American Analyst Calls Trump’s Advisers ‘War-Loving Psychopaths’

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A dispatch of Tasnim News agency

TEHRAN (Tasnim) – An American political commentator deplored the US government’s propaganda campaigns against Iran and North Korea as “xenophobic” and said President Donald Trump’s advisers are “all war-loving psychopaths”.

June, 23, 2018 - 16:09

“Trump's advisers are all war-loving psychopaths, so the logical conclusion is that this is the first step toward some sort of conflict....either with the DPRK or with Iran,” John Steppling, who is based in Norway, told the Tasnim News Agency in an interview.

“I can only say again that the attacks in the media and in Washington, against both Iran and the DPRK are both racist, imperialist, and xenophobic,” he said, adding, “That is always there right beneath the surface.”

Steppling is a well-known author, playwright and an original founding member of the Padua Hills Playwrights Festival, a two-time NEA recipient, Rockefeller Fellow in theater, and PEN-West winner for playwriting. He is also a regular political commentator for a number of media outlets around the world.

Following is the full text of the interview:

Tasnim: US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un concluded their recent historic summit in Singapore by signing a deal that included a pledge to “work toward complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.” What do you think about the agreement and how do you predict its success given Washington’s non-commitment to international treaties?

Steppling: Well, the first thing to note is that in the US, the Democratic Party is complaining openly about this. Liberal op-ed pieces in places like the NY Times are consistently negative. It is just stunning. One might almost think the Democrats were the real war party. Chuck Schumer, and it should be noted that Schumer is right at the top of the list of the most odious American politicians of his generation. Schumer is aghast at the summit with Kim Jong-Un. The minority leader is attacking Trump from the right, as are most of the Democratic Party. Now, the second thing to note is that yes, of course, the US has a long history of not keeping their word. However, I am struck by the disturbing orientalism of even supposed leftist commentators. The DPRK is routinely described as an Orwellian garrison state and totalitarian and the like. This is from the left. There is a terrible racist underpinning to these kinds of remarks. One expects NY Times type liberals to lament anything Trump does. If he found a cure for cancer they would demand Cancer be allowed to exist and have agency. I mean it is truly bizarre. But it is particularly depressing to have so many self-identified leftists demonize North Korea, as well. Having said that, the truth is the people of North Korea have survived in a heroic fashion after total destruction by the US in the early 1950s. The fact that "we" don't "understand" the culture is simply that. I've never been to the DPRK. But Christopher Black, a noted human rights lawyer from Canada, HAS been there. He traveled there with a group of international lawyers and together they issued a statement...and I quote an excerpt...: "The people of the world have to be told the complete story about Korea and our government’s role in fostering imbalance and conflict. Action must be taken by lawyers, community groups, peace activists and all citizens of the planet, to prevent the US government from successfully generating a propaganda campaign to support aggression in North Korea. The American people have been subjected to a grand deception."

The DPRK is routinely described as an Orwellian garrison state and totalitarian and the like. This is from the left. There is a terrible racist underpinning to these kinds of remarks. One expects NY Times type liberals to lament anything Trump does. If he found a cure for cancer they would demand Cancer be allowed to exist and have agency. I mean it is truly bizarre.

Tasnim: As you know, Trump recently announced the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and the Group 5+1 (Russia, China, US, Britain, France, and Germany). Prior to the move, the US had repeatedly violated the international pact by imposing numerous sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Given Washington’s non-commitment to such an important international agreement, what would be a guarantee of success of the US-North Korea deal?

Steppling: What is interesting in this deal is how it relates to the JCPOA. National Security Advisor John Bolton has openly referred to the "Libya Model". Meaning, after promising Libya and Qaddafi certain things in return for elimination of nuclear development (under Bush) the US came to destroy the country and assassinate Qaddafi. So it is hard to believe the US means what it says this time. On the other hand, it feels perhaps too cynical in principle to simply discount the agreement. You also have to factor in the significant role China plays in the North Korean economy. Trump's advisors are all war-loving psychopaths, so the logical conclusion is that this is the first step toward some sort of conflict....either with the DPRK or with Iran. What the actual logic might be is anyone's guess. But it is a fair assumption to believe that China looms as a strategic consideration.

