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We’re Spending 2 Trillion Dollars on Weapons That Must Never Be Used

By Donald A. Smith, PhD. Using my lyrics and Udio.com for the music, I created this military march about the risk and costs of the nuclear modernization program. 14 Oct24

Audio on original  https://progressivememes.org/war/We-are-Spending-Two-Trillion-Dollars-on-Weapons-That-Must-Never-Be-Used.html

We are spending two trillion dollars 
on weapons that must never be used.
Nuclear missile modernization they call it.
The waste and risks cannot be excused.

Two trillion dollars, and what does it buy?
Weapons of extinction to light up the sky.
Corruption and greed keep the war machine alive.
If the weapons are ever used, no one will survive.

Politicians grin, saying "jobs will be made"
While the truth is that we're all being played.
For every job made building weapons of war,
Money spent elsewhere creates two or three times more.

We’re spending 2 trillion dollars on death's quiet plan,
Building bombs in the shadows, buried deep in the land.
Sentinel missiles standing ready to fly.
If they ever launch, we’ll watch the world die.


We tore up arms treaties, walked away from the deals.
Now the money flows faster, greased by power’s appeal.
What’s the true cost when we flirt with the flame?
It’s humanity’s end, in this high-stakes game.

Cost overruns soar and the profits are high.
Politicians line pockets, with kickbacks that satisfy.
What are the opportunity costs? And who’s made more safe?
The end of the world is the risk that we face.

We are pawns in a system that’s broken and blind,
Building weapons of war that will wipe out mankind.
For some jobs and for profit, for power and gain,
We face a future of deprivation, death and pain.

We are spending 2 trillion dollars, but it’s all for the few.
As we edge toward the brink, what can we do?
A system so broken, with the darkest design,
Where we gamble existence, for the sake of their bottom line.

October 15, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts | Leave a comment

One Horrible Year on from October 7 2023, a Bleak Reflection.

1

 larryjhs  September 27, 2024,  https://webstylus.net/2024/09/27/a-bleak-year/?fbclid=IwY2xjawF1TM9leHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHesplRcX1423JwSpof6CAkT303FkdzIX_bEcTdRO5SkXXOkPsj9hdRcULg_aem_XDLROjlruTcdEBP9ZqlzlQ—

The past year since Hamas’ attack has been traumatic for the Australian Jewish community locally and internationally.  The fate of hostages appears to in the hands of Netanyahu, his generals, and extremists, who despite public outrage, has continued to prosecute an unwinnable war.  It is now clear that that Hamas has made numerous offers for a prisoner exchange and ceasefire, but these have been deliberately refused with a preference for war at all costs by the Israeli government.  Israeli Jews who protest are now arrested and beaten up.  This includes hostage members’ families and protesting members of the Israeli establishment. The forces of anti-democratic extreme nationalism and militarism have taken over the country, unimpeded. Sadly, this mentality appears to be held by some Jews locally.

This war against the Palestinian people has now been extended to the West Bank and into Lebanon against Hezbollah for firing rockets.  For liberal Zionists, the sum total of such a military strategy is a betrayal of what they thought was possible, to negotiate a peaceful political settlement for two peoples, in two states.  Zionism as an ideal now appears bereft of a moral foundation and liberal Zionists are flailing.  For non-Zionists and anti-Zionist Jews, it is confirmation of their worst fears about the seemingly inevitable drift of Zionism to extremism of the worst sort.

Some now call what is going on genocide, others reject the term as offensive, and in fact, it is up to the Internal Court of Justice to make the final ruling.  But with the ongoing evidence of incitement to genocide in the Israeli media, we should call a spade a spade. This is a situation where some Israeli Jews are calling for, or taking part in war crimes.

The violence in real time – aided by an almost unimpeded flow of American arms is like nothing we have seen before, and we have rapidly entered into the world of science fiction with remote explosions of pagers and other devices.    

There is always the same excuse for such violence and its “collateral” damage – Hamas or Hezbollah are our eternal enemies and the fight is existential. The only solution is military eradication.  Sadly, this is the script that has been in use for decades, but it has worn thin. This violence is an attempt to permanently destroy anything that amounts to independent Palestinian life.  The Israel State rejects the existence of an independent Palestine. But people’s wars – which is what the revolt in Gaza is about – are not won by military force, as learned in Algeria and Vietnam.  

Israel has committed war crimes in Gaza, far beyond Hamas’ own act on October 7. Israeli soldiers have been filmed rejoicing in destruction and using Palestinians as human shields. Hospitals and schools and universities have been destroyed and journalists killed.  Aljazeerah is closed down. Thousands are arrested for unspecified crimes. Starvation is taking place.  This is not an ordinary war for legitimate defence.  It is something far, far worse.  For Palestinians and their supporters, this is considered to be a continuation of what went on in 1948 and thereafter, but this time, the world sees the brutality on its screens.    


This brutality helps to explain why the atrocity against Jews and foreign workers on October 7 is now considered by many on the left as of secondary importance, when it has become an obsession among Jews, used to reinforce the sense of eternal victimhood. It also helps to explain the simplistic identification by some with Hamas’ actions and its war machine as a justified form of resistance “by any means possible”, when the result has been the superior and brutal murder conducted by Israel.   It also helps to explain why so many have doubted accounts of sex crimes and atrocities by Hamas, when Israel manipulated unclear information from the very beginning.  In war, truth is the first casualty.

Israel/Palestine brings together issues of war and peace, identity, and great power politics as a social media event. It has become a focus for culture and political wars that particularly affect the thinking of alienated young people in a world that appears to be falling apart under the pressure of climate change, political corruption, and technological abuse.  

The brutality of Israel’s assault also helps to explain how the uncritical acceptance of formerly specialist academic theories about colonialism, imperialism, and racism, have found root in many corners of the left internationally, angered by the lack of action by the US and others to stop the carnage.  Palestine has become the cause celebre even a surrogate for all international injustice even though other brutal regional wars and massacres also call for attention.  The difference is of course, that Israel has claimed to be acting as a democracy and in the interests of the West.  At times of course, this anger over Israel has at times segued into explicitly conspiratorial antisemitism, though this is abhorrent to responsible pro-Palestine advocates.  


In fact, the idea that only the colonized, not the colonialist has any rights is totally ahistorical.  Theories should not be set in stone and exclude other insights. In this case, the current take on Israel as a colony reflects theoretical narrowness and the absence of deep knowledge or particular empathy for the peculiar and awful historical circumstances that brought about migration of so many Jews to historical Palestine, as Zionists of one sort or other, or desperate refugees. Once a colony, damned as a colony for ever, including its children. This is determinism.  It has got to a point that the idea of a “conflict” is rejected, since the situation is seen as a pure invasion.   The Jews of modernity are thus regarded as wholly outside interlopers to an imagined Palestine, when in fact Palestine was always multicultural, subject to migration forces and domination by great powers. I’ve thus got a real concern that Palestinian nationalism, for all its talk of future equality, shares a similar thread of intolerance of difference as the Zionist project.  In fact, as the great Palestinian historian and activity Rashid Khalidi said in his The Hundred Years War on Palestine “[T]here are now two peoples in Palestine, irrespective of how they came into being, and the conflict between them cannot be resolved as long as the national existence of each is denied by the other.”

