US Empire decline

By Helmut Scheben* July 18, 2023 Mass media are often unreliable, but hardly anyone has time to check the news. If news reports later turn out to be false, they are usually already burned into the hard drive of collective memory as “historical truth”. Originally published at Zeit-Fragen After the Gulf War of 1991, it was forbidden for the media in the US to show pictures of the coffins of American soldiers killed in combat. This prohibition was lifted only in February 2009. Filming dead or wounded US soldiers were also banned, and the ban was enforced with extreme severity, especially during the Iraq war, as cameramen reported. Once, when I was looking for such footage in the vast archives of Swiss television, I found a single sequence that lasted about three seconds. An American soldier was trying to climb out of a burning tank. Three seconds out of thousands...

) Article 19.2 here. Why not support TFF – one of a handful of peace think tanks left that is truly independent and exclusively financed by all-volunteer workand concerned citizens like you?Go here – Thanks!

Jan Oberg July 13, 2023 After the NATO Summit in Vilnius, a US-Nordic Summit took place in Helsinki on July 13, 2023. Here is, first, what I would suggest the US, Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland take up: • How to back out of NATO’s conflict with Russia, stop the war in Russia and move – with the use of UN peace-keeping and -mediation – towards a viable, sustainable solution to Ukraine’s security problem that all parties can live with – although perhaps not be happy with. • How to re-create the Arctic as a de-militarised, low-tension region and cooperate to the benefit of all parties and the fragile environment. • How to secure that none of the Nordic countries shall have any US bases (except the one in Thule, Greenland, which by the way was not invited) – so to not provoke Russia unnecessarily.Given the Nordic countries’ historically comparatively...

• 1 NATO is not going to let Ukraine in as a full member. Probably never. All the statements about getting it in and its rightful place in NATO is sugar-coating. NATO cannot say that but knows now that its ill-considered promise in 2008 to make Ukraine a member is as dead as the promises made to Gorbachev that the alliance would not expand one inch. All the NATO words about military packages, G7 security assistance, reform path to be drawn up but no timetable, the new NATO-Ukraine Council with so-called ’equals,’ long-term commitments, etc. – all were words of cruel diplomacy serving to soothe a very disappointed Zelensky. • 2 The Ukrainian president will also have understood by now that the US has achieved what it wants: Economic deals with Ukraine about its resources, huge debts and a very high price to be paid by Ukraine and European NATO...

A basic document for understanding the last 30 years of US imperialist policies US Independence Day, July 4, 2023 The obsession with being # 1 and letting no other country ever challenge that position has dominated the thinking behind virtually everything the US has done, including NATO’s reckless and imprudent expansion and the new Cold War on China. We believe it is useful for our readers to have direct asses to this 1992 strategic – short-visioned and narrow-minded – document. You may read more about it on Wikipedia here and about Paul Wolfowitz and his record here. It should be observed that parts of the doctrine was written by another neo-conservative with another – dark – track record, Zalmay Khalilzad.

And you should listen carefully to how far he is from Western media and policy-makers who know close to nothing. A Cyrus Janssen Interview July 1, 2023 0:00 – What’s China Like in 2023? 0:53 – Who is Shaun Rein? 1:58 – China is Normal and Not Normal Right Now 4:03 – Why is Consumer Spending Down in China? 5:15 – How Geopolitics Are Changing Chinese People’s Mind 6:58 – Chinese Shopping Habits Have Changed 7:38 – How International Companies Are Looking at China 10:00– Can US and China Work Together? 11:15 – Why China is Turning to Global South 12:07 – Could Trump Solve US/China Tension? 13:37 – How Americans Are Being Conditioned to Hate China 15:05 – Where Should We Criticize China? 16:44 – Do Chinese Truly Support the Chinese Government? 19:36 – The Truth About Xinjiang and Uyghur Families 21:30 – What Do You Want the World...

June 26, 2023 New York Times About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Originally published in The New York Times on Dec. 26, 1977 Not long after John Kenneth Galbraith, the Harvard economist, arrived in India in 1961 to take up his new post as American Ambassador, he became aware of a curious political journal called Quest that was floating around the Asian subcontinent. The following oracle is bused on reporting by John M. Crewdson and Joseph B.Treaster. It was written by Mr. Crewdson. “It had a level of intellectual and political competence that was sub‐zero,”...

Alex Lo & Daniel Bell June 24, 2023 “It’s quite clear from recent policies that the US aims to curb China’s economic development and encircle the country with military bases in unfriendly (from China’s viewpoint) countries. Such demonisation only reinforces repressive trends in China and benefits security-obsessed hardliners in China’s political system. That’s why “de-demonisation” can help those in China who favour a more open and humane social and political system. I have yet to meet a single academic, for example, who favours more rather than less censorship and “de-demonisation” can help to strengthen such forces”, says Daniel Bell in a recent interview with Alex Lo. Published at johnmenadue.com on May 11, 2023 On the Confucian Communist Comeback in Contemporary China Once denounced as a fossilised ideology holding back China’s development, an updated Confucianism may be a guide to its future, according to Daniel Bell of the University of Hong Kong in...

Caitlin A. Johnstone June 12, 2023 When most people in the English-speaking world hear the word “propaganda”, they tend to think of something that’s done by foreign nations who have governments that are so totalitarian they won’t even let people know what’s true or think for themselves. Others understand that propaganda is something that happens in their own nation, but think it only happens to other people in other political parties. If they think of themselves as left-leaning they see those to their right as propagandized by right wing media, and if they think of themselves as right-leaning they see those to their left as propagandized by left wing media. Originally published at Mronline, on May 28, 2023 A few understand that propaganda is administered in their own nation by their own media, and understand that it’s administered across partisan lines, but they think of it in terms of really egregious lies like weapons of...

The US/Western media of various kinds increasingly raise critical questions about the NATO expansion and the NATO/EU countries’ response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although it is “too little and years too late,” one must appreciate this trend – if for no other reason than that it may eventually contribute to stopping the militarist madness. Jan Oberg, editor Benjamin Schwarz & Christopher Layne Harper’s Magazine, June 2023 Issue June 5, 2023 From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia. Thanks to Washington’s efforts to arm and...

“Long before Trump and “deep state” became an expression, I produced one ginormous investigation — Top Secret America — for the Washington Post and I wrote a nasty book — American Coup — about the creeping fascism of homeland security.” William M. Arkin June 5, 2023 (When I wrote this open letter in January 2019, decrying NBC and the news media’s singular focus on Trump and their subsequent cheerleading for the state of perpetual war, I didn’t think that much would change, and indeed it hasn’t. When the letter went viral (thanks to Glenn Greenwald), all the news media could talk about was my attack on the news media, missing the basic point that we’d built a system of subservience and even subordination to the war machine, one that the news media fed. I wrote: “NBC and much of the rest of the news media has somehow become a defender...

Andrey Kortunov June 5, 2023 A Quad summit meeting in Sydney scheduled for May 24 was abruptly cancelled. The US president had to pull out of his long-anticipated trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea. Instead, the heads of the four Quad member states got together on the margins of the G7 Summit in Hiroshima on May 20.  The main reason for the change of plans was the continuous struggle between the White House and Republicans on the Hill over the national debt ceiling. [This issue has now been solved by raising once again the debt ceiling – The editor]. This rather awkward last-minute cancellation of the Quad summit reflects a fundamental US problem – a growing imbalance between the US geopolitical ambitions and the fragility of the national financial foundation to serve these ambitions.  This article was originally published by Gobal Times on May 25, 2023 The Biden administration appears...