sell us out, it makes us slaves of the Deep State.
Read the fine print: it’s a <a href="https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-urges-colleagues-to-reject-expanding-warrantless-fisa-702-surveillance">doozy</a>.
Just as the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/07/patriot-act-violate-privacy">USA Patriot was perverted from its stated intent to fight terrorism abroad</a> and was instead used to covertly crack down on the American people (allowing government agencies to secretly track Americans’ financial activities, monitor their communications, and carry out wide-ranging surveillance on them), <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/what-is-fisa-surveillance-law-in-spotlight/story?id=109138345">Section 702 has been used as an end-run around the Constitution</a> to allow the government to collect the actual content of your conversations (phone calls, text messages, video chats, emails and other electronic communication) without a warrant.
Now intelligence officials are pushing to dramatically expand the government’s spying powers, effectively giving the government unbridled authority to force millions of Americans to spy on its behalf.
Basically, the Deep State wants to turn the American people into extensions of Big Brother.
As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) <a href="https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-urges-colleagues-to-reject-expanding-warrantless-fisa-702-surveillance">explains</a>:
<blockquote>“<a href="https://www.wyden.senate.gov/news/press-releases/wyden-urges-colleagues-to-reject-expanding-warrantless-fisa-702-surveillance">If you have access to any communications, the government can force you to help it spy.</a> That means anyone with access to a server, a wire, a cable box, a Wi-Fi router, a phone, or a computer. So think for a moment about the millions of Americans who work in buildings and offices in which communications are stored or pass through.
After all, every office building in America has data cables running through it. The people are not just the engineers who install, maintain, and repair our communications infrastructure; there are countless others who could be forced to help the government spy, including those who clean offices and guard buildings. If this provision is enacted, the government can deputize any of these people against their will, and force them in effect to become what amounts to an agent for Big Brother—for example, by forcing an employee to insert a USB thumb drive into a server at an office they clean or guard at night.
This could all happen without any oversight whatsoever: The FISA Court won’t know about it, Congress won’t know about it. Americans who are handed these directives will be forbidden from talking about it. Unless they can afford high-priced lawyers with security clearances who know their way around the FISA Court, they will have no recourse at all.”</blockquote>
This is how an effort to reform Section 702 has quickly <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/wyden-says-spying-bill-would-force-americans-to-become-an-agent-for-big-brotherhttps:/www.commondreams.org/news/wyden-says-spying-bill-would-force-americans-to-become-an-agent-for-big-brother">steamrollered into an expansion of the government’s surveillance powers</a>.
We should have seen this coming.
After all, the Police State doesn’t relinquish power easily, the Surveillance State doesn’t look favorably on anything that might weaken its control, and Big Brother doesn’t like to be restricted.
What most Americans don’t get is that even without Section 702 in play, the government will still target the populace for warrantless, suspicionless mass surveillance, because that’s how the police state maintains its stranglehold on power.
These maneuvers are just the tip of the iceberg.
For all intents and purposes, we now have a fourth branch of government.
This fourth branch came into being without any electoral mandate or constitutional referendum, and yet it possesses superpowers, above and beyond those of any other government agency save the military.
It is all-knowing, all-seeing and all-powerful.
It operates beyond the reach of the president, Congress and the courts, and it marches in lockstep with the corporate elite who really call the shots in Washington, DC.
The government’s “<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-n-s-a-s-chief-chronicler">technotyranny</a>” surveillance apparatus has become so entrenched and entangled with its police state apparatus that it’s hard to know anymore where law enforcement ends and surveillance begins. They have become one and the same entity.
The police state has passed the baton to the surveillance state.
On any given day, the average American is now <a href="https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/the_age_of_no_privacy_the_surveillance_state_shifts_into_high_gear">monitored, surveilled, spied on and tracked in more than 20 different ways</a> by both government and corporate eyes and ears.
Every second of every day, the American people are being spied on by the U.S. government’s vast network of digital Peeping Toms, electronic eavesdroppers and robotic snoops.
Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it will all be recorded, stored and used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.
Privacy, as we have known it, is dead.
