United States – Empire and domestic

. On December 12, 2012, on the day, 4 years earlier, Western countries and allies – perversely calling themselves ‘Friends of Syria’ – carried through a regime change by statement and set up a Syrian National Council of people never elected by anyone in Syria and told the world that it was, from now on, the only ‘legitimate representative of the Syrian people!’ During the 4 years, Western, Saudi, Turkish and the Gulf States supported innumerable illegal, destructive and mainly foreign terrorist groups with the goal to undermine the legitimate Syrian government and destabilise the country – as had been recommended by US ambassador William Roebuck (1) in Damascus as far back as in 2006 (WikiLeaks documentation here). December 12, 2016, marked a fundamental turning point. Aleppo did not “fall to the dictator/butcher/mass murderer” aka President Bashar al-Assad – no, it was liberated and the occupation by terrorist groups such...

Illustration by Mr Fish, from truthdig By Chris Hedges December 19, 2019 Immanuel Kant coined the term “radical evil.” It was the privileging of one’s own interest over that of others, effectively reducing those around you to objects to be manipulated and used for your own ends. But Hannah Arendt, who also used the term “radical evil,” saw that it was worse than merely treating others as objects. Radical evil, she wrote, rendered vast numbers of people superfluous. They possessed no value at all. They were, once they could not be utilized by the powerful, discarded as human refuse. This article was originally published by truthdig on October 14, 2019 We live in an age of radical evil. The architects of this evil are despoiling the earth and driving the human species toward extinction. They are stripping us of our most basic civil liberties and freedoms. They are orchestrating the...

More documents leaked confirming 2 OPCW whistleblowers’ accounts of Douma Report By Natylie Baldwin December 19, 2019 This past weekend saw two more major blows to the years-long establishment narrative of the Syrian war in general and the chemical weapons attacks allegations against the Assad government in particular. This article was originally published at Natylie Baldwin’s blog on December 16, 2019 First, Tareq Haddad, an accomplished British journalist who began working for Newsweek earlier this year, resigned last week, telling his Twitter followers that he had done so as the result of his editors attempting to block him from accurate reporting on the Syria war and the OPCW whistleblowers. He also said that in the coming days he would be sharing a write-up on what had happened, despite threats of legal action by Newsweek: Yesterday I resigned from Newsweek after my attempts to publish newsworthy revelations about the leaked OPCW...

The Europeans have not done well in countering President Donald Trump’s onslaught on Iran. When Trump unilaterally decided that the US should withdraw from the 2015 Iran Nuclear Deal, which committed Iran to winding down its nuclear research in return for the West, Russia and China (the latter two were also part of the deal) lifting sanctions which were crippling the Iranian economy, the Europeans huffed and puffed and then did little. The UN membership considered the 2015 deal to be very fair. The Security Council gave it unanimous support. Indeed, the US is now in breech of international law by opting out. But if the Europeans had had the guts when President Donald Trump announced the US withdrawal they would have pushed for debate on this issue at the Security Council and got the US condemned, even punished. Unfortunately, Trump had the Europeans’ guts for braces. After shouting loudly...

Imagine that you tell a friend something and you say it’s a fact and you know the sources are reliable – but then, a few weeks later, you learn that there was more to it, perhaps even that what you were in good faith believing was unfortunately factually wrong. Would you not call that friend and say – “hey, I’ve just learned that what I told you wasn’t really true; rather, it turned out to be a story, more or less constructed for a purpose, and the facts are much more complex?” Well, you are surely a decent person so you would. But what about our mainstream media? Do you remember to have seen a front-page item stating something to the effect that “we are sorry to inform you that the news story this media published some weeks back, turned out to be a planted propaganda story. We have now...

Political NATO’s London Summit on December 3 and 4, 2019 displays the deep political crisis of the 70-year-old alliance: Only a dinner and a short meeting, no statement to be issued, quarrels among the leading military members, accusations, substantial differences on Syria and many other issues, the deepest-ever Transatlantic conflict and the usual issues of burden-sharing. Legal But the political dimension of NATO’s crisis is only one. There is also a legal crisis. You’ll recognize it if you care to read the NATO Treaty text – something academic and media people don’t generally seem to have done. They would then have noticed that the Alliance of 2019 consistently operates outside – indeed in violation of – its own goals, purposes and values. For instance, the UN Charter which should be NATO’s guideline has been violated on a permanent basis for decades – such as in its out-of-area bombings of Yugoslavia...

