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<title>Forces of Impunity: The US Threatens the International Criminal Court</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/forces-of-impunity-the-us-threatens-the-international-criminal-court/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Binoy Kampmark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Tue, 07 May 2024 03:50:46 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Benjamin Netanyahu]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Hunger/Famine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[International Court of Justice]]></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=150272</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The International Criminal Court is a dusty jewel, a creation of heat, tension and manufacture in the international community. Various elements have gone into its creation. As with any international institution which draws its legitimacy from nation states and the like, its detractors are many, the invective against it frequent. Some 124 countries have signed […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/forces-of-impunity-the-us-threatens-the-international-criminal-court/">Forces of Impunity: The US Threatens the International Criminal Court</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[The International Criminal Court is a dusty jewel, a creation of heat, tension and manufacture in the international community. Various elements have gone into its creation. As with any international institution which draws its legitimacy from nation states and the like, its detractors are many, the invective against it frequent. Some 124 countries have signed the Rome Charter of 1998 that gives the body its authority and jurisdictional force, but no one is foolish enough to think that its reach can ever be anything but tempered by political consideration and self-interest.
Be it issuing a problematic arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin, attempting to investigate alleged US war crimes in Afghanistan, or busying itself with some nasty examples of African despotism, the scope of the body is potentially extensive. At present, ICC prosecutor Karim Khan is sniffing out the prospect of issuing arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials in the context of the war in Gaza. The sniff, however, has come with a rebuking blast from Israel, joined by various politicians in the United States champing at the bit to take a swipe at the body.
Such attacks have only been emboldened by the <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-107publ206/pdf/PLAW-107publ206.pdf">American Service-Members’ Protection Act</a>, an instrument from 2002 that prohibits federal, state and local governments from furnishing the ICC with assistance in any way while authorising the US president “to use all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release” of any “US person” or “allied persons” detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request,” of the ICC.
In what is expedient and legally anomalous, Washington has chosen not only to avoid signing the Rome Statute but reject ICC jurisdiction over the Palestinian territories. The ICC begs to differ, <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/victims/state-palestine">noting the acceptance</a> of the court’s jurisdiction on the part of “the Government of Palestine” and its accession to the Rome Statute in January 2015.
In late October 2023, Israel announced that it would not be permitting Khan to enter Israel, signalling its intention to frustrate, as far as possible, his investigative functions. In April this year, Axios <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/04/29/netanyahu-biden-icc-arrest-warrants-war-crimes">revealed</a> that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had requested US President Joe Biden to prevent the ICC from issuing arrest warrants against senior Israeli officials. A broader lobbying effort of the US Congress by the Netanyahu government is also taking place.
On May 1, a bipartisan group of US senators <a href="https://www.axios.com/2024/05/02/israel-icc-warrants-us-senators-meeting">held a virtual meeting</a> with members of seniority from the ICC, worried about the prospect that arrest warrants for top Israel might issue from the prosecutorial pipeline. In a threatening <a href="https://zeteo.com/p/exclusive-you-have-been-warned-republican">letter</a> to Khan from a dozen Republican senators led by Tom Cotton, the promise for retaliation was unequivocal: “Target Israel, and we will target you.” Issuing such warrants would be “illegitimate and lack legal basis, and, if carried out, will result in severe actions against you and your institution.” They would “not only be a threat to Israel’s sovereignty but to the sovereignty of the United States.”
This was hardly novel and was unlikely to have phased Khan or his staff. In June 2020, President Donald Trump implemented an <a href="https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2020-06-15/pdf/2020-12953.pdf">executive order</a> directed at the ICC. The order authorised the blocking of assets and imposed family entry bans into the US in response to the court’s efforts to investigate the alleged commission of war crimes in Afghanistan by US personnel. In September that year, pursuant to the executive order, targeted <a href="https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/12/14/us-sanctions-international-criminal-court#:~:text=The%20sanctions%20on%20Bensouda%20and,being%20involved%20in%20certain%20activities.">sanctions were imposed</a> on then ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda and senior prosecution official Phakiso Mochochoko.
Since 2021, the ICC has been vested in examining alleged war crimes committed by both the Israeli Defense Forces and Palestinian militants stretching back to the 2014 Israel-Hamas war. “Upon the commencement of my mandate in June 2021,” Khan <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/news/statement-prosecutor-international-criminal-court-karim-aa-khan-kc-situation-state-palestine">states</a>, “I put in place for the first time a dedicated team to advance the investigation in relation to the Situation in the State of Palestine.” Its mission is to collect, preserve and analyse “information and communications from key stakeholders in relation to relevant incidents.”
In November 2023, the office of the prosecutor received a <a href="https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/2023-11/ICC-Referral-Palestine-Final-17-November-2023.pdf">referral</a> from South Africa, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Comoros and Djibouti to investigate “the Situation in the State of Palestine.” The referral requests the prosecutor “to vigorously investigate crimes under the jurisdiction of the Court allegedly committed” on various grounds, including, among others, the unlawful appropriation and destruction of private and public properties, the forcible transfer of Palestinians, the unlawful transfer of Israel’s population into Occupied Palestinian Territory and a discriminatory system amounting to apartheid.
The spectacularly brutal Israeli campaign in Gaza following the October 7 attacks by Hamas also enlivened interest in using the ICC’s jurisdiction to investigate allegations of genocide, crimes against humanity and relevant war crimes. But the notable catch, and bound to be threatening to its intended targets, was the request that culprits be found, and perpetrators be outed and held accountable. South Africa, more specifically, requested that the prosecutor “investigate the Situation for the purpose of determining whether one or more specific persons should be charged with the commission of such crimes.”
On May 3, officials from the ICC openly reproached efforts to tamper and modify any opinions on the part of the body regarding its activities. The ICC welcomed, <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/icc-prosecutor-slams-effort-to-intimidate-him-on-possible-arrest-warrants-for-israelis/">according</a> to Khan, “open communication” with government officials and non-governmental entities, and would only engage in discussions so long as they were “consistent with its mandate under the Rome Statute to act independently and impartially”.
As he continued to explain in his statement, Khan argued “That independence and impartiality are undermined … when individuals threaten to retaliate … should the office, in fulfilment of its mandate, make decisions about investigations or cases falling within its jurisdiction”. He demanded that “all attempts to impede, intimidate or improperly influence its officials cease immediately.”
Netanyahu had previously <a href="https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/1783855474573492732">promised</a> that, under his leadership, “Israel will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self-defense.” He regarded any “threat to seize the soldiers and officials of the Middle East’s only democracy and the world’s only Jewish state” as “outrageous.” Going heavy on the forces of light battling those of darkness – a favourite theme of his – the Israeli PM went on to claim that such actions “would set a dangerous precedent that threatens the soldiers and officials of all democracies fighting savage terrorism and wanton aggression”.
Far from threatening democracies of whatever flavour, the actions of the ICC can serve the opposite purpose, holding individuals in high office accountable for egregious crimes in international law. In doing so, it can contribute, in no small part, to efforts in defeating impunity and rebutting brutal and often callous assertions of self-defence.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/forces-of-impunity-the-us-threatens-the-international-criminal-court/">Forces of Impunity: The US Threatens the International Criminal Court</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<item>
<title>Empathy or Anthropomorphism</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/empathy-or-anthropomorphism/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[T.P. Wilkinson]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2024 19:00:23 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Christianity]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Life/Animal Rights]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Psychology/Psychiatry]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[anthropocentrism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Bad Frankenhausenanthropomorphism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[empathy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Thomas Müntzer]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150270</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Words don’t mean anything, people do. Much of the conflict we experience, observe or imagine arises from the problem every human and arguably most other mammals confront from the moment they become distinct beings—animals. While I never studied classical languages, I believe the very term “animal” designates a being, an entity, endowed with a soul. […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/empathy-or-anthropomorphism/">Empathy or Anthropomorphism</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
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Words don’t mean anything, people do.
Much of the conflict we experience, observe or imagine arises from the problem every human and arguably most other mammals confront from the moment they become distinct beings—animals. While I never studied classical languages, I believe the very term “animal” designates a being, an entity, endowed with a soul. The literalists among the species Homo sapiens may in fact justify their attitudes toward each other and toward other animals by their underlying response to the soul at the core of animal being. Depending on the degree of self-value or self-effacement the humans adopt, a wide range of behaviours, i.e. responses to the world in which they live, may be elicited. Centuries of recorded Western thought have yet to establish any uniform pattern of response to the confrontation with life forms, whether animated or not—more precisely whether or not deemed animated—since there is no evidence of universal agreement as to what constitutes even the basis of such an assertion or category of response.
If after millennia there have only been contested responses, it may be assumed that such universal consensus will continue to elude us. That leaves us with the permanent interim solutions and the daily work of controlling behaviour, our own and that of others, in what for purposes of simplicity, we can call life itself. The fact that I am even writing this essay can be understood as an example of the many ways humans can attempt to respond to the world and ourselves in some manner judged appropriate. If the category of deity means anything, then perhaps it is best defined as the status in which all these responses are perfectly controlled – always appropriate and never incoherent or inadequate. Of course the stories we can find in all religions, whether Buddhism or Western monotheism, if we read the texts attributed to the divine command as authoritative, are full of conflicts and incoherencies. The gods or the one true god is also incapable of establishing stability of response and meaning (appropriate response). Creation is simply ungovernable. There is also no extant example of divine perfection — unless by that we mean unlimited indifference, sometimes called “fate” or “destiny”.
This uncertainty may arise ultimately from an error of scale. Humans are but one group of the living on this planet we call Earth. Despite the ambitions of our scientific clergy, explicitly religious or merely implicitly devoted, to imagine a universal scale of life and action, we are unable to demonstrate a view of the world which does not assume we are the middle of it. What Pluto or Jupiter might teach us about the significance of human life remains bound by the fact of our own animal existence.
In the past decade, there has been an increasing and perverse obsession with transhumanism and the creation of social and material organisations benignly anointed as “smart”. While very little of this rhetoric is actually new, the attention generated and the style of propaganda devoted to concepts like the Fourth Industrial Revolution, since 2020 the “great reset”, and many other subroutines best captured by the slogan “you will own nothing and be happy” have together enhanced the general insecurity fostered by those ecumenical fascists who constitute the World Economic Forum. As I have argued elsewhere, repeatedly, the most recent manifestations in Davos are based on the institutional environment that emerged one thousand years ago in the rabbinical-Latin absolutism of Pope Innocent III. Feudalism as conceived by the Latin Church was an order in which no one owned anything except by papal license.
The religious foundation of Latin Christendom — we can leave aside any discussion of Jesus of Nazareth or teaching attributed to this person as irrelevant — was and remains the salvation of the soul through ecclesiastically ordered and secularly performed torture and execution. The wealthy were entitled to live and the poor required to work and die. They did not even own their lives, but in heaven they would be happy.
When Marx argued that capitalism was automatic, i.e., it did not rely on the individual capitalist, he was identifying at the same time the spirit of Judeo-Christendom. Max Weber’s misguided attempt to justify capitalism by faith alone only confused the genealogical analysis, obscuring the continuity between the Reformation and the financial derivative system at the core of Latin political-economy. The West is still essentially — one hesitates to use the word “civilization” — a mass of people ruled by primitive superstition and piratical-barbarian violence exercised by a robust death cult. It makes no difference whether that superstition is reified at Lourdes, Fatima or Wall Street. The automatic violence of capitalism is maintained by constant revolution in the technology of production. Thus it should be no surprise that its current doctrinal manifestation, neo-liberalism/conservatism, is championed by members of the death cult who claim to have been Trotskyists. Since the Portuguese dismembered and disfigured the merchants and artisans whose trade relations they wished to dominate in the Indian Ocean basin and the British East India Company raped, pillaged and plundered India, every significant Western technological advancement has been directed to eliminating labourers and enhancing lethality.
The same underlying religious confusion has also shaped the opposition to all the consequences of this system’s automatism. The terms of condemnation include the deadly sins and some vulgar accusations of racism, sexism, or basically unfair conduct. On one hand there are plenty who want sin punished and prevented if possible. On the other there are those who imagine there is some unique great revolution or technological rationality that will neutralize the impact of individual bad conduct or evil. With regard to Marxism, the dominant form of socialist ideology by the end of the 19th century, pseudo-debates continue as to what Marx did or did not anticipate or adequately theorize. Such debates are structurally no different from those that persist in the Latin Church as to what Jesus really meant and what the Church – he never founded — ought to do.
Now that there appears to be a critical mass of articulate people who assert that they have transcended the primitive superstitions with which Western mass culture is fuelled, the debates are focussed on the capacity of humans to grasp and act in accordance with something called Science. That Science subsumes a vast industrial complex. Perversely — say I — but naturally if viewed as proposed here — we find in this mass of the articulate those who argue that the Science shows (Simon says) that the political-economy upon which the past five hundred years of Western history has been based is suddenly a hindrance to the continuation of the Planet (by which they mean themselves as inhabitants of same) and that the same Science dictates all sorts of measures which will save the Planet (by which they mean them). They are struck by the epiphany that Western culture is a system of enhanced lethality. However they turn to those who have had their hands on the trigger for five centuries as the not so “lone rangers” (together with their “Sloane Rangers” in the City or Wall Street) to save them.
The other order of mendicants imagine that once the arsenal has been liberated from the “old and greedy” and programmed with the “right” rules and computational procedures, we will be able to march to the Holy Land where life is free of the unreliable and messy humans who previously managed all that mischief. Their defence is that the technology is not defective — the people are. Change the people or liberate the technology from their cold, dead hands and salvation will dawn.
This is nothing more or less than the argument raised by the Great Reformer before he pled for the slaughter of rebellious peasants and their leader Thomas Müntzer at Bad Frankenhausen in 1525. The Church, once freed from papal autocracy, was still the door through which faith would lead man to salvation, even if reading Scripture was to be allowed. My point is not that overthrowing the Papacy in some form was not a good idea. It has been convincingly argued that Martin Luther did what was possible at the time. He could not have rejected the entire world in which he had been raised, could he? The clergy continued to serve as a source of oppression and instrument of imperial expansion — after all that is what mission is. He could not abandon the value of salvation either. Instead he tried to change or expand the terms upon which it could be attained.
If we return to the question with which this essay began — the problem of human souls and the souls of other animals — then we ought to ask ourselves seriously: when we seek salvation of our souls, do we actually consider the souls of other animals? Do we take soul seriously or is it just another manifestation of the malignant narcissism in which the West luxuriously bathes? The animal rights fanatics — and I consider this a kind of cult fanaticism—would have us wear petrochemical products instead of leather but have no serious response to the bipeds killed for oil needed to cloth them. The vegetarian and even worse the “veganese” — when they are not addressing the problem of industrial slaughterhouses and poisoned foodstuffs — seem quite silent about the nutritional sources of other animals. (I have a neighbour whose pedigree dog is actually allergic to meat.)
Many of the incoherencies I could list have been mentioned elsewhere. I have also elaborated on the legal and socio-political consequences of the inversion of “rights” doctrines to eliminate the very distinguishing characteristics of humans upon which human rights are based. However, here I am concerned with fundamental question, one which I would call moral for want of a better term. What is the difference between empathy and anthropomorphism?
If we are so bold to admit that Homo sapiens is a distinct mammalian species of animal then the soul/psyche we attribute to the members of this species joins us to other animals, other inhabitants of this miniscule planet. It is something we share. It is something a wolf and a rabbit share as do a whale or dolphin. We might ask ourselves if sharks or spiders have a soul. There are certainly religious attitudes which affirm this. However I have just as often asked myself if we are too deaf to hear the scream of a grain of wheat? If we are so bold to admit that other beings are endowed with attributes so unfathomable as the soul we attribute to ourselves and other mammals (in descending order), then we should also be sensible not only to what we presume to know but also to the vast universe of ignorance in which we wallow. Anthropomorphism is another manifestation of anthropocentrism. If we turn everything into a mirror of us we deny not only our own unique qualities—both positive and negative — but also the very existence and potential value of the world we inhabit. The jargon of sustainability or the religious fervour with which Science fanatics preach our salvation through technology are both symptoms of the Western religious pathology embedded in our modern mass culture and capitalism itself. Marx has been read as a latent technocrat. He was a political activist as well as a scholar. Obviously he could only make politics under the conditions of the world in which he lived — fighting the fights as the fronts were formed during his animal lifetime. Yet his explanation of where value is added is essentially humanist. It is a model analysis of empathy not automatism—which he explicitly criticized. He refused the formulation that prevails despite his argument that labour creates value and not things in themselves. Hence it was constantly necessary to ask what humans were actually doing? The machine, no matter how sophisticated, was not the creative force.
Anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism — both essential drivers of the current crusades and wars — turn the entire world into the human and thus abolish the very conditions for human qualities. When the pontificate and ecumenical fascists whether in Davos, Rome, Washington, New York or the City of London assemble they do what their patron saint, Adam Smith, wrote that they always do — meet to fix prices and restrain trade. That is the least harmful of their malevolence. For the last decade, with the benefit of nearly a century of mass destruction weaponry, e.g. atomic weapons, genetic engineering and virtual monopoly of mass media and medicine, they have committed themselves to our salvation. They have recruited from the generations of indoctrinated and alienated youth. Like the court who joined the pope behind the walls in Avignon this ecclesiastical oligarchy would drive those outside to their joyful deaths. Like the papacy that preached the Fourth Crusade, they would drive those outside with the promise that death and mortification, after killing the infidels and heretics, will save the Planet and leave a society of the saints managed by the benevolent computers and other EDP devices they have created for the survivors.
Empathy is not identification. It does not mean usurping the other. Rather it includes the limits of cognition soothed by the capacity to love — even someone or something one does not even know. Empathy is not wanton or gratuitous. Nor is it based on gluttony or lust. At the same time, it does not demand that a wolf eat bread or a sheep ground cattle bones. We eat and with time we too are eaten. If we had true empathy we would be concerned about enhancing the nutritional value of our lives for all those around us. We would nurture our spirit and not just our egos.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/empathy-or-anthropomorphism/">Empathy or Anthropomorphism</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
</item>
<item>
<title>If This Is 1968 over Again, More Popular Upheaval Is on the Way</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/if-this-is-1968-over-again-more-popular-upheaval-is-on-the-way/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael K. Smith]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2024 14:23:10 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Activism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Antiwar]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Martin Luther King Jr.]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Viet Nam]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[LBJ]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Reverend Billy Kyle]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Sirhan Sirhan]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Tom Hayden]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150265</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Mass graves, the criminalization of dissent, systematic slaughter glorified as self-defense, resisting students making history. Yes, the current nightmare does seem reminiscent of 1968, the year kaleidoscopic change burst forth seemingly everywhere at once. On January 31, the beginning of Tet, eighty-thousand Vietnamese troops issued Washington a formal eviction notice, attacking all the major cities […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/if-this-is-1968-over-again-more-popular-upheaval-is-on-the-way/">If This Is 1968 over Again, More Popular Upheaval Is on the Way</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Mass graves, the criminalization of dissent, systematic slaughter glorified as self-defense, resisting students making history. Yes, the current nightmare does seem reminiscent of 1968, the year kaleidoscopic change burst forth seemingly everywhere at once.
On January 31, the beginning of Tet, eighty-thousand Vietnamese troops issued Washington a formal eviction notice, attacking all the major cities and towns of colonial South Vietnam. Blasting through the walls of the U.S. Embassy compound, they killed two military police and holding off a helicopter assault for seven hours. Government employees arrived at work to find corpses twisted over the ornamental shrubbery and pools of blood in the white gravel rocks of the embassy garden.
They shelled the U.S. naval base at Camrahn Bay and threw open the jails in Quang Ngai city, setting thousands free. They marched nearly unresisted into the ancient capital of Hue and raised the Vietcong flag from its Citadel. They forced the U.S. to raze half the city to the ground at Ben Tre, which an American officer infamously justified on the grounds that, “We had to destroy the town to save it.”
After endless boasts of imminent victory, U.S. troops being home by Christmas, and the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel, the Vietnamese Tet Offensive proved beyond all doubt that a U.S. military victory in Vietnam was not in the cards.
Wall Street turned against the war.
In March, LBJ discovered his Vietnam policy had left him no path to a second term. Though elected in a landslide in 1964, four years later his “Great Society” had turned to riot and left him a lonely prisoner of the White House. Wherever he went he was besieged by throngs of outraged students taunting him with “that horrible song” – “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” No matter how many speeches he canceled or how abruptly he changed his travel plans he could not avoid being “chased on all sides by a giant stampede.” The people were firing the president.
Support for escalation in Vietnam had evaporated. Worried that fulfilling General Westmoreland’s request for 206,000 more troops would leave Washington insufficiently protected against the threat of insurrection at home, a Council of Wise Men told a shocked Johnson to cut his losses and withdraw from the war before it tore the U.S. apart.