Whether you’re walking through a store, driving your car, checking email, or talking to friends and family on the phone, you can be sure that some government agency is listening in and tracking you. This doesn’t even begin to touch on the complicity of the corporate sector, which buys and sells us from cradle to grave, until we have no more data left to mine. These corporate trackers monitor your purchases, web browsing, Facebook posts and other activities taking place in the cyber sphere and share the data with the government.
Just about every branch of the government—from the Postal Service to the Treasury Department and every agency in between—<a href="https://nsa.gov1.info/partners/index.html">now has its own surveillance sector</a>, authorized to collect data and spy on the American people. Then there are the fusion and counterterrorism centers that gather all of the data from the smaller government spies—the police, public health officials, transportation, etc.—and make it accessible for all those in power.
These government snoops are constantly combing through and harvesting vast quantities of our communications, then storing it in massive databases for years. Once this information—collected illegally and without any probable cause—is ingested into NSA servers, other government agencies can often search through the databases to make criminal cases against Americans that have nothing to do with terrorism or anything national security-related.
Empowered by advances in surveillance technology and emboldened by rapidly expanding public-private partnerships between law enforcement, the Intelligence Community, and the private sector, police have become particularly <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/police-jackson-mississippi-want-access-live-home-security-video-alarming-n1249566">adept at sidestepping the Fourth Amendment</a>.
Talk about a system rife for abuse.
Now, the government wants us to believe that we have nothing to fear from its mass spying program because they’re only looking to get the “bad” guys who are overseas.
Don’t believe it.
The government’s definition of a “bad” guy is extraordinarily broad, and it results in the warrantless surveillance of innocent, law-abiding Americans on a staggering scale.
Indeed, the government has become the biggest lawbreaker of all.
It’s telling that even after it was revealed that the FBI, one of the most power-hungry and corrupt agencies within the police state’s vast complex of power-hungry and corrupt agencies, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/05/19/fbi-jan-6-section-702-fisa-database-americans/">misused a massive government surveillance database more than 300,000 times</a> in order to target American citizens, we’re still debating whether they should be allowed to continue to sidestep the Fourth Amendment.
This is how the government operates, after all: our objections are routinely overruled and our rights trampled underfoot.
It works the same every time.
First, the government seeks out extraordinary powers acquired in the wake of some national crisis—in this case, <a href="https://apnews.com/article/justice-department-fbi-surveillance-75c466a64e838ab12eaef96f6335f3cd">warrantless surveillance powers intended to help the government spy on foreign targets suspected of engaging in terrorism</a>—and then they use those powers against the American people.
According to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/19/us/politics/fbi-violated-surveillance-program-rules.html">the FBI repeatedly misused Section 702</a> in order to spy on the communications of two vastly disparate groups of Americans: those involved in the George Floyd protests and those who may have taken part in the Jan. 6, 2021, protests at the Capitol.
This abuse of its so-called national security powers is par for the course for the government.
According to the Brennan Center for Justice, intelligence agencies conduct roughly <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/years-section-702-reform-part-vi-another-looming-deadline">200,000 of these warrantless “backdoor” searches</a> for Americans’ private communications each year.
No one is spared.
Many of the targets of these searches have done nothing wrong.
Government agents have spied on the communications of protesters, members of Congress, <a href="https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/years-section-702-reform-part-vi-another-looming-deadline">crime victims, journalists, and political donors</a>, among many others.
The government has claimed that its spying on Americans is simply “incidental,” as though it were an accident, but it fully intends to collect this information.
As journalist Jake Johnson warns, under an expanded Section 702, U.S. intelligence agencies “could, without a warrant, <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/news/wyden-says-spying-bill-would-force-americans-to-become-an-agent-for-big-brother">compel gyms, grocery stores, barber shops, and other businesses to hand over communications data</a>.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, “The Securities and Exchange Commission is deploying a massive government database—the Consolidated Audit Trail, or CAT—that <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-securities-and-exchange-commission-is-watching-you-surveillance-4e782f82">monitors in real time the identity, transactions and investment portfolio of everyone who invests</a> in the stock market.”
