For 200 years, the Monroe Doctrine – asserting a US sphere of influence over Latin America – has been a cornerstone of American policy. But as Russia and China assert their opposition to the US-led world order, American dominance in the region is beginning to look a little shaky.
As the “Russian invasion” scare enters its fourth month, and Russian tanks still fail to roll into Kiev, the parameters of Moscow’s likely response to the West’s rejection of its security demands are becoming a little clearer. Frustrated with what it sees as decades of Western contempt for its concerns, Moscow has demanded that the US offer it security guarantees, including a promise not to expand NATO further to the east. As has become clear through America’s negative response this week, the US has no intention of doing as Russia desires. The issue is now how the Kremlin will react.
Despite hysterical headlines in the Western media about a Russian invasion of Ukraine, Moscow has categorically ruled this option out. “Our nation has likewise repeatedly stated that we have no intention to attack anyone. We consider the very thought that our people may go to war against each other unacceptable,” said Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexei Zaitsev this week.
This is not surprising. Russian officials and security experts have repeatedly made clear that Ukraine is a secondary issue and that their primary concern is a much broader one – the general nature of the international system and of the security architecture in Europe. The idea that failure to achieve agreement on the latter would lead to the invasion of the former was never very logical. Instead of targeting Ukraine, Russia’s response to the current diplomatic impasse is much more likely to be directed at the party deemed by Moscow to be most responsible for the problem, namely the US.
And what better way to do this than to challenge America in its own back yard? Since President James Monroe declared his famous “doctrine” in 1832 – according to which any foreign interference in the politics of the Americas is deemed a hostile act against Washington – the US has fiercely asserted its primacy in both North and South America.
Nowhere has this been clearer than in successive US administrations’ efforts to depose the government of Cuba, as well as the imposition of sanctions on that country for over 60 years. During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Washington made it clear that it was willing even to risk nuclear war to prevent potentially hostile weaponry being deployed close to its borders. Meanwhile, elsewhere it has used other methods to undermine or overthrow Latin American governments deemed insufficiently friendly. These include supporting coups and insurgencies, such as aiding the Contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.
But Washington’s ability to bend Latin America to its will appears somewhat weakened. Support for regime change in Bolivia and Honduras has backfired, with members of the deposed governments having returned to power. Meanwhile, China is expanding its Belt and Road Initiative into South America, with seven countries having signed up to join and negotiations under way with Nicaragua to add an eighth. The US is no longer the only player in town.
Russia has now stepped into the mix. In the past few weeks, President Vladimir Putin has held telephone conversations with the leaders of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all countries with whom Washington has very poor relations. According to Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, agreement was reached with all three “to deepen our strategic partnership, with no exceptions, including military and military-technical.”
Asked if this meant deploying Russian troops to those countries, Lavrov’s deputy Sergey Ryabkov failed to rule it in, but failed to rule it out also. “The president of Russia has spoken multiple times on the subject of what the measures could be, for example involving the Russian Navy, if things are set on the course of provoking Russia, and further increasing the military pressure on us by the US,” he said.
A much-discussed extreme option would involve going back to 1962 and placing missiles in Cuba or Venezuela. Given that Russia now has missiles with hypersonic capabilities, this would give it the capacity to strike the US in a matter of minutes, rendering any defense impossible.
It seems unlikely, though, that the Russian government would take such a provocative step unless the US first did something similar in Ukraine or elsewhere close to the Russian border. Even the option mentioned by Ryabkov of some Russian naval deployment to the region is far from certain. “We can’t deploy anything” to Cuba, said former president Dmitry Medvedev this week, arguing that it would harm that country’s prospects of improving its relations with the US and “would provoke tension in the world.”
Still, the threat of such action now dangles in the air. So, too, does the possibility of lesser options, such as additional arms sales as well as economic assistance to enable the Cubans and others to resist American sanctions. For now, we will have to wait and see exactly what “military and military-technical” measures Moscow has in mind. But it is likely that whatever it is will not be to the Americans’ liking. Nor will Russia’s more general support of Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.
Reacting to talk of Russian military deployments in the Americas, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has promised that the Americans would respond “decisively.” This is somewhat ironic, since Sullivan and his peers in the US government seem to deny Russia the right to respond to American deployments close to its borders. But that is by the by. In reality, it’s hard to see what Washington could actually do, short of starting a catastrophic war. Efforts to overthrow the Cuban and Venezuelan government having failed, and economic ties having been almost fully broken, its leverage against those countries is weak.
Washington now has to face the reality that while it remains the foremost power in the world, it can no longer be fully confident of its hegemony even close to home. Its decline is a very gradual process. Nothing very dramatic will likely result from Russia’s latest announcement. It is also possible that Moscow would have decided to cooperate more deeply with Cuba and others even in the absence of current East-West tensions. But had relations been good, one can imagine that the Kremlin might have been inclined not to challenge the US in its own neighborhood.
As it is, the news highlights the fact that pressuring Russia is not a cost-free option from Washington’s point of view and may well rebound to its disadvantage. That’s something that the authorities in the White House could do well to consider.
Paul Robinson is a professor at the University of Ottawa. He writes about Russian and Soviet history, military history and military ethics, and is author of the Irrussianality blog.
February 1, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | China, Cuba, Latin America, Nicaragua, Russia, United States, Venezuela |
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You cannot discuss Corona or any other academic topic anywhere on the internet, without self-righteous small-minded debunkers demanding to know whether the studies you’re citing are peer reviewed. A lot of people, it seems, believe that there are no certain proofs or arguments, unless some random anonymous academics have approved them.
