Month: May 2014

Putin vs. Comrade Wolf – Showdown in Ukraine

The Ukraine crisis has its roots in a policy that dates back nearly 20 years. The origins of the policy can be traced to a 1997 article in Foreign Policy magazine by Zbigniew Brzezinski, titled “A Geostrategy for Eurasia.” The article makes the case that the United States needs to forcefully establish itself in Central Asia in order to maintain its position as the world’s only superpower. While many readers may be familiar with Brzezinski’s thinking on these matters, they might not know what he has to say about Russia, which is particularly illuminating given that the recent uptick in violence has less to do with Ukraine than it does with Washington’s proxy-war on Russia.

Continue Reading →

Justice Is Dead In Amerika

When a sexually assaulted American citizen can be falsely arrested for assaulting a police officer, brought to trial by a corrupt prosecutor whose false case is endorsed by a corrupt judge and convicted by an insouciant jury, you know that justice is dead in America.
The death of Justice is a huge problem. The US not only has the largest percentage of its population in prison of every country in the world, the US also has the largest absolute number of prison inmates, larger even than “authoritarian” China which has a population four times larger than the US. In China, despite Washington’s endless lies about “human rights abuses,” a citizen has a far lower chance of imprisonment than does a “freedom and democracy” American.

Continue Reading →

Why I Don’t Want to See the Drone Memo

Just because Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch don’t recognize the U.N. Charter or the Kellogg Briand Pact is not a reason for us not to. Laws don’t work that way. Laws remain law until they are repealed. These laws have not been. If a memo can make a murder part of a war and therefore legal, we are obliged to ask: What makes the war legal?

Continue Reading →

Western Media Blackout on the Reality in Ukraine

On 2 May 2014, there was a massacre that was initially reported as being of 116 anti-Kiev (or independence) demonstrators at the Trade Unions Building in Odessa. The latest reliable report (from an American, George Eliason, who lives in that area) indicates it to be instead “now counted at 272 people that were tortured, gassed …, bludgeoned, …, etc.,” above and beyond the numbers who had been incinerated there by the firebombing of the building. Western news-media unfortunately seem to be doing all they can to keep the public ignorant of what went on there, and of why.

Continue Reading →

The CIA Coordinates Nazis and Jihadists

The world is changing. Formerly, there was a capitalist right and a socialist left. Today, the world is dominated by the United States and the first question that arises is whether to serve or to resist them. As in World War II, we find all ideologies in each camp. For now, Washington coordinates the alliance between the Nazis and jihadists in Europe with the blessing of the anti-Putin Russians.

Continue Reading →

Kidnapped Girls Become Tools of U.S. Imperial Policy in Africa

The [Nigerian] military has refused the group’s offer to exchange the kidnapped girls for imprisoned Boko Haram members. (We should not assume that everyone detained as Boko Haram is actually a member – only that all detainees face imminent and arbitrary execution.)

None of the above is meant to tell Boko Haram’s “side” in this grisly story (fundamentalist religious jihadists find no favor at BAR), but to emphasize the Nigerian military’s culpability in the group’s mad trajectory – the same military that many newly-minted “Save Our Girls” activists demand take more decisive action in Borno.

Continue Reading →

Militarist Bunkum

In the 21st century Americans’ worst enemies are not al Qaeda, Iran, Russia, and China. America’s worst enemies are our own presidents who have declared repeatedly that the orchestrated “war on terror” gives them the right to set aside the civil liberties guaranteed to every citizen by the US Constitution. Presidential disrespect for the US Constitution is so extreme that Obama has nominated David Barron to the US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. Barron is the Justice (sic) Department official who wrote the memos fabricating a legal justification for the Office of President to murder US citizens without due process of law.

Continue Reading →

The birth of a Eurasian century

In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, Brzezinski argued that “the struggle for global primacy [would] continue to be played” on the Eurasian “chessboard,” of which “Ukraine was a geopolitical pivot.” “If Moscow regains control over Ukraine,” he wrote at the time, Russia would “automatically regain the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia.”

That remains most of the rationale behind the American imperial containment policy – from Russia’s European “near abroad” to the South China Sea. Still, with no endgame in sight, keep your eye on Russia pivoting to Asia, China pivoting across the world, and the BRICS hard at work trying to bring about the new Eurasian Century.

Continue Reading →

Noam Chomsky and the Public Intellectual in Turbulent Times

Chomsky does not subscribe to a one-dimensional notion of power that one often finds among many on the left who view power as driven exclusively by economic forces.

For Chomsky, ignorance is a political weapon that benefits the powerful, not a general condition rooted in some inexplicable human condition.

Continue Reading →

The Ukraine in Turmoil

It is not much fun to be in Kiev these days. The revolutionary excitement is over, and hopes for new faces, the end of corruption and economic improvement have withered. The Maidan street revolt and the subsequent coup just reshuffled the same marked deck of cards, forever rotating in power.

Continue Reading →

America Brings Hell to Ukraine

The American plan for domination doesn’t just assume coups and interventions but also its own invincibility. The road to hell isn’t just paved with good intentions but with arrogance and stupidity and America has an excess of both.

Continue Reading →
1 2 3 4 … 6