Journalist Leo Hohmann reports that the government is also handing out <a href="https://leohohmann.com/2023/09/11/exclusive-homeland-security-awards-20-million-in-grants-to-police-mental-health-networks-universities-churches-and-school-districts-to-help-identify-americans-as-potential-extremists/">$20 million in grants to police, mental health networks, universities, churches and school districts</a> to enlist their help in identifying Americans who might be political dissidents or potential “extremists.”
Ask the government why it’s carrying out this far-reaching surveillance on American citizens, and you’ll get the same Orwellian answer the government has been trotting in response to every so-called crisis to justify its assaults on our civil liberties: to keep America safe.
What this is really all about, however, is control.
What we are dealing with is a government so power-hungry, paranoid and afraid of losing its stranglehold on power that it is conspiring to wage war on anyone who dares to challenge its authority.
When the FBI is asking banks and other financial institutions to carry out <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/alarming-surveillance-feds-asked-banks-search-private-transactions-terms-maga-trump">dragnet searches of customer transactions</a>—warrantlessly and without probable cause—for “extremism” indicators broadly based on where you shop, what you read, and how you travel, we’re all in trouble.
You don’t have to do anything illegal.
For that matter, you don’t even have to challenge the government’s authority.
Frankly, you don’t even have to care about politics or know anything about your rights.
All you really need to do in order to be tagged as a suspicious character, flagged for surveillance, and eventually placed on a government watch list is live in the United States.
As long as the government is <a href="https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/360_degree_surveillance_how_police_use_public_private_partnerships_to_spy_on_americans">allowed to weaponize its 360 degree surveillance technologies</a> to flag you as a threat to national security, whether or not you’ve done anything wrong, it’s just a matter of time before you find yourself wrongly accused, investigated and confronted by police based on a data-driven algorithm or risk assessment culled together by a computer program run by artificial intelligence.
As I make clear in my book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1590795229/dissivoice-20">Battlefield America: The War on the American People</a> and in its fictional counterpart <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1954968027/dissivoice-20">The Erik Blair Diaries</a>, it won’t be long before Big Brother’s Thought Police are locking us up to “protect us” from ourselves.
At that point, we will disappear.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/warrantless-surveillance-makes-a-mockery-of-the-constitution/">Warrantless Surveillance Makes a Mockery of the Constitution</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-north-american-peace-movement-at-an-inflection-point/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Roger D. Harris]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2024 21:20:11 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Activism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Antiwar]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Colonialism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Empire]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Resistance]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Social Justice]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Solidarity]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[North American Peace Movement]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149825</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The North American peace movement is contesting ongoing US wars in Ukraine and Palestine and preparations for war with China. Out of the fog of these wars, a clear anti-imperialist focus is emerging. Giving peace a chance has never been more plainly understood as opposition to what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as “the […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-north-american-peace-movement-at-an-inflection-point/">The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[The North American peace movement is contesting ongoing US wars in Ukraine and Palestine and preparations for war with China. Out of the fog of these wars, a clear anti-imperialist focus is emerging. Giving peace a chance has never been more plainly understood as opposition to what Martin Luther King, Jr., referred to as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world: my own government.”
Palestinian, Muslim and Arab, and anti-Zionist Jewish groups have been in the forefront of the anti-imperialist peace movement. With strong youth components, they are not confused by either relying on sell-out liberal Democrats (e.g., anti-Iraq War) or by utopian calls for leaderless organizations without concrete demands (e.g., Occupy). Nor have been distracted by individualistic expressions of anger by trashing small businesses or in adventuristic confrontations with the police.
The Palestinian resistance has radicalized millions worldwide. The popular demand for a permanent ceasefire in Palestine is leading to a still larger project to cease the US-led imperialist order.
The overall consciousness of the resurgent peace movement reflects the normalization of anti-imperialism as a leading current; antiwar sentiment is becoming explicitly anti-imperialist.
Evolving understanding of the Ukraine conflict
The peace movement recognizes that, although Hamas’s action of October 7 came as a surprise, it did not simply erupt out of the blue. The uprising had a 75-year gestation starting with the Nakba of 1948 and the establishment of the settler colonialist State of Israel.