By then 150,000 Americans were dead or injured and much of Southeast Asia had been annihilated by a U.S. military machine that could do everything but stop. On March 31 Johnson went on nationwide TV to announce his forced retirement: “I shall not seek, and will not accept the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
Four days later Dr. King was assassinated for having publicly connected the dots between domestic racism and imperial war. A year to the day before he was shot he was widely condemned for a speech he gave before a crowd of three thousand at Riverside Church in New York City, where he did not mince words about the war:
<blockquote>“The peasants watched as we supported a ruthless dictatorship in South Vietnam which aligned itself with extortionist landlords and executed its political opponents. The peasants watched as we poisoned their water, bombed and machine-gunned their huts, annihilated their crops, and sent them wandering into the towns, where thousands of homeless children wandered the streets like animals, begging for food and selling their mothers and sisters to American soldiers. What do the peasants think as we test our weapons on them, as the Germans tested new medicines and tortures in Europe’s concentration camps? . . . .We have destroyed their land and crushed their only non-Communist revolutionary political force – the Unified Buddhist Church. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men. What liberators!”</blockquote>
A year later he was in Memphis to help striking Memphis garbage workers. The night of April 3 an exhausted and dispirited King was already in his pajamas and ready for bed when he received a call from Reverend Ralph Abernathy at Mason Temple, informing him that two thousand people had braved tornado warnings and a driving rain to hear him speak. “I really think you should come down,” pleaded Abernathy. “The people want to hear you, not me. This is your crowd.”
Dr. King got dressed and went out into the stormy night.
In the blaze of lights at the podium, he appeared nervous. He told his audience that if he were at God’s side on the dawn of creation he would ask to see Moses liberating his people, Plato and Aristotle debating philosophy, Renaissance Europe, Luther tacking his ninety-five theses on the church door, Lincoln emancipating the slaves, and Roosevelt charting a path to the New Deal. But he would not dally in those times or places, he said, preferring to move on and experience just a few years in the second half of the twentieth century, when masses around the world rose up to say: “We want to be free.”
Dr. King, abandoned by militants, vilified by the press, stalked by death and the FBI, felt deeply grateful to share in the freedom struggles that heaped his life with hardship.
With the crowd shouting its approval, he bellowed that he had been to the mountaintop and seen the Promised Land. Brushing aside prospects of premature death, he said that longevity had its place, but that on that night he was not worried about any thing, not fearing any man.
A burning passion in his eyes, his voice rising to a shattering crescendo, he declared his last will and testament: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”
The next day as he was preparing to go out to dinner with friends a bullet exploded into his face, severed his spine, and brought him crashing abruptly down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel.
Reverend Abernathy bolted to his side, crying out to those in the parking lot below: “Oh my God, Martin’s been shot!”
Dr. King, a look of terror in his eyes, clutched uselessly at his throat. His head lay in an expanding pool of blood. Abernathy tried to comfort him. “This is Ralph, this is Ralph, don’t be afraid.” Reverend King, still conscious, his magnificent voice silenced forever, couldn’t answer. But Abernathy felt he was communicating through his eyes.
In King’s motel room, Reverend Billy Kyle repeatedly banged his head against the wall as he screamed into the phone for an operator. Dashing up sobbing from the parking lot, Andrew Young groped for a pulse, then screamed: “Oh my God, my God, it’s all over!”
Everywhere at once riots erupted and cities burned.
Three weeks after King’s assassination Columbia exploded in protest. President Grayson Kirk, alarmed at the growing youth rebellion, announced that in disturbing numbers young people rejected all forms of authority, which was just another way of saying that all forms of authority were increasingly recognized to have discredited themselves.
Hundreds of students promptly took over the university, hoisting red flags, establishing community government, and barricading themselves inside campus buildings.
They purloined documents from Kirk’s office showing that the university was secretly promoting classified war research and working to “clean up” the neighborhood by moving out its Black and Puerto Rican residents. Resurrecting the spirit of the Paris Commune, the students debated meaning and tactics, relaxed to Dylan and the Beatles, and celebrated romance. Two students even got married, escorted to the center of an applauding circle by a candlelight procession of fellow protestors.
Eight days into deadlocked negotiations a thousand blue collar police were turned loose on the defecting sons and daughters of the Ivy League. Attacking with clubs and brass knuckles, they rioted for three hours, smashing up furniture and beating everyone in sight while carrying out a bloody mass arrest.
One hundred and twenty charges of police brutality were filed against the police department, the most in its history. Echoing the recently assassinated Che Guevara, Tom Hayden called for “one, two, many Columbias” in romantic hopes of bringing the racist imperial state tumbling down.
Days after the start of the Columbia revolt, student radicals in Paris surged into the streets chorusing “all power to the imagination,” propelling France to the brink of cultural revolution and setting the mighty franc to trembling.
Spontaneously embracing and kissing in the streets, tens of thousands of students and workers marched joyously together through the capital, waving red flags and singing the Internationale. Demanding workers’ power, peasants’ power, and students’ power, they announced the end of cooperation with soulless mechanization and bureaucratic arrogance.
On The Night Of The Barricades the fiercest street fighting since Liberation (WWII) shook the Latin Quarter as thousands of students marched in protest, overturning cars and trucks. The police attacked, beating them with clubs and rifle butts, kicking the rebels unconscious and dragging them through tear-gas clotted streets by the hair. The students fought back with Molotov cocktails, filling them with siphoned gas and pushing vehicles into the middle of the street to serve as barricades. When the police charged, the protesters torched the cars and retreated behind sturdier lines while building residents tossed down water and wet cloths to aid their youthful comrades fighting with cobblestones.
A veteran of the clash reported, “I never felt the gas. I was never more alive.”
In 1968, even Catholic pacifists were moved to a more aggressive style of protest. On May 17, what became known as the Catonsville Nine entered the Catonsville, Maryland draft board office and doused a pile of draft records with their blood, then set them on fire with soap chips and gasoline, a homemade napalm recipe gleaned from a Green Beret handbook. While waiting to be arrested, they prayed and watched the records burn.
At their trial they spoke of United Fruit Company keeping Central American land fallow while the campesinos starved. They told of the CIA overthrowing the elected government of Guatemala and replacing it with a reign of butchers worthy of Hitler. Father Daniel Berrigan told of his visit to Hanoi, of the merciless U.S. bombings, of the weaponry certified improved through tests on Vietnamese flesh and bone. He read a statement explaining how simple humanity required the destruction of the draft files:
<blockquote>“Our apologies good friends . . . for the fracture of good order . . . the burning of paper instead of children . . . the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house . . . We could not so help us God do otherwise for we are sick at heart . . . our hearts give us no rest for thinking of the Land of Burning Children.”</blockquote>
In early June U.S. support for Israeli savagery caused Sirhan Sirhan to temporarily lose his mind. He had been just three years old when a series of violent episodes near his Jerusalem home scarred him for life. A dynamite bomb hurled by Zionists blew up a line of Arab passengers waiting for a bus at the Damascus Gate; a sudden burst of gunfire caused an army truck to swerve around a barrier and kill his older brother before his eyes; a British soldier blown up almost on his doorstep left behind a severed leg in a church tower and a finger in Sirhan’s back yard.
Nineteen years later Sirhan was living in Pasadena when Israel bombed and napalmed Palestinian refugee camps, subjugating what remained of historic Palestine in the Six Day Land Grab (1967), a sequel to the driving out of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, among them Sirhan and his family.
With his people tasting another round of bitter injustice, Sirhan watched Senator Robert Kennedy wearing a yarmulke on television and promising to cut off U.S. aid to Arab states while sending fifty new Phantom jets to Israel. Shocked, angry, horrified, he fled the television set in tears, covering his ears with his hands.
He scribbled in his notebook: RFK must die.
At his trial for the assassination of Senator Kennedy, Sirhan testified to the assassination of an entire nation:
<blockquote>“Well, sir, when you move – when you move a whole country, sir, a whole people, bodily from their own homes, from their own land, from their own businesses, sir, outside their country, and introduce an alien people, sir, into Palestine – the Jews and the Zionists – that is completely wrong, sir, and it is unjust and the Palestinian Arabs didn’t do a thing, sir, to justify the way they were treated by the West.
“It affected me, sir, very deeply. I didn’t like it. Where is the justice involved, sir? Where is the love, sir, for fighting for the underdog? Israel is no underdog in the Middle East, sir. It’s those refugees that are underdogs. And because they have no way of fighting back, sir, the Jews, sir, the Zionists, just keep beating away at them. That burned the hell out of me.”</blockquote>
Nobody paid him the slightest attention. In spite of Israel’s constant provocations and attacks, Jews were everywhere portrayed as heroic, avenging victims, Arabs as congenital terrorists, and Israel’s Six Day Land Grab as a glorious warding off of a second Holocaust. Facts were entirely irrelevant.
With hopes of a peace candidate now definitively crushed, all eyes turned to Chicago as the Democratic Party prepared to nominate Hubert Humphrey there as its candidate for the presidency. Eighty percent of Democratic voters had chosen to support either RFK or Eugene McCarthy in hopes of negotiating an end to the Vietnam slaughter. Faced with LBJ’s vice-president heading up the ticket, anti-war protesters vowed to lay siege to the city as a prelude to what they somehow imagined might become a revolution.
Protest was out of favor in the Windy City. In response to the nationwide riots that followed Dr. King’s assassination, the Chicago Tribune opined that “Here in Chicago we are not dealing with the colored population, but with a minority of criminal scum,” and urged Mayor Richard Daley not to be like the “spineless and indecisive mayors who muffed early riot control” in Newark (1967) and Los Angeles (1965). Daley obliged, ordering his police officers to “shoot to kill.”
Loathing “longhairs,” Daley refused to issue permits for protest marches, rallies, or sleeping in the parks. He ordered the city Ampitheatre fenced off with barbed wire, put all twelve thousand Chicago police on 12-hour shifts, and mobilized six thousand National Guard troops. He posted a thousand FBI agents around the city and placed six thousand U.S. Army troops outfitted with flamethrowers, bazookas, and bayonets around the suburbs. With police outnumbering protesters three or four to one, Tom Hayden told members of a New York audience to come to Chicago prepared to shed their blood.
As summer waned the Convention convened, and following days of dangerous cat-and-mouse games in the streets between police and protesters, a brownshirt riot ensued.
Shouting kill, kill, kill, a squadron of red-faced, blue-helmeted, club-wielding police charged out of a bus at full-speed and attacked a jeering crowd of onlookers outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel, beating, choking, kicking and macing everyone in their path, including medics sporting Red Cross armbands. Like maddened Samurai they mowed their victims down, charging again and again, leaving the battered bodies bleeding in the street. Loading them onto the ambulances, they beat them once more.
Eyes bulging with hate, they drove the crowd through the window of the Haymarket Lounge, jumping through the glass shards to upend tables and smash everything inside. They screamed “get the fuck out of here,” and “move your fucking ass,” beating even the startled patrons of the bar. Undeterred by the presence of live TV cameras, they rioted in clouds of tear gas for seventeen long minutes while the surrounding crowd chanted, “The whole world is watching, the whole world is watching.”
Across the street in his hotel shower Hubert Humphrey was briefly overcome from the effects of the gas, which he never was from the horrors of Vietnam.
When televised images of the bloodshed reached the floor of the Democratic Convention, Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff stepped to the rostrum to denounce the “Gestapo tactics” of the police. In an instant Chicago Mayor Daley was on his feet, waving his arms and screaming in protest: “Fuck you, you Jew son of a bitch, you lousy motherfucker go home.”
As the ballots were being cast, footage of the police riot was beamed across the nation. Viewers saw Hubert Humphrey, irrepressible advocate of the politics of joy, nominated for president in a sea of blood.
Of course, all this was but child’s play compared to the unrestrained violence being inflicted on the slopes and dinks and zipperheads – otherwise known as the Vietnamese people – by the U.S. war machine in Vietnam. Two years later in Detroit, Vietnam Veterans gave chilling testimony as to the type of crimes being committed:
<blockquote>“ . . . they didn’t believe our body counts. So we had to cut off the right ear of everybody we killed to prove our body count.”
“ . . . we threw full C-ration cans at kids at the side of the road. Well, just for a joke, these guys would take a full can, and throw it as hard as they could at a kid’s head. I saw several kids’ heads split wide open.”
“The philosophy was that anybody running must be a Viet Cong; he must have something to hide or else he would stick around for the Americans, not taking into consideration that he was running from the Americans because they were continually shooting at him. So they shot down anybody who was running.”
“This was common policy. Kill anything you want to kill, any time you want to kill it – just don’t get caught.”
“ . . . the heads of the bodies were cut off and they were placed on stakes, jammed down on stakes, and were placed in the middle of the trails and a Cav patch was hammered into the top of his head, with Bravo Company’s ‘B’ written right on the patch.”
“I saw during my tour 20 deformed infants under the age of one . . . I thought it was congenital or something, from venereal disease, because they had flippers and things . . . it was common knowledge that Agent Orange was sprayed in the area.”
“Fugas is a jelly-like substance. It’s flammable . . . they explode the barrel over an area and this flaming, jelly-like substance lands on everything . . . people or animals or whatever.”
“You could take the wires of a jeep battery put it almost any place on their body, and you’re going to shock the hell out of the guy. The basic place you put it was the genitals.”</blockquote>
In other words, the conduct of the United States in Southeast Asia during the war years was nothing short of a complete disgrace. Washington dropped eight million tons of bombs and nearly four hundred thousand tons of napalm, leaving behind twenty-one million bomb craters. It killed over two million Cambodians, Vietnamese, and Laotians, wounded over three million more, and scattered fourteen million traumatized refugees throughout Indochina. It rained down eighteen million gallons of Agent Orange and other defoliants, creating forests bereft of trees, animals or birds, and cursing the war’s survivors with extraordinary rates of liver cancer, miscarriages, stillbirths, and birth defects. It left in its wake eighty-three thousand amputees, forty thousand people blinded or deaf, and hundreds of thousands of orphans, prostitutes, disabled, mentally ill, and drug addicts.
The total effect was nearly permanent, as journalist Donovan Webster discovered on a visit to Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon) in the mid-1990s. There he saw a storage room stacked from floor to ceiling on all four sides with deformed fetuses, the final result of the Pentagon’s defoliation program begun three decades before. Some were double bodies fused together on a single torso, others had malformed faces, many had excess heads, fingers, and toes.
Donovan walked out of the storage room in shock.
In a nursery down the hall, a roomful of genetically-damaged orphans was overjoyed to meet the U.S. reporter come to visit them from overseas.
Sources: 
 On Vietnam and the Tet Offensive:
Godfrey Hodgson, America In Our Time, (Vintage, 1976) p. 353-4; Frances Fitzgerald, Fire In The Lake – The Vietnamese and The Americans in Vietnam, (Vintage, 1972) p. 518-34; George McTurnan and John W. Lewis, The United States In Vietnam, (Delta, 1969) p. 371-3; Douglas Dowd, Blues For America, (Monthly Review, 1997) p. 153; Lawrence Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima to Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 289; David Harris, Our War (Random House, 1996) p. 89; Gabriel Kolko, Anatomy of a War, (Pantheon, 1985) p. 308-9; Edward Abbey, Confessions of a Barbarian, (Little, Brown, 1994) p. 214
On MLK and his assassination:
Steven B. Oates, Let The Trumpet Sound – The Life of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harper and Row, 1982) p. 435, 483-6; PBS Documentary, 1968 – The Year That Shaped A Generation.
On the Columbia protests:
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987) p. 306-8; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 304-5; Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Long March, Short Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly Review, 1969) p. 125-7, 145; Tom Hayden, Reunion, A Memoir, (Random House, 1978) p. 276-82
On the French student-worker protests:
Barbara and John Ehrenreich, Long March, Short Spring, The Student Uprising At Home and Abroad, (Monthly Review, 1969 p. 73-102 passim; PBS Documentary, 1968: The Year That Shaped A Generation
 On the Berrigan brothers and The Catonsville Nine:
Phillip Berrigan with Fred. A Wilcox, Fighting The Lamb’s War: Skirmishes With The American Empire, (Common Courage, 1996) p. 80, 93, 96, 101-5; Daniel Berrigan, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine (Beacon, 1970) p. vii; William M. Kunstler with Sheila Isenberg, My Life As A Radical Lawyer, (Carol Publishing Group, 1994) p. 190.
On Sirhan Sirhan and RFK:
Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection – What Price Peace? (Dodd, Mead & Co., 1978) p. 242-3
Note: A slightly different version of Sirhan’s mental collapse comes from the late Alexander Cockburn, who says Sirhan was driven over the edge from reading an account of the Phantom jets to Israel written by Andrew Kopkind in the Nation. See Jeffrey St. Clair, “Roaming Charges: the Return of Assassination Politics,” Counterpunch, August 12, 2016
On Sirhan Sirhan directly quoted from his trial:
Godfrey Jansen, Why Robert Kennedy Was Killed, (Third Press, 1970) frontispiece.
For an honest account of the Six Day War:
Norman Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict (Verso, 1995).
On Mayor Daley and protest at the 1968 Democratic Convention:
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, (Bantam, 1987) p. 320-6, Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir, (Random House, 1988) p. 297
On the Chicago police riots:
Todd Gitlin, The Sixties, p. 332-4; David Farber, Chicago, (University of Chicago, 1988) p. 200-1, 249; Daniel Walker, Rights In Conflict, (E. P. Dutton, 1968) p. 255-65; Mike Royko, Boss, (Signet, 1971) p. 188-9; Mark L. Levine et al, eds. The Tales of Hoffman (Bantam, 1970); p. 124; Lawrence S. Wittner, Cold War America: From Hiroshima To Watergate, (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1978) p. 297
On Vietnam Veterans’ testimony about war atrocities:
Vietnam Veterans Against The War, The Winter Soldier Investigation (Beacon, 1972) p. 5-114 passim
On statistics of the overall damage done by the Vietnam War:
Michael Parenti, The Sword and the Dollar – Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race, (St. Martin’s 1989) p. 44; Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, After the Cataclysm – Postwar Indochina & The Reconstruction of Imperial Ideology (South End, 1979), p. 7-9
On the long-lasting effects of the defoliation campaign in Vietnam:
Donovan Webster, Aftermath – The Remnants of War (Pantheon, 1996) p. 214-17The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/if-this-is-1968-over-again-more-popular-upheaval-is-on-the-way/">If This Is 1968 over Again, More Popular Upheaval Is on the Way</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Why the media have failed Gaza</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/why-the-media-have-failed-gaza/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jonathan Cook]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2024 13:32:33 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Censorship]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Corporate Media]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Crimes against Humanity]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Hunger/Famine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israeli Defense Force (IDF)]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Propaganda]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Russia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Students]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[The "West"]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Ukraine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United States]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[War Crimes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Media Criticism]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150261</guid>
<description><![CDATA[[This is a transcript of my full speech for the Bristol Palestine Alliance’s March Against Media Bias at College Green, Bristol, on Saturday May 4.] Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and it is fitting we mark it by highlighting two things. First, we should honour the brave journalists of Gaza who have paid a […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/why-the-media-have-failed-gaza/">Why the media have failed Gaza</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[[This is a transcript of my full speech for the Bristol Palestine Alliance’s March Against Media Bias at College Green, Bristol, on Saturday May 4.]
Yesterday was World Press Freedom Day, and it is fitting we mark it by highlighting two things.
First, we should honour the brave journalists of Gaza who have paid a horrifying price for making the Palestinian experience of genocide visible to western audiences over the past seven months.
Israel has killed a tenth of their number – some 100 journalists – as it tries to prevent the truth of its atrocities from getting out. Israel’s has been most deadly eruption of violence against journalists ever recorded.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ftcms-43248936-6176-4f1f-9665-4d5fad575278-copy.jpeg"><img decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150262" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ftcms-43248936-6176-4f1f-9665-4d5fad575278-copy.jpeg" alt="" width="520" height="292" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ftcms-43248936-6176-4f1f-9665-4d5fad575278-copy.jpeg 520w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ftcms-43248936-6176-4f1f-9665-4d5fad575278-copy-300x168.jpeg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 520px) 100vw, 520px" /></a>
Second, we must shame the western media – not least the BBC – who have so utterly betrayed their Palestinian colleagues by failing to properly report the destruction of Gaza, or name it as a genocide.
The BBC aired only the briefest coverage of South Africa’s devastating case against Israel at the International Court of Justice in January – a case so powerful the court has put Israel on trial for genocide. A fact you would barely know from the BBC’s reporting.
By contrast, the corporation cleared the schedules to present in full Israel’s hollow legal response.
The BBC’s double standards are all the more glaring if we recall how it reported Ukraine, also invaded by a hostile army – Russia’s.
Only two years ago the BBC dedicated its main news headlines to Kyiv’s citizens mass-producing molotov cocktails with which to greet Russian soldiers closing in on their city.
BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen felt emboldened to post – apparently approvingly – a <a href="https://twitter.com/BowenBBC/status/1499668674940133378?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1499668674940133378%7Ctwgr%5E0a2cc5b8854fd7acdf0edbc1c1c4459c2866ce6f%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.opindia.com%2F2022%2F03%2Fbbc-middle-east-editor-teaches-how-to-attack-tanks-with-petrol-bombs%2F" rel="">diagram</a> showing weak points where the improvised explosives would do most damage to Russian tanks, and the soldiers inside.
Two years later, in its coverage of Israel’s assault on Gaza, the same BBC has performed a 180-degree turn.
It is quite impossible to imagine Bowen or any other British journalist posting instructions on how Palestinians might burn alive Israeli soldiers in their tanks – even though those soldiers, unlike Russia’s, have been occupying and stealing Palestinian lands for decades, not two years.
Israeli soldiers, unlike Russian soldiers, are now actively enforcing a genocidal policy of starvation.
But the double standards of establishment media like the BBC aren’t directed only towards the people of Gaza. They are directed at us, the public, too.
The same media that celebrated families taking in Ukrainian refugees has willingly conspired in the smearing of those whose only crime is that they wish to stop the slaughter of 15,000-plus Palestinian children in Gaza.
There is apparently nothing heroic about opposing Israel’s genocide, even if opposing Russia’s invasion is still treated as a badge of honour.
The media give politicians a free pass to vilify as an antisemite anyone outraged that UK weapons are being used to help kill, maim and orphan many, many tens of thousands of Palestinian children. That accusation assumes that every Jew supports this slaughter, and erases all those Jews standing alongside us today at this protest.
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In the US, police forces are beating and arresting students who have peacefully called on their universities to stop investing in the arming of Israel’s genocide. When the police pulled back at UCLA, it was only to allow pro-Israel thugs to assault the students – again many of them Jews.
A clear war is being waged against the right to protest against a genocide. And in tandem, the media has declared a war on the English language.
The roles of aggressor and victim have been reversed. The BBC accused the students, encamped on university grounds, of “clashing” with pro-Israel groups that invaded the campus to violently attack them.
What explains these glaring inconsistencies, this gigantic failure by a media that’s supposed to act as a watchdog on the abuse of power.
Part of the answer is old-school racism. Ukrainains look like us, as some reporters let slip, and therefore deserve our solidarity. Palestinians, it seems, do not.
But there is another, more important answer. The establishment media isn’t really a watchdog on the abuse of power. It never was. It is a narrative factory, there to create stories that make those abuses of power possible.
State and billionaire-owned media achieve this goal through various sleights of hand.
First, they omit stories that might disrupt the core narrative.
The media’s script is a simple one:
What the West and its allies do is always well-meant, however horrific the outcomes.
And what the West does, however provocative or foolhardy, can never be cited as an explanation for what our “enemies” do.
No cause and no effect. They, whoever we select, are simply savage. They are evil. Theyare out to destroy civilisation. They must be stopped.
Nightly for weeks, I have watched the BBC news. If it were all I relied on, I would barely know that Israel is daily bombing the refugee camps of Rafah that are supposedly a “safe zone”.
Or that Israel continues to engineer a famine by blocking aid, and that Palestinians continue to die of hunger.
Or that the UK has actively assisted the creation of that famine by denying UNRWA funding.
Or that the protests to end the Gaza genocide – painted as terror-supporting and antisemitic – are backed by many, many Jews, some of them here today.
And of course, I would have little idea that Israel’s imprisonment and slaughter of Palestinians did not begin on October 7 with Hamas’ attack.
That’s because the BBC continues to ignore the siege of Gaza as the context for October 7 – just as it and the rest of the media largely ignored the 17-year siege throughout the years Israel was enforcing it.
If I relied on the BBC, I would not understand that what Israel is doing can be neither “retaliation”, nor a “war”. You can’t go to war, or retaliate, against a people whose territory you have been belligerently occupying and stealing for decades.
And when the media can no longer omit, it distracts – through strategies of deflection, misdirection and minimisation.
So when Gaza makes the news, as it rarely does now, it is invariably filtered through other lenses.
The focus is on interminable negotiations, on Israel’s plans for the “day after”, on the agonies of the hostages’ families, on the fears evoked by protest chants, on where to draw the line on free speech.
Anything to avoid addressing a genocide that’s been carried out in broad daylight for seven months.
In their defence, establishment journalists tell us that they have a duty to be impartial. Their critics, they say, do not understand how news operations work.
As a journalist who spent years working in major newsrooms, I can assure you this is a self-serving lie.
Just this week, an interview went viral of the Norway Broadcasting Corporation interviewing Israeli government spokesman David Mencer. Unlike on the BBC, Mencer’s lies did not pass unchallenged.
The Norwegian journalist spent 25 minutes unpicking his falsehoods and deceptions, one by one. It was revelatory to see an Israeli spokesperson’s claims stripped away, layer by layer, until he stood there naked, his lies exposed.
It can be done – if there is a will to do it.
Journalists at the BBC and the rest of the establishment media understand, however implicitly, that their job is to fail. It is to fail to investigate the genocide in Gaza. It is to fail to give voice to the powerless. It is to fail to provide context and aid understanding. It is to fail to show solidarity with their colleagues in Gaza being killed for their journalism.
Rather, the BBC’s role is to protect the political establishment from ever being held to account for their complicity in genocide.
The establishment media’s job is to create the impression of uncertainty, of doubt, of confusion – even when what is happening is crystal clear.
When one day, the World Court finally gets round to issuing a ruling on Israel’s genocide, our politicians and media will claim they could not have known, that they were misled, that they could not see clearly because events were shrouded by the “fog of war”.
Our job is to explode that lie, to deny them an alibi. It is to keep pointing out that the information was there from the start. They knew, if only because we told them.
And one day, if there is any justice, they will stand in the dock – at the Hague – their excuses stripped away.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/why-the-media-have-failed-gaza/">Why the media have failed Gaza</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Nesting in Australia: Indian Spy Rings Take Root</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/nesting-in-australia-indian-spy-rings-take-root/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Binoy Kampmark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2024 02:17:54 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Australia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Espionage/"Intelligence"]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[India]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Norendra Modi]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150259</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In his 2021 annual threat assessment, the director-general of ASIO, the Australian domestic intelligence service, pointed to an active spy ring operating in the country, or what he chose to call a “nest of spies”. The obvious conclusion drawn by information-starved pundits was that the nest was filled with the eggs and fledglings of Chinese […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/nesting-in-australia-indian-spy-rings-take-root/">Nesting in Australia: Indian Spy Rings Take Root</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[In his 2021 annual threat assessment, the director-general of ASIO, the Australian domestic intelligence service, <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-17/asio-director-intelligence-language-change-islamic-extremism/13256828">pointed to an active spy ring</a> operating in the country, or what he chose to call a “nest of spies”. The obvious conclusion drawn by information-starved pundits was that the nest was filled with the eggs and fledglings of Chinese intelligence or Russian troublemakers. How awkward then, for the revelations to be focused on another country, one Australia is ingratiatingly disposed to in its efforts to keep China in its place.
At the start of this month, a number of anonymous security sources <a href="https://thediplomat.com/2024/05/the-inevitability-of-indian-spies-in-australia/#:~:text=While%20Australia%20may%20remove%20any,strategic%20interests%20with%20New%20Delhi.">revealed</a> to various outlets, including The Washington Post, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, that the spies in question came from the Indian foreign intelligence agency, known rather benignly, even bookishly, as the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW).
The range of their interests were expansive: gathering information on defence projects of a sensitive nature, the state of Australia’s airport security, and classified information covering Australia’s trade relationships. The more sinister aspect of the RAW’s remit, and once it has extended to other countries, was monitoring members of the Indian diaspora, a habit it has fallen into over the years. According to Burgess, “The spies developed targeted relationships with current and former politicians, a foreign embassy and a state police service.” The particular “nest” of agents in question had also cultivated and recruited, with some success, an Australian government security clearance holder with access to “sensitive details of defence technology”.
In details supplied by Burgess, the agents in question, including “a number” of Indian officials, were subsequently removed by the Morrison government of the day. The Washington Post also revealed that two members of the RAW were expelled from Australia in 2020 following a counter-intelligence operation by ASIO.
Given the recent exchanges between the Australian Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese, and India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, all efforts to pursue the sacred cows of prosperity and security, this was something of an embarrassment. But the embarrassment is more profound to Canberra, which continues to prove itself amateurish when it comes to understanding the thuggish inclinations of great powers. Beijing and Moscow are condemned as authoritarian forces in the dark tussle between evil and good, while Washington and New Delhi are democratic, friendlier propositions on the right side of history. Yet all have powerful interests, and Australia, being at best a lowly middle-power annexed to the US imperium, will always be vulnerable to the walkover by friends and adversaries alike.
Grant Wyeth <a href="https://thediplomat.com/2024/05/the-inevitability-of-indian-spies-in-australia/#:~:text=While%20Australia%20may%20remove%20any,strategic%20interests%20with%20New%20Delhi.">writes</a> with cold clarity on the matter in The Diplomat. “With countries like Australia seeking to court India due to the wealth of opportunities it provides, New Delhi knows that actions like these won’t come with any significant consequences.”
The lamentably defanged responses from Australian government ministers are solid proof of that proposition. “I don’t want to get into these kinds of operational issues in any way,” <a href="https://thediplomat.com/2024/05/australian-ministers-wont-comment-on-media-reports-that-indian-spies-were-secretly-expelled/">explained</a> Australia’s Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, to the ABC. “We’ve got a good relationship with India and with other countries in the region, it’s an important economic relationship, it’s become closer in recent years as a consequence of efforts on both sides, and that’s a good thing.”
Operational issues are exactly the sort of thing that should interest Chalmers and other government members. In targeting dissidents and activists, Modi’s BJP government has taken to venturing afar, from proximate Pakistan to a more distant United States, particularly Sikh activists who are accused of demanding, and agitating, for a separate homeland known as Khalistan. The methods used there have not just involved plodding research and cool analysis but outright murder. The Indian PM, far from being a cuddly, statesmanlike sort, is a figure of ethnoreligious fanaticism keen on turning India into an exclusively Hindu state.
In September last year, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau <a href="https://twitter.com/Gray_Mackenzie/status/1703855250065518770">spoke</a> of “credible allegations” that Indian agents had murdered Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a prominent Khalistan advocate designated in 2020 by New Delhi to be a terrorist. He had been slain in his truck on June 18, 2023 outside the Surrey temple, Guru Nanak Gurdwara. “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil,” reasoned Trudeau, “is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty. It is contrary to the fundamental rules by which free, open and democratic societies conduct themselves.”
This month, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police announced that three Indian citizens resident in Edmonton had been arrested in connection with the killing. “There are separate and distinct investigations,” <a href="https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/05/04/asia-pacific/politics/india-canada-arrests-killing/">stated</a> the RCMP assistant commissioner, David Teboul. “These efforts include investigating connections to the government of India.”
Given that Australia has a Sikh population of around 200,000 or so, this should be a point of nail-biting concern. Instead, Canberra’s tepid response is all too familiar, tolerant of violations of a sovereignty it keeps alienating it to the highest bidders. Tellingly, Albanese <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-24/narendra-modi-calls-for-action-against-indian-separatists/102386294">went so far as to assure</a> Modi during his May visit last year that “strict action” would be taken against Sikh separatist groups in Australia, whatever that entailed. Modi had taken a particular interest in reports of vandalism against Hindu temples in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney featuring pro-Khalistan slogans.
Be it Washington’s seduction with its promise of nuclear-powered submarines and a security guarantee against manufactured and exaggerated threats, or India’s sweet undertakings for greater economic and military cooperation, Australia’s political and security cadres have been found wanting. There has even been an open admission by Burgess – expressly <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-09/asio-threat-assessment-dating-apps-foreign-spies-covid-protests/100817850">made</a> in his 2022 Annual Threat Assessment address – that “espionage is conducted by countries we consider friends – friends with sharp elbows and voracious intelligence requirements.” The ABC similarly <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-30/modi-government-operated-nest-of-spies-in-australia-/103786892">reports</a>, citing unnamed government sources, “that friendly nations believed to be particularly active in espionage operations in Australia include Singapore, South Korea, Israel and India.” Something to be proud of.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/nesting-in-australia-indian-spy-rings-take-root/">Nesting in Australia: Indian Spy Rings Take Root</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>How Hamas Changed the World</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/how-hamas-changed-the-world/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Paul Larudee]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Mon, 06 May 2024 01:58:35 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Benjamin Netanyahu]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Crimes against Humanity]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israeli Defense Force (IDF)]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[The "West"]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United States]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[War Crimes]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150257</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In a June, 2023 article, The Fall of the West, I named 2023 as the end date of a half millennium of Western domination of world power. Although neither the start nor the end of the era can be entirely discrete, the key indicator for that year was the failure of the combined might of […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/how-hamas-changed-the-world/">How Hamas Changed the World</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[In a June, 2023 article, <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2023/06/the-fall-of-the-west/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dissidentvoice.org/2023/06/the-fall-of-the-west/&source=gmail&ust=1715045895487000&usg=AOvVaw158uLE6xPG5uz5MC-LQXiu">The Fall of the West</a>, I named 2023 as the end date of a half millennium of Western domination of world power. Although neither the start nor the end of the era can be entirely discrete, the key indicator for that year was the failure of the combined might of the US and all of NATO to prevail over Russia, a relatively modest economic power, in the Ukraine war. Subsequent developments on the Ukrainian battlefields, as well as the astonishing resilience of the Russian economy, only support that conclusion.
But 2023 had another momentous event in store for us, which also marked a great change in the world power structure, bolstering the claim for marking 2023 as the end of an era. That event was the October 7th, 2023 revolt by Hamas and its allies against Israel’s increasingly repressive occupation of Palestine, and especially the repercussions of that revolt, changing the landscape of power worldwide in profound ways.
Although the Hamas revolt was puny by comparison with Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, its consequences were equally far reaching, due largely to Israel’s disproportionate response, directed against the Palestinian civil population and institutions rather than against the resistance fighters themselves, whose military capabilities were largely unaffected. This response is described by an Israeli military policy known as the Dahiyeh Doctrine, an extreme form of the war crime known as collective punishment, which deliberately inflicts massive and disproportionate destruction and casualties upon the civilian population and infrastructure as a deterrent against resistance. It is reminiscent of similar tactics in other wars and occupations, such as the Boer war in South Africa, the US exterminations in the Philippines, the Nazi repression in Greece and other territories, and in Russia, where it was given the name pogrom (“devastation”), when used by the tsars against internal populations. Israel has acknowledged using such war crimes as a means of dominating both its occupied Palestinian population and its neighbors.
In the case of Gaza, Israel has applied the doctrine multiple times, especially since sealing the enclave with walls and towers, largely completed in 2007. In the pogroms of 2008, 2012 and 2014, the ratio of deaths of mostly civilian Palestinians to mostly military Israelis has been as high as 100:1, in keeping with the Dahiyeh Doctrine.
This changed dramatically with the Hamas led revolt of October 7th, although only for a single day. On that day, the casualty rates were decidedly in favor of the resistance fighters, despite the fact that many of the Israeli casualties, including civilians, were inflicted by Israeli troops themselves as indiscriminate “friendly fire”. Israel counted 1,163 Israeli deaths, including hundreds by Israeli forces, firing upon other Israeli soldiers and civilians. The number of Palestinians killed that day is unreported, as far as I can tell, but surely much smaller, and all or nearly all combatants.
The repercussions of the event, however, were due more to Israel’s response than to the initial actions of Hamas and its allies. True to form, Israel responded massively with indiscriminate bombing against the Palestinian civilian population, killing tens of thousands of mostly women and children, and destroying most of the buildings and infrastructure throughout the Strip. By early 2024, most of the remaining population had lost their homes and livelihood, and had been driven on foot to the town of Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, quintupling its population. In addition, Israel destroyed Gaza’s water, sewage, electric and medical services, and severed or severely restricted its access to food, fuel and medicine, causing deliberate starvation and disease. Starving mothers delivered stillborn babies, or ones who died soon after birth, due to the inability of the mothers’ bodies to produce milk.
Israel’s intention was and is clearly to commit genocide and ethnic cleansing. So clear, in fact, that it has been articulated explicitly by the Israeli leadership and military, to the extent of calling for redevelopment of an empty Gaza Strip by Zionist Jewish settlers upon conclusion of the genocide. There is even suspicion, in some quarters, that Israel permitted and enabled the Hamas attack as a pretext for the genocide, to absolve Israel of its premeditated crime. The notion is not far-fetched. The population in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories is probably less than half Jewish, an intolerable situation for the Zionist leadership desiring to annex those territories, which it calls “greater Israel”. In addition, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is desperate to remain in power, if only to avoid legal prosecution on corruption charges. That, plus the legacy of “enlarging” Israel, would also be a motive for letting Hamas provide the pretext for genocide.
None of this has been lost on the rest of the world. Few nations are willing to be associated with such monstrous acts, especially when their populations fill the streets with demonstrations after seeing daily footage from Gaza. Countries around the world have ceased or reduced their military sales. Commercial, diplomatic and even academic ties are shunned. The International Court of Justice has issued an injunction against Israel, and has recorded public denunciation pronouncements from 52 nations made by their representatives before the ICJ bench. Israel has lost many of the links that it spent decades developing with the rest of the world. It has become isolated except for its ties with the US and a dwindling number of US allies. The vaunted “Abraham accords” have become an embarrassment to the few Arab states that agreed to them. In the space of a few months, Israel has become a pariah among nations.
The US can, of course, supply all of Israel’s needs, including vast quantities of weapons for genocide, and apparently intends to do so, regardless of Israel’s extermination of Palestinians, or the opinion of the rest of the world or even the American people. But most of the rest of the world is washing its hands of Israel. This constitutes a global realignment similar to that of the Ukraine war and its reverberations. Even many Israelis have fled the country – estimates run between 0.5 to 1.0 million – leaving it a smaller redoubt of mostly fanatical and violent Zionists that an increasing number of Jews now oppose, many of them quite actively.
Furthermore, Israel will not achieve its goal of emptying Gaza and defeating Hamas. Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance have not merely demonstrated that they cannot be defeated, but neither can its allies in Lebanon (Hezbollah), Iraq (al-Hashd al-Shaebi), Iran, Yemen (Ansar Allah) and other forces in the region. Hamas and its allies can make Gaza just as unlivable for Israelis as Israel is trying to make it for Palestinians.
The defeat of the US and Israel in Gaza comes on the heels of the US/NATO defeat in Ukraine, and with similar effect, sapping the global dominance of the US and the West, and bringing an end to Western hegemony.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/how-hamas-changed-the-world/">How Hamas Changed the World</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Pezzullo: The Warmonger Who Won’t Go Away</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/pezzullo-the-warmonger-who-wont-go-away/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Binoy Kampmark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sun, 05 May 2024 03:38:46 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Australia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Opinion]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Mike Pezzulo]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150240</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The compromised former top boss of the Australian civil service has the lick and smell of belligerence. Begrudgingly conceding error and when in office, a bully and meddler in party politics, an incessant advocate of threats visible and invisible, Mike Pezzulo switches into a warmonger’s gear with ease. The former secretary of the Department of […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/pezzullo-the-warmonger-who-wont-go-away/">Pezzullo: The Warmonger Who Won’t Go Away</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[The compromised former top boss of the Australian civil service has the lick and smell of belligerence. Begrudgingly conceding error and when in office, a bully and meddler in party politics, an incessant advocate of threats visible and invisible, Mike Pezzulo switches into a warmonger’s gear with ease.
The former secretary of the Department of Home Affairs was sacked last November after revelations that he had used WhatsApp to communicate with abandon with former New South Wales Liberal Party deputy director Scott Briggs. Those messages, unearthed in a joint investigation by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes, confirmed what many already knew: Pezzullo’s voracious appetite for meddling in the party politics of the Coalition government while denigrating fellow public servants and a number of politicians.
In August 2018, for instance, Pezzullo <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/five-years-a-thousand-messages-how-a-top-public-servant-tried-to-influence-governments-20230919-p5e5ss.html?collection=p5e7fq&gb=1">offered</a> Briggs his gamey views ahead of the Liberal Party revolt that would see the overthrow of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. “I don’t want to interfere but you won’t be surprised to hear that in the event of Scomo [Scott Morrison] getting up I would like to see [Peter] Dutton come back to HA [Home Affairs]. No reason for him to stay on the backbench that I can see.”
An <a href="https://theconversation.com/mike-pezzullo-sacked-after-scathing-findings-accusing-him-of-misusing-his-position-218592">inquiry into his conduct</a> led by Lynelle Briggs found Pezzullo in breach of the Public Service Code of Conduct on various grounds. 14 breaches were identified from five broader allegations, including failures to maintain confidentiality regarding sensitive government information, maintain an apolitical stance, and disclosing a conflict of interest. Most fundamentally, he had misused his office and standing to benefit or advantage himself.