“Uanset om man tror, at Assad står bag angrebet eller ej, er det journalisternes opgave at være kritiske over for egne magthaveres beslutningsgrundlag.” Det skrev jeg i Ræson den 20. april 2018 i forbindelse med at Assad og den syriske regering blev beskyldt for at udføre et giftangreb mod sin egen befolkning i byen Douma. Danmark, med tidligere udenrigsminister Anders Samuelsen i spidsen, støttede op om et amerikansk missilangreb mod Syrien på den baggrund, inden vi nåede at tag en offentlig debat om det i det danske demokrati. Hvordan vidste den danske regering, at Syriens regering stod bag? Hvorfor venter Danmark ikke med at støtte op om et missilangreb og fordømme den syriske regering, før der har været en undersøgelse? Er missilangreb en konstruktiv måde at “svare igen” på? Hvordan er Danmarks erfaring med at løse problemer i Mellemøsten ved at affyre missiler? Takket være de – dovne – danske...

It’s unbelievable that 102 years have passed since the Balfour Declaration when the British colonial government decided to give the Jews their own homeland- but also promised that “it be done without infringing on the civil and religious rights of the existing non-Jewish population”. Now, this month, the Trump Administration has announced that the Jewish settlements on West Bank Palestinian land are no longer illegal. No matter the rest of the world is against this, the Palestinians face the possibility that 60% of the West Bank will be covered with Israeli settlements. 40% will be left as disconnected and isolated Palestinian cantons. There are now about 400,000 settlers. The much-discussed two-state solution is dead. As the former Secretary of State, John Kerry, once said, there is a distinct possibility that Israel will now become “an apartheid state”. In terms of population, Israelis are about the same as Palestinians but Israel’s...

Of all the present foes of America it is Iran which has consistently been over time the number one.  Since its Islamic Revolution in 1979 that overthrew the secular-minded Shah and supplanted him with a militant, sometimes warlike, Islamic theocracy, it has been America’s Great Satan. (But for Europe rather less so, although no country has broken ranks with Washington.) In the current edition of Foreign Affairs two professors, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, write, “Imagine historians 100 years from now trying to decide which foreign power the US feared most in the decades from the late Cold War…They would see Russia first as an archenemy, then as a friend, and finally as a challenging nuisance. They would see China become a great power rival. North Korea would appear as sideshow. Only one country would be depicted as a persistent and implacable foe: Iran.” A couple of months ago it...

By William J. Astore November 14, 2019 The expanding cultural authority of the armed forces is a problem for U.S. democracy, writes William J. Astore. When Americans think of militarism, they may imagine jackbooted soldiers goose-stepping through the streets as flag-waving crowds exult; or, like our president, they may think of enormous parades featuring troops and missiles and tanks, with warplanes soaring overhead. Or nationalist dictators wearing military uniforms encrusted with medals, ribbons, and badges like so many barnacles on a sinking ship of state. (Was President Donald Trump only joking recently when he said he’d like to award himself a Medal of Honor?) And what they may also think is: that’s not us. That’s not America. After all, Lady Liberty used to welcome newcomers with a torch, not an AR-15. We don’t wall ourselves in while bombing others in distant parts of the world, right? Article posted on ConsortiumNews.com on October 31, 2019 (original article is posted on TomDispatch.com) here But...

The Future of Human Rights: Regressive Trends and Restorative Prospects Points of Departure Reviewing the global situation, the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zaed Raad Al Hussein of Jordan, opened a 2018 conference devoted to the 25th anniversary of the 1993 UN Conference on Human Rights and Development held in Vienna, on a decidedly pessimistic note. Instead of doing the usual on such occasions, that is, celebrating the progress made since the earlier event, Prince Zaed emphasized the disturbing evidence of regression with respect to a broad range of issues bearing on the protection of human rights embedded in international treaty instruments as evidenced by the practice of states. He insisted that without fundamental changes in patterns of governance by sovereign states and in the operation of the world economy it would be naïve to expect an improved international atmosphere for human rights. Originally posted on Richard Falk’s blog...

Photo: Gerard Malie/AFP/Ritzau Scanpix Posing the Question Such a question seems little more than a provocation until the effects of the interval between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the present are critically examined in relation to their principal effects. On closer inspection, I am not quite prepared, although almost so, to say that the peoples of the world lost ground as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and emergence of the United States as the so-called ‘sole surviving superpower.’ Generally, it was rather automatically assumed almost never challenged, that the outcome of the Cold War was a victory for liberal values, including human rights, political democracy, economic growth, and certainly world peace. There was the added popular view that since democracies supposedly do not go to war against each other, and if Communism was discredited on both ideological and materialist grounds, then democracy would spread...