The US sees the world hierarchically. Countries are ranked in order of importance and the US is always at the top. For many, this American exceptionalism is buried beneath other kinds of rhetoric, but it is there all the same. Some countries can have nukes and some can’t. It is, from the politicians' point of view, demeaning to be seen talking to "certain kinds of people". Unless of course, those people are buying lots of weapons (think Saudi Arabia). I can only say again that the attacks in the media and in Washington, against both Iran and the DPRK are both racist, imperialist, and xenophobic. That is always there right beneath the surface.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” — acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump — a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

BAR Book Forum: Stephen Gowans’ “Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea’s Struggle for Freedom”

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By Roberto Sirvent, BAR Book Forum Editor

Reconciliation Wall

“The leader of every state that has refused to submit to US political and economic domination is defamed as a monster.”

In this series, we ask acclaimed authors to answer five questions about their book. This week’s featured author is Stephen Gowans . Gowans is an independent political analyst whose principal interest is in who influences formulation of foreign policy in the United States. His book is Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom.

Roberto Sirvent: How can your book help BAR readers understand the current political and social climate?

Gowans

Stephen Gowans: The conflict between the United States and North Korea didn’t start at the moment North Korea embarked upon a program of nuclear weapons development, although the discourse surrounding US-North Korea relations—focussed largely on the ostensible threat Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles pose to the United States and the consequent demand for denuclearization—would lead you to believe it did. On the contrary, the conflict began in 1945, when the United States, taking its first steps to establish a global empire of unprecedented scale, arrived on the Korean peninsula to accept the Japanese surrender and refused to recognize the newly established Korean People’s Republic, the state Koreans proclaimed for themselves after 40 years of foreign rule by the Japanese.

Korea had been bisected by the United States into separate US and Soviet occupation zones to accept the Japanese surrender. US forces quickly eradicated the Korean People’s Republic within their occupation zone. They did so by fighting an anti-insurgency war against Korean guerrillas who took up arms to defend the nascent republic. In place of the republic, Washington installed a US military dictatorship, and subsequently a puppet regime, South Korea, which possessed, and continues to posses, the trappings of a viciously anti-communist police state.

“US policy since 1945 has been to crush any independent Korean government.”

The Korean People’s Republic survived north of the 38thparallel, in the Soviet occupation zone, and became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), known informally as North Korea. US policy since 1945 has been to crush any independent Korean government, whether the short-lived Korean People’s Republic, or its DPRK successor.

My book traces the history of US efforts to quash independent political movements in Korea, not only in the north, but in the south as well, and the struggle waged by Korean patriots to unify their country and emancipate it from the foreign rule and military occupation inflicted on it, first by the Empire of the Rising Sun, beginning in 1905, and subsequently by the US empire, since 1945.

What do you hope activists and community organizers will take away from reading your book?

I hope they take away a number of things, but two are particularly important.

The first is a basic understanding of what the aims of US foreign policy are and who shapes and influences it. US foreign policy largely shaped what Korea is and has become since 1945, and it is impossible to understand Korea without first understanding US foreign policy. US foreign policy is set, not by the broad public acting through its elected representatives to serve broad public interests, but by an elite based in the business and especially finance and banking communities to serve their sectional interests. I cite in my book an observation made by Lenin: “Unless the economic essence of imperialism…is studied, it will be impossible to understand and appraise modern war and modern politics.” Although Lenin made the point in 1917, it remains undiminished in its relevance. It is impossible to appraise modern war and modern politics, both domestic and foreign, without reference to political economy, by which I mean the study of who, by virtue of their control of economic assets, is able to wield enormous political power, enabling them to degrade others into an instrument of their own interests.

