“For goose-steppers,” wrote the historian Norman Pollack, “substitute the seemingly more innocuous militarisation of the total culture. And for the bombastic leader, we have the reformer manque, blithely at work, planning and executing assassination, smiling all the while.”
Putin is bound to deliver a showstopper at the UN. Spare a thought for the Obama administration’s foreign policy ‘muppets’, including the neocon cell at the State Department. Putin, under the glare of global public opinion, will frame the absolute defeat of ISIS/ISIL/Daesh as the key geopolitical issue of these times; he will commit Russia to it; and he will propose for the “West” to join in.
Since 2011, the member states of the CSTO have observed the NATO operation known as the « Arab Spring », which was designed to overthrow enemy régimes and also friendly régimes in the Middle East for the benefit of the Muslim Brotherhood (Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria), and since 2014, they have watched the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideal with the proclamation of a caliphate which challenges both international law and human rights.
“Neither national nor European worker protection laws apply to the ECB, because it is not part of any nation. Nor is it a European state,” said an ECB staffer.
“Migratory flows are caused by capitalism, by wars, by military intervention and the fact that wealth is concentrated in the hands of too few people.
“We need to democratise resources.”
All one needs to know about the intellectual caliber of the Obama administration is that it is still pondering whether to persist in “ignoring” Russian President Vladimir Putin, or invest in a real partnership to solve the Syrian geopolitical/humanitarian drama. After all, when in doubt between diplomacy or chaos, the Beltway weapon of choice still veers towards the simplistic group think uniting neocons and neoliberalcons: regime change.
Noam Chomsky on Bernie Sanders, Jeremy Corbyn, and the potential for ordinary people to make radical change.
One would hope that Cameron and Osborne fully understand the mechanics of modern money creation (although a recent survey by Positive Money shows 90% of their fellow MPs do not). Most of our money is created by private banks when they make loans. It doesn’t have to be this way. Another world is possible.
Westerners don’t want to face the truth of what their governments are doing – particularly NATO governments, and the US government most of all. The millions who died in Iraq were victims of a genocide that was intended to kill Iraqis in such numbers. The victims were not incidental to some other project. The same was true in Korea and Viet Nam, but it is also true in Syria, in Libya, in Yemen, in Somalia, in the DR Congo, and in many other places.
Successive British governments have spent billions on wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, plus on covert intervention in Syria. The outcome has been destruction of infrastructure across the Middle East, the growth of terrorism in the region, and the displacement of millions.
If the U.S. government’s hope was that the combination of Kerry’s hasty judgment and the DNI’s supportive “Government Assessment” would pin the P.R. blame for MH-17 on Putin and Russia, the gambit clearly worked. The U.S. had imposed serious economic sanctions on Russia the day before the shoot-down – but the Europeans were hesitant. Yet, in the MH-17 aftermath, both U.S. and European media were filled with outrage against Putin for supposedly murdering 298 innocents.
When the army of the DNI [commonly called Ukraine’s ‘rebels’] are retired Russian military, the West immediately writes about “Russian aggression”. And if retired (believe that retired) military mercenaries from the EU are fighting on the side of the APU [commonly called the Ukrainian government], why do the same media not write about “the aggression of the European Union?”