Last month heralded his return to the public arena, tinged by a sense of desperation that he wants to be taken seriously again. On the ABC’s 7.30 program, he <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-22/mike-pezzullo-admits-mistakes-warns-of-china-threat/103754858">admitted</a> to making “mistakes” and accepted “the finding that no matter how rough and tumble there is in a place like Canberra, that the gaining of influence and the personal advantage to be gained by way of certain channels of communication, whether it’s to the prime minister or anyone else, crosses the line in terms of conduct.” Showing the mildest contrition, Pezzullo claimed he had “paid a price.” Hardly.
With such preliminaries out of the way, he could return to one of his favourite pass-times: warning about the Yellow-Red threat emanating from Australia’s north. He accepted that the prospect of a war with China was “actually quite low [but] the consequences would be significant and indeed catastrophic.” A meaningless percentage of such an eventuality was plucked out of thin air: 10 per cent. Notwithstanding that statistic of potential conflict, it was “meaningful enough to plan for and indeed to be concerned about.”
Focus, he insisted, should be directed to the dangers of cyber and cognitive warfare. Cyber and critical infrastructure were “vulnerable” to malware threats that could burgeon in the event of a conflict. Concerns held by FBI director Christopher Wray were cited (unsurprising – Pezzullo habitually fawns before the US national security state): “that there is malware implanted in both US and allied networks, which is specifically designed to be activated in the lead up to, or at the outset of, a conflict.”
Dusted off, this Manchurian candidate vision of the world, with its hibernating potency, has been repurposed as a threat against the critical infrastructure. “Director Wray has talked about the low blows that would be visited on the population at large … taking down hospitals, electricity grids, and the like.”
Close attention should be paid to the disfiguring way Pezzullo uses history. When he was Canberra’s most powerful (un)civil servant, he liberally offered gobbets of historical readings that were hopelessly out of context. Pezzulo has that charming sub-literate Wikipedia knowledge of the world that makes him tolerable in the company of other sub-literates. As Home Secretary, he was not shy in spouting febrile nonsense about such topics as, “The prospect of Great Power War” that he claimed would “approach, but not reach, a level of probability”, or the use of chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons by actors that were not “readily identifiable”.
Such views were expressed in an <a href="https://theforge.defence.gov.au/article/michael-pezzullos-seven-gathering-storms-national-security-2020s">address</a> to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in 2019, alongside those fears that have become boringly recycled for endless consumption: “the deliberate subversion of our democratic institutions and our social cohesion”; “the world’s ungoverned and dangerous territories”; “radical extremist Islamist terrorism”; and “transnational, serious and organised crime” of the “globalised” variety.
His 2021 <a href="https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/news-media/speeches/2021/25-april-anzac-day-message">ANZAC Day address</a> made no secret of his lust for conflict, masquerading, as ever, under the cover of peaceful intentions. “Today, as free nations again hear the beating drums and watch worryingly the militarisation of issues that we had, until recent years, thought unlikely to be catalysts for war, let us continue to search unceasingly for the chance for peace while bracing again, yet again, for the curse of war”. The speech was notable for mangling the legacies of two US generals: Douglas MacArthur and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Fascinatingly enough, Pezzullo omits mentioning the sacking of MacArthur by President Henry S. Truman for exceeding his brief in wishing to bomb China during the Korean War, with atomic weapons, if need be.
As long as Sinophobic nonsense growls and barks in Canberra, most of it under the close, cultivating eyes of US-funded think tanks, political converts to empire and the Pentagon itself, this demagogic eunuch will have an audience.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/pezzullo-the-warmonger-who-wont-go-away/">Pezzullo: The Warmonger Who Won’t Go Away</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Don’t Get Me Started</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/dont-get-me-started/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[T.P. Wilkinson]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 04 May 2024 23:54:55 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Language]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Revolution]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Terrorism (state and retail)]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150236</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Where must we start? Every day, we start today A disagreement or a criticism, before it turns into a fight, or a fight which might be reduced to a mere disagreement or criticism: Where we start or end is the frontier between phrases and fists. It really is that simple. The only way to prove […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/dont-get-me-started/">Don’t Get Me Started</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-scaled.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-1024x748.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="365" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-149241" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-1024x748.jpg 1024w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-300x219.jpg 300w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-768x561.jpg 768w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-1536x1122.jpg 1536w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-2048x1496.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></a>
Where must we start? Every day, we start today
A disagreement or a criticism, before it turns into a fight, or a fight which might be reduced to a mere disagreement or criticism: Where we start or end is the frontier between phrases and fists. It really is that simple. The only way to prove any idea to be false is to kill everyone who holds it. At least that is certainly one of the more popular ways to resolve incoherence between verbal and non-verbal behaviour. My temperament at the end of the 18th calendar week was shaped considerably by the recognition that the disputes which dominate the public debate, gaols and battlefields, not to mention the queues of suffering, have been quite successfully reduced to exchanges between those armed with fighter-bombers, assault rifles, judges and police and those whose principal responses are restricted to hide and/or die.
Perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of government-sponsored universal literacy in the West as been to render large portions of the nominally educated incapable of reading and unwilling as well. By reading, I do not mean merely the consumption of print or screen text on whatever mass media is chosen. I mean reading as an auseinandersetzen, a deliberate almost surgical attention to the body of language in use. Instead I find even media claiming to be critical, obsequiously advising potential viewers, listeners, or readers of “potentially upsetting” content. I have heard that these are known as “trigger warnings”. Apparently in the world, with which I am only tangentially involved, has a series, perhaps malleable and innumerable, of words, images, and viewpoints that may not be publicly uttered. At the top end of the spectrum are the utterances deemed harmful because they could be “incitement”. Below that are those which suggest that the beliefs held by people real or imaginary, present or absent, are entitled to absolute protection regardless of content. An ambiguous class of “victims” has been created to satisfy the legal doctrines imposed by those in power– power they intend to preserve.
If I recall my school days with any veracity, then I cannot remember anyone who could object to criticism because it made the person “feel unsafe”. In fact, the whole basis of any critique, whether it was of personal conduct or academic performance, presumed that critique would make the person criticised feel “unsafe” with her or his conduct or performance. The very notion of being “wrong” implies discomfort or at least a desire to improve or correct the behaviour criticised, which logically could not be more comfortable once one has been criticised. The insincerity is obvious. Since unpleasantness cannot be tolerated, except when suppressed by pharmaments, the only ones allowed to raise objections to anything are those who are themselves anaesthetised.
Conspicuously, in the accumulating display of dissent among young people, mainly residing at universities, the students’ criticism is held to be a risk or violence against those who celebrate mass murder. This is a well established attitude with attendant repression. Almost all histories of the French Revolution of which I am aware treat the Bourbon monarch, his spouse and the estates that ruled France as victims of the Revolution. This is not an accident. Any ruling class prior to 1989 which had been deprived of its absolute power was held to be a victim, not a redundant, let alone, criminal perpetrator whose overthrow was an act of justice. After 1989 any government which could not be deposed by subterfuge and therefore was destroyed by force– either from air, land, or sea– was treated as justly punished once forces had accumulated sufficient to overthrow it. The citizens of the annexed GDR cannot claim to be victims of economic and political warfare, including bribery, election fraud, extortion, and other acts by the annexing agents which would ordinarily be subject to criminal prosecution. The citizens of Libya, since the savage murder and sodomising of their nation’s leader, are not victims of the forces who soiled the shores of Tripoli with bombs and blood.
This is not only a question of worthy vs. unworthy victims. It is a question far more serious: what is a victim in fact?
There was a time in the philosophical consideration of women’s rights when certain writers insisted that women were not victims. To call them victims was to deny their agency and far more importantly to deny the presence of institutional violence to which women (and other oppressed groups) were subjected. In essence a victim– this was the argument– was someone without power upon whom violence was exercised. Victimhood implied that the person was a mere object and suffered as if by act of god or nature. Instead by refusing to be treated or identified as a victim, real conflict was identified and the material exercise of excessive and unequal violence was made the focus of dispute.
Sadism and masochism rely on roles which are necessarily unequal with regard to the exercise of violence but not of force. The masochist plays the role of victim. The sadist plays the role of perpetrator. These two roles are dramatic complements. (It really is necessary to read de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom- La philosophie dans le boudoir -1795 – to understand how important sado-masochism is for contemporary politic-economy.) The performance of either sadist or masochist fails without the illusion of the victim. Christianity itself is a cult of victimhood. Its historical complement is a cult of perpetration. Thus the Sado-Masochism at the core of Western culture is prefigured in the term “Judeo-Christian”.
The legal regime created and enforced since 1945 and continuously reiterated is one which privileges victimhood but not human equality. However the victim is not the tortured, the expropriated, the displaced, or murdered. The victim is the performer of the role of “victim” who controls the stage upon which millions are abused, robbed and slaughtered while being labelled “terrorists”. These “terrorists” are the men, women, and children who refuse to perform in the theatre run for the titillation of the death cult that claims mastery over the world. Naturally they are not terrorists nor are they victims. However it is their refusal to play their appointed role in this malicious theatre that leaves the perpetrators no other choice but to feign the function of the helpless in the face of the merciless and evil.
Tearing away the mask of victimhood and confronting the face of evil power are necessary steps to restoring a playing field upon which Old Etonians and their like can be put in their proper place.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/dont-get-me-started/">Don’t Get Me Started</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>This Day in Anarchist History: The Haymarket Affair</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/this-day-in-anarchist-history-the-haymarket-affair/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[subMedia]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Sat, 04 May 2024 23:39:03 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Anarchism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[History]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Video]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150232</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Have you heard the story of why we celebrate May Day? In Chicago in 1886 police murdered two people at a general strike for an 8 hour work day. A rally for revenge on May 4thled to a riot when a bomb was thrown at the police. Several cops and protesters were killed in the […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/this-day-in-anarchist-history-the-haymarket-affair/">This Day in Anarchist History: The Haymarket Affair</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Have you heard the story of why we celebrate May Day?
In Chicago in 1886 police murdered two people at a general strike for an 8 hour work day. A rally for revenge on May 4thled to a riot when a bomb was thrown at the police. Several cops and protesters were killed in the ensuing gunfire and many more were injured.
The state then began rounding up known dissidents and sentenced most of them to death even though many of those arrested weren’t even there.
For over a century anarchists around the world have been avenging the Haymarket Martyrs through strikes, pickets and clandestine attacks.
<iframe class="wp-embedded-content" sandbox="allow-scripts" security="restricted" title="This Day in Anarchist History: The Haymarket Affair" width="500" height="315" src="https://kolektiva.media/videos/embed/1e22e144-97c7-41ce-a5e8-2fdb8a96307f#?secret=45IVv1M5hy" data-secret="45IVv1M5hy" frameborder="0"></iframe>The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/this-day-in-anarchist-history-the-haymarket-affair/">This Day in Anarchist History: The Haymarket Affair</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Veterans to Biden: US Law Says No Weapons to Nations with A-Bombs if They’ve Not Signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That Means Israel</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/veterans-to-biden-us-law-says-no-weapons-to-nations-with-a-bombs-if-theyve-not-signed-the-non-proliferation-treaty-that-means-israel/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dissident Voice Communications]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2024 21:34:22 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Antiwar]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United States]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Weaponry]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150210</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In a letter 18 April to President Biden and top members of his administration, Veterans For Peace cited existing federal law that gives the President “…no discretion whatsoever to allow any military assistance of any form to be delivered to Israel,” based on that country’s “serial violations of the Symington-Glenn Amendments, codified at 22 U.S.C. § […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/veterans-to-biden-us-law-says-no-weapons-to-nations-with-a-bombs-if-theyve-not-signed-the-non-proliferation-treaty-that-means-israel/">Veterans to Biden: US Law Says No Weapons to Nations with A-Bombs if They’ve Not Signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That Means Israel</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[In a<a href="https://www.veteransforpeace.org/files/8917/1345/5099/VFP_Israel_nukes_ltr_FINAL____4-18-24.pdf" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.veteransforpeace.org/files/8917/1345/5099/VFP_Israel_nukes_ltr_FINAL____4-18-24.pdf&source=gmail&ust=1714858151536000&usg=AOvVaw2eMYGnFBz03jgjT2E84fGq"> letter 18 April to President Biden </a>and top members of his administration, Veterans For Peace cited existing federal law that gives the President “…no discretion whatsoever to allow any military assistance of any form to be delivered to Israel,” based on that country’s “serial violations of the Symington-Glenn Amendments, codified at 22 U.S.C. § 2799aa.”
The letter cites a lengthy list of credible reports that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for decades. Because Israel has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the Symington-Glenn Amendments to the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976, which allow no presidential discretion, goes into effect, including:
<ul>
<li>termination of assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act, except for humanitarian assistance or food or other agricultural commodities;</li>
<li>termination of defense sales and licensing of Munitions List exports;</li>
<li>termination of foreign military financing;</li>
<li>denial of U.S. government credit, credit guarantees, or other financial assistance (except for medical and humanitarian assistance and agricultural exports from the United States);</li>
<li>U.S. government opposition to any loan or financial or technical assistance from international financial institutions (IFIs);</li>
<li>prohibition of any loan or credit from U.S. banks to the foreign government (except for the purchase of food or other agricultural commodities); and</li>
<li>prohibition under the Export Administration Act of exports to that state of specific goods and technology licensed by the Commerce Department (except for food and other agricultural commodities).</li>
</ul>
The letter states, “The President may not waive the cutoff of the above aid and exports under the Glenn Amendment where there has been a nuclear weapons detonation, or the offending state has received a nuclear explosive device. Congress would have to enact new legislation authorizing the President to waive some or all of these sanctions.”
VFP National Director, Mike Ferner, said, “Israel’s possession of The Bomb and the U.S.’ refusal to take appropriate action is yet another example of how the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA58cjxCyII" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v%3DOA58cjxCyII&source=gmail&ust=1714858151536000&usg=AOvVaw15f3IG_Sbqo2cHb9TDhNEb">Madmen Arsonists</a> – the Raytheons, Boeings, General Dynamics – actually govern our country and determine policy. The law is quite simple – Does Israel have an unregulated nuclear weapons arsenal? Yes, it does. Is Israel a signatory to the NPT? No, it isn’t. So, the question to Biden is, ‘will you obey the law or the Madmen?’”
Ferner added, “This election year our members will ask their Congressional representatives, ‘Will you hold hearings to enforce existing law, or let the Madmen Arsonists continue to run our country?’”
Highlights of the letter:
<ul>
<li>Senator John Glenn was prompted to seek a change in the law because of a reported theft of 100 kg of highly enriched uranium from an NRC vendor in 1968, later traced to the <a href="https://apnews.com/article/secret-israel-nuclear-construction-ecd8b6f3ffb329aa1fc566b9f9336038" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://apnews.com/article/secret-israel-nuclear-construction-ecd8b6f3ffb329aa1fc566b9f9336038&source=gmail&ust=1714858151536000&usg=AOvVaw0d7mSvFOAsE5GatvV7_iNg">Dimona reactor complex</a> in Israel. (pg. 3)</li>
<li>Repeated CIA assessments and remarks of Colin Powell in 2016 that the U.S. knew Israel had at least 200 warheads at that time. (pgs. 4-9)</li>
<li>Israel prosecuted and jailed Mordecai Vanunu for his courageous whistleblowing disclosure in the 1980’s that Israel has The Bomb. (pg. 7)</li>
<li>Benjamin Netanyahu was identified by the FBI as being directly involved in an Israeli smuggling operation in the 1980’s that successfully stole 800 krytrons, a prized device used for triggers in nuclear weapons. (pg. 7)</li>
<li>The Symington-Glenn amendment has been implemented by previous administrations. (pg. 4)</li>
<li>What the President must do (pg. 10)</li>
<li>Contrary to other instances where the Biden administration is allowed to ignore aid limitations, this one may be litigable in court. (pg. 10)</li>
</ul>
Veterans For Peace members across the U.S. are telling their members of Congress to <a href="https://www.veteransforpeace.org/take-action/veterans-peace-responds-war-gaza/do-not-sign-discharge-petition" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.veteransforpeace.org/take-action/veterans-peace-responds-war-gaza/do-not-sign-discharge-petition&source=gmail&ust=1714858151536000&usg=AOvVaw1vAsJ1rFl5zZ5p3-Mrwwfp">vote NO on any more weapons for Israel</a> and hold hearings to hold the Biden administration accountable They have participated in numerous protests and acts of civil disobedience to highlight Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/veterans-to-biden-us-law-says-no-weapons-to-nations-with-a-bombs-if-theyve-not-signed-the-non-proliferation-treaty-that-means-israel/">Veterans to Biden: US Law Says No Weapons to Nations with A-Bombs if They’ve Not Signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That Means Israel</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>The Heat’s On Big Time!</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/the-heats-on-big-time/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Robert Hunziker]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2024 18:50:31 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[CO2 Emissions]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150208</guid>
<description><![CDATA[“Nearly nineteen thousand (19,000) weather stations have notched record high temperatures since Jan. 1.” (Source: “Earth’s Record Hot Streak Might be a Sign of a New Climate Era”, The Washington Post, April 19, 2024). A blistering start to the 2024 year is breaking all-time global temperature records of 2023 and bringing to the forefront a […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/the-heats-on-big-time/">The Heat’s On Big Time!</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[“Nearly nineteen thousand (19,000) weather stations have notched record high temperatures since Jan. 1.” (Source: “Earth’s Record Hot Streak Might be a Sign of a New Climate Era”, The Washington Post, April 19, 2024).
A blistering start to the 2024 year is breaking all-time global temperature records of 2023 and bringing to the forefront a looming threat of Wet Bulb temperature concerns.
Even though summer ‘24 has not officially begun for the Northern Hemisphere (solstice June 20th), according to DW News (German public broadcast network) d/d April 25th, 2024, “Extreme Heat in Southeast Asia Leads to School Closures”:
<blockquote>Hundreds of millions of people across South and Southeast Asia are facing soaring temperatures and drought as a heatwave grips the region. Dozens have been killed by heatstroke in Thailand alone. Authorities in the capital Bangkok are warning their citizens of the ‘extremely dangerous’ conditions. Schools have been closed in the Philippines and Bangladesh for tens of millions of children and the daytime temperature in Myanmar has reached nearly 46 degrees Celsius. The UN has warned that deaths due to heatstroke were widely underreported, calling heat a ‘silent killer.</blockquote>
Throughout several regions:
<blockquote>Soaring heat and drought have been felt in recent weeks from India, which is carrying out the world’s largest election in temperatures that have risen above 40C, to the coffee plantations of Vietnam… Earlier this month, the United Nations Children’s Fund warned that more than 243 million children across East Asia and the Pacific are at risk of heat-related illnesses and death, as the region braces for an unusually hot summer… The prolonged heat wave already forced the Philippines to close some schools earlier this month, prompting a return to remote learning that became the norm during Covid, while the government urged people to save electricity as power plants were forced to shut down. (Source: “Southeast Asia Heat Wave Shuts down Schools, Stokes Power Demand“, Bloomberg News, April 28, 2024).</blockquote>
“Japan Launches New Alert System as Heat Stroke Deaths Rise”, JapanToday, April 25, 2024: “When the alert is issued, municipalities will open designated facilities such as libraries and community centers to residents as ‘cooling shelters.’ The system will be in effect through Oct 23 this year…The nation’s average temperature in the summer of 2023 was the highest since the Japan Meteorological agency began recording comparable data in 1898.
The Wet Bulb Temperature Peril
The Wet Bulb temperature effect is a killer that is unfortunately gaining new respect.
<blockquote>New research suggests that with Wet Bulb temperature above 31.5C the body can no longer cool itself and without air conditioning death follows. (Source:<a href="https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/policy-watch-countries-slow-wake-up-mounting-deaths-heat-stress-2024-03-18/"> “Policy Watch: Countries Slow to Wake up to the Mounting Deaths from Heat Stress</a>“, Reuters, March 18, 2024).</blockquote>
In that regard, Wet Bulb temperature (which was formerly calcuated to be 35C or approximately 95°F/100% humidity) based upon new research can now occur at 31.5C in a range of temperature/humidity configurations: 87°F/100% humidity to 100°F/60% humidity. This means the Wet Bulb temperature barrier is lower and more of a threat than previously thought.
For an interesting, yet gruesome, aside about the risks of human death caused by Wet Bulb temperatures, Andrew Forrest, founder of Australian mining giant Fortescue, attended COP28 in Dubai last year to press politicians to take the Wet Bulb threat seriously:
<blockquote>If our bodies can’t release the heat, then our bodies turn into ovens and they start to cook – our blood, our organs, and, of course, the proteins which our lives depend on. They basically can never come back, it’s like cooking an egg,” he told The Ethical Corporation. “That is what is going to make increasingly large parts of the world beyond the limits of human survival. (Ibid.)</blockquote>
Human migration, an ongoing worldwide phenomenon, is but one symptom of this devastating risk to human life.
According to EU Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), March 2024 was the 10th straight month of record global heat at 1.68°C hotter than an average March between years 1850-1900, which is a reference period for pre-industrial.