But such subtlety now appears to be rejected by many on the left in Australia with dogmatic calls for particular forms of future arrangements that smack of an antidemocratic form of thought and political control, and are devoid of any understanding of the reality of peacemaking in conflict zones, whatever the cause.  The result, as we all know, has even been a political nightmare even in Australia as accusations are made about the direct complicity of any number of institutions for any connection to Israel and politicians are accused of heinous crimes well out of their direct control. Many Jews feel unsafe whether or not the threat is real.  But as a number of commentators have said, there should be no confusion between the perception of unsafety because of political criticism that upsets a privileged comfort zone and blindness or indifference to the plight of others (as distinct from real antisemitism), and the truly and physically unsafe position of Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank.   

Of course, the intolerance shown by elements of the left to anything identified as “Zionist” deserves condemnation because it leads to stereotypes and oversimplification.  Consequently, I have greatly regretted the lack of support on the left in Australia for the activist Israeli Jewish left which while a minority in the Israel, has taken on the hard task of standing up for Palestine.  This criticism extends to elements of the anti-Zionist Jewish left who appear bereft of any empathy for 50% of the world’s Jews. This lack of support may be due to position that this amounts to “legitimatization” of Jewish -Israeli domination over that of oppressed of Palestinians.  I think this is a wrong position to take. Conflict resolution needs people of goodwill from all sides, whatever the shape of final political arrangements, which I hope are based on principles of full and equal rights for all, the end to the occupation and the apartheid system and restorative justice for Palestinians. Huge political & psychological concessions are required by both sides, something hardliners refuse to admit at both ends.

Of course, actions of major Australian Jewish organisations, aligned to dominant political interests in acting as echoes for hasbarah and attacking Israel’s critics has been destructive.  Their and others’ attack on universities for alleged and widespread antisemitism is also flawed, exaggerated, highly partisan, and a threat to academic freedom.  Crying wolf over antisemitism is destructive to the interests of free political speech.  Likewise, uninformed sloganeering, exaggerations and barbs on both sides, and attacks by Zionist or leftist thugs do nothing to progress social cohesion. They detract from political efforts to alter Australian foreign policy to take a strong stand against the Israeli state. 

Sadly, I may be wrong in all this and we will be stuck with unceasing violence by the military state, a largely compliant population, continuing repression of Palestians and violent blowback while the world stands by. The US will be constrained by internal weakness to do any thing, and there will be an increased fracture between Israel and a fair proportion of world Jewry, while an unrepentant and fanatical faction pours in money and support and exerts political pressure. Bleak Bleak Bleak.
(edited a bit for clarification)
[The image is “Exterminating the cockroach” Yosi Even Kama came up with these posters about the fascist state in 2010 as part of an art project about how things would be in 2023]

October 12, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts | Leave a comment

Nuclear Free Local Authorities want to lament, not ‘celebrate’ nuclear legacy.

NFLAs want to lament, not ‘celebrate’ nuclear legacy

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) has published its first Heritage Vision and Strategy[i] to ‘celebrate the history and cultural heritage of the nuclear industry’, but to the Nuclear Free Local Authorities the history of the industry is rather something to lament.

The NDA claims that the ‘benefits of preserving, safeguarding, and celebrating nuclear heritage are many, ranging from learning lessons of the past so we can support decommissioning and future nuclear developments, to realising significant social value potential by connecting with local communities and other stakeholders’ but the Nuclear Free Local Authorities are concerned that the strategy will only look to capture the ‘fluffy side’ of nuclear history and will disregard cataloguing its ‘sinister side’.

For the history of the nuclear industry is littered with money, scientific and human resources wasted on abortive, failed or delayed nuclear power designs; the major accidents at Windscale and Wylfa[ii] which endangered large parts of Britain; cancer clusters; the employment of civil nuclear facilities to produce plutonium for British nuclear weapons which poisoned Indigenous people and their lands and ruined the health and took the lives of many of the British military personnel involved in the test programme; a disastrous and costly venture into reprocessing; and a legacy of radioactive contamination of land, air, watercourses and seas, and radioactive buildings to demolish and a stockpile of high-level radioactive waste to manage that will cost over £280 Billion of taxpayers money at current prices.

Councillor Lawrence O’Neill, Chair of the NFLA Steering Committee, said: “Glorifying nuclear history by celebrating it, and ignoring its dark side, will only help facilitate the development of yet more nuclear plants in the future by boosting its acceptability at a time when every available penny and every national resource should be focused on building more renewable energy and storage capacity to achieve Net Zero and the Labour Government’s ambition to make Britain a clean energy superpower.”

The NDA opened Nucleus, the Nuclear and Caithness Archives, near the airport in Wick, Caithness in 2017[iii]. With a team of approximately 20 including archivists, preservation experts and support staff, Nucleus holds archives and artefacts from the nuclear industry. The organisation will work with staff from other sections of the NDA and national heritage organisations from England, Scotland, and Wales to deliver the new strategy.

Nucleus is open to the public Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm. Archives may be viewed in our public search room between 10am to 4pm. Visitors are urged to make an appointment and pre-order documents at least two days in advance. Drop-in customers will also be accommodated as far as possible on the day. Documents can be requested under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. Please phone 01925 802077 or email enquiries@nda.gov.uk. Members of the public are also invited to visit our exhibition space located at the front of the building.

Ends://For more information, contact NFLA Secretary Richard Outram by email to richard.outram@manchester.gov.uk

September 19, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts, UK | Leave a comment

The western way of war – Owning the narrative trumps reality

Take, for example, the NATO-orchestrated and equipped incursion into the symbolically significant Kursk Oblast. In terms of a ‘winning narrative’, its appeal to the West is obvious: Ukraine ‘takes the war to into Russia’.

Alastair Crooke, Strategic Culture Foundation, Mon, 26 Aug 2024

War propaganda and feint are as old as the hills. Nothing new. But what is new is that infowar is no longer the adjunct to wider war objectives – but has become an end in and of itself.

The West has come to view ‘owning’ the winning narrative – and presenting the Other’s as clunky, dissonant, and extremist – as being more important than facing facts-on-the ground. Owning the winning narrative is to win, in this view. Virtual ‘victory’ thus trumps ‘real’ reality.

Had the Ukrainian forces succeeded in capturing the Kursk Nuclear Power Station, they then would have had a significant bargaining chip, and might well have syphoned away Russian forces from the steadily collapsing Ukrainian ‘Line’ in Donbas.

And to top it off, (in infowar terms), the western media was prepped and aligned to show President Putin as “frozen” by the surprise incursion, and “wobbling” with anxiety that the Russian public would turn against him in their anger at the humiliation.

Bill Burns, head of CIA, opined that “Russia would offer no concessions on Ukraine, until Putin’s over-confidence was challenged, and Ukraine could show strength“. Other U.S. officials added that the Kursk incursion – in itself – would not bring Russia to the negotiating table; It would be necessary to build on the Kursk operation with other daring operations (to shake Moscow’s sang froid).

