US Empire/West Decline

Chris Hedges April 28, 2022 The coterie of neocons and liberal interventionists who orchestrated two decades of military fiascos in the Middle East and who have never been held to account are now stoking a suicidal war with Russia. Originally posted on Sheer Post homepage on April 11th, 2020, here The same cabal of warmongering pundits, foreign policy specialists and government officials, year after year, debacle after debacle, smugly dodge responsibility for the military fiascos they orchestrate. They are protean, shifting adroitly with the political winds, moving from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party and then back again, mutating from cold warriors to neocons to liberal interventionists. Pseudo intellectuals, they exude a cloying Ivy League snobbery as they sell perpetual fear, perpetual war, and a racist worldview, where the lesser breeds of the earth only understand violence.  They are pimps of war, puppets of the Pentagon, a state within...

Photo: GT Martin Jacques April 16, 2022 The overwhelming assumption in the West is that the world, with a few exceptions, is strongly opposed to Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. The West itself, including the great majority of Europe, seems to be of one voice in its condemnation. But worldwide the picture is rather more complicated. In the UN General Assembly on March 3, while 141 countries condemned Russia’s invasion and called for an immediate withdrawal, 35 countries abstained and five voted against. In the recent vote to exclude Russia from the UN Human Rights Council, 93 countries voted in favour, 58 abstained and 24 were against.  Originally published at Global Times in China While there are clearly deep misgivings on the part of many countries about Russia’s actions, there is also widespread concern about the stance of the US. The most interesting, and potentially by far the most significant...

Edward Kienholz, “Portable War Memorial,” 1968  Sabir Shah April 14, 2022 The US Has Been at war for more than 92 percent of the time The American history of overt and covert foreign interventions dates back to 1811, when it had invaded Chile, just a year after this South American country had gained independence from Spain. Research conducted by the “Jang Group and Geo Television Network” reveals that the United States has been at war for about 225 of the 243 years since its inception in 1776. While the number of US foreign military interventions had stood at 188 till 2017, the world super power was found involved in 117 “partisan electoral interventions” between 1946 and 2000 or around one of every nine ballot exercises held since Second World War. Originally posted on The News International in Pakistan on January 9th, 2020 This means that the United States has been...

John Pilger April 5, 2022 Marshall McLuhan’s prophecy that “the successor to politics will be propaganda” has happened. Raw propaganda is now the rule in Western democracies, especially the US and Britain. On matters of war and peace, ministerial deceit is reported as news. Inconvenient facts are censored, demons are nurtured. The model is corporate spin, the currency of the age. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously declared, “The medium is the message.” The lie is the message now. Originally published by EurasiaReview on February 19, 2022 But is this new? It is more than a century since Edward Bernays, the father of spin, invented “public relations” as a cover for war propaganda. What is new is the virtual elimination of dissent in the mainstream. The great editor David Bowman, author of The Captive Press, called this “a defenestration of all who refuse to follow a line and to swallow the unpalatable and are brave”....

Edward Curtin April 5, 2022 Oliver Stone Documents the Past to Illuminate the Present The timing of the early March 2022 release of this digital streaming documentary could not be more auspicious.  For anyone wanting to understand how we arrived at a new Cold War with the second Irish-Catholic Democratic president in US history, Joseph Biden, spewing belligerent absurdities about Ukraine, Russia, and Vladimir Putin, and leading a charge toward a World War III that could easily turn nuclear, the aggregated factual details in this series of why President John F. Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA and its minions is essential history that illuminates current events. Originally published at Off-Guardian While Kennedy was the last US president to genuinely seek peace at the cost of his life, his successors have all been lackeys in love with war and in full awareness that the promotion of war and the military-industrial...

Maidan protests in 2014 in Kiev. GENYA SAVILOV / AFP – Getty Images Bryce Greene March 29, 2022 The history of U.S. involvement in Ukraine is rarely analyzed by corporate media. The desire to open Ukraine to finance capital, the 2014 U.S. backed coup, and the drive to expand NATO all played a role in creating the current crisis. As tensions began to rise over Ukraine, US media produced a stream of articles attempting to explain the situation with headlines like “Ukraine Explained” (New York Times, 12/8/21 ) and “What You Need to Know About Tensions Between Ukraine and Russia” (Washington Post, 11/26/21 ). Sidebars would have notes that tried to provide context for the current headlines. But to truly understand this crisis, you would need to know much more than what these articles offered. These “explainer” pieces are emblematic of Ukraine coverage in the rest of corporate media, which almost universally gave a pro-Western...

