FRED REED—Don’t believe it. The US military does not defend America. The last time it did this was in 1945, at the end of World War Two. Since then, American soldiers were sent for twenty years to Afghanistan. Is Afghanistan America? No. Was it, is it, important to America? No. Then Iraq, Syria, Iraq again, and Serbia, bombing helpless cities. Iraq isn’t America. In my day–I’m an old guy–it was Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, where 63,000 Americans died, and killed huge numbers of peasants who did nothing wrong–for no reason. Washington is now getting ready to start a war with China. China is on the other side of the world.
CULTURE & CRITICISM
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MIDDLE EAST IN DEPTH WITH LAITH MAROUF – EPISODE 15 – ICC CHARGES – ADMISSION THAT WAR IS LOST
7 minutes readEDITOR—Garland and Laith discuss the tragic death of Iran’s president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash that has provoked enormous speculation about foul play given the strategic situation in the Middle East, especially in Israel. While most of the World, starting with Russia and China, have expressed their deepest condolences and support to Iran, the West’s politicians have kept silent, while their media has indecently almost celebrated Raisi’s death as the passing of a tyrant.
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EDITOR—Because of his apparent “reasonableness” in matters concerning Russia, the Ukraine War, and the Middle East, John Mearsheimer seems to many to be a public intellectual deserving of wide respect and credibility, says Garland Nixon, but such a view would be wrong. For Mearsheimer is just another Neocon, albeit a Neocon whose predilect bogeyman is China, the most dangerous of all possible US adversaries. Listen carefully to this talk by Garland analysing how a confrontation with China could easily get out of hand and escalate to all-out nuclear war, and you will see why Mearsheimer may be much more toxic than even John Bolton or Victoria Nuland, both chiefly obsessed with Russia.
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Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé on Interrogation at U.S. Airport and “Collapse of the Zionist Project”
8 minutes readDEMOCRACY NOW—We speak with renowned Israeli historian Ilan Pappé about his recent trip to the United States, when he was interrogated for two hours by federal agents upon arrival at Detroit airport about his political views on Gaza, Hamas and Israel, as well as demanding to know whom he knew in U.S. Muslim, Arab and Palestinian communities. Pappé was only allowed to enter the country after agents copied the contents of his phone. “They refused to tell me why they stopped me,” he says. Pappé, author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, also discusses the Nakba, growing support for Palestinian rights, and why he believes “the collapse of the Zionist project” is imminent.
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BILLY BOB—Despite Mearsheimer’s eminent reputation, the tremendous respect which he commands, and his accurate and scathing indictment of Western foreign policy, his framework is surprisingly shallow and lacking in even a basic grasp of “how the world actually works”. Why do I say this and what do I mean? For starters, Mearsheimer is a dyed-in-the-wool liberal who seemingly has never even heard of the concept of class. There are innumerable instances throughout history of seemingly inexplicable behavior that the lens of liberalism is incapable of explaining. Only when one adopts the lens of oppositional class interests and class struggle does history even begin to make any sense. The same is true regarding contemporary reality.