“It is impossible to appraise modern war and modern politics without reference to political economy,”

The second take-away is that the foreign policy elite, of which I include the major US mass media, defuse opposition to US aggressions around the world by defaming the people or nations which refuse to submit to what Domenico Losurdo has called the international dictatorship of the United States. An invariable aspect of this program of public opinion management is the dehumanization of the leaders of independent states. The leader of every state that has refused to submit to US political and economic domination is defamed as a monster,whether Slobodan Milosevic, Saddam, Robert Mugabe, Bashar al-Assad, Muamar Gaddafi, or Kim Jong-il and Kim Jong-un. The language of the bestiary is as favored by US presidents as it is by some figures of the Left. Once the targets of US foreign policy are dehumanized, opposition to such unlawful acts against them as unilateral air strikes, invasion, economic warfare, and aid to internal rebellions, melts away.

We know readers will learn a lot from your book, but what do you hope readers will un-learn? In other words, is their a particular ideology you’re hoping to dismantle?

One ideology I hope to dismantle is the notion that the absence of liberal democratic institutions in states made to suffer the aggressions of the US empire spring from ‘authoritarianism’ inherent in the states’ ideologies or in lust for power on the part of the states’ leaders, rather than from the state of crisis and emergency engendered by US aggression.

People naturally view other societies through the lens of their own experience, and if their experience is one of living in a country secure from invasion and attack, as is true of US citizens, they might have difficulty grasping the dual realities that North Korea lives under an incessant threat of attack and invasion, and that countries which are threatened are denied the luxury of openness.Liberal democratic institutions in North Korea would facilitate the organization by Washington of North Korea’s demise. (If there’s any doubt that bringing about the quietus of the DPRK is a US goal, John Bolton, the current National Security Advisor, once described Washington’s North Korea policy to a New York Times reporter by pointing to a volume on his bookshelf. The book was titled ‘The End of North Korea.’)

“Countries which are threatened are denied the luxury of openness.”

From the moment of the DPRK’s birth, the independent Korean state has faced a determined effort by the United States to bring about its destruction. This effort has included threats of war, an actual invasion, the total incineration of the country from 1950 to 1953, threats of nuclear annihilation, the mobilization of hundreds of thousands of troops along its borders at least once per year in US-led war games exercises, continual harassment of its borders by US warships and warplanes, an unceasing propaganda barrage, and 70 years of economic warfare, culminating in a blockade that is now nearly total. Under these circumstances, liberal democratic institutions are impossible.

The proof of this is manifold: First, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights exempts states in “time of public emergency which threatens the life of the nation” from their responsibility to guarantee civil and political liberties. This follows from liberal democratic theory, which makes provision for dictatorship in times of crises. What’s more, the United States, Britain and Canada became virtual dictatorships during the first and second world wars, regimented their societies, controlled the flow of information, brought their economies under state control, and immured political opponents in concentration camps. Two of these countries, the United States and Canada, faced no existential threat and both were protected from invasion by two vast oceans. Once the crisis of war lifted, liberal democratic institutions re-emerged. Anyone who truly wants liberal democratic institutions to flourish in North Korea should work to lift the threats that make these institutions impossible.

Who are the intellectual heroes that inspire your work?

The story I relate of Korea’s history through the Japanese colonial period and the US occupation of the peninsula is based largely on the work of the historian Bruce Cumings, whose work is very compelling. My approach to US foreign policy is inspired by social scientists, some working in the Marxist tradition, including Albert Szymanski and Laurence Shoup, and others, including William Domhoff and Thomas Ferguson, who don’t. The work of Domenico Losurdo provides the overarching intellectual direction of the book.

In what way does your book help imagine new worlds?

The book imagines a world that others have already imagined, including North Koreans and other peoples and nations that have had to endure and struggle to overcome empires. The new world they imagine—one of an international order of sovereign and equal states linked by relations of mutual benefit—is hardly new; it is formally imagined in the Charter of the United Nations.

Tim Beal, who has written voluminously on Korea, argues that North Korea is the embodiment of the UN Charter, and, indeed, the UN Charter’s themes are evident in the North Korean view of what the international order ought to be. In their view: “All countries and nations are equal and have the right to exercise their sovereignty…A big and developed country has no right to issue orders to and rule small and less developed countries. Only when all countries and nations develop relations on the principle of equality and mutual benefit can [the international order] be democratic and friendly.”

