Josef Beno didn’t want to go to war. A Czech, he didn’t want to kill his fellow Slavs, the Russians. A father, he didn’t want to leave his starving family unprotected.
But the year was 1915 and Austria-Hungary was rounding up men and boys to serve in the war. Those who resisted were shot. After hiding for a year, Josef was captured for conscription. He escaped, only to be captured by Russians and marched to Siberia.
Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s rigged convention. The great counter revolution had begun.
According to Seymour Hersh, the original plan of the Obama Administration regarding the disclosure of the execution of Osama bin Laden to the press was that he had been killed in a drone strike in the Hindu Kush mountains on the Afghan side of the border. But things didn’t go as planned during the operation as a Black Hawk helicopter crashed in Bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound and the whole town now knew that an operation was underway.
The last fortnight has seen the gloves come off as the Bremain camp engages in increasingly desperate scaremongering. Vote Bremain headed by that doyen of anti-corruption David Cameron is frightened by the stubborn insistence of millions of British people to reject the EU on June 23.
Polls reveal how Vote Bremain and Vote Brexit are neck and neck despite the avalanche of fear warmongering propaganda directed at the British public by Prime Minster Cameron and his big business supporters.
Brexit raises chances of war in Europe
The sale of weaponized Light Armoured Vehicles (LAVs) to Saudi Arabia has raised a heated debate in Canada, pitting so-called realists against people who expect trade to be conducted according to a minimum set of moral values. Outgoing Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s swan song was the $15-billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia, which Harper boasted would provide 3,000 jobs.
We have to create culture, don’t watch TV, don’t read magazines, don’t even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you’re worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you’re giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking.
Since the Korean War, but particularly since the Iranian Revolution of 1979 until today, the United States has been steadily escalating its military presence in the Persian Gulf. Taking advantage of many colossal events of the past 36 years1, the hyper-empire has institutionalized its massive presence on land and sea, and expanded its objectives to include the unambiguous physical control of the area, as well as the clear understanding that local Arab governments should abide by them.
The recent liberation of Syria’s Palmyra (a UNESCO world Heritage site) by the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) and allies is an important victory for numerous reasons.
For decades, American and Saudi officials have been calling each other allies. In countless occasions, though, Saudi officials shun the term “ally” and opt for “partner”. Why partner, not ally? But the hyper-imperialist superpower has also been conferring the grand tile of ally to Israel, Japan, Persian Gulf sheikdoms, Egypt, Jordan, and, of course, to all members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Do these members see NATO as a defensive alliance, offensive organization, or partnership for peace? Does their view of NATO coincide with that of the United States?
If some intelligent extraterrestrial beings were circling over our planet in their spaceship, monitoring for decades and centuries all that has been and is taking place on its surface, they would, most likely, be horrified by our brutality, and shocked by the countless contradictions, double standards and inconsistencies.