In my short time on this earth, I’ve done a lot of peer review. I’ve had my own stuff peer reviewed, and I’ve peer reviewed other people’s stuff. It is a cumbersome, arbitrary and worthless process. Whether any particular research has been peer reviewed or not, tells you nothing about its quality. What peer review does tell you, is that the peer reviewed item is very likely to be boring and to say more or less the same thing that all the other peer reviewed stuff says.
The purpose of peer review, is not to enhance the integrity or reliability of academic publications. Peer reviewed studies turn out to be wrong all the time. It is rather one of many mechanisms, via which academics aim to police their own discourse and exclude outside ideas.
I’ve written before about James Lindsay’s distinction between internet hive mind theories and ideas, and official establishment theories and ideas. The theories and ideas promoted by crazy anonymous internet people turn out to be far more dynamic, interesting and predictive, than the theories and ideas promoted by establishment media sources and heavily credentialed, tenured professors. The anonymous internet world is one with very low barriers to entry, many more participants, and ruthless selection for interesting, explanatory content. Here as elsewhere, there are many wrong and crazy ideas, but there is also a broader competitive process that weeds out the least defensible theories, and promotes the most interesting ones. Even when they are wrong, internet theories – by the time they come to your notice – have much more depth and texture to them than the intellectual products of establishment organs.
To save syllables, and widen the applicability of the concept, it is probably better to distinguish simply between curated and uncurated discourse. Curated establishment discourse was always managed and stifling, but before the internet, the people running it at least had the advantage of extensive networking. Professional organisations, periodicals and conferences are the main ways that professors network among each other and share ideas. Before the internet, people outside these academic networks remained comparatively isolated. They had their own local religious, social and professional networks, but it was not easy for them to build large networks around common intellectual interests. In this world, the gate-keeping mechanisms of academia excluded outside ideas, in much the same way as the press kept dissident politics out of the media and away from public notice for decades.
Social media and the internet have changed all of this. For 20 years now, blogs and internet commentary have destroyed the legacy media control over political discourse, and gone a long way to discrediting journalism. The barriers to networking have also fallen, and there now flourish enormous and highly sophisticated uncurated discourses in fields from ancient Greek history to microbiology. Hundreds of thousands of people participate in these discussions, and the curated discourse looks every day less interesting.
The internet did not make academics vulnerable, of course; it just overcame their defences. Universities have feared the ideas of outsiders for a very long time, because it is painfully obvious to every honest person here that most of what we do is wide open to amateurs.
January 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19 |
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Despite the fact that U.S. officials are playing the innocent in the Ukraine crisis, the fact is that the U.S. government will be responsible for the death toll that results from a Russian invasion of Ukraine. That’s because it is the U.S. government, specifically the Pentagon and the CIA, who have precipitated the crisis.
If the U.S. government had not kept NATO in existence at the ostensible end of the Cold War in 1989, Russia would not be feeling the need to invade Ukraine today. Or if the U.S. government had not had NATO absorb former Warsaw Pact countries and then threaten to absorb Ukraine, Russia would not be feeling the need to invade Ukraine today. The only reason that Russia feels the need to invade Ukraine today is because the Pentagon and the CIA kept NATO in existence and then had NATO move its forces eastward toward Russia’s borders by gobbling up former Warsaw Pact countries and by then threatening to do the same with Ukraine.
It should be noted that Congress has never specifically approved any of this NATO absorption. Ultimately, it’s the Pentagon and the CIA who make the determination as to who NATO will absorb and not absorb, notwithstanding the fact that the lives of America’s young people are being pledged to the defense of these countries.
U.S. officials innocently claim that Russia has nothing to fear from NATO troops, missiles, and tanks along Russia’s border. They say that the U.S. government is a peace-loving government that would never do anything bad to Russia.
Really? How about asking the Afghan people about that peace-loving bit? Or maybe the Iraqi people. My hunch is that they might have a slight disagreement with that peace-loving bit. Or maybe the Iranian people, who have suffered under years from brutal U.S. economic sanctions. Or the Cuban people, who have suffered for decades from the brutal U.S. embargo.
Moreover, let’s not forget something important: Those NATO forces on Russia’s border will include Germany, whose forces invaded Russia and killed more than 20 million Russian people. Yes, 20 million! That’s a lot of people. I suppose the Pentagon and the CIA would argue that the Russians just need to get over that.
Oh, yes, I know that U.S. officials are saying that Ukraine is a sovereign and independent country that has the “right” to join NATO. But if it really is a sovereign and independent country, then why did U.S. officials intervene in Ukraine to bring about regime change that ended up installing a pro-U.S. puppet regime in the country? Doesn’t a genuinely sovereign and independent nation have the “right” to be free from that sort of foreign interventionism?
While we are on the subject of sovereignty and independence, how do U.S. officials justify their decades-long interventions against Cuba? That’s a sovereign and independent country, isn’t it? Cuba has never attacked the United States or even threatened to do so. It’s always been the exact opposite. The Pentagon and the CIA have aggressed against Cuba since 1959 with their brutal embargo against the Cuban people, their assassination plots against Fidel Castro, their assassination partnership with the Mafia, their invasion of Cuba, and their acts of sabotage and terrorism within Cuba.
Moreover, let’s not forget the U.S. response when Russia installed nuclear missiles in Cuba back in 1962. Correct me if I’m wrong but the Pentagon/CIA response was not to claim that the Russians had the “right” to do that because Cuba was a sovereign and independent country. Their response, if I recall it correctly, was to go ballistic, exhorting President Kennedy to immediately begin bombing and invading the country.
In other words, the U.S. reaction to having Russian troops, tanks, and missiles 90 miles away from America’s border was quite similar to the Russian response to having German and American troops, tanks, and missiles right next to Russia’s borders.