This is the complete antithesis of the US view, which is that big and developed countries have the right to issue orders to and rule small and less developed countries. The book helps us to imagine what democracy means on an international level in contradistinction to the current international dictatorship of the United States.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Roberto Sirvent is Professor of Political and Social Ethics at Hope International University in Fullerton, CA. He also serves as the Outreach and Mentoring Coordinator for the Political Theology Network . He’s currently writing a book with fellow BAR contributor Danny Haiphong called American Exceptionalism and American Innocence: The Fake News of U.S. Empire.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

Nikki Haley: Damn the UN Human Rights Council and the Rest of You Too

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Ann Garrison, BAR contributor

“More censure of Israel is no doubt in the works, given Israel’s latest massacres in Gaza.”

On Tuesday, June 19, UN Ambassador Nikki Haley announced US withdrawal from the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) now meeting in Geneva. The UNHRC is stacked with human rights abusers including Rwanda, Saudi Arabia, and, till now, the US itself, but this is still an ugly gesture, like refusing to accept the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court, ditching the Paris Climate Accords, and shredding the Iran Nuclear Deal. Who gives a damn what the world thinks of us? We are good! As Hillary Clinton said at the last Democratic National Convention, “America is great because it’s good.” What could better evidence that than our 1000 or so military bases, our unparalleled arsenal, and however many wars we’re fighting, depending on how you count? Even BAR readers would probably have to stop and decide how to count before they could settle on a number. How dare anyone deny that America is good?

George W. Bush boycotted the UNHRC for three years, but Obama returned to the fold, and Hillary announced that we were back “to set a new agenda, based on three principles,” the second of which was: “The Council must apply a single standard to all countries…It cannot continue to single out and devote disproportionate attention to any one country,” meaning Israel.

“The human rights situation in Palestine is debated three times a year.”

At the close of its first session, on June 30, 2006, the UNHRC voted to establish a standing “Agenda Item 7: Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories” to be debated every time it convenes—three times a year. It’s since passed over 70 resolutions censuring Israel, including 5 passed at its March meeting earlier this year. Nikki Haley then scolded the Council for being “foolish and unworthy of its name.”

“Agenda Item 7” hasn’t been debated in the current session yet, but more censure of Israel is no doubt in the works, given Israel’s latest massacres in Gaza. In 2016, the US and other Western states walked out during the “Agenda Item 7” debate, and the delirious Jerusalem Post then screeched that “35 countries attacked Israeli human rights abuses against the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.” Imagine that! Attacking Israeli human rights abuses. Israel is great because it’s good! It even has nuclear weapons and everybody knows it, especially Iran.

This week Israeli Defense Minister Avidor Lieberman called for Israel to withdraw from the UNHRC even though it’s not a member. He seems to think that the US and Israeli states are one. America and Israel are good!

“The UK is also threatening to leave if the Council doesn’t overcome its ‘anti-Israel bias’ within the next six months.”

Most folks have never even heard of the UNHRC, so, just for context:

The UNHRC is composed of 47 members elected to three year terms within five geographic groups: Africa, Central America and Caribbean, Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, and Western European and Other States including the US and Australia. The seats are rarely contested; nations from the various groups just swap votes and take turns. Only the Asia Pacific seat was contested this year.

UNHRC resolutions are neither legally binding nor enforceable, so it’s just a forum, but occasionally it makes news. This year the UNHRC story in the headlines has been that the US might quit the Council over its “anti-Israel bias”—as it now has— before its three-year term expires in 2019. The UK made a few headlines too by threatening to leave if the Council doesn’t overcome its “anti-Israel bias” within the next six months. The UK’s term expires in 2019 too.

The UN General Assembly’s favorite sport

Last week, before threatening US withdrawal, Nikki Haley raged about the UN General Assembly’s latest overwhelming vote condemning Israel’s “excessive use of force” and calling for protection of Palestinians in Gaza: “What makes Gaza different for some is that attacking Israel is their favorite political sport. That’s why we’re here today. The nature of this resolution clearly demonstrates that politics is driving the day.”

