US President Barack Obama’s business-like meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit at the weekend belies a spate of bellicose comments made by the Pentagon towards Moscow. So, who is in control: Obama or the generals?
In transmitting President Richard Nixon’s orders for a “massive” bombing of Cambodia in 1969, Henry Kissinger said, “Anything that flies on everything that moves”. As Barack Obama wages his seventh war against the Muslim world since he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and Francois Hollande promises a “merciless” attack on that ruined country, the orchestrated hysteria and lies make […]
The more important story is that British governments, both Labour and Conservative, have, in pursuing the so-called national interest’ abroad, colluded for decades with radical Islamic forces, including terrorist organisations. They have connived with them, worked alongside them and sometimes trained and financed them, in order to promote specific foreign policy objectives. Governments have done so in often desperate attempts to maintain Britain’s global power in the face of increasing weakness in key regions of the world, being unable to unilaterally impose their will and lacking other local allies.
Since 2001 the U.S. has expended enormous efforts to kill a handful of men — bin Laden, al-Zarqawi, al-Awlaki, and this weekend, Jihadi John. Others, many without names, were killed outside of media attention, or were tortured to death, or are still rotting in the offshore penal colony of Guantanamo, or the dark hell of the Salt Pit in Afghanistan.
And it has not worked, and Paris this weekend, and the next one somewhere else sometime soon, are the proof.
Anyone else think it’s time our governments stopped colluding with radical Islam? Stopped arming, training and financing these crazed psychopaths? Imposed sanctions on their ideological sponsors, Qatar, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia? No? Ok, fuck it, its just me then!
Years spent depicting head chopping fanatics as rebels, moderates, and revolutionaries in an effort to effect the toppling of another secular government in the Middle East. Years spent cultivating Saudi Arabia as an ally against extremism and fanaticism rather than treating it as a country where extremism and fanaticism resides. Years spent treating the Assad government, Iran, and Russia as […]
An article in the Australian publication New Matilda gets to the real point about last night’s attacks in Paris – one that no one wants to talk about. What westerners feel right now is a powerful and very selective outrage that identifies with the suffering of people “like us”. We mourn the deaths in Paris while not even noticing those […]
Joseph Stiglitz, a senior OECD expert, slams OECD’s own policies to prevent global slowdown.
In a little-known speech at the United Nations University, renowned Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz criticised Western approaches to addressing the global economic crisis for being obsessed with market solutions that cannot work.
The systematic redistribution of wealth from the poorest to the richest which began under Thatcher, continued under Blair and currently is increasing at a pace under Cameron, is emblematic of the relationship between welfare state retrenchment and the notion of the role of the state as facilitator of welfare handouts to the corporate sector. Farm subsidies, public sector asset stripping, […]
The Guardian’s “Let’s Hate Russia” crusade, like the old Windmill Theatre, never closes. It’s a 24/7 op and needs a constant supply of attack pieces to keep those fires of division and racism stoked. So it’s not surprising a lot of barrel-scraping has to be done, and in fact sometimes the results can be so unintentionally self-parodying they become almost […]
Of course, the BBC has always been an instrument of the British state, established by statute in 1928 and run by a governor appointed by the Prime Minister. As Seumas Milne has pointed out: “There is no point in romanticizing a BBC golden age. The corporation was always an establishment institution, deeply embedded in the security state and subject to direct government control in an emergency…[with] around 40 percent of the staff… vetted by MI5.”
As the Vienna talks proceed over the coming weeks, the Western media will no doubt carry out more laundry services for Washington and its allies. High on the list will be attempts to misrepresent Russia’s political position on Syria with a view to cajoling Moscow into cutting off Syria’s Assad.