For perspective of too much heat, if monthly all-time record heat is continued year-by-year the final result is Venus, aka: “Earth’s Twin” or “Earth’s Sister Planet.” According to NASA, Venus formed in the same inner part of the solar system as Earth out of the same materials and similar in size but, over time, with a different atmosphere. Venus has a thick carbon dioxide -CO2- atmosphere that has a powerful greenhouse effect resulting in scorching temperatures over 900°F or hot enough to melt lead.
Here on Earth, with one eye on Venus, climate scientists have warned about global warming for decades; however, those warnings have been low and not taken seriously enough. But with fossil fuel CO2 emissions now at full blast, in fact, quadrupling, as oil and gas companies crank up production, given enough time, the entire planet turns into a gigantic heat ball right before everybody’s eyes. Hello Venus.
At the Paris 2015 climate conference, delegates from around the world agreed that measures had to be taken to hold global average temperatures under 1.5°C above pre-industrial or suffer challenging consequences. At the time, nobody thought the 1.5C limit would be hit as early as 2024 and before global implementation of effective mitigation measures to reduce CO2 emissions, which measures, by the way, are a big farce, as CO2 emissions steadfastly increase by the year, and now accelerating, in the face of every mitigation measure adopted to date. Moreover, the often-discussed hopeful lifeline Carbon Capture & Sequestration unfortunately is not a viable solution. Al Gore calls it “a fraud” and for good reason.
Meanwhile, the outlook for global warming is bleak. (It should be noted that the IPCC calculates the 1.5C barrier on a decadal basis, but so what? It’s a big problem right now.)
In January 2024 AP News carried the following article: “Earth Shattered Global Heat Record in ’23 and it’s Flirting with Warming Limit European Agency Says”:
<blockquote>On average, global temperatures in 2023 were 1.48 degrees Celsius (2.66 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than pre-industrial times. If annual averages reach above 1.5 degrees Celsius, the effects of global warming could become irreversible, climate scientists say.</blockquote>
Humanity has pushed the planet to a limit that climate scientists warned about for decades; e.g., Dr. James Hansen, former head of NASA Space Studies, in 1988 warned the US Senate that human influence was changing the chemistry of the atmosphere that would bring global warming. He was spot on. (“<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1988/06/24/us/global-warming-has-begun-expert-tells-senate.html?auth=login-google1tap&login=google1tap">Global Warming Has Begun, Expert Tells Senate”,</a> The New York Times, June 24, 1988).
Now, 36 years later, there are politicians at the highest levels of government in Washington, D.C. who still deny the reality of human-caused global warming. Canada’s National Observer has taken notice: “<a href="https://www.nationalobserver.com/2024/03/28/opinion/climate-denial-american-politics">Climate Denial in American Politics</a>” d/d March 28, 2024:
<blockquote>Climate denial is a sinister movement that denies the science of climate change that has infiltrated deep within American politics and is still thriving today. The widespread oppression of science in America is a rarity in modern history — with the exceptions of Germany and Russia during the 1930s — and has never been seen before in a democracy to this extent.</blockquote>
Sinister! Germany 1930s! Some words stick with you.
<blockquote>The environment and energy portfolios of Trump’s administration appeared to be puppets under the control of the “oiligarchs” — the powerful among the energy-industrial complex. As an American election looms later this year, the thought of another Trump presidency sends shivers down the spines of many in the scientific community… This alternate reality is built on alternate facts and alternate science (i.e., fake). We have been too tolerant for too long of this deviant behaviour by elected officials; the time to vote these politicians out of office is long overdue. (Ibid.)</blockquote>
According to <a href="https://www.co2.earth/daily-co2">CO2.Earth</a>: “A reminder that our world is pushing the planet’s thermostat beyond safe levels at 350 ppm CO2, and that more people are needed to combine our ingenuity and resources to keep the present overshoot brief”:
April 26, 2024 428.59 ppm
April 26, 2023 424.34 ppm
April 26, 1974 333.20 ppm
Good luck with that because the last time CO2 was at a safe level was 50 years ago. The only way to return to 350 is to cut CO2 emissions, but CO2 emissions have never been so robust.
 When it comes to knowledge about climate change, Americans are embarrassingly ignorant:
<blockquote>If you live in the U.S. and happen to get most of your news from national broadcast channels ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox… During the record-smashing year of 2023, these four TV stations spent less than 1% of their news time addressing climate change.” (Source: “Here’s What Record-Breaking Temperatures Looked Like Around the Globe, Yale Climate Connections, April 29, 2024).</blockquote>
 One year ago, the favorite web site for the White House and lawmakers, The Hill article said:
<blockquote>When it comes to the ‘wet bulb temperature’ nearly all of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas are under ‘extreme threat. (Source: “Extreme Threat”: Large Swathe of Southern US at Dangerous ‘Wet Bulb Temperature’”, The Hill, June 29, 2023).</blockquote>
How are the congressional delegations and state politicos from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Arkansas doing with the climate change/global warming issue?The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/the-heats-on-big-time/">The Heat’s On Big Time!</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Authoritarian Ireland and the Secular Apocalypse</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/authoritarian-ireland-and-the-secular-apocalypse/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2024 14:54:59 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Book Review]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150182</guid>
<description><![CDATA[In his book, How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, Thomas Cahill shows how the Irish monks maintained European culture during the dark ages when Rome was sacked by Visigoths and its empire collapsed. In the subsequent chaos and […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/authoritarian-ireland-and-the-secular-apocalypse/">Authoritarian Ireland and the Secular Apocalypse</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-1.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150183" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-1.jpg" alt="" width="258" height="386" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-1.jpg 258w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-1-201x300.jpg 201w" sizes="(max-width: 258px) 100vw, 258px" /></a>
In his book, How The Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe, Thomas Cahill shows how the Irish monks maintained European culture during the dark ages when Rome was sacked by Visigoths and its empire collapsed. In the subsequent chaos and illiteracy, symbolism took over from analysis. Cahill writes:
<blockquote>The intellectual disciplines of distinction, definition, and dialectic that had once been the glory of men like Augustine were unobtainable by readers of the Dark Ages, whose apprehension of the world was simple and immediate, framed by myth and magic. A man no longer subordinated one thought to another with mathematical precision; instead, he apprehended similarities and balances, types and paradigms, parallels and symbols. It was a world not of thoughts, but images. Even the “Romans” at Whitby presented their point of view in the new way. They did not argue, for genuine intellectual disputation was beyond them. They held up pictures for the mind – one set of bones versus another. (p. 204)</blockquote>
One thousand years later as the symbolism of the Dark ages and medievalism waned, a new movement arose to replace it: Romanticism. In the Romanticist outlook, passion and intuition determined our understanding of the world combined with themes of isolation and loneliness, and a delight in horror and threat. Beauty became about strong emotional responses and not about form. The Romanticists rejected Enlightenment Era artists who, like the Irish monks, were interested in ideas and thoughts, and who used them to depict and critique social relations.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-2.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150184" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-2.jpg" alt="" width="474" height="602" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-2.jpg 474w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-2-236x300.jpg 236w" sizes="(max-width: 474px) 100vw, 474px" /></a>Dockers (1934) <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_MacGonigal" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_MacGonigal&source=gmail&ust=1714785264334000&usg=AOvVaw331H6ZXKX3Vwhsdcucb3sK">by</a> Maurice MacGonigal
Unfortunately, Romanticism is a movement that is not only dominant in the production of culture but is also favoured by the institutions of commendation. One such institution is the Booker Prize for literature, and a good example is the 2023 winner, Prophet Song, a dystopian <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophet_Song" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophet_Song&source=gmail&ust=1714785264334000&usg=AOvVaw01WGUuj5i8PbhcxI6N8q8M">novel</a> by the Irish author Paul Lynch:
<blockquote>The novel depicts the struggles of the Stack family, including Eilish Stack, a mother of four who is trying to save her family as the Republic of Ireland slips into totalitarianism. The narrative is told unconventionally, with no paragraph breaks.</blockquote>
As we always love to reference James Joyce here in Ireland, we could argue that this paragraphless state of Prophet Song is influenced by the Molly Bloom soliloquy at the end of Ulysses, which was radical for its time in having no punctuation. (Indeed, Eilish Stack’s daughter is called Molly).
Furthermore the style of Prophet Song, in general, is similar to Molly Bloom’s stream of consciousness in that we get, merged together, Eilish’s thoughts, worries and utterances.
Throughout the novel we also get, in a staccato rhythm, brief descriptions of the coercive actions of the state as it faces the growing opposition of a resistance movement that strengthens and spreads countrywide.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-3-e1714700168922.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150185" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-3-e1714700168922.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="379" /></a>Communicating With Prisoners (1924) <a href="https://www.theirishstory.com/2016/11/17/revisiting-three-historical-paintings-by-jack-b-yeats/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://www.theirishstory.com/2016/11/17/revisiting-three-historical-paintings-by-jack-b-yeats/&source=gmail&ust=1714785264334000&usg=AOvVaw3LKPo4J-u4zZYr76K0sNrg">by</a> Jack Butler Yeats (1871–1957)
From the off, the dark terror commences with knocking at her door which reveals two men ‘almost faceless in the dark'(p. 1). The increasingly fascisitic Irish state is shown through the imprisonment of her trades’ union husband (p. 29), an Emergency Powers Act (p. 53), government controls on judiciary (p. 58), national service (p. 73), unmarked cars pulling up silently (p. 76), foreign media internet blackout (p. 175), and the government closing the schools (p. 183).
The rebels, on the other hand, are really not that much different. And this is the crux of the issue. There has always been a large gap between the Romantic heroes and working class heroes. In Romanticism the ‘resistance’ or ‘rebels’ are often ‘rejected by society’ with various combinations of introspection, wanderlust, melancholy, misanthropy, alienation, and isolation.
And even though “the worm is turning” (p. 147), and the armed insurrection growing (p. 130) the violence is abstracted into terrorism (p. 160), and Eilish “is overcome by loathing, seeing not men but shadows parading the day born from darkness, seeing how they have made an end of death by meeting it with death” (p. 202). The two opposing forces meld into one in the confusion as Eilish encounters “one checkpoint after another” with “different faces speaking the same commands” (p. 283). Her escape from the mystical terror across the border into the unknown dark countryside to the sea could have come directly from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s (1749–1832) The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Goethe wrote: “From the forbidding mountain range across the barren plain untrodden by the foot of man, to the end of the unknown seas, the spirit of the Eternal Creator can be felt rejoicing over every grain of dust”, emphasising the fearful, the mysterious and the unsure.
We live in stark, dark times, surrounded by media that is saturated with the Romanticist gloop of horror, terror, fantasy, science fiction, romantic egoism, etc., that threatens to slow society down and trap us into infinite and endless imagination to the detriment of any progressive forms of social consciousness and societal change.
Yet in the language of the Prophet Song there are many connotations of Ireland’s centuries long struggle against British Imperialism and colonialism: Ireland’s War of Independence, the war against the might of the British Empire in the description of the military men on horses (p.190), state forces moving in on college green (the scene of rebellions going back to the 19th century) (p. 94), cycling before the curfew, crossing the border (p. 112), the harp emblem (p. 123), a stage set up at the old parliament (now the Bank of Ireland HQ) against emergency powers and calling “for all political prisoners to be released” (p. 87). However, Prophet Song is not about a popular rising continuing on from Ireland’s tradition of radical opposition to authoritarian state forces.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-4.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150186" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-4.jpg" alt="" width="640" height="449" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-4.jpg 640w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/unnamed-4-300x210.jpg 300w" sizes="(max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px" /></a>The Apocalypse tradition: Karl Bryullov, The Last Day of Pompeii, 1833, The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism#/media/File:Karl_Brullov_-_The_Last_Day_of_Pompeii_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism%23/media/File:Karl_Brullov_-_The_Last_Day_of_Pompeii_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg&source=gmail&ust=1714785264334000&usg=AOvVaw2lgiehH6XZjMA_qBofkutR">State</a> Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
It is in the Romanticist tradition of a powerful figure (the Prophet) who cries for the lack of love and compassion in the world and, in the apocalyptic tradition, calls for people to change their ways to avoid the wrath of God and the end of the world. The secular version, the postmodernist ‘End of History’ thesis leaves no hope for those who do not benefit from neoliberalism. The Romanticist escape to Utopia, the remote, the exotic, and the unknown, is in stark contrast with the real lives of past leaders and activists of collectivist and communitarian movements who suffered, struggled, and died for real social change.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/cover2-1-e1714702429508.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150191" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/cover2-1-e1714702429508.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="445" /></a>The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/authoritarian-ireland-and-the-secular-apocalypse/">Authoritarian Ireland and the Secular Apocalypse</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Overcapacity: The West’s New Narrative against China</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/overcapacity-the-wests-new-narrative-against-china/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dongsheng News]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 May 2024 14:25:32 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[China]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Corruption]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Economy/Economics]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Employment]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Narrative]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Resistance]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Students]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Taiwan]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Trade]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Universities/Colleges]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Xi Jinping]]></category>
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<description><![CDATA[This week we would like to recommend to you a Chinese song from 1967 called Bravely March On, Arab People! (奋勇前进，阿拉伯人民) in support of the pan-Arab movement. If you don’t have a lot of time, this is what you should know: For China, Iran’s attack on Israel was “an act of self-defense” The West’s new […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/overcapacity-the-wests-new-narrative-against-china/">Overcapacity: The West’s New Narrative against China</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[This week we would like to recommend to you a Chinese song from 1967 called <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=bbe95479fa&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3Dbbe95479fa%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486331000&usg=AOvVaw1IAzdOzr1zMn8sxG2c5uh9">Bravely March On, Arab People!</a> (奋勇前进，阿拉伯人民) in support of the pan-Arab movement.
If you don’t have a lot of time, this is what you should know:
<ul>
<li>For China, Iran’s attack on Israel was “an act of self-defense”</li>
<li>The West’s new narrative against China: overcapacity</li>
<li>China exceeds its 5% GDP growth target in first quarter</li>
<li>Historic “peace trip” by former Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou</li>
</ul>
For China, Iran’s attack was “an act of self-defense”
In the context of the genocide that Israel is perpetrating on the Palestinian population, and in retaliation of Israel’s attack on its embassy compound in Damascus (Syria), Iran carried out a missile and drone attack on Israeli territory for the first time in history, repeatedly puncturing the famous “iron dome”.
After the military response, Wang Yi, China’s foreign minister, <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=700f85e505&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D700f85e505%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486331000&usg=AOvVaw166fDfPGG2h-WsYnWo3LM8">called</a> his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian. During their discussion, Wang Yi again condemned Israel’s “unacceptable” attack on the Iranian embassy in Syria, saying it was a serious violation of international law. He also stated that “Iran can handle the situation well and prevent the region from further turmoil while safeguarding its sovereignty and dignity.” The Iranian foreign minister assured Foreign Minister Wang that his country was willing to be moderate and had no intention of escalating the situation further. He further stressed that “the Islamic Republic of Iran advocates an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and supports China’s positive efforts to promote a ceasefire.”
In contrast, Yuval Waks, deputy head of the Israeli mission to China, said Israel <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=96ee9b880b&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D96ee9b880b%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486331000&usg=AOvVaw3FSeojWaNphEfenW9s5Xb9">was not satisfied</a> with China’s current response to Iran’s attack as, in his words, they had expected “a stronger condemnation and a clear recognition of Israel’s right to defend itself.”
A few days later, the US House Speaker labeled Iran, China, and Russia the new <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=3139e83e32&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D3139e83e32%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486331000&usg=AOvVaw0NZbIXPMI4wUG3FKngIVEx">“axis of evil”</a> while supporting the latest bill to send $60 billion to Ukraine.
For years, China has advocated a two-state solution, the creation of an independent Palestinian state, and full Palestinian membership in the UN. In fact, last week, it <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=490d68b98d&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D490d68b98d%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486331000&usg=AOvVaw3R3i8zjnyMiNxi1gkBR4Py">again supported</a> a UN Security Council motion to that effect, but it was vetoed, once again, by the United States.While everyone is talking about Iran’s actions in recent weeks, a major shift in Iran’s energy trade has been taking place in recent years. Despite Western sanctions, Iran’s oil exports <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=a6810a8a52&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3Da6810a8a52%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw1qsWlwcxisYUL7VLRmAAaA">reached a 6-year high</a>, boosting its economy by $35 billion per year.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Irans-oil-exports.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Irans-oil-exports.png" alt="" width="500" height="292" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150199" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Irans-oil-exports.png 500w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Irans-oil-exports-300x175.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></a>
Iran sold an average of 1.56 million barrels per day, of which the vast majority were sold to China. Approximately one-tenth of China’s oil imports come from Iran.
This makes it more difficult for the new sanctions that the United States and Europe may impose because of the conflict with Israel to really affect the Iranian economy. We could be witnessing a phenomenon similar to that of the Western sanctions against Russia since February 2022: by increasing trade with the economies of the Global South, driven by China, which does not engage with Western sanctions, the economy, which in theory should suffer, ends up strengthening and reducing its dependence on the West. It is too early to say but the indications provided by Iranian oil exports seem to point to this.
The West’s new narrative against China: overcapacity
During her visit to China at the beginning of April, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expressed her concern about an alleged overcapacity in the Asian giant’s new energy sector. In the last few weeks, this idea has been circulating in the Western media, accusing the Chinese government’s subsidies to energy sector companies as “unfair”. However, the decision to subsidize or not an industrial sector is a national sovereignty decision of the country and a common practice in international trade. The fact is that Europe heavily subsidizes its agricultural sector (and has even been accused of <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=3599c73f3f&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D3599c73f3f%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw0MwVeDGqwIkQ-2W6iJ52vY">dumping</a> practices) and, historically, the United States has had a protectionist policy to boost its domestic industry. The bottom line is that both the US and Europe are concerned about China’s sweeping advance in the production of electric cars, solar panels, technology, and robotics, products at the core of China’s current industrial development.
A good example is China’s largest automation company<a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=f65aff0fec&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3Df65aff0fec%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw0zrpeStI3UxB5efFEtPa1m"> Innovance</a>, which has a market capitalization of US$ 25 billion. Known as “little Huawei”, it was founded by former Huawei engineers and today is the main supplier of AC servo systems parts (those that produce motion in industrial machines) and the second largest national producer of industrial robots. Its 2023, revenues increased by 30% to US$ 4 billion; its R&D investment is significant, and it has two factories in Hungary and one in India.
According to figures from the International Federation of Robotics, in 2022 more than half of all industrial robot installations in the world were in China.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Industrial-robots-installed.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Industrial-robots-installed.png" alt="" width="500" height="328" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150201" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Industrial-robots-installed.png 500w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Industrial-robots-installed-300x197.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></a>
This boost in China’s new energy industries is an opportunity for countries in the Global South, Dongsheng member Marco Fernandes told <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=79d281a093&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D79d281a093%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw2K2b0irRrIbK62E-rBy422">CGTN</a> in an <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=5fdf35bbf8&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D5fdf35bbf8%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw3ZOtpHn7lvho_SvhqiWcBC">interview</a>. He emphasized that “…it is the first time that we have a major economy, such a strong economy in the Global South, so it is absolutely strategic” and that for developing countries it is “…a matter of trying to have balanced partnerships”.
In this way, China’s alleged overcapacity seems more of a threat to the traditional powers than to the world’s developing countries. Both Europe and the United States insist on decoupling or “de-risking” from China, but the data show that such a thing is far from being achieved. According to a <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=7930b7fdf7&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D7930b7fdf7%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw2VhSc1UxywMftc3yhE-QPe">Brookings paper</a> last year, US manufacturers are far more dependent on China than standard calculations that examine the origin of intermediate goods, i.e., imports used to make US products, suggest.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Decoupling-from-China.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Decoupling-from-China.png" alt="" width="500" height="258" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150202" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Decoupling-from-China.png 500w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Decoupling-from-China-300x155.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></a>
The paper reveals that, in 2018, China was the supplier for more than 90% of US manufacturing sectors, particularly apparel, motor vehicles, and electrical equipment. In 1995, Japan was the main foreign source for about 40% of US manufacturing sectors, followed by Canada with about 30%. This high dependence on Chinese intermediate goods implies, for the authors, that “decoupling from China will be much, much more difficult and much slower than many people think, and may be impossible.”
In the same vein, it was Siemens CFO <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=ebbb80c356&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3Debbb80c356%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw3TOnbKP_2j4-aQ9GtqNAd1">Ralf Thomas</a> who said a few days ago that it will take “decades” for German manufacturers to reduce their dependence on China. “Global value chains have been built up over the last 50 years – how naive do you have to be to believe that this can change in six or 12 months?” he remarked. This is a small sample of the dependence that European countries also have in their trade with China. Following Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s visit, China announced that it <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=67f48bb719&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D67f48bb719%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw1UiHuYrmjIdiwB1DbAmQ5j">will reduce controls</a> on German agricultural products, including pork, apples, and some beef products. Similar measures were taken earlier this year on products from Spain, Belgium, and Austria, in a clear sign of Beijing’s intentions to improve its ties with Europe.