Indeed, when Russian President Putin recently suggested that Russia might install troops or missiles in Cuba and Venezuela, U.S. officials had the same reaction that Russia has toward U.S. plans to install troops and missiles on Russia’s border. How’s that for a bit of hypocrisy?
After 20 years of death, injuries, maiming, suffering, misery, lies, and destruction from the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan, Pentagon and CIA officials haven’t skipped a beat. Everything is business as usual, with ever-expanding budgets, power, and influence — and, of course, perpetual crises to justify it all.
The question is: How long are the American people going to put up with all this deadly, destructive, and dangerous interventionism? There is no better time than now to put a stop to it. Dismantle NATO, end all foreign interventionism, abandon all foreign military bases, bring all U.S. troops home and discharge them, dismantle America’s national-security establishment, and restore our founding system of a limited-government republic. That’s what is needed to get America back on the road to liberty, peace, prosperity, and harmony with the people of the world.
January 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | NATO, United States |
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The media’s found yet another reason you might have a heart attack
In only our second article of this new year, This Year in the New Normal, OffG predicted that a major news story of 2022 would involve predicting and explaining heart problems that hadn’t actually happened yet.
Not even a month later, we’ve already been proven right.
Urgent warning as 300,000 Brits living with stealth disease that could kill within 5 years
That’s a Sun headline from three days ago.
The article is about a recent study, which apparently found that aortic valve stenosis is likely far more prevalent in the community than previously thought.
Aortic Stenosis (AS) is a disease affecting the valve of the heart which connects to the aorta, causing it to never open fully and making it more difficult for blood to flow.
Those with AS can suffer fatigue, chest pains, dizzy spells and even sudden death. Known complications include blood clots, which can lead to strokes or heart attacks.
According to the article…
the overall prevalence of severe aortic stenosis among the over 55s in the UK in 2019 could be almost 1.5 per cent – equal to around 300,000 at any one time.
Just under 200,000 (68 per cent) were symptomatic – meaning they had severe disease that would be eligible for surgery.
The remaining 90,000 (32 per cent) had a “silent” case of the condition and will probably not be diagnosed unless they are being screened for another problem.
Without timely treatment, up to 172,859 (59 per cent of the overall total) will die over the next five years to 2024, it’s estimated.
Are you following?
Let me sum it up for you in neat bullet points:
- Aortic Stenosis is a potentially deadly disease affecting the heart.
- A review has found that it is “under diagnosed”.
- Around 100,000 people in the UK could have the disease and not even know it.
- Many of them will likely die in the next five years.
Thus, any rise in heart attacks or other cardiac diseases is fully explained.
Any heart problems that do occur are totally unrelated to the experimental “vaccines” which are known to cause heart problems and blood clots, they want to be very clear on that.
Now, you could argue this is just a coincidence, a routinely hysterical public health scare story that just happened to land in the middle of the pandemic.
Obviously, we can’t prove that’s not the case, but there is plenty of evidence arguing against it.
For one thing, it is not as if aortic stenosis is a regularly recurring public health talking point, like breast cancer or diabetes. A brief google news search shows that, prior to Covid times, there was scant mention of the condition in the media for the past ten years. Only a handful of articles about celebrities having the condition or academic papers about new treatments.
It’s not a disease that has ever, as far as we can see, been thrust to the forefront of the public consciousness… until now.
It should also not be forgotten that this is not the first time an explanation for future heart attacks has been proferred. We have been hip-deep in pre-emptive explanations of cardiac arrest for weeks.
Remember “post pandemic stress disorder”? It’s a (completely made-up) nervous condition that some doctors predicted would increase the number of heart problems in the UK by 300,000 this year.
Interestingly, that’s 300,000 again. Both scares predicting the same exact number of cases is a funny little coincidence.
There are further examples, earlier this week it was reported that people who have had Covid are more likely to suffer heart attacks and strokes.
Research papers claim “long covid” can lead to blood clots, heart inflammation and strokes (all acknowledged side effects of the “vaccines”).
It’s not just predictive anymore either, Scotland is in a rush to explain its sharp rise in heart attacks and strokes.
One such story might be a coincidence… but four or five?
The media just keeps coming up with more and more reasons we may see a lot of heart attacks in the near future.
Interesting that.
January 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | COVID-19 Vaccine, UK |
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I’ll assume you have been reading my blog and agree with me that an attempt at gaining world domination is at this very moment failing.
It required a deadly pandemic, vaccines that actually worked, and the ability to snooker billions of people into believing that the responses of the government were logical, beneficial and well-intentioned.
It required keeping people separated from each other, communicating primarily via easily surveilled devices.
It required keeping people frightened and distrustful of one another.
It required loosening or destroying the bonds between family members.
It required uniform messaging by virtually all mass media.
It required making doctors and patients distrust one another, while yet submitting to government-enforced medical edicts, denying us the ability to act within any normal doctor-patient relationship.
It required a profound fear of death and loss, enough to supercede our normal instincts regarding loyalty, interpersonal relationships and friendship.
It required massive carrots and sticks to enforce a uniform narrative, against all data (most of which was persistently rigged) and the surrender of common sense.
The carrots came mostly in the form of taxpayer dollars. In the US, trillions have been spent since the start of the pandemic to enforce government lockdown edicts, masks, distancing, vaccinations… The list could go on and on.
No doubt plenty was spent before the pandemic as the chess pieces (crooks) were moved into place to get ready for the coup, under the guise of a medical emergency.
Fauci was already there. He moved Walensky in to control CDC. Janet Woodcock was made acting FDA Commissioner, and FDA sat without a Presidentially-appointed Commissioner for an entire year. Presumably the coup leaders had no one else who could be trusted to ruthlessly carry out every needed act. Such acts included issuing and then retracting EUAs to confuse the public over HCQ; doing a bait and switch with a Comirnaty license; then suing to prevent release of the licensing data, which no doubt failed to justify an EUA, let alone a license.