Initially, there was less clarity regarding the events in Ukraine of February 24, 2022. With research and reflection, most of the movement came to understand the conflict <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/03/10/when-did-the-ukraine-war-begin/">did not begin</a> that day. The supposedly “unprovoked” Russian intervention in Ukraine was sparked by NATO moving closer and closer to the Russian border, the 2014 Maidan coup, the sabotage of the Minsk agreements, etc.
A consensus is maturing in the antiwar movement that Ukraine is a <a href="https://uspeacecouncil.org/a-manufactured-crisis-in-ukraine-is-victimizing-the-worlds-peoples/">proxy war</a> by the US and its NATO allies to weaken Russia. Even key corporate press and government officials now recognize the conflict as a “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/ukraine-is-now-americas-war-too">full proxy war</a>” by the US designed to use the Ukrainian people to mortally disable Russia.
Likewise, opinions are coalescing around recognizing that there is just <a href="https://orinocotribune.com/is-the-us-global-empire-actually-in-decline-part-1/">one superpower</a> with hundreds of foreign military bases, possession of the world’s reserve currency, and control of the SWIFT worldwide payment and transaction system. Simply reducing the conflict to one of contesting capitalists obscures the context of empire.
The antiwar movement may differ on whether to call February 24 an invasion, an incursion, or a special military operation to protect ethnic Russian regions of Ukraine under attack. But unity has been forged that the solution to the conflict is a negotiated settlement and that the US/NATO project of “winning” the war is a threat to world peace. The outlier is the <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z8M5w52DSTvVOIO5568NgeVsM15DdRo1YYEtYMsn_jo/edit">Ukraine Solidarity Network</a> (USN).
Still using the language of anti-imperialism, USN’s left-leaning intellectuals and activists are opposed to a negotiated peace but champion a “<a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1-ihmachMueK2DKP-lRmPoxURY_xXoG6NyjWi4AfBCbs/viewform?edit_requested=true">victory</a>” backed by the US and NATO. Further, they uphold the “right” of the US to fund what they personalize as a war against Putin. Their statement on the second anniversary of the war accuses Washington of having a “<a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z8M5w52DSTvVOIO5568NgeVsM15DdRo1YYEtYMsn_jo/edit">double standard</a>” for supporting imperialism in Palestine but being on the side of justice in Ukraine. <a href="https://www.blackagendareport.com/ukrainian-solidarity-network-highest-stage-white-western-social-imperialism">Other peace activists</a> see USN’s opposition to the US involvement in Palestine, but not to its complicity in Ukraine, as a double standard.
The USN’s call for a Ukraine victory is consonant with the Democratic Party’s. In contrast, for example, the United National Antiwar Coalition’s (UNAC) <a href="https://nepajac.org/confres.htm">position</a> on Ukraine is: “No to NATO’s proxy war and Biden’s $80 billion military aid to Ukraine! No to Ukraine’s joining NATO!” Similarly, the <a href="https://www.peaceinukraine.org/">Peace in Ukraine Coalition</a> demands: “”STOP the weapons! START the talks!”
The emerging anti-imperialist peace movement sees the nature of US imperialism as systematic and not elective. The US empire is fundamentally imperialist; it is not a matter of choice.
First major antiwar conference since the Covid pandemic
In the first major antiwar <a href="https://nepajac.org/unac_confrpt.html">conference</a> since the Covid pandemic, <a href="https://unacconference2024.org/">UNAC</a> brought together 400 activists in Saint Paul, MN, on April 5-7, under the banner of “decolonization and the fight against imperialism.”
Among the some fifty groups participating were the Alliance for Global Justice, American Muslims for Palestine, Black Alliance for Peace, CodePink, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, US Palestinian Community Network, and Workers World Party. Local organizations included Students for Justice in Palestine, Twin Cities Students for a Democratic Society, and the venerable Women Against Military Madness, who have been protesting weekly in the streets since 1982.
