“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.” ~ George Orwell. The media furore surrounding the now viral image of wounded Syrian child, Omran Daqneesh, in terrorist-held eastern Aleppo, Syria is still raging, while the push back against the tide of western-sponsored anti-Syrian State propaganda reveals itself to be strengthening […]
When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.
You may be thinking ‘but this disaster befell that poor African country more than thirty years ago, surely things must be better today’. Well sadly, no, things are not any better. In fact the systemic failures which precipitated the local food shortages and amplified the effects of the drought have never been fixed and are in fact worse today than they were back then.
Ever since the US-EU policymakers decided to implement a war against Arab and West Asian secular nationalism in the Middle-East, Afghanistan, Iran and North Africa through serial ‘regime change’campaigns they have relied on Islamist Salafist mercenaries and volunteers to do most of the killing on the ground, while the West operates from the air.
Historian Mark Curtis cites some of the actions of successive British governments, barely mentioned by the corporate media, which go someway to understanding what makes Britain ‘great’.
Supporting the bombing of Yemen.
Arming Israel.
Occupying the Chagos Islands.
Supporting US aggression.
Arming Colombia.
Maintaining the global network of tax havens.
Just as there was no al Qaeda or ISIS to attack in Iraq until the U.S. bombed its government, there was no ISIS in Libya until NATO bombed it. Now the U.S. is about to seize on the effects of its own bombing campaign in Libya to justify an entirely new bombing campaign in that same country.
Amid today’s Churchillian parades and celebratory speeches, British media and schoolbooks may choose to only remember Churchill’s opposition to dictatorship in Europe, but the rest of the world cannot choose to forget Churchill’s imposition of dictatorship on darker skinned people outside of Europe. Far from being the Lionheart of Britain, who stood on the ramparts of civilisation, Winston Churchill, all too often, simply stood on the wrong side of history.
Historians of the 2011 NATO war in Libya will be sure to notice a few of the truly explosive confirmations contained in the new emails: admissions of rebel war crimes, special ops trainers inside Libya from nearly the start of protests, Al Qaeda embedded in the U.S. backed opposition, Western nations jockeying for access to Libyan oil, the nefarious origins of the absurd Viagra mass rape claim, and concern over Gaddafi’s gold and silver reserves threatening European currency.
In the abstract, capitalism and slavery are fundamentally counterposed systems. One is based on free labor, and the other, on forced labor. However, in practice, Capitalism itself would have been impossible without slavery.
In the United States, scholars have demonstrated that profit wasn’t made just from Southerners selling the cotton that slaves picked or the cane they cut. Slavery was central to the establishment of the industries that today dominate the U.S. economy: real estate, insurance and finance.
Did you know many African countries continue to pay colonial tax to France since their independence till today!
France is severely addicted to looting and exploitation of Africa since the time of slavery. Then there is this complete lack of creativity and imagination of French elite to think beyond the past and tradition.
Once again in the history of American intervention we have the spectacle of the creators being threatened by their own creation. It’s not that long ago that the mujahideen, who benefited from American financial and military support during the Soviet war in Afghanistan, later turned on the West in the form of Al-Qa‘ida. Yesterday’s “freedom fighters” have become today’s “terrorists.”
In truth, France had been implicated on the side of Al-Qaïda at least since the beginning of 2011. At that time, the United Kingdom and France had signed up for the US project called « the Arab Spring ». The goal of this operation was to overthrow all the secular Arab régimes and replace them with dictatorships run by the Muslim Brotherhood.