Of course, the overall aim was to show Russia as fragile and vulnerable, in line with the narrative that, at any moment Russia, could crack apart and scatter to the wind, in fragments. Leaving the West as winner, of course.

In fact, the Kursk incursion was a huge NATO gamble: It involved mortgaging Ukraine’s military reserves and armour, as chips on the roulette table, as a bet that an ephemeral success in Kursk would upend the strategic balance. The bet was lost, and the chips forfeit.

So, war becomes rather the setting for imposing ideological alignment across a wide global alliance and enforcing it via compliant media.

This objective enjoys a higher priority than, say, ensuring a manufacturing capacity sufficient to sustain military objectives. Crafting an imagined ‘reality’ has taken precedence over shaping the ground reality.

The point here is that this approach – being a function of whole of society alignment (both at home and abroad) – creates entrapments into false realities, false expectations, from which an exit (when such becomes necessary), turns near impossible, precisely because imposed alignment has ossified public sentiment. The possibility for a State to change course as events unfold becomes curtailed or lost, and the accurate reading of facts on the ground veers toward the politically correct and away from reality.

The cumulative effect of ‘a winning virtual narrative’ holds the risk nonetheless, of sliding incrementally toward inadvertent ‘real war’.

Take, for example, the NATO-orchestrated and equipped incursion into the symbolically significant Kursk Oblast. In terms of a ‘winning narrative’, its appeal to the West is obvious: Ukraine ‘takes the war to into Russia’.

Plainly put, this Kursk affair exemplifies the West’s problem with ‘winning narratives’: Their inherent flaw is that they are grounded in emotivism and eschew argumentation. Inevitably, they are simplistic. They are simply intended to fuel a ‘whole of society’ common alignment. Which is to say that across MSM; business, federal agencies, NGOs and the security sector, all should adhere to opposing all ‘extremisms’ threatening ‘our democracy’.

This aim, of itself, dictates that the narrative be undemanding and relatively uncontentious: ‘Our Democracy, Our Values and Our Consensus’. The Democratic National Convention, for example, embraces ‘Joy’ (repeated endlessly), ‘moving Forward’ and ‘opposing weirdness’ as key statements. They are banal, however, these memes are given their energy and momentum, not by content so much, as by the deliberate Hollywood setting lending them razzamatazz and glamour.

It is not hard to see how this one-dimensional zeitgeist may have contributed to the U.S. and its allies’ misreading the impact of today’s Kursk ‘daring adventure’ on ordinary Russians.

‘Kursk’ has history. In 1943, Germany invaded Russia in Kursk to divert from its own losses, with Germany ultimately defeated at the Battle of Kursk. The return of German military equipment to the environs of Kursk must have left many gaping; the current battlefield around the town of Sudzha is precisely the spot where, in 1943, the Soviet 38th and 40th armies coiled for a counteroffensive against the German 4th Army.

Over the centuries, Russia has been variously attacked on its vulnerable flank from the West. And more recently by Napoleon and Hitler. Unsurprisingly, Russians are acutely sensitive to this bloody history. Did Bill Burns et al think this through? Did they imagine that NATO invading Russia itself would make Putin feel ‘challenged’, and that with one further shove, he would fold, and agree to a ‘frozen’ outcome in Ukraine – with the latter entering NATO? Maybe they did.

Ultimately the message that western services sent was that the West (NATO) is coming for Russia. This is the meaning of deliberately choosing Kursk. Reading the runes of Bill Burns message says prepare for war with NATO.

Just to be clear, this genre of ‘winning narrative’ surrounding Kursk is neither deceit nor feint. The Minsk Accords were examples of deceit, but they were deceits grounded in rational strategy (i.e. they were historically normal). The Minsk deceits were intended to buy the West time to further Ukraine’s militarisation – before attacking the Donbas. The deceit worked, but only at the price of a rupture of trust between Russia and the West. The Minsk deceits however, also accelerated an end to the 200-year era of the westification of Russia.

Kursk rather, is a different ‘fish’. It is grounded in the notions of western exceptionalism. The West perceives itself as tacking to ‘the right side of History’. ‘Winning narratives’ essentially assert – in secular format – the inevitability of the western eschatological Mission for global redemption and convergence. In this new narrative context, facts-on-the-ground become mere irritants, and not realities that must be taken into account.

This their Achilles’ Heel.

The DNC convention in Chicago however, underscored a further concern:………………………………………………………………….

The Kursk ploy no doubt seemed clever and audacious to London and Washington. Yet with what result? It achieved neither objective of taking Kursk NPP, nor of syphoning Russian troops from the Contact Line. The Ukrainian presence in the Kursk Oblast will be eliminated.

What it did do, however, is put an end to all prospects of an eventual negotiated settlement in Ukraine. Distrust of the U.S. in Russia is now absolute. It has made Moscow more determined to prosecute the special operation to conclusion. German equipment visible in Kursk has raised old ghosts, and consolidated awareness of the hostile western intentions toward Russia. ‘Never again’ is the unspoken riposte.  https://www.sott.net/article/494279-The-western-way-of-war-Owning-the-narrative-trumps-reality

August 28, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts, Ukraine, USA | Leave a comment

Farewell, the American Century

What flag-wavers tend to leave out of their account of the American Century is not only the contributions of others, but the various missteps perpetrated by the United States — missteps, it should be noted, that spawned many of the problems bedeviling us today.

Rewriting the Past by Adding In What’s Been Left Out

By Andrew Bacevich  TomDispatch, 25 Aug 24

In a recent column, the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen wrote, “What Henry Luce called ‘the American Century’ is over.” Cohen is right. All that remains is to drive a stake through the heart of Luce’s pernicious creation, lest it come back to life. This promises to take some doing.

To solve our problems requires that we see ourselves as we really are. And that requires shedding, once and for all, the illusions embodied in the American Century.

When the Time-Life publisher coined his famous phrase, his intent was to prod his fellow citizens into action. Appearing in the February 7, 1941 issue of Life, his essay, “The American Century,” hit the newsstands at a moment when the world was in the throes of a vast crisis. A war in Europe had gone disastrously awry. A second almost equally dangerous conflict was unfolding in the Far East. Aggressors were on the march.

With the fate of democracy hanging in the balance, Americans diddled. Luce urged them to get off the dime. More than that, he summoned them to “accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world… to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.”

Read today, Luce’s essay, with its strange mix of chauvinism, religiosity, and bombast (“We must now undertake to be the Good Samaritan to the entire world…”), does not stand up well. Yet the phrase “American Century” stuck and has enjoyed a remarkable run. It stands in relation to the contemporary era much as “Victorian Age” does to the nineteenth century. In one pithy phrase, it captures (or at least seems to capture) the essence of some defining truth: America as alpha and omega, source of salvation and sustenance, vanguard of history, guiding spirit and inspiration for all humankind.

In its classic formulation, the central theme of the American Century has been one of righteousness overcoming evil. The United States (above all the U.S. military) made that triumph possible. When, having been given a final nudge on December 7, 1941, Americans finally accepted their duty to lead, they saved the world from successive diabolical totalitarianisms. In doing so, the U.S. not only preserved the possibility of human freedom but modeled what freedom ought to look like.