First quarter economy: China exceeds its 5% GDP growth target
China’s economy exceeded expectations and <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=6b8cd64fdd&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D6b8cd64fdd%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw0NhaR3mdOzCMxlZrqFY3NX">grew by 5.3%</a> year-on-year in the first quarter, consistent with the annual growth target of “around 5%” set at the Two Sessions earlier this year.
Amid China’s productive reorganization, based on manufacturing, not real estate, as the cornerstone of growth, the investment in fixed assets reached 10 trillion yuan (1.4 trillion USD), up by 4.5%. Amid the restructuring of industry, investment in real estate continues to fall (-9.5%), while manufacturing and infrastructure made up the overall growth in investment, increasing by 9.9 and 6.5%, respectively.
China’s industrial value-added grew 6% in the first quarter, especially in the high-tech sector whose manufacturing growth accelerated. China’s <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=0cb9a753d3&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D0cb9a753d3%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw3_AZTEMAd_Kc3TnH8S3q5R">central bank</a> will set up a 500 billion yuan ($70 billion) re-lending program to support the country’s science and technology sectors for small and midsize companies.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Unemployment-rate.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Unemployment-rate-1024x525.png" alt="" width="500" height="256" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-150203" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Unemployment-rate-1024x525.png 1024w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Unemployment-rate-300x154.png 300w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Unemployment-rate-768x393.png 768w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Unemployment-rate.png 1056w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></a>
On the international front, the use of the RMB in international transactions continued to grow. According to SWIFT, the share of the yuan in global payments rose to a record high in March (4.69%), remaining the world’s fourth most active currency. The US dollar continued to have the largest share in global payments, at around 47% and the euro fell below 22%.
When SWIFT began tracking the use of the yuan in 2010, the currency accounted for less than 0.1 percent of global settlements.
Moreover, the use of the yuan in China’s cross-border transactions for trade in goods was nearly 30% in the first quarter, up from 25% in 2023 and 18% in 2022.
Historic “peace trip” by former Taiwanese leader Ma Ying-jeou
Ma Ying-jeou, the former leader of the island of Taiwan from 2008 to 2016, made a <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=931227d7c8&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D931227d7c8%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw3dwSdhNUyi_6X2J6ZqNBNA">peace trip</a> to mainland China where he met with Xi Jinping. At the meeting, Xi affirmed that “there are no problems that cannot be discussed and no forces that can separate us” and that “external interference cannot contain the historical trend of national reunification”. For his part, Ma said that upholding the 1992 Consensus and opposing “Taiwan independence” are the common political basis for the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations.
Ma belongs to Taiwan’s main opposition Kuomintang party, which is more inclined to maintain a friendly relationship with the mainland. The Democratic Progressive Party, which has ruled since 2016, won the last regional elections. In a few days, the new leader <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=db692622e8&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3Ddb692622e8%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw0pgPj1Y4jFW7JK7WjBhFwo">William Lai Ching-te</a>, who will succeed Tsai Ing-wen, will take office. Since Tsai came to power in 2016, talks with the central government have been frozen since the Taiwanese government stopped recognizing the 1992 Consensus that respects the One China principle.
It remains to be seen how these relations will develop with the new government. Ma, after his visit to the mainland, <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=4696da02c3&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D4696da02c3%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw1Xa6QpwGzaxdzjWbKwmQgV">urged the elected leader</a> to respond “pragmatically” to Xi Jinping’s call for peace, and to respect the One China principle.
China launches third round of anti-corruption inspections of the financial sector
China launched another series <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=b207a0d106&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3Db207a0d106%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw0yPdEZN3dV1OPJJE3B44TC">of disciplinary inspections</a> of key government departments and state-owned financial institutions.
The third round of routine inspections, following the last one in 2021, will target 34 agencies, including central government ministries, the central bank, the Shanghai and Shenzhen stock exchanges, the largest state-owned banks and insurers, as well as policy lenders.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Anti-corruption.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Anti-corruption.png" alt="" width="500" height="254" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150204" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Anti-corruption.png 500w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Anti-corruption-300x152.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></a>
The anti-corruption campaign launched by Xi Jinping in 2013 has covered all sectors of governance. From ministries, finance, and state-owned enterprises, to health and sports. More than <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=1b64f579a1&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D1b64f579a1%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw0sED53pZaurx9etBUd7V7y">four million</a> CPC regional cadres and 533 at the vice-ministerial level and above have been investigated since the start of the anti-corruption campaign.
Pork prices plummet in China
Chinese pork prices are in a prolonged slump due to oversupply. After peaking at 26 yuan (US$ 3.6) in October 2022, they have now hit a low of 14 yuan (US$ 1.93). This product accounts for 60% of the country’s meat consumption, so fluctuations in its prices have multiple implications.
<ul>
<li>For a start, it puts deflationary pressure on the Consumer Price Index, which in March rose by 0.1% year-on-year, below the government’s 3% target.</li>
<li>If China decides to reduce the number of pigs raised, it will most likely have an impact on the global grain market, as a decrease in feed demand will put downward pressure on international prices.</li>
<li>In addition, the downward price trend puts producers at risk of bankruptcy and may put many small producers out of production, as has happened on other similar occasions.</li>
</ul>
That is why the Chinese government started to take action, announcing plans to reduce its target number of breeding sows by about 5% starting in March, from 41 million to 39 million. In addition, it will consider 92% of that target (about 35.9 million sows) as an acceptable level.
China’s coastal cities will be below sea level within a century
A quarter of China’s coastal land will sink below sea level within a century, according to a <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=5379d96c93&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D5379d96c93%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw0X7TSZqrR9AU2ApadHPFOd">new study</a> by Chinese and US researchers published in the journal Science. They found that about one-third of the population of the 82 cities analyzed live in regions that drop more than 3 mm per year, while 7% live in areas that drop more than 10 mm per year. The paper also found that 270 million Chinese currently live on subsiding land.
Changes in groundwater and the weight of construction would be among the reasons, and a possible solution could lie in long-term control of groundwater extraction.
Subsidence causes cracks in the ground, damages buildings, and increases the risk of flooding. In addition, land subsidence-related disasters in China have injured or killed hundreds of people and cost an annual direct economic loss of more than 7.5 billion yuan (US$1 billion) in recent decades.
The team mapped the subsidence of cities between 2015 and 2022 using a technique powered by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-1 satellites to measure vertical land movement.
New university graduates choose smaller cities for work
Chinese university graduates are increasingly opting to leave the country’s major cities and seek employment in smaller <a href="https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee&id=1ce3301b3d&e=4dca26c102" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://dongshengnews.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u%3D3804e8517f18cc127a31574ee%26id%3D1ce3301b3d%26e%3D4dca26c102&source=gmail&ust=1714768486332000&usg=AOvVaw3cA0MhJMxttGOLHRmnfSwn">cities and counties</a>. According to a Mycos survey, in 2018, only 20% of respondents were working in counties and cities six months after graduation, but this figure increased to 25% by 2022.
It’s because graduates want to move closer to family and avoid the pressure that comes with working in big cities. Counties and cities also offer more opportunities to get public sector jobs.
Nearly 60% of respondents working in counties and cities had been in the same place for at least five years and their average monthly income had increased from 4,640 yuan ($641) in 2018 to 5,377 yuan in 2022. Their average job satisfaction rate increased from 67% to 76% during the same period.
Some regions push policies aimed at promoting the return of graduates to their hometowns. For example, Suichang County in Zhejiang Province offers those with master’s degrees a housing allowance of 300,000 yuan and an annual living allowance of 30,000 yuan for five years.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Quality-of-life.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Quality-of-life.png" alt="" width="500" height="279" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150205" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Quality-of-life.png 500w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Quality-of-life-300x167.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></a>The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/overcapacity-the-wests-new-narrative-against-china/">Overcapacity: The West’s New Narrative against China</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>The Hidden Messages of the Power Elite’s Cultural Apparatus</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/the-hidden-messages-of-the-power-elites-cultural-apparatus/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Edward Curtin]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2024 21:54:36 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Beliefs]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Christianity]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Philosophy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Crimestop]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Max Weber]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Terry Eagleton]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[The Cloisters]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150178</guid>
<description><![CDATA[photo by Jeanne Lemlin To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly. It was a common form of execution in the ancient world. It is generally associated with Rome’s killing of Jesus and carries profound symbolic spiritual meaning for Christians. In its figurative sense, it refers to many types of suffering and […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/the-hidden-messages-of-the-power-elites-cultural-apparatus/">The Hidden Messages of the Power Elite’s Cultural Apparatus</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-5773 size-large aligncenter" src="https://edwardcurtin.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/image11-1024x768.jpeg" alt="" width="500" height="375" />
photo by Jeanne Lemlin
To be crucified is to suffer and die slowly and agonizingly. It was a common form of execution in the ancient world. It is generally associated with Rome’s killing of Jesus and carries profound symbolic spiritual meaning for Christians. In its figurative sense, it refers to many types of suffering and death inflicted on the weak by the strong, such as the ongoing genocidal slaughter of Palestinians by the Israel government.
Twenty or so years ago when the wearing of crosses by all types of people was the cultural rage, a woman I know said she was thinking of getting one. When I asked her why, since she was Jewish, she said it was because she thought they were beautiful. She seemed oblivious to the fact that to Christians they were gruesome but revelatory spiritual symbols, the equivalent of the electric chair or a noose, but linked to the Easter Resurrection and the non-violent triumph over death that is at the core of Christianity.
Her focus on beauty forcibly struck me that secular culture had triumphed in its establishment of an anti-creed creed wherein the pursuit of a sense of well-being and aesthetic tranquility had trumped traditional belief, while it used all faiths in its pursuit of a self-centered nihilism through a faux-spirituality linked to a precious aesthetic of beauty.
Philip Rieff noticed this in the mid-1960s when he wrote in The Triumph of the Therapeutic:
<blockquote>To raise the question of nihilism, as sociologists since Auguste Comte have done, demonstrates a major change in tone: the note of apprehension has gone out of the asking. We believe that we know something our predecessors did not: that we can live freely at last, enjoying all our senses – except the sense of the past – as unremembering, honest, and friendly barbarians all, in a technological Eden. . . . this culture, which once imagined itself inside a church, feels trapped in something like a zoo of separate cages. Modern men are like Rilke’s panther, forever looking out of one cage into another.</blockquote>
While today those cages would better be described as cells – as in cell phones – Rieff’s point was prescient in the extreme, echoing in its way Max Weber’s 1905 prophecy in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism of the coming “iron cage.”
It would be understandable if you assumed the photograph of the crucifix that precedes my words was taken in a church since its foregrounding before the apse of the Medieval Spanish church of San Martin at Fuentidueña makes it seem so. It was not, except if you realize that museums have become the modern churches, where people flock to revere art for art’s sake and perhaps to find some consolation they have lost at a deeper level.
Museums that have been built and maintained by the very rich to serve as their own churches to the glory of mammon and their own self-deluded immortalization.
Mammon that has been built on the backs of the poor and working class, just as these edifices have.
Beneath all high cultural institutions such as museums and arts venues like The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, Lincoln Center in New York, etc., lies the expropriated labor and land of the lower classes, the same classes whose sweat and blood was exploited throughout capital’s historical transmutations from commercial to industrial to financial to create the immense wealth of the super-rich.
There is a reason the nineteenth-century America industrialists such as Vanderbilt, Mellon, Carnegie, Rockefeller, et al. were called “The Robber Barons.” They were crooks. They are still with us, of course, aided and abetted by today’s latest billionaire class. They build and finance the aforementioned cultural institutions as well as own and operate the major institutions of mass communication and entertainment, such as newspapers, television networks, telecommunication corporations, film studios, etc. – the entertainment industrial complex. In this direct communication capacity, they control the mediation of “reality” to the general population. They serve the interests of what the great crusading sociologist C. Wright Mills called the power elite in and out of government, of which they are an interlocking part, and through which they move smoothly in a game of revolving chairs. They operate the great Spectacle for the general population while moving the levers of power backstage.
When he died, Mills was working on a massive book exploring what he provisionally titled The Cultural Apparatus. He defined this complex as follows:
<blockquote>The cultural apparatus is composed of all the organizations and milieux in which artistic, intellectual, and scientific work goes on and of the means by which such work is made available . . . it contains an elaborate set of institutions: of schools and theaters, newspapers and census bureaus, studios, laboratories, museums, little magazines and radio networks. . . Inside this network, standing between men and events, the images, meanings, and slogans that define the worlds in which [we] live are organized and compared, maintained and revised, lost and cherished, hidden, debunked, celebrated. Taken as a whole the cultural apparatus is the lens of mankind through which men see; the medium by which they report and interpret what they see.</blockquote>
Columbia University, where he taught and is today in the news headlines for its police crackdown on student dissent for their pro-Palestinian protest, is one of those elite cultural institutions, a place Mills was never comfortable at and whose colleagues looked at him askance for his critique of the power elite’s warfare state.
Columbia, with its racist history as it saw its elite status threatened by the growth of the neighboring black community in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, and Columbia’s further expansion into these neighborhoods since.
Columbia, like all elite cultural institutions, born in its own mind sui generis and raised to the heights in purity and innocence, but whose foundation is rotten with dirty money.
Yet, as Terry Eagleton recently <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n08/terry-eagleton/where-does-culture-come-from">wrote</a> in the London Review of Books, “This is not the way culture generally likes to see itself. Like the Oedipal child, it tends to disavow its lowly parentage and fantasise that it sprang from its own loins, self-generating and self-fashioning.” Like Columbia and all the elite universities of “higher learning” – Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, etc. – that serve as legitimating tools for the power elite and their mendaciousness, the museums and other well-known arts institutions exert an enormous influence, not only over culture in the high cultural sense, but over the transformation of society as a whole, often in ways that go unnoticed. Eagleton again:
<blockquote>There’s an irony here, since few things bind art so closely to its material context as its claim to stand free of that context. This is because the work of art as autonomous and self-determining, an idea born sometime in the late 18th century, is the model of a version of the human subject that has been rapidly gaining ground in actual life. Men and women are now seen as authors of themselves . . .</blockquote>
The photo of the crucifix and the apse that precedes my words was recently taken in <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/visit/plan-your-visit/met-cloisters">The Cloisters</a> in upper Manhattan, New York City, where the ghosts of dead religious beliefs prowl about the rooms. It is meant to present a “chapel-like gallery.” The Cloisters is a museum owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is now known as The Met Cloisters. It, and the beautiful 67 acre Fort Tryon Park upon which it sits, was created and financed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr. who, according to The Met’s <a href="https://www.metmuseum.org/press/news/2006/the-cloisters-a-history">website</a> was fascinated with the past. “The expert artistry of medieval art as well as its innate spirituality strongly appealed to this philanthropist and collector,” we are told.
Spirituality from the Middle Ages, I will amend, that when it had been transported to the museum was devoid of its living context and could be presented as a gift from a Robber Baron family to the people of NYC who needed to be uplifted by the noblesse oblige kindness of the Rockefellers. Dead spirits devoid of living inner religiousness who smuggle secret messages to a public hungry for meaning.
Like my friend who considered getting a cross, Rockefeller no doubt found the crucifix and apse that frames it quite beautiful and spiritually uplifting, but not the living spirituality of the criminal Jesus whose message about wealth never informed the Rockefellers’ ruthless exploitation of others on their rise to power.
In years long past, when I first visited The Cloisters, being a native Bronx New Yorker, it was known simply as The Cloisters, even though The Met owned it since its inception in the 1930s. Before I visited it as a young man, I had the impression it had some religious significance, as the name cloister suggests (early 13c., cloystre, “a monastery or convent, a place of religious retirement or seclusion”).
But I was wrong; it is a museum, a beautiful museum build with stones from European monasteries, churches, and convents transported long ago across the Atlantic and reconstructed on the heights above the Hudson River. It is filled with medieval art collected by Rockefeller, George Gray Barnard, and other wealthy art collectors. For those so disposed to wondering what royalty prayed for in medieval days – was it to slaughter as many Muslims as possible in the Crusades? – one can view the tiny prayer book once owned by the Queen of France – and imagine. Such imagining might cause one to realize how little things have changed and how little things mean a lot. The trick is to notice them.
Political power needs cultural power to operate effectively. The elites can’t just slam people around and expect no response. They need to worm their ideological messages into the public consciousness in pleasing ways. Writing of Edmund Burke, Eagleton says, “Instead, he recognises that culture in the anthropological sense is the place where power has to bed itself down if it is to be effective. If the political doesn’t find a home in the cultural, its sovereignty won’t take hold.”
Thus, for an example from Hollywood and the pop-cultural realm, <a href="https://williambowles.info/2024/04/29/five-blockbuster-movies-secretly-co-written-by-the-pentagon/">we might notice</a> how many movies and TV shows were secretly co-written by the Pentagon.
Another name for this is propaganda
Cultural messaging is where the power elite need to seduce regular people that power is being exercised for their own good and everyone is in bed together. Soft power. Nice power. Power that is disguised as beneficial for all. Beautiful power. “Spiritual” power.
As I said, Fort Tryon Park (designed by the Olmsted brothers, sons of the designer of Central Park, Frederick Law Olmsted) and The Cloisters are spectacularly beautiful. Walking through the park on a sunny spring day to reach the museum on its northern end – the flowers and cherry blossom trees dazzling and the Hudson River glistening below – one is overwhelmed by the beauty and grateful to its human gift giver – John D. Rockefeller, Jr. It takes a little mental stretching to grasp the paradox or the delusional dream of such thankfulness. But it cuts to the heart of the power of the cultural complex and the ways it works to soften the ruthlessness of its ultra-rich capitalistic controllers.
First they rob you, then they gift you with a walk in the park.
And when you step inside their institutions, you are provided with opportunities to think within controlled parameters, while also getting a whiff of the theatrical nature of your experience. The whiff is as important as the thinking, for it is a reminder to keep your mouth shut and you too will flourish. The fraudulence of the cultural entertainment-educational complex can dawn on some who have been invited into the inner sanctums of power and prestige, as it has done presently for many college students (and some faculty) whose consciences do not allow them to sit still while Palestinians are slaughtered. But if you dare to act upon your sense of being taken for a ride, watch out! You will be banned from the pleasures that are offered for your acquiescence, as these students are now finding out.
They have rejected that part of the learning experience that George Orwell called Crimestop:
<blockquote>. . . [it] means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.</blockquote>
Sometimes real thinking and conscience win the day, for the power of the elite’s cultural institutions is not omnipotent. Everyone is not for sale, even those invited into the banquet. Teach people to think and meditate on history and they just might think outside the cage of your expectations.
While the genocide of the Palestinians is transparent for everyone to see, the leaders of these elite universities, unlike the rebellious students, turn a blind eye to the obvious. They follow the script they were handed when they accepted their prestigious positions of power, living up to Julian Benda’s famous appellation – The Treason of the Intellectuals.
But “beautiful” power becomes the iron fist when the plebes get too uppity and actually take seriously their studies and rebel as human beings with consciences. This is the flip side to the hidden messages of the elite cultural institutions.
This two-sided process of hidden and obvious messages operates also in the media complex (see <a href="https://edwardcurtin.com/the-subtleties-of-anti-russia-leftist-rhetoric/">this</a>). While the so-called liberal and conservative media – all stenographers for the intelligence agencies – pour forth the most blatant propaganda about Palestine, Israel, Russia and Ukraine, etc. that is so conspicuous that it is comedic if it weren’t so dangerous, the self-depicted cognoscenti also ingest subtler messages, often from the alternative media and from people they consider dissidents. They are like little seeds slipped in as if no one will notice; they work their magic nearly unconsciously. Few notice them, for they are often imperceptible. But they have their effects and are cumulative and are far more powerful over time than blatant statements that will turn people off, especially those who think propaganda doesn’t work on them. This is the power of successful propaganda, whether purposeful or not. It particularly works well on “intellectual” and highly-schooled people.
Some people think that if you see more than is apparent when visiting sites such as The Cloisters in Fort Tryon Park, you are incapable of enjoying the beauty of these “gifts.” This is not true. They are not mutually exclusive. The great African-American scholar W.E.B. DuBois coined a term double-consciousness which I think can be used in this context to describe some people’s experience, not just that of African-Americans. They see at least two truths simultaneously. Their unreconciled double-consciousness prevents them from single vision when visiting the power elite’s beautiful creations. William Blake’s words – “May God us keep from single vision and Newton’s sleep! – inform their perspective.
On the same trip to The Cloisters, my wife and I walked extensively through Central Park, surely one of the most beautiful parks in the world. It was spectacularly aflame with Cherry Blossom trees and people from all over the world enjoying its pleasures, as did we. I, however, when entering and exiting this paradise, couldn’t help thinking that this park was caged in by the massive apartment complexes of the super-rich elite class, as if to say to the park’s visitors: you can visit but not stay. We oversee your pleasures.
