The compulsive hatred of Putin by many who have almost zero idea about Putin or Russian history is disproportionate to any rational analysis, but not surprising. Trump and Putin are like weird doppelgangers in the liberal imagination.
— John Steppling, “Trump, Putin, and Nikolas Cruz Walk into a Bar”, Dissident Voice, February 21, 2018.
Lebanon, as so often in the past, is facing mortal danger.
Saudi Arabia is putting great pressure on the Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, a powerful but controversial figure who holds dual nationality – Saudi and Lebanese. Riyadh expects Lebanon to play by its own rules, sidelining Hezbollah, ending Iranian influence in the country, and promoting Saudi business and political interests… or else. It is clear that foreign aid from the Gulf is increasingly conditional.
Since the FBI never inspected the DNC’s computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary Clinton ally.
— Daniel Lazare, “NYT’s ‘Really Weird’ Russagate Story“, Consortium News
Only in the world of comic-book fantasies is the United States a friend to the oppressed in Africa or anywhere else on the planet. In the real world, the U.S. is a predator, colonial/capitalist nation. But like the imagined nation of Wakanda, in the latest cultural assault on critical mass consciousness, “American exceptionalism” and “make America great again” – two slogans representing both sides of the imperialist coin, ruling class interests are obscured and the people are reduced to working against their objective interests and being accomplices to imperial lawlessness.
Mass shootings have become routine in the United States and speak to a society that relies on violence to feed the coffers of the merchants of death.
Why does nobody dare to pronounce the term “Genocide” in connection with the Washington-committed atrocities around the globe? If there is one nation that is guilty of mass-murder it is the United States of America and her Zionist handlers. But nobody seems to pay attention. Or, rather, nobody dares to say so. It has become the new normal. Enshrined in people’s brains.
It could be truly comical, if it were not to be so dangerous for millions of people living all over the world. The Empire, once mighty, ruthless and frightening is now jumping around like a dog infected with rabies; it is salivating, barking loudly, its tale is stiff between its legs.
It snaps left and right, and periodically it is even trying to bite a piece of Moon off. But the Moon is far, too far, even for the best armed and the most aggressive country on Earth.
This week marks the 37th anniversary of a pledge made by the United States in 1981:
The United States pledges that it is and from now on will be the policy of the United States not to intervene, directly or indirectly, politically or militarily, in Iran’s internal affairs.
Not a day passes without a prominent Israeli politician or intellectual making an outrageous statement against Palestinians. Many of these statements tend to garner little attention or evoke rightly deserved outrage.
One of the most ingenious propaganda weapons ever developed is that the powerful nations of the West—led by the United States—have a moral responsibility to use military force to protect the rights of people being repressed by their governments. This “responsibility to protect” (R2P) always had a dubious legal standing, but its moral justification also required a psychological and historical disengagement from the bloody reality of the 500-hundred-year history of U.S. and European colonialism, slavery, genocide and torture that created the “West.”
