How is that highly schooled people, those who have risen to positions of authority and influence within the west’s higher education systems, so often behave as if the bit of their brain governing rational thought has turned to mush whenever the issue of Israel is raised?
For the past 50 years, the essence of British strategy has been to ensure the UN’s failure to prevent or condemn Britain’s, or its allies’, acts of aggression.
After months of intense pressure led by unions and other social movements—including a general strike on the issue—the Uruguayan President listened to public opinion and left the US-led trade agreement.
Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Islamabad, and New Delhi have been actively establishing interlocking security guarantees. They have been simultaneously calling the Atlanticist bluff when it comes to the endless drumbeat of attention given to the flimsy meme of Iran’s “nuclear weapons program.” And a few days before the Vienna nuclear negotiations finally culminated in an agreement, all of this came together at a twin BRICS/SCO summit in Ufa, Russia — a place you’ve undoubtedly never heard of and a meeting that got next to no attention in the U.S. And yet sooner or later, these developments will ensure that the War Party in Washington and assorted neocons (as well as neoliberalcons) already breathing hard over the Iran deal will sweat bullets as their narratives about how the world works crumble.
By Pepe Escobar (RT | Op-Edge) Winston Churchill once said, “I feel lonely without a war.” He also badly missed the loss of empire. Churchill’s successor – the ‘Empire of Chaos’ – now faces the same quandary. Some wars – as in Ukraine, by proxy – are not going so well. And the loss of empire increasingly manifests itself in […]
There would be no public ownership of the mines, banks and rapacious monopoly industries, no economic democracy, as he had pledged with the words: “a change or modification of our views in this regard is inconceivable”. Reassuring the white establishment and its foreign business allies — the very orthodoxy and cronyism that had built, maintained and reinforced fascist apartheid — became the political agenda of the “new” South Africa.
What the world needs now, are “Mad Dogs”. Revolutionaries with a vision who dare to be unconventional and dare to be so all the way. It is time for us to become a Gaddafi rather than a Mandela. It is time to let the walls of fear around our thinking fall away. It is time to break free from the fear of not being liked, of no longer being accepted, of being looked upon differently, of being branded an outcast, a lunatic, a conspiracy theorist or anything bad when we raise our voices.
It has to be wondered whether the Prime Minister reflected on his 1989 “all expenses paid trip” to South Africa “funded by a firm that lobbied against the imposition of sanctions on the apartheid regime”- or the “Hang Nelson Mandela” badges that aspiring Conservative MPs wore at the time – some now actual MPs in his Party.
When Nelson Mandela was buried this week, his struggle against apartheid was duly celebrated in Australia, though the irony was missing. Apartheid was defeated largely by a global campaign from which the South African regime never recovered. Similar opprobrium has seldom found its mark in Australia, principally because the Aboriginal population is so small and Australian governments have been successful in dividing and co-opting a disparate leadership with gestures and vacuous promises.
What does it mean when a notoriously profit-driven, warmongering, climate-killing media system mourns, with one impassioned voice, the death of a principled freedom fighter like Nelson Mandela?
Does it mean that the corporate system has a heart, that it cares? Or does it mean that Mandela’s politics, and the mythology surrounding them, are somehow serviceable to power?
a more thorough examination of the facts, some of which are not well-known, leads to the conclusion to which many “Blacks” in South Africa have come: Apartheid did not end in substance, only in form. To all appearances there was a dirty deal between Mandela and the Apartheid regime that rendered possible Mandela’s release from prison and the apparent accession to power of the African National Congress, while most of the figures behind the Apartheid regime merely backed away from centre stage and continue to pull the strings behind the scenes.
Beware of strangers bearing gifts. The “gift” is the ongoing, frantic canonization of Nelson Mandela. The “strangers” are the 0.0001 percent, that fraction of the global elite that’s really in control (media naturally included).