Max Weber <a href="https://ratical.org/PandemicParallaxView/WeberProtestantEthicSpiritOfCap.pdf#page=202">said it well</a> a century ago:
<blockquote>No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might be said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.”</blockquote>The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/the-hidden-messages-of-the-power-elites-cultural-apparatus/">The Hidden Messages of the Power Elite’s Cultural Apparatus</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Has Zionism Caused the Destruction of the Jews?</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/has-zionism-caused-the-destruction-of-the-jews/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dan Lieberman]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2024 21:44:40 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[War Crimes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Zionism]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150173</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The proven danger of two million Gazans, blasted from their homes and struggling to find survival, is being overshadowed by unproven “safety concerns” for a relatively few Jewish college students who argue they are harmed by careless words and show no physical injuries. News reports reveal malicious intent and media complicity — divert the protests […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/has-zionism-caused-the-destruction-of-the-jews/">Has Zionism Caused the Destruction of the Jews?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[The proven danger of two million Gazans, blasted from their homes and struggling to find survival, is being overshadowed by unproven “safety concerns” for a relatively few Jewish college students who argue they are harmed by careless words and show no physical injuries. News reports reveal malicious intent and media complicity — divert the protests against genocide to a non-existent anti-Semitism and impede the effectiveness of the campus demonstrations by citing “safety concerns.” Generate hate of the campus demonstrators and disguise the malice by falsely accusing them of hate, the Zionist Modus operandi from its inception — hide the truth and answer critics by labeling them anti-Semites.
<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/db383533-24f2-4c25-906e-941230d2016d?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/db383533-24f2-4c25-906e-941230d2016d?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1714768486382000&usg=AOvVaw1xxh46TgtEfkXgSjjQEg13">NBC News</a>
<blockquote>A growing number of leaders and organizations have called on Columbia University and its president to protect students amid reports of antisemitic and offensive statements and actions on and near its campus, which has been the site this week of a pro-Palestinian encampment and protest.</blockquote>
<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/90544a20-f186-48eb-8be0-05808ddccc5b?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/90544a20-f186-48eb-8be0-05808ddccc5b?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1714768486382000&usg=AOvVaw3cAstGs99VE3cQNtSChdIY">CBS NEWS</a>
<blockquote>NEW HAVEN, Conn. — A Jewish Yale University student said she was assaulted during pro-Palestinian protests on campus and now the university is investigating. Sahar Tartak, editor-in-chief of the Yale Free Press, said she was assaulted Saturday night while covering demonstrations on the campus in New Haven, Connecticut. Tartak believes she was targeted for wearing Jewish attire. “I wear a Star of David necklace,” she said. “One of them taunted me by waving a Palestinian flag in my face and jabbed me with it in the eye.”</blockquote>
<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/501905e5-d1b9-4b32-84ce-93669c7e7afd?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/501905e5-d1b9-4b32-84ce-93669c7e7afd?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1714768486382000&usg=AOvVaw2SLhEutEfV_A0AreJmX6Tx">New York Post</a>
<blockquote>A Jewish Yale University student journalist reporting on an anti-Israeli protest at the Ivy League school Saturday night was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag, while her assailant has gone unpunished.</blockquote>
<a href="https://substack.com/redirect/082e664e-35a6-4a87-9162-592a5c2e2c9e?j=eyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-saferedirecturl="https://www.google.com/url?q=https://substack.com/redirect/082e664e-35a6-4a87-9162-592a5c2e2c9e?j%3DeyJ1Ijoiam4wMmoifQ.PaddeBtKle9joHJvDN3ueADzsKO9yeCM5BKLmMw0ldw&source=gmail&ust=1714768486382000&usg=AOvVaw1S1K5WHtTT1qZKMPT3LVSR">Breaking Points</a>
<blockquote>Krystal and Saagar discuss the ‘stabbed in the eye’ girl being debunked by the video of the incident. “This is all complete B.S.”</blockquote>
Examine the press reports
The campus demonstrations are protests against U.S. policy of assisting Israel in its genocide of the Palestinian people, and the press cites them as either “pro-Palestinian” or “anti-Israel.” These opposing descriptions give an impression that the protests have a bias, do not affect the American people, and mainly concern those who favor the Palestinians and those who are repulsed by actions taken against Israel. A few words, constantly repeated, affect the mindset of the American people and distract them from understanding their government’s disgraceful policies.
The NBC report is not news; it is an advertisement for organizations that have an agenda and manufacture rumors to satisfy the agenda, not different from an exterminator falsely telling Columbia University authorities to protect students amid reports of rodents infesting the campus. Note also the mental link to “a pro-Palestinian encampment and protest.”
The New York Post, an infamous rag sheet, turns an unverified statement by an Israeli supporter into her being “stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag, while her assailant has gone unpunished.” The victim, Sahar Tartak, came to the demonstration with a video camera, wearing a Star of David necklace, and accompanied by another person described as having the appearance of an Orthodox Jew, an indication of purposeful intent to broadcast that she and the other person are Jewish students. Neither Sahar Tartak’s video camera nor any video camera recorded an attack upon her persona. There is no hospital report to show she was injured and her appearance immediately after the incident does not indicate harm to an eye.
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Did Ms. Tartak come to the demonstration as a provocateur attempting to initiate verbal or physical attacks on her or the other Jewish student? When she did not succeed, did she fabricate an incident?
Striding as obvious Jewish students, Ms. Tartak and her friend walked untouched through the angry crowd. Her behavior initiated no attacks and showed that if there are attacks on Jewish students, they must be rare. Will Columbia University investigate her actions, which appear belligerent, untruthful, and purposely agitating? Isn’t it twisted to repress those who struggle to prevent genocide and follow the dictates of those who approve genocide?
Don’t Columbia and other universities know about the genocide and the terrible consequences inflicted on the Palestinians? Is their negligence due to American media — print, online, television, and radio — treating Israel as a friendly neighbor and a victim of terrorism, and approaching the two million Palestinians as collateral damage to Israel’s overpowering a few thousand Hamas militants who have no anti-tank weapons to halt tanks, no guided missiles to cause critical damage, and no handheld missile systems to destroy drones and aircraft? Nobody equipped Hamas with an adequate defense or for an effective offense. Militants crossed the border, walked a few miles, committed random havoc, and, after being alerted, Israeli forces wiped them out.
October 7, 2023, taught the Israeli military it had no problem in containing powerless Hamas; as soon as the militants met a prepared Israeli military they were quickly defeated. Israel had a temporary border problem of relaxation and apathy, which allowed the Hamas militants to enter. Stationing troops at the border and assuring they are alert rectified the situation. There was no need to send a massive number of soldiers into Gaza, have a number of them killed, slaughter the Gazans, and ensure none of the captives survived. Why did Israel pursue the more punishing path?
(1) The Israeli government did not want to engage in talks with Hamas, which would elevate Hamas’ importance and put Israel on the defensive.
(2) Israel has pursued one path — steal the Palestinian land and patrimony and contrive a means to cleanse the Palestinians from the area. Hamas’ resistance is a continuous block to the pursuit and a change in tactics was ordered.
(3) The Hamas attack presented an opportunity to change the tactics from a slow ethnic cleansing to a more rapid genocide — fool the world into believing the demolishing of the Gazans is retribution and not genocide. With the obedient Western media occupied with reports from Gaza, less attention will be given to the violent ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.
Attempts to subdue campus demonstrations that protest the Israeli genocide of the Palestinian people reveal the obvious — since day one of their appearance, spurious anti-Semitism has been a constant weapon of Zionists to disguise the truth, foment hatred of their opponents, and advance their agenda. Their deceptive tactics have enraged segments of U.S. and European societies and directly led to animosity and attacks against Jews. Describing their state as a “Jewish state,” and having a majority of Jews throughout the world support the state and its genocidal actions is causing a backlash to the Jews. The only salvation for the Jewish community is separation from Zionism, its oppressive state, and its suicidal inclinations and halt the continuation of relying on the media to confuse the populace into favoring, protecting, and urging governments to rescue the Jewish community.
PBS’ News Hour, supposedly a more respected element of the U.S. media, on April 26, featured Israelis mark Passover amid conflict, loss and trauma. Description of the program: “This week, Jews around the world are observing Passover, the festival of liberation that marks the historic exodus from ancient Egypt.”
“The historic exodus from Egypt?” Is there any history that tells us of this mythical exodus? Are news broadcasts a compilation of facts or fiction?
<blockquote>But, this year, joy is tempered with loss and trauma. More than 160,000 Israelis will mark the holiday while displaced from their homes, as the war with Hamas continues. Still others have empty chairs at the dinner table, their loved ones still held captive by Hamas.</blockquote>
Upon orders from their command, and not due to excessive danger, a small percentage of Israelis are taking a respite from their daily lives and still established homes and eating matzah in temporary hotel quarters. Almost all Palestinians have been forced out of destroyed homes, where relatives still lie under the rubble, and they search to find a tent or place to house their permanently displaced families and obtain some bread, leavened or non-leavened, to eat. They don’t have empty chairs at dinner tables; they have no chairs and dinner tables and suffer the loss of the tens of thousands of loved ones and captives held by Israel.
The biblical “Exodus” story did not free the Jews. Just the opposite, it has been used to keep Jews in perpetual bondage to a spurious history and to promote an attitude of constant victimhood, while distracting them from realizing the role they play in the injustices done to others. Hopefully, Jews who absorb verified history will awaken other Jews to the destructive impulses generated from Israel, which prevents them from recognizing the roots and appeal of modern Judaism and instead induces them to adopt atavistic and reactionary attitudes from ancient Hebrew stories and its fictitious world — recreating the Passover plagues that now kill Palestinian livestock and crops and sent lice, flies, frogs, wild animals, locusts, hail, boils, and extended darkness throughout Gaza, and death to the firstborn child in every Palestinian household.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/has-zionism-caused-the-destruction-of-the-jews/">Has Zionism Caused the Destruction of the Jews?</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Attacked in St. Louis</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/presidential-candidate-jill-stein-attacked-in-st-louis/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Don Fitz]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2024 14:08:42 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA["Third" Party]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Activism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Democracy]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Elections]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Freedom of Expression/Speech]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Joe Biden]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Palestine]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Students]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United States]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[War Crimes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Jason Call]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Kelly Merrill]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150158</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Green Party member Jill Stein center. After attacking Dr. Jill Stein, St. Louis police charged her with assaulting them. Stein is the presumptive Presidential candidate of the Green Party. On April 27 she spoke at a program of the Green Party of St. Louis and then went to support student protesters at Washington University. There, […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/presidential-candidate-jill-stein-attacked-in-st-louis/">Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Attacked in St. Louis</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/KellySteinHallByChicCrop-scaled.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/KellySteinHallByChicCrop-1024x723.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="353" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-150159" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/KellySteinHallByChicCrop-1024x723.jpg 1024w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/KellySteinHallByChicCrop-300x212.jpg 300w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/KellySteinHallByChicCrop-768x542.jpg 768w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/KellySteinHallByChicCrop-1536x1084.jpg 1536w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/KellySteinHallByChicCrop-2048x1445.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></a><center>Green Party member Jill Stein center.</center>
After attacking Dr. Jill Stein, St. Louis police charged her with assaulting them. Stein is the presumptive Presidential candidate of the Green Party. On April 27 she spoke at a program of the Green Party of St. Louis and then went to support student protesters at Washington University. There, she was arrested along with Green Party campaign managers Jason Call and Kelly Merrill with about 100 others.
As students peacefully gathered in tents and on the lawn, they were soon confronted by police from four departments: University City, Richmond Heights, St. Louis City and St. Louis County. When Stein arrived at the campus, students asked her to help defuse an already tense situation.
She identified herself to onlooking university administrators as a Green Party Presidential candidate. Stein, along with St. Louis Aldermanic President Megan Green and Alderwoman Alisha Sonnier, attempted to persuade university administrators to let students stay. Police moved to block the conversation. A reporter from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who attempted a discussion with university vice-chancellor Julie Hail Flory was ordered to leave the campus.
Merrill and Stein looked for a restroom and found all doors locked, but a student was able to unlock one door. Hearing yelling that the police were about to attack, they quickly went outside. They walked into the space between students and police, pleading for calm. But the police stormed in.
Merrill reported that “This was the first time I understood why so many police are on bicycles. They picked them up and used them as weapons to push people down.” When police began assailing protesters, they targeted Stein first and did not bother the two Democratic Party officials. They threw Stein on her head, threw Merrill to the ground, jumped on Call, and dozens became their victims.
Students were charged with trespassing and disruptive behavior. Those who were arrested have been prohibited from re-entering campus even if they will miss final examinations and not graduate. The administration-police reaction followed a pattern at universities across the US as if it had been scripted in Joe Biden’s office.
Being assaulted, arrested and jailed was only the beginning of Stein’s ordeal. Not being told what would happen to her, Stein sat alone in a cell for hours before being released. Exhausted, she did not make it to our house to sleep until 3:00 in the morning.
On Monday morning, April 29 Stein took a break from her mid-states tour to get checked out at University Hospital in Columbia MO. They found that, though very bruised, her rib was not broken; and she continued to Kansas City.
Bob Suberi is a Jewish member of the St. Louis Green Party who has made several solidarity visits to the West Bank. He brings back stories of the Israeli Defense Forces’ deliberately provoking Palestinians in order to have an excuse for over-reacting, sometimes with a massive raid. Similarly, Washington University students committed the trivial infraction of occupying space regularly used for events such as carnivals and this became the excuse for a police invasion.
The similarities between practices in Palestine and on US campuses is unmistakable. This is true not only for intolerance of dissent and brutality. It is also the case with the way Israelis destroy sanitary facilities in Gaza, leaving people with nowhere to relieve themselves except on sidewalks. This serves both to humiliate Palestinians and create a health crisis.
The mounting opposition to Israel’s war is reflected by the wide variety of speakers at the St. Louis Green Party event: Andrew de las Alas (Asians Demanding Justice), Saish Satyal (College Democrats), Lila Steinbach (Jewish Students for Palestine), Bahar Bastani MD (Dar al-Zahra Mosque and Education Center), Shahab Mushtaq (Green Party of St. Louis), Bob Suberi (Veterans For Peace), Chibu Asonye (Green Party of Illinois), Zaki Baruti (Universal African Peoples Organization) and Omali Yeshitela (African People’s Socialist Party).
Jewish herself, Stein insists that “The students are not the villains in this struggle against Israeli violence. They are in fact the heroes, defending the right of free speech and to peacefully protest. Many already see the villains being the Washington University administration, those who conspired with them to destroy free speech, and the Biden gang whose fingerprints are all over efforts to shut down peace initiatives. Out of one side of his mouth Biden claims he is working to end the killing and maiming of Palestinians. From the other side of his mouth comes the push for billions of war dollars that are causing the genocide.”
Dr. Stein joined tens of thousands of students in campuses across the US who are demanding university divestment from Boeing and other companies that manufacture weapons used by Israel. Students presented Washington University with five demands:
<li>Cut ties with Boeing.</li>
<li>Boycott Israeli educational institutions.</li>
<li>Drop charges and suspensions against protesters and defund university police.</li>
<li>Stop buying land in surrounding communities and make payments in lieu of taxes to University City and St. Louis.</li>
<li>Release a statement condemning Palestinian genocide and calling for an immediate ceasefire.</li>

University officials told the press that they felt that they had to take action because the demonstrators “had the potential to get out of control and become dangerous.” Apparently skilled at ignoring the obvious, these officials have never noticed that the corporate behavior of their partner, Boeing, has vastly exceeded the “potential” to become dangerous.
One of the great ironies of the episode is that above the April 28 Post-Dispatch story which described events at Washington University was another front page story reporting that Boeing was abandoning efforts to outsource much of its work. It approvingly announced that this would save 550 St. Louis jobs.
Of course, the Post-Dispatch has not published stories regarding the creation of peace-related jobs for Boeing employees if the war-manufacturer were to be downsized. Also worthy of note is the fact that no Boeing executive or government official working with them has been arrested for crimes against humanity, complicity with genocide or any other charge. Maybe they would have to peacefully sit in a tent on the Washington University campus to get busted.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/presidential-candidate-jill-stein-attacked-in-st-louis/">Presidential Candidate Jill Stein Attacked in St. Louis</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>The Little Flotilla that Almost Could</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/the-little-flotilla-that-almost-could/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Craig Wood]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2024 02:59:44 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA["Aid"]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Activism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Freedom Flotilla to Gaza]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Gaza]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Genocide]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Humanitarianism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Türkiye]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United States]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150144</guid>
<description><![CDATA[The flotilla cargo ship in Istanbul (Photo credit: Medea Benjamin) Two gutsy activists from the Twin Cities flew to Istanbul, Turkey April 17 to join over three-hundred others from about 40 countries on an eleven-hundred mile voyage across the Mediterranean Sea to raise awareness and bring lifesaving aid to Gaza. Vietnam Vet and member of […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/the-little-flotilla-that-almost-could/">The Little Flotilla that Almost Could</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 cargo ship in Istanbul (Photo credit: Medea Benjamin)
Two gutsy activists from the Twin Cities flew to Istanbul, Turkey April 17 to join over three-hundred others from about 40 countries on an eleven-hundred mile voyage across the Mediterranean Sea to raise awareness and bring lifesaving aid to Gaza.
Vietnam Vet and member of Veterans For Peace (VFP) Barry Riesch was nervous about signing on with the Freedom Flotilla Coalition (FFC), but felt he should try to do something for the vast majority of Gazans lacking medical care and being deliberately starved. Apart from the mission’s goal of delivering over five-thousand tons of urgently needed food, water and medical supplies (including five ambulances, and an abundance of baby formula), Reisch said he wanted to do this for his grandkids in hopes “they won’t have to grow up in a world that would ignore such a tragedy.”
Riesch has good reasons to be nervous. Since the Free Gaza Movement began in 2006, only a handful of small ships have been allowed to bring humanitarian aid to Gazans. Retired U.S. Army Colonel and former diplomat Ann Wright is a member of the 2024 FFC Steering Committee. She was a participant (resistor) on five previous flotillas that never reached Gaza. In 2010 she watched Israeli troops rappelling from helicopters onto the deck of the Mavi Marmara from a nearby boat. Ten resistors were killed and 50 more wounded after some of them allegedly tried to fight back in international waters against the Israeli invaders who were using pressurized water hoses on them. In a video, Wright gave other accounts of Israeli troops harassing and beating resistors before confiscating their belongs and taking them against their will to Israeli jails until they could be deported.
Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu contends that Israel has been unfairly targeted by resistors trying to break his country’s illegal navel blockade and bring humanitarian aid into Gaza. During a 2015 speech in Tel Aviv he told the Jewisih Agency Assembly “They send flotillas to Gaza, they don’t send flotillas to Syria. It’s amazing, this travesty of justice, this violation of the truth, the rape of truth.”
Former FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley is a member of VFP and Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) couldn’t disagree with Netanyahu more. She hopes that he and his cronies will be called to answer for their criminal behavior sooner than later. Rowley has been speaking at academic and other professional venues with an emphasis on ethical decision-making for twenty years. Before flying to Istanbul she talked over the phone with me about the “berserk Israelis” who have “shredded the law” — not only breaking the rules of the high seas for murder and kidnapping, but with their ongoing violations of international humanitarian law and war crimes on land. In a recent television interview she said “ I told people I can’t help seeing the faces of my own grandchildren (I have five grandchildren now) in the faces of these poor Gazan children who are being orphaned, starved and murdered.”
Riesch and Rowley attended intensive nonviolence training shortly after arriving in Istanbul. “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” author/activist Medea Benjamin wrote in a Counterpunch article. During an April 19 Zoom meeting in Istanbul, resistors discussed their fears about the trip. One recalled a mock situation where three doctors from New Zealand laid on the floor during a seminar and instructed resistors on what to do if their heads are stepped on in the dark. Lawyers provided legal advice about separating “false authority” from “legitimate authority” along with tips for walking away from precarious situations. Despite their fears, resistors believe what they are doing not only has to be done, it is morally and legally justifiable, citing a recent ruling by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) that it is “plausible” Israel has committed acts of genocide: The court further maintains, that it is now incumbent upon citizens and governments of the world to do what they can to stop the genocide.
The location of the launch was kept secret due to Israel’s history of sabotaging boats in port and the departure dates were pushed back repeatedly because of outside pressures — mostly from the Israeli and U.S. governments. Last week the Israelis made an announcement about intercepting the flotilla that prompted Huwaida Arraf, U.S. human rights attorney and FFC Steering Committee member to say “Governments must refuse to collaborate in maintaining Israel’s illegal siege on Gaza by obstructing the flotilla in any way. We call on the governments of the 40 countries represented on the Freedom Flotilla to uphold their obligations under international law and demand that Israel guarantee the flotilla safe passage to Gaza.” Soon after, UN experts reaffirmed Arraf’s demand “As the Freedom Flotilla approaches Palestinian territorial waters off Gaza, Israel must adhere to international law, including recent orders from the International Court of Justice to insure unimpeded access for humanitarian aid.”