Thank You, Comrades

So goes the preferred narrative of the American Century, as recounted by its celebrants.

The problems with this account are two-fold. First, it claims for the United States excessive credit. Second, it excludes, ignores, or trivializes matters at odds with the triumphal story-line.

The net effect is to perpetuate an array of illusions that, whatever their value in prior decades, have long since outlived their usefulness. In short, the persistence of this self-congratulatory account deprives Americans of self-awareness, hindering our efforts to navigate the treacherous waters in which the country finds itself at present. Bluntly, we are perpetuating a mythic version of the past that never even approximated reality and today has become downright malignant. Although Richard Cohen may be right in declaring the American Century over, the American people — and especially the American political class — still remain in its thrall.

Constructing a past usable to the present requires a willingness to include much that the American Century leaves out.

For example, to the extent that the demolition of totalitarianism deserves to be seen as a prominent theme of contemporary history (and it does), the primary credit for that achievement surely belongs to the Soviet Union. When it came to defeating the Third Reich, the Soviets bore by far the preponderant burden, sustaining 65% of all Allied deaths in World War II.

By comparison, the United States suffered 2% of those losses, for which any American whose father or grandfather served in and survived that war should be saying: Thank you, Comrade Stalin.

For the United States to claim credit for destroying the Wehrmacht is the equivalent of Toyota claiming credit for inventing the automobile. We entered the game late and then shrewdly scooped up more than our fair share of the winnings. The true “Greatest Generation” is the one that willingly expended millions of their fellow Russians while killing millions of German soldiers.

Hard on the heels of World War II came the Cold War, during which erstwhile allies became rivals. Once again, after a decades-long struggle, the United States came out on top…………………………………………….

What flag-wavers tend to leave out of their account of the American Century is not only the contributions of others, but the various missteps perpetrated by the United States — missteps, it should be noted, that spawned many of the problems bedeviling us today.

The instances of folly and criminality bearing the label “made-in-Washington” may not rank up there with the Armenian genocide, the Bolshevik Revolution, the appeasement of Adolf Hitler, or the Holocaust, but they sure don’t qualify as small change. To give them their due is necessarily to render the standard account of the American Century untenable.

Here are several examples, each one familiar, even if its implications for the problems we face today are studiously ignored:

Cuba. In 1898, the United States went to war with Spain for the proclaimed purpose of liberating the so-called Pearl of the Antilles. When that brief war ended, Washington reneged on its promise. If there actually has been an American Century, it begins here, with the U.S. government breaking a solemn commitment, while baldly insisting otherwise. By converting Cuba into a protectorate, the United States set in motion a long train of events leading eventually to the rise of Fidel Castro, the Bay of Pigs, Operation Mongoose, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and even today’s Guantanamo Bay prison camp. The line connecting these various developments may not be a straight one, given the many twists and turns along the way, but the dots do connect.

The Bomb.…………………..the role the United States played in afflicting humankind with this scourge.

The United States invented the bomb. The United States — alone among members of the nuclear club — actually employed it as a weapon of war. The U.S. led the way in defining nuclear-strike capacity as the benchmark of power in the postwar world, leaving other powers like the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China scrambling to catch up. Today, the U.S. still maintains an enormous nuclear arsenal at the ready and adamantly refuses to commit itself to a no-first-use policy, even as it professes its horror at the prospect of some other nation doing as the United States itself has done.

Iran. Extending his hand to Tehran, President Obama has invited those who govern the Islamic republic to “unclench their fists.” Yet to a considerable degree, those clenched fists are of our own making………………….

Afghanistan.………………………………………………………………..

……………………………………..All we know for sure is that policies concocted in Washington by reputedly savvy statesmen now look exceedingly ill-advised.

What are we to make of these blunders? The temptation may be to avert our gaze, thereby preserving the reassuring tale of the American Century. We should avoid that temptation and take the opposite course, acknowledging openly, freely, and unabashedly where we have gone wrong. We should carve such acknowledgments into the face of a new monument smack in the middle of the Mall in Washington: We blew it. We screwed the pooch. We caught a case of the stupids. We got it ass-backwards.

Only through the exercise of candor might we avoid replicating such mistakes.

……………………………………………………….. apologize to them, but for our own good — to free ourselves from the accumulated conceits of the American Century and to acknowledge that the United States participated fully in the barbarism, folly, and tragedy that defines our time. For those sins, we must hold ourselves accountable.  https://tomdispatch.com/farewell-the-american-century-2/

August 27, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts, history, USA | Leave a comment

The UK nuclear lobby’s festival of joyous propaganda.

The Sizewell C team has been raising awareness of the new nuclear power
project at community events across the county this summer. From The Suffolk
Show and the First Light Festival to Sotterley Country Fair, the team have
been engaging with thousands of people across the county as the project
continues to make significant progress.

“We’re really lucky in Suffolk to
have some of the best summer festivals and community events in the
country,” says Marjorie Barnes, Head of Regional External Affairs and
Development, Sizewell C. This week, Sizewell C volunteers attended the
Aldeburgh Carnival, and in September the team will be at the first Leiston
Book Festival.

Sizewell C 23rd Aug 2024

Keeping communities up to date at a summer of Suffolk events

August 26, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts, UK | Leave a comment

The pictures worth a thousand words

Canada and the Atom Bomb Exhibition

Canada’s little-known role in atomic bombings on display

By Anton Wagner, 4 Aug 24, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/08/04/the-pictures-worth-a-thousand-words/

The Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition launched a “Canada and the Atom Bomb” photo exhibition inside Toronto City Hall on August 2. The exhibition of 100 photographs reveals the Canadian government’s participation in the American Manhattan Project that developed the atom bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. 

The exhibition can be viewed in its entirety online at the Toronto Metropolitan University website.

It documents how the Eldorado Mining and Refining Company extracted uranium ore at Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories in the late 1930s and shipped the ore to its refinery in Port Hope, Ontario, for sale to the Americans. 

Images by the Montreal photographer Robert Del Tredici focus on the Dene hunters and trappers at Great Bear Lake who were hired by Eldorado to carry the sacks of radioactive ore on their backs for loading onto barges that transported the ore to Port Hope. Many of them subsequently died of cancer. 

Before his death in 1940, the Dene spiritual leader Louis Ayah had prophesied that such an illness would befall the Dene because of white men mining on Dene territory. Ayah also prophesied a nuclear holocaust that would end human civilization. 

Prime Minister Mackenzie King hosted President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill in Quebec City in 1943 where they agreed to have Canada participate in the production of the atom bomb. 

The exhibition highlights this participation by the Canadian government, scientists, industry, and nuclear research laboratories. Posters from the Hiroshima Peace Museum show the death and destruction in the two bombed cities. The exhibition includes five images by Yoshito Matsushige, the only photographer who took pictures in Hiroshima the day the atom bomb exploded overhead.   

