Washington’s ability to put its Fifth Columns into the streets of Moscow had an effect on insouciant Americans and Europeans. Many Westerners today believe that Putin stole his election and is intent on using his office to rebuild the Soviet Empire and to crush the West. Not that crushing the West would be a difficult thing to do. The West has pretty much already crushed itself.
Only in the insanity of corporate America can nonviolent animal rights activists be charged as terrorists while a white supremacist who gunned down African-Americans in a South Carolina church is charged on criminal counts. Only in the insanity of America can Wall Street financers implode the global economy through massive acts of fraud, causing widespread suffering, and be rewarded with trillions of dollars in government bailouts.
Like some mysterious figure who suddenly arrives in a Hollywood Western film, Jeremy has turned up in the wind-blown, parched town and taken on the oppressors. I am sure his bold initiative will be rewarded. Indeed, in the growth of a more confident left, it already has.
Like Blair and the rest of the establishment, the Guardian and other corporate media claim their motivation is to preserve Labour’s electability, rather than to attack any and all politics that stray off the ‘centrist’, ‘modernising’ path. In reality, it could hardly be more obvious that this collection of profit-seeking, corporate enterprises – grandly and laughably proclaiming themselves ‘the free press’ – is opposing a threat to their private and class interests.
Earlier this year, the US assured its allies at the Camp David summit that under the nuclear deal, Iran’s growing geopolitical influence in the region would be curtailed. Simultaneously, the US gave Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and others the green light to accelerate support to the Islamist militants of their choice in Syria.
Europeans who have been completely misled about the Greek crisis, and who are shielded from its consequences, are willing to endorse their governments’ cruelty toward Greeks. German officials have openly boasted about how well protected its economy is against collapse in Greece – not an empty boast given the reality of the past several years. People who believe in democracy assume that it gives voters the most influence on decisions that impact them the most. That is why nobody would endorse the citizens of Athens electing the mayor of Berlin and contemptuously disregarding what Berliners think. Anyone who claims that Germany and its allies are acting with democratic legitimacy in Greece are endorsing that kind of nonsense.
These stories are reflections of the daily realities faced by the children of Gaza. But despite the mountains of information that shed light on these realities, the Israeli public continues to be completely impervious to the consequences of the war waged in its name. This indifference does not result in passivity; on the contrary, it is an active and integral component to the structural violence that dominates Gaza’s population.
There’s the rub. The Pentagon simply won’t cancel an essential part of its Full Spectrum Dominance military doctrine simply because of mere “diplomacy.” Every security analyst not blinded by ideology knows that missile defense was never about Iran, but about Russia.
Human life is of no concern to corporate capitalists. The suffering of the Greeks, like the suffering of ordinary Americans, is very good for the profit margins of financial institutions such as Goldman Sachs. It was, after all, Goldman Sachs—which shoved subprime mortgages down the throats of families it knew could never pay the loans back, sold the subprime mortgages as investments to pension funds and then bet against them—that orchestrated complex financial agreements with Greece.
Imagine the BBC inviting readers to place themselves in the shoes of an Islamic State cannibal. The simple act of interviewing Abu Sakkar humanised him in a way that is unthinkable for Islamic State fighters, or any other official enemy perpetrating a comparable act.
In 2006, one year after 7/7, a report prepared for the Ministry of Defence’s internal think-tank, the Defence Academy, concluded — contrary to your dishonest or wilfully ignorant announcements — that the Iraq War had acted as a “recruit sergeant” for al-Qaeda.
In other words, al-Qaeda’s official arm in Syria, and another group closely affiliated with al-Qaeda, were among the “moderate” vetted groups receiving arms and aid from the Gulf states and Turkey, under the supervision of US military intelligence operatives in the field.