Here is one reasonable proposal for a way forward. Trillions were doled out to industry, schools, federal agencies, media etc. to get them to fall in line and do whatever was required.
These were federal contracts. We have the contracts. Simply require every entity that got paid off to give the money back to the federal treasury. Or, they can keep some of it if they clean up their act. Can’t pay it back? Ever heard of debtors’ prison?
Will media figure out how to stop lying and fearmongering? I think they could solve that in a heartbeat if it meant they did not have to return all the money.
What about schools? Could they ditch bogus curricula, mask mandates, plexiglass, vaccine mandates, testing… if the alternative was returning $190 billion dollars to the federal treasury?
Emergency rules at the state level: rescind them immediately or return the federal grants to states and state agencies. Give them a choice.
Remove the chief medical officers of every hospital and state agency, every state CDC, and HHS Department. All federal executive agencies. Have the deputies take over immediately. Pay the former agency heads their prior salary if they take on their new role: documenting all the methods by which martial law was imposed. Later they can go through a truth and reconciliation process. Based on South Africa’s example, if they fully spill the beans, they are pardoned. If not, they stand trial for their crimes. The deputies must also spill their beans, btw.
Honesty, kindness and consideration for one’s fellow man will become the new norms that are praised by society. Greed will not be seen as something to aspire to, and the tax structure will disincentivize greed. Under JFK, those paying the highest marginal tax rate had to part with 91% of their top earnings. We can do that again; why not? The tax structure is what allowed the Gateses and Bezoses and their ilk to amass the ill-gotten gains. The tax structure can also take away.
Antitrust prosecutions will be undertaken unless large corporations break themselves up in an approved manner.
We can do this. Let’s just be creative and fair. There are plenty of models around to draw ideas from. Let’s move carefully and deliberately back from the abyss.
And paper ballots, with identifiable markings and no scans or electronic ballots, will be all that is acceptable, with video cameras documenting the vote counts. Votes cannot be moved around–they will be counted where they are cast. Absentee ballots will require a visit to a public office with ID, preceding the date of any election.
Courts will be established to review initial information re corruption very quickly on members of Congress and other critical figures; if there is reasonable evidence of malfeasance, they will have to take a leave from office while the evidence is weighed.
January 31, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Covid-19, COVID-19 Vaccine, Human rights |
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Israel has apparently reprimanded a soldier for firing rounds into Gaza. That’s all very well, but what about the countless other soldiers who have done the same for years, maiming and killing Palestinian civilians?
The soldier, who posted his bravado video to TikTok, reportedly got 10 days in military prison. According to an Israeli army statement, “The soldier’s behavior in the video does not conform with the norms expected of soldiers and commanders.”
His sentencing and the media reporting around the incident is pure theatre, given the reality of how the Israeli army routinely targets Palestinians working on land in Gaza’s east and northern regions. While this one particular soldier received a mild punishment, many others who attack unarmed civilians are not held accountable.
Since pulling the illegal settlers out of Gaza in 2005, Israel has implemented a kill zone – dubbed the “buffer zone” or “no go zone” – where, on a regular basis, its soldiers shoot at Palestinian civilians. Ostensibly, it comprises a band of land 300 metres from the fence encaging Palestinians in Gaza. In reality, Israeli soldiers fire upon civilians well over a kilometre away, or even further, as I have experienced myself.
As I reported some years ago, “According to the United Nations’ Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), the 300 metres off-limits area extends in areas to at least 1.5 km. PCHR [the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights] has documented the Israeli army targeting of Palestinian civilians as far as 2 km from the border.”
Israeli soldiers in sniper position. © Eva Bartlett
Between 2008 and 2013, I regularly accompanied farmers and other civilians in border areas, and on many of the occasions that we came under fire, we were 500 metres or more from the fence. Among the disturbing incidents was an attack one morning in February 2009, when I came under prolonged Israeli gunfire while accompanying a group of farm labourers on land roughly 500 metres from the fence. By then, I was accustomed to the routine – I would walk with farmers on their land, the Israeli soldiers would arrive in jeeps, assume sniper position and begin firing at us.
On this occasion, the young men had finished their parsley harvest and were pushing a stalled pickup truck when the Israeli gunfire began. The incident was captured on video, as I was there to document such attacks, and as I wrote at the time, “The lightly-dressed, unarmed farmers were clearly visible to… the several Israeli army jeeps and the Hummer which had patrolled the border fence, stopping for long intervals to watch the farmers work, then moving on.” I noted that the soldiers had observed us for a good half hour before shooting, choosing to fire at precisely the time when the farmers were leaving.
Shooting just beyond where I stood in a fluorescent vest, an Israeli soldier hit 20-year-old Mohammad al-Buraim in his leg, and continued to fire at us for a further 15 minutes. Some weeks prior, an Israeli soldier shot his cousin Anwar in the neck, killing him and leaving his wife, young children, and extended family without a breadwinner. Anwar had been on land 600 metres from the fence, also doing farm labour work.
When someone gets injured in these areas, the injury is compounded by the fact that ambulances cannot reach them, as they are targeted by the Israeli army. So, locals need to somehow get the injured to a point where an ambulance can safely reach them. If this is not done quickly enough, the injured risks bleeding to death.
On another occasion, again with farm workers in Gaza’s southeast, I came under intense Israeli fire lasting over 40 minutes from soldiers roughly 500 metres away. Bullets flew within metres of our hands, heads, and bodies. This proved to be an especially interesting case, as a representative from the Canadian embassy in Tel Aviv – who had been informed of the shooting by other volunteers – called me to express concern for my safety.