“Canada and the Atom Bomb” concludes with photographs showing the efforts by peace activists to persuade Toronto City Council to participate in the world-wide movement to abolish nuclear weapons. In 2017, City Council reaffirmed Toronto as a Nuclear Weapons-Free Zone and called on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to have Canada ratify the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Setsuko Thurlow accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons in Oslo, Norway, in December 2017. A Hiroshima survivor, Thurlow, now 92, attended the opening of the “Canada and the Atom Bomb” exhibition on August 2. She will also speak at the annual August 6 commemoration at the Toronto City Hall Peace Garden to urge that Canada sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

Anton Wagner is with the Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition.

August 6, 2024 Posted by | Canada, culture and arts | Leave a comment

2-3 August, and 6-8 August Hiroshima Seen: Survivors and Witnesses Picture the Nuclear Age –

Learn more by exploring the galleries:

Hiroshima Seen

Canada and the Atom Bomb

On August 6th, 1945, one U.S. B29 bomber dropped one bomb, code-named Little Boy, on the city of Hiroshima at 8:15 a.m. without warning. The destruction it loosened upon the city’s 300,000 inhabitants was unimaginable. Never had such a fierce weapon existed: its flash released heat up to one million degrees centigrade, the shock wave toppled some 60,000 buildings, a firestorm erupted that burned four square miles. Radioactive oily black rain fell—and many gasping for water opened their mouths to drink it.

Some 70,000 people perished instantly or within days, due to radiation poisoning and other grave injuries; 70,000 more died before the end of the year. Those exposed to radioactivity faced punishing illnesses, cancers, and disorders such as bone crushing fatigue and recurring bleeding. Due to the censorship imposed over the seven-year U.S. Occupation, personal stories were repressed, but not forgotten. More than 25 years after the bombing, survivors were asked to make drawings of what they remembered of that day, reflecting their harrowing memories. These images were donated to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, whose mission is to witness and educate about the devastating effects of nuclear warfare—and to prevent its ever happening again.

This exhibition is co-sponsored by Hiroshima Nagasaki Day Coalition (HNDC) and Artspace Gallery. Images are courtesy of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum. Curated by Katy McCormick.


Read the complete Curatorial Statement here

August 2, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts | Leave a comment

How Nato seduced the European Left. The anti-war movement has fallen for a progressive circus.

UnHerd, Lily Lynch, MAY 16, 2023 

In January 2018, Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg held an unprecedented press conference with Angelina Jolie. While InStyle reported that Jolie “was dressed in a black off-the-shoulder sheath dress, a matching capelet and classic pumps (also black)”, there was a deeper purpose to this meeting: sexual violence in war. The pair had just co-authored a piece for the Guardian entitled “Why NATO must defend women’s rights”. The timing was significant. At the height of the #MeToo movement, the most powerful military alliance in the world had become a feminist ally. “Ending gender-based violence is a vital issue of peace and security as well as of social justice,” they wrote. “NATO can be a leader in this effort.”

This was a new and progressive face for Nato, the same one it has since used to seduce much of the European Left. Previously, in the Nordic countries, Atlanticists have had to sell war and militarism to largely pacifist publics. This was achieved in part by presenting Nato not as a rapacious, pro-war military alliance, but as an enlightened, “progressive” peace alliance. As Timothy Garton Ash effused in the Guardian in 2002, “NATO has become a European peace movement” where one could watch “John Lennon meet George Bush”. Today, by contrast, following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Sweden and Finland abandoned their long-standing traditions of neutrality and opted for membership. Nato is portrayed as a military alliance — and Ukraine a war­ — that even former pacifists can get behind. All its proponents seem to be singing is “Give War a Chance”.

The Jolie campaign marked a dramatic turn in what Katharine A.M. Wright and Annika Bergman Rosamond call “Nato’s strategic narrative” in several ways. First, the alliance embraced celebrity star power for the first time, imbuing its unremarkable brand with elite glamour and beauty. Jolie’s star power meant that the alluring images of the event reached apolitical audiences with little knowledge of Nato. Second, the partnership seemed to usher in an era in which women’s rights, gendered violence and feminism would assume a more prominent role in Nato rhetoric. Since then, and especially in the past 12 months, telegenic female leaders such as the Finnish Prime Minister, Sanna Marin, German Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, and Estonian Prime Minister, Kaja Kallas, have increasingly served as the spokespersons of enlightened militarism in Europe. The alliance has also intensified its engagement with popular culture, new technologies, and youth influencers.

Of course, Nato has always been PR-conscious, and has long engaged culture, entertainment, and the arts. Who could forget the 1999 album Distant Early Warning from electronic duo Icebreaker International, recorded with funding from the defunct “NATOarts” and inspired by the radar stations along Alaska and Canada’s northern periphery built to alert Nato of an incoming Soviet nuclear strike? Or the 2007 feature film HQ, produced by Nato’s public diplomacy division, which depicts life inside the alliance and a mock diplomatic response to a crisis in the fictional state of Seismania? Just about everyone it turns out. But what makes Nato’s more recent strategic turn so effective is that it has successfully echoed candidate countries’ progressive local traditions and identities.

No political party in Europe better exemplifies the shift from militant pacifism to ardent pro-war Atlanticism than the German Greens. Most of the original Greens had been radicals during the student protests of 1968; many had demonstrated against American wars. The early Greens advocated for West Germany’s withdrawal from Nato. But as the founding members entered middle age, fissures began to appear in the party that would one day tear it apart. Two camps began to coalesce: the “Realos” were the moderate Greens, politically pragmatists. The “Fundis” were the radical, uncompromising camp; they wanted the party to remain faithful to its fundamental values no matter what.

…………………………………………………………………………………. Earlier this year, Germany’s Federal Foreign Office also rolled out a new “Feminist Foreign Policy”, the latest of several European foreign ministries to have done so. This new orientation, also adopted by France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and Spain, paints cosmopolitan militarism with a faux-radical feminist gloss, opening the domain of war and security to women’s rights activists. No-nonsense feminist leaders are depicted as the ideal foil to authoritarian “strongmen”.

Sweden was the first country to adopt such a policy in 2014, permitting it to project its longstanding state feminism abroad, and to assume a new moral posture in the international arena. Domestically, there were positive Atlanticist stories in women’s magazines. In the “Mama” section of the Swedish newspaper Expressen, targeted at female readers, one interview with Angelina Jolie emphasised that Nato can protect women from sexual violence in war. Jolie also stressed that there is little difference between humanitarian aid workers and Nato soldiers, as they “are striving towards the same goal: peace”.

…………………….. Nato’s “Protect the Future” campaign. This year it included a graphic novel competition for young artists. The alliance also courted dozens of influencers with large followings on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and brought them out to the headquarters in Brussels. Other influencers were dispatched to last year’s Nato Summit in Madrid, where they were asked to create content for their audiences.