The immediacy of militant organizing was reported by Danaka Katovich of CodePink, Cody Urban of the Resist US Wars, Wyatt Miller of the Minneapolis Antiwar Committee, and a number of other youthful leaders.
Palestinian liberation against colonialism was a major focal point of the conference. Mnar Adley, editor of MintPress News, movingly described her experience of living under Israeli suppression. Today, she explained, “the Intifada has been globalized,” adding that the Palestinian resistance and the movement in its support have exposed the Democrats as the “bloodthirsty war-hungry party that it is.”
With the US presidential election imminent, conference participants had no illusions that either corporate party stands for peace. The initiative to cast ballots in the Democratic primary for “<a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2024/2/28/michigan_2024_primary_uncommitted_biden_gaza">uncommitted</a>” (to signify opposition to Biden’s complicity in the war on Gaza and to demand a ceasefire) received considerable support. Spontaneous chants of “shame” erupted throughout the conference whenever the Democrats’ conduct was raised.
K.J. Noh of Pivot for Peace warned about US preparations for war against China. Michael Wong of Veterans for Peace described the world struggle as not one of democracy versus authoritarianism but of national liberation versus imperialism.
Ambassadors Lautaro Sandino from Nicaragua, whose government is <a href="https://truthout.org/articles/nicaragua-takes-germany-to-the-world-court-for-facilitating-israels-genocide/">taking</a> Germany to the World Court for facilitating Israel’s genocide, and Dr. Sidi M. Omar of the Polisario Front of Western Sahara addressed the conference. International solidarity was affirmed in workshops on <a href="https://blackallianceforpeace.com/zoneofpeace">Zones of Peace in Our Americas</a>, opposition of <a href="https://sanctionskill.org/">coercive economic measures</a>, and <a href="https://www.no-to-nato.org/">NO to NATO</a>.
Combating repression against the movement was highlighted by Efia Nwangaza’s presentation on the campaign to “Stop Kop Cities” and Dr. Aisha Fields’ on resisting the attacks on the African People’s Socialist Party. Mel Underbakke addressed FBI frame ups of Muslims, and FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley briefed the conference on the mobilization for Julian Assange. Lessons were also drawn by speakers from the successful defenses of the <a href="https://frso.org/statements/resist-u-s-government-repression-build-a-revolutionary-movement-10-years-after-the-fbi-raids/">Antiwar 23</a> and the freeing of Venezuelan diplomat <a href="https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/12/24/how-the-campaign-to-free-political-prisoner-alex-saab-succeeded/">Alex Saab</a>.
Tasks ahead
Janine Solanki with the Mobilization Against War and Occupation in Vancouver spoke about the “unfolding antiwar and pro-Palestine movement that has a potential to go beyond the Vietnam antiwar movement.” She advised that what has been a mass spontaneous movement now needs to progress into a more coordinated and structured form. “We have humanity on our side…our role is to really organize these forces.”
Black Agenda Report (BAR) executive editor Margaret Kimberley concluded the conference with the mandate to stop the wars at home and abroad. The current context is a neoliberal economic regime failing to meet basic domestic needs and a global pax Americana becoming increasingly contested. In reference to the workshop on climate change, she observed, “we are in a battle for survival; that’s not hyperbole.”
In short, the conference was indicative of the larger movement that is melding youthful demographics – buoyed by the mass protests against the war on Palestine – with the mature understanding of the gravity of the tasks ahead. Kimberly closed with the guidance to “engage in principled struggle with our comrades; if you’re not struggling with someone you’re not doing enough work.”
Prospects for the anti-imperialist movement
Will the Democratic Party’s formula of “Trump trumps everything” quash the antiwar initiative? Back in 2015, the late BAR editor Glen Ford presciently <a href="https://blackagendareport.com/democrats_to_bury_black_lives_matter_under_election">wrote</a>: “The Democrats hope the Black Lives Matter movement, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, will disappear amid the hype of the coming election season.” What will happen to the 2024 antiwar protest movement when another US presidential election looms five months from now?