Politics! Imagine that. Politics are just a sordid process staining the purity of human rights respected and protected by the US in its global war on the planet and the people. Why not withdraw from the General Assembly? The US seat is secure on the Security Council, the only UN body whose resolutions are legally binding and enforceable. The U.S. ambassador vetoes any Security Council resolutions criticizing Israel or calling for peacekeepers to protect Gazans, but the US keeps getting beaten up, along with Israel, in all these toothless UN expressions of public opinion.

Donald Trump has suggested bombing the UN for violating our national sovereignty, but it’s right next to his property, so he may just have it collapsed like Building 7.

Sneaky secret ballots

[dropcap]A[/dropcap]t the end of June, the US suffered another blow to its moral authority when Pierre Prosper, its candidate for the UN Human Rights Committee, was defeated on a secret ballot. The Human Rights Committee is 18 internationally recognized human rights experts tasked solely with monitoring and commenting on compliance with the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. As a former International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda prosecutor and US War Crimes Ambassador, Pierre Prosper was tasked with canonizing Rwandan military dictator Paul Kagame by making sure that only Hutus, not Tutsis, were prosecuted for the Rwandan massacres of 1990-1994. Israel and Rwanda then formed a deep bond based on victim’s license to invade the neighbors and otherwise do as they pleased.

There’s some speculation that the US may be using its outrage about the UNHRC’s tri-annual censure of Israel as an excuse to withdraw and thereby dodge censure of itself for tearing migrant parents and children apart at the US/Mexican border. Or to avoid debate about the staggering report on extreme poverty in the US that the UN Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights will present on Thursday. Who knows? I can’t read Donald Trump, John Bolton, or Nikki Haley’s mind, but who cares? America is great because it’s good! So good that we might as well take the rest of the world down with us.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ann Garrison is an independent journalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2014, she received the Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza Democracy and Peace Prize for her reporting on conflict in the African Great Lakes region. She can be reached at ann@anngarrison.com.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

Anyone Promoting Regime Change In Iran Is An Evil Piece Of Shit

HELP ENLIGHTEN YOUR FELLOWS. BE SURE TO PASS THIS ON. SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON IT.

I have been saying all year that the 8chan phenomenon known as “QAnon” is bogus, and as time has gone on the evidence has become overwhelming that it is an establishment psyop designed to herd the populist right into accepting the narratives and agendas of the establishment orthodoxy. Whether they’re claiming that every capitulation the Trump administration makes to longstanding neoconservative agendas is actually brilliant 4-D chess strategy, or saying that Julian Assange isn’t really trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy, QAnon enthusiasts are constantly regurgitating talking points which just so happen to fit in very conveniently with the interests of America’s defense and intelligence agencies.

A recent “Q drop” (a fancy name for an anonymous user posting text onto a popular internet troll message board with zero accountability) makes this more abundantly clear than ever, with text reading as follows:

Free Iran!!!
Fight
Fight
Fight
Regime change.
People have the power.
We stand with you.
Q

Once you’re cheering for a longtime neoconservative agenda to be accomplished in one of George W Bush’s “Axis of Evil” countries, you are cheering for the establishment. Or, to put it more clearly to Q followers, you are cheering for the deep state.

So now you have conspiracy-minded populist right wingers being manipulated into supporting the same standard Bush administration globalist agendas that Alex Jones built his career on attacking. The support for regime change interventionism in Iran isn’t limited to the QAnon crowd, having now gone fully mainstream throughout Trump’s base, and I’d like to address a few of the arguments here that they have been bringing to me:

“Iran is nowhere near the same thing as Iraq, Libya or Syria!”

Please go look at a globe and think a little harder about your position here. Iran is a target for regime change for the exact same reasons its neighbors Iraq and Syria have been; it occupies and extremely strategically significant location in an oil-rich region that the US-centralized empire wants full control of. Thinking this one is different because its government isn’t secular is the product of many years of Islamophobic propaganda; the plutocrats and their allied intelligence and defense agencies don’t care what religion sits on top of their oil, and Saudi Arabia proves it. Any argument made against Iranian theocracy could be made even more strongly against KSA theocracy, but you don’t see Sean Hannity advocating the overthrow of the Saudi royals, do you?