The European Left has been utterly captivated by this show. Following the path taken by the German Greens, major Left-wing parties have abandoned military neutrality and opposition to war and now champion Nato. It is a stunning reversal. During the Cold War, the European Left organised mass protests attended by millions against US-led militarism and Nato’s deployment of Pershing-II and cruise missiles in Europe. Today, little more than the hollowed-out radical rhetoric remains. With hardly any remaining opposition to Nato left in Europe, and the alliance’s creeping expansion beyond the Euro-Atlantic area, its hegemony is now nearly absolute.  https://unherd.com/2023/05/how-nato-seduced-the-european-left/

June 4, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts, EUROPE | Leave a comment

The US Empire Isn’t A Government That Runs Nonstop Wars, It’s A Nonstop War That Runs A Government

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, JUN 01, 2024,

https://open.substack.com/pub/caitlinjohnstone/p/the-us-empire-isnt-a-government-that?r=cqey&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

It clears up a lot of confusion when you understand that the US empire is not a national government which happens to run nonstop military operations, it’s a nonstop military operation that happens to run a national government.

The wars are not designed to serve the interests of the United States, the United States is designed to serve the interests of the wars. The US as a country is just a source of funding, personnel, resources and diplomatic cover for a nonstop campaign to dominate the planet with mass military violence and the threat thereof. 

This campaign is not waged to benefit the American people or their security, but to benefit the loose international alliance of plutocrats and unelected empire managers whose wealth and power are premised on the world order of continuous violence, exploitation and extraction which the campaign of global domination upholds. This campaign of global domination and its manifestations as a whole may be referred to as the US empire, which has very little in common with the US as an individual nation

Until you understand this, nothing the US government or the US war machine does will make sense. You won’t understand why military operations are being waged which don’t seem to benefit the American people in any way, and which if anything actually harm the national security interests of the United States. You won’t understand why US foreign policy remains the same no matter who’s in office, regardless of party or platform. You won’t understand why the US and its allies do crazy things that otherwise make no sense for governments to do, like backing an increasingly unpopular genocide in Gaza, starting a cold war with China, or tempting nuclear armageddon with Russia.

And the answer is that these aggressions are not happening because they benefit the US as a nation, or even because they serve the political agendas of any elected officials. The nonstop violence is a means to a completely different end, and is almost an end in and of itself — benefiting war profiteers, shoring up geostrategic control, and expanding the sphere of the US empire’s particular brand of global capitalism.

There’s the nonstop worldwide military operation, and then there’s the theatrical set pieces of an official government slapped together in the foreground which we’re all meant to pretend has something to do with all the wars and militarism we are seeing. In reality the war machine just does what it’s going to do while the official elected suits in Washington put on these performances where they argue about abortion and Donald Trump to make it look like the US has a real government that’s making real decisions.

It was decided long ago that war is too important to be left to the will of the electorate, so now there’s this fake dummy political system that the American people are given to play with so they won’t meddle with the gears of the imperial machine. The local inhabitants of the hub of the globe-spanning empire are kept too propagandized, entertained, distracted, busy, poor, and sick to have a truth-based relationship with what’s being done in their name around the world, and if they do make some space in their life to become politically engaged they are herded into a kayfabe two-party system where both factions support war, militarism, imperialism, plutocracy and ecocidal capitalism but put immense amounts of energy into empty culture warring over issues that nobody with any real power cares about.

Trying to talk about this to people who are still plugged into the mainstream imperial worldview is like if Amazon had a children’s cartoon show called Andy Amazon & Friends, and the public believed the cartoon show was Amazon — they didn’t know anything about the sprawling trillionaire megacorporation that’s devouring the global economy. You’d try to talk about the gargantuan e-commerce company and they’d think you were talking about the cartoon, and object that what you’re saying doesn’t line up with what they know about the show and its characters. 

Once you see the corporation behind the cartoon, once you see the empire behind the performative puppet show of official politics, you see it everywhere. You see it in the movements of the imperial war machine. You see it in the news headlines. You see it in the phony justifications and narratives that are being spouted by the western political-media class. You see it in our education system. You see it throughout our vapid mainstream western culture of interminable diversion and capitalist indoctrination.

And you stop caring about the puppet show. You stop caring about presidential elections, about Stormy Daniels and Donald Trump, about the culture war wedge issue of the day and the latest hot topic that everyone’s saying you need to take a position on. It becomes as interesting to you as some Youtube video your kid has on in the background when you’re busy dealing with a home emergency.

And the behavior of the empire absolutely is an emergency. The escalations against Russia and China that these freaks are pushing have the world on a trajectory that’s going to get us all killed, and the horrors they are inflicting in Gaza and elsewhere are creating a nightmare on earth right here and now. The empire is only getting crazier and more violent as its planetary domination becomes more challenged, and until people can see it for what it really is, it’s going to be very hard to build up the necessary public opposition against it to use the power of our numbers to force them to stop.

June 4, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Germany admits to expelling Ukrainian soldiers over Nazi symbols

 https://www.sott.net/article/491499-Germany-admits-to-expelling-Ukrainian-soldiers-over-Nazi-symbols 17 May 24v

The German government revealed on Wednesday that it has expelled seven Ukrainian troops undergoing military training in the country for sporting Nazi symbols. Berlin, however, attempted to downplay the potential threat posed by Ukrainian far-right nationalists to any future peace process between Kiev and Moscow.

According to the German military’s estimates, “around 10,000 Ukrainian soldiers were trained by German and multinational units on German soil in 2023.” Under the European Union Military Assistance Mission Ukraine (EUMAM UA) established in November 2022, German instructors and those from several other member states have trained Ukrainian military personnel.

In a reply to an inquiry made by the right-wing Alternative for Germany Party (AFD), the German government wrote that “within the framework of training for the Ukrainian armed forces conducted by the Bundeswehr, seven cases have been established where soldiers were wearing far-right extremist symbols.”

The document further revealed that these troops had been removed from the course and sent home.

Incoming Ukrainian military personnel are warned against the use of Nazi insignias on arrival, the German government said.

The reply noted that Berlin “sees no threat to a possible peace process in Ukraine [posed] by Ukrainian extremist nationalists.”

“It is Russia’s imperialism that underlies the illegal Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, and that threatens security in Europe,” the document said.

Upon the launch of Russia’s military operation against the neighboring state in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin listed the “denazification” of Ukraine as one of Moscow’s main goals. Russian officials have for years expressed concern over the growing role of far-right elements within the Ukrainian government and military.

Moscow has also claimed that some units within Kiev’s army are made up almost exclusively of neo-Nazis.

Ukraine’s glorification of WWII-era nationalist partisans who collaborated with Nazi Germany, as well as Ukrainian SS units, has also been condemned not only by Russia, but also neighboring Poland.

Despite these criticisms, monuments to honor these figures continue to be erected across Ukraine, with streets renamed after them in some cases as well.

Comment: What with Germany’s unwavering support for the war on Russia, as well as Israel’s genocide in Gaza, one can imagine that Berlin must have been rather reluctant to do the above:

May 18, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts, Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Amidst genocide and war, anti-Zionism protesters are demonised as ‘extremists’

Independent Australia, By Martin Hirst | 13 May 2024

As human rights experts warn of an ongoing genocide in Gaza, any opposition to Zionism is being egregiously labelled as extremism, Dr Martin Hirst writes.

STUDENT PROTESTERS around the world are being demonised by politicians, bureaucrats and the news media for taking a stand against genocide.