This dissipated as soon as she realized I was being fired on by an Israeli soldier, and not a Palestinian. Her superior, the then-attache in the Tel Aviv office, had the gall to state quite clearly that they were fine with Israel’s “security measures” – firing on an unarmed Canadian and unarmed Palestinians and internationals, who in no way posed any threat to the heavily armed Israeli soldiers – and that we should be aware of the risks.
In another example, in February 2009, also in the southeast on land 550 metres from the fence, I accompanied elderly farmers and their families who intended to harvest some of their meagre crops. Shortly after we had arrived on the land, Israeli soldiers started firing very close to us, less than a metre from where we stood.
As I wrote at the time, “We could almost taste Tuesday’s firing, and the distinct ping-whizz sound they make was somehow impossibly loud, so close the shots were. One of the older women was having trouble walking away, stumbling in her fear. As the shots dug in around her she fell to the ground in terror. Positioning ourselves between the elderly farmers and the Israeli snipers, we accompanied them off the field. A few hundred metres away, the Israeli snipers continued to shoot. Another elderly woman had dived in terror behind a rock and adamantly wouldn’t get up. “They’ll kill me, they’ll kill me,” she cried in fear…”
Thankfully we did make it away that day in one piece. But this was just one of many examples of the terror Palestinian farmers face on a daily basis. And it’s not just farmers – at around the same time, a 17-year-old girl standing around 800 metres from the fence, near the ruins of her home (destroyed in the war just a month previously), was shot in the kneecap by an Israeli sniper.
Children going to school in the eastern village of Khoza’a were, at the time, being fired upon by Israeli soldiers at the fence 1km away. Teens and young men gathering scrap metal from demolished homes routinely come under Israeli fire. One example was 15-year-old Said Abdel Aziz Hamdan, who went to an area in Gaza’s north with his 13-year-old brother, to try to earn money for their large family. After finishing his work, an Israeli soldier fired at him, hitting his leg, without warning.
“People go there every day to gather bits of metal and concrete. The Israelis see us and know we are just working, it’s normal,” he told me when I visited him in hospital.
Palestinians don’t only face Israeli sniper fire, but also flechette shelling – dart bombs – which Israel has indiscriminately used against civilians and medics. One victim was 17-year-old Saleh Ahmad al-Medani, whose shoulder and neck were punctured by the two-inch-long, razor-like, dart-shaped bits of metal packed by the thousands into a single shell. He was attacked while walking home after midnight in June 2009, in northwestern Gaza, over 1km from the wall.
As I wrote at the time, “Due to their design, flechettes dig deeply into their target, with their “tails” frequently breaking off, leaving multiple injuries and rendering them nearly impossible to extract without inflicting more injury in the surgical search. In most cases, doctors opt against surgery, leaving the darts inside the victim’s body.”
The routine and very dangerous Israeli policy of harassment, which risks maiming or killing targets, also means farmers frequently stay off their land, meaning plants don’t get watered, and crops don’t get harvested. These are not isolated and random instances. They are part of a policy that aims to cut off any means of self-sufficiency the Palestinians try to engage in. Other Israeli army tactics include burning Palestinian crops, destroying wells and cisterns, and demolishing homes, livestock farms, and trees throughout the border regions.
So, please, let’s not get carried away with the fact that Israel has thrown one soldier in prison for unacceptable behaviour. It is quite clear that Israel doesn’t hold its own soldiers accountable for their crimes, including killing children or firing white phosphorus on heavily populated civilian areas. Neither does the United Nations nor anybody else appear willing to make Israel take responsibility for its decades of crimes against Palestinians.
One headline about one soldier being reprimanded for posting his tough-guy video on TikTok should not fool anyone.
Eva Bartlett is a Canadian independent journalist and activist. She has spent years on the ground covering conflict zones in the Middle East, especially in Syria and Palestine (where she lived for nearly four years).
January 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Gaza, Human rights, Israel, Palestine, Zionism |
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Secretly and quietly, the Biden administration has continued to use the killing machine crafted by President George W. Bush, expanded by President Barack Obama and employed from time to time by President Donald Trump. These presidents have used drones and other unmanned missiles and projectiles to target persons in foreign countries with which the United States is not at war.
They have done this notwithstanding the prohibition of taking life, liberty or property from any person — not just any American, but any person — in the Constitution each has sworn to uphold, and they have done so pursuant to secret rules that they themselves have established for these killings.
Last week, 11 senators and 39 members of the House of Representatives — Democrats all — to their credit sent a harshly worded letter to President Joseph R. Biden asking him to stop the killings. As of this writing, he has not publicly replied.
Here is the backstory.
The purpose of the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the Constitution — is to protect personal liberty by restraining the government.
The Fifth Amendment prohibits killing persons, restraining liberty and taking property without due process; that means a jury trial at which the government must prove fault. Until President Abraham Lincoln waged war on half the country, the operative clause in the Fifth Amendment was understood to prohibit all federal killing without a declaration of war or due process.
If the country is at war — lawfully and constitutionally declared by Congress — obviously the president can use the U.S. military to kill the military of the opposing country. And if an attack on the U.S. is imminent, the president can strike the first blow against the military of the entity whose attack is just about to occur.
There are no other constitutional circumstances under which a president may kill.
All this changed — culturally, not constitutionally — when President Harry Truman targeted Japanese civilians in Japan as the Japanese government was within days of surrendering in World War II. Truman was, of course, not the first American president to target civilians, as Lincoln criminally targeted American civilians during the War between the States.
Notwithstanding his unprosecuted war crimes, and with the government’s version of Pearl Harbor still fresh in many Americans’ minds, Truman was regarded as heroic for ordering the profoundly immoral, militarily useless, criminal mass killings against the hated Japanese using atomic bombs.