“But this regime change intervention would be completely different!”

No it wouldn’t. There has never been a US-led regime change intervention in the Middle East that wasn’t disastrous. Cheering for regime change interventionism in Iran is cheering for all the destabilization, chaos, terror, death, rape and slavery that always necessarily comes with such interventions. Wanting to inflict that upon the world is monstrous.

“This is different, though! This one is led by Trump! Look at all that he’s accomplished in North Korea!”

Okay, three things:

1. All that Trump has done with North Korea is take the very first step in the most rudimentary beginnings of peace talks. I fully support him in taking that step, but you can’t legitimately treat it as an “accomplishment” which proves that he is a strategic genius capable of facilitating the impossible task of non-disastrous regime change in Iran.

2. Even if Trump does help bring abiding peace to the Korean Peninsula, it won’t legitimize regime change interventionism in Iran. Hell, even if Trump gets North Korea to denuclearize (and he won’t), it still wouldn’t legitimize regime change interventionism in Iran. US-led regime change interventionism is always disastrous, especially in the easily destabilized geopolitical region of the Middle East.

3. Neocons are always wrong about foreign policy. Always. There’s no reason to believe Trump spearheading a longstanding neocon agenda would work out any better than Bush or any other neocon.

“Well what about the Iranians in Iran who want regime change?”

What about them? The fact that some Iranians want their government changed has nothing to do with you or your government. The Fox News and Washington Post pundits who keep pointing out the fact that Iran, like America, contains people who are unhappy with its current system of government are only ever trying to galvanize the west against Tehran. There’s no good reason for you to be acting as a pro bono CIA propagandist running around telling westerners how great it would be if the Mullahs were gone.

“Well I don’t want the US to intervene, I just want the Iranians to free themselves!”

Two things:

1. This administration is already currently engaged in regime change interventionism in Iran in the form of escalated CIA covert operations and harsh economic sanctions, and its involvement with Iranian terror cult MEK suggests it may run far deeper than that in a similar way to US involvement with extremist groups in Syria, Libya and Ukraine.

2. Why say anything, then? Ever stop to ask yourself why you’re always cheering for Iranians to overthrow their government? Why constantly cheerlead for something which requires zero western involvement? Whom does that help? Do you think Iranians don’t already know that America hates their government?

All you’re doing is helping to signal boost the pro-regime change propaganda that US defense and intelligence agencies have been seeding into American public consciousness for many years. Your “Yay, free Iran!” sentiments aren’t helping Iranians, they’re helping the western propagandists target western audiences. You’re just helping the public get more okay with any actions taken against the Iranian government, in exactly the same way Russiagaters help manufacture support for escalations against Russia.

Iran is Next! #FREEIRAN #Qanon pic.twitter.com/5zdpZ3KJj1

— Sherry Lynn (@mssherrylyn) June 19, 2018

Come on, people. Think harder. This one isn’t difficult. It’s not a random coincidence that you’re all being paced into supporting regime change in the final target named seventeen years ago in General Wesley Clark’s famous “seven countries in five years” list of neocon regime change agendas. The only thing that has changed is the face on the agenda.

Iran is not different from the other regime change targets of Iraq, Libya or Syria. Barack Obama served George W Bush’s third and fourth terms, and Donald Trump is serving his fifth. They were strong-armed in different ways by America’s unelected power establishment into advancing different regime change agendas depending on where their political support came from and public sentiment at the time, but it’s all been pointed at the exact same region for the exact same reasons.

Leave Iran alone. Leave the Iranian people alone. There is no legitimate reason for you to be cheering for regime change in Iran, and anyone who tells you otherwise is an evil piece of shit. Reject them.

____________________________

Internet censorship is getting pretty bad, so best way to keep seeing the stuff I publish is to get on the mailing list for my website, so you’ll get an email notification for everything I publish. My articles and podcasts are entirely reader and listener-funded, so if you enjoyed this piece please consider sharing it around, liking me on Facebook, following my antics on Twitter, checking out my podcast, throwing some money into my hat on Patreon or Paypal, or buying my book Woke: A Field Guide for Utopia Preppers.