This is just an updated version of the moral panic playbook that conservatives use to demonise young people who don’t toe the establishment line.

In the last six weeks, student protests have exploded around the world on a scale not seen since the Vietnam Moratorium almost 60 years ago. These students are protesting against what human rights experts are not hesitating to call a genocide in Gaza.

This reporter knows some of the Australian leaders of these protests quite well, organising politically with them as a long-term member of Left-wing group Socialist Alternative and a writer for its newspaper, Red Flag.

We know that none of these outstanding young activists are antisemitic. We know they are better educated about Palestine from a contemporary and historical perspective than our Prime Minister and most politicians…………………………………………………

We know that these young people are on the right side of history.

We also know that attempts by political leaders, intelligence agencies, Zionist hacks, the police and some university administrators to brand these brave students as violent, dangerous and antisemitic is a bald lie.

It is the lie itself that is dangerous because it actually emboldens Zionist thugs to launch ever-more violent attacks on student encampments, causing injury and mayhem.

It is also dangerous because it is a serious attempt – carried out with planning and intent – to criminalise anti-genocide activists and to criminalise their right to political speech.

What is happening in Australia, across Europe and in the United States is the creation of a state of emergency based on these dangerous lies. Right in front of our eyes, pro-Israel elements of the ruling class are establishing the conditions for a new wave of moral panic.

Students are being demonised as the 21st-Century version of the “folk devil“. The protests are being compared to 1930s Germany – which most people who make this comparison know absolutely fuck-all about – and they are being used to launch a McCarthyite witch hunt against students and academics who stand up for Palestine.

There’s nothing new about moral panics — the phrase was coined by British sociologist Stanley Cohen in the 1970s to describe the clamour for the state to take action against “Mods” and “Rockers” — two rival youth subcultures that enjoyed different types of music.

Interestingly, the Pogroms against Jews that swept Europe in the 1920s were a form of moral panic…………………………………………………………………………………………………

A moral panic only works when those in power – who feel threatened by resistance from below – can enlist loyal handmaidens in the media to prosecute their case and amplify their fear-mongering. Now, these tactics of intimidation are aimed at silencing dissent and any vocal opposition to the Israeli slaughter in Gaza.

Make no mistake, it is happening. Take it seriously because the Zionists and the political establishment are taking it seriously……………………………………………………

Failed Liberal Minister Josh Frydenberg helped to produce a “documentary” helpfully explaining to Sky News audiences how Australia is sliding into Nazi-era pogroms because of the threat to civil order posed by the student encampments and the wider anti-genocide movement.

In the last week alone, there has been a slew of opinion columns and news pieces in The Australian slandering student encampments while ignoring the attacks mounted on them by Zionist thugs.

Andrew Bolt and the usual list of suspects are apoplectic with rage that university administrators haven’t (yet) moved to shut down the protests.

However, the universities are beginning to move. The administration at Monash University in Melbourne is demanding students remove ‘Zionists not welcome’ signs from around their encampment because of some spurious “legal advice” that it is vilification.

Police have been allowed to install surveillance cameras overlooking the Monash encampment. Vice Chancellors from the Group of Eight — Australia’s richest universities — have asked Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to advise them if the slogans used in the encampments are “hate speech”.

This is particularly egregious because Dreyfus himself is a Zionist. Dreyfus declined to provide legal advice but urged people who feel offended to lodge complaints under Section 18a of the Racial Discrimination Act. …………………………………………………..

It is too early to tell where all of this will end, but we can confidently predict that the Labor Party will support Sarah Henderson’s call for a Senate inquiry.

Anthony Albanese is fuelling the moral panic with apparent joy. He is reported to have told a room full of senior Zionist elders and student leaders that he believes the campus protests are led by outside agitators.

Helpfully, he was able to name them too. It’s all “the Trots‘ fault”.

This is deeply ironic for two reasons:

Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky was a Jew and when he fell foul of the Stalinist regime, his Jewish heritage was used against him to launch a moral panic that even spread to Australia and poisoned the minds of many good Communist Party members, including the artist Noel Counihan who famously called Trotsky a “fascist gangster”.

Albanese has also been demonised as a Trotskyist by Murdoch hacks and (former Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop) “Kerosene Bronny“…………….. https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/amidst-genocide-and-war-anti-zionism-protesters-are-demonised-as-extremists,18594

May 15, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts, politics | Leave a comment

Israel’s Defenders Talk So Much About Feelings Because They Can’t Talk About Facts

Last October the imperial media suddenly got a lot less interested in reporting on the facts on the ground with Israel and Gaza, and a whole lot more interested in reporting on how some groups of people feel about it instead. 

CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, MAY 04, 2024,  https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/israels-defenders-talk-so-much-about?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=144302441&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

The Guardian has an article out titled “Israelis voice sadness and defiance over Gaza protests on US campuses”, subtitled “People in Jerusalem express little sympathy with anti-war demonstrators, with some accusing them of hatred for Israel”.

It’s exactly what it sounds like: an entire news report about the feelings that some Israelis are feeling in their feely bits about protests in another country on the other side of the world. The Guardian’s Jason Burke asked some random people about their feelings outside a theater in Jerusalem, and then presented this weird nothing thing as relevant news reporting.

“We didn’t know so many people hated Israel,” some random security guard is quoted as saying.

“Such feelings appear widespread among the Jewish majority in Israel, seven months after war was triggered by surprise attacks launched by Hamas into the south of the country in which about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, were killed and 250 taken hostage,” writes Burke.

“Jewish Israelis interviewed by the Guardian this week blame outrage overseas on misinformation, ignorance, historical hostility from international institutions such as the UN, global ‘double standards’ and entrenched antisemitism,” Burke informs us.

If you’re just tuning in, it might seem odd to you that a major news outlet would publish a story about the emotions that some Israelis are feeling about foreign protests against an active genocide being committed by their country. After all, this is not a news story. A story about how some people’s feelings are feeling is not news, and is not journalism. 

But that’s exactly what the last seven months have looked like in the imperial media: a nonstop fixation on feelings instead of facts. Israelis have upset feelings about anti-genocide protests. Western Jews have upset feelings at campus demonstrators. Biden has upset feelings at Netanyahu. Last October the imperial media suddenly got a lot less interested in reporting on the facts on the ground with Israel and Gaza, and a whole lot more interested in reporting on how some groups of people feel about it instead. 

Western reporters, pundits, politicians and officials cannot stop talking about this. The feelings of Israelis and western Jews are not only given more importance than the feelings of Palestinians or any other group, they are given more importance than Palestinian lives. Some Zionist kid pretending to feel “threatened” on an Ivy League campus will get more coverage than the daily massacres that have been occurring in the densely-packed city of Rafah.

Watch Matt Orfalea’s latest video about the deluge of coddling, cooing media coverage that was given to a Zionist activist who falsely pretended to have been “stabbed in the eye” by a pro-Palestine activist for a good example of this behavior:

Israel is the only issue where the western political-media class treats people’s feelings as a matter of supreme importance.

If you’re a stressed-out single parent struggling to pay bills and keep a roof over your kids’ head, they don’t care about your feelings.

