… a nation in which 87 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four year olds (according to a 2002 National Geographic Society/Roper Poll survey) cannot locate Iran or Iraq on a world map and 11 percent cannot locate the United States (!) is not merely “intellectually sluggish.” It would be more accurate to call it moronic, capable of being fooled into believing anything …
—Morris Berman, The Twilight of American Culture, June 28 2001
Capturing the wisdom and the beauty of Donald J. Trump in just one statement escaping from his charming mouth:
Our military has never been stronger. Each day, new equipment is delivered; new and beautiful equipment, the best in the world – the best anywhere in the world, by far.1
There is a serious, almost insurmountable, language obstacle I find when trying to discuss the US regime or its foreign policy. It is the absolute uselessness of terms like “communism” in the literature or other verbal sources. As I always argue from the beginning of any article, the “Cold War” and “communism” or “Soviet expansion” etc. were all terms that obscured the actual policies, interests, conflicts, and actors such that it became impossible to identify the genuine roots of power and targets of its exercise. This continues today.
On 7 November, in London’s famous Royal Albert Hall, there’s to be “a unique event drawing Christians and Jews together in celebration of the centenary of the Balfour Declaration and all that it led to.”
Christians will be reaching out to support the Jewish community and the state of Israel, or so the organisers claim.
There’s something happening here, but what it is ain’t exactly clear.
— Buffalo Springfield 1967
The Hillary Clinton mope tour, which should have reached a high water mark, has gone global. It entails drumming up her credentials (immaculate, we are told, but unnoticed), and pouring upon the man who beat her to the White house (a danger to the world). The latter is the fundamental point: Donald Trump would not have won, not because of Clinton’s flaws but because of what others did.
Mordechai Vanunu was imprisoned in Israel for eighteen years because he blew the whistle on Israel’s secret nuclear weapons program. He felt he had “an obligation to tell the people of Israel what was going on behind their backs” at a supposed nuclear research facility which was actually producing plutonium for nuclear weapons.
A recent interview with 88-year-old Noam Chomsky once again demonstrates just how insightful he is in providing rational analysis of Western power and the suffering it generates. By contrast, anyone relying on BBC News receives a power-friendly view of the world, systematically distorted in a way that allows the state and private interests to pursue business as usual.
If you find yourself lost and confused in a dark wood, then perhaps following this network of knots strung on a long string of dates listed below will help you find your way back home, where the bread of truth awaits you on the kitchen table.
