“You are a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.” President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to President Donald Trump, New York Times, May 21, 2017 The business of making money on property, badly, has shifted to the business of making money, greatly, for the US industrial arms complex.  This is the technique of President Donald Trump, who has[Read More…]

It is true that every story about the Balkan Peninsula begins with the ancient Illyrians.[1] Historians believe that these Indo-European people were one of the largest European populationsto inhabit the western portion of the Balkans from the coasts of the Ionian Sea and the Adriatic Sea to the Alps about 1000 B.C. Their eastern neighbours were also Indo-European peoples –[Read More…]

  There is in the U.S. a certain notion of being presidential.  Toss missiles at Syria or bomb Afghanistan and everyone reflexively calls it presidential.  Added to warmongering is peace making, visiting foreign countries, meeting with foreign leaders, holding joint press conferences with a slew of foreign reporters, all in a whirlwind of activity eagerly seized upon by the home[Read More…]

  “My guilt will never go away,” former Marine Matthew Hoh explained to me. “There is a significant portion of me that doesn’t believe it should be allowed to go away, that this pain is fair.” If America accepts the idea of fighting endless wars, it will have to accept something else as well: that the costs of war are[Read More…]

US lackey Australia (Oz) is second only to the US as a supporter of Apartheid Israel that denies 4.7 million Occupied Palestinians all human rights.  Oz has a racist New White Australia Policy for visitors and immigrants who must also sign a compulsory Australian Values Statement that hides the ugly reality of a massive Australian culture of mendacity, racism, invasion,[Read More…]

  This  is the fifth part (of 5 ) of a paragraph by paragraph commentary on a recent article posing as journalism in the March 6, 2017 issue of The New Yorker. I hope to demonstrate that this article is basically a totally mendacious concoction of cold war US propaganda constructed out of unsubstantiated opinions expressed by US government officials[Read More…]

  The ruins carpeted the city market, rippling outwards in waves of destruction. Broken beams, collapsed roofs, exploded metal shutters and fossilized merchandise crumbled underfoot. In one of the burnt-out shells of the shops where raisins, nuts, fabrics, incense and stone pots were traded for hundreds of years, all that was to be found was a box of coke bottles,[Read More…]

The Balkans has always been cursed by a recurring theme: that each entity within it can, at some point, become greater and more consuming in territory than the next neighbour. Each nation has, and in some instances continues, to nurse dreams of enlargement, pecking away at borders and assuming that few will notice. Strategies of expansion tend to have one[Read More…]

Lately, it has become a habit of Orientalist apologists of Western imperialism to offer reductive historical and theological explanations of Sunni-Shi’a conflict in the Middle East region in order to cover up the blowback of ill-conceived Western military interventions and proxy wars that have reignited the flames of the internecine conflict in the Islamic World. Some self-anointed “Arabists” posit that[Read More…]

It has been a lowering conversation, and one that Australia’s politicians have been engaging in with various degrees of discomfort. The Australian prime minister, for one, doesn’t seem to know where to place his feet on this one, showing considerable trouble in navigating the term “Australian values” before probing questions. Would such values, posed Leigh Sales of the ABC to[Read More…]

With little public notice, government agencies at the local, state and federal level, in conjunction with the Pentagon, began exercises at the end of last month war gaming the reaction of emergency responders and the military to the detonation of a nuclear bomb in a major American city. Contemporaneous exercises are taking place around the country involving thousands of emergency[Read More…]

  The UK BBC and the Australian ABC (Australia’s equivalent of the BBC) pride themselves on superiority over the Yellow Press as typified by the sex and scandal tabloids of the Murdoch media. However, as analysed below, both the Oz ABC and the UK BBC betray their audiences with fake news through lying by omission over horrendous Australian, British and[Read More…]

The idiots take over in the final days of crumbling civilizations. Idiot generals wage endless, unwinnable wars that bankrupt the nation. Idiot economists call for reducing taxes for the rich and cutting social service programs for the poor, and project economic growth on the basis of myth. Idiot industrialists poison the water, the soil and the air, slash jobs and[Read More…]

  The Trump administration is implementing new deportation priorities with the aim of creating fear as people are lifted from highly sensitive locations like schools, courts and places of worship, says Julia R Wilson of OneJustice. She was of the view that the Trump administration doesn’t believe in ANY immigration. Addressing a civil rights forum of the United Muslims of[Read More…]

One hundred years ago, the proletariat in Petrograd celebrated the historic May Day in jubilation and honor. “Thousands of people turned out for the 1917 May Day parade. They carried […] banners and posters, which became the main elements of the decorations in Petrograd.” (Natalia Murray, “Feast in a time of plague, May Day celebrations of 1917-1918”, Baltic Worlds, vol.[Read More…]

Progressive, left, and social movement forces in the U.S. need to build on successes of the past as well as move beyond them, taking on, for instance, a more pro-active position against militarism and a deeper critique of capitalism. Reaching out across racial and gender lines to working and lower income people, such a movement cannot allow for itself to fall under the hegemony of corporatist political actors. Rather it must be a project that provides a real fight back to the Trumpian right and the permanent war state it now inhabits.