Fast-forward to the 9/11 era, and Bush had precedent to begin his own presidential killings of people the government wanted Americans to hate. While Congress did authorize him to use force against those who caused or aided the 9/11 attacks, we all know that his thirst for Middle Eastern blood knew no regard for the Constitution, evidence, proportionality, civilian lives, morality or human decency.
Julian Assange sits in a British dungeon awaiting decisions on his extradition to the U.S. because he courageously, lawfully and constitutionally published documents and videos demonstrating conclusively that Bush’s use of drones targeted and murdered Afghan and Iraqi civilians, and his administration covered it up.
Obama took this to another level when he targeted and killed Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son, both of whom were born in the U.S. Obama’s attorney general, Eric Holder, advised Obama that the killings were lawful, as al-Awlaki had encouraged folks in the Middle East to fight against American soldiers there. Holder likened killing al-Awlaki to a shooting at a bank robber who is being chased by police and shooting at them.
Holder forgot that al-Awlaki was not charged or indicted for any crime, was never accused of violence and was not even the subject of an arrest warrant when a drone evaporated him while sitting at an outdoor cafe in Yemen.
The exercise of power by the federal government is largely based on precedent and politics. Whenever a president wants to kill secretly, he need only find an example of a predecessor having killed secretly with impunity — without due process, without a declaration of war and without an imminent attack. And then he needs only to calculate what he thinks he can politically get away with.
Stated differently, Joe Biden — whose drones in 2021 targeted innocent civilians in Afghanistan, killing dozens — is using unlawful powers that his modern predecessors used and got away with to target and kill unsympathetic persons.
The nature of political power is to expand so that it fills a perceived need, unless there are mechanisms in place to restrain its expansion.
The founding generation believed that British monarchs had no limits on their power and that was a good enough reason for the 13 colonies to secede. They also believed that they had crafted founding documents — the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — for the new nation that imposed sufficient restraints on the federal government.
After all, the Constitution is the supreme law of the land. Its language is clear that only Congress writes laws and declares war, and presidents can kill only troops in wartime or civilians consistent with due process.
Moreover, every president takes an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution as it was written, not as they may wish it to be.
Sadly, the Founders were wrong.
Today, the president writes laws and rules that let him restrain personal liberty and kill with impunity, and Congress and the American people let him get away with it. Formally, we still have a Constitution. Functionally, it has utterly failed to restrain the government.
Ultimately, we have ourselves to blame for these killings. Why do we repose the Constitution for safekeeping into the hands of those who subvert it? If a future president uses Bush’s lust and Obama’s logic and Biden’s stealth to kill Americans in America, no one’s life, liberty or property will be secure.
Creators Syndicate, Inc. © 2022
January 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Human rights, Joe Biden, Obama, United States |
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IT IS reported that 21 councils have found a solution to the soaring cost of energy: a source of free electricity which they are providing to wealthy owners of electric vehicles.
One of the councils that has made this startling discovery is Lancaster District Council. Their website proudly proclaims ‘The council is providing free electricity’ for electric vehicle owners.’
A spokesperson for the well-represented Green Party on the council was unapologetic about how they prioritised the distribution of the ‘free electricity’. When asked why they favoured the provision of free fuel to the owners of already subsidised Teslas and Mercedes-EQs, rather than giving it to residents of sub-standard housing who were unable to heat their homes, she replied in a rather abrupt manner: ‘Don’t you know there’s a Climate Emergency! For goodness sake, it’s on the BBC every night! How do you expect the City Council to do its bit to control the weather if rich people drive around in their big cars belching out emissions that are literally killing baby polar bears. It is beastly of you to even ask that question!’
After taking a few moments to compose herself, she put down her cat, dabbed her eyes, and continued, ‘We already do a tremendous amount for the poor people. It is horrid of you to imply that we don’t care about them. We send them leaflets which tell them where they can buy cheap overcoats and jumpers. We encourage them to go to the library to keep warm, and we suggest that they buy a second hand bicycle so they can ride up and down our cycle paths. We even send them our ten favourite vegan quinoa recipes. We simply can’t do everything. There is only so much free electricity to go round. One day we hope to give everyone in the District an electric vehicle, or at least an electric scooter.’
When asked about the source of the free electricity, a representative of the City Council’s secretive Special Initiatives Department, based in a bunker in the Forest of Bowland, declined to give too much away. ‘Let me just say that we are working closely with Lancaster University, members of the Morecambe Witchcraft Society and local alchemists, but other than that my lips are sealed. However, I am allowed to tell you that we are about to make a major announcement about our work on the philosopher’s stone. Watch this space.’
Some have suggested that the electricity being given to electric car owners is not exactly ‘free’ but is courtesy of the council tax payer. If this is the case, it is clearly seen as a ‘vital service’. In a report about the decision to increase council tax in 2021, the Lancaster Guardian wrote that Anne Whitehead, the cabinet member with responsibility for finance, said: ‘We are acutely aware of the additional burden that this rise will place on some households and we do not want to have to ask households to pay more. But as with all public services, the City Council is under pressure financially and needs to protect the vital services it provides.’
January 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Supremacism, Social Darwinism, Timeless or most popular | Green Party, UK |
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The seeds of the current crisis were sown several decades ago, when Washington decided to double-deal with Moscow
The current and rapidly escalating tensions between the US and Russia over Ukraine have dominated international headlines and moved stock markets in recent weeks. In reality, they have their roots in a series of NATO actions and omissions following the demise of the Soviet Union in 1989/91. On the Russian side, there is a widespread perception that Moscow was misled by both Washington and NATO, a pervasive malaise about a breach of trust, and a violation of a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ on fundamental issues of national security.