Image Credit: Creative Commons. Dave Majumdar March 18, 2022 The ultimate what-if? As strange as it seems, in 1954 when the United States and the Soviet Union were settling into a pattern of Cold War hostilities, the Kremlin actually proposed to join the NATO alliance on March 31 of that year.  The Soviets made the pitch for NATO membership after the Kremlin’s proposal for a pan-European collective security treaty at the Berlin Conference of Foreign Ministers in February 1954 was shot down by Western powers. While the Soviets expected to be rejected – and they were – Moscow considered it to be a win-win proposition. Originally published at The National Interest “Most likely, the organizers of the North Atlantic bloc will react negatively to this step of the Soviet government and will advance many different objections. In that event the governments of the three powers will have exposed themselves, once...

Aaron Maté March 18, 2022 After backing a far-right coup in 2014, the US has fueled a proxy war in Eastern Ukraine that has left 14,000 dead. Russia’s invasion is an illegal and catastrophic response. “The United States aids Ukraine and her people,” Adam Schiff declared in January 2020, “so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don’t have to fight Russia here.” Schiff made this statement during the opening of Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, where the Democratic Party’s bid to ensure unimpeded US weapons sales to Ukraine was presented, and widely accepted, as a valiant defense of US democracy and national security. Originally published at mate.substack.com Two years later, the US use of Ukraine to “fight Russia over there” has reached its logical end-game: illegally, murderously, and catastrophically, Russia has invaded Ukraine to end the fight. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is a violation of the UN Charter. Without UN authorization, states...

Members of the neo-Nazi Azov Regiment take part in a march to mark the anniversary of the founding of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army in Kyiv in 2020. (STR/NurPhoto via Getty Images) Branko Marcetic February 25 2022 The CIA has been secretly training anti-Russian groups in Ukraine since 2015. Everything we know points to the likelihood that includes neo-Nazis inspiring far-right terrorists across the world. Originally posted on JACOBIN’s official website on January 15, 2022 here The US government has a well-documented history of backing extremist groups as part of a panoply of foreign policy misadventures, which inevitably end up blowing up in the American public’s face. In the 1960s, the CIA worked with Cuban anti–Fidel Castro radicals who turned Miami into a hub of terrorist violence. In the 1980s, the agency supported and encouraged Islamic radicals converging in Afghanistan, who would go on to orchestrate the September 11 attack. And, in the 2010s, Washington backed Syria’s not-so-“moderate”...

Cartoon printed by The Japan Times Alex Lo February 18, 2022 Endless negative news stories and opinion pieces about how bad China is in almost every way are bound to shape public perception. Almost nine in 10 Americans (89 per cent) consider China a competitor or enemy, rather than a partner, according to the authoritative Pew Research. Commenting, Winston Lord, a US ambassador to China in the 1980s, said Beijing only had itself to blame. “The shift is caused by China’s actions under Xi [Jinping], the repression at home, the more aggressive approach abroad and intrusions in societies, including our own,” Lord said. “It has turned off not only Americans, but also Europeans and Australians.” Originally posted on “Pearls & Irritations – John Menadue’s Public Policy Journal” on February 9, 2022 Lord was once one of Henry Kissinger’s bright young proteges. There is no dispute that he understands China-US relations...

Robin Edward Poulton February 11, 2022 1 Feb 2022 – Secretary of State Blinken’s statement on January 26th was a disaster: a statement pleading for peace in Ukraine that was laden with aggression against Russia. The statement suffered from the lack of imagination we associate with U.S. imperialism, and a wanton refusal to understand how and why Russia feels threatened by NATO and the USA. Originally published at Transcend Media Service (TMS) Ukraine is a buffer state between Russia and Germany/Europe/NATO. And we need buffer states. Buffer States are often necessary for stable peace. No less a person than the Secrétaire Permanente de l’Académie Française – Madame Hélène Carrère d’Encausse – commented recently that Helmut Kohl and James Baker had promised Mikael Gorbachev that NATO would not expand eastwards…. which it then did, now expanded to 30 member states. Madame Hélène Carrère d’Encausse was born in Russia. Her magisterial book L’Empire Eclaté described the break-up of the Soviet...

Thomas De Waal February 3, 2022 Many people are trying to rewrite the history of the 2008 Georgia-Russia War in the light of the Ukraine crisis. The EU’s report on the war is still a useful baseline and a reminder of how different the two conflicts are. Originally published at Carnegiemoscow Six years ago, on September 30, 2009, the European Union made a bold and mostly successful attempt to deal with recent history. The report on the Georgia-Russia war of 2008—known informally as the “Tagliavini Report” after its team-leader, Swiss diplomat Heidi Tagliavini—came out little more than a year after the events themselves. The idea of the “Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on the Conflict in Georgia,” was to separate truth from fiction in the information war which both sides had waged and in particular to explain how the conflict started. It would be wrong to simplify the...