If you’re an American who’s been cast into destitution and homelessness by medical bills, they don’t care about your feelings.

If you’re a Palestinian whose apartment complex was bombed with your entire family inside, they definitely don’t care about your feelings.

But if you’re a western Zionist who doesn’t like the cognitive dissonance that comes with encountering anti-genocide protesters, or even if you’re an Israeli who’s upset about anti-genocide protests in whole other country on the other side of the planet, they’re very, very interested in your feelings.

This is of course because the west’s unconditional support for Israel cannot be defended through facts, so the narrative control needs to focus instead on one nonstop appeal to emotion fallacy. Their position is so gross and indefensible that all they have left is babbling about some select people having upset feelings and holding those feelings as more important than stopping an active genocide.

The propagandists and empire managers don’t have facts on their side and don’t have morality on their side, so they attempt to manipulate by pulling on the heart strings using sympathy and compassion. They appeal to some of the healthiest impulses within us in order to dupe us into supporting some of the most evil actions the world has ever seen.

Which is an absolutely disgusting thing to do, naturally. But, again, it’s all these freaks have left.

May 6, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts, Israel | Leave a comment

UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities to join new “Rock Solid2” art exhibition 

The UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities Secretary will be joining Cumbrian artists and activists at the launch of a new art exhibition at Kendal Museum next month.

Rock Solid 2 has been organised by co-ordinator and artist Marianne Birkby. Marianne supports local campaign groups Radiation Free Lakeland / Lakes against the Nuclear Dump in opposing plans to impose a Geological Disposal Facility upon Cumbria. This could be located by the coast in Mid- or South-Copeland to receive Britain’s legacy and future most toxic radioactive waste, which would be transferred from the Sellafield nuclear complex and buried in tunnels beneath the Irish Sea.

Marianne described the exhibition as “a must see for all those who love Cumbria.” She explained that it was “a unique celebration of Lakeland’s jewel-like geology, landscape, flora, and fauna seen through the lens of a ‘quixotic’ plan to bury atomic wastes deep under the Cumbrian coast and the sea. Altogether 20 artists have produced artworks including comic books, installations, sculpture, and multi-media in a vibrant and thought-provoking exhibition.”.

Winner of the John Moore’s Painting Prize, guest artist Martin Greenland will be joined by internationally renowned mountain painter Julian Cooper, record producer Russell Mills, Lake Artist Society award winners Kate Bentley and Andrea Pentecost, Steve Wallis, and Irene Rogan amongst others. Artists have spent time looking at the Museum’s natural history collection for inspiration.

The exhibition will open in the People’s Gallery on 9th May, but a special official launch will be held on Friday 10th May from 6pm to 8pm.

A follow-up talk, titled ‘Atomic Wastes Under Cumbria’, will be held on the following day on Saturday 11th May in The Venue, which is accessed through the Museum.

Kendal Museum can be found on Station Road, Kendal, LA9 6BT. It is a short distance from the railway station.

Everyone is welcome to both events, which are FREE, but attendees are asked to contact the Museum to book a place at the official launch and/or the meeting by email to info@kendalmuseum.org.uk or by telephone on 01539 815597.

NFLA Secretary Richard Outram has been asked to join radiation expert Dr Ian Fairlie in speaking at the official launch and at the meeting.

Following the events, the exhibition will be open to the public on Thursdays, Fridays, or Saturdays from 9.30am to 4.30pm until 29 June. There is also a related art trail to explore around the galleries and shops of Kendal.

Ends//… For more information please contact the NFLA Secretary Richard Outram by email at richard.outram@manchester.gov.uk

May 3, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts, UK | Leave a comment

Ralph Nader – on Palestinians as “The Others”

By Ralph Nader, April 20, 2024

Throughout history, military empires have reduced their victims, their subjugated, and their abducted to a state of “The Others.” The political and mass media institutions usually follow suit by supporting their empire’s predatory policies with slanted coverage.

Such is the case with the U.S. global and the Israeli regional empires. The U.S. federal government and the mainstream media often move in lockstep.

For example, take the word “terrorism.” The New York Times regularly refers the Hamas regime as “terrorists,” while describing the far more extensive Israeli acts of state terrorism as “military operations.” Since October 7th, the Israeli military superpower has killed over 500 times more children than Hamas killed in their raid through a still uninvestigated collapse of Israel’s vaunted multi-tiered border security.

Apart from a massively greater overall civilian toll inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza – the vast undercount stands at 34,000 Palestinian deaths compared to the deaths of 1,139 Israeli civilians, soldiers, and foreign workers. This staggering ratio – over 14,000 Palestinian children (with many thousands under the rubble) compared to 30 Israeli children – escapes proper reporting. “The Others” don’t get accurate coverage as was also the case with huge Iraqi losses during the Bush/Cheney criminal war. (See, the March 5, 2024, column: Stop the Worsening UNDERCOUNT of Palestinian Casualties in Gaza).

Take the use of the term “hostage.” Hamas seized over 240 Israelis hostages on October 7th. Since then, the Israeli army has seized about 9000 Palestinians, including women and children, and taken them without charges, along with many more thousands languishing in these prison camps also without charges for years (it’s called Israel’s “administrative detention”). Many of the imprisoned Palestinians are being tortured. Who has gotten the far greater attention? Aren’t these Palestinian hostages also? Again “The Others.”

How about the application of the right to self-defense? Every state has the right to self-defense. Count the many times you have heard, “Israel has a right to defend itself” compared to “Palestine has a right to defend itself.” Members of Congress who bellow the former declaration daily can not get themselves to say the latter. It is a forbidden phrase. Yet, who is the violently occupying, colonizing, land, and water-stealing party? Israel. For over fifty years, more than 400 times more innocent Palestinians have been killed and injured compared to innocent Israeli civilians. Where is the detailed coverage of the loss of life from enforced destitution and denial of life-saving medicines, equipment, and emergency transport to health facilities? Again, it is “The Others.”

“The Others” are always described with less charitable words. In a meticulous content analysis by The Intercept of the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and the Washington Post between October 7 and November 24, the use of the words “slaughtered,” “horrific” and “massacre” in relation to Israeli and Palestinians killed was 218 to 9!

The Intercept said Israel’s war on Gaza is “perhaps the deadliest war for children – almost entirely Palestinian – in modern history.” There is scant mention of the word “children” and related terms in the headlines of articles in that span of time.

(Note, reporters from these papers are like the rest of the mainstream Western media reports, including Israeli journalists, who have been long banned by the Israeli government from freely reporting from inside Gaza, but have managed to write some exceptionally graphic stories from a distance.)

Palestinian Arabs are denied the description of armed-force anti-semitism by the Israeli war machine. Arabs are Semites and have long been the victims of violent racist, hate-filled anti-semitism by brutal Israeli leaders. (See the “Anti-Semitism Against Arab and Jewish Americans” speech by Jim Zogby and DebatingTaboos.org)………………………………………………………………………. more https://nader.org/2024/04/20/palestinians-as-the-others/

April 22, 2024 Posted by | culture and arts | Leave a comment

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