“All options for responding to future provocation must remain on the table.  Diplomatic and financial levers of power will be backed up by a willingness to counteract North Korean aggression if necessary.” Rex Tillerson, Apr 28, 2017 The theatre unfolding in various international forums regarding North Korea is garnering top prices for front seats.  The press corps await the next[Read More…]

  President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office were a frightening experience for the seven-million strong Muslim American community. According to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest American Muslim civil advocacy group, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) profiling of Muslims accounted for 23 percent of cases in the first three months of 2017. This represents[Read More…]

  In the early days of hip hop, most of the artists either lived in or were born in New York City’s South Bronx. That area was devastated in 1929 by the building of the Cross-Bronx Expressway, which displaced 60,000 Bronx residents. Although the white residents who lived in the realm moved to the suburbs, many of the poor African-American[Read More…]

  This is the fourth part (of 5 ) of a paragraph by paragraph commentary on a recent article posing as journalism in the March 6, 2017 issue of The New Yorker. I hope to demonstrate that this article is basically a totally mendacious concoction of cold war US propaganda constructed out of unsubstantiated opinions expressed by US government officials[Read More…]

British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has suggested the UK could join US military action against the Syrian government without parliamentary approval. Johnson said he and PM Theresa May agreed that in the event of another chemical attack by the Assad regime, it would be hard for the UK to refuse any request to join military action. No evidence has been provided that[Read More…]

  Text and Photos: Andre Vltchek Dr. Gus Abu-Sitta is the head of the Plastic Surgery Department at the AUB Medical Center in Lebanon. He specializes in: reconstructive surgery. What it means in this part of the world is clear: they bring you people from the war zones, torn to pieces, missing faces, burned beyond recognition, and you have to[Read More…]

Vassal visiting time, and the next slot in the US imperium tourism schedule was one of America’s more cosy allies, Australia. The US Vice President Mike Pence popped in to keep an eye on matters just to make sure that all was in order. There had been that issue of the notable phone call, when Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull[Read More…]

April has been an eventful month geopolitically so far. President Trump carried out a much-trumpeted-about Tomahawk missile strike at the Syrian regime, held responsible by him for a nerve-agent attack on the village of Khan Sheikhoun in Idlib, a province largely held by rebels. Trump has changed his mind on China, which he previously accused as a ‘currency manipulator’. He[Read More…]

The novelist Anthony Powell spoke of old age as penalisation for a crime one had not committed.  Obviously, not being biblically inclined in that sense, the antics of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden were discounted. Through the histories on the subject of aging, mythologies have accumulated as eager moss crossing moist rock.  These have assumed something of[Read More…]

  Back in the Middle East for a few months, I find myself astounded by the absence of the strong voices of Arab intellectuals. The region that has given rise to the likes of Michel Aflaq, George Habash, Rached al-Ghannouchi, Edward Said and numerous others has marginalized its intellectuals. Arab visionaries have either been coopted by the exuberant funds allocated[Read More…]

  This  is the second part (of 5 ) of a paragraph by paragraph commentary on a recent article posing as journalism in the March 6, 2017 issue of The New Yorker. I hope to demonstrate that this article is basically a totally mendacious concoction of cold war US propaganda constructed out of unsubstantiated opinions expressed by US government officials and various[Read More…]

The definition of the term “terrorism” has been deliberately left undefined by the Western powers to use it as a catch-all pretext to justify their interventionist policy in the energy-rich Islamic countries. Depending on context, “terrorism” can mean two markedly distinct phenomena: that are, religious extremism or militancy. If terrorism is understood as religious extremism, then that is a cultural[Read More…]

  Scenario ONE: Imagine that you are on board a ship, which is slowly sinking. There is no land in sight, and your radio transmitter is not functioning properly. There are several people on board and you care for them, deeply. You don’t want this to be the end of ‘everything’. What do you do? A) You fix for yourself[Read More…]

  One of the world’s leading rocket scientists, national security advisor and MIT Professor Theodore Postol, who has won awards for debunking claims about missile defense systems and has been a scientific adviser to the US Chief of Naval Operations, says today in a nine-page report that a four-page report released by the Trump administration yesterday intended to blame the[Read More…]

I recently awoke from a rather pleasant dream in which members of Congress and the President embraced the unique proposition that they had been elected to serve the People of the United States. Congress had determined that healthcare was a matter of right (by simply reducing the age at which a person qualified for Medicare to birth) and that every[Read More…]