While the US protests that it never gave assurances to Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastwards, declassified documents prove otherwise. But even in the absence of declassified documents and contemporary statements by political leaders in 1989/91, including Secretary of State James Baker and German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher (which can be confirmed on YouTube), it is all too obvious that there is a festering wound caused by NATO’s eastward expansion over the past 30 years, which has undoubtedly negatively impacted Russia’s sense of security. No country likes to be encircled, and common sense should tell us that maybe we should not be provoking another nuclear power. At the very least, NATO’s provocations are unwise; at worst, they could spell apocalypse.
We in the West play innocent, and retreat into ‘positivism’, asserting that there was no signed treaty commitment, that the assurances were not written in stone. Yet realpolitik tells us that if one side breaks its word or is perceived as having double-crossed the other, if it acts in a manner contrary to the spirit of an agreement and to the overriding principle of good faith (bona fide), there will be political consequences.
It seems, however, that we in the West have become so used to what I would call a ‘culture of cheating’, that we react in a surprised fashion when another country does not simply accept that we cheated them in the past, and that, notwithstanding this breach of trust, they should accept the ‘new normal’ and resume ‘business as usual’ as if nothing had happened. Our leaders in the US, UK and EU contend that they have a clean conscience and refuse to consider the fact that the other side does feel uncomfortable about having been taken for a ride. A rational person, a fortiori a statesman, would pause and try to defuse the ‘misunderstanding’. Yet the US culture of cheating has become so second nature to us that we do not even realise when we are cheating someone else, and we seem incapable of understanding that denying our actions and reneging on our words adds insult to injury.
The culture of cheating is in the family of the doctrine of ‘exceptionalism’. We self-righteously claim the right to cheat others, but do not accept that others can cheat us. Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi (that which Jupiter can do is not permitted for the bovines). This constitutes a kind of predator behaviour that neither religion nor civilisation has succeeded in eradicating. We mount false-flag operations and accuse the other side of the same. The CIA and M15 have been caught red-handed on so many occasions, yet no one seems to be asking whether, in the long run, such conduct is counter-productive, whether our credibility is shot.
Perhaps one explanation for this kind of behaviour is that we have elevated the culture of cheating to a kind of secular virtue – equivalent to cunning, daring and boldness. It is seen as a positive attribute when a leader is ‘craftier’ and ‘sneakier’ than his/her rival. The name of the game is to score points in an atmosphere of perpetual competition where there are no rules. Our geopolitical competitors are just that – rivals – and there is no interest whatsoever in fraternising with adversaries. Co-operation is somehow perceived as ‘weak’, as ‘un-American’. ‘Dirty tricks’ are not seen as dishonest but as clever, even patriotic, because they are intended to advance the economic and political interests of our country. In a way, ‘dirty tricks’ are perceived in a positive light, as artful, ingenious, adventurous, even visionary. This curious approach to reality is facilitated by a compliant and complicit corporate media that does not call our bluff and, instead, disseminates ‘fake news’ and suppresses dissenting views. Unless an individual has the presence of mind to do his/her own research and to access other sources of information, he/she is caught in the propaganda web.
The US government has practised this culture of cheating in its international relations for over 200 years, particularly in its dealings with the First Nations of the continent, who were lied to over and over, and whose lands and resources were shamelessly stolen. As Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in ‘Why We Can’t Wait’, “Our nation was born in genocide”. How many ‘Indian’ treaties were broken, again and again? And when the Sioux, Cree and Navajo protested, we massacred them. See the studies of the United Nations’ Sub-Commission on the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights. This ‘culture of cheating’ is documented countless times in connection with the Monroe Doctrine and US relations with Mexico, Latin America, Hawaii, the Philippines and so on.
One of the elements that is totally missing from the Ukraine debate is the right of self-determination of peoples. Undoubtedly the Russians in Ukraine are not just a minority, but constitute a ‘people’, and, as such, the Russians in Donetsk, Lugansk and Crimea possess the right of self-determination enshrined in the UN Charter and in Article 1 common to the International Covenants on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Until the deliberately anti-Russian coup d’état of February 2014, the Ukrainians and Russian-Ukrainians had lived side by side in relative harmony. The Maidan brought with it Russophobic elements that have since been exacerbated by systematic war propaganda and incitement to hatred, both of which are prohibited by Article 20 of the ICCPR. Thus, it is not certain whether the Russians in the Donbass feel safe enough to want to continue living with Ukrainians who have been and are being incited to hate them. Back in March and June 1994, I monitored the parliamentary and presidential elections in Ukraine as a representative of the UN Secretary-General. I travelled around the country. There was no doubt that the Russian speakers had a profound sense of Russian identity.
There would be no conflict in Ukraine today – although both Kiev and Moscow deny an invasion is imminent – if Barack Obama, Under Secretary of State for Political AffairsVictoria Nuland and several European leaders had not destabilised the democratically elected government of Viktor Yanukovich and organised a vulgar coup to install Western puppets. Bottom line: Western interference in the internal affairs of other states can backfire, and the culture of cheating and deceit that we continue to practise renders it impossible to reach sustainable solutions. The UN Charter, the only mandate underpinning the existing ‘rules-based international order’, has the necessary mechanisms to resolve our differences on the basis of the principles of sovereign equality of states and the self-determination of peoples.
Professor Alfred de Zayas is an international law expert at the Geneva School of Diplomacy who served as a UN Independent Expert on International Order from 2012-18.
January 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Militarism, Timeless or most popular | NATO, United States |
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New book shows how the American general’s contempt for ‘the racket’ was born during his service in the 20th century ‘small wars.’