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About the Author

Caitlin Johnstone is a brave journalist, political junkie, relentless feminist, champion of the 99 percent. And a powerful counter-propaganda tactician.

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Parting shot—a word from the editors
The Best Definition of Donald Trump We Have Found

In his zeal to prove to his antagonists in the War Party that he is as bloodthirsty as their champion, Hillary Clinton, and more manly than Barack Obama, Trump seems to have gone “play-crazy” -- acting like an unpredictable maniac in order to terrorize the Russians into forcing some kind of dramatic concessions from their Syrian allies, or risk Armageddon.However, the “play-crazy” gambit can only work when the leader is, in real life, a disciplined and intelligent actor, who knows precisely what actual boundaries must not be crossed. That ain’t Donald Trump -- a pitifully shallow and ill-disciplined man, emotionally handicapped by obscene privilege and cognitively crippled by white American chauvinism. By pushing Trump into a corner and demanding that he display his most bellicose self, or be ceaselessly mocked as a “puppet” and minion of Russia, a lesser power, the War Party and its media and clandestine services have created a perfect storm of mayhem that may consume us all.— Glen Ford, Editor in Chief, Black Agenda Report

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Anti-Communist ‘Academia’ ALL LIES – Interview with Prof Grover Furr (Video)

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No other historical figure in modern times—except for Putin—has been the object of such unrelenting demonisation as Stalin.

While the Western media and bourgeois academia have no problem rehabilitating the image of international war criminals like George W Bush and his camarilla, or even Hitler, the venom against hardcore communist leaders, or those who oppose the US capitalist empire, remains fierce and unyielding.

Proletarian TV

Published on Jun 21, 2018

The technique of dressing up anti-communist propaganda as 'objective truth' is the stock in trade of all academic departments and professors of 'Soviet Studies.'

Prof. Furr

From George Orwell to Robert Conquest to Solzenytsin, very few people have bothered to check the sources on which they base their sweeping anti-communist 'conclusions'.

Professor Grover Furr, a talented linguist and Historian, with an interest in the USSR, Stalin and the communist movement, has done just that, and it is his evaluation of ALL the sources and ALL the footnotes that allows him to reach an authoritative opinion on the true value of these 'bibles of anti-communism. It turns out that the overwhelmingly reactionary Polish and Ukrainian sources are ALL biased, or outright fabrications.

Professor Furr has evaluated the most prominent sources of the bourgeois anti-communist myths: "The Great Terror" by R. Conquest and "Bloodlands" by Timothy Snider. What's more he has dissected the most prominent "socialist" sources of anti-communist and anti-Stalin myths - those put forward by Khrushchev in his "secret speech" (secret as far as the citizens of the USSR were concerned, but broadcast widely to the imperialists as a symbol of surrender; and to the international communist movement, demoralising and disorganising it most profoundly to this day), that marked the beginning of the revisionist counter-revolution in the USSR, and the ultimate dissolution of Soviet Socialism into 'market Socialism' and then outright counter-revolutionary gangster capitalism.

He has also broken down the anti-communist, anti-Soviet and anti-Stalin lies of Trotsky and the Trotskyites.

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]n this short interview, Prof Furr talks about the evidence, his research method, and how he came to focus on these most profound areas of human history, which still offer rich sources of revolutionary experience and inspiration to the proletariat and toiling masses, struggling as we are under the yoke of oppressive finance capital and its web of world domination and political and military suppression. In the words of Stalin: "I know that after my death a pile of rubbish will be heaped on my grave, but the wind of History will sooner or later sweep it away without mercy." Prof Furr has made a valuable contribution. We must pick up the political tasks, learn the lessons of the Bolshevik revolutionary movement and experience and build a revolutionary party capable of destroying exploitation of man by man and nation by nation; wiping away the historical crimes of this decadent era and building a bright and optimistic future for humanity. We will follow this interview with his presentation: "Khrushchev lied" and a Q&A session that followed.

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