The verdict, outlined in the CBI’s 2013 chargesheet, stated that the police attacks were carried out in cold blood, and “staged” by Gujarat police and the government’s Intelligence Bureau (IB):
“The above said fake encounter was a result of Joint operation of Gujarat Police and SIB [State Intelligence Bureau], Ahmedabad. In this operation the overt acts committed by the accused Gujarat Police officers have been established by the evidence on record.”
[W]hen a senior journalist complains of ‘intimidation and bullying’ by the public, making comparison’s to ‘Vladimir Putin’s Russia’, the mind really boggles at the distortion of reality. Those were claims made by Robinson, the BBC’s outgoing political editor, using an appearance at the Edinburgh international book festival to settle a few scores.
There’s a popular uprising that may bring down the president, General Pérez Molina. It’s based on corruption, but Pérez Molina was also involved in mass murder during the 1980s, when he was the field commander in the Ixil zone for the Ríos Montt program of slaughter against the indigenous Mayan population. Pérez Molina was also on the payroll of the CIA when he served as chief of intelligence for the G2. The program of massacre by Ríos Montt was backed by the United States, by the Reagan administration.
The inner essence of fascism and totalitarianism, of atrocity, lies not in ideology as such, but in willed actions whose purpose is to show that there are no limits to what can be done to the individual, or even to entire classes of individuals.
A new memoir by a former senior State Department analyst provides stunning details on how decades of support for Islamist militants linked to Osama bin Laden brought about the emergence of the ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS).
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?”
Above all else, what has been proved by the bitter experience made by Greek workers with Syriza is that it is impossible to defend anything—jobs, wages, essential social services—without breaking the stranglehold of the financial oligarchy over economic and political life. It demands the independent political mobilisation of the working class against the major corporations and banks and their government.
Two research documents published in recent months by the US Army reveal the military establishment’s latest thinking in startlingly frank terms. The research not only lends credence to environmental warnings about how climate change will fuel political instability, but also vindicates concerns about how looming resource shortages could destabilize the global economy.
As one reads through the hundreds of articles mentioning the four Labour candidates, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that serious, much less harsh, criticism of the New Labour triumverate is not on the agenda. It just becomes obvious that there are no forces within the Guardian willing to support such a focus.
Befitting his own campaign for a new, healthy and open politics, Corbyn can only but welcome more critical scrutiny of a media that’s urged people to support ‘sensible’ New Labourism, kept readers in step with ‘neoliberal reality’ and waged such a campaign of hostility towards Corbyn himself. And remember, this is not just the right wing press, it’s the Guardian, Independent and others claiming to be serious about progressive change.
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.
The ideas and vision that Jeremy Corbyn represents, for so long buried beneath a ton weight of Thatcherite ideology, have risen from their slumber and are now part of the mainstream political discourse again, breathed new life by thousands of young people who demand a real and humane alternative to the thin gruel that passes for reality today.