Resisting being absorbed into what Ford called the Democratic election blitz to bury the movement will be the <a href="https://peoplesconferenceforpalestine.org/">People’s Conference for Palestine</a>, May 24-26, in Detroit, which will bring together anti-imperialist groups including the Palestine Youth Movement, National Students for Justice in Palestine, Al-Awda, and Healthcare Workers for Palestine. The ANSWER Coalition, associated with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is a leading element. ANSWER and some of these other groups had also been instrumental in building major pro-Palestine demonstrations in Washington DC, the biggest ever in the US.
Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world, is among the faith-based groups that have carved out a new and implicitly anti-imperialist identity for their followers. Surely JVP, along with other Jewish activist organizations, like IfNotNow and International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network, will continue to militantly protest US support for Israel’s apartheid system in unity with Palestinian and other activist groups.
Come this summer, CodePink, Bayan, and others will be confronting the largest joint war exercises in the world with <a href="https://www.codepink.org/cancelrimpac410">Cancel RIMPAC</a>. Protests are also scheduled for NATO’s 75th anniversary summit, July 6-7, in Washington DC; the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, July 15-18; and the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, August 19-22.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/the-north-american-peace-movement-at-an-inflection-point/">The North American Peace Movement at an Inflection Point</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>We’re Still Breathing: Amhara Genocide in Ethiopia Official Trailer</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/were-still-breathing-amhara-genocide-in-ethiopia-official-trailer/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Graham Peebles]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Apr 2024 19:56:13 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Documentary Trailer]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Ethiopia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=149439</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Award Winning Documentary Film by Graham Peebles Ignored by western governments and largely overlooked by media a genocide is taking place in Ethiopia. The Amhara people, a large ethnic group, are being ethnically cleansed from the region of Oromia, the largest region in the country. Tens of thousands of Amhara have been killed by Oromo […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/were-still-breathing-amhara-genocide-in-ethiopia-official-trailer/">We’re Still Breathing: Amhara Genocide in Ethiopia Official Trailer</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<iframe loading="lazy" title="We're Still Breathing: Amhara Genocide in Ethiopia Official Trailer" src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/929930071?dnt=1&app_id=122963" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write"></iframe>
Award Winning Documentary Film by Graham Peebles
Ignored by western governments and largely overlooked by media a genocide is taking place in Ethiopia. The Amhara people, a large ethnic group, are being ethnically cleansed from the region of Oromia, the largest region in the country.
Tens of thousands of Amhara have been killed by Oromo fanatics (estimates range from 30,000 – 50,000); over three million have been displaced, homes, land and livestock stolen.
The Oromo Liberation Front (OLF or Shene) together with the Oromo regional militia are responsible for the carnage, with the support of the Oromo Regional Authority and the federal government.
In addition to mass murder and wholesale displacement, estimates claim that more than 300,000 Amhara have been arrested. Journalists, human rights workers, parliamentarians, academics, protestors and students, are all among those interned without trial, often in undisclosed locations. In detention, torture and execution is reportedly widespread.
Hundreds of Amhara men and boys have been herded into industrial detention centres (that some are calling concentration camps), where they are held without charge and injected with contagious diseases.
At the request of an Ethiopian human rights group (Amhara Association of America) I travelled to Ethiopia in June 2023 to make a short documentary. We spent time in Internal Displacement Camps and met some of the people affected. Their stories were deeply distressing: children murdered in front of their parents; young men slaughtered en masse; pregnant women attacked, their bellies stabbed, the baby killed. Whole communities eradicated.
The purpose of the film is to raise awareness of this appalling issue, and to add our voice to those calling on western governments (the US, EU and UK in particular), to apply pressure on the Ethiopian Government, led by Prime-Minister Abiy Ahmed.
Screenings of the award winning documentary (Best Documentary at the Global Film Awards and Best Human Rights Film at the World Film Festival in Cannes) have taken place in Washington DC, Dallas, Toronto, Canada. More screenings are planned in April/May/June in the US.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/04/were-still-breathing-amhara-genocide-in-ethiopia-official-trailer/">We’re Still Breathing: Amhara Genocide in Ethiopia Official Trailer</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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