Shefa Salem al-Baraesi (Libya), Drown on Dry Land, 2019. Three days before the Abu Mansur and Al Bilad dams collapsed in Wadi Derna, Libya, on the night of September 10, the poet Mustafa al-Trabelsi participated in a discussion at the Derna House of Culture about the neglect of basic infrastructure in his city. At the […]
A key function of state-corporate media is to keep the public pacified, ignorant and ill-equipped to disrupt establishment power. Knowledge that sheds light on how the world operates politically and economically is kept to a minimum by the ‘mainstream’ media. George Orwell’s famous ‘memory hole’ from ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ signifies the phenomenon brilliantly. Winston Smith’s work […]
The reality of the West’s trademark current foreign policy – marketed for the past two decades under the principle of a “Responsibility to Protect” – is all too visible amid Libya’s flood wreckage. Many thousands are dead or missing in the port of Derna after two dams protecting the city burst this week as they […]
Amidst this week’s strange attempt to instigate a military coup from the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, President Putin took a loud stand calling out the operation as a foreign directed insurgency with parallels drawn from the chaotic revolution of 1917. Just as in 1917, the nation was at war with an enemy on the […]
The pump don’t work ’cause the vandals took the handles — Bob Dylan, “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” 1965 A lot of folks, including this writer, were surprised to learn in the Spring of 2018 that the United States had a significant troop presence on Syrian soil. Of course, America had shot some “Home of the Brave!” […]
The post Stalled Out on the Road to Damascus, Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.
Let us begin a conversation in response to what currently qualifies as the most profound question, the one that needs most urgently to be addressed if we are to have any chance of understanding what we conveniently refer to as the “Ukraine crisis.” This is, more accurately, a planetary crisis—close in magnitude to the near-certainty […]
Nation states are habitually doomed to defeat their best interests. Conditions of mad instability are fostered. Arms sales take place, regimes get propped up or abandoned, and the people under them endure and suffer, awaiting the next criminal regime change. Nothing is more counter-intuitive than the effort to isolate, cripple and strangulate the Taliban regime […]
Let me start out by openly and unequivocally stating that most of the individuals who are in the decision-making and decision-influencing positions which determine U.S. foreign policy and drive its recklessness are a truly shameful bunch. They are morally bankrupt, ignorant, myopic, barbaric, drunk on power, and as far as I can tell, without any […]
The post Regime Change: Up Close and Personal first appeared on Dissident Voice.
It all seems worn, part of an aspic approach to foreign policy. But US President Joe Biden is keen to ensure that old and lingering mistakes retain their flavour. Towards Cuba, it is now 60 years since President John F. Kennedy’s Presidential Proclamation 3447 imposed an embargo on all trade with the island state. The […]
The post Hemispheric Gangsterism: The US Embargo Against Cuba Turns 60 first appeared on Dissident Voice.
During the 21st century, the US, working with corporate elites, traditional oligarchies, military, and corporate media, has continually attempted coups against Latin American governments which place the needs of their people over US corporate interests. US organized coups in Latin American countries is hardly a 20th century phenomenon. However, this century the US rulers have […]