But on April 26, the doubts crept home. During a morning call, Riesch talked about his dwindling hopes that the flotilla would make it to Gaza “Now there’s a problem with ship flags” — this is the fourth delay.” According to Reuters, Guinea-Bissau made a decision to remove its flag from flotilla boats. Istanbul activists answered with this: “The Guinea-Bissau International Ships Registry (GBISR), in a blatantly political move, informed the Freedom Flotilla Coalition that it had withdrawn the Guinea Bissau flag from two of the Freedom Flotilla’s ships, one of which is our cargo ship.”
Riesch mentioned that frustrated resistors were already drifting away and during last night’s FFC meeting, he found out numerous other boats loaded with activists were preparing to join the flotilla in a show of solidarity, even though Israelis planned to stop them with a blockade. So, it was decided the flotilla would meet up with the blockade and wait a few days before turning around. The earliest departure time he said would be Sunday April 28 — if they could clear customs. Later that evening he sent a text saying the trip was canceled.
During a follow-up Q&A TikTok post, Wright told Benjamin that Israel always uses delay tactics before flotilla launches and the State Department invariably issues travel warnings and cautions Americans about challenging the Israeli government — especially now since the U.S. has been so openly complicit with the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Gaza. While support for the flotilla remains high from Turkish nationals, Wright strongly believes the U.S. is using economic pressures including military aid, ito derail the project in Turkey.
If nothing else, those who traveled to Istanbul succeeded in bringing much-needed attention to the plight of captive and undernourished Palestinians waiting in refugee camps for the next bombing campaign. About 45% of the people living in Gaza are children under the age of 15. So far, well over one hundred fifteen thousand Palestinians have been killed or wounded — most were women and children. It may take decades to rebuild the parts of Gaza already destroyed but for now, resistors are packing their bags — some hope to return this summer.
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Image1-e1714564268363.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150146" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Image1-e1714564268363.png" alt="" width="500" height="667" /></a>First row — Coleen Rowley far left and Barry Riesch third from left
<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Image_1-e1714564683712.png"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-150147" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Image_1-e1714564683712.png" alt="" width="600" height="450" /></a>Ann Wright second from left, and Medea Benjamin second from back in Istanbul The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/the-little-flotilla-that-almost-could/">The Little Flotilla that Almost Could</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<title>When Safety is a Fiction: Passing the UK’s Rwanda Bill</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/when-safety-is-a-fiction-passing-the-uks-rwanda-bill/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Binoy Kampmark]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2024 02:14:49 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Asylum]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Australia]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Migration/Migrants]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Paul Kagame]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Refugees]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Rwanda]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[United Kingdom]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150156</guid>
<description><![CDATA[What a stinking story of inhumanity. A country intent on sending asylum seekers to one whose residents have actually applied for asylum and sanctuary in other states. But the UK-Rwanda deal, having stalled and stuttered before various courts and found wanting for reasons of human rights, has become law with the passage of the Safety […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/when-safety-is-a-fiction-passing-the-uks-rwanda-bill/">When Safety is a Fiction: Passing the UK’s Rwanda Bill</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[What a stinking story of inhumanity. A country intent on sending asylum seekers to one whose residents have actually applied for asylum and sanctuary in other states. But the UK-Rwanda deal, having stalled and stuttered before various courts and found wanting for reasons of human rights, has become law with the passage of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill.
The story of this deal has been a long one. On April 14, 2022, the government of Boris Johnson announced the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/memorandum-of-understanding-mou-between-the-uk-and-rwanda/memorandum-of-understanding-between-the-government-of-the-united-kingdom-of-great-britain-and-northern-ireland-and-the-government-of-the-republic-of-r">Asylum Partnership Arrangement</a> with Rwanda, which was intended “to contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated and unlawful cross border migration by establishing a bilateral asylum partnership”. Rwanda, for a princely sum, would receive those whose asylum claims would be otherwise processed in the UK through the “Rwanda domestic asylum system” and have the responsibility for settling and protecting applicants.
This cynical effort of deferring human rights obligations and not guarding asylum seekers and refugees from harm has been made all the more hideous by Kigali’s less than savoury reputation in the field. Refugees have been shot for protesting over reduced food rations (twelve from the Democratic Republic of Congo died in February 2018). Refugees have also been arrested for allegedly spreading misinformation about Rwanda’s less than spotless human rights record. And that’s just a smidgen of a significantly blotted copybook.
Notwithstanding this, UK home secretaries have gushed over Kigali’s seemingly falsified credentials. Suella Braverman, who formerly occupied the post, was jaw dropping <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/6/20/rwanda-is-no-refuge-for-uk-asylum-seekers">in her claim</a> that “Rwanda has a track record of successfully resettling and integrating people who are refugees or asylum seekers”. This is markedly ironic given that the Rwandan government <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2023/6/20/rwanda-is-no-refuge-for-uk-asylum-seekers">has been accused</a> of creating its own complement of refugees running into the tens of thousands.
The UK government has a patchy legal record in trying to defend the legitimacy of the exchange with Rwanda. The Court of Appeal in June 2023 <a href="https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/AAA-v-SSHD-judgment-290623.pdf">reversed</a> a lower court decision on the grounds that those asylum seekers sent to Rwanda faced real risks of mistreatment prohibited by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Rwanda, it was noted, was “intolerant of dissent; that there are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech; and that political opponents have been detained in unofficial detention centres and have been subjected to torture and Article 3 ill-treatment short of torture.”
The government also failed to convince the UK Supreme Court, which <a href="https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2023/42.html">similarly found</a> in November 2023 that people removed to Rwanda faced a real risk of being returned to their countries of origin in violation of the principle of non-refoulement. That principle, by which persons are not to be sent to their countries of origin or third countries if they would be placed at risk of harm, is a cardinal rule in several instruments of international law and enshrined in British law.
In what can only be regarded as a legal absurdity, the Safety of Rwanda bill essentially directs the home secretary, immigration officials, courts and tribunals to deem Rwanda a safe country in accordance with UK law and UK obligations to protect asylum seekers. It also bars decision makers from considering the risk of refugees being sent by Rwanda to other countries and disallows UK courts from drawing upon interpretations of international law, including the European Convention of Human Rights. Effectively, a sizeable portion of the UK’s own Human Rights Act 1998 has been rendered inconsequential in these determinations.
A final, nasty feature of the legislation is the grant of power to a Minister of the Crown to decide whether to abide by interim measures made by the European Court of Human Rights regarding any removal to Rwanda. This is astonishing on several levels, not least because it repudiates the <a href="https://www.echr.coe.int/documents/d/echr/pd_interim_measures_eng">binding nature</a> of such interim measures.
Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, <a href="https://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/-/serious-human-rights-concerns-about-united-kingdom-s-rwanda-bill">could barely believe</a> the passage of such an obnoxious bit of legislation. Not only did it fly in the face of obligations to protect refugees, it constituted a direct interference in the judicial process. “The United Kingdom government should refrain from removing people under the Rwanda policy and reverse the Bill’s effective infringement of judicial independence.”
Shadowing these proceedings is an unmistakable, ghoulish legacy of Australian origin. The former Home Secretary Priti Patel openly acknowledged that elements of the “Australian model” of processing asylum claims in third countries were appealing and something to emulate. The particularly attractive element of the plan was the refusal by Canberra to ever permit those found to be refugees to ever settle on Australian soil. Other countries, including such European states as Denmark, have also chosen Rwanda as an appropriate destination for unwanted asylum seekers.
The entire affair is a stunning example of political entropy, a howl from an administration marching before the firing squad. With each failure, the Tories have tried to claw back respectability in the hope of appearing muscular in the face of irregular migration. They have accordingly cooked up a scheme that is not merely cruel, but one of staggering cost (each asylum seeker of the current cohort promises to cost the British taxpayer £1.8 million) and ineffectualness. Sunak, a laughably weak and unpopular prime minister, is, politically speaking, at death’s door. Despite getting the legislation through, legal struggles from potential deportees are bound to tear into the arrangements. What Britain’s judges do will prove a true test of character.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/when-safety-is-a-fiction-passing-the-uks-rwanda-bill/">When Safety is a Fiction: Passing the UK’s Rwanda Bill</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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<item>
<title>Returning to the 11th Century</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/returning-to-the-11th-century/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[T.P. Wilkinson]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 01 May 2024 21:31:39 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Artificial Intelligence (AI)]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Crimes against Humanity]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Technology]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Viet Nam]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[War Crimes]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Intelligence]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Joseph Weizenbaum]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Phoenix program]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Russell Ackoff]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150152</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Technology fetishism and dogmatic irresponsibility Without the use of digital devices, instead mainly that analog apparatus known as the pen, I have managed to retain meaningful recollections and engage in analytical reflection for the better part of sixty two years. The manner in which I have worked since the earliest moments I can remember has […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/returning-to-the-11th-century/">Returning to the 11th Century</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-scaled.jpg"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" src="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-1024x748.jpg" alt="" width="500" height="365" class="aligncenter size-large wp-image-149241" srcset="https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-1024x748.jpg 1024w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-300x219.jpg 300w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-768x561.jpg 768w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-1536x1122.jpg 1536w, https://dissidentvoice.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/cover_TP-2048x1496.jpg 2048w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></a>
Technology fetishism and dogmatic irresponsibility
Without the use of digital devices, instead mainly that analog apparatus known as the pen, I have managed to retain meaningful recollections and engage in analytical reflection for the better part of sixty two years. The manner in which I have worked since the earliest moments I can remember has engendered the habit of collecting, sorting, observing and evaluating life as I lived it or perceived it by others. It was about 1976 that I was introduced to Russell Ackoff, a professor at the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania. He was introducing some basic tenets of systems theory, also outlined in his short book Redesigning the Future. My attendance was accidental since it was my high school physics teacher who took me to this meeting of a regional planning commission where Professor Ackoff had been invited to speak. He was quite droll and said several witting things. However, the most important statement he made was that the purpose of planning was not to produce a plan. Rather planning was a purpose in its own right. What he clearly meant – and that was reiterated in the book I subsequently read – was that planning was an attitude toward the future or toward life and not an industrial process for producing planning documents. The logical consequence of Ackoff’s argument was that the attitude of planning was more important than the creation of machines for churning out plans which would be obsolete before they could be implemented.
Although I only learned about the book ten years later, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at various universities and one of the early researchers in what became the field of artificial intelligence (AI), published Computer Power and Human Reason in the same year. 1976 was one year after the ignominious withdrawal of US Forces from Vietnam, ending more than 30 years of their organized terror in that part of Southeast Asia. The US war against Vietnam was the first testing ground for both systems theory and artificial intelligence. These concepts and the technology developed to apply them were dedicated to surveillance, planning, target acquisition and destruction of the so-called Vietcong infrastructure, i.e. the civilian government that operated in lieu of the criminal state established by the French and US Americans first in Hanoi and then in Saigon after the partition of the country in Geneva. The government agency primarily responsible for planning and implementing the destruction of the popular government of Vietnam was the US Central Intelligence Agency. ICEX was the first name given to what became known as the Phoenix Program. One of the CIA officers interviewed after the war called it “computerized mass murder”. He was referring to the kill lists generated by the PHIS, the Phoenix Information System by which all the data about Vietnamese citizens was collated and evaluated to guide the deployment of the various hunter-killer teams. These teams were composed of local hires, mercenaries, RVN and US military personnel like the infamous Lt. Caley, and other contractors working on behalf of the Agency. Recently there has been mild consternation because of the PHIS legacy product used by the IDF to perform the same kinds of tasks. Lavender is called an AI solution. It is just a later version of the same computer-driven murder planning machine deployed half a century ago.
No one should wonder about this since the Israel Defense Force and the other government agencies in occupied Palestine were actively informed and involved in every stage of these system developments. The systems-driven assassination program was a major component of the US counter-insurgency operations throughout Latin America. Death squads and data processing are natural partners going back to IBM’s computer support to the NSDAP. Artificial intelligence is fundamentally an intelligence operation and part of the systems theory of mechanized murder. It has no other serious application.
Permit me to return to Joseph Weizenbaum. In 1976, many AI fetishists will argue, the technology was simply not very sophisticated. ELIZA and other experimental platforms were primitive and lacked the support of today’s super-computers. I met Weizenbaum shortly before he died. He had returned to Berlin, the city of his birth from which his family had emigrated in the 1930s. He had been invited to talk at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. Having read the book in the 1980s I was anxious to meet the man who had so politely trashed the AI project. He was introduced by an obnoxious and obsequious American whose other qualities or qualifications left no impression on me. The young man tried to impress the audience by telling us that Joseph Weizenbaum was working at Case Western University when the university decided they needed a computer– and Weizenbaum built it. Normally such calculated flattery would be met with a demurred nod of appreciation. Professor Weizenbaum retorted that Case Western did not need a computer. Moreover no one needed one! That was the last we heard of the young man from Einstein Forum.
Nearly 30 years after his book was published Weizenbaum was just as adamant. Not the Internet (which most people clearly forget is an adjunct to the US atomic warfare system) or the so-called super-computers, whether in the US or China, have altered the premises upon which his argument is based. As recently as today I read some conversation strings about AI in which one author argues:
<blockquote>The result of having this ability is not to contest who is right or wrong, but to learn to be right most of the time so that the AI can successfully maintain a peaceful, harmonious human society. At the end of the day, humans are seriously flawed and cannot be trusted to run this society. Therefore, human management will be phased out.</blockquote>
The author and those who follow his reasoning clearly believe that the strip mining of the Congo and other parts of the world to obtain the rare (and toxic) minerals essential for super-computing capacity along with the impoverishment of all other components of human culture in favour of electrical engineering and computer sciences is the price to be borne by humanity so that computation can fully displace human judgement (and humanity itself). The naive yet thin veneer of modernism and claims to sophistication in the interest of peace and harmony are deeply anti-human, not only in their objectives but at every link in the chain these AI proponents would forge from cradle to grave.
Weizenbaum’s argument was not based on the state of the art in 1976. In fact he was quite clear that faster processors and larger memory storage would no doubt expand the computational capacity of the emerging technology. Instead Weizenbaum insisted that judgement was not computation. In Berlin he reiterated data is not information. Computation is nothing more than the arrangement of data according to rules defining the circulation of electrical power through increasingly complex circuits. Judgement is the result of human activity not electrical circuits. Data is the numerically codification of signals from whatever source. Information is the product of assessing data and responding to it– i.e. giving it meaning. Computers ought not to give meaning– control human responses to the world. Humans ought to control their own responses, even if they use tools like computers to generate and store data for evaluation.
<figure class="wp-block-image size-full"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="wp-image-4819" src="https://seektruthfromfacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/IMG_5406.jpg" sizes="(max-width: 371px) 100vw, 371px" srcset="https://seektruthfromfacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/IMG_5406.jpg 371w, https://seektruthfromfacts.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/IMG_5406-187x300.jpg 187w" alt="" width="371" height="594" /><figcaption class="wp-element-caption">Screenshot</figcaption></figure>
Those who, like the author cited above, imagine that machine intelligence is superior to human intelligence are, to put it mildly, confused about what intelligence is. Claiming– either naively or cynically– that machine intelligence is at least potentially far more suited for regulating human society than humans themselves, these technology fetishists betray their primitive superstitions. Artificial intelligence, which until now has never advanced beyond its intention as a weapon for mass murder and surveillance, is simply the electronic manifestation of the omnipotent deity whose every will must be fulfilled. The desire to see human management rendered obsolete or impossible is the same denial that humans have any personality beyond that defined by the absolute deity of the kind we have known from the 11th century. The dream of the AI cultist is the same dream of the absolutist papacy and the regime that survives in the modern business corporation from which this nightmare arises.
Weizenbaum did not address the whole production chain in which AI needs to be seen. His humanist position stands on its own, especially when the lines are drawn between humanism and its antitheses transhumanism and anti-humanism. Much is made of the enormous progress– far beyond what the carcinogenic West has accomplished– in Chinese AI. Suffice it here to enumerate some of the absurd claims that dominate in the media and among the cult’s prosyletizers.
Computer power rests ultimately upon the power to extract highly toxic minerals from the Earth, until now based on quasi-slave labor in Congo, i.e. central Africa. For the past half-century computer power has cost more than six million lives and the independent development of a country whose territory is roughly the size of the European Union. To this must be added the wars and other violent and corrupt interventions to obtain these resources elsewhere on the planet. Then of course we have the highly dubious benefit of employment redundancies as so-called AI systems replace human labor in the industries and service sectors previously maintained by homo sapiens. Marxists praise AI contributions to the end of alienated labor. However the implementation of AI not only aims to kill people for the IDF or other counter-insurgency agencies but to kill the conditions for economic activity for huge numbers of people at all levels of educational and occupational qualification. The subsequent radical concentration of wealth will hardly be an inducement to enhance living conditions– which after all cannot be rationally calculated except as cost minimizing. (We need not ignore the eugenicism underlying the AI cult too.)
As to the claims that these machines will be infinitely more rational and therefore better managers of human society than humans themselves, the obscenity should be obvious. Any management of humans by agents other than humans can only be accomplished by subjugation of humanity to machines. This is the dream of those whose puerile malice leads them to identify peace with the absence of other people and order with absence of responsibility for their own actions. The nightmare of AI is the dream of what was once called the Dark Ages. Don’t forget, before you leave, to turn out the lights.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/returning-to-the-11th-century/">Returning to the 11th Century</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
</item>
<item>
<title>Mayday Mayday Mayday</title>
<link>https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/mayday-mayday-mayday/</link>
<dc:creator><![CDATA[Philip A. Faruggio]]></dc:creator>
<pubDate>Wed, 01 May 2024 16:53:41 +0000</pubDate>
<category><![CDATA[Activism]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Antiwar]]></category>
<category><![CDATA[Peace]]></category>
<guid isPermaLink="false">https://dissidentvoice.org/?p=150149</guid>
<description><![CDATA[Fifty four years ago today this writer was getting ready to hitchhike to classes at Brooklyn College. It was a sunny, blue sky, early Spring day, and the college was a few miles from our apartment building. This writer was into just two important things in May of 1970: Meeting girls (as we called them […]
The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/mayday-mayday-mayday/">Mayday Mayday Mayday</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></description>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[Fifty four years ago today this writer was getting ready to hitchhike to classes at Brooklyn College. It was a sunny, blue sky, early Spring day, and the college was a few miles from our apartment building. This writer was into just two important things in May of 1970: Meeting girls (as we called them then) and preparing for our school’s first football schedule in over 15 years. Ah, to be twenty years old and looking “lean and mean” with my bellbottom jeans, longish, wavy hair, Joe-Namath green eyes, and white buck shoes. I was ready to Rock and Roll at the campus.
Hanging out on the campus that day, I first heard the news of President Nixon’s latest edict of sending US soldiers into the sovereign nation of Cambodia, along with our bombers, to rout the Vietcong. Up to that point, quite candidly, I cared too little (for my own good) about the shit that was going down in Nam. Why should I? My self-centered narcissism was on cruise control with my 2-S draft deferment. As long as I stayed in school and took at least 12 credit hours a term Uncle Sam could not touch me. The way I looked at it that would be at least three more years before I might be forced into uniform. Yet, when one of my old freshman baseball team pals gave me the lowdown on this latest dose of Nixonian craziness, I took notice… finally! My friend, Larry, in addition to his addiction to the trotters (harness racing) and his girlfriend, was the first “Lefty” I had ever met at school. All of my football team compatriots were not into any sort of politics at all. Why I don’t really know, but I was just like them at this time. Larry said that this latest news was just too much to take for any sane American.
We all got the news about the many college campuses throughout the nation where there were not only demonstrations, but student strikes as well. Everything accelerated when some of our college’s more radical students were demanding that all military recruiters must get off our campus… NOW! Having experienced a few guys from my neighborhood coming home in boxes now hit home with me… finally! I joined the ranks of the protestors and got myself deep into the strike that just like that fermented.
Before you know it I was up inside the school President’s office with a group of fellow strikers. The President had left his office, as had most of the other staff , including all of our professors and instructors. I organized a group of student strikers to join me in getting the campus grounds cleaned up of all the thousands of flyers throughout. I knew the local news would be there real soon, and wanted to show the world that protestors can be diligent in keeping things copacetic. A real trip was when I got a guy I knew from Buildings and Grounds, a handball buddy, to help us with the tools we needed to make things look normal.
The strike took a more ominous tone on May 4 when those four Kent State student protestors were shot dead by National Guardsman; I was just about the same age as them. The cops were soon called in, but our student strike had already petered out. You see, it’s tough to maintain such an energy when 100% of the student population are commuters. So, the war in Vietnam had finally reached many of us students. I for one grew up that May of 1970 to become what I am today, a lifelong Anti (Phony) War Activist.The post <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org/2024/05/mayday-mayday-mayday/">Mayday Mayday Mayday</a> first appeared on <a href="https://dissidentvoice.org">Dissident Voice</a>.]]></content:encoded>
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