Smedley Butler was one of the most decorated Marines in U.S. history, and by the end of his life he was also one of the most outspoken critics of the U.S. imperialism that he had spent most of his life enforcing. That contradiction between Butler the antiwar critic and Butler the builder of empire is at the heart of an important new book by Jonathan Katz, Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire. Katz’s book is an essential reminder of what the U.S. did during those decades and of the lasting effects that those interventions had on the countries where Butler went.
Butler took part in America’s so-called “small wars” in Asia, the Caribbean, and Central America in the early twentieth century. Like those wars, his military career has mostly been forgotten by the American public. That career was defined by aggressive military interventions on behalf of corporate interests, and by the end he was disgusted by it. As the author of War Is a Racket, Butler has been an inspiration to many antiwar and anti-imperialist Americans over the years, but he was also one of the military officers responsible for implementing destructive American colonialist designs at the expense of other nations. Twice awarded the Medal of Honor, he never believed he had done anything to deserve it, and the massacre that he took part in at Fort Rivière in Haiti haunted him.
In his later life, Butler came to see much of his career as a disreputable series of actions in the service of wealthy American interests, and he called himself a “racketeer for capitalism.” The racket he denounced was one that benefited a very few at the expense of the many. That core problem with our foreign policy that Butler identified almost ninety years ago is still very much with us. The U.S. still wages unnecessary wars based on flimsy pretexts against countries that cannot possibly threaten us, and today it also enables other wars with its weapons sales. The military budget grows every year despite the extraordinary physical security that the United States enjoys, and the hunt for new monsters to slay is unending. The racket is bigger and more destructive than ever.
Katz has produced a superb book in which he traces Butler’s steps from his first deployment to Cuba through his last mission in China. Through extensive use of Butler’s correspondence with his family, Katz is able to reconstruct to a remarkable degree what Butler thought about his various missions. Occasionally, there are flashes of anger at policies he was ordered to carry out that anticipate his later antiwar arguments. Appalled by the losses suffered during the invasion of Veracruz in 1914, he applauded his father’s belated vote in Congress against the mission. Katz writes, “The trauma fed Butler’s misgivings about the immorality and pointlessness of war.”
To read Butler’s story is to be reminded of our country’s long and ugly history of dominating many of our weaker neighbors. As Katz shows throughout the book, these countries are still living with the effects of those policies a century later. Katz traveled extensively to visit all the places where Butler served to learn more about his experiences and to document the legacy of the interventions in which Butler participated, and he bears witness to the lasting damage that U.S. policies have done. While most Americans know little or nothing about these interventions, many people in the affected countries still remember what U.S. forces did when they were there.
Butler is most loathed in Haiti, where he is viewed simply as “the Devil” and mechan (evil), because of his role in forcibly dissolving Haiti’s National Assembly to push through a new constitution, his reintroduction of a cruel system of forced labor, and the counterinsurgency campaign he waged against Haitian resistance to American rule. The Gendarmerie that Butler created became the national army and went on to interfere in and dominate Haitian politics for much of the rest of the century.
The outrages that the U.S. committed in its wars in the Philippines and Haiti, among other places, still affect how the U.S. is perceived today. The police and military institutions that the occupying U.S. authorities created in several countries became the apparatus of oppression used by later dictators, some of whom, like the Dominican Republic’s Trujillo, had been trained by the U.S. and became U.S. client rulers. During his brief time as the head of Philadelphia’s police force, Butler used the tactics he had employed against insurgents in other countries to fight “bandits” at home in an early example of the militarization of the police and the abuses that came with it.
The period of U.S. foreign policy between the start of the war with Spain and WWII is often wrongly described as “isolationist,” but no one can look at these decades of frequent, violent intervention in the affairs of other nations in the early twentieth century and still believe that. The U.S. took sides in Mexico’s civil war, it invaded other countries on the slightest pretext that a foreign rival might be gaining influence, and it militarily occupied some of them for years or decades. Like colonial empires the world over, the U.S. dominated weaker nations because it could and because its political leaders saw some economic advantage to be exploited.
While these interventions benefited private interests and were done on their behalf, they did nothing to make the United States more secure and were never really intended to. As Butler concluded in his later years, America’s colonial possessions in the Pacific only exposed the country to the dangers of a new, much larger war. “Sooner or later, if we hold onto them, America will be jerked into a damn war before we know what it’s all about,” Butler told a reporter in 1933. That was why he became an early supporter of independence for the Philippines as part of his broader antiwar advocacy. Butler did not live to see that prediction come true, but he was proven right eight years later.
Today there are still some neo-imperialists that look back on the “small wars” Butler fought as a model for how the U.S. should police the globe. Butler would be among the first to reject that idea out of hand. If his experience teaches us anything, it is that wars for empire cause tremendous harm to both the people being dominated and to the people sent to fight in those wars. Gangsters of Capitalism is an excellent account of Butler’s career, and it is also an outstanding history of the development of overseas American imperialism. The wars that Butler fought in anticipated and paved the way for the later militarization of U.S. foreign policy, and they serve as cautionary tales of the long-term harm that military intervention usually does to the nations that experience it. In order to find a way to stop the endless wars for good, we need to remember and learn from the brutal history of America’s empire-building.
January 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | Human rights, Latin America, United States |
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January 23, 2022: Half a million people went to Brussels (Belgium, EU capital) to demonstrate against the mandatory QR-codes and Covid vaccinations. What was a beautiful, colorful. and peaceful protest was corrupted by Antifa, the Police, the Military, and the Main Stream Media. This short film shows you the evidence of a scam, a set-up to make the “anti-vaxxers” look like criminals, vandals, aggressors. It’s time to expose the oppressors of the People! Please share this video wide and far…
Script, voice-over and editing: Janet Ossebaard
January 30, 2022
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Timeless or most popular, Video | Antifa, Belgium |
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If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
Aletho News
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